This article was taken from the September 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by <span class="s1">subscribing online.
What happens in classrooms hasn't fundamentally changed since Victorian days: most schools still rely on that Gradgrindian model whereby students absorb the teacher's wisdom, to be tested on what they remember. Thankfully, a few educators are showing that alternative models can deliver creativity and self-directed learning. "The key person in education is the student," says evolutionary psychologist Peter Gray of The Rockefeller University. "Sometimes the innovation is 'do nothing' -- let the kids take charge." We think it's time to reinvent primary and secondary education. Here are six projects that passed the Wired test.
Blue SchoolNew York, USA
The Blue Man Group consists of face-painted theatrical humanoids who explore the world around them. This curious spirit has now taken over at Blue School, founded in Lower Manhattan by the original Blue Man trio and their wives. The school, which currently runs up to fifth grade (UK year six), and is expanding to eighth grade by 2017, believes that curious minds are best at learning, and taking on different perspectives is the optimal way to encourage curiosesity.
At the school's core are six modes of learning, based on the Blue Man Group's performances. These are characters that kids "try on": there's the Scientist, the Innocent, the Group Member, the Hero, the Artist and the Trickster, each with unique worldviews.
Heroes, for example, are leaders, whereas Tricksters are rule-breakers and innovators. When kindergarteners were learning about the work of artist Andy Goldsworthy, they studied it from a Trickster viewpoint. Soon, the walls of the school were filled with guerrilla artworks: sticks, stones and leaves were glued together and stuck up surreptitiously. "This was very much a Trickster act, and it was supported and celebrated by the school," says Matt Goldman, school and Blue Man Group cofounder.
Two-year-olds in pre-kindergarten classes beat drums covered in neon paint, an idea straight from the Blue Man Group's onstage performances. At higher grades, kids have more say in what they want to learn about. "The teacher's job is to take the questions kids come up with, and to turn that into a curriculum," says Allison Gaines Pell, Blue School's head. In one example, when fifth-graders studied Homer's The Odyssey, they became interested in how the Ancient Greeks preserved food -- and so built a food dehydrator to try and figure it out.
By building a curriculum on inquisitiveness, the school's founders believe they're crafting entrepreneurial kids. "We think there's a kind of combustible alchemy from having a rich worldview," says Chris Wink, a school cofounder and Blue Man. "It's being able to jump from one lens to another."
High Tech HighSan Diego, USA
Larry Rosenstock was teaching carpentry at a state-run high school in Massachusetts in the 90s when he realised that hands-on projects were the best way to engage children. So in 2000 he helped set up High Tech High, a middle school of 200 kids in San Diego, with funding from Irwin Jacobs, cofounder of Qualcomm. The school is one of 12 institutes to specialise in project-based learning, with five more (ranging from elementary to high schools) being built over the next five years.
Entry to the school is by lottery and students and teachers work in teams as "designers" to tailor their own curricula. Completed projects so far include an environmental field guide to San Diego Bay, which was sold on Amazon, and a year-long video study on gun violence in schools. Teachers often blend subjects; for instance, an art project could involve making a sculpture incorporating gears, which pupils are studying in physics.
The benefits are clear: 87 per cent of High Tech High students graduate from four-year college courses, compared to the state average of 35 per cent, according to Rosenstock. The plan now, he says, is to go global. He teaches two Massive Open Online Courses, one with the MIT Media Lab on deeper learning and another with University of California, Berkeley on how to start a school. "The world needs to experiment more with what a school looks like," he says.
Quest to LearnNew York & Chicago, USA
Katie Salen was coding and teaching game development in New York in 2009 when she became interested in 11-year-olds' obsession with gaming. "Game design is all about player experience," she says. "You have to build a system so that they feel like they are in control and can win. That is not a feeling that middle-schoolers often have." So Salen, 43 (pictured), founded Quest to Learn in New York -- a public school in which classrooms are built on the principles of game design. In-house game designers work with teachers, and Salen's nonprofit Institute of Play, which runs the school, has incubated a studio called GlassLab with Electronic Arts, which develops games that have an assessment component.
The curriculum is based on challenges. "We call them quests and missions," explains Salen. "We set up a problem that classes have ten weeks to solve. When they achieve a quest, it unlocks another one. With games you fail, but that helps you move forward and do better." Props such as hula hoops and dice are regularly used in the classrooms. Completed quests include a challenge to write a business plan for a food-truck business. Another used Minecraft to build a game-based sustainable-energy system for the school: a geothermal model generated by molten lava flowing below the building.
There is now a ChicagoQuest charter school and another planned for Denver. Next up: using what they learned to bring the gamified classroom to Turkey.
Mind Lab12 countries worldwide
Pupils in the Mind Lab school programme spend their time playing board games. In pre-school, for instance, the curriculum includes Noughts & Crosses, Quarto, Hoppers and Rush Hour. "As an engineer who's worked with computers all my life, I couldn't understand why teachers were playing board games with kids," says Valmir Pereira, CEO of Mind Lab, who bought the company in 2009. "But everybody loves it. Parents would come to me and tell me that their kids used to spend time playing football and had bad school grades. After Mind Lab, they still played football, but their grades had improved."
Mind Lab was developed in 1994 by educational researchers Ehud Shachar, Tzvika Feldfogel and Dan Gendelman in Jerusalem. The methodology involves at least one hour per week playing board games and learning skills such as strategic thinking, emotional intelligence and decision-making.
Pereira, an entrepreneur from São Paulo, ran a 2007 Mind Lab pilot study in Brazil involving 2,000 students across 60 schools.
It now operates in 12 countries including the US, China and the UK.
According to Pereira, more than 500,000 students now use its methodology. A study by Donald Green at Yale University found that Mind Lab's methods improve students' scores in maths and language tests. "He's clearly shown that we improve skills in these core subjects, even though we don't teach them," says Pereira.
School In The CloudVarious countries, including India and the UK
Back in 1999, Indian-born education researcher Sugata Mitra installed an internet-connected computer in a New Delhi slum. The machine entranced local children, who were soon using it to learn independently. Now professor of educational technology at Newcastle University, Mitra is going one better with his School In The Cloud.
Using $1 million awarded to him as the 2013 TED Prize, he has set up seven lab schools -- five in India and two in the UK -- in which children learn for themselves using internet-connected terminals.
Retired teachers, or "Grannies", oversee students via Skype (Microsoft is a sponsor). The students are also encouraged to form groups and discuss their peers' work to aid learning.
In his previous experiments, Mitra found that children are able to learn complex biology and physics with light encouragement.
The schools will run for three years, during which time Mitra hopes to refine self-learning. "We've never had anything like the internet before," he says. "The danger is trying to force it into an 18th-century model of education."
Sugata Mitra will speak at Wired 2014 on October 16-17. wiredevent.co.uk
Ahmedabad, India
Schools make kidshelpless and afraid of failure, says Kiran Bir Sethi, founder of the Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India. So under her watch, kids are encouraged to leave the classroom and learn their lessons in the real world. Sethi's idea -- transmitted through her organisation Design for Change -- has spread to schools in 35 countries, including the US, China, Mexico and, most recently, Cameroon. "It's an open-source idea," says Sethi.
Riverside pupils spend 50 per cent of their time outside the classroom working with community members and businesses. For an economics class, year-11 students worked with the Havmor Ice Cream Company in Ahmedabad to make and market a new flavour they called Ras'mataz, which the company now sells. For a language skills class, year-three students spent time at Ahmedabad's Kankaria Zoo and created an audio tour for its reptile house. And after a conference about children's rights violations, Sethi asked her year-five students to roll incense sticks for eight hours, to bring home the reality of child labour in India. "What was amazing was how something that was just intellectual became an enduring understanding," she says.
In 2009 Sethi started to expand her vision to kids beyond Riverside, by launching A Protagonist in every Child, an NGO. She and her pupils marched into municipal offices and demanded change in Ahmedabad that would make it safer for children. The city listened, and created "Street Smart", a monthly event in which the city's streets are closed and turned into a safe area for community activities.
In 2013, Riverside's performance was 50 per cent higher than the national average for maths and 30 per cent higher for science. And in a country where children are pushed to become doctors or lawyers, Sethi says her students tend to be more imaginative. "I've had dancers, hotel-management executives and herpetologists," she says.
Riverside raises citizens, not just academics, Sethi believes. "We aren't experimenting," she says. "Every other schooling system that isn't doing this, they're 'alternative'."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
