Here is what I learned at school today.

Forty years of research by Gallup demonstrates the difference effective teachers make on student performance - not just to students' academic gains but also to their hope, engagement, and well-being.

We all know that good teachers make effective learning.  But let’s look a bit closer at the evidence here.

If you ask students in America today whether they know they will graduate from High School, find a job, or whether there is an adult who cares about their future, 50% will answer no.  They have no hope.  They no longer believe in the learning process; they are disengaged.

If you measure levels of student engagement in the learning process, 60% of students in America feel connected to the process of learning at Grade 5.  Year-on-year, however, this felt connection to the learning process drops to an average of 36% by Grade 12.  

Gallup also demonstrates the link between levels of well-being and engagement in the learning process.  79% of students who ‘smiled yesterday’ feel engaged in today’s learning.  Class size, meanwhile, had no impact of levels of student engagement.

Whichever way you look at it, the system seems to be broken.  Students have no hope because they are not engaged; and they are not engaged because they do not have a sense of well-being.

So what’s the solution?

The Gallup study also shows us that 79% of students who were able to answer positively to the statement ‘My school is committed to building the strengths of every student’ were engaged and that student achievement, amongst these students, was significantly higher.

Many entire education systems, however, are founded upon an entirely different methodology.  They propose what I once heard appropriately described as a form of ‘bulimic learning’, where facts are stored up through memorization and, on a particular day, spewed out during the course of an examination.

But let’s imagine a system where teachers are trained to spot the strengths of our children and relentlessly build upon them.  What would be the impact of a system that sought to unlock the human potential of our students, as opposed to simply setting up hoops for them to jump through?

Here’s another interesting statistic that has a ring of truth about it at least.  97% of Kindergarten kids want to be entrepreneurs when they grow up.  Yet only 17% will be studying this at University and a mere 4% will ever actually do it!  By contrast 80% of us are today doing jobs that we feel do not in any way build upon our strengths.  We work, in other words, not because it is what we were destined to be, but because it pays a wage.

Companies figured this all out some time ago. Great companies are not concerned with their weaknesses or what they cannot be best in the world at.  Their strategic focus is relentless in the pursuit of becoming better at what they are already good at. 

It is time for schools to play catch up.

I attended a student ‘graduation’, recently, at a primary school not far from where I live.  Lined up to receive their certificates, it was clear that these students had successfully jumped through the hoops of bulimic learning as had been required of them.  The Headteacher even went as far as mentioning the two students who had not been successful, who were now forced to repeat another year at primary school.

I left the ceremony disturbed by what I had seen, thinking that I had just witnessed something distasteful. Even today, months later, I find myself wondering about the two students who did not received their certificates.  Had anyone ever given them a reason to smile?  Were any of their teachers relentless in the pursuit of their personal strengths and talents?  Had anyone ever thought to ask about their sense of well-being and level of engagement in the classroom?

Just when are we going to learn?

Thanks to the team at Gallup Europe who inspired this article, following their Learn@Teatime event entitled 'Can Europe create schools that live up to the 21st century's challenges?' on 4 November 2009.

Go on! Try and imagine the school of the future     

More often than not, when we ask this question, the conversation leaps quickly towards an imaginary world of either ‘no school at all’ with  teachers replaced by technology, or thoughts of extraordinary buildings in which children are engaged in unimaginably complex tasks, far removed from anything we experienced during our own school days.  As we attempt to plot our journey towards the future, it might therefore be useful to strip our thinking back to a few simple, guiding questions.

What will change?

A great deal. We are already feeling the transformative impact of the digital revolution on the learning landscape: the sheer quantity of available information is expanding exponentially and student access to it is 24/7/365; the revolution in social media means that children can talk to each other anytime, anywhere, in ways that may make parents feel alienated and disenfranchised; the traditional physical and temporal boundaries between home and school are dissolving; teachers and students can work together at any time; students can bully each other from the safety of their own bedroom. For schools and parents alike, change is happening at a speed that is genuinely hard to manage.

In terms of curricular content also, the need to address pressing global issues and educate students in ‘21^st Century Literacies’ is fast re-shaping content and pedagogy. Those same global issues are re-shaping school design and policy. After all, if we are to practice what we preach, our schools must be models of sustainability.

The students produced by these schools graduate into a changing world of employment. They will move jobs more frequently, live in a greater range of locations. They will need to work in collaborative teams, be adept at rapid innovation in response to a highly competitive market, with powerful new economies dominating market trends.

So, much will change and it is our task to prepare today’s students for success in a world that moves more quickly, and less predictably; where work can be any time and ‘home’ can be anywhere.

What will stay the same?

The same answer: a great deal. People are people.  Change or no change, Facebook or no Facebook, we love our children and want them to grow up to be happy, successful, ethical human beings. The essential elements in making this happen will not – indeed, should not – change that much.  But what are these irreducible, timeless pedagogical elements?

It’s quite simple really: values and human relationships.

Pushed forward by the relentless winds of change, we must never lose sight of what we stand for and the value of authentic human encounter; we must never lose sight of the fact whilst technology can liberate, it can also isolate and alienate our students and blur the distinctions between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, the virtual and the real.  Despite the promise of the digital revolution, we cannot abdicate the responsibility we have – as parents and teachers – for helping children come to a deeper understanding of truth, justice and ‘what is right’ by passing on the stories that are good enough to live by.

So will ‘physical’ schools and ‘real’ teachers disappear? Not if we want students to learn. Certainly, they will have multiple access points to vast quantities of information. But information is not knowledge. In fact, information without human interaction is just information glut. It is the human connection, the opportunity for social interaction and, crucially, the power of human conversation that turns mountains of ‘stuff’ into a personal bank of enduring understanding. The test of schooling must be that new material is sufficiently ‘learned’ for the student to apply the learning appropriately in the range of new and unpredictable situations in which these students will find themselves. That will not happen in virtual learning environments, devoid of genuine, human learner-teacher relationships.

So, we will see exponential growth in information, new markets, new products, new levels of personal adaptability and mobility. We are on a fast train, fuelled by technology. But, as we change, we will come to revalue our old values, realizing that ethics, relationships, humanity, just became more important, not less.

How are international schools equipped to face this evolving reality?

Remarkably well, we would argue.  In terms of change, they are almost always independent of large bureaucracies or political movements. They are, in other words, ‘rapid-response’ schools that can adapt quickly to changing learning environments. They live the reality of ‘no borders’,  drawing students from a global catchment area - so are past masters at preparing children to move across boundaries: intellectual, cultural, physical. They are well-resourced - so can invest in the technologies that are at the leading edge of learning and life; and they have to, because they serve parent populations that are both informed and demanding.

They are, though, not just schools. They are communities. For an expatriate family, on the move every three to four years, they are the village, the social centre, the home town, the ‘third place’. As such, they are as focused on the students as people, and the parents as partners, as any local school. Indeed more so, as families tend not to have a well-established life outside school, so really do look to the school for ‘everything’. While this places extra demands on the schools, it does have the benefit of making it easy and natural to share conversations about values, managing the realities of raising ‘digital children’ while still emphasizing the constants: bullying is bullying; plagiarism is plagiarism; respect is respect; service is service; information is not knowledge, virtual or not.

International schools are ideally placed to embrace the valuable in the new, without displacing the valuable in the old. So ideally placed, in fact, that, despite the current financial storm, the industry is booming. According to one recent study, for example, the number of fee-paying international schools providing an English-medium education on 1 September 2009 had already reached 5,351 worldwide – more than double the number of schools in 2000.

‘Whichever way you look at it’, says Nick Brummitt, Managing Director of ISC Research Ltd who undertook this study, ‘the English-medium international school market is not just alive but positively thriving.  Using the lowest annual growth rate of the last several years we can therefore expect the market to again double in size by 2020, reaching a market worth of £24 billion’.

If parents are voting with their children’s feet, the consensus would seem to be that international schools are the schools of the future.

Who are international schools for?

If one obvious trend is simply ‘growth,’ another is equally conspicuous. We have seen above how an international school can be a ‘local’ school for a global family. Now we see that local families are pulling their children out of local, state-run, schools; opting for what they see as the benefits of a truly international education.  They are excited to think that their children will have the opportunity to learn in an environment rich in cultural and linguistic diversity.   For these families an ‘international school’ also means a ‘global’ school for local families.

But, it’s not just about good business.  International schools have, from the outset, been dedicated to the challenge of developing educated, ethical, empathetic individuals, capable of ‘making a difference’ in future society. Many of us who have been involved in international education over the years are also deeply committed to the ideal that education does make a difference.  In short, we believe that the experience we offer and the service we provide to both our globally-mobile and local families can literally make a better future for our children.

Certainly, international schools, with their high quality of service and their lack of state support, are expensive. However, whether they are looking for good value, or good values, international schools are increasingly the schools of choice with ‘national’ and ‘international’ parents.

So what’s the future of international education?

Even if international schools offer an intriguing combination of rapid response to the new while sustaining old values of community, ethics and service and developing students who move easily across boundaries, aren’t they just an insignificant anomaly in the world of education, where the vast majority of students attend national schools?

Perhaps not.  We believe that national ministries of education would do well to learn more about how international schools organize themselves to support diverse student bodies, how they have designed flexible, thematic conceptual curricula, how they manage their peer-driven systems of school evaluation, how they work as communities with their parents.

There is much here to be learned and shared, if only the decision-makers in national educational systems, struggling to cope with today’s realties, would take a leaf out of the books (or tablet pc’s) of international school students, and think across borders.

This article was co-authored with Kevin Bartlett, Director, International School of Brussels and Board Chair, Council of International Schools.

It was published in the Telegraph newspaper in October 2009.  Click here to visit the site.  Click here to download in PDF format.