Twelve years ago, the Arab Spring swept across North Africa. In Egypt, security had collapsed, the internet was switched off and cash had dried up. With roadblocks in place and protests flaring up, it was too dangerous to run a school and the decision to close was made without hesitation.
Egypt’s best school was faced with its worst nightmare. In such circumstances, necessity is the mother of invention. In an age before Google Classroom, Teams, or Zoom, we moved our school online: Set up a site in the UK and built our own virtual classrooms. Using great tech from India, we were able to host live classes and keep our school community together.
Four years ago, Covid swept across the world. In Mexico, schools were closed overnight. Having built a virtual learning platform in case of earthquake enforced closures, the school went online overnight. Live classes followed a normal timetable and great professionals adapted to teaching from home.
Beyond such cases of crisis management or contingency planning is the emerging importance of innovative learning environments for the future of education. Their significance is rooted in a need to define our terms, develop our perspectives, and draw conclusions from examples of innovative learning environments sourced from across the globe.
There are big influencers currently at work: A stronger understanding of how students learn (via cognition research), step-change advances in machine-based learning, and an increasingly diverse tapestry of educational provision (caused by Covid).
Competing paradigms frame international thinking on educational purpose and practice. Progressive education was long built on holistic principles, a belief in experiential learning and a concern for the development of the individual. Gardener’s multiple intelligences stimulated school interest in developing emotional, psychological, and physical needs. More recently, thinking about high performing systems has dominated debate, with a concern for how education is preparing students with the knowledge, skills, and qualities for tech-transformed futures.
There are common characteristics of high performing school systems: They start from the premise that all children can learn and develop; that all children can be high performers at school; they focus on future skills not past knowledge; and they get and keep great teachers.
Future-oriented systems focus on skills that are difficult to measure in conventional assessments, such as creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. Such systems will integrate thinking on the design of learning spaces with impactful pedagogies. In building schools for the future, we focus on creativity and sustainability.
Significant research on innovative learning environments has been conducted by the OECD. Its seven key principles for innovative learning environments drawn from its 10-year study offer a useful point of departure (source: Educational Research and Innovation, Schooling Redesigned, Towards Innovative Learning Systems, OECD).
With students at the heart of what we do, learning is a social and collaborative activity. With learner motivations and well-being at the core, individual student differences are to be expected and encouraged, feeding into teacher planning and delivery.
With high standards set for all learners, close and continuous feedback supports impact and outcomes. With learning activities connected across subjects and staff, unconventional learning occurs within and beyond unconventional classrooms.
For innovative learning environments to evolve, three steps must happen:
Step one: Do what works best and put research-backed pedagogy at the heart of a professional strategy. Evidence based education frames our impact on learners (see: https://evidencebased.education/).
Step 2: Build learning focused leadership, with vision, values, and practice attuned to their impact on students (see: https://www.highperformancelearning.co.uk ).
Step 3: Evolve through partnerships with wider communities, educational institutions across sectors and levels, for successful synergies (see: https://www.ecis.org/ ).
At my own school, Haileybury Bhaluka, we have been guided by the principles of sustainability and collaboration. Mindful of our responsibilities to our wider communities, we seek to share our advantages with schools across the country. In doing so, we move forward together.
Simon O’Grady is the Founding Headmaster of Haileybury Bhaluka, the first school in Bangladesh to be outstanding at its outset. An experienced international educator who has built schools on three continents, he outlines the importance of innovative learning environments in an age of transformation.
