Education Framework

Exploration

School provides students with tool for observing and acting on their world: Mathematics, History, Language, Science, Arts — these are the tools students can use to build models of reality. Accurate models are the foundation for the capactity to create change. If the student doesn't understand their world, they will not know how to meaningfully participate in it. Exploration is the means by which the student can build these models with the tools developed in their studies. In the 3X model, the institution's role is to safely and equitable structure this exploration by providing accessible opportunities and sufficient encouragement.

Exploration must be rooted in what the student actually experiences outside of the school walls. Community engagement, dialogue, and local history are all essential components for the student to understand and act upon their surroundings. In many cases, the school is the only place where they student can be guided to access this information. On their own, they can not be expected to seek these opportunities out on their own. It is our role, as people with more experience, to provide productive avenues for their curiosity.

Experience

Knowledge is built, not obtained. New understanding only arrises when we discover connections between concepts that already exist in our minds. For this student, these concepts are most prominently their family, their friends, the activities they enjoy, and the topics that draw their native curiosity. Academic concepts are anything but segregated from these, but they are often treated this way, much to the detriment of the student's motivation to learn. 3X placed the integration of academia and arts with the student's lived experience as central to the development of agency.

Without this integration, student motivation is based in ever-waning extrinsic pressures to perform and in competition with the multitude of easily-accessible distractors. Students on their own cannot see the importance of their learning, and we cannot expect them to. Institutions must fulfill the role of demonstrating the useful connection between the classroom and their worlds. Beyond motivation, students will be able to see what they learn through real-world levers of change. Through embodied practice and observation, students learn how to act as agents who have tha ability to shape their surroundings.

Excitement

We have understood the mechanisms of engagement for a long time. Gameificaiton, competition, self-expression, independence, personalization... Student attention and excitement is directable and it is essential to learning. Until now, the barrier was material. Institutions did not have enough resources to channel towards this effort, and one teacher cannot design engaging material for each of their unique students. But this is the exact limitation that technology solves — achieving more with less. If institutions want their students to care about their learning, they must adopt the tools necessary to do so.

Personalized learning technology can bring this to every student affordably and equitably. It is part of our mission at Helicon Insitute to ensure this. In a world where every student has access to learning that is optimized to the current state of thier mental development, the role of institions in to ensure this excitement continues to flow towards application, not just understanding.

The New School Day

The principles listed above are not new. Education science as a field has long understood the mechanisms that drive effective learning, but have instead faced barriers at the practical level. Each student has a unique set of needs captured by a wide range of theories described in the 3X Framework, but it is beyond the capacity of a single teacher of many students to apply these principles appropriately to every individual. Instead, we must resort to curriculum adherence in hopes that the provided standardized resources match the students' needs. This no longer needs to be the case.

Accelerated Academics

Theory-driven instruction can be delivered digitally, allowing for adaptive personalized learning. This kind of delivery contrasts with traditional lockstep methods that require students to follow a strict path, regardless of whether they have sufficiently mastered foundational material before moving on to more complex and dependent ideas. This, in combination with restricted instructive mediums, accounts for much of the time students spend learning any given topic. Widespread access to personalized learning will accelerate learning, especially for students who have fallen behind. This opens the school day up to new kinds of developmental activities focused on student expression, competence in non-traditional topics, and community engagement.

The primary benefit of academic mastery is the clarity with which it allows the student to observe their worlds. The systems that shape their environments are physical, mathematical, and humanistic in nature. The traditional curriculum focuses on topics that, when fully understood, allow the students to see these systems as they are. All intentional change first requires a comprehension of the factors that create the current state of a system. Once visible, the student has the ability to influence their environment through expression.

Practicing Expression

Students who can clearly observe their environments can then begin imagining how that environment might change in a way that aligns with their intrinsic values. No values exist purely in the abstract; they must manifest in the environment, social, physical, or otherwise. Students who have mastered core academic topics will not only be able to clearly observe their environments, but articulate their appreciation for and desire to change these environments. This is the essence of expression.

In the new model of education, students are encouraged to practice expression by observing aspects of the environments that are most valuable, understanding them as deeply as possible, and articulating their satisfaction or discontentment in mediums that feel meaningful. This is their contribution to the discourse that shapes the community's direction of development. There are three modes of expression: Artistic, Academic, and Active. They can be restated as externalizing, internalizing, and implementing forms of expression respectively. The school's role is to provide sufficient opportunity for each of these modes through material, social, and temporal resources. This facilitation need not be self-contained. In fact, opportunities for student expression can be greatly expanded through engagement with the greater community.

Community Engagement

The external community can expand the opportunities available for practical application, learning, and expression for students. Schools can create avenues for these opportunities by building relationships with people and organizations locally and digitally. Helicon Institute serves as a hub and provides network building services towards this goal.