Beyond the Timetable: Designing Learning That Mirrors Life by Kyle Wagner
From Provocations V1, Transforming Reality to Realize Interdependence and Human Unity
This piece is from our Provocations Magazine, V1: Transforming Reality to Realize Interdependence and Human Unity. If you’re tired of the same recycled edu-content and ready for ideas that actually challenge the system, this is for you. Provocations is an exclusive benefit for our paid subscribers—join the educators who refuse to tinker at the edges.
Written by, Kyle Wagner.
A bell rings to start class.
Students pull out textbooks, and all turn to the same page.
A single teacher stands at the front of the class and delivers instructions in front of a large whiteboard.
Thirty five pupils in neatly assembled rows look up in unison.
She directs their attention to the prepared slidedeck for the assignment instructions that day.
Each student will complete the same set of math exercises around factoring polynomials.
It’s not just this kind of passive learning that occupies only 45 minutes of most Secondary Students’ days. It’s all six hours. Six siloed subject classes divided into neatly assembled rows and columns in their master timetable.
They say school is supposed to be preparation for the ‘real world.’
What about this resembles the way learning looks outside of school?
In a fast paced, dynamic, ever changing world learning in the real world doesn’t happen in 45 minute chunked blocks of time. It’s continuous and interconnected.
It’s not driven by a micromanager who holds all the cards (well- in some cases it is); but by innate curiosity, motivation, and necessity.
Maria Montessori once famously said, “Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words, but by experiences in the environment.”
One hundred years later, we are still educating in the most unnatural way.