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INTRODUCTION

by Ted McCain and Frank Kelly

Do you realize that we teach the same way today that Aristotle taught Alexander the Great 2,000 years ago? It hasn’t changed. That’s got to change.

—Michio Kaku

The purpose of any education system is to help students learn. The key to student learning is effective interaction between a student and a teacher. Schools are the places best equipped to facilitate that interaction. This raises the question: How can we better design schools for maximum effectiveness in facilitating improved student and teacher interaction?

We immediately face a significant challenge when we ponder the answer to this question—the general look and nature of schools haven’t changed much since the early 20th century. This is something that anyone who was raised in public schools, and then raised their own children or grandchildren in public schools, will recognize. Virtually everyone has a common picture in his or her mind for what a school is and how it operates, and that vision is consistent whether you are a teacher working directly with students in a classroom; a school administrator responsible for creating a timetable that determines when and where teachers and students meet; a facilities staff member for a school district responsible for determining the specifications for new or renovated school buildings; an architect tasked with designing a school facility; a parent of a school-age child; a schoolboard trustee charting the future course for the schools in your district; or a department of education official at the state (or province) or federal level involved in planning curriculum for secondary schools (grades 6–12). The list goes on, but the mindset persists that learning occurs in schools with classrooms. Communities have built schools this way for so long that it’s difficult to conceive of any other way for them to look.

However, the foundation for why we organize schools this way is gone. The stable, predigital world for which we designed our school system no longer exists. A highly volatile, ever-changing, globally networked world of instantaneous information transmission is replacing it. The skills students need for success in this new environment are significantly different than those educators traditionally teach in the school system. This puts our schools in a precarious position because we are too often preparing our students for the wrong future. Instead, schools must serve and be a part of the world in which they exist. To do that, they must evolve with that world.

This is not to say that secondary educators, administrators, school architects, and district leaders are not giving their all to make schools work. There are many dedicated people working hard to make the education system the best it can be for students. The problem is that we educators can do an excellent job executing within existing systems, but we are often not doing the right job. The digital world does not need our modern school systems’ obsolete picture of excellence.

Modern school systems are obsolete because technological innovation has disrupted the traditional ways the world outside of school works. This disruption brings radical new ways of accomplishing tasks into our lives. For example, knowledge workers in diverse fields like accounting, engineering, medicine, and financial planning can now reside anywhere in the world and digitally send their work to clients via the internet. North American workers must compete with highly qualified workers from around the globe. Automation in the form of both robots and software continues to replace many jobs humans traditionally performed. This is the new workplace reality. In contrast, and as we will explain in this book, the world inside schools looks much like it did throughout the 20th century. For the most part, the skills schools teach, how they teach them, and the way they assess student achievement remain virtually the same as in the 20th century. This leaves schools out of sync with the world for which they are supposed to be preparing students.

Furthermore, the changes that will occur in the world by 2040 or even 2030 will dwarf the changes we have had to deal with so far. We describe many of these changes in detail in Learning Without Classrooms: Visionary Designs for Secondary Schools, but rest assured, they will challenge educators, leaders, and school architects to adapt quickly if they are to effectively prepare students for a much different world than previous generations experienced. This requires schools to implement new instructional approaches that properly equip students with the new skills necessary for their future success. Adopting these approaches means rethinking the entire concept of classroom learning.

Brilliant minds across all of education have explored the changes educators must make in their teaching methodology to align with 21st century learners’ needs (Robinson & Aronica, 2015; Thornburg, 2014; Wagner, 2012; Zhao, 2009); however, few question or explore alternatives to the 21st century schools’ central paradigm—the traditional classroom consisting of four walls with a grouping of twenty-five to thirty students sitting at desks, receiving stand-and-deliver-style instruction from one teacher covering one subject in one hour. Any new instructional approaches school systems introduce largely build on this traditional classroom model because teachers can implement them with very little new training. Since there has been little movement away from the traditional classroom arrangement, there has been little need to question how districts design schools. Consequently, districts continue to construct school buildings that look much like the schools 20th century learners grew up with.

For the sake of future learners, we must explore how secondary school facilities can differ if we implement in a significant way the sound, decades-long, and research-based instructional ideas of educational experts (Andrade & Valtcheva, 2009; Bloom, Engelhart, Furst, Hill, & Krathwohl, 1956; Gardner, 2011; Vygotsky, 1978). Consider how we could design schools that facilitate individualized, learner-centered instruction that allows students to progress at their own pace. What would schools look like if we re-examine how schools use time and consider alternatives to the traditional one-hour periods? Is there a better way to configure the physical space in secondary schools to support problem-based instruction that mimics the challenges students will face when they leave the school system? What impact could truly authentic assessment have on the way we use space in schools? Could we better design schools to support the important, meaningful, long-term relationships students need with their educators?

These are all questions we answer in this book, but to really understand the significance of our ideas, we need to introduce a concept that underpins everything you will read in the coming chapters—the elements of schooling. From there we break down this book’s approach to these elements and how we’ve organized it to propose a vision for schooling that doesn’t depend on classrooms.

The Elements of Schooling

To ensure that the new schools we create are effective, every stakeholder in education needs to rethink all the factors involved in schooling. However, student learning must always be the focus of everything we do in schools. To that end, we identify six crucial and interconnected elements that factor into the learning equation (see figure I.1)

Figure I.1: The six crucial elements of schooling.

None of the components in this figure are ends in and of themselves. Instead, their effectiveness derives from how well they work together to create relevant learning environments for students. To emphasize this point, this figure specifically illustrates how each of the support areas interconnect. Note that because we reference these elements of schooling throughout the book, thoroughly understanding the purpose and role of each element, and how all elements impact each other, is critical to the vision we present.

The following list explains how we define the six elements of schooling.

1. Community context: Each school must reflect the characteristics and community needs of its location. When the community changes, schools must change to continue to be effective. We need to make different schools to serve different students in different communities. The cookie-cutter schools of the 20th century cannot work for all students in all communities.

2. Instructional approach: A school’s instructional approach should have a direct impact on the configuration of its physical space. The problem is that schools have used the lecture approach for so long it has become entrenched as the default way to teach. This leads to default expectations, procedures, and policies in the overlapping elements in figure I.1 (page 3). However, there are many ways to teach, and we know that students learn in different ways. No instructional method works equally well for all students. We must tailor the methods we use to teach the students we serve so that we can measure learning outcomes one student at a time and not by mass statistics. Changing the instructional approach in schools will have significant ripple effects in all the other circles in the diagram.

3. Use of time: The amount of time that schools allot and how they organize around the time available determine much of what teaching and learning look like. We know that different students learn and work at different paces (Levine, 2011; Medina, 2014; National Education Commission on Time and Learning, 2005). If time is fixed, then learning will be the variable. Most often, students receive failing grades for not meeting learning objectives in the time allotted (a semester, for example), not because they are incapable of learning the objectives. We can make school time serve students and learning rather than make students serve time in their schools.

4. Technology resources: The technology the world outside the school system uses has changed dramatically in the 21st century. Not so inside schools. For example, classroom teachers often do not have access to scanners, 3-D printers, digital still and video cameras, or the photo- and videoediting software and training necessary to effectively use these tools. The technology we use inside schools must remain in sync with the technology in place in the professional world. This means the technology we use to support teaching and learning must quickly make the transition from paper based to a variety of digital resources that expand students’ abilities to find any information they need at any time and from anywhere.

5. Spatial environment: Teaching and learning needs should shape the physical spaces in our schools rather than vice versa. Schools are not neutral containers. The configuration of a physical educational space enables and constrains the instruction that takes place within it. Consider the secondary school classroom that represents the centerpiece of school design; it is a space with walls and a door with about seven hundred to eight hundred square feet. It serves one teacher, a class of about twenty-five students, and one subject for one period, usually about one hour in duration. This classroom configuration severely limits the opportunity for teachers and students to explore learning that is individualized and self-paced. Instead, instruction is invariably teacher-centered and lockstep because teachers want every student doing the same thing at the same time. This classroom configuration also makes interdisciplinary studies very difficult. Furthermore, facilities staff want classroom construction to be durable and lasting, which constrains flexibility to respond to changes in teaching and learning. New and renovated school spaces, like those we propose in this book, can and must support and enhance innovative ways for effective teaching and learning.

6. Funding resources: The funding available for schooling and facilities clearly impacts the resources available for teaching and learning. The funds coming from public sources (federal, state or provincial, and local) too often draw schools into broader discourse over taxes and politics. Many funding decisions are limited in scope without considering the wider implications of the impact schooling has on society, and many of those responsible for funding decisions may not be open to paying for schools that operate differently from what they grew up with. But consider the huge costs when we don’t spend education dollars in ways that benefit teaching and learning. Students who are ill-prepared for the wider world limit a nation’s ability to compete globally. Students who are unemployable because they fail or drop out generally pay fewer taxes and place larger demands on governmental entities for welfare, medical services, incarceration, and so on (Latif, Choudhary, & Hammayun, 2015; Mallet, 2016; Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2014). Conversely, successful students are a net benefit to society.

All student learning is the product of the interplay of these six elements, which are all inextricably linked—make a change to one and it affects all the others. It is our belief that many insightful and valuable education initiatives fail to achieve maximum effectiveness because they focus on just one of these elements without taking into account that the relationship each component has to the others is more important than the component itself. For example, change the funding for schools and its effect ripples through all the other elements with a positive or negative impact on overall learning. When U.S. schools cut staff in response to the 2008 recession, school districts laid off hundreds of thousands of teachers and support staff (Center for Public Education, 2010). As class sizes grew, this change impacted how schools delivered instruction. In turn, that impacted facilities as classrooms were too small to accommodate the increase in class size. That limited the programs schools could offer and reduced their ability to respond to community needs. It became a vicious circle.

For another example, what if we change the technology we use in schools? The impact of such a change also ripples through the other elements in figure I.1 (page 3). With digital technology for instruction and individual devices for students, we have the potential to dramatically alter the relationship between students and teachers. Students can have direct access to content anywhere and anytime; not just from teachers, and not just in classrooms. Subjects and courses can come to students wherever and whenever they might be versus students going to teachers for course content that teachers deliver in fixed classrooms at fixed times. The opportunity for individualized, self-paced instruction is real and practical, and we explore this opportunity in Learning Without Classrooms. With digital technology, we could eliminate or dramatically reduce paper text and library books, saving considerable sums and reducing the area and staff libraries require. But, the technology is not cheap, and schools must prepare to consistently update or replace it. Effective technology use dramatically impacts instruction, time, facilities, and funding.

As a final example, consider how a school might change its use of time. Since the early 20th century, we have operated on an agrarian calendar in which schools are open approximately nine months of the year. This means that while school districts have billions of dollars invested in school facilities, equipment, and so on, those capital investments sit idle about 25 percent of the year. That is enormously costly.

Altering the school year for year-round use opens the door for students to work continuously and succeed at their own pace. We would not have to fail students because they don’t meet learning objectives on a fixed schedule. Instruction becomes more flexible and accommodates varied learning styles and paces, improving outcomes for students and thereby actually saving taxpayers from paying for students to repeat failed courses.

The point of all this is to convey that there are no neutral changes. Because each of these six elements has a ripple effect on the surrounding elements, improving student learning to make it effective in preparing students for life in the 21st century means we cannot focus on only one element. Instead, we must deal with them all concurrently. Failure to do this accounts for the extreme difficulty we’ve had for decades in truly improving and transforming education. Consider that, in most school districts, each element is an entirely separate administrative group with its own leadership, budgets, procedures, and so on. Consider that these groups are so different in their staffing and the nature of their work that they may not share a common vision for the future, may not communicate well, and may not always be fully cooperative.

We believe that it is vital that we put an end to this silo approach to education where there is little shared vision or meaningful discussion between those who represent the six elements in our diagram. In this book, we hope to engage people whose work comes from all the elements in our diagram. We want to spark conversations between all the stakeholders in education about what effective schooling should look like as we move further into the 21st century. That means examining real and substantive alternatives to traditional, classroom-centered schools.

About This Book

Learning Without Classrooms uses the elements of schooling to propose a new and highly flexible model, or concept, for schooling rooted in the advisory-school concept. This is a format that supports teachers and students in achieving individualized, self-paced, and successful technology-driven learning. To establish our vision for this concept, we organize this book to establish the scope of the challenges we face and then detail how we can design schools and curricula to meet them. This book is for grades 6–12 stakeholders across the educational world, whether you are teachers, administrators, school designers, elected or appointed officials, or parents. Although we specifically target this content toward educators working in the United States, we believe you can adapt and apply our ideas in communities throughout the world.

There are three parts to this book. Part 1 (chapters 1–4) 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. It is imperative that all educators wrestle with the issues confronting 21st century learning and the reasons why we need to consider dramatic changes to school design. Chapter 1 deals specifically with why traditional classrooms are ill-suited to support learning. Chapter 2 establishes key principles for modern learning, including the disruptive role technology plays in it. Chapter 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.