Redesigning School

In our summer series of episodes, we want you to meet the actual human beings at the heart of The Mastery School of Hawken. First up: Dan O'Connor, Humanities teacher at Hawken and a key member of the Mastery School's design team. Dan has written some of our most popular blogs, including Teachers are Furniture and Lessons from a Dinosaur-Shaped Taco Holder. He has a lot to say about education -- his own and the one he envisions for students at The Mastery School of Hawken. 

We're not alone! Not by a long shot.

Educators around the world are immersed in rethinking what, how and why we teach and students learn. One school that's starting from scratch is The Revolution School in Philadelphia, a new high school with a mission "to inspire a diverse group of learners, thinkers, and doers to be active and reflective problem-solvers, who are bold and empathetic with academic and emotional resilience."

Co-hosts Terry Dubow and Julia Griffin spoke with Noelle Kellich, Head of Teaching and Learning, and Tom McManus, Head of Mission, about the Revolution School's origin, mission, hopes, and worries. As they note on the website, "It’s not every day that a school gets the chance to build its curriculum from the ground up. With Revolution School, we are fortunate to be able to take a principled approach based on current research in education from around the globe."

Also, if you're interested in reading the story about the legendary Polish Boy sandwich that Terry mentions, take a look!

Google started as a search engine in 1998 and now is an Alphabet valued at three-quarters of a trillion dollars. In between those two moments in time, it transitioned from a mere idea to one of the most profound and disruptive technologies in the history of the human race.

What could schools learn from this kind of evolution? A lot, it turns out.

In this episode of the pod, Terry Dubow and Julia Griffin interview John Schirm, Compensation Manager at Google, to learn more about how Google created a culture that values growth, psychological safety, and collaboration. We also hear a bit of a defense of liberal arts colleges and just how amazing lunchtime is on the Google campus.

Thanks as always to Nick Fletcher and Rennie Greenfield for their technical support. 

It’s hard to think of a field that demands more content acquisition than medicine, so what to make of medical schools that train doctors using problems not tests? Dr. Neil Mehta, Associate Dean for Curricular Affairs of the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, joined Terry Dubow and Julia Griffin on the pod to discuss the paradigm shift that has altered the way that he and his colleagues prepare our future doctors. They started with a simple and profound question: “What are the competencies that make a good physician?” The answers surprised them and changed everything. 

Every one of our graduates eventually becomes someone else's employee.  As we redesign school, how much should we take into account the world of work our students will enter?

You could make the argument that the model of today's school was designed to create and sort labor pools for industries -- many of which have changed profoundly or even disappeared. (Truth in advertising: we make that precise argument at The Mastery School of Hawken...). Should we now design school around the needs of Google or the local wind turbine manufacturer?

In this episode Terry Dubow and Julia Griffin chew on this topic with the help of Sarah Pearson, Product Support Manager at Google and Hawken alum, who sheds some light on the world of work. She also shares her ideas about what schools should and shouldn't do to prepare students.

If you're interested in seeing the video that Julia references, click here.

You might also be interested in this piece about how some employers are opting out of asking where or whether applicants went to college...

If you haven't heard, we're designing a new school.  The Mastery School of Hawken is a new high school in Cleveland’s University Circle designed with students and the future in mind. We’ll welcome our founding class in August 2020.

In this episode, Julia Griffin changed hats and sat down for an interview in her new role of the Director of the Mastery School of Hawken. Scott Looney, Head of Hawken School, joined Terry Dubow to dig into the why and the what and the how of this new venture. If you're at all interested in what the future of school might look like, you'll want to download this one...

When students hear there's a project coming their way, they don't always jump for joy. And yet we know that projects are some of the best tools we have for helping students achieve enduring and deep learning. In this episode of Redesigning School, Terry Dubow and Julia Griffin work on their own project: How to Make Project-Based Learning Work.

They're joined by Doris Korda, former Associate Head of School at Hawken, who was the principal architect of Hawken Entrepreneurship program and the signature MACRO courses, as well as a critical coach/designer with the Hawken faculty of many of the Intensive courses. Doris' curriculum is the foundation of the educational and instructional framework of the Mastery School. She is working with the leadership and faculty at Hawken to design the school's curriculum, and is training and coaching teachers in how to bring this transformational teaching method to the Mastery School's classrooms.

Thanks to Rennie Greenfield and Nick Fletcher for their production help! 

Does your school feel like it should rebrand itself as Suffering Academy? When kids are young, play is an essential part of learning, but then something happens that converts play and its black sheep cousin fun with something antithetical to the real work of a rigorous and challenging education. Why though?

In this episode of Redesigning School, teachers and co-hosts Terry Dubow and Julia Griffin invite three of their colleagues at Hawken School to discuss the benefits of making school joyful again.

Special thanks to Becca Marks, Lauren Coil-Sherck and Steve Weiskopf for joining the pod. And as always, thanks to Rennie Greenfield and Nick Fletcher for their production help!

If you're interested to read some of the pieces mentioned in this episode, click away!

• Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students -- Denise Pope 
• Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World -- Steven Johnson
• The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human -- Jonathan Gottschall
• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience -- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

If you could start all over, how would you design high school? Hawken School asked a group of seniors precisely that. Actually, Julia Griffin and Head of School Scott Looney taught a three-week Intensive course in which students got a blank sheet of paper, a thorough download of current research, and a trip to the Bay Area so they could draw up a school designed with them and the future in mind.

On this episode of Redesigning School, teachers and co-hosts Terry Dubow and Julia Griffin interview Scott and discuss the trip to California, the class, and what inspired it all. 

Special thanks to Rennie Greenfield and Nick Fletcher for their production help!