By Emily Raudenbush Gum
Human-scale education—it’s a phrase that almost feels redundant. Should we really have to specify that the education we are after is designed for the cultivation of people? As a school leader, I would argue that too much of what happens in schools is driven by a different set of design standards. Sometimes that means we reduce our expectations of who we actually know kids to be: complex and plagued by setbacks but extraordinary in their capacities and growth. If you haven’t recently been utterly taken aback by the creativity and synthetic thinking of a child (of any age), then I encourage you to slow down and listen with this intent to one of the children in your life. Or, it could mean that we don’t plan ahead for the setbacks that are inevitable. Have you ever met a person who didn’t experience some ups and downs in their lives? Of course not! Why would we allow schools to not take this into account? As just one example, think of a report card that tallies to an overall cumulative GPA. No wonder we are stressing out our kids. The system has no capacity to acknowledge even one bad term for a student and set it to the side, capturing only that kid at their best. I hope my point is beginning to be clear: we need schools that continually ask themselves whether what they are doing is great for the overall cultivation of children as we know them in all of their wonderful complexity. We need schools that are adaptive to any evidence that they are not living up to this ideal. To accomplish this, we need to acknowledge that schools lose too much of their humanity when they are not designed to be human-scale.
The tools that have come from the work of “design thinking”—whether through Stanford’s Design School or elsewhere in management thinking—have very little to do with aesthetics and everything to do with intentionality. When it comes to school transformation, perhaps the key missing component is humility. I don’t mean to sound harsh. School leaders and teachers are among the most selfless and generous members of our communities. But as institutions, schools struggle with adaptability. We move slowly and prefer what has worked before. At the institutional level, I think it is fair to describe this as a lack of humility. We believe that what we have is awesome or at least good enough and aren’t willing to name the problems and challenges and set realistic expectations for change.
Let’s be precise in our thinking about this. Design standards are not design constraints. All good design has constraints: budget, time, place, and so on. To design is to be realistic about constraints while remaining focused on the best possible instantiation of those design standards. Design standards name the values of our mission. Every institution has design standards; and you get what you design for. Schools are complex social ecosystems and there are expectations for student behaviour, hallway etiquette, eating together, the role of the arts and beauty, sportsmanship, models of authority, just to name a few. All of these components are outside of the core competency of schools: teaching content and skills for academic development. It would be a mistake to pretend that these design standards are somehow secondary. Instead, we need to accept that they are primary, as all of the excellent work around school culture and the social-emotional learning of children has done.
So, what is the core design standard of human-scale education? The answer is quite simple; children are interacting with adults who know them well and champion their success. Schools, in their most basic form, are
intergenerational communities rooted in a place and organized around a mission. We call that mission education because we believe that humans have an incredible capacity to live up to the dignity of that term, educare: to be called and nourished forth. Herein is the design constraint. What does it really mean for a child to be deeply known and believed in?
Teachers are mentors. Consider the research findings of late around what sets apart the super achievers in global education: Finland, Estonia, and so on. One observation that emerged has to do with the phenomenon of looping. Looping happens when students are with teachers for multiple years in a row. As Adam Grant put this in a recent New York Times article, “Instead of specializing just in their subjects, teachers also get to specialize in their students. Their role evolves from instructor to coach and mentor.” I lead a relatively small high school of 330 students. Schools like ours have felt the pressure of larger schools to ensure that every teacher is singular in their specific area of competence to ensure student test outcomes, and this collegiate model of differentiated excellence does have its clear benefits. However, research lends itself to the belief that it is possible to have tremendous academic outcomes for students and also strive for comprehensive and integrated thriving. For this more robust outcome, which our school has striven after for 175 years, schools need design standards which ensure students of all ages are known and championed, and that takes mentors in human-scale, adaptable schools.
As technologies arise, Artificial Intelligence tutors not least, it is crucial that we stay focused on the design standards that will lead to the outcomes that we want for our children. We want our kids to do their very best and be acknowledged for it across many areas of life, and we want the structures around our kids to make sure that things are going well for them and that challenges are addressed. These outcomes are best addressed by design standards that take seriously how wonderfully complex people are. When we do this, we might be challenged to find that the future of education is not grand and complexified but is instead interpersonal, adaptable, and human-scale.
Emily Raudenbush Gum is the 12th Head of School at The Frederick Gunn School in Washington, CT, celebrating its 175th year.
