Microsoft's Class Action

Rewriting The Rules At the School of the Future, students like Quetta Fairy are experimenting with a whole new way to learn.

"Miz Mary" Microsoft's Mary Cullinane says the company's "interest in education is very much a vested interest."

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On the day of my visit, Cullinane leads a tour beginning in the School of the Future's Interactive Learning Center, a student library showcasing bizzspirational tomes such as Who Moved My Cheese? One of the first PowerPoint slides she shows to the dozens of educators features a boldfaced caveat: "This is not a prescription, only an example." "People think we have the answer here. I don't believe that," Cullinane says, projecting from her diaphragm to make sure the people in the back row can hear. "People ask us, 'Why haven't you discovered the silver bullet?' But there is no silver bullet. We're going to show you our innards, and you can decide if any of that is going to support your development."

Cullinane describes a Bertelsmann-commissioned study comparing the effectiveness of two distinct teaching styles: standing in front of the class and lecturing, or a more free-form manner, using dynamic digital aids and encouraging direct student participation. "Now, which group did better?" she asks. "Raise your hand if you think it was stand-and-deliver." Thinking they see the answer coming, no one moves.

"You sure?" Cullinane says, grinning as though preparing to pull a scarf from her sleeve. "Actually, you would be wrong--in fact, there was no difference in the groups' scores when they were tested on the material directly afterward. But, when the groups were tested again one year later, the students in the traditional group could remember almost nothing, and the other group was expanding their detailed knowledge of the topic to other subject areas. As teachers, what kind of legacy do we want, kids from the first group or kids from the second group? And as a Microsoft person, which kid do I want to hire?"

Those data are at the center of the School of the Future's curriculum--and the heart of its revolutionary potential. For all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds corporate-ed projects, many just piggyback career-related classes onto traditional scholastic fare. At Weill's Academies of Information Technology, for example, students take classes such as Digital Media, Advanced Web Tools, and Introduction to the Internet, but also slog through freshman English and sophomore-year social studies.

The Philadelphia school district and Microsoft, by contrast, have opted to dynamite the stand-and-deliver approach and rebuild from scratch. Under George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind policy, the educational focus in America has been squarely on coaxing students to perform to preset standards--on teaching to state tests, which is essentially the factory model with a fresh coat of paint. From the School of the Future's perspective, that strategy is nonsensical. Teaching the three Rs in a vacuum, with no attention to practical skills and application, is like handing a kid a golf club, without explanation, and expecting him to become Tiger Woods.

Cullinane's position is that a more interactive, integrative classroom environment helps kids retain knowledge better and engage more actively in learning--and an intimidating array of research backs her up. In addition to the Bertelsmann study, she cites the Jasper-Woodbury experiments conducted at Vanderbilt University in the 1990s, in which researchers challenged teenage students with real-world problems that demand cross-disciplinary thinking. (In one scenario, a hiker finds an injured eagle in a remote mountain pass that can be reached only by personal aircraft; students work in teams to figure out the best way to retrieve it, given a fixed wind speed and fuel capacity.) Compared with students in traditional math classes, the Jasper-trained pupils performed better on tests of math and science knowledge; they also had stronger general problem-solving skills. In a separate trial of the Jasper method, students scored higher on measures of creativity as well.

Inspired by such results, Salcito, Cullinane, and the Philadelphia Board of Education swept aside the old "silo learning" model and replaced it with one in which subjects are subsumed into open-ended topics: "How are our identities constructed?" or "Should the U.S. be concerned about bird flu?" Traditional disciplines are applied in the course of exploring these broader questions, exercising students' writing, calculating, and analytical skills concurrently, as well as the career-oriented skills on Microsoft's "education competency wheel," including organizing and planning, motivating others, dealing with ambiguity, and working in a team setting. In Kathy Lee's "learning sessions," for instance (School of the Future denizens steer clear of talking about "classes"), students like Quetta Fairy are investigating the growing pains associated with Philadelphia's urban renewal. Every aspect of this real-world transition lends itself to an instructional opportunity. Eminent-domain laws that allow the city to raze buildings and homes are grounds for an in-depth online investigation into how legislative systems operate--and for discussions about how to create an open forum for residents of affected neighborhoods. The question of how new buildings should be designed serves as a springboard for polishing kids' trigonometry skills. In another lesson, kids did Internet research to pinpoint areas in the city that they felt were not receiving their share of social services. And a study of slavery prompted laptop-driven examinations of the students' own family trees. "I asked my mom for the last names of our relatives, and I researched my entire family back into slave times," says Tyler Wilson, one of Lee's students. "It was really cool."