A New Day for Learning

Expanding Our Notions of Time, Textbook, and Classroom

By Milton Chen, An-Me Chung, & Judith Johnson

In a lawyer’s office in Boston, a fish hatchery in rural Alabama, an art museum in Peekskill, N.Y., a construction site in San Francisco, and an academy for young entrepreneurs in Oakland, Calif., a new day for learning is emerging. These locales do not look or feel like a traditional school, but what is happening in them combines classroom instruction with work in a community setting and represents the beginnings of a more powerful approach to learning.

These learning environments are not constrained by the increasingly outdated classroom form and schedule: chairs in rows, 50-minute periods, and bells to both punctuate periods and puncture students’ eardrums. Instead, these “schools” enable students to work deeply and use time more efficiently. Students engage in ambitious projects requiring the work of a team and mentoring and consulting with teachers, fellow students, and experts—a process similar to how professionals learn and communicate in the modern workplace.

Today, these more-expansive models of learning are exceptions in American public schools. But the day is fast arriving when such exceptions need...