can still taste the fear I lived during my high-school years, especially during history class, where memorization was the paramount learning practice. I had a tough choice. Should I quietly (God forbid openly) rebel against that system—perhaps learning in a different way, on my own? Or should I lower my head and accept that I had neither choice nor voice in that classroom?
I chose the latter. Then there is today.
Marlly is my student. At fifteen, she attends public high-school in Peru. She told me last week, “my teacher, she is alright and all, but I’m really scared of her. You can’t imagine Franco, I had to wait for two weeks before I could tell her about what I wanted to do for the school”. Inside my thirty-five year-old mind I asked myself why, after twenty years, kids still live in fear of their schooling lives.
In 2018, I came across the concept grammar of schooling, developed by historians David B. Tyack and Larry Cuban. It said there are deep design features within the schooling system that over time—and these are my own words—acquired a quality of being sacred and untouchable. They are so transcendent that they are no longer even visible to us. This is a big blind spot when we talk about transforming education.
Let’s take a moment to explore this through some questions. Have you given serious thought as to why students should be in grades arranged by age? How about organizing learning in subjects? What about the idea that all students should spend the exact same amount of time learning each concept? Finally—and my personal favorite—why must we rely on grades and rankings? These may make education convenient, but for who? For what purpose? Do these design features fundamentally help students thrive, and if not why do we continue?
Building the Classroom I Never Had
With this in mind, I decided to create the classroom my inner child never had, and throw out the window some of these sacred features. It is a virtual classroom (no in person!? Heresy!) where you can find students grouped from fourteen to seventeen years old, some of whom are formally in their first year out of high-school. The regular experience in my classroom is multicultural; students come from every culture across Peru. Nothing brings more joy to me than seeing them together, deepening their sense of self and taking part in building a safe environment. Belonging. We have a motto: “no grades, no rankings, just growth”.
Our system shifts power and purpose in favor of the students. At the beginning of the year they familiarize themselves with transferable skills such as design methods, personal well-being, curiosity, research, systems thinking, analyzing inequity, creating stories, building curriculums, facilitating groups, thinking ethically, and developing a purpose. They decide on a portfolio of projects to make our country better over ten months, and pursue those projects through a combination of personalized mentoring, group meetings, peer support, and their own will. The power that I might have held from creating an adult-driven standard curriculum is shifted toward my students because they decide why to learn, what to learn, how to use and expand their competencies, how to use their time, and how to tell their story. They invariably choose a higher purpose for their education: to be a good person or to spend time positively impacting others.
Our ten-month student leadership program is in essence a challenge to structural issues around practice, purpose, and power in education.
Remember how Marlly—who is in our student leadership program but feels fear inside her regular classroom—wanted to do something for her school? Several months ago I asked her what project she’d like to build. What moves her? She said, “I am moved by teenagers who suffer daily because of the bad things that happen to them on the internet, and I want to create a curriculum to teach my peers in my community how to defend themselves.” Thinking about that purpose—crafted by her—she got up, went to the teacher she feared and proposed that she—a fifteen year old, typically powerless within a school, but now with her own power and purpose—could run a program of cybersecurity sessions for their peers. The teacher accepted.
A month later Marlly texted me and said “I already facilitated my first session. It didn’t go as planned, but I liked it ☺”. Now she is challenging her leadership, working to expand the program to all the classrooms in her grade. Her actions transformed me too. I see her becoming a courageous, kind woman.
But for the time being, with just a bit of a mind shift, and a little magic dust, she is learning differently. And she loves it.
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A Gift to my Younger Self: Building the Classroom I Never Had
Photo by J. Balla Photography via Unsplash.
October 7, 2022
There are design features in the schooling system that have acquired a quality of being sacred and untouchable. This is a blind spot when we talk about transforming education, but we must challenge ourselves to imagine an education experience many of us never had, writes Enseña Perú’s Franco Mosso.
I
can still taste the fear I lived during my high-school years, especially during history class, where memorization was the paramount learning practice. I had a tough choice. Should I quietly (God forbid openly) rebel against that system—perhaps learning in a different way, on my own? Or should I lower my head and accept that I had neither choice nor voice in that classroom?
I chose the latter. Then there is today.
Marlly is my student. At fifteen, she attends public high-school in Peru. She told me last week, “my teacher, she is alright and all, but I’m really scared of her. You can’t imagine Franco, I had to wait for two weeks before I could tell her about what I wanted to do for the school”. Inside my thirty-five year-old mind I asked myself why, after twenty years, kids still live in fear of their schooling lives.
In 2018, I came across the concept grammar of schooling, developed by historians David B. Tyack and Larry Cuban. It said there are deep design features within the schooling system that over time—and these are my own words—acquired a quality of being sacred and untouchable. They are so transcendent that they are no longer even visible to us. This is a big blind spot when we talk about transforming education.
Let’s take a moment to explore this through some questions. Have you given serious thought as to why students should be in grades arranged by age? How about organizing learning in subjects? What about the idea that all students should spend the exact same amount of time learning each concept? Finally—and my personal favorite—why must we rely on grades and rankings? These may make education convenient, but for who? For what purpose? Do these design features fundamentally help students thrive, and if not why do we continue?
Building the Classroom I Never Had
With this in mind, I decided to create the classroom my inner child never had, and throw out the window some of these sacred features. It is a virtual classroom (no in person!? Heresy!) where you can find students grouped from fourteen to seventeen years old, some of whom are formally in their first year out of high-school. The regular experience in my classroom is multicultural; students come from every culture across Peru. Nothing brings more joy to me than seeing them together, deepening their sense of self and taking part in building a safe environment. Belonging. We have a motto: “no grades, no rankings, just growth”.
Our system shifts power and purpose in favor of the students. At the beginning of the year they familiarize themselves with transferable skills such as design methods, personal well-being, curiosity, research, systems thinking, analyzing inequity, creating stories, building curriculums, facilitating groups, thinking ethically, and developing a purpose. They decide on a portfolio of projects to make our country better over ten months, and pursue those projects through a combination of personalized mentoring, group meetings, peer support, and their own will. The power that I might have held from creating an adult-driven standard curriculum is shifted toward my students because they decide why to learn, what to learn, how to use and expand their competencies, how to use their time, and how to tell their story. They invariably choose a higher purpose for their education: to be a good person or to spend time positively impacting others.
Our ten-month student leadership program is in essence a challenge to structural issues around practice, purpose, and power in education.
Remember how Marlly—who is in our student leadership program but feels fear inside her regular classroom—wanted to do something for her school? Several months ago I asked her what project she’d like to build. What moves her? She said, “I am moved by teenagers who suffer daily because of the bad things that happen to them on the internet, and I want to create a curriculum to teach my peers in my community how to defend themselves.” Thinking about that purpose—crafted by her—she got up, went to the teacher she feared and proposed that she—a fifteen year old, typically powerless within a school, but now with her own power and purpose—could run a program of cybersecurity sessions for their peers. The teacher accepted.
A month later Marlly texted me and said “I already facilitated my first session. It didn’t go as planned, but I liked it ☺”. Now she is challenging her leadership, working to expand the program to all the classrooms in her grade. Her actions transformed me too. I see her becoming a courageous, kind woman.
But for the time being, with just a bit of a mind shift, and a little magic dust, she is learning differently. And she loves it.
