Roger Schank, one of the world's leading visionaries in artificial intelligence, learning theory, cognitive science, and the building of virtual learning environments, has fought all his life to revolutionize how people think about learning. In September, 2011, his grandson Milo, will enter first grade and, unsatisfied with the current educational system, he has decided to build an alternative.

THE PROBLEM - WE DON'T LIKE WHAT SCHOOLS TEACH AND WE DON'T LIKE HOW THEY TEACH IT

Children go to school for six-plus hours a day for years and years and the result is what?

  • Most of what they learned, other than very basic reading, writing, and math, they never use after school ends.
  • They do not know what they want to be when they grow up, not even the general field in many cases.
  • They are not employable.
  • If employed, employers report they are not skilled in what is really needed in the work place.
  • If they go to college, they do not know why they are there.
  • They can't think clearly and precisely.
  • They don’t know how to work well with others towards a common goal.

Why is it that students ultimately get themselves trained and employed in a wide range of jobs and careers, but for the many years they are formally educated they all follow a virtually identical course of study?

According to my view, any one who would be good at anything must practise that thing from his youth upwards, both in sport and earnest, in its several branches: for example, he who is to be a good builder, should play at building children's houses; he who is to be a good husbandman, at tilling the ground; and those who have the care of their education should provide them when young with mimic tools.

- Plato, Laws; 360 B.C. -

Students’ long days in school are largely wasted time. Kids are taught facts in a vacuum, with no context, often through lectures in which they’re not actively involved. Who cares what the capital of some far-off country is? Why memorize the order of the planets from the Sun, or the abbreviations in the Periodic Table of Elements (just to forget them a week, month or year later)? What does sitting in a desk and trying to retain information have to do with success in the real world? Why do kids learn facts when what they really need is to practice skills- skills they’ll need to succeed in the real world for the rest of their lives, skills like how to solve problems, how to predict, persuade, negotiate, judge, manage others, and work collaboratively?

We are long overdue for real change, but large-scale change in schools is difficult to make happen. Therefore, as a starting point, we simply need to provide students with an effective alternative.

THE PROPOSED SOLUTION - ALTERNATIVE LEARNING PLACES

We're proposing to re-design and replace school with what we are calling Alternative Learning Places (ALP). What will the alternative look like? Kids working in teams on projects that they're interested in, with goals they care about (using parachutes to land an egg safely, building a toothpick bridge that can hold weight, building a car that will win a race, planting a garden and maintaining it, building rockets for a launching competition...) Kids practicing the skills they need for lifelong success in the real world- such as teamwork, goal conflict resolution, judgment, persuasion, management, and communication.

FAQs


Click on any of the FAQs below to see the answer to that question.

WHO IS ALP FOR?

We are starting at the beginning, developing a first grade curriculum in for 5-6 year olds. We will then grow with our students, developing curricula for these 5-6 year olds as they grow, all the way through 12th grade.

WHAT ALP IS BEING DEVELOPED FIRST?

Because all kids are not interested in the same topics, and because we believe kids (and adults) only really learn if they’re interested in what they’re learning, we plan to offer a variety of ALPs, from which students can choose a program based on their interest. The  first ALP, currently in development, will focus on Engineering, with each activity taking students through a basic engineering process: design, build, test, and modify.

WHAT SETS OUR CURRICULUM APART?

We focus on the cognitive skills that matter – the ones you need to function in the world, the ones that affect how you are perceived and judged by others. These skills, listed below, are developed gradually over time. Our curriculum is designed to help students practice and hone these skills.

Conceptual Processes

  1. Prediction: Making a prediction about the outcome of actions
  2. Modeling: Building a conscious model of a process
  3. Experimentation: Finding out for oneself what works and what doesn't
  4. Evaluation: Improving our ability to determind the value of something on many dimensions

Analytic Processes

  1. Diagnosis: Making a diagnosis of a complex situation by identifying relevant factors and seeking causal explanations
  2. Planning: Learning to plan and do needs analysis as well as acquiring a conscious and subconscious understanding of what goals are satisfied by what plans
  3. Causation: Detecting what has caused a sequence of events to occur by relying upon a case base of previous knowledge of similar situations
  4. Judgment: Making objective and subjective judgments

Social Processes

  1. Influence: Understanding how others respond to your requests and recognizing consciously and unconsciously how to improve the process
  2. Teamwork: Learning how to achieve goals by using a team, consciously allocating roles, managing inputs from others, coordinating actors, and handling conflicts; managing operations using a model of processes and handling real time issues
  3. Negotiation: Making a deal; negotiation/contracts; resolving goal conflicts
  4. Describing: Creating conscious descriptions of situations to explain them to others in writing and orally

Schools only deal with some of these skills and rarely address them directly, instead choosing to focus on subjects rather than on thinking ability. It is not impossible to learn how to do these things while studying school subjects, it’s just a lot more difficult because traditional teaching almost never emphasizes them. These skills in no way depend on any particular subject. They can and should be learned without reference to subject matter knowledge. People have different interests as far as subjects go, but everyone has a deep need to become proficient at these skills in any area they pursue. The fact that school has been organized around subjects is one reason why the students produced by that system are not capable of thinking very clearly.  
A five-year-old child might have a limited idea about the skills listed above. The goals of any learning program for five-year-olds should be focused on enhancing and extending each child’s limited experience with these skills, , and that’s exactly what the ALP does. ALP students will be able to think in a more clear and deliberate way, producing , for example, a child who can describe clearly the thinking that went into planning a project and be able to explain what went wrong initially and how it was fixed.




GET INVOLVED

We have no financial support for building the first grade ALP (it is simply too unusual for standard funders). Nevertheless we have been contacted by many people who want to run one in their own part of the world. If you wish to volunteer to help us we will guide you in the process of building a piece of the curriculum (hopefully in an area in which you are an expert.) We offer you the use of the final product (that is, the entire first grade) for your use. We are happy to teach you (by learning by doing with mentoring, of course) how to build this sort of thing so that we all can make use of it. Contact Suzanne Kiggins.

Join our ALP Wikispace.

How is the ALP structured?

Each ALP consists of a series of projects, within a specific field or area (e.g., engineering), designed for a specific age group (e.g., first graders). Project length varies, but generally projects are designed to cover roughly 2-4 weeks, assuming students work on the project 3 hours per day, 4 days a week. Students work on one project at a time. Each project is broken down into activities – a project may have 20-30 activities, which are implemented in a prescribed order.

What does a day look like?

Students work on the projects 3 hours a day (not necessarily all at once), and the remaining 3 hours are filled with lunch, snacks, Spanish, and play, some of it structured (e.g., football games), some unstructured.

One day per week is set aside as a "flex day", in which students might take a field trip, host a guest visitor, tie up loose ends on their project work, or pursue questions that have arisen as they work through their projects.

WHAT WE'RE WORKING ON NOW

The Engineering ALP will consist of a series of engineering projects. Students will work in small teams, directed by a teacher, to complete these projects, each of which will last 2-4 weeks.

Projects that are completed or near completion include:

  • Glider: Students experiment with glider parameters to determine what factors cause what type of performance, culminating in an 'air show'.
  • Drought: Students are presented with a fictional town experiencing a drought. They design and build a working model river and dam system to produce a lake to solve the problem.
  • Vesuvius: Students experiment to harness as much gas as possible, and quickly, from a calcium carbonate/vinegar reaction, in order to fill a balloon and ‘race’ foam up a tube.
  • Chocolate: Students experiment with unique ingredients to make chocolate bars for company Chocolate Delight, which wants a bar to appeal to a 5-10 year old market.

Following is a partial list of additional projects currently planned for the Engineering ALP

  • Garden Growing
  • Parachute-and-Egg System
  • Lifting Loads w/Balloons
  • Rocket Launching
  • Remote-Control Car Building
  • Bridge Building

Why ALP?

We focus on the cognitive skills that matter – the ones you need to function in the world, the ones that affect how you are perceived and judged by others. These skills, listed below, are developed gradually over time. Our curriculum is designed to help students practice and hone these skills.

Conceptual Processes: Prediction, Modeling, Experimentation, and Evaluation

Analytic Processes: Diagnosis, Planning, Causation, and Judgment

Social Processes: Influence, Teamwork, Negotiation, and Describing

ENROLL YOUR CHILD

Write to Roger Schank if you have a child that you wish to enroll of if you have an interest in starting an ALP.