This is an an attempt to compile a list of new approaches to education, primary schools that are trying out alternate ways of engaging and educating kids :
Lets build this list :
Innovative Schools : A blog article
Studio Schools : A network of UK schools
High Tech High : 11 Schools in San Diego US
A great presentation by Guy Kawasaki – relevant for all our students who are considering innovative ventures. Relevant to us to – as we attempt to innovate on ways of learning.
Olin College gets it right.
engineering starts with people — understanding who we’re designing for, what they value, and where there are areas of opportunity — and ends with people
Olin College was founded because we believe there is a problem with undergraduate engineering education. The traditional curriculum is too narrow; it teaches students how to solve problems, but not how to find the right problems to solve, or how to get their solutions out of the lab and into the world.
At most schools, students spend the first semesters — sometimes years — taking prerequisites in math and science before they do any engineering. These programs discourage many of the students who are most interested in engineering.
At Olin, students start engineering right away, with three classes in the first semester that provide hands-on experiences in several areas of engineering. And throughout the curriculum, students stay engaged by working on projects connected to real-world challenges. Students begin to explore the arts, humanities, social sciences and entrepreneurship early on, and they are able to directly integrate and apply this learning in all areas of the curriculum.
We are trying something really new this term. Not something that we all agreed on. But something we felt worth trying, with Tristan Miller being the chief experimenter supported by Maja.
In all the teaching I have been involved in, specially software teaching, we first qualify students to ensure that they have the background necessary to follow the course. We decide and announce what language they would be learning and what kind of exercises and projects they need to do and what they want to focus on and of course we run it strictly according to plan.
We pretty much let everyone who wanted to join the module join. Some of them knew programing and some have never programed.
While we started the module with processing, students were allowed to chose languages of their choice. We see them moving onto different languages (not all of which we know).
Students choose their own.
Thanks to the structure of the adventure space we do not carry that burden.
So as you can can see Tristan is running this module in a very very weird way. But is it working ? By the looks of it – very much so.35 students are fully engrossed learning what they wish to learn.
We are breaking new grounds here.
Deciding what too offer this term through our digital literacy program was a bit chaotic. I had planed a clever strategy. Since I knew that kids were bored with education, why not introduce them to fun stuff first and them trick them into learning math and science ?
After all we are part of a school and funded by tax payers. I was not sure if we can sustain a program that is based on the schools motto of “Follow Your Own Adventure”. So I schemed. A carefully planned strategy to introduce math and science thorough programing was presented to our team.
But every member of the team much to their credit had ideas of their own.Those who cook up devious schemes need to cooperate else they get caught out. It was not going to work. So we decided not to kid the kids – mainly because we could not agree on how to.
So we decide that we will not. The kids won. We will not be kidding them. We will let them follow their own adventure. So the kids choose. They choose the programing language the projects that they wish to do and the level of skills that they wish to develop.
No more hidden agendas.
This explains the nature of the path well. Most people prefer the sensible path shown first, but then when they get there they will realize that they are amongst a crowd that has slogged their way there. The second path is full of perils. Many will give up. But every obstacle is a learning opportunity, even if they don’t get up there, they have learned more than peddling along a well paved path.
Such is the nature of innovation.