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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. To meet these goals, we must move on from a 20th century mindset of assembly lines and mass production. We need to consider new ways of schooling that do not center around the traditional classroom.

To that end, what if we designed schools for mass customization rather than mass production? What if our schools could better help each student maximize his or her strengths and minimize his or her weaknesses while also allowing him or her to progress at his or her own pace and enter the wider world better prepared to be a functioning, productive member of society? These are questions we answer throughout Learning Without Classrooms, but we begin in this chapter by examining the hidden mindsets that affect how we approach education and how we can break our attachment to the traditional classroom.

See the Hidden Mindset

Contemplating alternatives to conventional approaches to classroom instruction is a great challenge because schooling based on traditional classroom structures has been with us since the early 20th century. As educators, we have developed great familiarity with the mass-instruction classroom model to the point that teachers, students, administrators, and parents aren’t even consciously aware of all the concept’s attached assumptions, expectations, and behaviors.

We all have an amazingly similar mental picture of what a school is and how it operates. It is a facility that limits access to only certain times during the day, uses bells to govern classroom activity time, and closes for more than two consecutive months each year. When the school is open, rules require students to physically meet inside a relatively small room where they often limit access to the online world that is the backbone of the world economy and the essential means of global communication. Instead, schools confront students with the long-established idea that a teacher, and supplemental textbook and photocopied materials, can provide all the information they need to fully function as citizens, employees, or entrepreneurs ready to successfully deal with the complexities of modern life.

The foundational assumption of this artificial world is the classroom. It is a concept that captures the essence of what school is and has been for a long time. Educational institutions even use the word classroom as a descriptor for an overwhelming number of educational concepts and terms. Classroom instruction, classroom management, classroom seating, classroom learning, classroom behavior, classroom organization, classroom resources, classroom technology, classroom staffing, classroom schedule, classroom size—the list goes on and on. The word classroom is so loaded with meaning for virtually anyone who has gone to school since 1920 that as soon as you use classroom as an adjective to describe anything, everyone knows exactly what you are talking about. This is the hidden mindset that unconsciously accompanies any school organized around the traditional classroom.

We observe an incredible number of assumptions inherent in schools built around classrooms. Many of these assumptions associated with the traditional classroom skew heavily toward preparing students for the late industrial age. The following are just a few examples of the baggage that comes along with the traditional classroom.

• The classroom is a homogenous, teacher-owned, and static space that is often visually and physically enclosed. Teachers rarely float between classrooms. The bell and class schedule generally limit student access to the space and teacher, and students do not have a personal workspace of their own.

• Classroom teachers use technology as a tool to enhance teacher-centered, stand-and-deliver instruction. Students’ technology use is not integral to instruction, if the school allows it at all.

• Teachers emphasize memorizing static details and procedures for performing discrete tasks rather than on developing in students critical 21st century skills like independent problem solving, investigating, creating, and collaborating. Fostering meaningful relationships between students and teachers is not a priority.

• Classroom evaluation generally focuses on summative evaluation rather than formative evaluation.

• Uniformity and conformity are implied classroom goals. Schools group students by age and move them lockstep through their grades. Teachers instruct mass groups of students on a linear educational pathway (usually set by the district, state or province, or department or ministry of education), and schools view as a problem any student who disrupts or does not keep up with the pathway. This leads educators to view student failure for some percentage of students as an acceptable outcome. (It’s not!)

• With the focus on group classroom instruction and fixed time, students who fail must repeat the very same process that did not work the first time. Thus, they lose months or even a year of their lives, and taxpayers must pay for the same education twice.

• With group classroom instruction and fixed time, reporting to parents tends to occur only at specified times and specified ways (report cards). Individual parent-teacher-student communications are infrequent.

• Many classrooms have outdated furnishings that are not appropriate for learning activities and technology use.

• School systems operate in silos. Districts do not expect teachers to know anything about school design, nor facility staff anything about instruction. Yet, having all stakeholders understand new instructional perspectives is critical for designing effective, forward-looking school facilities.

With these points in mind, consider for a moment—if you were starting from scratch—how you would define a methodology to meet students’ needs for the 21st century and the spaces to house those students. Very likely, this vision bears little resemblance to the traditional classroom concept. Indeed, schools based on traditional classroom designs have been the norm for so long that educators, parents, administrators, departments of education staff, and politicians rarely consider alternate organizations of physical space. When districts build or renovate a school, they almost never ask, “Should we have classrooms?” Instead, most districts ask, “How many classrooms do we need?” To change that, we need to look beyond the classroom.

Move Beyond Classroom Attachment

Our goal throughout the rest of this book is to look at how all educational stakeholders can work together to change schools to be more effective and consider what those changes should look like. To be sure that we are objectively evaluating new thinking, it is critical that we acknowledge our familiarity and comfort with schools designed around classrooms. This is important because new ideas for delivering instruction to modern digital students using new online digital tools will most certainly stretch our thinking beyond a classroom-based approach. These ideas may be uncomfortable to contemplate because they will employ concepts and methodologies that are unfamiliar to most educators. When we confront educators and other stakeholders with our ideas for how schools could operate in the future, we often see their first response is not to like them. They can’t see how such radical changes to the status quo can possibly work. They see all the reasons why it will be difficult, if not impossible, to make these changes. However, we must all resist this initial reaction because, in many cases, our attachment to the entrenched classroom mindset creates an out-sized counterweight.

Instead, we must come to grips with the fact that the classroom is an obstacle to making the shift to effective, forward-thinking instruction because it does not provide the necessary flexibility in the face of new online digital tools and experiences. For example, modern digital students are completely comfortable with what Ted calls spontaneous ad hocism. Texting on their phones, young people form several new social and work groupings in real time over the course of a day. If several students discover they are working on the same project at the same time, they can form an impromptu work group to get the project done. They are accustomed to and successful when working in this way. Classrooms are a barrier to this kind of approach.

Classrooms, and all the behaviors and expectations that accompany them, are acting like deadweights as education stakeholders try to create much more responsive school systems that are more effective in preparing students for the 21st century. We must look beyond 20th century ideas for how to organize schools and consider what learning could be without classrooms.

To do this, it is critical that we immediately engage all stakeholders in exploring these ideas. We cannot afford to leave this until tomorrow. Whether you are a teacher, a school administrator, a school board member, a superintendent, a Department of Education employee, a politician, or a parent, you must begin looking at how your schools can and should change to meet the challenges of preparing students for their futures. The pressing need for everyone to envision new schools without classrooms is summed up in this quote from Arthur Levine (2011):

Today’s schools are an anachronism. They resemble the assembly lines of the industrial era, when they were conceived. Groups of 25 to 30 children, beginning at age five, are moved through 13 years of schooling, attending 180 days each year, and taking five major subjects daily for lengths of time specified by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910. These schools are time-based—all children are expected to master the same studies at the same rate over the same period of time. They focus on teaching—how long students are exposed to instruction, not how much they have learned. They are rooted in the belief that one size fits all—all students can benefit equally from the same curriculum and methods of instruction.

With this in mind, the following chapters explore how educators can change secondary schools to make them more effective in preparing students for success when they graduate.

Essential Questions

As you reflect on this chapter, consider the following questions.

• Think about the physical facility of the middle school or high school that you attended. Was the school built with traditional classrooms designed for one teacher to teach twenty-five to thirty students? If so, how do you think that affects your ideas for what schools look like?

• How does the traditional classroom mindset affect people’s planning for new schools?

• How do your school’s existing learning environments inhibit student learning?

• Given that most districts organize traditional schools for mass instruction, what would schools be like if districts organized them for mass customization and serving individual student needs?

• Close your eyes and think about designing a new school that will prepare each student for life in the 21st century. How do you see the arrangement of physical space? What would you change relative to traditional classroom-based methods that would help customize learning experiences to better support students and help them succeed after they graduate?

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