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.

Conversations that are shaping the future of international education

Our friends in the corporate world woke up to this idea a few years ago.  Communication, they told us, is all about a new kind of ‘conversation’ in which everyone is talking to one another in language that is open, natural, open, honest, direct, funny, and often shocking.’[i]  Hardly could they have imagined how far we would have come.  Hardly could they have imagined a world, not even ten years later, in which almost every aspect of what we do is caught up in conversations mediated by the growing authority of Social Media.

David Perkins summed it up perfectly: ‘Organizations,’ he says, ‘are made of conversations.’[ii]  Today, it seems, there is simply no doubting the truth and relevance of this statement.

So surely, at some point, we have to ask ourselves about the quality of the conversations we are having, who we are having them with and where on earth they are leading us.  We also have to think about a key aspect of any truly authentic conversation, namely, who we are listening to. 

Schools are complex organizations.  It is hardly surprising that they tend to be dominated by numerous overlapping conversations. 

So if you want to eavesdrop, here are a number of conversations that we are having right now.

Listening to our students: we are talking with students about their learning; inviting them to rate this learning against commonly agreed standards. 

Listening to our parents: we are leveraging the power of web 2.0 technology to listen-in to what people are saying about us. We are also spending a lot of time in more traditional face-to-face meetings with parents.  We want to better understand the hopes, fears, expectations and concerns of families arriving from every corner of the world. 

Listening to companies: we are preparing our students for life beyond school, recognizing that many of them will pursue careers in the world of business and enterprise.  We cannot afford simply to assume that our programmes of learning are adequate in their preparation of these students; so we are talking to companies, listening to their present challenges and future predictions. Only in this way, it seems, do we stand any chance of equipping our students with the knowledge, skills and dispositions they will need in the future. 

Listening to other schools: no school knows it all! Not surprisingly, then, by some distance, the most utilized forms of learning for school leaders are the well-established global networks of ‘schools talking to schools’.  On any given day, schools leaders from across the globe are talking to one another, gathering best practice and finding new solutions on any number of practical or pedagogical issues.  Social Media is undoubtedly making these conversations more effective and more immediate. 

So where is it all going?
How we finally engage people, listen for understanding, problem-solve and reach collaborative solutions will vary. In some cases, we will focus on the promise of Social Media.  In others, we will do better to stick to traditional face-to-face meetings.  In the end, however, it is clear that the emerging future of international schools will never depend on smart business plans or even the most promising educational manuals.  On the contrary, we will discover a future for ourselves by engaging in better, more collaborative, more thoughtful, more honest conversations with the people who really matter.   

This article was co-authored with Kevin Bartlett, ISB Director.  It is due for publication in Newsweek (Europe and Asia) on 28 September 2009.  The ISB Let's Talk Campaign will also begin on this date.  Click here for details.

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[i] Levine et al, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual.  Pearson Education, 2000.

[ii] Perkins, King Arthur’s Round Table: How Collaborative Conversations Create Smart Organizations. John Wiley, 2003.

How green is our school? Thinking through the challenge of environmental impact

What should our children be learning these days?

There’s a question out there that I keep stumbling across: Are kids learning the right ‘stuff’? There might be better ways of asking the question, but even here the modern pedagogical challenge is clear: to what extent are we truly preparing children for a world that is quite significantly different from the world in which we ourselves grew up.

Let’s start with climate change.

Ten years ago, most of us had not heard of it. Five years ago, it was a topic of conversation that only caused a few to sit up and take notice. Today ... well, it goes without saying. It is impossible to get through a day without being reminded of the detrimental effects of our actions upon the environment.

And so schools have begun to change – and there are some outstanding examples out there of what can be done to help children of all ages grow in understanding and believe that they can truly make a difference.

ISB has certainly begun to change too. We would never be so bold as to claim that we have already found the answers, but we believe that we have at least come some way in understanding the complexity of the task and mapped out a clear future direction.

The ‘greener’ side of ISB

Set in an idyllic campus, surrounded by the famous Forêt de Soignes, ISB has always been reminded of the importance of helping students understand their relationship to their environment. Children learning in the forest, initiatives by students and teachers for better recycling, working with the local Commune and Brussels Region has therefore been commonplace. ISB was even the first school in Belgium to be awarded an ‘Eco’ Star by the Brussels Institute for Management of the Environment (IBGE).

The problem was that we did not have a school-wide plan that ensured both that people (students, parents, faculty...) knew about what we were doing – and that we understand where we needed to go next.

ISB 2010 and ISBEarth

Today, ISB has a plan for the future: ISB 2010, setting out the goals and priority agendas that will drive the development of the school over the next few years. Central to the plan is an ambitious environmental agenda, commonly known as ISBEarth. Our stated aim is to be:

A school in which all individuals understand that international citizenship includes taking real responsibility for finite, shared resources.

The project itself recognises a series of interconnected questions, that bring into sharp relief the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead of us. But let’s imagine for a moment a school in which what is taught in the classroom, is modelled by the way we organise ourselves, is supported by a range of community stakeholders, is effectively communicated and even resourced by external ‘Partners’ who also share our vision. ISBEarth is all about trying to make particular dream a reality.

But how will it happen? In understanding the way ahead, we have found ourselves often turning to Michael Fullan’s recent remarks on sustainable leadership, which, he explains, absolutely requires top-down, bottom-up and ‘sideways’ support of your school’s goals and objectives.[1] In practice, this means total Board-level and leadership commitment to an ambitious environmental agenda; support from key stakeholder groups such as the school’s ‘Environmental Committee’ who have long campaigned for more environmentally-friendly practices in the classrooms and across the campus; plus the realisation that we simply will not achieve what we want to achieve without actively ‘building lateral capacity’ with other schools, organisations and networks that share our values and mission.

Vision Partners: Lateral capacity building in practice

Believe me, it’s not just about the money. What we are beginning to discover at ISB is that a school as complex and ambitious as this cannot achieve its goals without the development of partnerships that will give entry into new worlds of understanding, knowledge, insight and perspectives. A recent partnership with the Directorate General for Energy and Transport of the European Commission illustrates the point.

In 2005, the European Union launched a major campaign – Sustainable Energy Europe[2] – that was designed to raise awareness and change the landscape of energy both in terms of sustainable energy production and energy efficiency. In acknowledgement of the work that it was doing in this area, as well as its capacity to model good practice to other schools, ISB was invited by the Commission to become the first school ‘Campaign Associate’. This formal acknowledgment was, of course, welcomed by the school in that is gave increased visibility, but also had another, unexpected and immediate impact. It was as if the acknowledgement itself challenged us to go further than we had gone before... a self-fulfilling prophesy was at work!

One of the most tangible expressions of this partnership was an environmental and energy day, set in the context of the European Sustainable Energy Week 2007. Entitled Reducing our impact, the day consisted of a series of plenary sessions and hands-on activities, each designed to help students realise how they can respond to today’s global energy and environment issues and mitigate their environmental footprint.

In total, the event involved more than 400 high school students and faculty members – as well as a number of external experts on the subjects of environmental impact and sustainable development. European Commission representatives were present, as well as other key external stakeholders from Exxon Mobil, WWF, Unilever, Toyota and the Brussels Institute for the Management of the Environment. “A day like this certainly makes you sit up and think!” says Rachel Chapman, a high school student at ISB. “By measuring the size of our ecological footprint we realised it was time to begin to act. What is important now is to change what we do in the future and to believe we can truly make a difference.”

The Sustainable Energy Europe campaign is proving extremely successful. Originally foreseen to last for four years (2005-2008), organisers have announced that they intend to prolong the campaign for a second four-year term until 2012. This will mean extended reach to citizens across Europe and undoubtedly a greater emphasis upon the role of schools. After all, as Kevin Bartlett, ISB Director, explains: “The Sustainable Energy Europe Campaign is about changing habits, a notoriously difficult process. By engaging schools and other organisations as partners, the European Commission multiplies its success. The real future of sustainable energy lies with forming habits, and that is the work of schools.”

Delivering on the Promise

So where are going next? Today, there are teams of teachers across the school working on a major curriculum initiative that specifically addresses the question of what kids are learning in terms of global issues and, specifically, environmental impact. This year’s Annual Giving Programme is soliciting funds for a ‘Forest School Project’, designed to ensure – via the building of outdoor wireless networks to support the school’s 1-to-1 technology project, an outdoor classroom, observation platforms, signage, etc – that the forest is preserved and yet also a place where students can gain a deep understanding and respect for the outstanding natural beauty surrounding them them. New energy smart buildings and mobility solutions are also being planned – to ensure that, at every level and in every way, we really do practice what we preach and begin to reduce a carbon footprint that for too long has remained too large.

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[1] M. Fullan, Leadership and Sustainability: System Thinkers in Action (Corwin Press, 2005).

[2] For more details on the Sustainable Energy Europe Campaign, as well as how schools can get involved, visit: www.sustenergy.org.

This article was first published in IS Magazine (ECIS) in January 2008.

It was republished in the Annual Journal of the National Association of Field Study Officers in 2009.

Click here to view in PDF format.