This is a high school that encourages high flexibility, and gives a lot of Agency to students. For a more “structured” school plan, see Schools are bad for learning.
- Guiding principles: more flexibility and encourage high Agency. Should remove as many obstacles in the way of students doing what’s excitingly ambitious as possible.
- Flexible class lengths and depth: If I’m obsessed with computer science, I would want to be able to take 3 hour classes for a semester on computer science. If I have a side-interest in microeconomics, but I don’t want it to take up too much of my time, I would like to be able to take a 30 min/day class for a semester that would give me a broad overview. All classes being relatively standardized in terms of time and depth makes it less adaptable to students.
- How this could work:
- Slightly “abnormal” courses could be turned into high-quality structured online courses made by a central organization on a wide variety of topics. Basically College Board++. The school can identify groups of students who are taking similar classes and place them into study groups with each other. These groups could be basically like normal class environments except every student is self-teaching.
- Specialization among faculty (which already exists) so that they can answer questions that students might have with either prior knowledge or just being able to quickly grasp the topic and explain it due to familiarity with related subjects.
- How this could work:
- Advocation for the use of spaced repetition. This would help most students learn and actually retain information better, and I think it could speed up classes slightly as well because reviews would be less necessary.
- Open-ended projects with broad guidelines
- Time is carved out of the school day and/or school work is minimized to allow/encourage students to work on cool projects and excitingly ambitious things. Blog posts, programming projects, learning something extra, applying your knowledge from a class to something new, etc. Maybe there’s a few big showcases?
- I think picking up various frames of looking at the world is really good, so there should be a required class that’s specifically designed to expose you to lots of different topics. Maybe every month a new subject is covered.
- A heavily modified English class
- Better curriculum design
- Classes use a top-down approach to teaching similar to fast.ai’s as much as possible.
- An emphasis on grasping the intuition behind why something works rather than rote memorization. 3Blue1Brown approach to pedagogy should be a big inspiration