Every year for the past dozen years I've presented the students in my classes with the questions, "If school could be whatever you wanted it to be, what would a future school look like?  How would it serve society and the student's needs better than the current school system we have?" 

The answers to these questions that the students supplied in our "School of the Future" collaborative project have been some of the most compelling ideas about what our education should be like in the 21st Century.  It is heartening that many of the schools used our school, AACT, as a model and then built on it to make it even better.  There is a reason that AACT has a 100% graduation rate after all.  

From a skills perspective, the main point is for students to do research and create an annotated bibliography, as well as write a proposal for their school.  We end with a presentation of their distinctive ideas and a celebration of their work.  Below are a few interesting ideas from the past few years that I thought were worth sharing.

Reno Career Technical Institute

Ever since I started teaching Film Studies I've been excited to see how much great cinema, regardless of its era, still enthralls and engages students.  One of my absolute favorite films, Rear Window, had my high school students on the edge of their seats in the climatic moment.  Alfred Hitchcock's masterpiece is a perfect demonstration of the Kuleshov Effect used to perfection.  By the time my students got to the scene below, they were so focused and anxious that they were talking to the screen.  If you know the film, you know exactly what scene I'm talking about.