Patrick Atwater
October 3, 2013

Patrick Atwater

Patrick Atwater

California has embarked on a bold experiment in education. Policy shifts like the new Common Core State Standards and the governor's Local Command Funding Formula make local school districts dramatically more autonomous.

Such changes provide a golden opportunity to transform education'south much derided one-size-fits-all factory model into something, frankly, more human. And so how might your local school district have advantage of that flexibility to embody the principles of inventiveness and adjustability brilliantly articulated by renowned education and inventiveness proficient Sir Ken Robinson? Stag Hunt Enterprises is sponsoring a contest with a $one,000 award for the best action program to change education paradigms in a local school district.

Imagine you are writing for a superintendent or other educational activity leader who is interested in Sir Ken'due south ideas just is unsure how to implement them. Submissions are due November 5th and will exist judged by a console of experienced local education practitioners. The goal of the contest is to turn insights into actions that get beyond the electric current tired education "reform" debate.

Such new thinking is needed. Consider a canonical education reform instance report: grade size reduction. In the early '90s this policy gained steam every bit the reform du jour and earned favor at the state Capitol.

Every bit a event, the policy needed to be implemented; and implemented quickly. Never mind the fact that in that location are deep reasons we develop, program and finance capital improvements like schoolhouse facilities over the span of several years; the new incentives meant districts needed to reduce class sizes almost overnight.

Pedagogy reformers wanted results yesterday. So bungalows were hastily synthetic to house the new teachers anywhere space was bachelor – often on playgrounds. The reformers' beautiful map crashed into the realities of California's 10,000 plus schools – each with its own local particularities – and children lost an area for play.

Some people forget about this byproduct of a research-driven reform. I do not. The reformers ruined my recess, and I want it dorsum.

Over the intervening years, nosotros've had a raging management-labor dispute over which group of adults has power, but in likewise many districts, the basic model of school as a place where students go to sit down in neat rows and get talked at for several hours each day has not inverse. In fact, that underlying factory-like construction has remained basically the aforementioned since Horace Mann brought the Prussian common school model to Massachusetts over a century and a half ago.

Yet humans are non widgets and information technology makes trivial to no sense to talk in terms of "optimal" course sizes in universal terms. What regression should one run to uncover the truth of whether every human ever volition learn best in a classroom with under 20 students, a classroom of 34 students, solitary in their backyard canyon or amidst a hundred 1000 online peers? How is information technology non a premise that students larn ameliorate in groups of diverse sizes? And why do we not more fully consider that a given student might acquire best in one environment for one line of inquiry and in a different environment for another?

So why not brand such learning-group-size decisions on the footing of individual students and specific subjects? Some might point out obvious barriers: the finite resources that is a teacher'due south time, the difficulty of analogous so many individualized learning plans, the difficulty in differentiating so many curriculums or the challenge in managing kids going at such radically dissimilar paces in such diametrically different directions.

Here information technology's important to remember what'due south changed since the early '90s. The Internet has dramatically matured, providing categorically new pathways for learning. Platforms such equally Quora offering a virtual glimpse into how community might transform education. The popularity of social media sites such as Meetup and Skillshare suggests a hunger for local cognition and a desire for lifelong learning across diverse groups.

Nosotros too quickly forget that schools are only ane pathway for learning and that substantial areas of human knowledge are necessarily unmapped. Call back of what a doc learns in residency, a novice carpenter learns in an apprenticeship or an aspiring public retainer learns in a Coro Fellowship. The whole signal is that such practical insight, what the ancient Greeks chosen metis, cannot be gained in a classroom or through a book.

The simple fact is that didactics extends far beyond formal schooling, and the shortcomings of our electric current school structures are foundational. The argument is non that we should completely toss out how we currently brainwash the next generation; rather we demand to look deeply at the foundations of our educational model and examine how we might build a model that more fully reflects the world we alive in. That'south the goal of Stag Chase's Socratic Claiming.

Returning to our original case study, before we can ask what class size is optimal, we need to ask what actually constitutes a classroom. The answer lies across four walls and a few desk chairs.

We at Stag Hunt wait forrad to reading your programme for your local school district.

This mail excerpts from a longer Stag Hunt white paper "Reforming Education Reform" from the inaugural Summertime Stag Hunt mag. The winners of the Socratic Challenge will exist included in the Rainy Season Stag Hunt magazine.

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Patrick Atwater is co-founder of Stag Chase Enterprises, a publishing startup pioneering political economy insights. He serves on the board of the Los Angeles Education Partnership and as a mentor in Higher Bound.

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