Good Learning Design: High Ceilings, Low Floors, and Wide Walls

Reflections of a high school principal trying his best to turn the tide of education reform

Vector art created by the author

Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research at the MIT Media Lab, offers a helpful metaphor to use when designing learning: build “high ceilings, low floors and wide walls”.

A colleague introduced me to this wonderful metaphor when working at the International Baccalaureate a couple of years ago. It has been playing on my mind again this week as we have been thinking about how we want to design our new programme for high school students in Grades 9 and 10.

High ceilings

A ceiling often represents the highest point we can reach. A low ceiling is restrictive, whilst a high ceiling can provide both room for growth and something to aim for.

But who decides on the height of the ceiling? What is high for one person might not be for another; this is one of the great paradoxes of the standardised mass education system. We want students to show what they have learned by taking them through a standardised curriculum and then mass testing them to produce an order of merit that can be used to determine the winners and losers. There remain a number of reasons why societies…