Think about a particularly powerful and enduring learning experience you had, growing up. Where did you encounter it? Why did you choose this particular experience?
If you’re like most Americans, that experience was not to be found in your everyday schooling. More likely, you named an extracurricular like drama club, or a sport, or a science fair project, or something that had no connection with attending school.
What if your school – and the school your own kids attend, the school every young person attends – were designed to enable that kind of powerful, purposeful, super-engaging, life-enhancing learning all the time? Every day?
Walk into Northern Cass School District in rural North Dakota and you’ll find third grade teacher Megan Margerum’s students creating their own “Watch Me Grow” projects – building on their natural, in-born curiosity to explore, make, communicate, learn, lead, and adapt. By eighth grade, students in Northern Cass complete sophisticated, interdisciplinary “gateway projects” that help prepare them for high school’s demands. That’s where learning twines with the world outside the classroom. One music-interested senior recently rewrote (for credit) the final scene of Into the Wild as an original song, working with a professional musician in a recording studio to produce the track and her reflections on the experience. These aren’t special programs for gifted students; they are what learning looks like for everyone at Northern Cass.
This is Horizon 3 learning. Not someday; not in special schools serving selected students. Now, in public schools serving diverse student populations on typical budgets, from rural North Dakota to urban Los Angeles and Portland, ME.
To paraphrase William Gibson: the future is here, today, for tens of thousands of lucky students in public schools like Northern Cass. For them, experiences like the one you recalled as your most important, enduring learning journey take place routinely. They are what school is all about. For the 40 to 50 million other learners attending the nation’s public schools: Sorry. Not yet.
This isn’t a problem of knowing what to do or why to do it. It’s a problem of sparking and marshalling the will to help it happen.
It may be the most urgent and important work of our times.
What “Next Gen Learning” Encompasses
Various labels for powerful forms of learning have emerged over the past two decades: student-centered, project-based, personalized, competency-based, experiential, “real-world”/authentic learning. These aren’t competing models. They’re overlapping approaches unified by what students actually experience: deep, enduring learning in which students find purpose and relevance; that is constantly informed by varied ways of demonstrating increasing competence and mastery; that is collaborative with teachers and peers; and is interactive, challenging, and equally accessible to every student.
“Next gen learning” is what happens when schools integrate these elements into coherent models – approaches that students experience as coherent – rather than treating the elements as add-ons to the pervasive, teacher-directed model that’s dominated what kids have encountered in U.S. public schools for a century now. It’s learning designed for both capability (knowledge and the skill to apply it in novel situations) and agency (the self-direction to take ownership of your own development and life choices).
What It Looks Like: Schools Proving It Works
Casco Bay High School (Portland, Maine) demonstrates how relationship-building through “Crew” advisory programs and immersive, real-world learning motivates deep student engagement in their school. Crew isn’t just homeroom; it’s where trust and belonging get built through deliberate structures that persist across students’ four years. Casco’s “learning expeditions” aren’t simply the occasional cross-curricular project you might find in traditional schools; they are Casco’s learning backbone, enabling students over time to take intellectual risks, engage in productive struggle, and develop the resilience required for deeper learning.
Sunnyside Unified School District (Tucson, Arizona) shows what district-wide coherence looks like through a relentless focus on Identity, Purpose, and Agency – their “IPA” vision for student success. At Sunnyside, students don’t just know the framework—they’ve internalized it. Students expertly distinguish between “true agency” – what Sunnyside cultivates – and the superficial “voice and choice” refrain of other, less visionary reform efforts. CTE (career and technical education) students proudly display the precision-designed and -produced prosthetic limbs they have created for amputees. Coherence in Sunnyside isn’t a diagram; it’s a deeply shared depth of understanding about the purpose and nature of the work that is lived daily by students and adults alike.
What Makes These Examples Work
Three interconnected design principles enable this learning:
Whole, Authentic, Purpose-filled Experiences. Traditional schooling fragments knowledge and skill development across curricular silos that don’t actually exist in real life. Next gen learning creates developmentally appropriate “junior versions” of real work. If your remembered learning experience involved an extracurricular activity, that’s a perfect example. In next gen learning schools, students are developing a wide range of competencies by pursuing, collaboratively or on their own, increasingly complex projects that provide a context of content. They vividly demonstrate the fallacy of tired arguments about “knowledge vs. skills” or “hard vs. soft skills.”
Personalized, Competency-Based Progression. All of these schools ask students to demonstrate mastery rather than accumulate seat time. They fluidly mix students instead of marching them through age-based grade levels. Students understand the competencies they are working to develop – individually, for each learner – along with how and why they are developing them. The schools’ shift from “I taught it” to “they learned it” fundamentally changes accountability and outcome mindsets across the entire school community. You don’t tend to hear “Will it be on the test?” from students in these schools.
Breaking Down Walls. For many students in traditional public schools, their real life lies outside their school’s walls. Inside the school, they generally can’t use the most powerful technologies humankind has created (smartphones and AI), they aren’t trusted to make important choices, and they find much of what they’re learning boring and irrelevant. In next gen learning schools, the line separating “inside” from “outside” is porous. In middle school and above, these schools integrate internships, community projects, dual-credit college course-taking, and industry partnerships into daily schedules. Students build social capital through relationships with mentors and employers while practicing competencies in authentic adult contexts. This “Wider Learning Ecosystem” provides the complexity and authenticity that classroom-only learning cannot replicate.
Creating schools like these, or transforming existing schools to reflect these learning approaches, can be daunting, complex work. And yet: Today, thousands of students are learning this way and applying their youthful energy, curiosity and wide-open innovating to problems of every grain size, from campus litter to the U.N. Global Challenges. In doing so, they are acquiring the skills they’ll need – and that we all urgently need them to develop—in order to lead societal efforts to solve these problems. Tens of millions of other students are out there, waiting and hoping for the rest of us to act.