How to Design a School for the Future | Punya Mishra | TED

67,334 views ・ 2023-06-09

TED


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00:03
This is a story about failure, my failure.
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And though the story has some kind of a happy ending,
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it's not your typical story where failure is a stepping stone to success.
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It almost feels like failure is celebrated a lot these days.
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For instance, you hear slogans like "Fail forward, fail better, fail faster."
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And to be honest, these slogans drive me crazy.
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I mean, who wants to fail?
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Failure is not fun.
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And I would know because, you know, I'm sort of a poster child for failure.
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In fact, when one of my friends was writing a book about the topic,
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he reached out to me to write a chapter for his book.
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But I'm also an educational designer,
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so I see failure in terms of systems and values.
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That failure is often a misalignment of values or bad design.
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But I'm getting ahead of myself.
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Let me take you back to this point of my failure.
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So I want to take you back to my undergraduate days,
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my freshman year in engineering.
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I'm sitting in a physics class.
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I'm looking forward to learning.
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And in my notes I'm writing little limericks and poems
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about quantum states.
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That tells you something about who I was when I was that age.
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I loved physics and math,
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but I also loved art and literature and poetry and film.
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And I was excited and engaged to be in this engineering school.
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Sadly, that was not the case.
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Sadly, those next four years,
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were possibly the worst four years of my life.
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Creativity and imagination was not encouraged.
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All we had was lectures upon lectures and tests and tests and tests.
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There was no scope for understanding.
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There was no space for having fun with the ideas.
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And these poems I was writing, they were, I'm sure, not great poetry,
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but they were meaningful to me.
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They were a way for me to explore and play with ideas,
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something that was squelched very early on.
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And so this went on for four years, and I finally graduated.
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But I never genuinely became an engineer.
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I felt I was worthless, that I had failed.
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And what was sad was it was not a one-shot failure.
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It was every day, every month,
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semester after semester for four long years.
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And at this point, I saw a poster for a program in visual communications,
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and on a whim I decided to apply.
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Clearly, I was not going to be an engineer or a scientist,
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so maybe, maybe I could make educational film
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because I had grown up inspired by people like Carl Sagan and Jacob Bronowski.
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Long story short, I got into the program, and almost overnight my life changed.
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The system and structure and culture of the institution were very different.
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Creativity was encouraged.
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Flexibility and playing with ideas was supported.
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So even these things that I --
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these haphazard things that I had been interested in,
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dabbling with art and science and poetry,
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somehow were meaningful all of a sudden.
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And it was also there that I was introduced to the idea of design,
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something I didn't know much about, but I felt very much at home in.
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For four years in engineering,
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I had never felt that I had become an engineer.
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I had never felt like I belonged.
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But somehow this design seemed to give me a purpose and meaning.
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And what was amazing was how quick that change was.
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You know, in May of that year,
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I was feeling worthless, as if I was a failure.
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And by September of that same year, I had found a purpose.
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I had found a community.
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I had found a field that I could live within.
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So even today, I call myself an educational designer.
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And what that made me realize
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is that my success or failure depended on a variety of systems and values
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that were often hidden from me.
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And this lens of design then allowed me at look at the world
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as something that had been made up.
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And that made me question what are the other things that we have made up.
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Well, one of the biggest things we have made up is this idea of school.
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There is nothing natural about schools and universities.
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You know, there's nothing natural
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about credit hours and multiple choice exams and so on.
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But underlying them are certain key values
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about what is worth learning and what is not.
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So this has led me to the work that I do today.
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To design learner-centered, just and equitable systems
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that question these assumptions that we have made
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about how learning should and can happen.
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Now, how does that work?
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So let me give you a story.
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A few years back,
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a local school district reached out to us
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to help them design a school for the future.
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Now that's a tall order. What does that even mean?
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How did we go about doing it?
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Well, first we created a design team:
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an eclectic collection of teachers, administrators,
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parents, members of the community.
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And then we set out to listen.
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So we talked to the chambers of commerce.
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We created focus groups. We talked to parent groups.
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And most importantly, all through this,
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we kept asking ourselves: Who is at the table, and who is not?
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And how could we bring those who were not into the conversation?
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For instance, one group that we never talk to
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or very rarely talk to are children,
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which is very strange given that they are the ones
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who are going to actually be in these schools.
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So we talked to kids, lots of them.
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We in fact followed them for a day.
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You know, sitting in their classes, listening to lectures, doing worksheets,
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eating cafeteria food and really enjoying the joy of recess.
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And while we were doing this and listening,
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we kept asking ourselves questions.
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What were we seeing? What does this mean?
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And we began to question assumptions.
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Like why are things a certain way?
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How might we create a school that actually connects with the community?
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How might we think of technology in ways that allow for expression and creativity?
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How might we create a school
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which is driven by the impulses of the learner?
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How might we create a school
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where we break the "one teacher, one classroom" model?
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And in these conversations we developed a set of design principles,
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a set of values that would guide our discussions and our design.
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These were things that as a community, we believed in.
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And it was at this point in time where things seemed to go a little slow,
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where we had so many possibilities, but yet they seemed like very few.
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And we wondered what the next step forward would be.
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And there were all kinds of the usual hassles of internet failures
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and scheduling problems.
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But then chance happened.
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We learned about this building,
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which was somewhat unused in the school district
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that they said we could play with,
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and suddenly the whole design team was energized.
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And if there's a lesson here, it is that you need to be prepared.
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And if an opportunity comes your way,
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you grab it with both hands and don't let go.
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And that's exactly what we did.
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All the work we had done
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with the focus groups and the design principles and so on
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came together in this school
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and over two years of work later,
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this school exists today.
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It is a school that reflects the values of the community.
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It's a school that's very different from the ones that you see around you.
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We had to break down, both literally and figuratively,
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a whole bunch of walls to create this space
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where 100-plus kids would learn and work together.
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It is a space where they're surrounded by an array of responsible adults
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who work in teams, working in small groups and large,
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to meet the needs of these learners.
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It is a school which is open to the community,
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both in its demographics,
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as well as allowing parents and community members
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to go in and out as and when needed.
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This is truly a special place.
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And that doesn’t mean that we have figured everything out.
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But I’m proud to say that that school is expanded.
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It went in the next year to another studio space,
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and then now it goes all the way from K through eight.
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And for my team, this is truly one of our greatest successes.
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To circle back to the beginning.
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You know, one could argue that it was that failure that led to this success,
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but I think that would be missing the point.
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It would be missing the point
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because it ignores the pain and hurt that failure causes.
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It ignores the agony that I went through for four long years.
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At that point, when I graduated from my undergraduate degree,
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I felt I had failed, I did not blame the system.
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But now, when I look at it,
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I realize maybe it was a system that had failed me.
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A system that fails a lot of our children.
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Focusing on the individual prevents us from looking deeper.
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It prevents us from questioning the systems that led to the failure.
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It prevents us from questioning the values that underlie these systems.
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We can and must do better.
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I think our children deserve better.
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That 18-year-old me writing poetry in physics class deserved better.
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Thank you.
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