By Alejandro Jiménez

What if, instead of learning through a textbook, we explored the city to expand the limit of knowledge a textbook can give us. Turning the city into a classroom will keep students engaged with new information that a textbook cannot present to them. For example,instead of learning the history of Boston in a classroom, we could take a field trip to the Freedom Trail or to the John Hancock building and learned from there. There would be much more student engagement and more active participation overall.

I spoke with Ross Wilson, Managing Partner for Innovation for the BPS.

Alejandro: How is learning through the city an advantage as opposed to learning through a textbook?

Ross: Oh man, that’s an easy one!

We’re not preparing students for career and college success through a textbook.  You forget most of the things you learn through a textbook. If we look back and ask any adult what they learned from a textbook they’d say, “Not much!”  We learn what we care about, what we’re connected to, what drives us and what we want to do. We should be preparing our students to be out in the community. In a city like Boston there’s no reason Boston itself shouldn’t be our campus because there’s a thriving community for any interest. So, we need to figure out how to open up our minds and the restrictions that we place on education and allow our students to think about real-world experiences and how we value and assess that and, finally, how we make that a part of the credit-bearing process in high schools.

Alejandro: How do schools go about incorporating this curriculum?

Ross: I think there’s a really good opportunity in Boston through this High School Redesign process and a big desire to see schools better engage our students and prepare them for college and career success.  Right now, we’re really interested in teams of teachers and school leaders and students working together to create pilot programs in our schools to show what could work, to try out things that are different, to take a risk and to showcase that. Some things will fail and some things will succeed but we’ll learn from everything.

Our new superintendent Dr. Chang, our school committee and our Mayor have challenged us to change our system and there’s a great opportunity for schools to work together to do that.

Alejandro: How have you received support to explore this new kind of learning environment?

Ross: Mayor Walsh has opened up the door for us in the city of Boston and challenged us to rethink our high school experience. Chief of Education Rahn Dorsey has been the champion of this effort. He has led this great organizational effort with Dr. Chang around community forums – so going to schools, going to community organizations and asking students, teachers, parents, community members and what do we want to see in our schools.  We’ve developed principles that we think are really good models and now we want to continue to challenge existing high schools to go off to do some design work. But I can tell you: politically and organizationally, we have had great support for reimagining what high schools should look like.

It’s too bad, man. You’re a senior. You’re going to miss all the good stuff. But you’re high school is one of our examples of a really innovative high school, right? The Muñiz is a non-traditional high school that has created a phenomenal model. That’s what we want to draw upon, models like the Muñiz.