I'm teaching a "new" type of program call the Futures Forward Project. It joins three grade ten subjects for the morning with one teacher. The idea is that if students have one teacher all morning, with three subjects, their education can become more flexible and therefore more student-directed as they individually decide every day what kinds of projects to do and when.
The idea has been around for centuries. It started with Rousseau, then Montessori, and more recently with Hall-Dennis, Outcomes Based, and Mastery Learning projects. All of these recent additions to education seem to come and go over and over under different names. It's curious to me how we have this one main way of teaching that involves socratic teaching and some rote memorization of facts followed by testing and the practical application of skills within a typical classroom setting, and then every few years or so, we're told to throw it all out and do something radically different. Then we revert back to the old standard again.
