The Traditional Way of Teaching Versus the Landscape Model

deal of damage to the potential of young people. While explicit biases are just as destructive, they tend to be easier to identify and address, whereas implicit biases are, by their nature, more unrecognized, often based on stereotypes and assumptions that the individual and collective community don’t even realize they’re making. As a result, many educators see bias as something other teachers have, but have difficulty recognizing it in their own practices. This makes implicit bias particularly difficult to deconstruct, while its impact is just as negative for students as more explicit bias.

We see these impacts in many forms, several of which will be explored more deeply later in this book. Research finds that negative stereotypes, such as the behavioral and cultural assumptions that lead to disproportionally higher rates of suspension for African American boys in U.S. schools, can be incredibly damaging, with Black boys perceived as “violent” in cases where White boys are viewed as “having a bad day” for the same behavior (Mills College, 2020). Even positive stereotypes, such as the assumption that Asian Americans are academically high achieving, can cause undue pressure on Asian students of all ages, ignoring students’ unique needs and selves. Research also finds that implicit biases connected to gender negatively affect girls, particularly in mathematics outcomes, and that Black girls are disproportionally penalized for being assertive in the classroom as compared to their White counterparts (Chemaly, 2015). As Mills College (2020) asserts, “Whatever the stereotype, viewing students as a group instead of as individuals leaves them at risk for not getting the support they need to learn.” Whether because of students’ cognitive challenges, exceptional giftedness, cultural identity, race, gender identity, sexual orientation, or socioeconomic background, educators’ implicit biases, however unintentional, often limit students’ goals and, in doing so, cut short potential careers and futures.

Certainly, we have examples of students who thrived despite such experiences with educator bias, like Mae Jemison’s insistence that she would become a scientist when told by her White kindergarten teacher that she should strive to become a nurse instead (as cited in Changing the Face of Medicine, n.d.). We know from her work that Dr. Jemison went on to become not just a doctor but the first female African American astronaut in history (Changing the Face of Medicine, n.d.). Sadly, the stories we never hear are of the countless students who give up along the way, who believe the limited perspective of the adults who educate them, the stories of students who never strive for more because they’ve been told it’s impossible, or because some element of their circumstances suggests such aspirations are unrealistic. This is where the landscape model of learning comes in.

This work will require the deep commitment and inclusive vision of school leaders. At the end of the day, leaders will need a high tolerance for challenge, a natural tendency to listen to, trust, and validate the ideas of students, and a solutions-oriented mindset that keeps their communities focused on the goal, however challenging or distant that horizon may feel some days. We generally see the most success where school leaders ensure their team spans a diversity of talents, skills, and world views, whatever the initiative undertaken. In the case of the landscape model, the leadership and instructional coaching team needs to include individuals who share the students’ background, as well as individuals with specific skill sets like the ability to train and coach others in the use of brave spaces, project-based learning, and asset- and strengths-based teaching and learning. It will also be important to have members of the leadership team who are trained in strategies for understanding and deconstructing implicit bias. While this is a long wish list, such a team might be built over several years, and it can be complemented by teachers who have those skills and want to devote some of their time to helping lead the initiative.

The most common qualification of educators suited to this work, whether they teach on the landscape or lead the effort, is their ability to understand what the current educational system feels like for students who aren’t well served by it. We as authors find ourselves touching back on our stories again and again in this book, both stories of students who succeeded and stories of students failed by the systems we’ve worked in. We let those failures guide our work toward something better, keeping students in our hearts in all we do. We are guided by elements of our culture and community, too, by our sense of planetary interdependence, and by the urgency we feel to create an educational system that prepares students for the challenges of today and tomorrow, not twenty years ago (and definitely not one hundred years ago). Everyone we interviewed for this book had this same quality in common: they spoke of students’ needs more than of educators’ needs; they addressed broader systemic challenges with students in mind first, and they told warm, moving stories that captured how and why they work toward the highest level of success possible for every single child. We encourage any reader of this book to do the same, particularly those who will lead this work and will need to inspire others to chart a different course forward in education.

The Traditional Way of Teaching Versus the Landscape Model

Education, as educators know it, has existed since only the 19th century. Grade levels and subject matters, classrooms, and the shuffling of students through hallways at the command of bells, is the invention of a small group of university

academics in response to U.S. education reformer Horace Mann’s visit to Prussia in 1843 (Rose, 2012). This trip exposed Mann to the solution the Prussians proposed to meet the challenges of supplying their military with soldiers of a similar and minimal level of education. On return to the United States, Mann and a group of university academics used this model to support, rather than the military system, the U.S. industrial complex, with the goal of supplying its industry with workers of a similar and minimal level of education.

Since that time, schooling has seen varying degrees of success and failure. As a global society, we have tried to address these challenges and failures through centralized solutions, like the United States’ federal No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top (U.S. Department of Education, 2009), and the U.K.’s Education Reform Act (1988), to name a few. Centralized solutions like these have focused on creating manuals for educators to follow, so to speak. They place administrators in supervisory positions, overseeing the implementation of schooling that looks like checking tasks off a list. As Sir Ken Robinson (2016) writes, the standards movement was meant to make educational systems “more efficient and accountable. The problem is that these systems are inherently unsuited to the wholly different circumstances of the 21st century” (p. xxi). Society has also addressed this through decentralized solutions, like giving districts and individual schools the freedom to pursue innovative models and individualized programs like Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID, n.d.), the magnet school movement (Kitchens & Brodnax, 2021), and one-to-one technology programs (Herold, 2016) to name just a few. These initiatives have supported some progress, but results have been mixed.

Other educational reformers have been finding their way back to older practices from a time long gone. The inquiry-based style of Socrates, the lessons of Indigenous place-based learning (a style of teaching and learning grounded in the context of place, providing learners contextualized opportunities), and the interpersonal connection and personalization of the one-room schoolhouse have all come back into vogue (Getting Smart, eduInnovation, & Teton Science School, 2017). These practices are positive, inherently student centered, and have, in many cases, been helpful when it comes to ensuring culturally responsive, relevant educational experiences for students. Furthermore, they align well with the landscape model of learning.

Senior learning designer and author Jill Ackers-Clayton, who reimagines learning spaces with Fielding International as much as what happens inside of them, describes most traditional schools as prison-like, with “double-loaded corridors and doors that close,” siloing subject areas and isolating students’ experiences

(personal communication, April 2, 2021). The authors agree and believe that the landscape model leverages exactly what Anderson indicates, whether by rebuilding the whole educational system, as we address in the last chapter (page 235), or by making reasonable modifications to the existing system, as we address throughout this book.

The landscape metaphor is by no means an easier path, but it is more effective and is so because of the three elements that form the foundation of teaching and learning in the landscape model. 1. Ecosystem: The ecosystem is a metaphor for the learning environment, where each student is a unique organism at a distinct point on the landscape because of the contexts and identities students bring with them into the classroom. Rather than seeing learning as starting and ending at fixed points for all students, this element invites us to consider students as beginning their learning from many different points on the landscape, and it asks educators to understand who students are as deeply as possible. Understanding a child’s culture, race, upbringing, socioeconomic advantages or disadvantages, previous learning, learning challenges, and more allows us to work toward the most appropriate goals (horizon) for each child, to support them in the most appropriate ways, and to co-construct the best pathway to the highest level of success possible. 2. Horizon: The horizon is a metaphor for the goals we work toward with students, that “end” point on the landscape that we might call mastery or success. While we recognize that schooling sets a common end point for all students in most parts of the world, in the form of standards and national exams, we are also keenly aware that those goals make some students feel stuck all the time, and make others feel limited. The horizon is not a fixed point—it is a lifelong learning journey. But in practical terms, this element is about working with students to define what success and mastery look like for them, given what each brings to the ecosystem and where they are positioned on the landscape. 3. Pathway: The pathway is a metaphor for how we get from where students are (on the landscape) to where they can go (horizon). On any landscape, we have pathways, some more traveled and some lightly etched by wind, water, or animals. This element asks us to work with students to design the best pathways through learning, the pathways that best suit the needs of students as individuals or groups of individuals. Rather than envisioning the learning process as identical