Anyone who has spent time in a classroom will know that traditional teaching methods -- authorial, minimally interactive, focused on individual effort as opposed to collaborative experience -- are not the best way to learn what we need to know. Accordingly, we forget much of what we learn in school and remember most of what we derive from life experience. This makes sense; after all, life is immersive, and engaging, and consistently packed with challenges that are enormously relevant to our personal and professional development. Shouldn't school be like this?

 Here's my short list for how improve the purposefulness, meaning, and efficiency of education:

•  Minimize emphasis on the authorial role of the teacher (or instructor, or professor, or whatever status-enforcing designation you prefer). The essential task of a teacher — whether in the school system, the family, or the community — is not to impart information. A teacher does not, in fact, teach. Instead, a good teacher attempts to engage students with their own learning. In the ideal learning environment, students teach themselves. In this context, the role of the teacher is to provide support and mentorship, to offer resources and perspectives, to mediate conversations, and to contribute the odd bit of professional lore. That’s all. Students learn best through personal engagement, not through the delivery of content by an authority. An authentic teacher facilitates the ground of learning, brings the students together, then gets out of the way. In the best learning environments, the teacher is invisible.
• Maximize learner responsibility. I shift the language here to learner to emphasize that authentic educational experiences are not contingent upon submission to an expert (student) but rather on the engagement, personal and social responsibility, and commitment of the person engaged in learning. This perspective is one in which learners act individually and collaboratively to design and implement their own strategies and outcomes for the learning process. This requires participants (especially teachers) to trust the process, to focus on relationships as much as content, and to emphasize process more than product.
• Recognize that learning is often nonlinear (chaotic, to use the proper term). Learning is not a straight path but a spiral. Learners follow this spiral in unique and surprising ways. But as long as they are guided by an authentic spirit of inquiry, the path always leads  -- eventually -- home to the core of learning, which is another way of saying that learning is the path of personal development. In this sense, all fields of learning represent different facets of a single, vast field of study. Within that field, all things are connected.
• Get out of the seat.The truly colossal amount of research against the practice of sitting in chairs (one such example) has not been sufficient to shift the traditional cultures of education.We sit. It's what we do, it's what we've always done. This method -- with its inertia, and inevitable boredom, and health risks -- is one of the most destructive aspects of the modern educational system. If you want to have a healthier and better classroom, remove the tables and chairs, move about at regular intervals, and allow the body -- which, after all, is the instrument of our consciousness -- to do what it was designed to do.
• Get off the podium. When learners take responsibility for their own process, teachers must shift their emphasis away from content delivery and toward interpersonal details. Accordingly, an engaged teacher finds ways to make contributes in snippets (of no more than about ten minutes), by way of conversations individually and in small groups, through the method of engagement rather than lecture.
• Work in small groups. The classroom is a community, and learners are predisposed to find small families within that community. Assist them in doing so, and in avoiding the predictable cliques and alliances that are simple and persistent artifacts of human nature. View these as opportunities for collaborative learning rather than hurdles to overcome. Small groups are more efficient, more engaging, emotionally safer, and more fun. Use them whenever you can.
• Recognize the artificiality of outcomes imposed by external regulatory bodies. These have limited usefulness and tend to embody the myth of objectivity. Yet outcomes determined by learners -- what am I learning, how will I know when I have learned it? -- can be immensely useful. But such outcomes must grow from the inside, from within the modes of inquiry pursued by learners, and must be adaptable enough to accommodate the ever-shifting landscape of learning experiences.
• Speak the unspoken. One of the pivotal roles of an engaged teacher is to articulate what has not yet been expressed, to help learners explore the undiscovered country, to identify and draw out the awkward, difficult themes and moments essential to every learning environment. This requires delicate and dedicated skill. But learning is not only about illumination, the search for light in the darkness; learning also requires that we explore that darkness.
• Be a mentor. This is the essence of everything above: mentorship. The mentor’s task is to witness, to trust in the spirit of learning, to offer honesty and compassion and skill. And to offer it to the defiant, the truculent, the dismissive, the unready and the unsteady in equal measure. Nothing less.