An Excerpt from Extraordinary Learning for All

No two students have the same interests or learn in the same way. So why has education traditionally been offered as a one-size-fits-all solution? Educational designers Aylon Samouha, Jeff Wetzler, and Jenee Henry Wood argue that it is possible to break free from the traditional model of schooling and create a better future for all students.

In their new book, Extraordinary Learning for All, the authors draw on the voices and experiences of real school communities that have embraced the challenge of reinventing education to better serve students and strengthen community bonds.

In this excerpt from the book's introduction, the authors highlight three key takeaways for readers and express hope that a better educational method is within reach.

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TWO SCHOOLS, TWO DISTRICTS, TWO POSSIBLE FUTURES

Joanna is a ninth grader at General High School. All her life she has been artistic, creative, and curious. Her family moved to this community because all the common wisdom said that it was a “good school district.” Test scores were high, as were graduation rates. By all measures, this was an enviable place to be. But over time, Joanna’s family notices that their artistic and adventurous child appears stressed and withdrawn. Her creative spirit has dimmed. She is buried underneath homework, grades, and test prep.

Joanna’s school day is typical of many American students. She arrives around 8:30 a.m., sits in fifty‐five‐minute content subjects with students her same age, takes notes from a teacher at the front of the room, hurries through lunch, and completes mountains of work that she finds disconnected from the issues she cares about most. Joanna likes her teachers, who are thoughtful and hardworking, but school is tedious.

Across town, Ali is having a very different experience at Discovery High School. Like Joanna, he is highly creative and has long shown interest in filmmaking. When he was in middle school, he participated in a yearlong learning experience that helped him to understand his passions and sense of purpose. He discovered that he loved interviewing people and telling stories. He created a thirty‐minute documentary about the experiences of small business owners in his downtown. The experience was transformative. Now, Ali’s high school experience looks very different from Joanna’s.

When Ali arrives, he’s already completed a math and science class, focused on the fundamentals. His school offers online courses for students who want to expedite their learning and have shown they can master competencies. In person, Ali attends a math and science hybrid seminar—his working group is attempting to create efficient solar ovens. They are applying concepts from geometry, optics, and energy. They are varying the designs, angles, and thickness of materials to test hypotheses. Ali’s team is solving a challenge he and his classmates care about: life on a warming planet.

Ali’s next experience is a small‐group Advisory Circle, where he reflects on his weekly goals with peers. He then attends a writing workshop where he tests ideas for a documentary series he’s creating. His friends from Advisory encouraged him to expand his horizons, so he is taking a hands‐on construction class where he and a small group are exploring how to prevent flooding in a greenhouse they are building.

Ali is motivated to be at school. His learning environment allows him to practice new skills, learning from his triumphs and failures. Ali has a sense of control over his learning, being able to pick how fast or slow he progresses through content. Every day, he has opportunities to increase his self‐understanding and feels that he belongs here.

Joanna and Ali are not radically different young people with wildly divergent dreams for their futures. However, they are immersed in fundamentally different learning environments that are creating different outcomes and experiences. Joanna attends a high school that many of us recognize. It is what we call “industrial‐era education”—schooling that reflects the needs and structures of a bygone age when jobs in factories or fields were the expectation. Her learning is characterized by a set of experiences that are often narrow, inflexible, and confined to the four walls of the school building.

When you think about the learning environment that you want for your own children or the children in your district, which would you choose? While Joanna and Ali still have so much more life to experience, their life trajectories could be different. Students from Ali’s high school are not guaranteed a perfect future, but they are armed with myriad experiences that have cultivated growth in all kinds of transformative ways. Ali’s learning environment is one nearly everyone would choose for their children and themselves.

What makes Discovery High School and the school system that supports it so extraordinary? It’s the design.

OUR CASE FOR CHANGE

In this book, we ask and answer one big question: How do communities create extraordinary learning for all?

As educators, we know the reality for most young people in school today is merely fine. School is neither awful nor extraordinary. Students make their way through the education system as it was intended to unfold. But when we reflect and allow ourselves to think expansively about what matters, for all children, we see in Ali’s journey something extraordinary happening that is worth learning from.

This book has three big ideas. If you read no further, take these with you:

Big Idea #1: School has a design, and it can be redesigned. A set of basic practices, structures, and assumptions has historically shaped the American public school system: students grouped by age progress through a subject‐based curriculum, assessed at the same time, within a singular building structure. Scholars have called this the “grammar of schooling”—practices ingrained in the education system and resistant to change, much like the grammar of a language. School as we know it was designed more than a century ago for efficiency and control over students. It incorporated ideas at the time—that emphasized managerial philosophy, such as standardization and specialization, in an economy built on factories or farms—but that are far from sufficient for developing the skills and habits that young people need today.

Big Idea #2: We must redesign school from the ground up by making big “Leaps” away from outdated approaches. We have developed the Leaps for Equitable 21st Century Learning framework to describe the key ways we believe the student experience must change so that schools can prepare all young people to thrive in and transform the world. These ten Leaps invite us to reimagine how we educate young people—centering on personal growth and equal opportunity for every child—so that all young people will not only maximize their own potential but also tackle society’s greatest challenges.

Big Idea #3: Community‐based design is a proven process by which communities can make these Leaps. It is a strengths‐based approach to school change that draws upon our proximity to real communities making these strides as well as a century of learning and progress in the education sector. This approach combines the latest in learning and cognitive science with a community’s wisdom, needs, and goals. Through community-based design, schools rethink every aspect of teaching and learning, from curriculum and culture to scheduling and facilities. The result is a 21st‐century learning environment that leaves students more intellectually engaged, emotionally connected, and personally empowered.

For many of us, our conception of school change has one of two archetypes: we are pursuing either “top‐down” initiatives headed by visionary leaders or “bottom-up” change emanating from classrooms, schools, or parents. Community‐based design offers a third way: a local process where young people, educators, administrators, and caregivers come together—supported by expertise in learning science and design thinking, as well as evidence‐backed models—to collaboratively pursue better learning experiences and outcomes. This process is grounded in the belief that young people deserve learning environments that cultivate comprehensive human development and value communities as a powerful resource for building better schools.

At this point you may be thinking, “Terrific, I’ve purchased another out‐of‐touch, fanciful education book that can be achieved only if my community is wealthy, connected, and preferably both.” Suspend that skepticism! Innovation and change have never been more possible in all schools than now, today.

The last ten to twenty years have brought tremendous insights from the interdisciplinary field of the science of learning and development. It is teaching us how humans actually learn. Technology is increasingly enabling personalized, self‐paced learning that accommodates each learner’s unique strengths and weaknesses. Teachers are embracing new technologies in the classroom, which have the potential to revolutionize learning. Platforms that allow young people to see their progression on learning competencies and self‐pace toward mastery empower students to own their learning in profound new ways. AI‐powered tutoring systems can provide individualized support, answer questions, explain complexities, provide high‐quality feedback, and enable practice. By the time you read this book, there could be even more significant advancements that we cannot yet foresee.

This book is about inspiration and hope, not only a critique about how no‐good‐and‐very‐bad American schools are. We aim to offer a positive vision for how communities come together to dream up and create schools that look like Ali’s Discovery High School. Our goal is to inspire and equip communities everywhere to embark on community‐based design, work that is done by communities, not to them. At a time when so much of the country— including education—is polarized, we need approaches that bring communities together more than ever.

Excerpted from Extraordinary Learning for All: How Communities Design Schools Where Everyone Thrives by Aylon Samouha, Jeff Wetzler, and Jenee Henry Wood, published by Jossey-Bass. Copyright © 2024 by Aylon Samouha, Jeff Wetzler, and Jenee Henry Wood.