International education and the future of our schools

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.

Working hard at play

Children know what I am talking about here. It’s the adults who find it confusing.

Close your eyes and imagine a children’s playground. Then ask yourself a simple question: what’s going on?

If you look carefully, beyond the screams of delight and screams of pain (falling over is all part of effective play), you will almost always catch sight of curious young minds working hard at play: actively engaging all their available senses in a frantic effort to make sense of the world around them.

And, believe me, this play is serious!

So let’s look a while longer and consider the three features of any good playground: safety, clear boundaries and connection to the work-a-day world.

1. Safety: It is almost too obvious to mention, but playgrounds have to be safe spaces for the children who play in them. At the same time, they have to be challenging enough to encourage appropriate risk-taking and the desire to (literally) reach new heights. If you consider that storybooks, in a very similar way, are ‘playgrounds’, the same principle applies. The witches and monsters in all good tales are always powerful enough to transport children in their imagination towards the darker side of humanity. In the end, though, they are safe enough not to cause any real or lasting harm.

2. Clear boundaries: Boundaries are essential in all good play activity. Whether it is a game of football, an imagination-filled ‘den’, or a simple game of dressing up, there is always a line in the sand where the magic stops. In other words, play is all about the transition from ‘normal’ life to another, where these normal ‘rules’ simply no longer apply – a world in which we can fly, realize our dreams, and become a princess.

3. Connection to the work-a-day world: There is always a wardrobe or some other literal or metaphorical gateway dividing Narnia and what we tend to call ‘reality’. Necessarily, though, this is a very permeable membrane, allowing children to cross backwards and forwards, carrying with them huge existential issues of life and death, love, power and relationships, good and evil. Defeating the witch in Narnia is practice for the challenges that all of us will have to face at one time or another against far more menacing enemies.

This is just to get you thinking. But before you start assuming that this is nothing more than child’s play, think again. We grow up and are quickly educated out of playful activity (normally by the age of 12), but it doesn’t mean that play loses any of its importance for human existence. On the contrary, to be human is to understand life as a constant ‘oscillation’ between, on the one hand, periods of autonomous activity and, on the other, contact with sources of physical or symbolic renewal.

... a shifting back and forth between being dependent upon a trusted other and actively exploring the world. We all venture out like children ranging out into the park in play, but from time to time we need to come running back to Mother for renewal. We can then go running off again on our own. Sometimes we need to regress to go forward. (Bruce Reed, The Dynamics of Religion)

Here’s the point: watching Arsenal football club; going to the cinema; reading a good novel; attending a funeral; singing at the top of your voice in the rain... they are all entirely positive forms of authentic play activity that, far from being distractions from the business of living, are necessary ‘resting places’ along life’s sometimes difficult path; giving us a chance to stop, take a breath, lift our eyes, look around and get our bearings.

There is a paradox, however, in all this.

You see, in order to be truly authentic, play activity needs to be a ‘letting go’ of the work-a-day world and a giving of oneself over to carefree, pointless, creative imagination; it cannot be something we consciously ‘work’ on, as if looking for a return on our investment. Rather, we must yield to the magic, lose ourselves for a while, pre-empt the future and give lie to the inconvenient world of fact – with not a thought as to what impact it will have upon the rest of our lives.

And no one should make us feel guilty for doing so. Every great idea, invention, breakthrough began somewhere in a playground. So we had better learn how to get back there.

Realistically, though, children were always a lot better at finding their way back to Narnia than we adults. But imagine a world in which we learned from our children and discovered a more playful way of being... of working.

Infinite possibilities.

It is easy to blame others for the state we are in. But it was during the Reformation that we lost sight of homo ludens and began to think of ourselves differently. The Protestant Work Ethic was all about homo faber. It was suddenly all about what we made, built, thought... everything had to be useful; everything had to be given a price.

Surely, though, it’s time to change. Time to play more. Time to imagine the impact it would have on who we were, what we could achieve and what we will pass on to our children who come after us.

Not that they need us to pass on our wisdom. Skipping around the playground, it appears they know the secret already.

The problem with innovation

What comes into your mind when you think of innovation?

Most people, when asked this question, will give examples of cutting edge scientific breakthrough, state of the art product design or previously un-thought-of ideas. 

And they are right. Innovation is about the successful implementation of new ideas, new patterns or new ways of seeing the world.

The problem is that, these days, everyone has suddenly become ‘innovative’ and our relentless pursuit of the new has not necessarily added as much value as we first thought.

The huge cost of all this adding, using and moving-on is only now becoming clear; so much so that some companies have stopped asking ‘Can we?’ innovate to improve our products and started asking the far more difficult question: ‘Should we?’

So let’s take another approach and think about the possibility of innovation as consolidation: the relentless, disciplined focus to simply keep doing what we do, only better – more efficiently, more responsibly, more truthfully.

Perhaps you remember the series of Accenture ads that featured Tiger Woods? With the strapline ‘We know what it takes to be a Tiger’, one of these infamous ads made a simple statement:

50% relentless consistency – 50% willingness to change.

For me, it is this 50% of relentless consistency that makes Tiger the great golfer that he is today. And, again, the key is discipline.

So the question is, surely: how do we innovate in a way that enables us, not so much to do new things, but become better, more consistent, at the things we already do?

In his book The Ten Faces of Innovation, Tom Kelley seems to suggest that it is all about the person or ‘face’ that we bring to the jobs that we do. Again, it is not about doing more stuff, but being a certain kind of person; bringing a certain kind of perspective, pattern or meaning to the work that we do.

Essentially, Kelley suggests, there are 10 faces, which themselves can be divided into 3 broad categories:

The Learning Personas who constantly gather new sources of information to expand their knowledge and grow.

1. The Anthropologist observes human behaviour and develops a deep understanding of how people interact with products, services, spaces, tasks.

2. The Experimenter prototypes new ideas continuously, learning by trial and error. She loves to take calculated risks!

3. The Cross-Pollinator looks over the fences and translates what is going on in other industries and cultures to fit with the unique needs of their own enterprise.

The Organising Personas spend their time trying to understand how organisations work.

4. The Hurdler has a knack of overcoming or outsmarting roadblocks. He has huge perseverance.

5. The Collaborator helps brings people and groups together, often leading from the middle of the pack and establishing new forms of cooperation.

6. The Director gathers together a great team and sparks their creative talents.

The Building Personas, meanwhile, apply all of the above to make innovation happen.

7. The Experience Architect designs compelling experiences that go beyond mere functionality to connect at a deeper level with customers’ latent or expressed needs.

8. The Set Designer creates a stage on which innovation team members can do their best work.

9. The Caregiver delivers outstanding customer care, anticipating customer needs and look after them.

10. The Storyteller builds both internal morale and external awareness through compelling narratives.

The problem with innovation is that it has tended to become associated with the new gimmick that, in fact, we did not actually need; that added no value to our lives.

Truly innovative thinkers, on the other hand, help us find meaning in what we already do by bringing new connections, recycling olds ideas and bringing sustainable solutions to new problems, or simply telling the story in a different way.

Again, it is not so much about what we do as the ‘face’ we are that really counts.

So which face of innovation are you?