Schools of the Future: Learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
Schooling plays a crucial role in preparing children for the world of work, equipping them with the necessary skills and attitudes to become productive global citizens. However, with a fourth industrial revolution forcing workforces to shift towards more digital, technological based areas, it’s important that education adapts its learning models to support children in these changes to ensure they are well-equipped for the careers awaiting them.
Many of today’s students will work in new job types that have yet to exist, most of which will have a strong focus on both digital and social-emotional skills, however many education systems still rely heavily on passive forms of learning that focus on direct instruction and memorisation, rather than interactive methods that promote the critical and individual thinking that is needed in today’s more innovative economy.
The outdated systems currently in use limit students’ access to the skills necessary to drive a prosperous economy, posing risks to global productivity – according to a recent estimate which is mentioned in a report from the World Economic Forum “as much as US$11.5 trillion could be added to global GDP by 2028 if countries succeed in better preparing learners for the needs of the future economy.”
“Education 4.0” is a term coined by the World Economic Forum’s Platform for Shaping the Future of the New Economy and Society, and refers to the mobilisation of new learning standards and models to properly support students for a new world digital skills and careers, as well as ensuring that they have the tools to become conscientious global citizens.
In their report, ‘Schools of the Future’ the World Economic Forum has identified eight “critical characteristics in learning content and experiences” to define high quality learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution:
Global Citizenship Skills – Focusing on building awareness of the wider world, sustainability and how students can play an active role in the global community
Innovation and Creativity Skills – Fostering the skills required for innovation, including complex problem-solving, analytical thinking, creativity and systems analysis
Technology Skills – Content based on developing students’ digital skills, including programming, digital responsibility and the use of technology
Interpersonal Skills – Focusing on interpersonal emotional intelligence, including empathy, cooperation, negotiation, leadership and social awareness
Personalised and Self-paced Learning – Moving from a system where learning is standardised, to one that is based on the diverse individual needs of each learner, and is flexible enough to enable each learner to progress at their own pace
Accessible and Inclusive Learning – Moving from a system where learning is confined to those with access to school buildings to an inclusive one where all children have access to learning
Problem-based and Collaborative Learning – Moving from process-based to project- and problem-based content, allowing for more peer collaboration while more closely mirroring the future of work
Lifelong and Student-driven Learning – Moving from a system where learning and skills decrease through life to one in which everyone is continuously improving on existing skills and acquiring new ones based on their individual needs
Through this article, we will go a little deeper into each of these characteristics and look at the example schools and programmes that WEF have identified as key players in paving the way towards Education 4.0 being the norm in education worldwide.
Global Citizenship Skills
Income inequality has increased high-income and emerging economies over the last few decades, and with such excess seemingly out of the control of the individual citizen, there is the potential to create a general sense of unfairness and increase social polarisation on a global scale. As well as this, human activity is continuing to push the boundaries of the planet, which poses further risk to growth and equality. As such, children need to be given the skills to navigate this new world, maintain social cohesion, promote sustainability and become agents of positive change.
While content based on global citizenship does already exist, it is also possible to more seamlessly integrate these skills into the existing curriculum. For example, a focus on sustainability could be incorporated into a science and technology-based project, and global awareness can be fostered through exploring moments in history through the perspectives of different people around the world, rather than through a more myopic, localised lens. Global citizenship education could also take place outside of the classroom through activities like volunteering, community service and campaigning for change.
Technology can play an important part in allowing children to exchange information and learn more about global challenges through different avenues – online, interactive maps, for example, can help pupils to understand where they are in the world, and virtual and AR technologies can transport learners into new environments, allowing them to explore areas and take a closer look at the challenges that others face in different areas.
Global governments can promote global citizenship learning by ensuring that clear national standards exist. Recently in Italy, the Minister of Education announced that public schools will require all students to study climate change and sustainability as part of the national curriculum – the hope being that by instilling these values in children from a young age, and reinforcing them through each level of schooling, they will carry them into adulthood, and as such create more conscientious global citizens.
Skills in action:
The Green School, Bali, Indonesia
The Green School opened in 2008 and is committed to a style of education that promotes sustainability and shapes the green leaders of tomorrow.
The school’s physical space supports the students’ critical thinking, creativity and entrepreneurship, with learning taking place in a completely natural and sustainable environment, which includes wall-less classrooms and a structure entirely built out of bamboo. Even their school transport – the BioBus – is a cooking-oil-fuelled vehicle that was designed by the students, and saves over four tonnes of carbon emissions per year.
Their campus also includes an Innovation Hub, a maker’s space that houses woodworking equipment, 3D printers, and laser engravers; as well as a Project Hub, where students and pitch project ideas to be used in the classroom.
All of the children’s learning is directly connected to the idea of having real-world applications. In middle school, for example, the students worked collaboratively in their maths class to build a functional cable and bamboo bridge across the Ayung River. The project was entirely student-led, with the children working out the design, cost estimations, and construction processes with little to no outside intervention. While at the high school level, students at The Green School worked alongside students at the University of Cologne to design and build a new, sustainable solar and hydropower system for their school.
The Green School partners with many private sector companies in order to support their curriculum – for example, in 2018, they partnered with Singapore’s largest clean energy provider, Sunseap, to support the school’s student-led initiative, Operation Rain or Shine, which aims for the campus to become completely off-grid and a model of renewable energy.
The model of this school is clearly a success, as students showed lower levels of stress, greater resilience, less distraction, higher self-esteem and greater motivation to learn, while the campus itself (in their latest annual report) shows a 40% reduction in their environmental footprint, and in fact, it uses just 10% of the energy consumed by other schools.
In 2015, Koen Timmers donated his laptop to the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya in order to connect international volunteer teachers to children in the camp and offer free distance learning. This concept has since expanded to include 350 teachers across six continents, offering refugee children courses in English, Maths, and Science via Skype. The model also trains a teacher within the camp to guide weekly international cultural exchanges with other classrooms around the world.
The Innovation Lab Schools established through this. Project have developed their own curriculum that marries the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals with STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Maths) learning to help children develop skills in empathy and global citizenship. The Lab also partnered with We Care Solar, which supplies them with a solar suitcase (a folding solar panel which offers free and sustainable power) to support teaching in areas that don’t have direct access to electricity. However, to-date the Lab has lacked the infrastructure to allow more than 20 students to join a session at any one time, and so a physical school is now under construction that will allow for 200 children from the camp to join digital classes, as well as housing a training centre to help local refugees gain the skills to become teachers.
The Labs rely on a multistakeholder approach to design and implementation that has seen them partner with Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots, Microsoft, LEGO Education, the Varkey Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize, Edukans, and more to help achieve their vision. Their success has allowed for 350 global teachers from 75 countries to offer free education to children who wouldn’t otherwise have access, which increases their likelihood of being relocated to other areas of the world and offers children the opportunity to see the world beyond their camp.
Innovation and Creativity Skills
Within this Fourth Industrial Revolution, flexibility and the capacity to adapt have become the key drivers of growth and value creation, and in an ever-changing economic context, the countries that can quickly invent and adopt new ideas, products and processes with have a distinct competitive advantage in the market. However, in order for a flexible future economy like this to exist, children must learn the skills necessary to generate new ideas and turn those concepts into viable solutions and adaptable systems.
Curiosity, creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and systems analysis are all skills that enable such innovation – and skills which are set to be in high demand in the coming years. To best develop these skills, education must focus on active learning styles, rather than passive ones, allowing children to question the norms and engage with material that encourages critical thinking.
Playful learning is particularly helpful in honing children’s innovation skills, as both structured and unstructured play activities encourage children to tap into their natural curiosity, learning through trial and error, as well as exploring new solutions to the challenges that they might face. In fact, in Finland, New Zealand and Estonia, to name just a few countries, have widely adopted playful learning and consider this form of learning to be an important basis of early childhood learning.
Innovation may extend far beyond technology, but digital tools can be effective in fostering these skills. Online education and coding games can help structure experiences for students that allow them to contextualise learning, while also channelling their boundless creativity into crafting their own online worlds. Programs such as Dassault Systèmes’ SOLIDWORKS, for example, are effective in helping children to express themselves creatively through design and engineering.
It is an approach that is completely at odd with the traditional direct teaching methods that we are generally used to, where students are passive recipients of knowledge, and therefore enabling the growth of innovative and creative learning will require a shift towards more interactive methods of instruction, where the teachers take on the role of facilitators and coaches, rather than lecturers. There will also be a need for collaboration between education systems and private sector companies in order to fully understand how skills development in these areas can support real-world needs for innovation. The Real Play Coalition, a partnership between the LEGO foundation, National Geographic, Unilever, the Ingka Group and UNICEF, is a great example of an approach led by the private sector that aims to put a focus on playful learning as a way to build creativity and innovation skills in children by providing resources for playful activities which can take place in school or at home.
Skills in Action:
Founded in Toronto, in 2016, The Knowledge Society is an extracurricular three-year programme for students aged 13-18, focusing on building students’ entrepreneurial and technology skills. Sessions run from September to June, alongside the academic year, for a 10-hour total weekly commitment.
The Knowledge Society was designed to mirror the working environments of some of the world’s biggest technology companies, exposing students to the latest cutting-edge innovations, such as blockchain, robotics and artificial intelligence while also teaching them how to use these tools to create positive change in the world. The programme is partnered with companies that include Walmart, Airbnb, and TD Bank, exposing learners to the real-world challenges that those organisations currently face while also seeing them use the McKinsey & Company consulting framework in order to work through those issues and present their recommendations for change to the organisations themselves.
TKS’s three-year programme is divided as such:
Year 1: Building foundational technical and communication skills – through this period, the students explore over 40 different technologies, before finally choosing the technologies that they find to be most appealing
Year 2: Students focus on their technology of choice, expanding their technical skills within that particular area
Year 3: The students are encouraged to build their own innovative and disruptive companies, honing their communication skills to successfully convey the potential impact of their innovations
By the end of the third year of the program, all students have designed their own company, and many of these have been converted into real companies, for example G-nome, a blockchain-based application which compensates users for uploading anonymous genetic information to help diversify gene-editing lab data pools, was developed by one of the teenage TKS students and then acquired by a blockchain start-up. Another student of TKS founded a company that is now working with the Sinai Health System to develop wearable, non-invasive blood-testing devices.
And while internships are not guaranteed by the programme, and must be obtained based on students’ skills and merit, all those participating in the programme typically obtain a summer internship by the end of it, with hiring partners including Microsoft, IBM, and Deloitte.
According to the World Bank, young people account for around 60% of unemployment in Africa, as expensive models of high-quality learning limit access to skills necessary to enter the labour market. This has resulted in about 10 million young Africans struggling to find employment every year – enter Kabakoo (meaning “to wonder” in the Bamanan language) a pan-African network of education facilities with aim to solve this problem by empowering Africa’s youth with the relevant innovation skills that they will need to become employable in their localities, with a focus on small-scale manufacturing.
This programme has trained nearly 500 learners across middle school, high school, and university levels of education in skills like rapid prototyping, robotics, web design and biotech, as well as other emerging technologies. Kabakoo’s curriculum puts a focus on ensuring employability in their students as well as the immediate applicability of content to the local context. Students are allowed to freely choose the local issues that are most important to them, and then take part in courses and group work to develop their own innovative solutions to these problems. For example, some students are developing West Africa’s first citizen platform to fight against ambient air pollution, having designed and prototyped a low-cost tool which can monitor air quality.
To physically reduce the distance between students and this high-quality learning, the pilot academy was built in a low-income neighbourhood, and there are no educational prerequisites to join Kabakoo other than the ability to read and write. Additionally, in order to enable maximum access, students have the option to enter into income sharing agreements, meaning that they pay only after they have secured a job or even set up their own business.
The academy has also created its own online platform which enables students to track their progress towards the “seven habits of Kabakoo”:
Explore the world around them
Know themselves
Communicate effectively
Create
Connect
Share their work
Reflect
As part of their commitment to Kabakoo, the programme’s alumni are required to act as facilitators for a period after their graduation, encouraging all graduates to contribute to the future success of the programme, and so creating a multiplier effect within the wider community.
TECHNOLOGY SKILLS
Perhaps unsurprisingly, technology design and programming are two of the key skills that will be in high demand in the coming years, as the reliance on technology continues to have an impact on global business growth, and in order to capitalise on the full potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, businesses and world economies must help to foster the necessary skills in the workforce of the future.
Unfortunately, studies suggest that public policy frameworks have not kept pace with the level of innovation that is prevalent in most economies, and so it becomes all the more crucial that alongside the hard skills of technology design and development, children must understand the principles of digital responsibility. This kind of shift in content would help children to develop more healthy relationships with technology, understand the principles of managing digital risk and security, as well as build awareness in their duties as responsible developers and consumers of technology. Tools such as CodeAcademy and Code.org offer resources for teaching programming, and help learners to develop a fluency in the use of digital technologies by creating their own unique interactive stories, animations, games, music and art.
However, this shift toward technology will only become possible with public-private collaboration, ensuring that schools have both the infrastructure to enable such digital learning, and the job market insight into the technological skills that will be most relevant to future employment opportunities. An example of this in practice is Verizon’s Innovative Learning Programme, which works with schools across the US to provide free technology, internet access and a technology-focused curriculum to under-served communities in order to bridge the digital divides in society.
At a national level, education ministries must play a fundamental role in nurturing technology skills. The United Arab Emirates Ministry of Education has launched the Artificial Intelligence and Robots Competition Series, which sees over 3,000 young people take part in national and international robotics, programming, and technology competitions. Competitions which serve as the culminating events for over 31 educational facilities across the country working with children on their technology skills.
Skills in Action:
Founded in 2017, TEKY is the first academy in Viet Nam specialising in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) for children aged 6-18. Since their founding, TEKY has established 16 labs in five cities nationwide, and partnered with 30 schools across the country to deliver their 9-18-month technology courses. They have also developed a “coding camp” which allows students to engage in learning additional technological skills over the holiday period, and are currently developing an e-learning platform to deliver their programmes to children in the more remote provinces in the region.
While studying with the academy, students will spend around 80% of their learning time interacting with technology, and classes are small (between 3 and 8 students) delivering content through collaborative projects. Students are entirely responsible for driving the learning journey, as each student joins several of the pilot classes before they decide which technology class most appeals to them.
Collaborating with several education technology partners, including Sigong Media, MIT for Scratch, Tynker, LEGO Education, RoboRobo, and Maker Empire, TEKY are able to develop tailored programming that hones their students’ critical technology skills for the future. And in addition to these classes, the academy hosts an annual Minecraft Hack-athon, a national programming competition for over 1,000 Vietnamese students, as well as one internal technology contest every quarter.
TEKY has established their own research and development team, composed of experts and researchers in pedagogy and educational technology, who are responsible for crafting the curriculum and continuously improving the quality of their programmes. The academy also leverages a digital platform through which the teachers can share class images, student presentations, and learning materials with parents to more closely engage them with their children’s learning.
Students of the academy consistently participate in national and international STEM competitions that allow them to demonstrate their technological aptitude, with TEKY students winning five WeCode International Children’s Program medals in 2017, and silver medals in the 2019 World Robot Olympiad, a major global science and technology event.
Accelerated Work Achievement and Readiness for Employment (AWARE), Indonesia
The AWARE project aims to build a future-ready workforce by teaching them the skills necessary to succeed in the digital economy. Originally a joint initiative between the Education Development Centre (EDC) and the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, the project provided work-readiness training and opportunities to students aged 16 and older in the Philippines and Indonesia.
AWARE creates a direct link between students, schools and industry leaders to support the education of young people, through structured, work-based learning in collaboration with more than 65 private sector companies including BMW, Globe Telecom, LG Electronics, and Schneider Electric.
Leveraging the EDC’s Work Ready Now! curriculum, the project delivers preparation in work readiness through eight content modules on skills that range from interpersonal communication, to leadership, to entrepreneurship and financial fitness, as well as business innovation challenges to address community and business challenges, and projects where students design, build and grow their own businesses.
The project also offers intensive two-day bootcamps where students can apply core technical skills with local partners in the ICT industry, and opportunities for their students to apply their skills in web design and digital marketing through simulated “gig economy” jobs. Through their time with the programme, students are able to build up a digital portfolio of the websites, designs, and other digital work products they have developed in collaboration with industry partners.
The first of the AWARE programmes trained 4,347 students on Work Ready Now! and 98% of these students were placed into structured, on-the-job training. Almost half of that group has already found employment in the industry. AWARE has also trained over 200 ministry officials in Indonesia and the Philippines on their educational approach.
INTERPERSONAL SKILLS
As technology continues to automate the routine tasks traditionally performed by workers, human-centric skills are providing a distinct advantage over the machines in the workplace, with employers reporting that skills in leadership, social influence and emotional intelligence are some of the most highly demanded interpersonal skills of future workers.
Fostering these skills within children’s education can help them to develop healthy relationships with others and consider different views, which can help to complement other skills in the future. For example, if a child understands that those with disabilities and someone with a non-binary gender identity may have different needs to others, it may allow them to innovate new products, approaches and services that are much more inclusive than those currently on offer.
Studies have shown that developing these non-cognitive skills at an early age can also have a lasting positive impact on individual children in the long term, beyond employment, including higher wages, better health, and lower chances of being involved in crime. Such teaching methods, that emphasise a wider cultural awareness and diversity are one way by which this learning shift can be achieved. These approaches can be taught in courses that put a focus on social and emotional development or even be integrated into the existing curriculum. For example, a class on writing can incorporate communication skills through having children give a persuasive speech in a public setting.
There are also a number of other informally ways that these skills can be taught, such as through The CASEL Guide to Schoolwide Social Emotional Learning, which provides the tools for implementing school-wide social-emotional learning, including through interactions with student support services, discipline policies, and community partnerships.
Diversity is also an important element in schools and classrooms for helping to foster interpersonal skills in children – such diverse surroundings can enable students to interact and collaborate with others who have different perspectives, which can help them to exercise more inclusive and empathetic leadership in the future. The introduction of communication technologies can also support a more diverse environment for students, as through the use of Skype or other video conferencing platforms, teachers can have their students deliver persuasive speeches to children in other parts of the world, adding layers of complexity to their writing projects by considering the perspectives and influences of people outside their own contexts.
Businesses and governments can support the development of these interpersonal skills by working together to define the key competencies needed for the future of the working world as well as the future of citizenship. Leaders could and should collaborate in order to set new standards for what learning interpersonal skills could look like, as this is an area where there is little consensus between parties, leading to an overall sense of confusion. The Skills Builder Partnership, for example, enables school, families, and private sector leaders to come together to create a common framework for building teamwork and leadership skills through specific activities and milestones for skills mastery.
Skills in Action:
Founded in 1988, The International Education and Resource Network (iEARN) is a non-profit organisation which partners with over 30,000 schools and youth organisations in more than 140 countries, creating a global community of learners who engage in cross-cultural exchange and collaborate on service-learning projects over an online network. Today, over 2 million students worldwide take part in iEARN’s collaborative projects.
Through this project, students can connect with their peers in schools all over the world on projects that aim to create positive change in the world. It offers a selection of over 150 different projects that teachers can integrate into their existing lesson plans. Each project proposed in the programme must answer the question: “how will this project improve the quality of life on the planet?” and students should indicate how their project supports the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Their Future Citizen Project focuses on exploring the rights and duties of the individual citizen, asking students to research local laws, election processes and government systems in their countries and complete a local service project in their community, such as volunteering at voter polls, and exchange their findings with students in their project circles. Following this, students must then create a final documentary that describes the characteristics of good citizenship skills. Throughout the process, students are encouraged to engage in cross-cultural exchanges and identify commonalities between students around the globe.
Each participating iEARN country has a country coordinator, and decision-making at the international level is carried out by a Global Assembly, composed of voting members from established iEARN centres. The project’s model includes in-person professional development workshops for teachers, focusing on how best to include the iEARN programme in their existing curriculum. After these workshops, participants return to their schools with built-in support networks – on-going technical and staff development assistance from the programme’s staff, as well as an online community of colleagues worldwide.
South Tapiola High School, Finland
The Finnish school system is consistently ranked as one of the best in the world, and South Tapiola High School (ETIS), founded in 1958, is considered one of the best in the country. Serving over 500 students, it combines the Finnish national curriculum with a unique focus on collaborating through entrepreneurship, citizenship, and social awareness.
South Tapiola High School offers a curriculum which focuses on developing collaboration and interpersonal skills through real-world application, and in their Young Entrepreneurship Programme, students work in groups to design and create their own business throughout the course of a year. These groups then go on to compete in national competitions against other student entrepreneurs.
The school’s approach to learning is more perspective-based – every opportunity is taken to have students experience different points of view – for example, instead of using direct instruction to teach students about the Cuban Missile Crisis, they might instead take the perspective of a particular individual during that period and have students debate different points of view.
ETIS works alongside numerous private-sector companies, such as DELL, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft, to successful deliver its curriculum, with a focus on the integration of technology in a way which is more tailored to the students’ needs. Students then provide the company with feedback on how to improve their products.
The school has consistently placed among the top performing schools in the Finnish national assessments, and in 2019, their students outperformed the national averages in maths and chemistry by more than double. A research study on the school also showed that students from ETIS were twice as likely to get into medical school and three times more likely to join law faculties than graduates from average high schools – though this may be due to the school’s extremely high entry standards.
PERSONALISED AND SELF-PACED LEARNING
Children today are growing up in a world of abundant amounts of choice and personalised experiences due to new technologies, and while there are many debates around the ethics of children’s use of technology, it is clear to see that personalisation is a concept that is quickly becoming an expectation and a reality. In the working world, skills disruption will need organisations to become all the more agile in the way in which they deliver working and learning experiences that are better tailored to the individual needs of workers.
Although children will be entering workplaces which are more customised and adaptable than ever before, most of the education systems around the world are still firmly rooted in a standard approach to learning. Shifting their learning approaches to something more personalised and flexible will not only help schools more closely align themselves with the realities of work and the world beyond the school, but is actually proven to show better outcomes for students.
One study has shown that adopting more personalised methods, including designing individualised learning journeys, progression based on skills mastery, and flexible learning environments, has had a significant positive effect on students’ maths and reading performance over the course of two years.
There are numerous different ways in which personalised can be delivered to children, and one approach is to reduce class sizes to enable teachers to provide their students with more personalised feedback, however this is also a somewhat unrealistic method, as there are already massive gaps in the teaching workforce, so there would not be enough staff to accommodate many small classes. However, many classrooms approach this style of learning in a different way, instead opting for a small-group learning approach that sees most children engaging in independent learning or reading while the teacher rotates between smaller groups according to the specific needs of those children.
The use of technology can also accelerate this shift in learning, as individual students can learn through the use of digital courseware as the teacher works with smaller groups, and these tools can enable students to work through learning content at their own pace. This kind of technology can also support the personalisation of learning in developing economies. For example, M-Shule is a mobile learning platform that serves millions of primary school students in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa, using adaptive learning technology to analyse each student’s skill level and in turn develop them a personalised learning journey. M-Shule is SMS-based, which means it has the potential to be accesses by the more than 456 million mobile phone users on the continent.
Collaboration between public- and private-sector companies can have a tremendous impact on shifting towards personalisation in Education 4.0, as closer cooperation between education ministries and education companies can help to ensure that innovation in the sector is geared more towards instruments that support the personalisation that is sorely needed in today’s classrooms.
Skills in Action:
Pratham Hybrid Learning, India
Established in 1995, Pratham is one of the largest, non-governmental organisations in India, and is dedicated to improving the quality of education in India by supplementing the work of schools. They launched their own digital initiative, the Hybrid Learning Programme, in 2015, which is a community-driven approach to learning that serves more than 90,000 children aged 10-14 in around 1,000 villages in the country.
Pratham’s Hybrid Learning Programme operates on two basic assumptions – that it takes a village to educate a child, and that children themselves are naturally inclined to learn.
They work with each village to create a physical learning environment for children, by raising awareness of the status of education in the village and creating ownership of learning interventions amongst the community members. It also provides these spaces with a digital infrastructure and play-based learning content to be executed by volunteers in the community.
In this sense, there are no teachers in the programme, as instead it taps into the children’s natural learning curiosity, enabling entirely student group-led activities to take place with the volunteers merely acting as supervisors. Children are encouraged to form their own groups of 5 or 6, choose a project (focused in the areas of health, the arts, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship) that they would like to work on together, and present what they have learned to an audience.
Pratham’s programme leverages several different technologies to deliver learning – for example, speech-to-text technology is used to support the children’s reading practices. With the support of private-sector partners (such as Google, the Vodaphone Foundation, and Dubai Cares) Pratham has been able to develop its own unique app which includes quizzes, games, reading material, assessments and other resources for children and the adults in their lives; and to ensure accessibility across the continent, the programme has also partnered with other NGOs to help translate their resources into 11 regional languages in India. They provide families with tablets to enable them to work on different activities with their children, and these resources are made available offline in case of unstable internet connections.
An early childhood curriculum established in 2002, Anji Play focuses on learning through play, and can be applied to any learning setting. Since its inception, Anji Play has been scaled to more than 100 public schools in over 34 provinces in China, with additional trials of the curriculum run in the United States, Europe, and Africa.
The curriculum uses “true play” as the mechanism for learning, with the basic premise being that any environment has the potential to become a learning environment for children. The model suggests that children dedicate a minimum of 90 minutes a day to outdoor play using materials like ladders, buckets, and climbing cubes. However, whether the play is taking place outdoors or indoors, the key to Anji Play is that the child freely chooses the activity that they would like to focus on and then engages in a period of focused and uninterrupted discovery and play. At the end of this activity, the children are then asked to reflect on what they have learned and share what the experience was like for them.
The adult’s role in the learning journey is support, but not steer the play in any way – they must observe the students’ interactions and problem-solving, and document their observations.
The Anji Play model has gained traction as a global phenomenon, expanding the idea of play-based learning to low-income children all over the world. For example, The One City Early Play Centre led the first US trial of Anji Play, and plans to expand this to around 1,100 low-income children in the coming years.
ACCESSIBLE AND INCLUSIVE LEARNING
Despite the expansion of public education in recent years, learning remains inaccessible to many children around the world, with around 258 million children of primary and secondary school age out of school today. And while many experience physical barriers to their education, such as conflict and lack of infrastructure, the standard approach to learning may also limit access for the estimated 93-150 million children living with disabilities who are already enrolled in school.
A key driver of social mobility and wellbeing, education must now shift learning systems towards a more accessible, and therefore more inclusive, method of learning to create opportunities for everyone. Without this shift, current education styles risk further exacerbating present levels of inequality.
New styles of learning, such as visual, audial, tactile, and kinaesthetic methods can be included in the existing curriculum in order to help children to engage with materials in different ways. Weighted accessories and tactile stimulants geared more towards students with special needs can be used to create a learning environment that will work for all children in the classroom. As well as this, ensuring a diverse representation is present in learning materials cam make learning feel more accessible to children of various backgrounds.
Technology can be especially helpful to children with special needs, as applications such as text-to-speech can help visually impaired students to engage with resources, and digital courseware and communication can provide education to children who might not otherwise have physical access to it. Virtual labs, such as Labster and Praxilabs, can also allow students to access experiences that their own schools and communities may not be able to provide, by designing online lab simulation experiences to help teach science to those who don’t have the necessary facilities available to them.
Skills in Action:
Prospect Charter Schools, United States
Studies have shown that New York City’s public school system is among the most racially and economically segregated in the United States, and so Prospect Charter School’s “diverse by design” model aims to address this issue by creating a truly diverse and integrated learning environment, where students can gain a better understanding of the ways in which different perspectives can drive innovation and creativity. Today their network spans four primary and secondary schools, serving around 1,500 students.
Mirroring the city’s own diverse population, the Windsor Terrace campus’ 324 students, for example, consists of 41% white students, 34% Latino students, 11% black students, and 6% Asian students. Around half of their students are from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and 25% receive special education services. This is a level of diversity that is closely mirrored across all of the network’s school facilities, and is achieved through a randomised lottery system that does not consider a student’s previous academic performance.
As well as the students, there is also a focus on diversity in the teaching staff, with more than half of their teachers being people of colour. Classes are designed to be more inclusive and diverse, ensuring a good balance of student ethnicity, fluency in English, gender, gender identity and sexual orientation.
The high school also offers embedded honours courses to its students, a which allows for any student to choose to enter the honours courses, rather than be placed onto this track based upon their previous performance. This encourages equality in the system, by removing potential teacher bias, and making the more challenging courses seem less intimidating to students.
To ensure the success of this model, every staff member at the school regularly participates in equity and inclusion training, and the network also relies on the support of experts, researchers and NGOs to consistently evaluate, validate, codify and scale the network’s approach to integration.
Tallahassee Community College, United States
As with many higher learning institutions, Tallahassee Community College offers a “dual enrolment” programme, where college course are offered to student in primary and secondary schools. Their Centre for Innovation aims to carve new pathways to STEM careers and connect students as early as elementary school to build to this. In particular, TCC targets schools within Florida’s lowest income areas through direct instruction, career and technical education, and advising on the transition to college.
To do this, the school has partnered with local employers to design the Digital Rail Project, which offers mobile technology labs in 8-metre-long trailers that are equipped with a virtual and augmented reality system, robotics, 3D printing, and the very latest in a range of technologies. These trailers are then deployed in under-served neighbourhoods and school facilities, along with an applied science advisory who travels with the Rail full-time.
In order to ensure alignment with future skills needs, the DRP partners with the Business Industry Leadership Team (BILT), a group of select TCC deans who work in collaboration with more than 30 local employers. The BILT meets biannually to review the programme’s skills framework, and votes on the skills that ought to be prioritised across the curriculum – the group then collaborates with education technology company, Viridis Learning, to design an effective curriculum that is aligned with those skills.
Through their partnership with Viridis Learning, the DRP creates a digital Skills Passport for each student, which enables student to connect the skills that they have developed in the project to jobs that best match their skillset and therefore provide them a clearer understanding of future career opportunities in areas such as digital media, web design, programming, app development, 3D printing, rapid prototyping, and cybersecurity.
PROBLEM-BASED AND COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
Within the traditional learning models, teachers impart knowledge directly to students by demonstrating standard processes and formulas to arrive at a single, correct answer – these formulas are then memorised, and children must imitate them in order to solve other similar problems.
However, the issue with this approach is the fact that today’s innovation-driven economy depends on the creation of entirely new ideas, services, products and solutions – something for which there is no hard and fast formula. Creativity and innovation cannot be imitated, as they require individuals to try different approaches and designs to solve a problem. In order to hone these kinds of thinking skills, education systems will need to shift from a process-based to a problem-based approach to learning, which studies have shown helps students to improve their problem-solving skills by taking an opened-ended, rather than single-answer, approach.
This means that classrooms should enable students to try many different solutions to a problem and compare results, building on each other ideas rather than focusing on the identification of a single correct answer. Shifting to this style of learning will teach children to be more collaborative as they learn to expand upon and improve each other’s ideas.
While not a requirement for this approach to learning, technology can still offer valuable support to students in collaborative, problem-based learning approaches. For example, cloud-based tools can allow students to work together on the same documents from different locations, and build on each other’s work.
Skills in Action:
Peru ranked near the bottom of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2009, underperforming in key areas like reading, maths, and science skills. To help address this gap in education, Intercorp Peru Ltd, IDEO, a design and consulting company, and engineer Jorge Yzusqui partnered in 2011 to develop Innova Schools as an affordable ($130 per month) high-quality learning alternative.
Around 70% of the students’ time at Innova is focused on group learning, often in small groups, with their teacher simply serving as a facilitator. The rest of the time is dedicated to independent learning, using online learning tools like Khan Academy, Aleks, and others. Students develop their own learning journeys with teachers offering guidance where necessary, and schools offer dynamic workspaces, including mobile walls which allow students and staff to easily adapt between large and small learning groups.
Innova’s network has created a Teacher Resource Centre, an online marketplace for quality-approved lessons for each subject and grade, which enables teachers to exchange best practices and advice on the implementation of these lesson plans. The network also includes a dedicated innovation department, responsible for designing, prototyping, and executing new ideas in the four main areas of academics, space, systems, and infrastructure, ensuring the school model is in line with the latest education practices.
LIFELONG AND STUDENT-DRIVEN LEARNING
According to one study, in the coming years, everyone will need on average an extra 101 days of learning to be able to keep pace with the changing world of work, and while traditional education systems are designed to see a decrease in learning with age, a new system must be adopted through which people engage in lifelong learning to navigate future career disruptions.
To bring this vision to life, a love of learning must be instilled in children from a young age, so they are more inclined to dedicate their personal time to the development of new skills. Creating this lifelong love of learning will require a shift towards a system of learning for learning’s sake, rather than in the pursuit of reward or success in standardised testing.
For example, a school could give its students the option of showcasing what they have learned about a topic through different methods, such a giving a speech, creating an artwork, creating a film, or writing an essay. While all are different formats, each would give a teacher valuable insight into the student’s understanding of the material, whilst also giving the children more independence in their educational journey.
Digital courseware is also a good tool for encouraging learner-driven approaches to education, as it allows for students to choose what material they would like to engage in as well as giving them the flexibility in when they want to engage with the material.
Governments can help in the shift to lifelong, student-driven learning, as in Finland for example, does not have national standardised tests, instead choosing to pull samples of students to evaluate learning. This approach enables the children to focus on the joy of learning, rather than the pressure of assessments.
Skills in Action:
Skills Builder Partnership, United Kingdom
The Skills Builder Partnership is a global partnership which works with schools, teachers, employers, and other organisations to build essential skills in young people, through a network of 514 educational facilities, over 200,000 students, and more than 700 organisations.
The SBP connects learning to real-world applications by bringing together schools and employers such as JLL, BP, and Bank of America, who host students in their offices for visits, meet-the-CEO events, and workplace-relevant workshops to expand students’ knowledge.
The programme focuses on building 8 essential skills among children, including:
Listening
Presenting
Problem-solving
Creativity
Resilience
Collaboration
Leadership
Each of the skills are clearly defined and then broken down into teachable steps, milestones, and mastery indicators for different age groups, and each participant in the global partnership can use this framework to measure their own students’ progress towards the mastery of these skills.
Students who participated in the Skills Builder programmes showed 62% more progress toward the mastery of essential skills than their non-participating peers.
In conclusion, it is easy to see that there is an urgent need for change in global education systems to allow children to truly get the most from their schooling, and the Education 4.0 framework provides a solid vision for how school systems can be updated to deliver on children’s future needs. The jobs of tomorrow may not be fully realised today, but this doesn’t mean that we cannot prepare children for them by allowing them to hone a broad set of skills that will adhere to the requirements of future workplaces.
Written by Lucy Cale
Subject Matter Innovator & Consultant for: STEAM, Digital Transformation (DX), Digital Modernization, Technology, Cyber, Cybersecurity, Data Analytics, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Quantum Computing.
2moWe must seek to advance the Education Ecosystem with innovation that is possible through effectively using Digital Transformation.