Schools of the Future

This year society has been forced to look at every aspect of our lives through a different lens. While the pandemic has so many people out of their element, many leaders and thinkers have taken this opportunity to look at our daily lives—work, travel, commutes, the economy, and of course, school—to see what makes sense, and what can change for the better. We took the opportunity to speak with one such leader, Mike Posthumus, an Education Design Specialist and President of EcoGeek Solutions, about the future of schools.

CF: What sort of trends have you seen in education design?

MP: There are three things that pop out [at] me. We’re seeing technology emerge that helps teachers make better decisions about how to give a student a different way to think about something. This technology is ultimately giving us more power to individualize learning for each student. We’re still at the leading edge of this, but we’re probably going to see in the next decade major transitions to artificial intelligence and neural network powered software that’s equipping our teachers to be superhuman. Next, and this has been highlighted by the COVID response, [is] an increase in attention to social-emotional learning. It’s easy to forget how important educators are in the lives of our children, especially the lives of children from impoverished communities who do not necessarily always have adults in their lives. Technology is also allowing learners to not spend as much time in community, to not have as many direct conversations with individuals that they’re around. We see the socialemotional learning that often happened in families and in community not being reinforced as often. Now it’s becoming something that schools have to explicitly do. The third [trend] is learning as a skill that we have to teach: learning to learn. One of the things that’s driving this is the largest market cap companies in the world, the three A’s Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet (which is Google), these are learning organizations. They make money by learning and creating new ideas and then applying [them] to business solutions. The most valuable talent that we can have right now is the ability to learn and the ability to teach a computer to learn. So you have to be able to learn yourself. As a consequence of this, learning to learn is becoming this incredibly important part of the teaching and learning experience that we’re seeing way more attention being paid to.

CF: What is the long-term impact of COVID-19 on school?

MP: COVID is this turning point, people figured out that school is not just academics. A lot of people know that, but

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the public opinion of school is, you get on the bus, go to school, learn some stuff, and come home. [But] school is a market for food, it’s a restaurant, a mental health service provider, physical fitness, physical therapy. School is a social service. It is not an organization or a building. I think COVID has really opened the wound. We are asking this service, this system to do so much, we need to respond to it. I think we’re going to see norms getting challenged in education. For schools to operate the way that they need to operate, to really support communities the way they need to be supported, there’s going to be change in the way that people think about school. Other really practical things that I think will happen, distance learning is not going away. It’s going to be a part of every student’s learning experience. Even if it’s not the ideal form of teaching and learning, [students] have to be prepared for it for when they leave [school], whether it’s working or learning remotely. We need to equip students to be able to do this connected model of learning. You might see a new normal in school, where you do online learning, but you might be in a space where it’s comfy, like a coworking space. We might see schools starting to develop these types of environments where [students] have a class where they’re in that space, doing some type of instruction or learning experience. We have to teach things that are relevant. How do you gain the attention of a seven-year-old online if you’re teaching something that they don’t care about? You’re online, they can go to anything in the world that they might be more interested in. It’s going to force curriculum to become more responsive to the audience. I think we’re going to start seeing curriculum become more specialized to localities. It’s necessary for us to actually have a more equitable learning experience for people of color and for marginalized communities. We have to see curriculum change in order for those communities to really feel engaged in a part of the learning experience.

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CF: How do we make school a more equitable place?

MP: I am not a person of color so I am not authority and I cannot pretend to have the answers. What I will say is we work very hard to work with and work alongside and to elevate the voices of these community members when we’re designing schools. There’s this great resource called the Black Space Manifesto (blackspace.org/manifesto). It’s a group of black architects and city planners that came together and said, what does it mean to build a building or to build a community alongside the black community. There’s going to be more things like this emerging to position people of color in leadership positions, to help be the authority on what needs to change, so that learning can be more equitable. We’re designing a school in Wenatchee, Washington. It’s a small rural community and there’s a strong Hispanic, Latino community designing the first charter school. We are designing the physical building and it looks very different than a traditional school. We have a Plaza which pulls on Hispanic home experiences with beautiful rich fabrics, dance, music, and mariachi. We have a market instead of a cafe so kids can come and visit food trucks and local community vendors. We are taking the community that the school is serving and building what a learning space should be for that community based on their voice. We’re building it around their vision, not what we call cells and bells, where you have a corridor and a line of box [rooms] that mimic prison. We know that the school to prison pipeline is real. We are trying to decolonize the nature of school by literally designing them differently; more open spaces, more labs, more literal round spaces for discourse and conversation and dialogue, places for community organizations to have offices in the school, spaces for community members to come and have conversation. And then of course, places for dance and music and gathering and celebration. All of those things are really closely connected to social-emotional learning, too. We need to see more of that in education, not just around the physical design of buildings, but also around the curriculum that students are experiencing.

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Extracurricular Online Learning

With another season of online learning upon us, your kids might need a break from their regularly scheduled learning at school. These educational websites, apps and resource libraries are great places for your kids to learn about what they want to learn. They will keep kids entertained and keep their brains working at the same time. There are thousands of amazing sites offering free help during the pandemic, so these are just a few, but they all have quality “programming” and offer a wide variety of lessons for learners of all ages.

Outschool

outschool.com Outschool has a ton of really cool courses taught by teachers from around the world via live stream. Courses feature topics from writing and the arts, to STEM topics like coding and robotics, often with fun themes like Harry Potter potions, LEGO and Minecraft. Courses range from one-time to multi-week courses and from as little as $10.

National Geographic Education Resource Library

nationalgeographic.org/ education/resourcelibrary Learn about the world with National Geographic, including lessons on weather, globalization, engineering, physics, earth science and social studies.

Varsity Tutors

varsitytutors.com Nearly 200 free, live K-12 classes available all day long intended to help parents fill their children’s day with enriched learning. Some popular classes are “Intro to Spanish for Kids,” “Coolest Women in History, and “The Story of Your Favorite Fairy Tales.” There are free courses as well as paid courses ranging upward from $10 per hour session.

Khan Academy

khanacademy.org Learn just about anything at Khan Academy, for FREE. During the COVID crisis, Khan has daily schedules for students ages 2–18 to keep them learning, as well as resources for parents and teachers.

Brain Pop

brainpop.com This website has great animated videos and related activities on just about every topic your kids want to learn about, including coding and making movies, plus antiracism resources, quizzes, games, and a personalized goaltracking system.