In education research circles, there’s a certain moment that keeps coming up lately. A child is using paper, paint, clay, or perhaps just a pencil while seated at a table—not a screen, but a real table. She is not being graded by anyone. She is not being timed by anyone. Additionally, she is so preoccupied that she fails to notice the researcher who is quietly taking notes nearby. Even though it seems insignificant and unremarkable, a growing number of serious scholars in America who research how children learn have developed an obsession with that moment. For a long time, the…
Author: Janine Heller
Painters always seem to start by mentioning a certain aspect of the light in northern New Mexico. In the late afternoon, it arrives sideways, capturing the red and yellow rock formations in a way that gives the scene an almost staged, overly intentional feel. O’Keeffe, Georgia, saw it. She didn’t actually go. And somewhere in that same stretch of high desert, between Abiquiú and Taos, something has been quietly taking shape. It’s not just a place for artists to work, but something more akin to a living institution that operates more like a school that no one is formally enrolled…
There is a specific type of subdued radicalism that doesn’t use manifestos or slogans to make its presence known. Instead, it manifests itself in the way a school arranges its curriculum, selects its pupils, and determines its core beliefs about humanity following protracted institutional discussion. You can quickly get a sense of it by strolling around the Rhode Island School of Design’s urban campus in Providence on any given afternoon. Students make sketches of fire escapes. A sculpture installation is being pulled through a small hallway by someone. In the middle of a sentence, a professor pauses to examine a…
Around October, teachers experience a certain type of fatigue. The initial enthusiasm of a new school year has faded, the planning materials are already out of date, and a teacher’s creative aspirations from September are subtly put on hold somewhere between grading and parent emails. The majority of teachers are familiar with this emotion. The notion that things don’t have to be that way is more recent. A small group of San Francisco-based education-focused startups have been addressing this issue by giving teachers back momentum, something they seldom receive, rather than eliminating them from the equation as more ostentatious AI…
There’s something quietly striking about watching a team from one of the world’s most well-resourced universities walk into a school where the ceiling leaks when it rains. That contrast — between institutional prestige and crumbling infrastructure — sits at the heart of a new creative partnership between Stanford University’s d.school and five underfunded California public schools. It’s an unusual arrangement, and depending on who you ask, either long overdue or still not enough. The d.school, formally known as the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, has spent two decades teaching Silicon Valley’s future founders how to prototype, iterate, and think differently.…
If you’ve spent any time observing how schools actually operate, you’ve probably noticed the discrepancy between what is taught and what is obviously needed. Children are seated in rows. Instructors navigating slides. The room was filled with a sort of silent compliance. It is essentially effective at disseminating information. However, more educators are beginning to openly express the sense that something is lacking. The Teachers College at Columbia University has been considering this concept for some time, and the conclusion that is emerging there is neither optional nor gentle: learning will be creative in the future, both structurally and unavoidably.…
Every afternoon when you stroll through the hallways of MIT’s Media Lab, you instantly sense something is wrong, but in the best way possible. Desks are not arranged in rows. No one is taking notes off of a whiteboard. Rather, there’s a sort of productive noise: students hovering over prototypes, scraping materials, and conversations that sound more like arguments than discussions. It’s completely deliberate, controlled chaos. For years, the Media Lab has operated under a philosophy that, depending on who you ask, most traditional schools would find either deeply uncomfortable or inspiring. The concept challenges the idea that learning occurs…
A 26-year-old teacher with a master’s degree in education is spending her third consecutive Tuesday night updating individual learning plans for thirty-one students in a crowded, underfunded, fluorescent-lit classroom in suburban Ohio. Six of the students have documented behavioral issues, and two of them do not yet speak conversational English. Her goal was to become a teacher. She’s engaged in a completely different activity. There are multiple stories in this. It’s turning into the standard. At the entry level of American education, a subtle but important change is taking place nationwide. Within the first three to five years of their…
Graduate school exudes a certain kind of energy that makes people try things they probably shouldn’t. This energy is equal parts ambition and exhaustion. Somewhere in the midst of that conflict, a small group of graduate students at Boston University made the decision that they would not limit their research to the issues surrounding educational technology. They intended to attempt repairing one. The end product was an innovative educational app that subtly and quietly made its way into the daily schedules of 500,000 educators worldwide. Even those who witnessed it still find that figure shocking. The project’s intellectual foundation came…
When a student is asked to defend their own work, a certain kind of silence descends upon the classroom. Instead of reciting a memorized response, they must explain the reasoning behind their decisions. It’s a little electric and uncomfortable. It’s also precisely the point, according to those behind a growing Pratt Institute initiative. Pratt Institute, a Brooklyn-based art and design school that has long been considered one of the nation’s most serious creative institutions, has been discreetly introducing a portfolio-based assessment model into public schools throughout New York State for the better part of the last few years. The program,…