Revolutionary K-12 education might look like a creative incubator | Catherine Fraise | Big Think

I started out as a public school teacher, and then when I had children, I explored a lot of different alternative pedagogies, and Montessori was the one that I felt most comfortable with. And I really liked Montessori because she was a scientist, and she observed children and their behavior and what they needed in their development. And she found universal pieces that you need to have in an environment for them to thrive and to develop optimally.

So I thought I'd take the human tendencies and all the wisdom that she had collected over her lifetime and create an environment where I could implement all those pieces, as well as make it very Google-like. Like a creative company, so that children felt they were going to this amazing creative space to create their best lives ever. Some people might call that school. I call it getting an education.

They have a board of parents and this professional ed team to help them put it together, and they own their education. It's really empowering for them. We want them to start it when they're young – when they're seven and going up so that by the time they're 27, they'll have mad, crazy skills and will be earning money, finding their niche, feeling really empowered to co-create exactly the life that they want for themselves.

So the 21st-century skills that everyone seems to be talking about now out there in the education world are communication, creativity, collaboration, and critical thinking. You need to create an environment where they just integrate these skills naturally. You don't have to teach these things if you create the right environment where they're doing that all the time, and it's just very natural.

So the best medium for that, in my opinion, is what I call an interdependent community. It's a large group of multigenerational people doing their thing in all different ways, intersecting just like a reef. If you could think about it like a coral reef that's teeming with life, and you've got all sorts of different people and different ways they do things, and they're learning from each other.

Not like something with four walls with an authority figure and then a bunch of students who have to remember what that teacher has told them. This is children who are having – they're free moving, they're thinking all the time. They have to come up with their projects. They've got to design their education. They've got to keep themselves in balance. They've got to communicate with everyone.

They're all collaborating, doing all sorts of different things. And they're discovering who they are in the process. It's a very joyous way to be as a human, and they manage to get the academics as well. School is becoming irrelevant. When I first created Workspace, I was thinking I wanted to make a space that incubated social entrepreneurs.

Children who felt confident and were confident to manifest their ideas, whether they were a product or an idea for a play they wanted to write. Any idea was fine. We have a design thinking model because we want them to not just come in and do stuff without really thinking about what they want to do. We want them to understand that an idea is really just the beginning, a spark of what could be.

So we really tease out what they could actually do and what they really care about and what they're good at. We help them launch into a big passion project. Now, when they make something or do something, you have to have sort of a platform that they can share what they're doing with the community. We have two big marketplace events. We do a little Shark Tank for them.

We do open mic night. We have karaoke salons and all sorts of different ways that they can show the community what they're doing. The community, the parents become this big launch community that are helping these children on their journeys. So we like to, as much as we can, include all the other parents in all the children's projects so they get buy-in and they get someone cheerleading them on.

We have a professional ed team that is there all the time to support our parents as they are implementing this journey for ...