One of the most exciting projects we have been involved with in the Office of Scholarship and Innovation (OofSI) has been our partnership with the Kyrene School District. We have written about it previously (on the OofSI site as well as on my website), and just today there were two stories on the Teachers College News page about this project.

The first story: Improving education from the ground up starts as follows:

This fall, nearly 100 third and fourth grade students in the Kyrene School District in Phoenix, Arizona, will experience the start of a school year different from any other. They will be the first student body of a new program that combines their two grade levels in an innovative learning space at Kyrene de las Manitas Elementary School.

The second story Q-and-A with the T-E-D is an interview with Mary Brown, the lead Teacher Executive Designer.

Mary will be one of the key leaders in this new reimagined classroom. Her interview is worth reading just for the sheer breadth of thought and innovation that is being brought into the lives of the students in this new learning space. Learning in this new school, she says, will still be content and standards-aligned but with driving questions that the students will explore through a range of projects. And most importantly, she says, the students… 

… have to come up with the questions, then seek out the answers. That’s something we miss sometimes in traditional curriculum design. We ask questions that have one answer. But these kids will be coming up with questions that might have different answers, finding different solutions and critiquing them.

It is invigorating to see the work put in by our team, the team from Kyrene and countless others come to fruition. There is still a lot we have to do and a lot that we will learn through this process but I could not be more excited, and proud. 

Take a moment to read both the stories (link 1 & 2), check out the project page on our website or play the School Design Game that was inspired by our work in Kyrene.