At Eastside College Preparatory School in East Palo Alto, CA, where I taught computer science and…

In hindsight, I wish we’d done it anyway.

The students surely would have gained more skills than from just sitting in an English or an engineering class. What better way for a student to dive into the text than to bring the story to life? What better way for them to be empowered as makers than to design a real solution?

As the students would begin to build their devices and experience the complexity of construction, their empathy for the characters in the book would undoubtedly deepen.

This experience taught me a valuable lesson about bringing interdisciplinary lessons to high schools: Teachers and schools need to move past our need for control in order to provide students with deeper learning opportunities.

Teachers (including myself) often often say that if there weren’t a list of mandated standards to cover, we’d do amazingly innovative lessons and projects. My experience with the Lord of the Flies project forced me to ask myself: Would we? Or are we so used to the comfort of teaching standards that we would struggle to adjust to a world of complete freedom?

If we are to push education to the next level of innovation, we have shake off our inertia. We need to make learning practical, integrate subjects, and give our students space to explore their passions. Here’s why.

For most students, school is boring and impractical — regardless of the teacher.

Why would a teenager care about how to derive geometric proofs or memorizing dates from historic wars? How does that at all connect to what’s happening in his everyday life? While we do our best to present these topics in engaging ways, if we were to be honest, most of what students learn in schools never gets used once they graduate. We know this and so do students.

Yes, we want them to be intrigued by everything, but in order for that to happen, we need to show students how what they’re learning relates to their lives in real ways. If a concept isn’t practical, we should stop teaching it. And if you’re not sure how a concept is used in real life, don’t make something up; instead, find someone who uses it in their work and share that with students.

Math, for example, is incredibly practical because it helps us model the world, predict the future, and understand the past. But we need context for it. An imaginary problem about calculating speeds of trains isn’t interesting because it’s not one that most teenagers can imagine themselves needing to solve. But modeling how much money their family needs to save now to pay for college in three years or analyzing their social media data to determine the best times to post? Those are real life problems that students can relate to.

Knowledge is naturally integrated and unnaturally separated into subjects.

Often in school, we start with the concept we want to teach and plan our lessons around it. But, what if we started with the practical question we want to answer instead? A question like, “How much money does your family need to save now to pay for college in 3 years?” might seem like math on the surface, but in order to effectively answer it, you need a more systemic view of the world. You need to know psychology to better understand yourself and what colleges might best fit you. You need to know history to understand what causes have led to increases in college tuition in the past. And, you need economics to understand the time value of money.

But students rarely answer questions like this. Instead, we focus on questions like, “How do we predict future values using linear regressions?” As a result, they miss out on seeing how naturally connected all of the subjects really are and begin to believe that they can only be a “math person” or a “humanities person”.

What’s most unfortunate is that, as adults, they will be expected to integrate knowledge in their careers but we’re not preparing them to do that. Students who become engineers will need to work on teams and write design briefs. Students who become doctors will need to know ethics to make moral decisions about patients’ lives. Students who become artists will need to know how to sell their work online and manage their money. But when do we show them this reality?

Teachers don’t control learning. Students do.

Nobel laureate and artificial intelligence expert Herb Simon once said, “Learning results from what the student does and thinks — and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn.”

As much as we want to believe that our carefully planned projects will ensure that every student learns, that’s simply not true. Students learn because they choose to. To be sure, they need something to choose to engage with, which is part of where teachers come in, but it’s important that we understand the power that students carry in controlling their learning.

We try to motivate students to learn with interesting carrots and scary sticks, but why rely on extrinsic motivation? They may not have intrinsic motivation to learn fractions, but if they were running a pizza shop and earning money for new shoes, they’d learn far more than what we could imagine and would more naturally see the connections between the disciplines. How do we create more opportunities for students to control their own learning?

As teachers, we so often carefully script every moment of our time with students in order to ink out as much learning as we can, but it’s possible that students would learn even more if they were given freedom for authentic exploration and expression in their education. That’s what we were hoping for anyway with this Lord of the Flies project: We wanted the students to learn that there were no right answers so long as they supported their choices with evidence — whether they designed a communal tree house to practice 3D modeling or decided to build a watch tower to learn more about air traffic or did something else completely unexpected.