Hacking Education: 10 Quick Fixes for Every School (2015)

CONCLUSION

HACK YOUR LEARNING

What’s next?

The best solutions are often simple, yet unexpected.

— JULIAN CASABLANCAS, AMERICAN MUSICIAN

BOOK NOOKS, MARIGOLDS, quiet zones, and pineapples. These are a few hacky solutions to some important school problems. We’d be the first to acknowledge that we haven’t eliminated poverty, ended world hunger, or even figured out how to stop standardized testing (we’re working on this one though). What we’ve done is admittedly very simple.

As we said in the introduction, most of these hacks build on something someone has used or is attempting to implement, perhaps even you. They use assets that in most cases are already available to teachers and administrators. They can be initiated tomorrow and be fully implemented over time by taking steps that require no special skills or additional training.

There is no magic ongoing professional development or major financial backing behind these powerful solutions. As hackers, we’ve just turned the problems around and viewed them with a different lens, from angles that most people may have overlooked. We have asked “what if” questions, never worrying that someone or something will get in the way of our ideas.

We have many more Hack Learning Series books planned, books that will help you solve other big school problems: assessment, Common Core instruction, and rapport building, to name just a few.

Still, we hope you won’t wait for us. We hope you have now become a hacker and that the 10 ideas presented here have helped you understand how to look at resources you already have and use them in a different way, so that the problems we haven’t covered here, when viewed with your new hacker mentality, will seem completely solvable.

Now go make something happen.