Giving Compass' Take:

• Edsurge interviews Pam Moran and Ira Socol, authors of Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools, over their thoughts about how to redesign schools based on how the education landscape is changing.

• These two authors believe in zero-based thinking which means creating a starting point that erases everything you already knew. This can play out in educational environments by re-organizing and building the kind of classrooms, schools, and curriculum that you think would be best for students. 

• Read about how to create a collaborative classroom. 

The key to reforming schools is imagination—and bringing the spirit of shows like The Jetsons or Star Trek to school design. That means throwing out all preconceptions and revisioning how school could be designed for today’s needs.

That’s the argument made in a new book, “Timeless Learning: How Imagination, Observation, and Zero-Based Thinking Change Schools.”

EdSurge recently sat down with two of the book’s co-authors, Pam Moran, and Ira Socol, to better understand their argument, and ask what practical advice they have for teachers and administrators looking to transform schools. Moran is a former superintendent of the Albemarle School district, in Virginia, and Socol is a former school chief technology officer in Virginia. Between the two of them, they've probably seen more schools, more kids and more teachers than most people ever do in a lifetime.

EdSurge: Your book is about thinking practically about how children learn, and about what we've learned about children’s learning. How has that changed over the years for you?

Ira Socol: Education has not included that real study of how you observe the world, and one of the things we started right at the beginning of our work was walking classrooms together and looking at how we saw children learning both inside and outside schools.

Pam, you actually studied as a field biologist. How did looking from the point of view of a field biologist change the way you look at a classroom?

Pam Moran: When I became an educator, and started to really process the way that education works, I realized that education is an ecosystem. We're a web. We are connected, and what one person does in one room, even though it may be very isolated from other people, it can have ripples all the way through the system.

Read the full article about rethinking schools by Betsy Corcoran at EdSurge