This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 83 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast.

In this episode, we're going to take a close look at an innovation class,

a model for self-directed, real-world learning right inside a regular public school.

I hear it all the time. The world is changing and schools need to change.

Lots of us recognize that we should no longer be relying on the old model,

where we just dump information into our student's brains and they regurgitate it back.

The world we live in today requires more of people, problem-solving skills, creativity,

collaboration, the ability to innovate, iterate, and design solutions for problems that don't even

exist yet. The way we do school now just doesn't prepare kids the way it should.

It's a good message, a true message, but too often that message leaves us hanging.

We not along, we agree that things need to be different, but then we go back to doing more or

less what we've always done, because we aren't exactly sure how to change school.

Luckily, more people are starting to figure it out, and part of my mission here is to share

their ideas with you. In Episode 62, I interviewed the teachers at the Apollo School,

an innovative program blending history, English, and art that's run inside a public high school in

Pennsylvania. In Episode 73, we talked to Stephen Ritz, whose incredible urban gardening projects

transformed his Bronx classroom and the lives of his students. And in Episode 38, we heard about an

underused middle school library in Ohio that completely reconfigured its space into a collaborative,

flexible, technology-rich learning hub that now stays busy all the time. In this episode,

we'll look at another model for 21st century learning. A year-long elective offered in an

Indiana high school where students design and execute their own passion-driven projects.

The course is called Innovation and Open Source Learning, and the teacher's name is Don Wetrick,

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