If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got.
Now this quote has been rightly or wrongly attributed to Henry Ford.
But regardless of its true origins, it's worth thinking
about the essence of this, as we, we design schools.
>> Put another way, every machine is
perfectly designed to produce exactly what it produces.
And organizations are the same way.
Our schools produce the results they do because we've built
them in a way to make those results.
And it's only by questioning the assumptions at the core of schools
that we can start to think about machines that get very different results.
Now this isn't Only, only about blended learning.
But if you're going to redesign a school, you can't
just think where's there technology and where's there not technology.
You actually have to go at the core assumptions around,
the calender, where students go, how we use adults, and redesign
schools with those ideas in mind.
>> So let's dive in: Assumption one that we make
is that the school year should be from September though June.
Now, we know the origins of this from the agrarian calendar when students
had to get off for summer, so that they could tend to the farm.
But, in this day and age, does this still make sense?
And even more so when we have evidence about the summer
slide, that actually affects students from
disadvantaged communities where they don't continue
to learn during those summers, and they
just slide off and their performance wanes?
We have some studies that, point out the
detrimental effects of this in the resources section.
It's a big assumption that you want to keep in mind as we re-design schools.
>> So let's put this calendar from June, September until June into the
bucket of things you may want
to reconsider if you're starting from scratch.
Assumption two, school should be from 8:30 to 3:30 every day
of the week.
Three ideas for you to think about in this.
One is the brain-based research we're seeing about just how many hours of sleep
an adolescent brain needs, and the kind
of school schedules that would most accomodate that.
Secondly, we're in a reality now where
many families have both parents working so the
custodial hours the schools need to think about
may be different than just 8:30 to 3:30.
And lastly, it is interesting to look internationally and compare the number of
hours the students are in schools in other countries compared to our own.
We'll focus on two of our protagonist schools and look at
the schedules they've created around the ideal experiences for their students.
>> Assumption three.
The daily schedule should be fixed for all students so that
all students receive the same amount of time in every single subject.
Now, this may make sense from a law and order
point of view, and managing a, a strict schedule each day.
But from the perspective of
individualizing and personalizing learning for
each student, we have to question whether this still makes sense.
>> And assumption four.
Class size is super important, and also should be roughly the same all day long.
Now, there are some really interesting debates
about the effect of class size, and we
put a couple of links in the resources section if you want to dive in more.
But for this purposes we're going to start to wonder
what are some of the schools doing to have much
larger class sizes at some part of the day and much smaller class sizes
at another, and actually be deliberate about
that choice versus defaulting to a one-size-fits-all approach.
>> Assumption five.
The default for all students is to be in a group of students
in a box with a single credentialed teacher at the front of the room.