In my
last post I sketched the kind of school I'd like to propose HCS becoming. In this post I'll add a few details but mainly, as I promised there, I'll look at it from the points of view of a few fictional students some years hence. Jack is a rather geeky freshman, who loves the technical side of everything; Jill is his athletic/artistic elder sister who tolerates tech as a necessary evil; Joe is their eldest brother, an athlete now in college, who was a freshman in the transition. Let's start with Joe.
Joe: All through 8th grade, Joe was very much aware of a muted uproar in the high school -- it's really just one big building for K-12, and he was encouraged to come to meetings. There was a lot of photography going on, supporting drastic extensions to our previous efforts to put helpful explanations of course material into
YouTube playlists. Everything possible was going up, with
TED-Ed lessons built around those videos and a separate software platform being designed, adapted from the KhanAcademy concepts. Many 9-12 students were studying and earning part-time money by reviewing their classes in front of cameras; a large crew of outsiders were hired to help.
Every course in 9-12, with grade 9 to be semi-complete by the next fall, was being recast as a series of "student-run projects" and "student-group problem sets" supported by rotation with on-demand lecture material having mastery quizzes, fact-sets, and lists of standardized labels for the skills and knowledge each project used and developed. All through the summer, while all the incoming 9th graders read
HPMOR as preparation for several projects, the process continued. Nobody expected this to be easy, and it wasn't; Joe's 9th and even 10th grade teachers often had to fill in material that should have been online, and the cameras were there to make it work better next time -- Joe himself, like all the other students, contributed possible mastery-quiz questions. "Planning Fallacy!" became a running joke throughout the school, until the official adoption of "Good Try, What's Plan B?" as school motto posted over the main door. Still, by 10th grade the courses had started to fade into one another because virtually every project includes critical reading, conceptual modeling whether mathematical or not, writing, and art/drama in the presentation -- teachers were busy supporting that. By 11th grade, the notion of "grade" was losing focus; some of Joe's classmates would be graduating after three years, some might take five, it really didn't mean a lot. Joe could have passed the
Regents at the end of 11th grade, but he thought learning some more (and getting better scores) was a better bet. As an athlete, he'd chosen some self-measurement experimentation projects in 9th and became one of the founding members of the
Quantified Self Club. He learned HPMOR's rationality techniques, especially the multi-megayear ethical thinking, but what he really got from HPMOR was a belief that opposition to Death is a realistic long-term goal, even for Muggles. He decided to become a computational neurogerontologist, developing and testing models of aging brains -- and if there wasn't any such thing he was going to invent it. He's in college for now, but he doesn't feel that he needs college; he has learned to learn from books and MOOCs and from mentors he found in the
biohacking community, and the kind of startup he expects to join won't care about credentials. Meanwhile, he drives for both Uber and Lyft and partially supports his apartment with AirBnB.
Jill: Jill entered high school (which no longer has a "9th grade") as Joe was finishing, and he was a student mentor for one of her projects, a year-long LARP set in an alternate-history WWI, based on
All Quiet on the Western Front with material brought in from a German translation of
The Butter Battle Book, and with computational modeling of the
iterated prisoner's dilemma in the context of the
Christmas Truce. The LARP included intensive German as well as history, engineering, the physiology of PTSD.... Joe was also backstage helping with a Greek chorus of "robots" for a grotesquely comical musical adaptation of Macbeth where JIll performed, so they used and were credited with quite different skills and knowledge. Each has chaired meetings including the other, under the simplified Robert's Rules of Order. She is now in her third and last year, using a Coursera MOOC and a Colgate hybrid class as she gets ready for Regents but with a focus on art, dance, music, and soccer -- and she simply doesn't like tech that much. She prefers physical books. With video, she transcribes in Tee-line journalistic shorthand and then redoes her notes in Cornell Notes notebooks, and puts her fact-sets for study onto physical index cards, creating mnemonics and
silly stories. A Daily pack-in-a-rubber-band exchanges cards with the Weekly box every night; the Weekly box exchanges cards with the Monthly box every Sunday; the Monthly box exchanges cards with the Yearly box once a month. It works for her, and her parents and the school have signed off on it. She has been working with and in local businesses and expects to be a yoga instructor, dance teacher, massage therapist, maybe physical therapist ... but she hopes these are steps along the way to working in
dance therapy. Meanwhile, she'll start a biology major with pre-med orientation, which will teach her things she wants to know.
Jack: Jack reread HPMOR last summer after 8th grade and picked an initial project-sequence through to graduation, but he has already changed most of it because he recently decided that the IoT, the Internet of Things, is going to achieve consciousness and we are all
doomed unless we work out how to make sure it's a friendly sort of AI. (He started thinking about friendly AI from reading about HPMOR's
author, who is prominent in that area.) So he has signed up for as many IoT projects as he can, most of which at HCS are sensor projects within agriculture, athletics, or dance projects -- he is working and then socializing with farm kids, jocks, and arts kids, who might never have talked to him at all in a larger school with conventional structure. (They'd have interacted to some extent in HCS anyway, because it's small -- that makes this whole thing easier, with less resistance to be overcome.)
So, what difference did our project make for these three? Mainly just that they were in control of their lives, much more than they would have been at a traditional school; secondarily that their schoolwork centered on complex projects with subprojects. They were making choices that they then had to live with, recovering from project and subproject failures with adult help rather than learning fact-sets and tasks, one after another. In Alison King's now-famous phrasing, the teacher shifted
from "sage on the stage" to "guide on the side". Some of their choices were individual choices, some were voted-on group choices, and they've learned a variety of styles of running groups with subgroups, as adult advisors look on nervously. They are independent learners, independent planners, independent thinkers; intellectually and emotionally ready for the instabilities and opportunities of the century to come.
As I suggested in the
last post, the key factors are the internal motivation factors. For individual accomplishments we think about AMP:
autonomy (e.g. of plan choice, and choosing the on-demand mini-lectures to make the plan work);
mastery of the chosen subject matter (not just trying to pass a test on material dumped out in class);
purpose of the plan overall and of autonomously-chosen compoents within that plan. For individuals within the groups they sign up for, we have SCARF: the
status of their roles in their groups,
clarity of the structure of that group and the rules that run it,
autonomy of action within their roles,
relatedness of each thing-to-be-done with other things that already matter, and
fairness of group structure and of evaluation.
A Sampling of Sources:
So, my ideas for what they're worth are in my
SuperSchool workplace thoughts, my
Flexible-Plan Failure-Based Autonomy School outline, and here.
What I'm proposing can be viewed as a mix of Salman Khan's
The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined with Peter Gray's
Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, adding ideas from Sir Ken Robinson's
Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education and Yong Zhao's
World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students. (Yong Zhao is talking about China's decreasing test-focus, and about the needs of entrepreneurial "black-collar workers". Robinson describes many things, but I would summarize as "You can't have Aristotle without Aristophanes, you can't have Euclid without Euripides" although he doesn't put it that way. I've come to think it's true even if Aristotle might be outraged.) Central ideas about motivation are from Daniel Pink's
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us and David Rock's
Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long. The sense of rationality we're trying to develop is mostly described in Yudkowsky's work, not only
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality | Petunia married a professor, and Harry grew up reading science and science fiction but
Rationality: From AI to Zombies; also Tetlock's
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction which has been described as
"putting some of the rationality/cognitive-science literature into an easily accessible and more authoritative-sounding form." The future for which we're hoping kids will prepare themselves, since nobody can do it for them, is roughly as described in Tyler Cowen's
Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation with ideas about future job markets from Garett Jones'
Hive Mind: How Your Nation’s IQ Matters So Much More Than Your Own. [
update: I left out two previously-linked books, Megan McArdle's
The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success on the need for our schools to teach resilience instead of preventing it, and Steven Johnson's
Where Good Ideas Come From on social networks as the source of innovation.]
I'm done.
Or then again, maybe not. :-)
