In trying to create a working complementary school, we've come to have a complicated relationship with the existing public school system. On the one hand, we are very aware of its shortcomings, because these shortcomings are exactly what we are trying to fix. On the other hand, public schools are our best source of evidence for what works and what doesn't -- simply because they are both the most numerous and the best studied schools out there.
When it comes to curriculum design, however, matters are pretty clear. We see no reason to follow the public-school curriculum beyond the bare minimum that is required for the external end-of-year tests required by the state. For everything else, we do not ask ourselves, "how does that fit in the curriculum?", but "will this help students have a fulfilled life and reach their goals?" This sounds simple and self-evident, but it is not. We are so used to thinking in terms of "content that students need to learn" that we often fall into a familiar trap: that of creating workshops and projects as mere "hooks" for content rather than activities with a real-world goal. This is what often happens in public schools, when enterprising teachers want to spice up their classes with some "project-based teaching". Not that this is a bad thing; it is probably the easiest way to bring project-based teaching into public schools. A chemistry teacher who, before teaching polymers, considers "how can I make this more relevant to my students" and then has them do a project on recycling plastic waste is clearly doing a better job than someone who just gets students to memorize the most common natural and synthetic polymers. But what this results in is hook-based projects, not project-based teaching. In contrast, we want to start by asking, "What is it that we want students to achieve or experience?" -- rather than saying, "This is what they need to learn, now let's find something they can do with it." We are not out to create practical applications as alibis for a prescribed curriculum. Conversely, whatever our students learn should grow out of practical applications. Students should learn things in order to do something, not the other way around. There are two obvious objections to it. One is, "But what about skills or knowledge that students do not need now, but will need later in life?" The other: "Isn't it terrible to limit the things students learn to things that are immediately useful?" Both are legitimate concerns, but we believe that both of these issues are addressed by how we approach teaching at our school. For one, our Orientation Phase explicitly aims to get students acquainted with a wide range of human endeavors and ways of living -- this goes way beyond mere career choice in scope, to include everything from the arts to gardening, from philosophy to charitable work. Unlike traditional schools with their "general education", however, we do not presume to have a complete taxonomy of everything worth knowing. Instead of learning "everything they need" in a sheltered environment divorced from practice,then, we will expose students to the full richness of life outside the school walls -- a much more inclusive experience than the dozen-or-so "subjects" they will encounter at a regular school. This practice-based approach also resolves the other issue. The idea that students will need skills "later in life" that they have no opportunity to use "now" only applies in traditional up-front schooling. If students do actual work to achieve real-life goals in a variety of contexts -- again, not limited to paid work or business activities -- they will encounter all the skills they might possibly need in practice. What they will miss out on, though, is all the fluff that schools use to stretch their curricula so there is enough content for every subject to fill the school year; and the rote memorization of useless facts whose only benefit is that they are easy to test. The challenge, then, is to resist starting with the bottom line of what we assume students will need to know eventually. Instead, we start by asking "what concrete and worthwhile goals can our students achieve now?", and only then try to figure out what we can offer them to help them reach those particular goals. This is not always easy, as the concept of up-front teaching is so deeply ingrained that it sometimes seems like part of the definition of "teaching" itself; but we believe it is well worth the effort.
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SHIC -- short for "Students for High-Impact Charity" -- is an unusual non-profit organization. Their goal is to get students to think hard about how they can make the world a better place. To that end, they are developing free and easy-to-use lesson plans that help train some very important skills: among other things, students learn how to look beyond their own preconceptions and gain a more accurate picture of the world by working with data; they also have to deal with probabilities and tradeoffs in relevant, real-world scenarios. All of this serves one goal: to equip students with the tools and habits of thought they need to tackle the world's problems in a way that will actually make a difference.
This is great for a number of reasons. First, making the world a better place seems like an unambiguously good idea, and SHIC's approach is refreshingly free of moralizing; the focus is on reducing suffering using methods that have been proven to work. Second, their lesson plans are not only very well thought-out didactically, they are also incredibly useful in many different contexts. If you teach languages, they're great for debates and honing argumentation skills. If you teach Maths, they offer some concrete problems that serve to show how mathematical skills are useful in real-world contexts. Teachers of Geography, Economics or History have a full syllabus at hand that covers many of the things their classes are about in unusual and engaging ways. But ultimately, being useful to teachers is merely a means to an end. The real reason why I'm so enthusiastic about SHIC is that they are a perfect example of how to improve schools' curricula world-wide from the bottom up. Traditional curriculum reform, where it happens at all, tends to work something like this: Influential individuals, lobbies or special interest groups exert pressure on the school authorities to include new things in the official curriculum. If they succeed -- which usually only happens for powerful actors with a lot of political clout -- new content gets "tacked on" to the existing curriculum. Sometimes this just takes the form of an updated document or an instruction to teachers telling them to cover the new content in class. In the best of cases, this is supplemented by additional teacher training and new school books. The process is always slow, hampered by compromise, and usually frustrating to teachers, who feel like they constantly have to cram in more content without getting the necessary resources or breathing room. More often than not, the official documents at the top of the hierarchy look very promising and even ambitious, but by the time it trickles down from there into the classroom, there is very little left of it. Not so for the bottom-up approach. Organizations like SHIC do not impose their ideas through political means; instead, they make themselves so useful to teachers and students that their materials are adopted at the lowest level of the hierarchy, directly by practicioners themselves. This makes it possible for small non-profits to effect more change more quickly than many big lobbies or interest groups. While some powerful institutions have taken a similar approach (in the next Resources Roundup post I'll talk about the "Financial Literacy" courses offered by some financial institutions, for example), a look at their results suggests that authentic conviction and enthusiasm make for better curriculum design than throwing money at hired hacks. As public education lags further and further behind, it is time for non-state actors to fill the gaps in the curriculum. This is one of the things that we are trying to do with our school, both by publishing all our materials and by encouraging the creation of other complementary schools; and we are thrilled to be working alongside innovators such as SHIC in helping students around the world gain a wider range of skills and knowledge. (Right now, SHIC are in the final hours of their initial fundraising campaign -- if you are reading this before August 17th, 2016, consider supporting them through Indiegogo or their website.) Designing a new curriculum from scratch is hard. The fact that we do not seek to replace the entire existing school system, but just want to make up for some of its most obvious deficits, makes it quite a bit easier for us; but there are still some interesting challenges involved.
One is that we cannot be sure exactly how much we can expect from our students. One of the central assumptions underlying our school concept is that students in public schools are continuously underestimated, both with regard to what they can think and what they can do. Unlike most of our other basic assumptions, however, the evidence we have for this is rather slim and mostly anecdotal. Sure, there are kids who do exceptionally well outside the public school system, and we see plenty of examples of children and teenagers delivering expert performances in specialized fields thanks to focused training outside of school; but we obviously cannot generalize from a few outstanding examples to infer the "true potential" of all 12-14 year-olds. The first challenge, then, is to find the right middle ground between what ordinary schools expect of their students -- which, we are still quite sure, is much less than they could deliver and in some cases actively stunts their growth -- and frustrating our students by setting them goals they cannot achieve. To calibrate our intuitions on that point, we are now developing a range of sample workshops at different challenge levels for test runs in a number of different public schools over the next school year. (If you are a teacher or school official and wish to run one of our test workshops, send us a message to be notified when the course guides and materials go online, or watch this space.) Software is not just a tool. These days, it's part of our environment, and increasingly so (see Breaking Smart's "Software is Eating the World" for a great series of articles on that). If you're unable to understand or write code, you cannot influence or safely navigate that part of our environment.
It follows that we have to teach coding as a basic skill, next to languages and maths. Fortunately, there are quite a few good resources out there that we can use, all of them well suited for self-paced learning:
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