Ask most educators what the basic unit of learning is at a high school, and they’ll most likely say a course, subject, or period. Forty-five minutes with one teacher, one group of students, one set of standards to cover. We’ve organized schools around this container for so long that it no longer feels like a design choice. It just feels like school.

But what if we started from what we actually want for learners, to know who they’re becoming, how they’re contributing, and what they’re capable of, and then asked what structures would need to exist to make that possible?

That’s the complex challenge our team of educators, technologists, researchers, and young people wrestled with at the LiftOff Design Sprint.

Over two and a half days, 10 cross-sector teams worked to prototype future-ready learning models for adolescents and young adults. My team took on what turned out to be one of the most generative design challenges I’ve worked through in a long time, building a learning experience without relying on courses as the default organizing structure.

Assets from the 10 learning models designed during the LiftOff Design Sprint. View each model here.

The Tension You Don’t See Until You Try to Build

Removing courses from the equation sounds straightforward until you’re actually doing it. The moment you do, a set of real design tensions surfaces. If you want learners to pursue topics and projects that genuinely interest them, you need flexibility. 

But if you believe, as we do, that learning is fundamentally social and community-based, you also need shared time and structure. Those two things pull against each other, and no amount of visioning work resolves that tension. You have to design your way through it.

What helped our team move forward was a simple reframe. Rather than asking what school should look like, we asked how meaningful work actually gets organized in the world:

• Project teams with shared goals.
• Focused skill-building in direct service of those projects.
• Mentorship.
• Structured reflection.
• Community connection. 

None of these are foreign concepts; they just aren’t how we typically organize school. When we used them as our building blocks instead of subjects and periods, something opened up. The model that emerged from our team replaced traditional courses with community building, maker time, direct instruction tied to real projects, structured reflection, and regular one-on-one time with a trusted adult—a rhythm that looks far more like a productive workplace than a typical high school day.

What struck me most wasn’t the model itself, but what the design process demanded of us. We had to be explicit about tradeoffs in a way that visioning conversations often don’t require. Every choice surfaced something about what we actually believed learning should be.

Where Technology Enters the Picture

One of the things that became clear during the sprint is that learner-centered design consistently generates use cases that school-centered technological solutions are not built to address.

Take scheduling. A truly flexible, modular schedule, one that allows learners to pursue individual interests while still participating in shared community experiences, requires tools that simply don’t exist on the market (yet). No software vendor is going to build that tool independently, because they’d first need to understand the design problem it’s meant to solve, and that understanding only comes from going through the design process itself.

This is where the rapid advancement of AI and emerging technologies becomes genuinely exciting rather than merely disruptive. When I was a superintendent, I wanted to build a personal learning platform for our students, and the scale of that undertaking was enough to give anyone pause. The infrastructure required, the technical capacity needed, that kind of tool would have taken years to develop and even longer to sustain a decade ago. 

Today, AI advancements and options like vibe coding mean that the same kind of platform could be prototyped and tested in a fraction of that time. Technologists embedded in the design process, as they were at LiftOff, can move from concept to working prototype at a pace that meaningfully changes what’s possible for districts willing to engage in this work.

The design work has to come first, though. Without it, we end up with technology solutions in search of problems that haven’t been properly defined yet, which is how schools have so often ended up with software tools that replicate the very structures we’re trying to move beyond.

Read More: Building a Public Education System That Learns, Adapts, and Endures

What This Means for School and District Leaders

The LiftOff models are intentionally unfinished. They were designed as prototypes, starting points for communities willing to ask the hard design questions and test their way toward answers. That spirit reflects something we believe deeply at Learner-Centered Collaborative. You don’t have to redesign everything at once. You start by creating a container where new ideas can be tried, learned from, and eventually scaled.

Read More: Connecting Research, Development, and Evaluation in District Systems

The real takeaway from LiftOff isn’t any single model. It’s what becomes possible when educators, young people, technologists, and community members work through genuine design challenges together, with real constraints, real tradeoffs, and real outcomes in mind. That kind of process surfaces new insights that our learners and communities need right now.

If you’re curious about what learning in your community could look like if you designed it with intention, we’d love to help you start that conversation. Explore the LiftOff models, and reach out to collaborate when you’re ready to build.