School has to change. The world has changed radically in the last
100 years while academia has stayed the same. This state of affairs
must end or students will be learning increasingly irrelevant
material taught using ever-more-outdated methods.
Professors talk. Students take notes. Then there is a test.
Subjects are taught independently of each other in a strange
smorgasbord approach that means graduates can barely remember what
they learned the year before. At the university this state of
affairs persists because professors have no interest in making
anything change. They much prefer thinking about research to
thinking how real learning takes place.
In high school, this state of affairs is even stranger. In the
"subject-centered" curriculum model in place at most schools,
students move from subject to subject, spending 45 minutes a day at
each. The subjects they are taught were decided upon by a
curriculum committee in 1892 who were certainly not interested in,
nor capable of, imagining the world we live in today. The school
experience they created in no way mirrors what student lives will
be like after graduation, nor does it take into account any modern
theory of how students learn best. The experience is passive,
fragmented, unmotivated, and generally dull. And, not surprisingly,
it usually does not work. Drop out rates in high school are
astoundingly high.
In contrast to a passive, subject-oriented curriculum, a
Story-Centered Curriculum (SCC) can be viewed as a carefully
designed apprenticeship-style learning experience in which the
student encounters a planned sequence of real-world situations
constructed to motivate the development and application of
knowledge and skills in an integrated fashion. A realistic story,
at the core of each SCC, provides a meaningful, motivating role for
the student, designed to ensure that the student faces exactly the
right progression of challenges to stretch and build his or her
abilities. While the "characters" that a student encounters in a
traditional apprenticeship are primarily concerned with their
own-life goals, the characters in a Story-Centered Curriculum are
specifically constructed to further the student's education by
providing appropriate challenges. Mentors play the expert role,
providing one-on-one coaching, help, and feedback to the student,
while encouraging self-directed learning. Through these mechanisms,
the SCC provides accelerated experiential learning.
Although realistic projects are crucial to a successful SCC, a
curriculum is not just a random collection of projects. Rather, it
is a carefully crafted sequence in which each project builds on and
extends the knowledge and skills of previous projects, while
remaining in the same overarching story context. This progression
of projects is the heart of any SCC. A rich and realistic context
promotes the acquisition of knowledge to be used, while extended
interaction within a single story leverages the story context,
reducing the need for "non-value-added learning" unrelated to
targeted knowledge and skills (e.g., learning the particulars of a
fictional client company).
Because real-world problems are often large, multifaceted, and
complex, students in a SCC are taught to work through very large
challenges in a principled and incremental way, building
systematically on previously acquired skills and knowledge. This
helps students understand how to break down problems into
manageable sub-problems, put together a sensible work plan for
accomplishing all the required tasks, and not be daunted when
facing similarly large problems in the world around them.
The normal high school situation pits individual students in
competition with one another for grades, and only rarely teams
students in a serious way. The SCC often teams students because the
stories underlying them require multiple roles, and because
learning to work as team"and, perhaps, as even as a virtual
distributed team"is an important aspect of many modern-world
careers. The team-based nature of many SCC projects means that
students can learn from each other, and it also means that students
must learn additional skills, such as dividing work equitably and
dealing with relationship and work-style issues.
SCCs are not inherently computer-based, and much of the activity
that students perform as they complete an SCC typically takes place
offline. This can include meeting with teammates, researching a
local issue, building a robot, or drawing an architectural sketch,
depending on the particular story that the student is participating
in. However, the computer is typically used to deliver an SCC.
Students enrolled in a curriculum are typically "employed" by a
fictional organization (such as the webzine company, or the
robotics company, again, depending on the story), and each project
is typically laid out for the student in the form of a simulated
web-delivered email from a fictional manager or other superior in
the organization. The emails explain what needs to be done, and
other pages on the website provide help about how to proceed,
including tips and traps, pointers about books that may be helpful,
and so forth. In addition, if the student is getting help from a
distant mentor supplied by us, then they use the site to find out
how to ask questions of the mentor, and how to submit deliverables
to the mentor for evaluation and feedback.
An SCC drastically alters the place of instruction in the
curriculum. Whereas instructors are center-stage in the traditional
curriculum, the SCC places the student and his or her role within
the story at center stage. Instruction is relegated to a reduced
but still important support role, providing help, advice, and
feedback just in time as the student works. We use the word
"mentor" rather than "instructor" to highlight the changed role of
the teacher.
The SCC calls for two types of mentors: learning coaches and
subject-matter experts. A learning coach will motivate and channel
the student in productive directions, helping the student to
formulate strategies for assigned tasks and to identify
opportunities for self-directed learning during the performance of
a task.
We have already built numerous online learn-by-doing education
offerings. We have done this on both the K-12 level and the
university level, as well as for numerous major corporations.
In early 2002 we created a new type of master's program for
Carnegie Mellon's new West
Coast Campus in Mountain View, California. The
programs replaced traditional lectures with project-based learning
by SCC. Students work in teams on realistic projects with authentic
deliverables, receive coaching from faculty and mentors, and have
the opportunity to experience in simulation the realities of a
career they might pursue upon graduation.
The programs are identical whether students take them on campus or
online, the only difference being whether they collaborate with
their teammates and mentors in person or via the Web or phone. Each
student team consists of around five or six students. The teams set
their own meeting times and schedule their own sessions with
mentors. In this way, the students have maximum flexibility and
find that they can more easily balance their schoolwork with other
commitments they have.
These masters' degrees have been offered by Carnegie Mellon for
more than four years now. The response by students has been very
positive, they are clamoring to be admitted.
Now we have begun the great experiment by creating an alternative
that challenges existing high schools. This alternative, the first
of which we have named the Virtual International Science and
Technology Academy (VISTA), consists of one curriculum per year. At
this writing, we have completed half of one year, a curriculum in
Health Sciences. In this curriculum, students work in a fictional
nutrition clinic, sports medicine clinic, and organ bank, among
other challenging environments, dealing with biological issues,
medical diagnosis, ethical issues, basic scientific reasoning, and
so on. In February of this year, we began to test a segment of the
Health Sciences curriculum, Superworm, which is a one-week
intensive experience in attempting to re-design the common
earthworm in order to improve its role in agriculture and make
better crop-yields. Obviously these kinds of issues are new to
high-school-age students and they must learn a great deal about new
subjects if they are to produce the required deliverable. Students
present their theories on what kinds of changes could actually be
made to an earthworm that would be helpful to agriculture without
killing the worm. They propose hypotheses to mentors along the way
and get help in making choices.
Our tests were a great success. Most of the students loved the
experience. Those who did not like it complained that it was too
much work and that it was much easier to sit quietly and pass
tests. Teachers enjoyed mentoring students in this way. One group
of students asked to work some more days because they knew the
presentations they had made weren't very good.
But, by far the most interesting results were in the questions the
students asked of mentors. They were fundamentally questions about
evolution. How can an animal survive under certain conditions and
would it survive under different conditions?
Oh, I forgot to mention. All of initial tests were done with
students in Kansas. We hadn't gone into this intending to teach
evolution in Kansas, but that's how it worked out.
As we get more funding we will build more curricula. We hope to
build 100 or so in every field in which students might be
challenged to think and also be potentially employed. If we really
want to prepare students for the world in which we live, a good way
is by having them practice in a fictional version of that world.
They come out more curious about the issues in that field and
empowered by new skills they have acquired in the natural course of
the experience.
About the author
Roger Schank has had a 35 year career as a professor of
Computer Science at Stanford, Yale, Northwestern, and Carnegie
Mellon. He retired early to pursue his dream of creating an online
alternative to the current school system. The non-profit he runs,
Engines for Education, will launch the first VISTA curriculum in
September 2007.