Brightworks School in San Francisco, CA 

On a typical day at Brightworks, you will be introduced to conscientious building, breaking and fixing mixed with a little responsible danger. But you'll be ok; this is how we learn!

Gever Tulley, a former software engineer and the school’s founder, whose Ted Talk can be found here, believes in the power of real tools, real materials, and real challenges to spark the curiosity of children. Tulley does not worry about kindergarteners using power tools or attending class in a tree house. When students play dangerously, they discover what they're capable of, according to Tulley. Problems start to look like puzzles, and today’s world needs more solvers. Their Community Lunch program brings the entire school together once a week to share a meal, engage in lessons about where food comes from, and learn how to prepare it.  The school believes learning can happen anywhere and field trips are not your typical trips to the museum. Educators are called collaborators. They support a mixed age environment and take the lessons of friendship, empathy, and understanding to a new level. Brightworks’ school design — a giant maker space without walls around classrooms — fits their curriculum design and is intended to spark creativity at every turn. Tech Insider named Brightworks one of the most innovative schools in the world for its living-on-the-edge approach to education. 

Hudson Valley Sudbury School in Kingston, NY

The learning at the Hudson Valley Sudbury School, an independent school in Kingston, NY, is self-directed and self-governed. Students have a say in everything from how they spend their day to how they demonstrate their learning. Adults don’t initiate the learning process; they provide guidance. HVSS students may head outside to learn from nature, spend the day co-developing rules for the school, or sit by themselves creating a video game. In fact, HVSS challenges students to seek out their own resources (books, local professors, YouTube tutorials) on every subject from sociology to engineering. 

Although a lot of learning happens outside the walls, the design of the school is thoughtful. There is room for fast and slow thinking, independent and group work, and quiet contemplative reflection along with busy, bursty conversation. There are no tests and no grades. If students so choose, they figure out a way to translate their learning into transcripts colleges can embrace. Though it sounds way outside the box, HVSS is not an entirely new model. It is based on the educational philosophy first developed by another Sudbury school, the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, MA in 1968. The belief is that young people are hard-wired to grow and learn. When given the opportunity to be free to do so, they thrive.

E3 Civic High in San Diego, CA

The E3 Civic Charter High School is located inside the San Diego Public Library. The school, opened in 2013, said the library is not only its home, but a "co-educator" for its students. In fact, E3's students have access to the library’s collection of more than 1.2 million books, along with its auditorium, art gallery and reading rooms. The school's classrooms are configured flexibly, with furniture designed to move around and writeable walls that students are encouraged to use for mapping ideas, challenges, and solutions. 

The program is STEAM-integrated and founded in Design Thinking. Their project-based learning approach challenges learners to “explore the human condition throughout each discipline.” During their senior year, scholars have the opportunity to engage in internships of their choice several days a week. Along with meaningful engagement in the community and a community-supported online store for professional clothing, E3 celebrates the fact that their student population is representative of the diversity of San Diego. 

The Apollo School in York, PA

Apollo is an innovative program that operates inside a public school, Central York High School in York, Pennsylvania. Apollo offers the Central York students a semester-long, four-hour block of classes blending English, social studies, and art into an interdisciplinary project-based curriculum. The special program is co-taught by three teachers, one from each subject area. Over the semester, students design and complete four major projects aligned with core educational standards in all three subjects. Students set their own goals each day based on the project they are working on at the time. They engage in individual and team work, have personalized sessions with instructors, and attend mini-courses of their choice taught by the teachers. 

When a project is completed, students meet with all three teachers to represent and defend their learning, tying it to specific standards and learning targets. Student evaluation focuses on academic skills — reasoning, perspective, contextualization, and synthesis — and “soft skills” or dispositions — communication and time management.

The Apollo choice is one variety of “mass customized learning” with the goal of student voice and choice.  As lead English teacher Wes Ward states, “Apollo is one spoke of that wheel.”