Harvard’s Daniel Wilson: ‘We should rethink homework. It’s hard to learn without real-life relevance’

Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Innovation’s educational research laboratory, is collaborating with Spain’s Universidad Camilo José Cela private schools on a program that seeks to describe and understand what is happening in UCJC’s nationwide network. The schools are seeking to encourage curiosity, a sense of belonging and fun through their students’ interactions with their surroundings, whether those take place at day centers for the elderly, mechanical workshops or greenhouses — and integrate these experiences into school curriculum. “It’s a collaborative project with UCJC, non-invasive. It’s not about the lab coming up with questions and then testing them in these schools,” says Daniel Wilson (Waterville, Maine; 1969), who has been the director of Project Zero since 2023, and is currently heading up the Spanish program, which they are calling Learning Outside-In.

Project Zero is operating 49 worldwide programs in total. In Wilson’s interview with EL PAÍS, he spoke in a mixture of Spanish (he learned the language during his time living in Colombia) and English on one of his school visits. He’ll be spending time at UCJC’s SEK International Schools in Madrid, Vigo and Almería throughout the three-year span of the program.

Question. How much has the pandemic changed education?

Answer. It has exacerbated many challenges. The loss of learning is one worry, of course, but the topic of [emotional] well-being is perhaps even more complex. Previously — frankly — schools paid more attention to well-being. It’s a challenge that we will probably never understand completely. I think that the pandemic’s impact will last for the next 15 to 20 years, it will take time to recover because an interruption of this magnitude is so unique.

Q. Does it only affect students?

A. It affects everyone. When schools closed, teachers, families, everyone, we all had to change. And when they re-opened, some schools and educators questioned whether we should go back to normal. Some schools in Spain changed their practices and when they shared some of those changes, I found them very interesting. And then, they invited me to start this project, which looks for ways that school support well-being. They do so through exploration, learning outside the classroom, in communities and re-connecting with society.

Teachers thought, if we can learn something in our community, why are we in the classroom?

Q. In what way?

A. When the pandemic hit, some of these schools chose to look for sites in the community where they could learn — a mechanical workshop, a museum — and they created a community-based curriculum. And then, when they were allowed to return, many teachers and families said, “Actually, getting out there was really interesting. If we can learn something in our community, we are we in the classroom?” Last fall, I was visiting a school, SEK-Santa Isabel in Madrid’s Las Letras neighborhood, which is trying to develop the empathy skills of its sixth-grade students. They’ve established a relationship with a day center and visit the senior citizens there regularly. It’s beautiful seeing how sixth-grade (approximately 12-year-old) students form friendships with the elders from their community. You see a senior citizen begin to trust a young person enough to show them their artwork, and the young person feeling proud about it in front of their friends.

Q. Will the kids have to keep memorizing things, or will experiences like the ones in this project be enough? Will still have to do homework?

A. We should be having a highly critical debate about what homework means, although of course it’s important to commit some things to memory. We should rethink homework so that it has a practical purpose. If there’s no real-life relevance, it’s difficult to learn, whether it’s spelling or the theory of relativity.

Q. To put a curriculum like the one you’re proposing into action, you need the complicity and commitment of the community.

A. Absolutely. If we continue to isolate learning from the rest of what life is, it will be disastrous. We need to reintegrate learning into life.

Pull quote: We want people to be able to visit schools where the project is being implemented.

Q. In El Elejido, in the Spanish state of Almería, this is playing out in a different way.

A. Yes. Instead of learning science in the classroom, they spend time in greenhouses. It’s not a field trip, it has educational intentions.

Q. The program seems similar to service learning projects, in which a group of students volunteer, for example, by building a community garden, and learning throughout the process.

A. In some schools, they have service learning; children, for example, help seniors to learn how to use their smart phone or YouTube… This kind of learning is not new, but it’s now changing a bit. Schools are implementing mini lesson sequences and integrating them into curriculum. They’ll return to the same site, with other questions. The environment and people will continue to change and I think it’s very interesting for them to see that process.

Q. What’s next for this project?

A. The idea is to launch free resources in certain cases, examples. And we want it to be possible to visit schools where the project is being implemented, or organize workshops. What we have to do is put the schools in contact, for them to get to know each other. Changes can’t take place without human relationships.

Q. In Spain, the use of technology in classrooms is starting to become a topic of conversation. Will that come into play for this project?

A. It’s quite typical for students to use technology in these experiences. For example, to take a photo that shows they’re in the right place. It’s a tool to share what you’ve done. For example, the other day, the kids in Vigo were using an iPad in the middle of a forest. I know it’s an ethical and cultural debate that is being held in many places, an alarm is being raised. My expert peers say that it will still be five to 10 years before we begin seeing the effects that screens have on cognitive development. There’s no standard solution, we live in a diverse world.

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