Picture the stereotype of a perfectly run conventional classroom. Desks are arranged in tidy ranks and rows as on a chessboard. Students deploy their notebooks at parallel slants, their pencils poised in unison, like the bows of a violin section. All eyes are on the teacher looming at the front of the room. Silence reigns but for the first tap of her chalk against the blackboard. It’s a decorous and fitting atmosphere… for a funeral.
The ideal classroom, in my opinion, would look and sound quite different.
As I’ve said, I would group together as many as a hundred students of widely varying ages. They would seldom if ever all be doing the same thing at the same time. And while nooks and alcoves within this imagined school might be perfectly quiet for private study, other parts would be bustling with collaborative chatter.
At a given moment, perhaps one-fifth of the students would be doing computer-based lessons and exercises aimed at a deep and durable grasp of core concepts. Let me pause a moment to stress this: one-fifth of the students. This is another way of saying that only one-fifth of the school day, or one to two hours, would be spent on the Khan Academy lessons (or some future version thereof) and any peer tutoring that it might catalyze. Given the greatly increased efficiency of self-paced, mastery-based learning, one or two hours is enough, and this should ease the concerns of any technophobes out there who fear that technology-based education means that kids would sit numbly in front of computer screens all day. That’s neither true nor necessary. An hour or two suffices—and, as we’ve already discussed, even that time involves significant peer-to-peer tutoring and one-on-one time with teachers.
But let’s come back to the rest of the students. Twenty kids out of a hundred are working at computers, with one of our team teachers circulating among them, answering questions, troubleshooting difficulties as they occur. The feedback and the help are virtually immediate, and the twenty-to-one ratio is augmented by peer-to-peer tutoring and mentoring—a central advantage of the age-mixed classroom.
What of the other eighty students?
I can see (and hear!) a boisterous subgroup learning economics and trying out market simulations by way of board games such as those we’ve used with good effect at our summer camps.
I would have another group, divided into teams, building robots or designing mobile apps or testing out novel ways for structures to capture sunlight.
A quiet corner or room could be devoted to students working on art or creative writing projects. A less quiet corner would be reserved for those working on original music. Clearly, it would be an advantage to have a team teacher with particular affinities for those fields.
The most important aspect of this is that it would carve out space and time for open-ended thinking and creativity for all students. In today’s schools, it’s not hard to find “different-thinking” students who are too often neglected, misunderstood, and either alienated or simply left behind by rigid standard curricula. I’m talking about the kind of kid who might prove to be brilliant but at certain snapshot moments is regarded as slow, or the kind of kid whose interests zig off in peculiar directions that the rest of the class simply doesn’t have time or interest to follow. The kid who becomes obsessed with solid geometry and isn’t ready to let it go when the lesson ends, but rather wants to derive its equations and spin out its implications all on his own. Or the kid who is happiest racking her brain over a math problem that might not even have a solution. Or formulating an approach in engineering that has never even been tried.
These are the kinds of curious, mysterious, and original minds that often end up making major contributions to our world; to reach their full potential, however, they need the latitude to follow their own oblique, nonstandard paths. That latitude is seldom found in a conventional, box-shaped classroom in which everyone is supposed to be doing the exact same lesson, and “differentness” is generally used as a negative. To a large degree, these students just haven’t allowed themselves to be molded to the Prussian ideal. And I believe many, many more students can be like them if we allow them to. I believe a school in which they could cover basic course material in one or two hours a day, leaving plenty of time—not interrupted by bells every hour—and space for their private mulling in a supportive environment, would allow most kids to thrive academically, creatively, and emotionally. The actual physical layout of the room could be experimented with; in theory this could even occur in existing classrooms or an open field. The important difference between what I am describing and today’s classrooms is that any walls would be only superficial physical boundaries, not mental ones.