Why innovation becomes imperative in education

by Dirk Van Damme 
Head of the Skills Beyond School Division,  Directorate for Education and Skills

Since Harvard economists Goldin & Katz published their ground-breaking book The Race between Technology and Education (2008), education has come face-to-face with the challenges of a world continuously altered by technological innovation. Education is generally perceived to be a laggard social system, better equipped to transmit the heritage of the past than to prepare for the future. This perception is not entirely accurate; OECD/CERI work on Measuring innovation in education (2014) demonstrates that education is a system that is not change-averse.

From a historical perspective, education has adjusted to the needs and opportunities of the 2nd Industrial Revolution, for example by introducing natural sciences into the curriculum – although it took many years for that to happen. Will education have the luxury of time to confront the current wave of technological change and innovation? How will it react to the challenges of digitalization and artificial intelligence?

On 25-26 September some hundred education policy makers from national governments and international organisations and representatives from the emerging education industry gathered at the 3rd Global Education Industry Summit (GEIS) in Luxembourg to discuss these questions. Jointly organised by the OECD, the European Commission and Luxembourg, the GEIS aspired to be a platform for discussions on how education can embrace innovation and how the education industry can be involved in that endeavour. This year the focus of the event was on opening up education, with the title Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions. A background report with the same title provided the substantive materials to support the discussions: it suggests that schools need to  reach out  to regional economies and local communities to be part of innovation ecosystems in order to contribute with knowledge and learning opportunities, but also to get incentivised to become more innovative themselves.

One of the most visible outcomes of the discussions was that education policy makers and industrialists are not yet on the same page. While the latter forcefully argued for a sense of urgency and more drastic changes, the former made a case for piecemeal engineering of a very complicated system. Some participants concerned with the economics of education argued that innovation will become a systemic imperative, driven by the exploding cost of current models. Over time PISA scores remain rather flat, while the cost of education is increasing. “You can’t keep squeezing the model; you need to change the production function”. But education policy makers argued that education needs to be inclusive, taking into account not only the innovation pioneers but many other stakeholders as well.

Part of the discussion was about what we exactly mean with ‘innovation’. Spectacular changes at the frontier of scientific discovery and technological inventions attract of lot of attention. But in broader definitions, such as the one adopted by the OECD Innovation Strategy, innovation is not only about the latest state-of-the-art disruptive technologies, but also about the breadth of societal changes, including social innovation. Innovation is also about the knowledge and skills that make societies future-proof, including capacities and capabilities for using, integrating, accepting novel solutions to challenges.

Some representatives from innovative schools were invited to the Summit to share their views and experiences. Some of them convincingly argued for greater diversification, moving away from the standardization and uniformity that has characterised education’s solutions to the challenge of the 2nd Industrial Revolution and its demand for mass education. In the past standardisation was the easy answer to the increasing need  of access and equity, but the future will require education to implement systemic diversification to meet very different economic and social needs and to provide opportunities to very different talents.

On how schools should progress, education industry representatives applauded the call for schools to open up and become partners in innovation ecosystems in regional economies and societies. Networking and connecting schools with business and local communities will be essential drivers of innovation in education; opening up is the best strategy to address change and connect schools with what’s happening in the outside world.  Industry representatives recognised that this would involve more risk-taking by schools, but that’s what is expected from all social systems in a period of rapid transformation. The status-quo is not an option, and not risk-free either.

Opening up education to businesses was, however, an idea that provoked a rather strong reaction from the side of Education International, the representative of teacher unions, against the dangers of commodification and privatization of education. Employers can play a role in education, but education works for the greater public good and should not be submitted to the economic interests of for-profit actors. Others argued that innovation will never endanger the critically important role of teachers, quite  the contrary. Innovation-proof education systems will have to rely on a very strong, mature profession. But the teaching profession will have to move away from an industrial model to a professional model. We need to take a giant leap forward in the process of professionalization of teachers.

In the end there was an idea on which all participants agreed: the critical role of governments to steer innovation in education. Increasing school autonomy, decentralisation, complexity and technological disruption make the task of governing education systems more difficult, but also move the governance challenge to a higher level, that of leadership in a period of change. Democratic government is and will be the system through which change and innovation in education will happen. But this will only be possible by empowering schools and supporting those that promote innovation.

Links

Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions

3rd Global Education Industry Summit

Follow the conversation: #GEIS2017

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Schools at the crossroads of innovation

by Dirk Van Damme

Head of the Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education and Skills

In a not so distant past, it was seen as one of the defining features of schools that they isolated learners – and the learning process itself – from the surrounding environment. As so brilliantly described by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in his account of the modern machinery of discipline and power, schools must be secluded time/space settings, far away from the impurities of the contemporary world which would poison the minds and character of children. But also in a more enlightened and emancipatory sense, separating young learners from an often depressing environment was perceived to be the best way to guide them to higher levels of knowledge, skill and wisdom.

Schools and schooling have changed a lot in recent years, but they are still well-defined in terms of the time and space boundaries that separate them from their environment. Some modern progressive pedagogies have gradually opened up schooling by moving children out of the school and into the surrounding natural and social environments, introducing a new learning process based on realistic and relevant challenges. But in most cases, schools are still isolated spaces, defined by concrete walls and iron fences, where life is dictated by the rhythm of the school bell.

How different this mindset is from the realities of today‘s world! The separation of school time from the wider world, characterised by borderless networking and communication, may seem rather alienating to young people. Isolating schools from their environment does nothing to help the process of incremental change, nor the innovation of education and learning. No modern institution changes solely from within, but rather does so in reaction or interaction with an environment which continuously challenges its processes and outputs. In today’s world, these pressures challenges and demands towards schools seem to accumulate, be it in the form of employers asking for more relevant skills and offering workplace learning arrangements to move learners into the reality, or in the form of citizens and civil society claiming all kinds of changes in the curriculum in order to align education with what they perceive to be the common good.

These issues are further developed and expanded in a new OECD/CERI publication Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions, and will be discussed with education ministers, high-level policy makers and industry leaders in the upcoming Global Education Industry Summit, which takes place in Luxembourg on 25-26 September, hosted by the OECD, the European Commission and the Government of Luxembourg.

Too often the answer from the world of education is defensive and self-protective. It is time to radically rethink schooling in terms of openness and networking, or in other words, as nodes in wider ecosystems of innovation and learning. Schools are among the most important knowledge institutions of modern societies and they have such great potential to play a critical role in processes of knowledge production and dissemination, vital to innovation in the local and regional economy. Many accounts of innovation would agree that human capital plays a crucial role, but they tend to look first at the knowledge and skills of educated individuals, and not at the active engagement of schools as learning environments where innovation also occurs. Similarly, schools can – and should –play a very important role in building the social capital of local communities, by offering services that improve the well-being and social cohesion in local communities.

By developing an ecosystems view of schools and opening up schools to the surrounding economies and societies, many important stakeholders would feel empowered to support and contribute to them. Local employers, who already play a role in apprenticeships and workplace learning arrangements in vocational education, could easily expand their role towards other dimensions and sectors of the educational system. Opening up schools will generate a completely different governance system for education, one where vertical command-and-control steering and accountability is exchanged for more horizontal relationships and a networking system made up of various stakeholders. Such developments would strengthen the relevance of what is learnt in schools, and contribute to the social and emotional learning that is essential for fostering good citizenship and engaging human beings.

Innovative schools challenge the boundaries – in time, space, and also in curricula and learning processes – that tradition seems to impose on schools today. They often have different approaches to the learning process and especially how its pedagogical core is organised. It is true that deep learning sometimes requires concentration, silencing the noise from the surrounding environment. And a networking world can be a very noisy world. But the era when isolation and separation were necessary to define the learning environments for our children has passed. Schools are at a crossroads of innovation: they are becoming partners and actors in processes of innovation in the surrounding economy and society, and taking benefit of the world around them to innovate their own existence.

Links
Schools at the crossroads of innovation in cities and regions
3rd Global Education Industry Summit, Luxembourg, 25-26 September, 2017

Follow the conversation: #GEIS2017

Photo credit: The Global Education Industry Summit

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Educating for Innovation and Innovation in Education

by Andreas Schleicher
Director, OECD Directorate for Education and Skills

People have quite different views on the role that digital technology can and should play in schools. But we just can’t ignore how digital tools have so fundamentally transformed the world around schools. Students unable to navigate through our complex digital landscape are simply no longer able to participate in our social, economic and cultural life.

In the past, education was about teaching people something. Now, it’s about helping students develop a reliable compass and the navigation skills to find their own way through an increasingly uncertain, volatile and ambiguous world. These days, we no longer know exactly how things will unfold, often we are surprised and need to learn from the extraordinary, and sometimes we make mistakes along the way. And it will often be the mistakes and failures, when properly understood, that create the context for learning and growth.

A generation ago, teachers could expect that what they taught would last for a lifetime of their students. Today, schools need to prepare students for more rapid economic and social change than ever before, for jobs that have not yet been created, to use technologies that have not yet been invented, and to solve social problems that we do not yet know will arise.

The dilemma for educators is that the kind of skills that are easiest to teach and easiest to test are also the skills that are easiest to digitise, automate and outsource. Half of the jobs that we know in OECD countries can already be carried out by digital technology. Put simply, the world no longer rewards people just for what they know – Google knows everything – but for what they can do with what they know. Because that’s the main differentiator today, education is becoming more about ways of thinking; involving creativity, critical thinking, problem solving and decision making; about ways of working, including communication and collaboration; about tools for working, and that includes not just the capacity to use technology but to recognise its potential for new ways of working; and, last but not least, it’s about the social and emotional skills that help people live and work together. Think about courage, integrity, curiosity, leadership, resilience or empathy.

All that demands new and innovative approaches to education where technology can no longer be on the margins of education but needs to be central to any solution.

I know teachers and school leaders are working hard to make this work. But our latest PISA results show that the reality in our schools lags considerably behind the promise of technology. In 2012, virtually all 15-year-old students in OECD countries had a computer at home, but less than three quarters used a computer or tablet at school, and in some countries it was fewer than half. In fact, the first thing we usually tell students entering their school is to turn off anything that has an on-or-off switch.

But far more importantly, even where computers are used in classrooms, their impact on student learning outcomes is mixed at best. Students who use computers moderately at school tend to have somewhat better learning outcomes than students who use computers rarely. But students who use computers very frequently at school do a lot worse in most learning outcomes. Imagine that, the more intensively students use computers at school, the less digital literate they seem to be, even after accounting for social background and student demographics.

And perhaps the most disappointing finding is that technology seems of little help in bridging the skills divide between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Put simply, ensuring that every child attains a baseline level of proficiency in reading and math seems still to do more to create equal opportunities in a digital world than subsidising access to high-tech devices and services.

So it’s clear that more of the same technology cannot be the answer. But it’s also clear that we need to get this right if we want to provide teachers with learning environments that support 21st-century pedagogies and, most importantly, if we want to provide children with the 21st-century skills they need to succeed in tomorrow’s world.

That’s why we have invited Education Ministers and industry leaders to come together in Israel for our second Global Summit on the Education Industry. Why Israel? Because it has such a vibrant startup culture in education where educators, entrepreneurs and policy makers aren’t afraid of each other but collaborate day after day for more innovative and productive educational solutions.

Technology is the only way to dramatically expand access to knowledge. Why should students be stuck with a textbook that was printed two years ago, and maybe designed ten years ago, when they can have access to the world’s best and most up-to-date information?

Technology also provides great platforms for collaboration in knowledge creation where teachers can share and enrich teaching materials. And indeed, if you look at the countries with the most technology-savvy students, they typically start with connecting teachers before pushing technology into classrooms.

But we also need to become much better at using technology to support new pedagogies that focus on learners as active participants with tools for inquiry-based pedagogies and collaborative workspaces. Technology is our best bet to enhance experiential learning, foster project-based and inquiry-based pedagogies, facilitate hands-on activities and cooperative learning, deliver formative real-time assessment and support learning and teaching communities. And there are plenty of good examples around, such as remote and virtual labs, highly interactive courseware that builds on state-of-the-art instructional design, sophisticated software for experimentation and simulation, social media and serious games.

And all of this is isn’t just about 21st-century learning. The teachers of today’s “connected” learners are confronted with lots of related issues, from information overload to plagiarism, from protecting children from online risks like fraud, violations of privacy up to setting an appropriate media diet. We expect schools to educate our children to become critical consumers of Internet services and electronic media, to help them make informed choices. And we expect schools to raise awareness about the risks that children face on line and how to avoid them.

To better deliver on the promises which technology holds, countries will need convincing strategies to build teachers’ capacity. And policy-makers need to become better at building support for this agenda. Those are precisely the topics that we want to discuss at this summit.

Given the uncertainties that accompany all change, teachers will always favour the status quo. If we want to mobilise support for more technology-rich schools, we need to become better at communicating the need and building support for change. We need to invest in capacity development and change-management skills, develop sound evidence and feed this evidence back to institutions, and of course back all that up with sustainable financing.

And none of this is going to work without teachers becoming active agents for change, not just in implementing technological innovations, but in designing them too. One thing is clear, technology can amplify great teaching, but great technology will never replace poor teaching.

This summit is a start for this and the OECD stands ready to support and facilitate the dialogue between Ministers and the Education Industry to take this discussion forward.

Links:
Innovating Education and Educating for Innovation: The Power of Digital Technologies and Skills
Global Education Industry Summit: September 26-27 2016, Israel
Photo credit: Innovation concept diagram illustration design over a white background @Shutterstock

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