The spacious, collaborative space gleams with ergonomic chairs and large windows. Groups cluster at various tables, working on projects like monitoring water quality, creating educational video games, and increasing Wi-Fi accessibility. Other small groups plan for meetings with local leaders and businesses that they will be in contact with over the course of a project. This could be an office in Silicon Valley, a think tank, or a consulting group. Surprisingly, however, it is not. The people here are not adults; they are high school students in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and this is their high school curriculum.
This is Iowa Big, a half-day, project-based public school — without admissions prerequisites — based in Cedar Rapids. This school focuses its education outside of the classroom, through projects and community engagement. Iowa Big is revolutionizing its students’ educations and engaging them in unprecedented ways. Although other schools may not need to entirely overhaul their curriculums and leave the traditional classroom, they could definitely consider aspects of this model as a way to get students to engage more deeply.
Curriculum from Crisis
In 2008, devastating floods ravaged Iowa, and the Cedar Rapids community faced a daunting rebuilding project. Infrastructure was renovated and education was reformed. As part of this initiative, Iowa Big co-founders Trace Pickering and Shawn Cornally invited roughly 50 business and community leaders to return to school to do everything students would do, including tests, assignments, and discussions. In an interview with the HPR, Iowa Big teacher Nate Pruett explained how after completing the interactive immersion, the evaluators saw “fundamentally bored and disengaged students,” could not believe that they “forgot how siloed the disciplines are,” and recognized “that teachers are trying their best to make the content relevant and engaging, but fundamentally it is not working.” Echoing similar themes, Pruett himself described the typical classroom as a place where “by and large, the engagement is very low. It is sporadic. It is not consistent.” Could the traditional, structured classroom be obsolete? Pruett would say there is a good chance. “If it’s not obsolete yet, [the traditional model] is moving towards becoming obsolete.”
To combat this trend, Iowa Big set out to create a model that optimizes engagement, connects students to their communities, and gives them real-world skills like collaboration and communication. In creating its student body, Iowa Big draws from three different Iowa school districts. Students place into the school for half of the day, usually by a lottery system, spending the morning at their home high schools and spending the afternoon at the program. For projects, the school stipulates that a student shows genuine passion, finds interdisciplinary connections, and works closely with a third-party audience. Staff members of the school go out into the community and solicit project ideas from local businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations, and students work directly with these entities. “It isn’t a predetermined outcome. We believe in step zero, and we need our kids to begin at step zero so that the project becomes theirs,” Pruett explained.
Experiential Learning Explained
Iowa Big’s curriculum is certainly experiential, and the school would argue that its experiential components set it apart from other schools by allowing it to connect students to the meaning of their work. What “experiential learning” entails, however, can be vague: it ranges from completely immersive activities — like actual farming to complement an environmental science curriculum — to doing interactive activities, such as a mock congress or debate within a normal history class setting. To this end, Northern Illinois University refers to experiential learning as “learning through action, learning by doing, learning through experience, and learning through discovery and exploration.”
Alternatively, many experts reserve terms like “experiential” for specific programs like Iowa Big. In an interview with the HPR, professor Kathryn Boudett, a senior lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, explained that a more accurate way to refer to the action plan that many schools looking to improve their curriculums would undertake is something like “authentic opportunities to process information, experiment with the way [students] communicate, and productively struggle.” Boudett continued, “I just don’t want to co-opt the word ‘experiential,’” reserving it for schools with more alternative curriculums.
In fact, many schools are limited in their resources and cannot necessarily provide “experiential” methods in truly outside-of-the-classroom ways like field trips, community engagement, and outdoors activities. But even within the typical classroom, “there’s still a wide range of the level at which you allow students to experience the learning process,” according to Boudett. Boudett cites reference models like the flipped classroom as being effective and practical. Within the classroom itself, Boudett clarified that the role of the teacher should not necessarily be “the sage on the stage,” but rather “the guide on the side,” igniting the learning experience in students but not taking exclusive control over it.
That being said, schools which are more or less traditional but do have the resources to incorporate some experiential elements, like field trips, outdoor activities, and internships, could take advantage of these opportunities to supplement and enhance curriculums. For example, the School Without Walls, a public magnet high school on the campus of George Washington University in the District of Columbia, integrates international travel, internships, partnerships with institutions like the Kennedy Center, cross-registration with GW, and field trips into its curriculum. Like Iowa Big, SWW also seeks to include third parties in its curriculum; student research papers will be graded by GW or local law firm partners.
In creating this dynamic, SWW places a great deal of trust in its students, allowing them to arrive at sites independently and to use the city as their broader school environment. “Students get to use the city; they get to use the transportation system,” SWW principal Richard Trogisch told the HPR. Programs ranging from visiting Justice Sonia Sotomayor at the Supreme Court to actively participating in the Anacostia River clean-up project “lend themselves to students wanting to come to school,” explained Trogisch. Likewise, by combining internships, field trips, and other factors, Trogisch believes his students learn a great deal of maturity and time management relative to the students at other schools where he has taught. These experiences mitigate many of the pitfalls in decision-making and time management that high school students often face as they move onto college and beyond.
Likewise, in an almost completely opposite setting, the Mountain School brings together 45 high school juniors for one semester to study, live, and work on the school’s farm in rural Vermont. Alden Smith, Director of the Mountain School, stresses that the curriculum is crucial in helping the students become more mature and independent. Like the SWW, the Mountain School still utilizes a relatively traditional classroom model but takes advantage of its setting in order to incorporate its environment into its coursework. To further integrate the school’s setting into its curriculum and allow students to experience the beauty of rural Vermont firsthand, the school adds chores, farming, hiking, and other work to its curriculum.
As Smith told the HPR, “students are often better equipped to become authors of their own learning” as a result of the school’s model and focus on self-sufficiency. By the time students leave the Mountain School to return to their home high schools, Smith hopes that students will “learn more about their energy and their food, become masters of their own learning, [and] have much more of a collaborative mindset in terms of their learning.” Moreover, they “will certainly see food systems and the Northern Forest and our built spaces as systems worthy of our study.” Despite their obvious differences, both SWW and the Mountain School believe that immersion and integration in their environments both enhance their curriculums and provide students with intangible skills.
The innovations that schools like Iowa Big, SWW, and the Mountain School set out to create are thus not necessarily programs that exist outside of the context of larger systems. Experiential learning has a long history, and regional and national networks feature experiential learning in their missions. John Dewey wrote his famous Experience and Education in 1938, and leading experiential learning theorists like David Kolb have been active for 50 years. Associations like Big Picture Learning partner with hundreds of schools to foster “student-driven, real-world learning.” Experiential learning is not a novel, isolated topic, but its continued integration remains an important consideration.
Trepidation around Experiential Learning
Fully experiential methods create profound student involvement, and within the classroom setting, teachers should probably allocate the majority of time to actively engaging students rather than imparting knowledge. With these considerations in mind, the lecture is perhaps not the most effective model.
Still, however, John Kijinski, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at SUNY Fredonia, would argue that experiential techniques, while helpful, should not replace academic coursework. Kijinski stipulates, for example, that a political science major should opt to take a non-required statistics course, related to but not falling within the major, rather than doing a service-based internship with a state legislator, assuming the student can only pick one. In Kijinksi’s opinion, the coursework provides foundational background skills that facilitate and preempt applied learning.
“Many of the same programs that require or strongly recommend ‘engaged learning’ also allow students to graduate who are unable to read or speak proficiently any language other than English, whose quantitative abilities don’t allow them to understand even mid-level mathematical analysis, and who are not demonstrably able to write clearly and persuasively about complex topics,” Kijinski writes in his article “On ‘Experiential Learning.’” Solving complex math problems, pouring over philosophical treatises, and piecing together the steps of human evolution, as mentioned by Kijinski, teach students to think — “and not one of them features ‘real-life’ engagement.” Ultimately, according to Kijinski, students have a lifetime to engage with “real-world” problems but will only be students until their young adulthood.
Looking Forward
The question about how to structure the learning experience thus remains an open one, but engagement and student involvement are unequivocally crucial elements. An even more pressing question is how teachers can initiate that engagement. While an hour-long lecture may not be effective, completely removing students from the classroom may not have to be the solution. Even if it is, not all schools have the time and resources to do so.
With these questions in mind, a school should and does need to balance classroom learning with experiential elements. At Iowa Big, students spend half of their days at traditional high schools, and Pruett himself teaches a literature seminar that looks similar to other high school and college discussion-based courses. As Trogisch mentioned, too, the SWW, for all of its field trips and independence it grants its students, still values Advanced Placement courses and uses them as a barometer of student achievement. Lastly, as Smith explained, even though farming is an integral part of the Mountain School curriculum, the classroom environment itself is still relatively traditional. As at the SWW, students may still take AP classes.
Ultimately, schools should savor every opportunity they can get to engage with the community, promote student internships, or incorporate field trips, as these elements augment the curriculum in way that cannot be achieved within the classroom alone. That being said, total experiential learning is not necessarily the required solution, and it is not always practical for many schools. The traditional classroom setting can still be effective, provided that teachers reimagine it to acknowledge that students are the ones truly in charge of their education.
Image Credit: Vermont Mountain School