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  • How would an innovative education project look like?

    Education projects should reflect an innovative vision we could share for the future of education.

    An education project can take place at school or outside, involving the community in a unique integrating process, creating values, fostering solidarity and individual and collective solidarity, in the classroom and in the surrounding community. If we can decide that these are our common objectives, then creativity, entrepreneurship spirit, critical thinking, young people participation and cooperation with committed adults become the main pillars of any education project.

    Genuine children participation is especially important if we want to achieve community mobilization to preserve our planet and fight climate change, protect our rights and reduce inequalities, promote sustainable habits and reduce obesity and sedentarism, encourage new mobility modes and make our roads safer.

    One of the most important role that can be taken by children is to investigate the quality of our environment and share their findings with the community. Inquiry is often more valuable than minor changes. Young people can speak louder than their parent when addressing in a critical way main issues of their community, using democratic principles to inform about the results of their work, for instance city hall representatives or other local stakeholders.

    An education project is one of the most powerful tool to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals objectives, from the perspective of awareness raising as from the one of real action. An education project has to promote a new form of dialog and communication that enables all involved citizens, especially young people to get creative and constructive ownership of all key questions for our future.

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    When designing an innovative education project, we should consider four key aspects:

    1. No education content will ever substitute children capacity to act upon their environment

    2. Enable students to undertake some type of concrete action to change their surrounding community

    3. Acknowledge children and young people capacity to lead a strategy of change in their community and society as a whole

    4. Design and support innovative education strategies to allow that students, teachers and families develop a cooperative learning procédures in which each has a unique role.

  • How innovative is an education project?

    In a recent article, the NY Times told the story of technology giants that have begun remaking the very nature of schooling on a vast scale. DreamBox Learning – spondored by Netflix –  developed a math-teaching program that use artificial intelligence to adapt math lessons to students. The math program worked a bit like the software Netflix used to customize its video recommendations. At Summit Public Schools – sponsored by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – Summit’s platform came to show students every lesson they will need to complete for the year and they may tackle lessons in any order working at their own pace.

    Innovation in education is often confusing and questions quickly arise: Are we fascinated by the power of data or by the children capacity to learn on their own? Are we impressed by the absence of teachers or by the redefinition of their role? And above all, is it really new and does it really work?

    There are no answers yet but we all acknowledge the importance of designing innovative education projects without knowing always how to do it.

    I will suggest 10 criteria that could characterize an education project.

     

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    1- Innovative learning experience

    An education project should foster student’s ability to learn how to learn and develop as a human being.

    2- Participatory Method

    An education project should recognize the unique capacity of children to engage with essential problems in their community and lead the change by bringing new solutions.

    3- Sustainable impact

    An education project must have a long-lasting effect in the school enabling the staff to take full ownership of the project, integrate it into the school’s global project and improve it constantly.

    4- Creativity 

    Educative projects should enhance students’ creativity, make them think differently, unveiling their talents and helping each of them to take the best of them.

    5 – Teacher’s role

    Projects need to be designed from the perspective of the teacher rather than using him as a mere instrument for projects that have been designed neither with him nor for him. Teachers should be directly involved in project’s monitoring and evaluation.

    6- Knowledge activation

    An education project is not so much about the quantity of knowledge it deals with but about the opportunities provided to students to activate knowledge in real-life situations.

    7- Behaviour change

    An educational project is a transformation tool enabling behavioral changes on a number of issues. Students as individuals and in groups should be empowered to investigate a problem, design solutions, take actions and evaluate them.

    8. Families’ involvement

    An education project has to be inclusive and take into account multiple learning spaces, thus strengthening family participation in the learning process. The intergenerational dimension of learning is essential to social and family cohesion.

    9. Community impact

    An education project should have a transformative, multiplying and long-lasting impact in the surrounding community involving local actors in a shared learning experience.

    10. Contribution to Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)

    Any education project should consider all SDGs as a transversal priority for the whole learning process and should directly contribute to the goals’ achievements.

     

  • “Most likely to succeed”

    Is change in education most likely to succeed? We are such in a hurry to see it happen that we are ready to do almost anything and pay whatever may be needed to change education NOW!
    Edtech entrepreneurs, policymakers, thought leaders share the same urgency –  for different reasons – to make change happen. We built over the years strong research evidence that demonstrate why and how change could happen. We got convinced that evidence was enough to engage teachers and principals in the change process. We forgot some basic questions: Why would they change, who would drive the change, what is the change about?
    Designing the change is not an easy path. I asked my friend Yishay Mor a very naive question: how do you engage teachers into change? Remember, he said, “the first step in design is empathy”. Understanding who is your target audience, what are their needs, desires, fears, constraints. Finding them “where they are” and taking them to “where they want to go”.
    Urgency makes us believe that “teachers are generically at school” and that it is more important to know “where we want them to go” than “where they want to go”.
    Unfortunately designing the change has rules that are difficult to change and that we are prompt to forget. The first one is that “designing for anyone i.e. any teacher” is equivalent to “designing for no one”.
    To make change in school most likely to succeed, we must take time to understand what are the concerns of the teachers, how do they learn, exchange, construct knowledge. We must build personas, empathy maps, force maps, transition matrices… that will best reflect what teachers are really into. We must identify their learning instruments: Do they meet? Use whatsapp groups? Facebook? Take courses? Register for MOOCs?
    To do that, we must enter the schools, listen to teachers, co create the path with them. A new report on Evidence-informed teaching concluded that “most teachers were unlikely to be convinced by research evidence on its own: they needed to have this backed up by observing impact themselves or hearing trusted colleagues discuss how it had improved their practice and outcomes for young people”.
    Teachers need informed debate from the inside. And there are multiple ways to initiate it: a documentary like “Most likely to succeed” can launch a debate as it has been proven in hundreds of schools all over the world. But debate only makes sense in a well-designed and timely framework addressing teacher’s attention, passion, information, knowledge, action, habit, identity.

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  • Community learning

    What is community learning?

    Let’s imagine people with “common needs engaging in shared discussions that will continue and grow over time, leading to complex webs of personal relationships and an increasing sense of identification with the overall community”. This is how John Hagel describes virtual community and this is how we could describe any learning community.

    Take a school or a company. Students or employees get together on a daily basis, they share discussions, develop relationships and a common identity.  They build joint ownership, trust, mutual understanding.

    I’d like now to take a sideway, sit in a park, enter a metro station or a public library, meet, listen, talk to people, start a dialogue. Another way to explore community learning.

    Learning anywhere, anytime… Dismounting learning boundaries… (Re)discovering learning spaces.

    Real and virtual worlds collide. Social networks boundaries get blurred. Real people meet in a coffee shop and later in Second Life.

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    Can it be sustained?

    Social interactions are central to learning. They can grow or disappear as quickly as they grew.

    Any learning space, a park or a classroom has to be sustainable.

    We use Hagel’s metrics to identify three main sustainability indicators any learning space’s designer should pay attention to:

    – Return on Attention (RoA) – a learner has little attention to give and many options from which to chose -;

    – Return on Information (RoI) – a learner has to share a lot of information about his aspirations and needs and requires a lot in return -;

    – Return on Skills (RoS)– a learner wants to see his/her talent develop quickly.

    A learning space is like any transactional space: exposed to harsh competition. Hopefully, this is above all a competition for happiness!

  • The learner power

    One of the conclusions of the “Education and Skills for Life Report” is in words of  Sir Michael Barber, Chief education advisor at Pearson, that “even the highest-performing countries in The Learning Curve Index are far from providing education that would ensure every single student is prepared for informed citizenship and 21st century employability.”

    This may mean that an improvement in the education systems alone will never be sufficient to respond to people’s needs and expectations. Education is increasingly happening outside schools and universities. And the power of education can’t be easily controlled.

    The “Learner power” may well be a new descriptor for the revolution that is taking place and the expression of a complex reivindication to learn the way we want. Learners claim for the right to design their own learning path, identify their own learning sources, create their own learning contents. Learning and learners can’t be confined any longer by school’s walls.

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    Learners see themselves as makers and have the capacity to transform the communities they live in. They may not need the schools we know to but innovative learning spaces where knowledge can flow freely, be used, transformed and reused by others. Learning in the street, in a park, in a public library, at home… explode the boundaries of all education systems.

    The transformation that is taking place from the inside of the systems, changing curricula, training teachers, introducing technology are therefore nothing compared to what is happening outside. Instead of strengthening the systems and improving them, it might be more efficient to prioritize the “learner power”, fostering peer learning and mentoring, acknowledging informal learning and creating learning hubs at the community level that will progressively complement then substitute our schools.

    Svenia Busson, one of her newest education thoughtleader is starting her edtech tour in Europe. Her journey takes us closer to the “learner power” at the periphery of these education systems that can’t be reinvented from the inside.

     

     

     

  • Dar tiempo al tiempo

    Education is in a hurry to change. PISA has just been released and ministers all over the work are going crazy to innovate and improve. For them, time is an issue. In other words, they need change NOW! Time has always been an issue: it takes too long to innovate, too long to change the sytem.

    Time is certainly the most crucial problem raised by teachers when they are asked about innovation in the classroom. Time is a “scarce good”. Teachers need time to prepare their lessons. They need time to teach. They need time to spend with their students, listen to them, help them. They need time to investigate new methods, new tools. They need time to train. They need time to work with their colleagues on joint projects, time to spend with the headmaster, … Time they simply don’t have.

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    Students also require time to study, time to do their homework. They need time to team up with their mates and jointly work on projects, time to think and investigate. They need time to relax and play. A time they usually don’t have. They also require time from their teacher to help them learn better, time from their parents to get guidance… time none of them usually have.

    The paradox is well known: (good) Education needs time that no one has! Time is a key challenge for education entrepreneurs. Innovation in education should enable teachers and students “buy back” the precious time they need to teach and learn better. Often innovative solutions are too complex and take too long to be implemented in school. Innovative solutions for the classroom should be time efficient, respectful of both teacher’s and student’s time constraints.

    “Dar tiempo al tiempo” (give time to time) could very well be the new edtech challenge.

  • Il faut voter Macron

    Il faut voter Macron. Cette phrase peut résonner bizarrement dans un blog rédigé presque exclusivement en anglais et consacré à l’innovation en éducation. Elle est le résultat d’une série de questions posées par ma fille Charlotte sur comment convaincre ses amis de voter Macron sans se fâcher avec eux. L’éducation est un dialogue qui dépasse le cadre de l’école pour embrasser la vie dans son ensemble et donc la politique. Peut-on penser l’innovation en éducation dans un pays fermé sur lui-même et aux autres? Non bien sûr.

    Voici ce dialogue.

     

    Papa

     “Toi qui a les bons mots et sais les mettre en ordre, aide moi à expliquer à mes amis:

    –       Pourquoi c’est une connerie de ne pas voter?

    –       Qu’est-ce qu’une dictature économique et capitaliste?

    –       Pourquoi Macron il néglige les classes sociales?

    Faut que je structure mon discours sinon je ne vais plus avoir aucun ami à Paris.”

     Charlotte

     

    Ma fille,

    Ce sont des questions bien difficiles pour un entre deux tour. Voici un essai de réponses.

    “Pourquoi c’est une connerie de ne pas voter?”

    Renvoyer dos à dos Le Pen et Macron revient à refuser les règles du jeu de l’élection présidentielle pourtant connues et acceptées par tous ceux qui sont allés voter: onze candidats au premier tour, deux passent au second tour, le candidat qui obtient la majorité des suffrages est élu. Nous avions le choix entre onze et maintenant nous avons le choix entre deux. Aucun des deux ne nous plaît, alors on ne vote pas ou on vote blanc: trop facile! Il faudrait donc ne voter que pour celui ou celle qui nous plaît et comme les résultats du premier tour ne nous ont pas plu, ne pas voter au second ou voter blanc serait la solution.

    Et bien non: Macron n’est pas Le Pen. Entre les promesses de l’une et de l’autre, il faut avoir le courage de trancher et de croire. Au-delà des engagements et des programmes, il reste des valeurs pour lesquelles il vaut encore la peine de se battre: lutter contre l’exclusion, le racisme, l’antisémitisme, défendre l’ouverture vers l’autre, garder l’espoir. Il reste des opinions qu’il faut combattre, négationnisme, haine, homophobie. Les Français regardèrent ailleurs en 1942 pendant la rafle du Vel d’hiv. On ne prenait pas position. On serrait les fesses. On votait “blanc”. Ni pour De Gaulle, ni contre Pétain ou l’inverse. Ni résistant, ni collabo. Et pendant ce temps, on déportait à tour de bras.

    Ni blanc, ni noir? Ne refaisons pas encore et toujours le même non choix. Alors votez Macron aujourd’hui pour mieux le critiquer demain! Ne pas voter vous renverrait à la triste position du bystander, celui qui regarde narquois le monde se décomposer et pleure ensuite parce qu’il n’a rien fait…

    Qu’est-ce qu’une dictature économique et capitaliste?”

    Je n’en sais rien. J’imagine que tu fais référence à la domination absolue du capital,, aux riches qui sont toujours plus riches, aux lois du marché, aux crises économiques et financières qui font toujours les mêmes victimes, à ces inégalités insupportables, à la violence faite aux femmes et aux hommes qui ne vivent pas ou plus de leur travail, à la maltraitance faite aux jeunes qui ne trouvent pas d’emploi à la fin de leurs études, à la mort des villages désertés par leurs habitants, à la fin des exploitations agricoles, à la fermeture des usines, à tous ces gens qui ne rêvent que de bien vivre de leur travail et donner un meilleur avenir à leurs enfants.

    Tu penses aussi peut-être à ces artisans qui se battent pour conserver les traditions, à ces créateurs de startups qui réinventent les transports ou l’éducation, à ces agriculteurs qui protègent la planète, à ces entrepreneurs sociaux qui cherchent à rendre la vie meilleure pour les plus pauvres, à ces travailleurs sociaux qui combattent la précarité.

    La France n’est pas (encore) une dictature. La France n’a jamais été une dictature économique et capitaliste. La France est un Etat de droit qui n’a pas réussi à donner à tous les mêmes chances de réussir. La France est un grand pays qui doit se réinventer.

    Macron a travaillé chez Rothschild? C’est donc un banquier juif! Vieille rengaine antisémite qui a la vie longue en France. Macron a bien travaillé en classe? C’est donc un nanti! Macron est bien habillé? Il méprise les ouvriers! Un peu court quand même! Luttons contre les préjugés, contre TOUS les préjugés.

    Le Pen propose une dictature “populaire” refermant la France sur un passé que tes amis n’ont pas connu, parlant du franc comme d’une relique alors que vous n’avez connu que l’euro, parlant de l’Europe comme du mal absolu alors que vous avez grandi entouré d’européens.

    Que leur faut-il à tes amis? Vivre dans une vraie dictature pour se rendre compte de ce que résister veut dire? Dis leur de se battre avec les armes de la démocratie pour un monde meilleur. Et cela commence par voter pour Macron même s’il ne leur plaît pas, surtout s’il ne leur plaît pas, car se limiter à voter contre Le Pen ne veut rien dire.

    “Pourquoi Macron il néglige les classes sociales?”

    Je ne sais pas s’il les néglige. Les classes sociales existent. Les plus pauvres souffrent. Les plus riches s’enrichissent toujours plus. Est-ce une fatalité? Non!

    L’avenir appartient à la jeunesse. L’avenir appartient à la fraternité. Macron n’en a pas l’exclusivité. À quoi pensez vous au moment d’élire un président? Pensez vous élire un sauveteur, un magicien? Soyez réalistes et faîtes de vos rêves des réalités. C’est à vous d’inventer les clés d’un nouveau “vivre ensemble”.

    Macron ne fera peut-être rien pour vos rêves mais il ne les empêchera pas et c’est énorme. Pour avoir le droit de vous opposer à Macron, votez pour lui! C’est ce paradoxe qu’il faut expliquer encore et encore.

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    Alors pesez bien vos bulletins de vote à l’aune de vos valeurs, de vos rêves, de votre avenir. Il ne peut y avoir de doute. Votez d’abord pour votre avenir. Il passe aujourd’hui par Macron. C’est le jeu de la démocratie. Et on ne peut que l’aimer.

    Voilà ma fille quelques réflexions d’un “vieux” démocrate… qui votera Macron.

  • This is the end?

    The conference “Shaping the Future 4” organized by our colleagues from Mindcet in Tel Aviv provided stimulating thoughts on the future of education.

    Could we envisage the future of education without teachers? Rose Luckin raised the conflictive issue of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education. Will AI eventually substitute teachers? Is this the end of education?

    Her latest publication “Intelligence Unleashed” cowritten with Wayne Holmes identifies instead several scenarios under which teachers’ expertise will be strengthened thanks to AI. In a nutshell, AI should help “developing teacher expertise, addressing teacher retention, and providing respite where teacher shortages are acute”. Even more importantly, AI should help understand the learners better.

    Rose and Wayne address a crucial topic: teachers’ time. Time shortage comes always as the first item to explain teachers’ resistance to change. AI could help overcome time shortage by for instance reducing time needed for grading or time needed to identify the adequate learning resources. More time should enable teachers to teach better, pay more individual attention to learners. AI could help freeing up teachers from daily bureaucratic constraints to help them concentrate on teaching. When writing this piece, I realize how absurd it may seem to think of teachers doing anything else than teaching… But this is the reality!

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    Freeing up the teachers is only part of the debate on innovation in education. Turning education into a continuous conversation is even more challenging.

    David Weinberger insists on the growing role of knowledge networks. In a recent MOOC he reminded us of the importance of conversation as an innovative learning model. The network model enables learner to engage fruitfully in network conversation, instead for instance of learning together as part of a collaborative model. As networks question the meaning of knowledge, learners are challenged to acquire new skills of problem solving and critical thinking.

    Learning will therefore experiment a drastic change departing the private sphere towards the public one and resulting in a gigantic network where we are all learners and teachers.

    Opening up the classroom will mean for all teachers and students joining public conversations that will ultimately make everyone smarter.

    Is this the end of education or a new beginning?

  • School is boring!

    School is boring!

    How often have we heard this sentence!  Googling the expression will give more than 60 million results.

    Most education “innovators” start with the same statement “school is boring” and end up with the same conclusion ” let’s change it”.

    But our innovators arrive late. Let’s look back in history for a moment.

    For centuries, brillant educators have introduced innovative methods and practices based on a simple conviction: school shouldn’t be boring!

    Saint Augustine in the fourth century defined education as “a process of posing problems and seeking answers through conversation”.

    The Saint Augustine Taken to School by Saint Monica. by Niccolò di Pietro 1413-15
    The Saint Augustine Taken to School by Saint Monica. by Niccolò di Pietro 1413-15

    After him, Swedish educator Ellen Key, German education reformer Kurt Hahn, Italian paediatrician Maria Montessori, Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, French educator, Célestin Freinet, British visionary A.S. Neil, Catalan anarchist Francisco Ferrer y Guardia, American psychologist John Dewey, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire all envisaged education as a dialogue, flowing from learner to teachers and back.

    Their ideas and methods are however still considered as marginal and categorized as  “alternative” as no other words seem to fit them.

    We are prompt nowadays to celebrate any innovation in education, advocate for education entrepreneurship but we forget the truly disruptive nature of innovation, i.e. restore freedom to learn and freedom to teach as a central component of any education system.

    Students and teachers require after all two basic “rights” to do their jobs right: engage into continuous dialogue and be free to learn and teach.

    All education innovators should help strengthening these basic rights.

     

  • Good teaching is truly magical

    Good teaching is truly magical

    Magic in the classroom happens thanks to the teachers, the true magicians! Edtech entrepreneurs have often a hard time understanding that it is not enough to tell how boring learning is to provoke changes. Changes must be built out of consensus between all parties involved. One intangible feature of the learning process remains the classroom. Design may be more or less creative. Accessibility and connectivity may vary. But the classroom remains the center of attraction for students, teachers and parents.

    What can we do to make the classroom a better place to teach and learn? How can we help the teacher pay attention to a (too) large group of students, maintain the group cohesion and at the same time make his or her teaching as personalized as possible to take care of the classroom diversity? How can we help the teachers do better his or her work (and not take his or her place!).

    Some innovative tools have been designed to do just this: help teachers teach better. It sounds too simple to be true.

    Take the example of Unio by Harness, an innovative teaching tool proposed by a startup in which P.A.U. Education has invested. Unio by Harness came out of a design thinking process with teachers. Some would say: what a strange idea to involve teachers in the innovation process!

    Teachers require key supporting features to gain time, raise attention and concentrate on the most needed students. They want to be able to better plan their class, communicate the main contents in advance to the students, structure their teaching around activities they have designed themselves, control how their students learn but without imposing the learning pace, let group work develop and encourage peer learning.

    This is exactly where technology can help and this is what Unio by Harness does. But technology is useless if not piloted by the teacher from the very beginning. The teacher has to decide which technology he or she wants to use, in a given context and for a given purpose.

    Teachers that have chosen Unio by Harness are just pretending to do their job better. This is truly magical!