Pop!Tech '09: Re-imagining the classroom and the student

Big picture, big issues, big problems.
How big? Education big.
While not as tangled and thorny as say, oh, fixing health care, changing education in America poses some big questions.

At Pop!Tech on Friday the focus shifted to education as part of "Re-imagining America," through breaking traditions and understanding how students, parents and communities work.

People like James O'Brien, principal at the Brooklyn Community Arts & Media High School, Steve Barr, founder of Green Dot Public Schools, and Dennis Littky, creator of Big Picture Learning, spoke about their experience on the frontlines of trying to reform and revolutionize education.

O'Brien, a Pop!Tech social innovation fellow, is also the founder of BCAM, where the program is focused on creative arts and real-world professional development as well as academics. He even invoked the name of those world-reknowned educators, the Wu Tang Clan. "We bring the ruckus with arts curriculum," he said.
His method is part outreach and challenge to students who may otherwise (and some who have already) land in trouble with the law.

Barr said part of changing education is confronting conventional wisdom as well as antiquated funding models, teaching methods and how schools connect to their community. Green Dot started or took over 18 schools in the Los Angeles area and refocused on directing money to classroom, making schools and curriculum personalized and managing it all locally. That meant making the school and staff accountable, but also parents and students, Barr said. School systems need to find ways to make sure funding goes directly to classroom instruction, where it makes the most difference, he said.
Though he's working locally, he says efforts like his are a way of pushing public  school districts to change. But it's not easy. As a nation "we've lost our ability to think we can solve big problems," he said.

But sometimes big problems can be reduced to smaller, potentially easier to fix, problems. Ashley Merryman,  a journalist who has done research on child development, said sleep can have a large impact on how students learn. In one survey at least a third of students said they fall asleep in class at least once a week, she said. Some studies have shown that the difference between and "A" student or "B" student is 15 minutes of sleep, Merryman said. That can be fixed by pushing back school start times, she said.
"Give them a little more sleep and the world might open for them," Merryman said.