When creating a school that’s different from the mental model many parents, teachers, administrators, citizens (and some students) hold in their heads, key critiques arise that, when not addressed appropriately, result in confusion, wasted effort, hand-wringing, and disillusionment. And these emotions can in turn compel innovators to revert to the traditional, broken, inequitable systems and habits that have been exacerbating inequality and boring kids for well over a century.

What follows are three features of innovative schools that many believe to be problems, and attempts to describe how the problems are actually challenges to embrace, and not accidents or oversights.

Students in the Same Class/Grade/School Have Different Experiences

If a characteristic of an innovative school’s approach is to empower teachers and students to be the ones co-designing learning experiences, different students will certainly have different experiences.

For example: one biology teacher with a background in zoology will likely approach the subject of evolution differently from a teacher with a background in genetics. The former may have students create field journals at the zoo, while the latter may have students produce a video of a controlled fruit-fly experiment. Although there would be substantial overlap in the learnings of students in these two courses, their learning journeys would vary greatly.

Far from cause for alarm, there are at least two virtues of schools that take this approach:

• Teachers design learning at the intersection of their own and their students’ passions, skills, and interests, allowing the classes to dive deeper into their collective inquiry. They can also, in many cases, make use of their own professional experience and contacts in the field, to create opportunities for students to work alongside, and receive feedback from, professionals. In such a regime, student experiences are different, sure, but much richer for it.
• Since teachers and students have been granted substantial autonomy to co-create learning journeys, educators in such models are empowered to personalize the work for each student. In addition to building their curriculum designs around a broad and energizing central inquiry and infusing it with rich opportunities for student voice and choice, they can, for example, adjust assignments to incorporate an individual student’s interests, provide alternate modes of assessment, and encourage students to identify their own learning goals.

Proceeding as described here is not to embrace a chaos model, with every teacher Lone Wolfing about the learning landscape. Rather, it’s to suggest, for example, that forcing all 9th graders to go on the same number of field trips or perhaps even take the same exact history assessments, is to attempt to align at the wrong level of analysis, given what many innovative schools are trying to do.

Instead, student experiences at such schools can be different but coherent. They can cohere around a set of design principles, or a broad and flexible intended curriculum, with core assessments such as student-led conferences, exhibitions of work, internships, and presentations of learning. The school’s culture and community can cultivate valuing difference and diversity, which emerges as the shared belief, beautifully paradoxical in its shared-ness, that what we share are our differences and our need for different things.

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Thinking more deeply about this suggestion that students should have the same or even similar experiences, one could consider that innovative schools offering students differentiated experiences have the capacity of being infused with the spirit of equity, rather than the spirit of Procrustes.

Procrustes was the evil, mythic Greek who invited weary travellers to stay overnight in his castle, treated them to a sumptuous dinner, then either stretched their bodies or trimmed their legs to fit the bed in their appointed room–a procedure that resulted always, unfortunately, in the traveller’s death.

While a push for equality–which sounds virtuous enough–might suggest that all students should get the same size bed, as it were, equity suggests that schools should strive to provide every student with the one that’s best fit for them. Tackling this challenge, rather than the challenge of standardization, orients a school’s energy around the aspiration for equity as the National Equity Project defines it: “Educational equity means that each child receives what they need to develop to their full academic and social potential.”

Students Are Not Learning This, That, or The Other

Understandably, there’s an expectation that students will learn a variety of things in school, including facts. Even those who don’t ascribe to the “empty-vessel” schooling model, which asserts that students must be poured full of facts, might sometimes say, “But gosh, shouldn’t they all be learning this, that, or the other?”

The challenge, of course, is that this phrase encompasses a wide swath of stuff indeed, which could include, for example, the significance of the Battle of Fort Sumter, the names of the catalysts in the Krebs cycle, the major organelles of a human cell, the side-angle-side rule for the congruence of triangles, and millions of other crucial facts that thinking citizens should just know.

So, yes, at innovative schools some students are not learning this, or that, or the other. Students endeavour to learn a smaller required, core amount of stuff because:

• Recent neuroscience has shed light on the mechanisms for what a long history of memory research has shown: the passive intake of facts, absent an emotional connection to them and consistent spaced revisiting, results in low retention. Repetition and emotional connection take time, so the amount of stuff must be adjusted accordingly, but it can be learned deeply, and well, and in context. Innovative schools frequently ask students to learn things and know them for a long time and connect to them personally and, beyond that, reflect on the process of learning so they have the chance to fall in love with the process and know how to learn more when they want to or need to. Meanwhile, the vast majority of students at more traditional schools, with a more ambitious amount of stuff to learn, forget most of it soon after the exam.
• Not only does compelling students to learn too tall a mountain of stuff not work, it’s frequently counterproductive. Learning facts out of context invites kids to hate school and learning, and those don’t hate school are either magical or overly compliant. The magical ones will be fine anyway, and the compliant ones need to be pushed to use the facts they’re learning to some end purpose.

The absence of learning this, that, or the other at an innovative school is, in most cases, neither an oversight nor a postmodern war against the idea of facts or truth itself. Rather, a curricular focus on a set of concrete particulars facilitates significant learning experiences, through which students also learn more about what they want to know, how to find out about it, and how to make it matter.

You Are Not Preparing Them Academically for College

Embedded in this critique is the grim fatalism of one of William Faulkner’s characters, who used to say that “the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.” Put another way, the critique assumes that the appropriate method to prepare students for the soul-crushing lectures and high-stakes exams of college is to subject them to the same thing in high school. Most innovative schools do not make this assumption, and instead organize themselves as if high degrees of student agency, engagement, and a sense of belonging positively and crucially influence the students’ learning and well-being in the present, and also prepare them well for the future.

Another, almost opposite response to this critique, is also true: many colleges (in response to the internet, equity initiatives, student demands, and other forces) are themselves evolving to become more project-based, more forward-looking in terms of assessment and class structure, and less dependent on outdated methodologies.

At least three stool-legs support college preparation for students in many innovative schools:

• If we proceed from the notion that schools should attempt to do no harm to a student’s natural curiosity, lectures and test can (perhaps even “should”) be deployed, but sparingly and always within opportunities for reflection and refinement. Embedding these practices carefully results in hormesis, rather than the death of the desire to learn.
• Schools that cultivate a supportive community that can provide multiple avenues of support, friendship, guidance, and a sense of purpose graduate students who are hungry for the same things in college. They have created habits creating supportive communities of their own and assembling with like-minded people to engage in work and play that’s of value to them and to their communities.
• Students who have opportunities during high school to try on the hats of professionals through projects and internships, to engage the complexities and challenges of real-world problems, to experience the power and impact of their own creations on an authentic audience have an increased chance of arriving at college lit up by some purpose and/or a sense of curiosity.

As with the other perceived “bugs,” in this case many innovative schools have attempted to take a clear-eyed look at resource allocation and decided on different priorities for how students, teachers, and staff spend their time.

Tell The Story

One must acknowledge that innovative schools who make the innovative tradeoffs described here do not execute perfectly, not least because we live in the real and fallen world. It’s probably true that some schools’ students should emerge, for example, as more confident, powerful, and adept readers and writers than they are, or that they should know more about this or that.

But there can certainly be room for improvement in these areas without reverting to traditional means of education. Levers for school improvement can include better instructional methods, coordinated inventions for struggling readers, and better libraries, to name a few.

As important as continual improvement, innovative schools will need to tell their story to help demonstrate the strengths of the new approaches. Schools whose students do work that matters to them, who feel they belong, and who can explain what they’re doing and learning to their families and to audiences of adult professionals, may find themselves talking less about bugs.