the timboucher experience

This is a pretty good article called “Most classroom learning sucks” on a blog about experience design, or something like that. Anyway, there is one section where the author is talking about a private school that they’d sent their daughter to that had a non-traditional classroom style. It sounds totally awesome:

In that school, there were no classrooms. There was no teacher-at-the-front rows of chairs thing. Kids sat where they wanted to do their work–on the floor, on the deck, at the kitchen table, whatever worked for them. There were no lectures, no formal lessons. When kids needed help on a “project”, they asked, and one of the teachers helped them. If a few kids were dealing with the same thing, the teacher might take them into what looked like a little corporate conference room, for an ad-hoc session. Even then, the teacher was more like a mentor/guide, and not the “sage on the stage”. Kids were allowed to work on whatever they wanted, as long as they were fulfilling, somehow, their goals to include geography, math, language, etc.

This is pretty close to the model I was trying to work towards back when I was teaching at a computer-training company. It’s really successful if you can get people to be motivated by what they’re doing. In fact, it’s sort of the model that I use as I am educating myself through this website. The next passage also cuts right to the heart of how to get people motivated in this kind of learning-environment: find out what they’re interested in.

And each kid had his entire curriculum custom-made for his personal interests. For the things that turned his brain on. One kid was obsessed with dinosaurs, so with the help of his teacher, he designed his entire first year around dinosaurs. Everything he did was based on learning more about dinosaurs. Math was based on calculating sizes and dates, and making his own categorizations. Language was, well, he had to learn to read if he wanted to learn about his passion. Geography was based around researching the areas where different dinosaurs lived at different times, creating timelines, etc.

If I ever have kids, I plan on finding or putting together something exactly along these lines. And again, this is exactly what I do myself. It makes so much more sense than handing somebody a curriculum and a syllabus, and saying you have to teach XYZ in this order. The author of this article says “The important thing was that they took the time to discover what the kids were passionate about, and used that as a vehicle for motivation.”

Looks like the school they were referencing in this piece was the Manhattan Academy, which is a Montessori-based school in California. I’ll have to read more about the Montessori system of education, because everything I’ve ever heard about it has been really cool. Here is Wikipedia’s page on it, which has some good introductory information.

• Is Self-Taught Better?
• Unpredictability of Self-Directed Education
• Adult Education
• Next Wave Human-Computer Interface Metaphors
• Serious Education in America