Tools of the Trade

As education schools face pressure to retool, Shady Hill represents a new way of training educators.

By Jeff Archer

Cambridge, Mass.

She'd flopped once and didn't want to do it again.

In her first lesson back from winter break, Kim McMahon gave each of her 6th graders two maps of Africa: one blank and one with the outlines of the ancient kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. Their task, which seemed simple enough to her, was to copy the information from one map to the other, while creating their own keys to show which outline represented each kingdom.

Then came the avalanche of questions from the class,...