There’s a moment when you enter Farmers Branch’s Firehouse Theatre and notice the floor. In particular, the white lines. The painted markings that once directed enormous fire trucks into position are still there, though they are now faint due to years of foot traffic and opening-night excitement. It’s a minor detail that is simple to overlook. However, it’s precisely the kind of thing that gives this place a sense of belonging. Actually, to a lot of people. The Mustang Station Arts and Culture District, a section of Farmers Branch that has been gradually and purposefully transformed into something the suburb…
Author: Janine Heller
A well-designed classroom for young children has a certain kind of silence that descends upon it; it’s the focused hum of genuine curiosity rather than the silence of suppression. That’s precisely what you notice when you enter the most talked-about bilingual creative learning center in Los Angeles. tiny hands flipping things over. Before they’ve finished putting the words together, questions start to form on their lips. Teachers are bending down to listen, not to correct. Most of us are not familiar with this preschool from our childhood. It’s something much more intriguing and much more difficult to define. A specific…
The noise is the first thing you notice when you walk into a hands-on creative learning school on a typical Tuesday morning. Not chaos, but constructive noise. A teacher crouching next to a student at a worktable, kids organizing supplies on low wooden shelves, and someone quietly explaining what they’re building. It doesn’t resemble school as most adults recall it. That’s the whole point. Private education is undergoing a subtle but noticeable change across the United States. The strict, lecture-heavy approach that characterized American classrooms for many years is being abandoned by families. A different type of school is taking…
There’s a noticeable difference when you stroll through the hallways of some Ohio high schools on a Thursday afternoon. The students aren’t in the art rooms as much as they once were, but they’re still there. Some are working on a real client brief with a professional creative director in a graphic design studio across town. Others are present at a small ceramics workshop as participants with real deadlines rather than as spectators. At first, it’s a little confusing because there isn’t the usual commotion of teenagers haphazardly drawing still-life fruit bowls. A portion of traditional high school electives have…
The first thing you see when you enter a RoboThink session on a Tuesday afternoon in San Diego is not a robot. It’s the pencil sound. Before a single screen was turned on, children bent over blank paper and drew anything they wanted, including a spaceship, a dragon, or a half-remembered character from a video game. For a program based on block-based programming and Arduino circuits, this decision seems almost purposefully counterintuitive. However, it may be the most crucial thirty minutes of the entire session, according to Mr. Javier, the founder and lead educator who has coached competitive robotics teams…
The Collabrify Roadmap platform’s unglamorous appearance is the first thing you notice about it. There isn’t a fancy onboarding video or a homepage supported by venture capital that promises to “reimagine education.” All that’s needed is a quiet interface, a collection of tools, and a roadmap that outlines the school day in the manner that a considerate instructor might draw it on the back of a napkin. Nevertheless, this small piece of software, developed at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, has found its way into the hands of about two million educators. That’s not a figure you would…
When you walk into a homeschool co-op on a weekday morning, the noise is the first thing you notice. Not the disorderly kind. Something more akin to a functional studio. Water samples from a nearby creek are being debated by a group of nine-year-olds in West Virginia. A chemistry experiment that went awry caused two teenagers in New Hampshire to argue. With coffee in hand, a parent in Birmingham leads a group of younger children through a writing exercise that she had meticulously prepared the previous evening. Almost no textbook is visible. And that appears to be the point more…
The notion of entrusting a teacher with money and no script seems almost archaic. Give them a check, inquire as to what they would construct if no one intervened, and then take a step back. Though most people outside the field are unaware of it, the Indianapolis Foundation’s Radical Imagination Creative Grants program has quietly emerged as one of the more intriguing developments in Indiana education at the moment. Teachers in public schools throughout the state receive the grants. By philanthropic standards, the funds are not substantial. However, the framing is important. The foundation is asking teachers more along the…
Nestled in a corner of the borough where construction cranes still seem to be a part of the skyline, the new building is located in Downtown Brooklyn. On September 7, a group of ninth graders arrived for their first day, passing hallways that had yet to accumulate the scuff marks that all schools eventually acquire. They were the first students to attend Design Works High School, a public institution that appears to be like any other on paper but behaves completely differently in reality. The school is the result of a lengthy, somewhat unlikely partnership between Bank Street College of…
A freshman is working on a quick film about her grandmother somewhere on the outskirts of the San Diego State campus. It is a component of the Life Tree project, a first-year assignment that, on paper, sounds like the kind of thing universities have always done: students reflecting, sharing, and learning how to introduce themselves. The toolkit is different. By the end of the semester, she will have a digital artifact that she can present to an employer, and she is working in Adobe Express rather than a notebook. That tiny change, which is repeated annually by 4,000 students on…