Entrepreneurship in education is one of those phrases that often trigger assumptions, divides, and misunderstandings. Not every young person wants to be an entrepreneur, and nor should they. The path of entrepreneurship is often romanticized, and it certainly not for everyone. Some would like to be entrepreneurs, but there's no single thing they feel passionate enough about to make the leap.
Others feel that working for another company is the best way to achieve their own objectives for their own vision of what happiness and stability look like. Working in a 9 to 5 role is sometimes unfairly mischaracterized as "uncreative" or "lacking courage" compared to the entrepreneurial path. Forget the noise. It is your life, and there are many ways to live it.
The future is not going to be so binary in any case, as the children of the future will likely experience a combination of role types, moving between freelance roles, or attaching themselves to projects via a liquid working arrangement, retooling, and retraining, and generally shifting not only between roles and companies but industries and careers.
And that's why everyone should learn how to be an entrepreneur. And no, we're not contradicting ourselves here. Entrepreneurship's narrowest definition is starting a company yourself to bring an idea to life. Great, but we are talking about the broader concepts of what being an entrepreneur requires. We're not talking about education for entrepreneurship, but education through entrepreneurship. Let us explain what we mean.
Embracing uncertainty, learning to be adaptable and flexible, understanding the process of innovation, fostering challenge without equating it to judgment on your own abilities. Cognitive flexibility, creativity to drive value creation, self-reflection, and the building in of failure as a learning opportunity. These are all things that educators are now accepting as essential skills and abilities to face a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
The interesting thing is that entrepreneurship has been associated with these things for well over 30 years, and is already a well-developed and well-researched field in education. While thought leaders scramble to design new paradigms, and name processes or approaches to building these exact skills, we are often missing an opportunity.
Those who are teaching innovation, design thinking, and entrepreneurship in schools and universities quite commonly are not involved in bringing that learning to the transversal application; that is, across other subjects and fields.
Teachers who tend to separate the idea of entrepreneurship from what they think of as education, are often doing so because of the stigma of commercialization. The idea that entrepreneurship is about business and wealth, and this should be kept out of the heart of what education is.
This is not only misunderstanding what value creation can really be (it is certainly not only about money), but generally missing a huge opportunity.
The experts in entrepreneurial education already know how to do so much of what progressive educators are trying to build, but very often have had experiences of education that have been lacking in the very qualities they so needed to follow their own paths. We need to look at ways to bridge this gap.
Educating for entrepreneurship is something best left until later years, but education through entrepreneurship can begin in elementary school. Discovery through iteration is a fancy way of saying "play", and it is what kids do best. If only we adults could learn more from them.
We all know that experiential learning or learning by doing is one of the best ways to really understand something, and entrepreneurial education takes that one small step forward. Learning by creating value is a way of constantly keeping the social, cultural (and yes, even financial) benefits of ideas in mind. At its most simple level, value creation is meaningfulness or causing happiness in others, which is a much nicer objective for our projects than a grade on a piece of paper. There is a reason to start the process of entrepreneurial thinking much earlier on, and that reason is in the brain.
Around the age of 9 or 10, our brains change. Whereas earlier in life we could try to learn or do something new and not get it immediately, though we would likely get frustrated, we wouldn't necessarily give up, and it's less likely we would form any value judgments about ourselves as a result.
But then we develop self-consciousness, and we more keenly feel people watching and evaluating us. When we try something with a lot of effort and can't do it right away, we are more likely at that age to start to equate it with a lack of innate ability. "I'm just not good at that", we tell ourselves.
This is a critical time, and certainly not the best moment to be grading young children on results. If we are to really be ready to self-regulate as healthy adults in a complex world, we need to embrace challenging situations as the best places to learn. We need to understand that it takes time to master something, and "failure" is inevitable. It doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but that we should adjust our strategy and try again. That is at the heart of entrepreneurial education.
Embracing challenges as you try to solve a problem with creativity means learning is nonlinear. The constant process of reflection before progress will serve young people so well in later life, allowing their minds to remain cognitively flexible through top-down actions (progress journaling, mindfulness, creative reflection) and bottom-up environments (richly diverse project-based activities that are self-directed when the learner chooses the problem they want to solve). By the time our prefrontal cortex comes to maturity in our mid 20's and we have a sense of what makes you "you", the richness of your earlier experiences will have a profound impact. This is the age when most are setting off to start their careers, and having spent your formative years identifying and solving problems, learning from the joy when you achieve something through adversity, or just knowing yourself through trial and reflection; could you be better prepared for the uncertainties of the world? We don't think so.
Persuading others that your idea is a good one, and learning to accept when others tell you that they have found a flaw in your plan. Pivoting quickly to embrace a better idea, and developing a sense of who you work best with to achieve your goals. Pursuing self-chosen projects rather than inauthentic textbook-based one-size-fits-all versions, so that the joy of success is long-lasting and forms an emotional memory you won't forget.
A huge range of "subjects" can be drawn on to address a single project. To create a new menu for the school cafe means maths to calculate costs, biology for nutrition, persuasiveness to make it happen, design skills to make the menu look appealing, and on it goes. Sounds like Project-Based Learning? It is, but add in the value creation aspect as an integral part, and some design thinking and interaction with experts in the "outside world" and you have an entrepreneurial approach.
The OECD found that, though much of the research is still in its infancy about embedding entrepreneurial education in elementary and high schools, it was still "extremely promising".
We seem to be trying to equip the children of the future with the very skills and competencies that entrepreneurship education is also focusing on. We have well-evidenced processes and approaches in entrepreneurial education, but yet still need to build evidence about the impact of a transversal, learner-directed approach to education, before the traditional modes will let go of the reins.
The sooner we build on what we already know and can prove, the better it will be for everyone. Embedding entrepreneurial approaches in education makes a lot of sense, and what our children of the future do with those skills and insights, is entirely up to them.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and change in education is necessary. Do a quick Google search for "K-12 Innovation" and you will find a huge array of initiatives, collaborations, technologies, and methodologies. But where is it all headed?
Change takes time, and revolutions that seem to occur in a single year have been bubbling and fomenting for a generation or more beneath the surface. So what is bubbling in education?
We have seen a generational shift away from the behaviorist approach to education, where facts are memorized and repeated on demand. The evidence that supports better ways of learning is indisputable, and even the most traditional systems have progressed in some way towards a more learner-centered model.
We have seen industry demand an increased focus on skills, adaptability, and critical thinking with a practical application to real-world challenges, rather than the ability to express more abstract theoretical knowledge. The social shift towards a more circular, environmentally aware, and values-based approach to business and commerce has driven changes in education that reflect it. From social leadership programs for high schools to change makers groups encouraging activism and action from the heart of education. Thought Leaders are leading, and innovators are innovating, but all within the same system. The question is: to what extent can we truly expect innovation to create transformative impact within the parameters of the same old system? While inspiring ideas from above are great, the people at the "top" are always changing, so ideas become policies, policies becomes politics, and around we go. Do these ideas really impulse bottom-up innovation to change things on a grander scale?
This needs to be said first because it really is the case. Teachers, who are the heart of the system and the core of its functions, are tired. New ideas and initiatives come by every single year, when the director has attended a conference or learning festival, or a colleague has embarked on a learning visit to another school, or when the government changes and hands down a slew of new curricular approaches and best practice guidelines.
All of this happens with the very best of intentions, but it must be exhausting. When we talk of innovation in K-12 education, we must be mindful of the health and wellbeing of those who will bring it to life.
To streamline what we might call "progress", innovation needs to be guided by purpose. Let's assume that the reason to innovate in education is to improve the learning experience, outcomes, and impact. Then let's think about all of the innovations that we have seen, and ask ourselves which of them supported that purpose more.
From theories in psychology, advances in applied neuroscience, the rise of AI and Augmented Reality to pedagogical changes in competence-based education, STEAM, and a whole host of others; some have made more impact than others, some resisted or written off as "the latest trend", and many have simply not been integrated or supported well and come in for undeserved criticism.
In our world of perpetual movement, the productivity paradox theory makes clear that all innovation is not progress, all progress is not growth, and all growth is not sustainable. Keeping purpose at the heart of innovation will join up the thinking around its implementation. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.
So let's think this through. If the thought leaders are evolving their arguments for change, the politicians are changing every few years and taking their ideas with them, where is the solid platform on which to build?
It was always the learner. The needs of a human being have remained present throughout it all. To belong somewhere, to find purpose and passion, to play and discover, to know yourself, and belong to a community.
Any attempt to innovate in education without including learners in the equation is not guided by purpose. We know that the best ideas come when we step back, or step outside and let go of our patterned ways of thinking. But yet, we find it difficult to let go of our learning structures; to allow learners to iterate and fail, play and reflect. To observe and embrace what our learners gravitate towards, and what they shun; what fires their neural networks and what puts them to sleep.
If we truly put learners at the center, we remove the contradictions that are barriers to innovation. Tablets are provided with great fanfare, but cellphones are banned. Any fact can be found in Google in seconds, but learners are required to memorize them. Activities to support learner diversity are used to prepare them for a standardized test. Innovation for impact means not tinkering at the edges, but following the guiding purpose all the way to its logical conclusion and outcome.
Is there anything as debated and discussed in education as technology right now? There is almost a scramble to adapt as apps and digital tools appear at a dizzying pace, and words like "gamification" can bring late adopters out in a cold sweat.
Technology is not a fad. It is the future, and educators should be more supported to vet, analyze, select and implement technology in ways that bring the most benefit for learners. The OECD reported in the area of Ed-Tech that "Major changes in informal teacher professional development should be highlighted as an encouraging trend" but that "the results should lead us to think more carefully about policy implementation".
This is exactly where we are. The gap is still wide between new technology and conscious integration of the way it is applied within purposeful learning frameworks. There is a risk that technology implemented in a top-down way will simply support and augment the approaches of a traditional learning environment, such as when some schools simply started delivering traditional lessons in the same way but on Zoom instead of in front of a physical class.
The comfort level of technology among educators is hugely varied, and research has found that "To effectively meet the learning styles of Generation Z and those students following, educators need to be able to adapt to quickly changing technology, be comfortable with students who multitask and be open to technology-rich teaching and learning environments. However, most educators do not have the adequate knowledge, skills, and confidence to effectively or efficiently use the available technologies to support technology integration into the learning environment".
If we are serious about innovation-driven by technology in the classroom, then not only do we need to make sure that it is learners themselves showing us how it can support them, but also that our educators are given all the support that they need to make it happen.
The Deeper Learning Dozen initiative tells us that innovation in education should not be "scalable" but "spreadable". Be wary of the word "scalability" when applied to education. This is a word of the industrial revolution, where replication is applied from a top-down perspective, exponentially maximizing efficiency; something that works when you are producing a uniform end product in uniform circumstances.
Our learners are not uniform, and neither are the environments they inhabit. Positive innovations need to be adapted to culture, context, resources, and a host of other things that meet the learner where they are. Spreading innovation is less proprietary, more altruistic, and more organic.
Why does this matter? The challenge is that an organic culture of collaboration and innovation through design-thinking is bubbling up from the roots of education, but having to innovate within the proscriptive structures of a traditional system. This is not how innovation flourishes best, but by sharing and collaborating peer-to-peer at the grassroots, there builds an impulse for change that is becoming difficult to ignore. Collaboration around innovation puts purpose at the heart of progress, refuses to commoditize it, and spreads widely across organic networks of educators on a global scale.
Despite what may sound like a negative note, we really are hopeful about the future of education. We believe in the idea of purpose guiding innovation, but for innovation to spread, and gather evidence of its own efficacy, that purpose has to be common.
Learner-centered innovation through learner-directed practice can be shared widely, but unless there is a common sense of where we are trying to get to, things will move more slowly and sporadically without taking root. There are a huge number of organizations and individuals involved in a discussion about where education should change and what innovations are driving it forward, but unless that voice becomes more harmonious, agrees on certain fundamental principles, and finds commonality of purpose and vision among learners, educators, and parents, the system will continue to restrict innovation in its truest sense.
The question is, who is willing to lead? There is huge potential and big ideas, but the world of education hasn't yet managed to reform itself from within. Perhaps it is time for learners to step forward and lead the change? The next Greta is out there somewhere, and when they find their voice, it is time we listened.
The pandemic has been really challenging for so many people, but K-12 students have had it particularly tough. Dr. Lisa Damour said in a New York Times article that "pandemic conditions are at cross-currents with normal adolescent development". The same article reported the results of a study, which found that young people from less stable financial situations had been particularly affected.
Just last week, we shared the story of Ayla, who struggled so much with the shift to online classes, that her grade average dropped too low to get into her chosen university course, and now has to repeat the year. We are hearing and seeing the same story repeated in so many countries and contexts.
To address the narrow entry requirements in universities and colleges, there is a move in many institutions towards what is sometimes referred to as contextual admissions. This is basically where the institution "relaxes" or "lowers" entry requirements for learners who come from more challenging situations.
However, is this the best we can do? To lower standards for learners is arguably a stigmatizing approach, with words such as "deprived" and "tough realities" being used. Surely this is an opportunity to think more seriously about broadening access and recognizing other ways of evidencing the skills, knowledge, and competencies to access a higher education course.
At present, the main routes are either grades or entrance exams. The SAT test in the USA claims to test language skills, intelligence, and the ability to problem-solve, and similar tests have been adopted in the UK to try to provide another entry pathway to higher education. These tests put test takers under enormous pressure to do well in a certain environment on a certain day.
There is no facility in these tests to measure non-cognitive skills, such as adaptability and positive self-concept, or even demonstrable things like leadership and contribution to the community. Why is the world clamoring for cognitive flexibility and teamwork abilities in graduates, but we narrow them down to one high-stakes test that doesn't even look at any of that?
The stakes are high. Until very recently, the thaanawiya amma entrance exam in Egypt was a test that everyone had to take to enter university. The high scores get you a place in the faculties of law, medicine, and architecture. The lower scores direct you to a career in music, social sciences, and...education.
Egypt has since replaced it with something similar to the SAT, with the encouraging inclusion of projects as part of the submission, but still heavily reliant on long-form answers to standardized questions and (yes this is still a thing) multiple-choice questions. No comment.
There is no easy answer to this one. The answer varies depending on the type of institution for a start. The skills needed to prosper in some traditional universities are just the same as those required to get high grades in traditional K-12 schools.
Crossing over into a more learner-directed environment, however, will require something more. If you have learned to get ahead by cramming and memorizing in strictly segmented subjects, then transversal approaches to Project-Based Learning might take some adjustment. If your school set you every task, gave you little flexibility of choice, and generally set out the path for you, you cannot be blamed for struggling with being suddenly in the driver's seat.
The Rainbow project tried to expand the SAT with a new test that measured "creative, analytical and practical skills". If you wonder how practical skills could be measured, here is an example question from the test: "You've been assigned to work on a project for a day with a fellow employee whom you really dislike. He is rude, lazy and rarely does a proper job. What would be the best thing for you to do?" No comment.
Though the test did actually reduce some of the diversity issues in results, it is still a test on one day, for high stakes. We are not even going to get into the issue of whether we can "assess" creativity in a test, but if you have some spare time and want to start a burning argument on LinkedIn, we invite you to post that question on your feed and grab some popcorn.
The Ivy League Universities have some very broad methodologies for evaluating "character", as beautifully detailed in Malcolm Gladwell's article for the New Yorker. We can only imagine the difficulties in navigating subjectivity and bias in most of these approaches, despite the advances and progress they have made.
For the rest, the situation is broadly as it has been for many years. As the late Sir Ken Robinson famously put it, we don't need reformation, we need transformation. If we are listening to the overwhelming evidence that creativity, adaptability, resilience, self-direction, etc. are to be nurtured and supported in higher education, but the best we can do is to try to find yet another test to measure these things, then aren't we just tinkering at the edges?
If our answer to new ideas is to figure out how to test them, then we are not listening. Testing is top-down, and will always struggle to reflect the beautiful diversity of applicants and their own mosaics of experiences, stories, self-concepts, and idiosyncrasies. We can do much better.
The evidence is overwhelming that to flourish in true learning, whilst developing skills that an uncertain future will require of us, a system of standardized testing and a focus on grades just won't do. A more sustainable and circular economy is calling out for change, and companies are even circumventing higher education in access programs to top-level careers.
Alternative approaches to higher education are flourishing, though they still lack the subsidies and state support for students due to their non-conformity to centralized accreditation bodies. Recommendations have been repeatedly made that Universities should accept a learning portfolio as evidence of skills, knowledge, and competence, but adoption has been slow and often accepted only alongside, and not instead of, the more traditional scores and grades.
Learning portfolios might, for example, evidence social impact, leadership experiences, self-reflection on collaboration and growth, self-directed learning experiences evaluated in digital form, mixed media artifacts alongside a competency transcript, and the comments and insights of learning guides and peers.
Even mainstream schools are often well versed in Project-Based Learning and "skills for life" along with a number of hugely progressive approaches. The vanguard of progressive learning environments such as Learnlife and A School for Tomorrow is several steps ahead in transforming the existing paradigm and showing us all how things could be.
Is it time to let go? To listen to research, industry, employers, schools, learning guides, educators, and learners themselves? We already know how to support self-directed learning. We know how to support learners to flourish in pursuit of their passion, and to build the skills for an uncertain future along the way. Now, perhaps, it is time we stopped trying to fit that unimaginable breadth of experience into a test; into a single day.
Perhaps it is time to develop spaces, opportunities, and structures of support for learners to choose how to show us who they are and what they can do. If you have thoughts around this or are working towards these objectives, we would love to hear from you as we amplify the voices and the reach of the institutions and organizations that are taking us towards a bolder and brighter future.
"Admissions say I need at least a score of 80 to get into my degree program at the University of New Brunswick", said Ayla, a high school student in Alberta, Canada. Ayla told us of the final year of her high school, where all of her classes were shifted online and she just was not able to cope with the change.
Her grades, normally in the mid-'80s, dropped by 30%. Now she is resigned to the fact that university will just not happen this year, and that her intended career in Physiotherapy will have to wait. Ayla will, instead, spend the next academic year "upgrading" at the same high school, again taking her courses online.
Ayla is not the only one. Across the world, learners with self-discipline, curiosity, passion, and analytical skills to excel in the world of higher education, just cannot get through the gate. Were Ayla to spend the next year interning at a physio clinic, she would learn far more of foundational use in her forthcoming university education, but the flexibility just is not there.
Instead of presenting a year's worth of experience and reflection in a directly related field, and the testimonial of her employer, she must instead repeat even the subjects which are only indirectly related to her future career. The goal is a score of 80, and she is told that nothing else counts.
If you are, like us, feeling disheartened and perhaps even a little upset at reading this, then perhaps it is a good time to look at how things are changing in a more positive direction, and how universities are beginning to broaden access by introducing more flexibility in how learners evidence what they know and what they can do.
Micro-credentials, as this helpful article by Forbes Magazine explains, are basically digital badges that evidence a particular, specific skill. They can be found at all "levels" of study, from postgraduate level credentials like managing uncertainty or cybersecurity. Now the stacking up of graduate and postgraduate micro-credentials are, according to the CEO of Futurelearn, competing with the traditional degree by providing a "range of new skills that are in high demand", much as we discussed in our article on liquid learning.
We will get back to that. Right now, that does not really help Ayla, who is determined to become the first in her family to get a degree and has to meet the rigid admissions criteria to do so.
In a learning analytics workshop in 2017, two academics from the University of Michigan brought together a diverse range of colleagues from both academics and admissions across the region. The aim was to look at how to support learners to evidence a diverse range of skills in order to access university, rather than just the standard high school score.
They found that there was a broad consensus that things had to change, but that it was difficult to really set out a structure or process that could support it. In terms of the reliability of micro-credentials as evidence of learning, the technology and security aspects are ready to go. The question is: what would universities be willing to accept?
A learner may present a list of micro-credentials to a university detailing skills such as time management and critical thinking alongside knowledge clusters such as social media marketing, but there is the question of how they fit together. In a ground breaking 2016 blueprint for fairer access to higher education in Scotland, the report outlined the difficulties of presenting "snapshots" of learning and recommended that:
"a more systematic approach to the use of data is required and fundamental to that is the ability to track learners throughout their education journey...to help sectors share information to support learners as they transition from one stage of learning to another."
Micro-credentials are a viable way to capture learning in non-traditional settings, which makes access to higher education fairer and more equitable to everyone, but there is a reluctance to formally adopt them for entry criteria just yet. While institutions such as the University of Michigan are positive about Micro-credentialing as a "promising tool for recognizing student learning in ways that are not currently captured by more typical measures such as standardized tests and high school GPAs", the change seems a few years away at best.
We suspect, that Australia might be the first to move into this new flexibility, but in the current pandemic/accelerated pace of change, anything is possible. Just not in time to help Ayla.
Talk about learning portfolios to most people, and they will relate them to subjects from "the creative arts". But yet, can we truly say that maths and microbiology are less "creative" than painting and photography? We do not think so. At all.
Creativity in learning environments is something that is arguably missing from a lot of mainstream education settings, but we can hopefully agree that creativity is present in all people. Curiosity is innate, play as a means of discovery is the intuitive methodology of learning for all of us, until we are asked to put down the building blocks and pick up a pencil. Ayla is clearly capable of studying at university. She is passionate about her subject, has well-developed learning skills, is self-directed and curious, but none of that can be evidenced in the score she has to show the admissions department. A difficult year and an unstable learning environment in 2020 have no reflection on her capacity to succeed. Elevate Academy, a K-12 school in Idaho, works principally with project-based learning. Their curriculum is competency-based; meaning that the objective is to master skills and abilities, rather than scores in segmented subjects.
They do this with the help of Lift; a bespoke digital platform that helps schools design "living, digital “skill portfolios”. Learners know exactly what growth looks like for every competency, and they have a library of projects and resources to unlock as they level up". Learners end their studies with competency transcripts and a digital portfolio of successful projects and the resultant reflective learning. With innovative schools like Elevate joining the rapidly growing alliance of progressive institutions at the K-12 level worldwide, the transformation to a more flexible and learner-directed paradigm is clearly gaining momentum. It is at the Higher Education level where the bottleneck occurs, and so hugely innovative schools such as Learnlife still offer the option of bolt-on "formal" examinations at the end of an incredibly learner-directed experience in their groundbreaking approach to K-12 education, as some stakeholders simply feel reassured by this.
Higher education offers little choice in this respect, and parents often feel the pressure to make sure their child's education conforms; even if that has to be "bolted on" at the end. The rigors and structures of accreditation at this level do not change easily or quickly. David Lipkin, Founder of Lift told us that "Higher Ed and employers are seeking candidates with demonstrated abilities and soft-skills, so there is increasing demand and acceptance of portfolio- and competency-based transcripts. In the US, the mind-shift from emphasizing GPA and class completion to demonstrated skills is well underway and could unlock more creativity in secondary school practice".
Change is a constant. Our pathways through life are rarely straight and rigid, but the one thing we can be sure of is that every corner, every twist, and turn presents a learning opportunity. Finding ways to support learners like Ayla to evidence this, to paint a picture of a lifelong learning journey, and to show institutions and employers who they are and what they can do; this has to be the future.
So many people are working hard to make this a reality, from K-12 schools to University and College admissions professionals, researchers, and industry experts from education to technology. The impulse is there, the need is apparent, and now we look to the decision-makers to take us forward.
At geNEOus (formerly NEO Academy), we try to do our part by amplifying the voices of innovative institutions and organizations by raising their profiles, streamlining their marketing & admissions operations, and leaving them with more space and time to dedicate to progress and innovation.
If you work for a school, university, or education organization and find yourself in agreement with our call for change, then please do reach out to share ideas, take part in our discussions or just be a part of the conversation.
Innovation as a concept is often misunderstood, misrepresented and, quite honestly, easy to write off as a buzzword that's just not applicable to the day in, day out operation of a school or university. That's understandable. We are surrounded by stories of revolutionary new innovations in technology, transport, medicine and yes, in education too. The stories are big and bold tales of something totally new and exciting.
Danny Crichton writes on Techcrunch that "Few areas have been as hopeful and as disappointing as innovation in education. Education is probably the single most important function in our society today, ... with the rise of the internet, it seemed like education was on the cusp of a complete revolution. Today, though, you would be excused for not seeing much of a difference between the way we learn and how we did so twenty years ago”
But Crichton is really talking about large scale disruption, instead of smaller scale transformations. As a teacher in a K12 school in Italy, or a business school in Malaysia, there is just too much to focus on in supporting learners within the existing system, to really spare time and energy to game out how it might be disrupted entirely. Education in every school and university is part of a wider, systemic supersystem, which generally hands down the instruction or impulse to change from the top and, according to Fullan, most often just frustrates the teachers as "another new initiative" that misses the point. No wonder innovation is getting bad PR in the grass roots of education.
Innovation is not always a world changing new app or a levitating train. Innovation can be as simple as a fresh take on an established process, a twist on the familiar that reframes its purpose and capacity. This is what we are looking at here today; innovations that improve things for the stakeholders in your organisation or institution are absolutely possible, and actually add to a wider culture of progress in education as these ideas spread and culminate.
Creating and sustaining a culture that supports this level of innovation doesn't come from a guest speaker who does a two-hour design thinking workshop then shuttles off to the next school. There has to be more. A lot more.
Whether the innovations are to happen in teaching and learning, marketing and admissions, or communication and administration, the institution-wide structures and culture must be there to support it. Here are some ideas on how to build towards that.
Creating an innovation culture starts with making sure the whole team understands where the organization is headed. If there is no strong understanding of organizational values, mission and vision, then innovation has no spark.
To ensure there is a supportive culture around new ideas, there needs to be a shared sense of direction, which gives team members the confidence to speak up and suggest new approaches, or even to know which existing areas, process, courses or products might need to be revamped.
This is a central part of sustaining a collaborative culture of innovation, but certainly just the start.
Rigidity is the enemy of iteration. The more people are boxed into tight-fitting job descriptions, and carry out the same tasks with the same people, the less chance there is of innovation. Decision-making at the top, filtering to action down "below", creates a top-down culture that separates people by department and fails to build a transversal picture of how the organization actually works.
By looking more at skills, interests, passions, and competences in your team, it will be apparent that Emma and Alice would make a great team to look at how the teaching workload could be lessened, but Emma and Sergio together have the best skill set for setting up a new feedback system for the students. People move around, cross collaborate, and get out of their silos with each and every shift.
Bring in diverse team members and start with a problem, not an idea.
Rigidity also means answering the question before you've given people room to think about it, and when we are talking we are simply repeating what we already know. Listen, create space, and see what comes of it. "How can we reduce the attrition rate in the law degree program", or " how can we involve parents more in the grade 7 reading project"? When fluidity becomes a constant, we start to see the possibilities around us.
This all means giving people space. Time to reflect, and time to discuss and share. This is certainly not the staff meeting that Jason Fried has tried for years to get us to avoid at all costs. This is a working environment in which informal bouncing of ideas is encouraged among staff, and spaces are available in which to do it. This is an organization where structures facilitate engagement and not just compliance.
So many good ideas just never see the light of day: the suggestion boxes that are rarely opened, the naysaying culture that finds problems in anything new and dresses it up as "just being practical". There must be support from the leadership to give good ideas the oxygen and nourishment they need to grow. Remember that even in ideas that objectively won't work, there is sometimes the seed of something that will.
A lot of literature is devoted to creating a reward culture to recognize great ideas, but what does that recognition means if your idea is eventually just quietly parked or, worse still, never even gets out of the garage to start with. Most of us would much rather see our idea being properly explored and implemented than getting a pat on the back and an employee of the month mug. Follow through on new ideas and bring in others to flesh it all out.
Support all voices, and ensure that those voices can reach you. Making sure your team are not rigidly siloed in fixed roles is one thing, but those barriers can be vertical as well as horizontal. Ensuring there is an effective communication and feedback system that is taken seriously is one way to make sure that there is no ivory tower syndrome that stifles innovation before it even has a chance.
Finally, be prepared to take risks. Jeff Bezos said that Amazon had developed the tolerance to get it wrong 9 times out of ten, in order to reap the rewards of that one great idea. Now Jeff is not short of a few dollars, and in education we are talking about a real human impact of getting things wrong, rather than a few cents off Amazon’s share price.
Nonetheless, a risk-averse environment is where great change will happen.
Someone in a leadership role has to be willing to champion ideas that are perhaps unpopular at first or will cause disruption before there are results. This is where a common goal, sense of purpose and shared values will pay dividends. Participative, values-based decision-making is not always right, but it's never wrong.
The same people in the same meetings come up with the same ideas, but the world is changing quickly around us and just won't wait. Education reform is coming, and whether we are talking about education 4.0 or a wider systemic disruption to a new, learner directed paradigm, a team that can step back, think, change and adapt will always be the one you want around you.
As we started out by saying, innovation can be at all levels, and doesn't mean reinventing the wheel. By starting small and building in space to get creative, you never know what your school, college or university could find. At NEO Academy, we are constantly changing and adapting; helping to provide fresh ideas for our partners, or opening up space to hear from them in return. It is the most rewarding feeling to share that learning with others, through the many ways we help our partners succeed.
Check back later for a #geNEOusChats video, where we discuss these ideas and more with an innovation expert in the education area.
Wellbeing as a central concept has existed in different forms for centuries but the word itself has only been used as we know it today since the 1980's.
Back in the great influenza epidemic of 1918, the world was a very different place. The Great War had hardly ended when in came another wave of tragedy, forcing a huge disruption on an already weary and fragile society in so many countries. Several schools in the US were completely closed, but some key cities stayed open, arguing that the children were better off in the well-ventilated classrooms with health professionals on staff than they were at home in cramped living conditions. In the UK, most schools stayed open, citing the same reason. Schools were a refuge, and of course distance learning was just not an option in those days.
It is interesting in reading of the 1918 pandemic, that very little discussion is available around mental health and wellbeing because the infrastructure around public healthcare was yet to be fully developed (the UK Ministry of Health was founded in response to the 1918 pandemic), and though the collective social trauma of a pandemic hot on the heels of a ruinous world war must have been deep and damaging, these issues were just not as well understood as they are today.
While we can learn from the social, political, and medical response to the 1918 outbreak, for measures to protect mental health and wellbeing, we are starting from scratch. This is a defining moment, and once again, the commitment, dedication, and altruism of teachers have been nothing short of heroic. The situation has also presented us with an opportunity to learn and, perhaps, find a better way forward.
Policy coming down from UNICEF and the WHO has been very general in the area of mental and emotional wellbeing. The guidance issued worldwide in Autumn 2020 was about 95% focused on procedures like hand washing and physical distancing. On mental health, the advice was simply to allow learners to ask questions about the situation and to encourage them to be kind to each other.
That is something that most teaching professionals would have done intuitively anyway, and so it was left to national bodies to issue more specific guidance to schools. Again, the advice was sporadic and general. In systems like Germany, Spain, and the UK, there were huge patchwork alliances of charities and NGO's quickly forming partnerships with schools, and distributing free materials. In the US, the CDC issued simple guidance to teachers on "encouraging self-care". There was a generalized agreement in most national and supranational bodies that K12 learners should be supported with strategies to promote positive mental health, self-care, and resilience, but the details and implementation were left to the schools and, ultimately, the teachers. So how did the teachers meet the challenges?
Jose Negrin of West Lea School in the UK recently said that "If I could share one piece of advice with school leaders, it would be that ...we should strongly focus on wellbeing. If someone is struggling with their wellbeing, they cannot learn – and the same applies to staff and their teaching".
Marcela Betancourt, of Gimnasio Moderno in Bogota Colombia, told us that her teachers could simply not focus on anything else before addressing the emotional wellbeing of her staff and learners.
The expectations of homework, attainment, and assessment moved to a distant second place. Exams were cancelled in many countries (though not everyone was happy about it) and support for wellbeing came to the front. This report from 2017 across 10 European countries concluded that schools were not doing enough to promote positive mental health and wellbeing, but that this was largely down to provision and funding, and not a lack of awareness or commitment. In 2020, there was far more talk of mental health and wellbeing as the number one priority. Organizations like Young Minds, whose research showed that only 15% of K12 students in the UK felt there was enough support for mental health in their school, are calling loudly for change "beyond tomorrow". At this very moment, there is little disagreement that resilience, mental health, wellbeing and emotional literacy are number one priorities, but a great many of these voices are only talking about it in the short to mid-term, future as a response to the effects of the pandemic. There is an opportunity to galvanize this movement to shore up support for a permanent shift in this direction.
Teachers got really creative here. Trying to take the classroom-based structure and just move it online does not work at the best of times. Try that during a pandemic and it is a recipe for disaster. Instead, the social networks lit up with teachers sharing ideas about making the experience more positive.
It was widely accepted that not only should we be making space in online learning environments to talk about how we feel, but also that it helped everyone for the teacher to contribute too. The sense of a shared journey and shared vulnerability is powerful.
Peer teaching was also stepped up, which strengthened the social dimension of online learning (and in general is something we should always be encouraging in any learning environment anyway). In the absence of grading papers and quizzes, constructive peer assessment also proved hugely beneficial in strengthening empathic bonds and promoting positive self-image.
Learners could take time out and switch off the camera, backchannel chat with the teacher without the stigma of being seen to do so, the expectation of "task completion" was switched for "task engagement". Project-based learning allowed pupils to engage in learning through outdoor activity or experimentation, nature walks, and craft projects with their families. In making sure that learning was less stressful, and more socio-emotionally rewarding, and the most learner-directed it could be, teachers put the mental health and wellbeing of the learners front and center. This gave learners a sense of control in an environment where everything else must have felt unpredictable and chaotic. What they also did, was give us a glimpse of what a new education paradigm might look like, and reminded us clearly that teachers have always been the backbone of a healthy and progressive society.
When things go wrong in education, what does the discussion look like? When a country is underperforming on outcomes, or when a school is the subject of complaints in the community or a sub-par inspection report, where do people look to explain this situation?
Don't look at teachers. Teachers don't make the rules. We are not talking about classroom management here, but the structural aspects of what "success" looks like in learning, and how "capacity" is measured and reported. That's on the system itself and the culture which supports it. Through all of the changes in the education systems across the world, teachers remain constant. The political winds shift, qualifications come and go, and a deluge of initiatives pile up at the door of every classroom, adding strain to the simple, straightforward sanctity of a learning space. If you have to teach to a test or sculpt your environment to look good on an inspection sheet, you will find that neither of these things is requested or required by the learners themselves. It was only a matter of time before we mentioned Finland. Since the early '90s, Finland has been steadily building a new culture around education in which teachers are rightly praised and prized, empowered, and left to get on with what they do best. Inspections are replaced with mutual trust, and the wellbeing of both learner and learning guide is not an outcome, but a prerequisite. It takes time, but Finland has shown us the way forward. Take away the red tape, elevate the status and treatment of teachers to what they have always deserved, listen to the evidence and stay fluid to change, and embed wellbeing as a foundational prerequisite, without which learning will never lead to self-actualization. Teachers know all this already, and perhaps we need to get out of their way so they can get on with it.
UNESCO are not alone in calling for mental health to be prioritized when learners return to face-to-face learning environments. As much as teachers try their very best to support learners in their home environments, the reality is inescapable. Home is not always a safe place for everyone, and being confined there for so long can have impacts that are not easy to see, measure or act upon. A self-report study in California found that about a third of high school pupils had experienced worsening mental health in 2020, but the true figure is likely to be much higher.
So where are we? The pandemic happened, and everything changed. We all agree that mental health and wellbeing should be fundamental prerequisites to effective learning, but surely we can look beyond this as a simple transition phase to settle back into "normality"?
How will we tell our learners that, once the dust settles, we are moving back to exam-based testing, grades, and school league tables? How will we return to social engagement managed by the teacher, project based learning only as episodic intervention, success measured in numbers and letters, and technology integrated flexible learning left on standby for the next emergency?
For a short while, we saw wellbeing and the feelings of our learners as the most important thing. We elevated teachers and shone on them the spotlight they always deserved. We made learning flexible and came up with ways to help create learning environments outdoors or through experiential projects. We let learners take control of their own pathway, engaging when they felt ready, and taking breaks when they needed to.
We are hopefully getting closer to the end of this period of intense disruption. As we dare to think about what comes next, imagine for a second that we had something better than before to look forward to? That is a story we could tell our children; that we built from the challenges, and dared to build back stronger and better, for the future and anything it might bring.
