Rethinking schools

Revamping public education is often compared to fixing a plane while it's in the air. Perhaps that's why so many reform efforts feel more like screw-tightening than redesign.

So I thought I'd share a couple of items on ways to shake things up. (An aside: Does it drive anyone else crazy when people use the hackneyed "thinking outside the box" to describe originality?)

Tamela Rich passed on a link to a New York Times op-ed piece about a Massachusetts school that let eight teens design their own school-within-a-school. They launched scientific inquiries, set themselves a rigorous course of reading and tackled individual and collective projects.

"Perhaps children don’t need another reform imposed on them," concludes author Susan Engel. "Instead, they need to be the authors of their own education."

Colleague Gary Nielson urged me to watch this video in which Salman Khan describes "flipping the classroom," with students watching professionally-made video lectures on their own time and using class time with teachers to do "homework." Khan has created a nonprofit academy of video tutorials that spun off from YouTube videos he made to help his nephews study.

He argues that many students are more comfortable watching videos at their own pace, and the technology allows the best instructors to lecture an unlimited number of students. "If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to," Khan says.

Real-life teachers, meanwhile, are freed to "humanize the classroom" by spending their time helping kids apply the lessons.


As a certifiable old fogey, I've always viewed video teaching as a second-rate substitute for the real thing. But this got me thinking: What if my high-school science lectures had been delivered by, say, Carl Sagan or Oliver Sacks? Would that have been better than what I got? Absolutely.
 
That's my food for thought. If you're reading, watching or hearing about other creative ideas, please share.