Every educator knows the feeling. It’s the invisible tension that occurs every school day around 8:00 AM when diverse and hyper-connected, 21st-century minds walk into classrooms that are fundamentally still operating on a legacy playbook.
Most who work in education (especially classroom teachers) recognize this problem. But as an industry, we haven’t been able to solve it. I spent the first 15 years of my classroom teaching career living it, and the past 12 years focusing on solutions. What I’ve come to realize is that our current priorities are outdated.
The WHAT and the HOW
Today we focus almost exclusively on content – WHAT to teach. And we’ve gotten very good at it: the facts, the data, the content benchmarks and the canned curricula. There’s no doubt that the WHAT is critically important to education. But even the best content isn’t engaging our 21st century students. Why not?
I believe the answer to this question lies in “the HOW”: How we deliver this amazing content in ways that are engaging to minds that have grown up in the internet age. Let’s face it, our teaching methods are the same as they were a century ago, when information wasn’t freely available. Our current approach provides educators with an endless supply of the WHAT, but we rarely help them with the HOW of engaging students who already have the answers to every factual question right at their fingertips.
In 21st century classrooms, the HOW is as important as the WHAT, yet it’s not something that we prioritize.
Building A New “Information Rich” Educators Playbook
The traditional model of schooling was designed for a fundamentally different world—one where information was scarce, centralized, and hard to find. In that era, the classroom was the repository of knowledge, and the goal was to find, acquire, and retain facts.
But today, facts are a commodity. Our students don’t need schools to spoon feed them information; they need schools to teach them how to use that information. Students need to know how to find it, synthesize it, question it, and apply it to real-world problems.
When we limit learning to rigid, static, siloed subjects, we fail to spark the very curiosity that makes learning stick. To bridge the gap between legacy designs and our students’ 21st century minds, we don’t just need more content or better technology. We need a fundamental shift in HOW learning happens.
Introducing Total Experience Learning (TExpL)
At ConvergeEd, we believe that education should feel like a rebirth of discovery, not a struggle to compete with a smartphone. That is why we developed Total Experience Learning (TExpL).
TExpL is an instructional framework designed to help educators break down those metaphorical and physical classroom walls. It shifts the teaching paradigm from delivering content to engineering experiences by leveraging the resources readily available in today’s information-rich world. Instead of focusing on isolated facts, TExpL focuses on the “how”—equipping teachers with practical, easy to implement, methodologies, strategies, and tools to activate student curiosity through phenomena-based learning, cross-disciplinary problem solving, and authentic agency.
By focusing on the HOW, TExpL does two vital things simultaneously:
- It re-energizes educators, enabling them to deliver required curricula in an engaging and modern way, and restoring their role as the architects of true education.
- It engages students with diverse backgrounds and abilities by allowing them to approach learning from their own lens, turning them into the primary beneficiaries of an education that actually mirrors the modern, interconnected world.
Teachers know the “why” of teaching—they entered the teaching profession to inspire and engage their students. But, every day shouldn’t feel like such a battle to achieve this. So, in addition to the WHAT, it’s time for us to also focus on the HOW of truly engaging today’s 21st century students.
A Grass Roots Renaissance, Led By Teachers
This educational renaissance isn’t a distant dream—it’s a grass-roots effort happening right now in our classrooms. Recently, a veteran educator with over two decades of classroom described her own renaissance this way:
“As a veteran with over 20 years of experience in education, I was tired of the daily battle to engage my students’ 21st century minds with classrooms set up for the 19th century educational practices. TExpL offered me the opportunity to break down the classroom walls and bring a true renaissance to my teaching. I feel as if I am an integral part of the much-needed transformation to modernize our educational system, and my students are the primary beneficiaries.”
Want to learn more?
Over the next few weeks, we will be diving deeper into how this framework operates. You can learn more in the inaugural TExpL White Paper, a comprehensive, 4-page blueprint designed for administrators, policymakers, and leaders who are ready to move past legacy constraints and explore the mechanics of modern engagement.
Adelle L. Schade, Ph.D.
CEO ConvergeEd LLC, Chief Innovation Officer, Pre-College Programs at Alvernia University, Founder TExpL Institute at Alvernia University
