I am attending the Rural Telecommunications Congress Annual Conference, and as usual, it is loaded with excellent speakers. The opening keynote was presented by two representatives of the EAST (Environmental and Spatial Technologies) education program. EAST may be the most innovative approach to K12 education in the country. Typically offered as a year long class in high school, EAST students are presented with real community problems and issues and are told to solve them.
To help them do this, a typical EAST classroom has $700,000 in hardware and software, purchased from participating vendors for about ten cents on the dollar. EAST students are given no training on any of these systems, because it is literally impossible to train teachers to be competent in such a wide array of systems. Instead, EAST students are expected to figure out how to use the systems themselves and to work together to use them as part of the class projects.
And indeed, it is expectations that sets the EAST program apart. Students are not given an option to drift along through the class. Instead, EAST sets high expectations in terms of time, commitment, and effort from day one. The EAST classroom more closely resembles a business work place, and has the kinds of software and systems used by businesses. The program focuses on students being in charge of their own learning and growth. EAST teachers are facilitators and managers. EAST teachers don't regard students as empty vessels into which to pour measured chunks of memorized "knowledge."
An EAST project described in the talk involved going out into rural Arkansas and conducting a door to door survey of households to assess broadband availability. Students then created sophisticated GIS maps to show the actual patterns of broadband availability and use, as opposed to the FCC method of simply saying a zip code area has broadband if an incumbent can deliver service to a single subscriber.
EAST programs are in 225 schools in five states, but the program started in Arkansas, where more than 145 schools use the EAST program. After hearing about EAST, I have only one question: "Why doesn't every school in America have an EAST program?"