The seating arrangements are compared to airport traffic patterns. The student schedules are called playlists. And lesson plans are generated by a complicated computer algorithm for the 80 students in the class.
This could be the school of the future, according to the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, who visited Middle School 131 in Chinatown on Tuesday to promote a pilot program called School of One.
The program, which is being held in a converted library, consists mainly of students working individually or in small groups on laptop computers to complete math lessons in the form of quizzes, games and worksheets. Each student must take a quiz at the end of every day, and the results are fed into a computer program to determine whether they will move on to a new topic the next day.
Mr. Klein said the program would allow learning in a way that no traditional classroom can, because it tailors each lesson to a student's strengths and weaknesses, as well as the child's interests.
"The model we are using throughout the United States in kindergarten to 12th-grade education is fundamentally the same as it was 100 years ago," Mr. Klein said.
| Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas