Description

In this Salon series, we will imagine educational systems that meet the needs of learners and their communities in settings far from our current ones. Our thinking is not based on current best practices in public, private, charter, home, or lab schools; or, in exemplary informal educational programs in museums, libraries, clubs, or online -- although many useful insights are undoubtedly available there. And, we are not focused on solving today’s most urgent educational problems -- although they are among the highest priorities in today’s society, and we hope our work will benefit these efforts. Rather, we approach the challenge of designing a fundamentally new educational system from first principles of human learning and development.

The salon will consider three facets of education:

Pedagogy: how will we facilitate learning and development? 

Example: “constructionist” project-based collaborative learning

References

• Learning Through Digital Play: the Educational Power of Children Making and Sharing Digital Creations (Gray & Thomsen, 2021)

• Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity Through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play (Resnick, 2018)

Curriculum: how will we define and organize categories of learning? 

Example:  “holism” (addressing the whole child or person)

• First principles or “powerful ideas” (Papert) across four realms: physical, living, social, digital.  

• Core self and skills:  mindfulness, self-efficacy, executive function

• Core developmental paths: cognitive, social-emotional, physical

• Epistemologies / ways of knowing:  science, art, engineering, design

References

• Mindstorms (Papert, 1980)

• The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff (Gold, 2007)

• Age of Entanglement  (Oxman, 2016)

Theme: what is the central moral, ethical, or life lesson? 

Example:  Building Wisdom

• Orient toward the far future

• Learn lessons from the past

• Honor multiple perspectives

• Do social good

Sample Principles of human learning and development

• Learning is an active process of building new knowledge on existing knowledge.

• Children learn naturally by interacting with their environment: people, places, things

• Learning results from a combination of personal, interpersonal, and cultural processes

• Social learning occurs through processes such as: modeling and imitation, observation and participation 

• Learning in one situation does not necessarily transfer easily to other situations.

• Some kinds of learning for some children required direct instruction (e.g. literacy)

• Learning occurs at the level of the individual, group, institution, and community. 

• Social activity is internalized as mental activity (e.g., self-talk)

• Fairness and equity should be central to community structures and processes of cultural reproduction

Current Exemplars

Present day innovative schools

School of the Future, NYC

• Many aspects offer a unique and deeply connected student experience, including an average class size of twenty-five; the prioritizing of critical and creative thinking; strong teacher collaboration; a diverse, integrated student body; and the ability to see and know our students well as learners and individuals.

• https://www.edutopia.org/stw-assessment-school-of-the-future

School of the Future, Philadelphia

• The School of the Future is a comprehensive, technology rich educational program.  We are charged to create, communicate and deliver an innovative, technological, solutions-based model of instruction that is replicable, as well as refine best practices that can be leveraged across the entire district and in communities around the globe.

High Tech High.

• High Tech High is guided by four connected design principles—equity, personalization, authentic work, and collaborative design—that set aspirational goals and create a foundation for understanding our approach.

• https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/50443/whats-so-different-about-high-tech-high-anyway

Prospect Schools, NYC

• educational model, built on Diversity, World Class Academics and Excellent Teaching

• Prospect Charter School’s “diverse by design” model aims to address this challenge by creating truly diverse and integrated learning environments where students can gain a deep understanding of the ways in which alternative perspectives drive innovation and creativity.

Summit Public Schools 

• In Summit Learning classrooms, teachers deliver dynamic lessons to the whole class, small groups, or one-on-one. Recognizing that each child is unique, educators teach in ways that ensure each student gains knowledge and develops lifelong learning skills on the timeline and in the ways that they learn best.

Readings

Schools of the Future: Defining New Models of Education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, World Economic Forum

Children must be prepared to become both productive contributors of future economies, and responsible and active citizens in future societies. Realizing this vision requires children to be equipped with four key skill sets: 1) Global citizenship; 2) Innovation and creativity; 3) Technology; and 4)Interpersonal skills.

Eight critical characteristics in learning content and experiences have been identified to define high-quality learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution—“Education 4.0”:

• 1. Global citizenship skills: Include content that focuses on building awareness about the wider world, sustainability and playing an active role in the global community.

• 2. Innovation and creativity skills: Include content that fosters skills required for innovation, including complex problem-solving, analytical thinking, creativity and systems analysis.

• 3. Technology skills: Include content that is based on developing digital skills, including programming, digital responsibility and the use of technology.

• 4. Interpersonal skills: Include content that focuses on interpersonal emotional intelligence, including empathy, cooperation, negotiation, leadership and social awareness.

• 5. Personalized and self-paced learning: Move from a system where learning is standardized, to one based on the diverse individual needs of each learner, and flexible enough to enable each learner to progress at their own pace.

• 6. Accessible and inclusive learning: Move from a system where learning is confined to those with access to school buildings to one in which everyone has access to learning and is therefore inclusive.

• 7. Problem-based and collaborative learning: Move from process-based to project- and problem-based content delivery, requiring peer collaboration and more closely mirroring the future of work.

• 8. Lifelong and student-driven learning: Move from a system where learning and skilling decrease over one’s lifespan to one where everyone continuously improves on existing skills and acquires new ones based on their individual needs.

Teachers as Designers of Learning Environments: The Importance of Innovative Pedagogies

• Pedagogy is at the heart of teaching and learning. Preparing young people to become lifelong learners with a deep knowledge of subject matter and a broad set of social skills requires a better understanding of how pedagogy influences learning. Focusing on pedagogies shifts the perception of teachers from technicians who strive to attain the education goals set by the curriculum to experts in the art and science of teaching. Seen through this lens, innovation in teaching becomes a problem-solving process rooted in teachers’ professionalism, rather than an add-on applied by only some teachers in some schools. Teachers as Designers of Learning Environments: The Importance of Innovative Pedagogies provides a snapshot of innovative pedagogies used in classrooms around the world. It sets the stage for educators and policy makers to innovate teaching by looking at what is currently taking place in schools as potential seeds for change. At the heart of all of these approaches is a sensitivity to the natural inclinations of learners towards play, creativity, collaboration and inquiry. To illustrate how teachers use these innovative practices, the publication presents examples from 27 national and international networks of schools. It is now generally acknowledged that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. This volume goes a step further to argue that a teacher cannot help students meet new educational challenges by continuing to draw on a limited and perhaps even inherited set of pedagogies. And here lies the genuine importance of innovative pedagogies.

Learning to Leapfrog: Innovative Pedagogies to Transform Education

• The international community has been much more able to recognize the need for pedagogical change than to address what the pedagogical approaches actually are. This report lays the foundations of what the pedagogical choices are (see the six clusters of innovative pedagogies figure and their key enablers). We focus on teacher learning and the need to develop the foundations for quality teaching, as well as on widening the profile of educators as integral to pedagogical and system transformation. The complexity of the 21st century and the demanding nature of professionalism call for hybrid learning environments and for the scaffolding of coherent educational models and complementary support materials. Transformation demands scaling as deep change in cultures of collaboration. The report argues the pivotal role of the “missing middle,” or “meso,” level—of networks, chains of schools, and communities of practice—to make this transformation happen.