3 outlines the crucial skills students need for success in the 21st century. Chapter 4 establishes multiple visions for how education must change to support students in a rapidly changing world.
Part 2 (chapters 5–7) establishes what an advisory school looks like and how a school built on this concept can successfully banish classrooms to the dustbin of education’s history. Chapter 5 establishes the core vision by detailing an advisory school’s instructional approach, its components, how it changes a school’s use of time, its funding, and how districts can support their staff in adapting to it. Chapter 6 focuses on practical ways districts can effect these changes in its schools by establishing a vision and then executing it. This is the chapter for those most interested in answering the question: How do we establish and execute this process? Chapter 7 establishes four examples of advisory schools that could immediately function in the United States and in many other locations around the world.
The chapters in part 3 (chapters 8–15) each explore how your districts can apply the ideas we present in this book to an existing middle school or high school. Not every district can afford to undertake the design and construction of new school buildings, so we want to outline how to transform existing school buildings to create effective learning environments for the 21st century. Chapter 8 focuses on additional challenges educators and other stakeholders will face in establishing advisory schools in their communities and how to overcome them, while chapters 9–15 each highlight a different school and how its respective district could reinvent it as a school fit for 21st century learning.
Finally, the epilogue revisits our elements of schooling as a means to reflect on the content you absorbed from this book as well as looks at some schools in the United States that already use its tenets to positive effect.
To help people engage with the ideas we are presenting, we include a set of essential questions at the end of each chapter. It is our hope that these questions will spark lively and much-needed discussions about the nature of schools and schooling.
Although parts 2 and 3 explore physical changes to secondary schools, to address the ideas we present in part 1, you need to know that we actually wrote all of this content for teachers as much as we wrote it for school facilities staff, leadership, and architects. Part 1 outlines some powerful ideas about what we need to do to change our schools to better prepare our students for the world of the future, but these ideas only work in tandem with the concepts we present in the rest of the book. We believe it is imperative that all educators, regardless of professional focus, wrestle with all these issues.
Let’s begin.
PART 1
UNDERSTANDING 21ST CENTURY LEARNING
Chapter 1
THE CLASSROOM HAS RUN ITS COURSE
by Ted McCain
It's amazing how little the typical classroom has changed over the years….it doesn't reflect what educators have learned about helping students and teachers do their best work.
—Bill Gates
In our elements of schooling diagram (figure I.1, page 3), the community context element represents technological innovation’s impact on the world. This element also represents the new generation of digital students entering our schools. It, combined with the technology resources element, is putting pressure on the other elements and creating the impetus for change. Digitally controlled machines and digital software have drastically changed the way companies manufacture and deliver products, the way marketers reach prospective clients, and the way customers place orders and communicate with companies. In addition, the students entering our classrooms have spent their entire lives using powerful digital tools that enable them to access and edit information from around the globe. These tools also empower them to publish their thoughts and visually communicate their daily life experiences in ways that are foreign to many adults. Consequently, educators feel pressure to update what they teach to keep instruction relevant for the modern world.
If we accept these ways in which technological development has dramatically changed the nature of the communities surrounding our schools, we must accept that schools must change just as dramatically to effectively prepare students for success in the world they will enter when they graduate.
We must remember that radical changes due to technological development are not a temporary anomaly that educators can wait out until everything returns to the way it was. No, the new world of constant, disruptive, and technology-driven change is here to stay. This means we can’t pretend that we can fix the education system with minor improvements like adding a new course, changing a test, adding a new teacher requirement, or adopting a singular pedagogy. Such changes will not somehow make schools magically work for the 21st century. Therefore, it is time for educators to make some major structural changes to the way schools operate.
One of the greatest hindrances to updating our schools to keep them effective in this new world is schools’ basic unit for spatial organization—the classroom. The basic concept for the modern classroom comes from William Wirt who, in 1908, applied mass production thinking to education (Thiede, n.d.). Wirt envisioned a factory school based on classrooms where teachers specialized in teaching a single subject. In this model, as each period ends, a bell rings, and students move to their next class as though they were on an assembly line, moving from one specialist to another. These schools sacrifice an individual student’s unique interests and learning skills for the sake of greater efficiency (Cohen, 2002). The economics and efficiency of this concept were so powerful that it caught on and rapidly spread to virtually all secondary schools across the continent. Many people don’t realize it, but we continue to have Wirt’s 1908 assembly-line approach to education in most secondary schools.
Although the mass-production, assembly-line approach makes schools easier to organize and easier to run, it prompts certain questions: Does this approach make learning better? Does a mass-instruction approach to education maximize individual student potential? The answer to these questions is the critical point. Schools are not factories. Unlike the uniform products that come from the factory production line, the products schools produce are human beings who range widely in interests and abilities. We believe education’s goal must be to shape a wide range of students from many backgrounds and perspectives into citizens who can function effectively in a pluralistic, democratic society, as well as achieve sufficient financial success to live happily while contributing to a nation’s overall economic health.
