Innovation in Education: a day with Charles Leadbeater @ SCIL

SCIL at NBCS is very pro active about innovation in schools - different learning spaces, different teaching and learning models and innovation that includes technology. These photos (taken from a blog post in Playducation) are great and reinforce what they say about learning, how it should be: motivating, fun and inspiring.
Love the furniture options and the flexible classroom models:

Learning from Extremes challenged us to think about where and how learning takes place. Being involved in a project to build schools in Central Sulawesi, I was particularly taken with the ideas of learning and innovation in developing countries, three ideas stood out:
1) Where need is greatest and resources least there’s radical innovation
2) Innovation in learning is needed at the most disadvantaged places in the world - currently they are in school and not learning
3) Mobile devices have a big future in the developing world – expanding access to communication and the scope for learning.

Charles Leadbeater suggested there were three important ingredients to innovation in education:
1) Learning: He asked us to think about what is at the heart of learning: emotions, thinking, self regulation, need, desire
2) Technology: Technologies have always been a part of education - whether its the blackboard, the printing press or online technologies - they all enhance our learning experiences.
New technologies (particularly mobile) have given access to learning to more people than ever before, its immediate, its anytime/anywhere, its creating knowledge as well as consuming it. It leads to a different style of learning to which we all need to adapt.
3) Innovation: Educators should take the leap to discover new ways to engage and relate to the 2025 generation. Innovation comes from crisis, curiosity or need - we need to discover our vantage point and this will determine everything.
We were challenged to think hard about our own questions about school innovation, first determining an end point and then working to understand how we are going to achieve it. Schools need to be high systems / high empathy organisations in order to cater for today's learners.

Innovation, Leadbeater analogises, is a series of recipes and cakes – blending ingredients to create some sort of new cake.
By blending our approaches we will rely on making connections - most good innovation relies on connections, best innovators are socially connected. We should, as educators, learn from this and apply it to our learning models - both for ourselves and our students.

In the break out sessions we spent time in groups devising some sort of disruptive approach to innovating schools, here are some of the ideas that came from the groups:

1) Combine school /family and community - we are all learners and should learn from each other - use experts and the community to extend the learning beyond the classroom walls
2) Distributed architectures: learning in all sorts of places - traditional classrooms loose their relevance.
3) Collapsed timetables: focus days/weeks where students are emersed in relevant, learning that develops their curiosity, interests and focus. Teachers available as tutors, convenors of groups and one to one mentors - not classroom teachers
4) Assessment happens when the student is ready to be assessed - when they have mastered the outcomes - not necessarily at a designated time.
5) Make outside spaces learning spaces - places to play and learn, relevant to real life eg coffee/food court plaza style
6) Use school spaces in innovative ways outside of school hours - community comes to school to share the learning
7) Connect classrooms across the globe - not necessarily like with like schools and classes - but look for difference
8) Engage virtual mentors using technology to connect learners - through social networking and mentorship programs
9) Have greater movement of students through grades and stages and subject areas to match their abilities
Out of the day - the group decided that it was important to keep the enthusiasm and interest going for change, we proposed that a group be formed called the "Coalition of Innovative schools" and have teachermeets / online conversations and ongoing thinking. This is a really exciting outcome of the day and I'm looking forward to getting involved.

An amazing day - full of people who really care about future learning and the future particularly of our schools and how we can adapt to our changing students and the changing environment.

365 Project

This year I have taken on the task of documenting our school year as a visual diary using 365 Project. As I'm just about half way through, its time to reflect on the process and its value.

The Process:
The 365 Project is a simple photo blog, take an image a day, add a caption and tag and upload to the site. For some students and teachers in the school it's been an easy entry into the world of blogging and interacting online in a safe environment.
The fun part has been taking the photos. Each week I look at the school's ever increasingly busy calendar and decide what should be covered. Often two or three days have special events going on - visitors to the school, a fund raising activity, excursions, sport etc - so they are easy days, but often not the most interesting. Its the random little snapshots of the school I find the most endearing. For example a Yr 3 boy has started a 'french knitting' craze in the grade. Its building, and each day more boys are getting into it. In fact I overhead the other day one student saying to another "I'm going to take this up a notch and get into sewing". These moments are priceless and in the big picture of a school year would normally get totally lost and forgotten. Now its there for posterity.
Taking photos around the school also allows some students to shine - they are not the sporting successes, the brilliant musicians, the popular boys that always seem to get in the money shots for the school - but instead I have been also highlighting the quiet achievers, the quirky characters. This is what makes a school rich.
I've been also asking for teachers to watch out and send me shots that they think might be worth including. Here's where the buy in from teachers and students begins. If they have contributed - their willingness to join the conversation about the images is heightened and we suddenly have a social network talking and looking at the pictures.
The photos literally take a couple of seconds to upload and write a caption - not a burden and at the end of the week I send out an email letting teachers know what's on for the week so they can share it with their class.
Each month I take a screen capture of the month calendar and print it - so an accumulated set of thumbnail images is growing on a notice board. This also serves as publicity for the project.
Next term I'm going to allocate responsibility to different classes each week to take "a week in the life of the class" - where their class is showcased. Similarly I think that can also work for specialist areas such as Art, Music and Sport.

10 ways to use the project with students:
The project can be used in many ways by many members of the school community. Here's some of what I've observed from the project so far:
1) Classes look at the weekly photos and vote on their favourites - discussion, argument and stating a case and finally voting for a favourite gives the boys a chance to think and reflect on the week.
2) Teachers and students select photos to include - again this is whole class decision making in action. Classes can agree on captions to accompany an image - or a student can be set the task.
3) Boys independently log on and comment on photos and therefore events around the school.
4) Parents can see what's been going on and also be part of the community and comment also.
5) The schools we connect with in other cities can see what we are up to and when we do things together, these images can be included and they can also comment - joining our community conversation.
6) Teachers can set a reflective comment as a homework task.
7) Once the Project comes along some of the way, there are mathematics opportunities for the class to tally number of times a class or subject is featured using the tags.
8) There are also opportunities for text type writing that can launch from the photos.
9) It presents an opportunity for the students to become engaged in a web 2.0 environment, interact with others and value the power of the image and reflective thought.
10) By the end, it becomes a really nice time capsule of the year.

I would recommend the project to anyone, a class, a student or teacher with a special interest or as a simple a reflection of the year. A family even can work together and collect their favourite snapshots and share them online, the site really has many possibilities to use it in a variety of forms. I'm hoping exposure to the project will give our students and teachers some inspiration to have a go.
Visit our site at http://365project.org/cjsphotos/365 and follow us, or join the project and leave us a comment.

What is iLearning?

I have had reason to think about what ilearning (or innovative learning) is lately. It encompasses many things and involves buy-in from all parts of a school.
Ilearning is not just about the technology, although to truly innovate an educational program the technology should be a piece of the puzzle. It not just about the skills set, although when thinking about the delivery of curriculum one must be aware of the skills that need to be embedded into learning experiences. And it is definitely not about the content. The content is the driver of the learning – but the underpinning approach by teachers is what can make learning truly innovative.

We are teaching in exciting times – although this sort of phrase is turning into a cliché – it is true enough. There is lots of thinking going on about what students should really be learning about at school, the new National Curriculum has a huge content component attached to it although it does pay some attention to the skills students also need. It is also true to say that students are now more than likely learning more outside of school time that within it. We are battling with multiple sources of connection and engagement in the real world that if we don’t keep apace with the how and what of learning outside the school, we are in danger of becoming irrelevant institutions, something students ‘have’ to do rather than something they see as relevant and interesting.

21st century skills are the gateway to understanding what’s required to live and work in this century. The 4 C’s are front and centre to a modern educators thinking. Students need to be able to competently communicate in a variety of ways, collaborate with others both online and face to face, be creative in their output and think critically – understanding issues and solving problems. They also need to be reflective and socially / globally aware (my 5th C – global citizenship).

Engagement is the key – if students are engaged in their learning, more will follow. Developing passions and understandings in students, being culturally and socially aware and giving students the tools to see past what is feed to us on a daily basis by the mass media is our task as educators.

A “Bells and Cells” model to learning is not in keeping with an innovative approach to curriculum. It is artificial and counter productive. It is not how we conduct our lives in the real world. Opening learning spaces, team teaching, collaborative and anywhere/anytime approaches to curriculum should be investigated. The freedom to have learning choices, in the ways we not only find our information but also communicate it to others.

Information technology, our ability to connect, work and learn in online spaces and reach people we could not previously even know about, are exciting prospects for educators. We can blend our students learning to expand horizons, see possibilities and foster creativity and hopefully engage students to so that they not only learn effectively during their school and tertiary years, but that they become life-long learners.