Raquel Romano
MAS 713
October 1, 2001
The Future of Schools
I believe time is a critical and elusive element of learning and teaching environments, something that has a strong influence on what happens in classrooms daily, and on what long-term changes schools undergo. Time can make or break an idea for learning a concept, a methodology for teaching a subject, or a new paradigm for the school of the future. And time is particularly essential for any evolving creature. If the school of the future is to be a product of evolution, its design should explicitly take into account the role of time at every scale.
Evolution is a valuable concept for thinking of how people learn. We have seen how trial-and-error can lead to extraordinary discoveries for students and teachers, but it is inherently time-consuming and not necessarily efficient or direct. When there is pressure from administrators, parents, and politicians to show short-term results in the classroom, almost any innovative learning experiment is bound to be too risky to try. So to allow learning to be a truly evolutionary process, schools must accompany any new idea with a conscious plan for how time can best serve that idea.
It is often difficult in a project-based/learner-centered/constructionist/constructivist/etc. learning environment to strike a balance between creative, exploratory learning and more guided instruction. Seemingly "wasted" time may leave no immediately visible benefits, and the process may be initially exhausting for teachers, worrisome to parents, and confusing to students, all accustomed to established school customs. Only over time can these ideas evolve their own customs that reappear from one year to another and last long enough to create a legacy, a sense of "this is just the way things are done" that makes any tradition entrenched.
Enabling such new practices to take root is a long-term experiment, possibly requiring several generations of learners and teachers. Imagine a community of teachers and parents who grew up learning in these sorts of environments: for them, nothing could be more natural. Positive examples of these learning practices will abound. The difficult question is how to pave the way for such a generation to evolve.
Just as biological evolution requires mutations, some of which die off and some of which leave permanent changes, schools should provide a medium for mutations in learning practices. This is tricky because allowing some "bad" mutation to leave a whole set of students at a dead end is obviously not desirable. Is the time that we want to give to students, teachers, and schools a daily chunk, a long-term ribbon, a gradually increasing trickle, or a huge block of months or years? If change is to be gradual, how can a valuable but initially unorthodox idea ever take hold?
I believe the “gradual” nature of change can apply to how new practices spread to all sorts of learning, but that immediate, revolutionary change is possible within new, non-traditional learning environments. Think of a class to be held either inside or outside the time and space of an existing school, that teaches a new subject about which communities have little prior expectation, i.e., not one of the “basic” subjects (reading, writing, math, science) that carry so much controversy. A long-term plan to teach this subject throughout the entirety of the students’ school years could be allocated the necessary time for evolution, mutation, adaptation, and experimentation for valuable discoveries to have a lasting impact. Within this class, the initial change would be drastic, immersive, and unconventional, with no guarantee of “success” by whatever measure the community uses. But such an example, if allowed to flourish, could yield certain lasting effects on the students, the teachers, the parents, and on general attitudes about how learning takes place. Ideally, with such obvious examples available for everyone to witness, the spread of such practices to other school environments will be natural. But this takes time.