To read the full article on the Huffington Post website, click here.

“Rise above oneself and grasp the world.” — Archimedes (engraved on the Fields Medal)

Making is making a comeback. A cornucopia of fabrication and tech labs public and private are sprouting throughout the country. Maker Faires — sprawling outdoor extravaganzas that combine the atmosphere of a medieval fair with old low-tech and new high-tech garages — are bringing makers of all ages together to share their work and their learning. These new expressions of “thinkering” bring the wizened tinkerer and the tech-savvy youth together in playful competitions that range from the serious and sublime to the deliberately frivolous and outrageous. Fab labs provide makers with easy access to powerful and expensive technology tools in a community of like-minded minds.

Making provides opportunities for young people to use their hands and their minds together. Untold numbers of youth are messing around with all manner of tools to create, in tangible form, what’s on their minds. Equally important, the maker movement nurtures communities of practice that bring adults and young people together around common interests. Thus, to visit the Maker Faire or a community-based fab lab is to see an aspect of our young people that we seldom witness in schools.

Sadly, however, to observe these young “thinkerers” is to be at least temporarily deluded into believing that this is what many of our young people are all about. Not so. Unfortunately, most young people do not experience making in their schools or in their lives. Literally and figuratively, most of our young people are not at the Faire. Research reveals that the vast majority of them are not into making at all and instead are frittering away their time in a variety of wasteful and unproductive learning activities.

Making is a celebration of an alternative and powerful way of knowing and of thinking things through. Consequently, making is typically antithetical to what traditional schools are all about. That is why the communities of practice that come together at Maker Faires and fabrication labs usually–some would say thankfully–flourish outside of schools.

A few educators, however, are circling these making places to determine where and how they fit in schools, if at all. Educational historian Larry Cremin once wryly noted, that educators respond to a new area of learning by creating a course in it. Recall how schools responded to technology by creating a course “down the hall at fifth period” without ever thinking about changing every course because technology existed. Similarly, educators run the risk of demeaning hand and mind work by creating separate courses for making rather than bringing making into all aspects of the school curriculum and thereby thoroughly reconstituting it.

It was this dissonance between actuality and potentiality that prompted Big Picture Learning to conduct at the end of July a symposium focused on young people “making their way in the world.” Big Picture assembled a broad cross-section of individuals experienced with making and hand-mind learning–artists, craftspeople, neurologists, engineers, students and educators. We met in Dearborn, Michigan at The Henry Ford museum and used as our inspiration the Maker Faire that ran at The Henry Ford during the BPL (Big Picture Learning) symposium. That inveterate tinkerer Henry Ford was our muse and the Ford Motor Company Fund was our benefactor.

By using the Maker Faire as our source of inspiration, we observed, investigated, played, and analyzed how the aspects of making, inventing, and creating combine and fit in innovative ways into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), career and technical education (CTE), and the arts. By looking across generations of makers at the vast assembly of fabricators, we gathered information on the practice, motivation, skill and determination of the Faire contributors.

Big Picture’s purpose was to determine how making can be an integral part of how young people figure out who they are in the world and to show schools how to capitalize on the fact that people of all ages are natural fabricators and makers. People, as one symposium participant observed, “use their hands to figure things out,” not just to solve a problem related to what they are making, but to figure themselves out as well. Making provides us all a means of validating who we are, what we know and what we can do.

We centered our symposium conversations on several young people from our Big Picture Learning schools who had stories to tell about how making opened them up as learners and as individuals. We created images and examined data to develop additional insights. We harnessed this interplay between stories, images and data to gain perspective on the design of programs that might establish making as an important part of the school curriculum.

We reviewed disturbing data on how young people spend their time. We learned, for example, that they use the Internet about 12 hours a week, more time than they spend watching television (about 10 hours per week), talking on a cell phone (13 hours per week), and doing homework (9 hours per week).

The research reveals that the U.S. is becoming a nation of “non-tinkerers.” In a poll of 1,000 U.S. adults, nearly six in 10 (58%) said they never have made or built a toy. More than a quarter (27%) have not made or built even one item from a list of eight common projects ranging from a dollhouse or piece of furniture to a fence or flower box.

As Frank Wilson, symposium participant, neurologist, and author of “The Hand” reminded us, the hand has “a mind of its own,” as well as being at one with our minds. To engage the hand is to engage the mind. Thus, schools must provide for all students a hand-mind approach to the essential “academics.” The hand-to-mind pathway is a way to engage all students and deepen their learning, to understand what quality looks like, and through practice and tinkering to apply discipline-based skills. Working the mind without the hands, and without a practice community of adults and young people, produces abstract learners who have difficulty applying what they know to the world around them. Making with hands and minds stimulates young people to develop their imaginative, creative, entrepreneurial, and scientific chops.

Schools can reap the rewards of making if they can resist the “curse of the course;” loosen rigid time structures to promote exploration and smart failures; and, in the evening and on weekends, open their labs, sheds and garages to the community and to makers of all ages and levels of expertise. They will need as well to bring the traditional academic disciplines — including the increasingly essential arts and design — into those fab labs and to the making itself. By employing people, objects, places and situations (POPS) to support making, schools will prepare a whole generation of young people to succeed in the challenging careers out there now — and the ones that will be.

Radio listeners across the nation heard Rhode Island’s Michael McCarthy discuss the innovative College Unbound program where he is a first-year student on NPR’s August 24th Talk of the Nation.

Listen to the story

“I was just extremely excited to get an opportunity to work in a program that was as different and as, you know, just able to integrate my passion and interest directly into what we were doing for coursework.”

“The model was so different that it has just, it has opened up the world to me as far as what I was going to be able to accomplish inside of pursuing a bachelor’s degree, which is something I never thought was possible.”

“I’m going to get this chance to do this work that I’m passionate about, in this case, community access to sailing and maritime pursuits for inner-city students and so forth. And being able to actually do that work currently with my school, so I can apply these different concepts and the different coursework to what I’m doing and vice versa.”

About Michael:
Michael McCarthy is a 28-year-old first-year College Unbound @ Roger Williams University student from Newport, Rhode Island and Rogers High School. Having served as a medic in Afghanistan, Michael returned to Newport to do community work and plan for a college degree. He discovered and applied for College Unbound when designing a sailing instructional program for underserved students at Newport’s The East Bay Met, a Big Picture Learning school associated with the college program.

Each year since 2002, staff members from the Big Picture Learning network of schools have gathered for a summer professional development session to improve their understanding of the Big Picture Learning design, share best practices, psych themselves up for the school year ahead, and strengthen their relationships with other schools. An enduring piece of Big Picture Learning’s professional culture, the non-proft is proud to announce the success of its ninth Big Bang that celebrated its fifteenth year as a national, and now international, network of schools.

Last week, over 200 staff members, students, and administrators from the United States, Australia and Canada gathered in Providence, Rhode Island to take part in Big Bang 9, four days of training that offered Big Picture Learning’s own unique blend of professional development, training, and culture-building. It was a valuable foundational experience for those opening new Big Picture Learning schools in the Fall 2010, a learning opportunity for those interested in incorporating the BPL design into their current work, and a great opportunity for those educators new to the BPL network who want to learn more.

In addition to a beneficial professional development and collaboration opportunity, Big Picture Learning also utilized this gathering of professional educators to honor three Big Picture Learning graduates for their outstanding achievements both in school and post-high school. Mia Lombardi, a graduate of the Met School in Providence in 2000, was an outspoken student committed to defending the welfare of those who were unable to fight for their own rights. Presently, she has become an ardent and vocal supporter of alternative education in her community. La Creelin Shaneice Caton, a graduate from the San Diego Met School in 2010, was the first in her family to finish high school, be accepted to and attend college. Currently, La Creelin is attending the University of California, majoring in Biology, and is focusing on her studies as she was granted a full merit scholarship. Finally, Christopher Pride, a 2006 graduate from Big Picture Learning’s Denver school, credits his advisor as the person who redirected his life, helped him value his own potential. Pride writes “I gladly would like to thank the Big Picture for helping me understand that I can be the change in this world and for showing me that education is the most powerful weapon that can be used to change the world.”

The inscription on the Fields Medal of Mathematics has this quote by Archimedes. As it turns out, it is very appropriate for what we did at the “Making” Their Way in the World Symposium. The conversations coming from this work have been fast and insightful. Many participants are still trying to unpack not only our work but also their own in the context of the Maker Faire and the symposium.

Our deep appreciation to the students, educators, and social entrepreneurs who attended and made this such an incredible and productive experience.

Check out the visual notes here, thanks to the amazing artistry of Rachel Brian!

The terms “vocational education” and more recently “career and technical education” have served historically as codes for programs or schools serving young people–often poor and minority youth–who are judged not capable of going on to post secondary education and, therefore, must be provided with a set of skills so that they can enter the workforce directly from high school. This judgment has created a two-tiered caste system of college-bound and work-bound education that is hardwired in our collective societal consciousness as the latest in a sorrowful lineage of caste systems that schools have created to funnel youth into pathways and bins based on such characteristics as disabilities, race, and class.

Those caste systems are defunct.

The world has changed. The economy has changed. The nature of work and the workplace have changed. Most everyone understands that there is, or certainly should be, a “career” and a “technical” aspect to all learning, just as there is, or should be, an applied, “hands-on” aspect to all learning. Can you imagine high school students aspiring to be architects, doctors, or lawyers who would not want to learn about the career and the technical aspects of their preparation for those professions? All high school education is, in large part, career education, just as all high school education is preparation for post secondary–make that lifelong–learning.

Consider what many see as essential features of excellent career and technical education.

• A personalized learning program focused on each student’s career interests.
• A thoughtful integration of academic and technical skills development.
• Opportunities for each student to engage with adults working in the student’s career interest area.
• Requirements that students exhibit skill and understanding through authentic performance demonstrations.
• Opportunities for students to obtain, in addition to a high school diploma, multiple forms of certifications and credentials in their career interests.
• All of the above provided in the workplace and community as well as the school.

You might conclude, as we have, that all high school students would be well served by programs with such features. Few high schools, however, offer them.

Consider also the by-now familiar list of skills employers want in their new hires, whether they arrive with a high school diploma or a two- or four-year college degree.

• The ability to construct and apply new knowledge across varying work activities.
• The ability to generate innovative solutions that require predicting, analyzing, forecasting, forming perspective, and recognizing patterns.
• The ability to communicate, using a variety of tools in multiple situations and cultures, particularly as a member of a team.
• The ability to integrate knowledge from multiple disciplines, including both the arts and sciences.
• The ability to transition across projects, firms, disciplines, and work/learning experiences.
• The ability to organize work and persist in its successful conclusion.

Again you might conclude, as we have, that all high school students need to demonstrate competence in these skills by graduation. Few high schools, however, teach or assess them. Even in our Big Picture Schools, focused as we are on learning in the workplace and the community, we are challenged to do so.

Observing the new world economy, we are reminded that it is not the career we choose that provides job security but our ability to use these essential skills, always prepared to make the inevitable shift to new work, perhaps in new industries, which the new economy will require.

All high school students need to have access to diverse program options that match their career interests and the ways they wish to pursue them. And within those programs, they need choices that allow them to customize their learning plans. Such programs will go a long way toward eliminating the caste system and turning America’s promise of universal equity and access into programs and practices for all youth.

Might educators and policy makers, therefore, eliminate the increasingly useless separation between traditional college preparatory and career and technical education programs? Might it be more productive to envision one high school system with a continuum of multiple pathways and choices for students, all incorporating those features listed above, and leading to multiple destinations, not just traditional four year colleges, but community colleges, technical schools, even work or, in some cases, a year off for travel?

A small number of school districts throughout the country already provide multiple pathways through career-themed programs of study. Many more high schools need to follow their lead and go beyond that focusing on individual interests, essentially wrapping a career academy around each learner. Offering such choices will keep many more students from leaving school before graduation and ensure that many more graduates are prepared for success in their post secondary learning and careers.

The caste system is defunct. Let’s get over it.

Explores the need for a revitalized partnership between education and business. In this article, Washor and Mojkowski argue that schools need to move toward specific learning modules that integrate practical academic, technical and employability skills.

Download the entire article (PDF format) here.

Click here to download the full article as a PDF.

One result of our learning from the symposiums is that we believe the Big Picture Learning design can be successfully modified to create programs that address the special needs and circumstances of these young people. We have already begun developing detailed program designs. We welcome your feedback on the paper. We will be blogging about the topic on tinkingandthinking.org and in the near future will develop prototypes based on our program ideas.

Our nation’s appalling and persistent high school dropout rate is thankfully getting the attention it deserves. While I might quibble with the quality and effectiveness of actual and proposed programs, I can at least be thankful for the renewed focus on increasing the number of high school graduates who are ready for success in work and post secondary learning.

This same focus and attention needs to be extended to the millions of young people already out of high school but without a diploma. Many are without jobs or in low-wage, often temporary, work that is unconnected to an education, training, or career. The current recession has particularly punished these youth, many of whom are poor and minority. Drifting in and out of work and without significant prospects, they are missing opportunities for learning that would prepare them for high-wage work and successful careers. Moreover, the cost to society is enormous and growing.

The data regarding these young people are alarming. For example:

• From a 2009 report from the Center for Labor Market Studies: There were nearly 6.2 million total dropouts in 2007 (1,817,429 ages 16-19 and 4,356,454 ages 20-24).
• From a 2010 report entitled Building a Learning Agenda Around Disconnected Youth: In 1978, about 52% of male teens ages 16-19 were employed. By 2006, the rate had dropped to 37%. In the first half of 2009, the rate was 28% (lower for African-American teens).
• From a 2009 Congressional Research Service report: Females are more likely than males to be disconnected. Overall, 6.4% of females ages 16-24 were disconnected in 2008, compared to 3.8% of males the same age.

At Big Picture Learning, we wanted to understand the needs and the circumstances of these young adults by starting not only with such data but also with their stories and from those stories developing insights about how we might provide innovative programs that are first different then better. We see little to be gained from improving flawed designs that produce such data. A different design is needed, one worth making better over time. Our intent was to learn how we could adapt our Big Picture Learning design — successful at the high school level — to this population.

We conducted two symposiums–the first in Seattle, WA, the second in Newark, NJ–and assembled a diverse crew–a broad cross-section of individuals from the education, foundation, business, and community sectors. CEOs dialogued with teachers. Principals interviewed leaders of non-profit organizations. Students questioned school district leaders. We invited several young people, most of them dropouts, to tell their stories and describe their encounters with the system. (For a description and commentary on the symposium design, see Sam Seidel’s article in GOOD.

Despite the fact that these students are part of a group we call “disconnected youth,” we came to understand that each young person is unique in the challenges he or she has faced and in the way he or she has responded to those challenges. The stories, images, and data we examined led to insights into what happens when not one thing but many things go wrong for a young adult, all at once or slowly, but wrong nevertheless.

From their own perspectives, these young people are not disconnected, at least from the things that matter to them. It is true that they are disconnected from schools, but they describe their continually expanding and diversifying connections to other individuals and groups. George Valliant of the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development notes: “It is not the bad things that happen to us that doom us; it is the good people who happen to us at any age that facilitate enjoyable old age.” Traditional schools and systems have difficulty understanding or supporting these alternative connections.

So what is the “different then better” that we think will significantly improve the prospects for these young people? We envision centers or hubs for youth without the impediments to providing a highly customized set of connections to an aligned set of resources.

These centers or hubs will provide:

• A personalized learning program wrapped around each young adult’s career interests and work, helping him or her to develop and pursue a productive career pathway resulting in a high school diploma, technical degrees, and certificates in a diverse range of career/occupational pathways.
• One-stop access to the support services–food, housing, and health care–essential for keeping the young person focused on productive learning and work.
• A comprehensive data system that records each young person’s connections to all aspects of the system: work, housing, and health care.
• Places for youth to obtain just-in-time learning resources, including online learning, tutoring, classes, and certifications linked to work and services.
• Paid work experiences with internships, mentoring, and integrated learning of academic and technical skills leading to job readiness certificates and productive work.
• Post secondary pathways that include community colleges, technical schools, and other non-traditional learning opportunities.

Such programs are difficult to provide but far from impossible. They require the political will to create coherent policy through legislation and regulation, to reallocate and align resources, and to redesign programs. They require as well that we extend our field of vision beyond stemming the tide of high school dropouts to addressing the needs of millions of young people drifting just outside the system.

Most of us went to school. The path is similar for the majority of those in the U.S. and abroad: grade school, high school, some university-level course work. Some of us even go on to complete graduate school. If you are reading this article, you probably finished high school and college - you likely even completed an advanced degree from a respected university. School was okay for you. It got you a degree and a profession. It did what it was supposed to do.

So why would someone want to change schools? In the U.S., we’ve all accepted a formulaic method of education, which generally includes a self-contained classroom in elementary school, the 52-minute classes in high school, and the big lecture halls in college. We’ve accepted that school is a certain way, and if you can’t make it in that environment, it’s your own fault. Dropouts aren’t noticeable or even worthy of notice. Yet no one ever would admit something could be wrong with the design.

The System Doesn’t Work
The dropouts are now very noticeable. In fact, high school dropout rates in the United States run as high as 70 percent in some cities, averaging out at 50 percent. Dropouts are made to feel stupid, and the media and educators just say these predominantly low-income students don’t have the skills, motivation, or family support to succeed.

The college situation is even worse. Of the low-income students who don’t drop out of high school and graduate with good enough grades to actually go to college, only 11 percent will make it through the process. Eighty-nine percent of first-generation college-going students in the U.S. drop out. Could 89 percent of the students be that wrong? And how come no one knows these statistics? Again, educators and policy makers say it is the student’s fault, and that the students have come to college unprepared. Some even say low-income students of color shouldn’t go to college.

We’ve blamed the media, the parents, and the kids themselves. Perhaps it’s time to start blaming the design of the education process—the design of the institution of education itself.

Schools were originally designed to be like factories, to put content into students’ heads in a rote and repeatable fashion. But those intending to participate in modern society need critical-thinking skills and need to be able to solve problems, collaborate, communicate, and use advanced technology. These are new skills, abilities, and methods. But schools are still just trying to confer old content to students. No wonder businesses are saying students are not preparing to work in the real world.

There is all kinds of data telling us K–12 education is not working and college is working only for the middle class—and not really for them either (there is an average 50 percent dropout rate across colleges in the U.S.). We are less and less able to compete in the global economy. Our college-completion rate has gone from No. 1 to No. 15 in the world in the past 10 years. For the most part, the innovations and the changes in education consist of small tweaks around the edges, trying to make an outdated system a little better. Some high-school educators are trying 104-minute classes (double periods), a slightly more interesting curriculum, and an online course here and there. States have developed charter-school laws giving educators the right to start new schools, and most of these schools are smaller and more personal than those in the system they left. I appreciate that low-income parents have a choice in picking a school for their children, yet even charter schools maintain the outdated design of education and repeat the same old pedagogy.

I also appreciate that everyone is trying. President Obama putting big money into a few states. The Gates Foundation realizes the problem, and after 10 years of working on the K-12 system, they are expanding to college. But it is not enough. The ideas that are being supported are not different enough; they don’t go far enough to make the necessary changes. Our educational system needs a complete overhaul.

An Answer
In 1995 my colleague Elliot Washor—a successful and innovative educator—and I had the opportunity to think about the following question: “If we didn’t know what high schools looked like, what would we design to educate our youth?” We knew we wouldn’t have 52-minute classes and ask the students to memorize a certain body of facts. We knew we would try to personalize education, take advantage of intrinsic motivation in the youth, and create a design that would match our 21st-century world. And we would engage our students in real work that was important to them.

Working at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, Elliot and I set up a small nonprofit, Big Picture Learning. Working with the commissioner of education in Rhode Island, we had the opportunity to start a high school, The Met, as a model of what the schools of the future should look like. We started with a simple concept: one student at a time and what’s best for kids?

The school was broken down into advisories, with a teacher and a group of students who spent four years together. Each adviser, parent, and student developed an individual learning plan. The school had broad goals of reading, writing, applying math, empirical reasoning, communication, and personal qualities. Every student would have his or her own way of reaching those goals with high standards. The teacher—also acting as adviser—would help the student identify his or her interests and then find a mentor and workplace to help make the learning real.

Students start in ninth grade at an internship two days a week that is matched to their interests. They spend the other three days back on campus, using their interest and their work at the internship to learn additional skills.

Consider these real-world examples. Anita is a girl from a low-income family on the south side of Providence whose mother is mentally disabled and is constantly moving from apartment to apartment because of lack of funds. She develops a math formula to help figure out the profit in a boutique she is working in. Or take Jimmy: His uncle was shot and killed at a bar, and the assailant was never apprehended. Jimmy wrote a law to have security cameras in all bars and took it through to the legislature—as a ninth grader. All the projects have real meaning to the students. The students had to work with adults, and they had to present their work publicly.

Four years after creating our school, the first 50 students were ready to graduate. Our first graduating class had a dropout rate of 3 percent, compared with the 41 percent dropout rate in the city. There was a 97 percent attendance at The Met versus 77 percent in the city. Ninety percent of our students went off to college. These students were all low-income, first-generation students (50 percent were Hispanic, 30 percent African American, 15 percent white, and 5 percent other).

On top of that good news, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation had been watching The Met’s progress. After a visit to see for themselves, they asked Big Picture to set up 12 schools like The Met around the country. Three years later, after successful starts in Oakland, Detroit, San Diego, and other large cities, we were awarded a grant to start 40 more schools. Ten years later there are 70 of our schools in the U.S., as well as 22 in the Netherlands and Australia. The results have continued to be excellent. The schools throughout the U.S. average 95 percent graduation and 90 percent attendance rates, all in cities where dropout and attendance fall below 50 percent.

We continue to observe our students after they graduate from high school. The students from Big Picture Schools are holding their own, with college completion rates that are much better than those of other students with similar demographics. But when we looked more broadly and observed the 89 percent college dropout rate in the U.S. among first-generation students, we knew something had to be done at the college level.

In 2010 students need more than a high school degree to be successful. They need technical training and skills, and they need to become greater thinkers and doers. Big Picture Learning has decided to turn college education on its head, just as we did with high school education. In the fall of 2009, in partnership with Roger Williams University and with support from the Lumina Foundation and the Nellie Mae Foundation, we started a college. The college is being built around student interests, real work, and a personalized curriculum. The goals of Roger Williams remain the same; the methods of engaging students are different. The work and learning is positioned as “life to text” rather than “text to life.” One of our students is working with a design/architecture firm, doing drawings, presenting at conferences, working in the field, and helping with actual building, all while being mentored by brilliant designers in the field. Back at campus, seminars are set up to broaden the students’ thinking through readings, discussions, and writing. Each of the students is at a different internship and brings with him or her that specific knowledge to the liberal arts seminars. Our program—”College Unbound”— is a three-year, year-round program.

It will be an interesting next few years as we see if colleges are willing to redesign their curricula to meet the needs of their first-generation students who are failing. Slowly, colleges have started inquiring about our model and how it can be applied at their university. Time will tell. We don’t have to accept schools as we knew them and as we experienced them. I encourage you to ask tough questions and help change education.

We are looking for students who are engaging in work that exemplifies the mission of Big Picture Learning. Two students will be selected and flown to Big Bang to receive this award.

Click here to download the nomination form.

The deadline for submission is July 15th. Students will be notified by July 20th and the winners will be announced at Big Bang.

Forward this to staff (current and past), and send us your nominees! We know there are students that are doing amazing work and we are excited to hear why you think they deserve this award.

Please contact Kari Thierer at kthierer@bigpicturelearning.org with any questions.