Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools

Reinvent public schools with proven, innovative practices

Our homes, communities, and the world itself need the natural assets our children bring with them as learners, and which they often lose over time on the assembly line that pervades most of the public education system today. We see no actions as more important in school than developing, supporting, and reinforcing children's sense of agency, the value of their voices, and their potential to influence their own communities.

In Timeless Learning, an award-winning team of leaders, Chief Technology Officer Ira Socol, Superintendent Pam Moran, and Lab Schools Principal Chad Ratliff demonstrate how you can implement innovative practices that have shown remarkable success. The authors use progressive design principles to inform pathways to disrupt traditions of education today and show you how to make innovations real that will have a timeless and meaningful impact on students, keeping alive the natural curiosity and passion for learning with which children enter school.

• Discover the power of project-based and student-designed learning
• Find out what “maker learning” entails
• Launch connected and interactive digital learning
• Benefit from the authors’ “opening up learning” space and time

Using examples from their own successful district as well as others around the country,the authors create a deep map of the processes necessary to move from schools in which content-driven, adult-determined teaching has been the traditional norm to new learning spaces and communities in which context-driven, child-determined learning is the progressive norm.

Keywords:

Education; public school; public school education; education in public schools; shift in education; childhood learning; child learning; early childhood development; learning in child development; new ways of teaching children; how to teach children; children learners; teaching child learners; progressive education; John Dewey; William Alcott; maker; maker education; CoderDojo; open classroom; multiage; school design; digital learning; educational technology; learning spaces; change agency; Neil Postman; Postman and Weingartner; 21^st Century Learning; Albemarle County; change agency