I Design the School of the Future

It is a crisp fall morning at The New School High.  One third of the student population is gone.  Not missing – just gone.  Like a baker flicking flakes of sugar over a delectable dessert, one third of New School High high-schoolers are sprinkled around the globe, in home-stays and in schools in countries like India, China, Vietnam, and Peru.  Those students are involved in an ongoing cultural project in their three-month hiatus from New School High – writing blogs about their cultural experiences and creating the cultural projects they will showcase in May at the spring project exhibition.  The rest of the student body is on The New School High campus, walking amicably through the glass entrance doors, ready to work on their projects .  

 

As they enter, they see the open space that is unique to New School High.  About the size of a football field, the space looks more like a modern library or a roman atrium.  On the western facing wall, there are three long rows of Apple desktops where students sit.  On the eastern facing wall there are rows of bright wooden tables, where students work with their materials spread out in front of them.  In the back corner of the building, there is a large reading/meeting area, filled with beanbags and plush burgundy leather chairs.  And on the far back wall of the open-space there is a large u-shaped table where some students eat; cooks busily move about the inside of the U, serving oatmeal and fresh fruit to the students.  Some students work while they eat, others sit beside classmates at the oversize family style table and converse.  Beside the large u-shaped kitchen table, there are teacher offices.  They are open space cubicles, designed so that three to four teachers work in one space, and students can see them working.  

           

Along the base of the glass roof of the building, there is a long narrow scrolling screen with red and green letters, like the one at the New York Stock exchange.  It runs the length of the school and can be seen from anywhere in the atrium.  At 10 AM, Javier Mendez and Jonathan Black’s names scroll across the screen.  They know what this means; it is time for their weekly assessment meeting.  

           

They take out their laptops and open the movie editing application.  Javier and Jonathan have always been movie buffs.  So they chose to spend their combined craftsman allowance – a chuck of money each student gets from the school to hire a master craftsman – to hire a local documentary producer to be their teacher.  Susan - the documentary filmmaker they hired – Arthur – one of the many full time core content teachers – and Javier and Jonathan sit together at a large wooden table to analyze the work.  They watch a portion of the movie Jonathan and Javier have finished, and they critique the boy’s individual accompanying essays on ‘The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking’.  Afterwards, Susan and Arthur discuss the movie and the essays with them; they ask questions; pose suggestions; field questions; and finally grade them according to the rubrics.  Every project at New School High has three rubrics: one to grade the project; the second to grade the accompanying Math and English core content work; and the third to grade to grade the group dynamics.  The core content teacher and the master craftsman grade the rubrics together on a weekly basis.  The final rubrics are graded on the day of the spring exhibition.

           

Susan and Arthur finish grading, and they leave to file the grades in a computer system.  Other names of students scroll across the screen, and the process continues, over and over again so that students meet with their craftsman and core content teachers once a week.  

           

At the center of the atrium, there is a large white cube, each side 4 feet tall and wide.  As students encounter problems or questions that they cannot find answers to on the internet, they stick post it notes on the white cube.  Every 20 minutes, a teacher walks by the cube and pulls off the post it notes.  The principal then makes an announcement inviting the student/s who asked the question to meet with a teacher in a designated area.  The principal also invites anyone who is interested in the question meet as well.  

           

As students need, they stop working and take a lunch break.  They head to the back kitchen table, and are served a healthy lunch, often prepared by other students.  And so the hours pass, and the official ‘school-day’ comes to a close.  It’s 2:30, which means it is clean up time.  The words ‘clean-up time’ scroll across the screen at the top of the atrium.  For 20 minutes, all students and teachers stop working on their projects; they grab their assigned tools from the closets and begin sweeping, vacuuming scrubbing, raking, mowing, gardening, and weeding.  Once the cleaning is complete, the day is done.  Some students and teachers head home, and others stay at school to work, to participate in a club, or to play an organized school sport.  This is a day in the life of a New School High student.

           

The days and weeks go by, each student working on his or her project and breaking when he or she wants to eat.  It runs like clockwork and leads up to the days of the spring exhibition.  On these days the work areas are pushed to the back of the atrium, and a stage is constructed - fully equipped with visual, audio, and lighting features to make the presentations an interactive experience.  Then the presentations begin.  Presenters are grouped together based on project categorization: engineering, math, and science projects in the morning, humanities and world travel projects in the afternoons, and arts and crafts projects in the evenings.  The presentations take several days, but it feels like the hours pass by quickly like a brisk fall wind; and student’s anticipation fuels the burning excitement around the spring exhibition.

             

After each presentation, judges, content teachers, and craftsman teachers meet to calculate a grade.  Grades are calculated not according to the average grade of all assignments, but rather they are calculated based on the how much evidence of learning and evolution occurred from the projects inception to the projects finish.  Then the grade is calculated and given to the students.

           

After the exhibition days end, students start a new project.  With the help of their content teachers and peers, they begin brainstorming the next project, begin to plan their next overseas trip, and begin the process of starting anew.