These days technology is often the last thing I'd recommend schools bother with when trying to engage students. There's plenty else we can invest time in before technology will achieve even a fraction of what it can in an engaged school. And now a set of action research reports in the UK is showing the path many schools might wish to take.
I'm working with several primary (elementary) and secondary (high) schools at the moment in England, Australia and the States. All of them face the same daily and long-term strategic challenge: students have never been so disengaged. Many have seen technology as a principal hook to reverse this disengagement, which is why they get in touch with us, but quickly on my initial visits to schools I'm keen to point out the other steps that we need to get through before technology will add what it could do. Otherwise, I'm just a tools salesman, selling tools that the owners don't know how to harness.
The journey is a complex one, and one that, in my opinion for what it's worth, most of the 'big' eduction commentators in North America still fail to recognise. I've complained numerous times before about the fetichisation of 'tools' and 'edtech' by those who work with and in schools where other elements of the teaching and learning process clearly deserve fetichisation first.
What are these elements?
A unique and undervalued research project based in the UK, with partners in the US (including High Tech High), is discovering, analysing and sharing those elements through its regular pamphlets, blog and, above all, grounded practice across nearly 50 schools.
It's our job to help scale this ambition to other schools around the world.
Learning Futures' The Engaging School: principles and practices has some choice quotes amongst the practical steps school leaders might take to begin turning this apparent tide of disengagement. Here are my favourites:
The irony, for commentators like Alfie Kohn, is that invariably, “when interest appears, achievement usually follows” (2000, p. 128). … It is almost as though we have accepted the inevitability of learning as a cold shower: you’re not expected to enjoy it, but it will do you good. ... We have recently seen a large number of students becoming disengaged achievers, performing well academically, keeping out of trouble, but rejecting further and higher education. … A second problem with the traditional model of engagement stems from its predominantly instrumental applications: engagement as a vehicle to improve student performance or discipline within school. Inevitably, such a mindset constrains success indicators within a compliance model. Students are deemed to be engaged, for example, when/if they: • attend regularly • conform to behavioural norms • complete work in the manner requested and on time • are ‘on-task’ • respond to questioning If we have greater aspirations for students—beyond compliance and toward a commitment to lifelong learning—then the conventional concept of engagement is inadequate. ... While project-based learning and activities that go beyond school can be liberating for staff and students, it is important that activities incorporate a sense of bounded freedom—that students are given a clear set of guidelines, procedures or protocols within which they can make choices. As one Year 9 student put it: “I’d like to have a little bit more of a say, but...I think you need the teacher there to sort of guide you.” … Students are absorbed in their activity: anyone witnessing a young person playing, say, on-line role playing games will know what this looks like. It is rare, however, to see such depth of absorption in school-based work. Munns and colleagues (2006) at the University of Western Sydney (2006) have quantified the difference as being in-task, not just on-task. Other indicators of high absorption would be students wishing to continue beyond the end of a lesson, or not even noticing the lesson had ended—what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) has described as being in ‘‘flow’’.
I'm hoping that apparenly embattled leadership colleagues in the US might sit up when they see the confidence of the youngsters I interviewed for the post, and feel that they can engage in a different way of doing things from the perceived norm.
I sit on the Board of Trustees for this framework that sets out competences, not school subjects, as the principal mechanism through which students learn the 'hows' and 'whats' of the world. It's not dissimilar in goal to the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence, with the RSA's Opening Minds accreditation scheme acting as a means to provide stellar professional development and coaching between schools who "are there" with those new to this way of thinking and working.
This is a summary of the talk I delivered at the Norfolk ICT 2011 Conference, expanding on my TES editorial back in January.
During the final half of 2010, I asked more than 1,500 teachers around the globe two questions: what are your happiest memories from learning at school, and what are your least happy experiences?
When I do the "reveal" of what I think their answers will be, every workshop has a "but how did he know?" reaction. It's more akin to an audience's response to illusionist Derren Brown than to the beginning of a day of professional development.
For teachers' answers are always the same. At the top is "making stuff", then school trips, "feeling I'm making a contribution" and "following my own ideas". Their least happy experiences are "a frustration at not understanding things", "not having any help on hand" and "being bored", mostly by "dull presentations". "Not seeing why we had to do certain tasks" appeared in every continent. Most of these educators agreed that the positive experiences they loved about school were too few, and were outnumbered by the "important but dull" parts of today's schooling: delivering content, preparing for and doing exams.
But while a third of teachers generally remember "making stuff" as their most memorable and happy experience at school, we see few curricula where "making stuff" and letting students "follow their own ideas" makes up at least a third of the planned activity.
Design Thinking: the creative industries' framework for relentless creativity
Coined by design superstars IDEO, "Design Thinking" in a simple form is a four-part process of thinking and acting that I see replicated in every successful creative company in film, television, web startups or marketing with whom I work. I see it in some of our most creative classrooms, too.
What is the carbon footprint of the nation's shopping basket?
Who is the biggest polluter in our region?
How can we make the journey to school safer?
How can we better use the school budget we have?
We then follow these four stages of problem-solving:
Immersion
Immersion is not just unleashing youngsters with a sketchbook, or sending them off to Google to find out everything they can on a topic. It's about students working hard to gain empathy with those affected by the problem they've encountered. It's about putting oneself in the shoes of another and capturing all the emotions, feelings, facts, viewpoints possible. This can be done in a huge number of ways, but capturing these insights we must: on digital photographs, cell phone audio recordings or videos, post-it notes, documents...
The most important part is for students not to try to solve the problem, but merely delve into it, and understand it from as many perspectives as possible. It is also vital that the problem comes from the students, as much as possible. Note in this short clip how the 'obvious' learning point of activities around sand is replaced by what the three and four year olds are interested in: the truck that delivers the sand:
Synthesis
Every idea that has been captured needs to be brought together, preferably in a project space, a project corner, so that teams of students can work to find
combinations
opposites
information that needs further splitting down
low-hanging fruit
outlier ideas that, at first, don't seem to belong elsewhere
Look at the IDEO team in action, one week over two minutes, in this clip, and you'll see how a ton of messy, asbtract information comes together into organised thoughts ready for turning into ideas:
The teacher's role in this stage, as in immersion, is critical, but not as deliverer of knowledge. The teacher's role is that of key questioner. Good questioning technique is the most important skill to master to pull this creative process off, and there are some structures you can use to help. The G.R.O.W model and similar coaching models are such frameworks to help frame questions at each level of the project's thinking (short, medium and long-term):
Mhairi Stratton, formerly at Humbie Primary School in East Lothian, Scotland, introduced me to this way of thinking, and she has seen other benefits coming from this way of 'coaching' students to success:
'The whole school is benefitting because the pupils are involving the other class and sharing their learning with them.
‘Pupils are now identifying what resources they need, and why, and then working out how to source these.
‘This is also having a very positive effect on parental involvement as the pupils are also discussing their learning more at home and often asking them to provide the resources!’
Ideation
Actually coming up with solutions to a problem comes quite late on in the process. In schools, most of the time, though, the problem has been defined by a teacher or a textbook and most learners are thrust into the creative process at this point, at the point when the process is nearly over!
Ideation can be simple brainstorming, or it can rely on a greater box of mental tools to stimulate better, more unexpected, more sustainable ideas. For example:
everyone's a consultant, where each individual adds to everyone else's idea with a...
"yes, and..." statement - ban "no but"; it's anti-creative, and what didn't work last year might work now. Things change.
100 ideas now - set your students a challenge to take the available synthesised information and come up with 100 ideas in just one session.
FedEx days, where you invite learners (and colleagues) to deliver an idea within 24 hours.
This kind of pupil-led learning creates entrepreneurial, confident individuals. Professor Sugata Mitra's work shows that children in Indian slums are able to teach themselves and each other when provided with a computer kiosk on a street corner and access to the internet.
Within six weeks of starting my teaching career in the UK in 2002, I was fortunate to take up a spot on a small delegation to New Brunswick, Canada. There, since the 1970s, pupils have been achieving stellar results through experiential, project-based learning in which they have the lion's share of control over what is learnt, with whom and using what resources. And they have done it in a language that is not their mother tongue.
Yet the thought of allowing 30 assorted children at a time - or 90 at a time in the supersize classes I saw in New Brunswick - "free rein" upsets even the most innovative of educators. Far better to set a project theme for them; at least we know we will cover what we need to cover.
Prototyping
On the other side of the world in New Zealand, at Auckland's Albany Senior High School, deputy head Mark Osborne gives his pupils free rein every Wednesday through impact projects. "It can take weeks of discussion, reading and searching, but once you have struck their passion, their eyes light up and you can't stop them," he says.
Pupils have built a VW "Herbie" car, a rocket and a content delivery platform for the school's plasma screen system, inadvertently undercutting the commercial outfit pitching to the local university by NZ$280,000 (£137,682).
As US academic Professor Roger Schank puts it: "There is really only one way to learn how to do something, and that is to do it."
Over in California stands High Tech High, set up in San Diego in 2000 as a charter school. It was created with support from local businesses as an environment that would help fill the skills and attitudes gaps faced by the area's technology industries. Principal Larry Rosenstock believes that until teachers identify their own passions they cannot hope to facilitate the experience for pupils.
Further up the coast in San Francisco, Gever Tulley is developing his Tinkering School, an educational experiment with big ambitions currently acting as a one-week summer school.
Pupils learn by building bridges from dumped plastic bags, roller coasters from old crates or villages on stilts designed to provide secret niches for reading. The ideas come wholly from the seven-year-old collaborators and staff work tirelessly to spot and reinforce the learning opportunities inherent in the build. Elements of physics, mathematics, design, art, music and language are all wrapped in the vital skills of the 21st century for which there is, thankfully, no subject: ingenuity, collaboration, experimentation, failure and storytelling.
Don't think. Try.
Harnessing entirely pupil-led, project-based learning in this way isn't easy. But all of this frames learning in more meaningful contexts than the pseudocontexts of your average school textbook or contrived lesson plan, which might cover an area of the curriculum but leave the pupil none the wiser as to how it applies in the real world.
There is a line that haunted me last year: while pupil-led, project-based learning is noble and clearly more engaging than what we do now, there is no time for it in the current system. The implication is that it leads to poorer attainment than the status quo. But attainment at High Tech High, in terms of college admissions, is the same as or better than private schools in the same area.
The assumption that pupil-led, project-based learning offers less success in exams is a false but persistent one. John Hunter was the anatomist who defined modern medicine because, frankly, no one else had. He had a saying that has since become the mantra of the modern surgeon: "Don't think. Try the experiment."
Innovations in education that engage young people and have the most profound impact will not occur because someone told teachers what to do and how they should do it. They won't come by tinkering with the curriculum or seeking the perfect balance of assessment. The most important changes in learning this decade will come around because someone, a teacher, maybe you, thought that things weren't what they could be and that something new was worth a try. They will get together with colleagues and make time to talk through the possible and seemingly impossible. And then they will go and try it out.
When you listen to four politicians responsible for education and lifelong learning in their parties, it's remarkably easy to spot those with some savvy and those who choose to waffle on the clichés they think we want to hear.
At the Scotland on Sunday Education hustings this week the current Education Minister, Mike Russell, was at home sick, so the SNP's Lifelong Learning and Skills Minister Angela Constance took up the reins for the debate. She was joined by Des McNulty (Labour), Elizabeth Smith (Conservatives) and Margaret Smith (Liberal Democrats).
For all that she was a lastminute panel replacement, Constance was the only one speaking in terms of action, policy with the facts to back it up, with experience rooted in what she has seen herself in Scottish schools, on teacher unions' understandings of the current state of play and on the latest research, some of it commissioned by her Government over the past four years.
The others delivered platitudes, meaningless statements ("less indiscipline", "more testing", "more rigour") without any indication of what role a Government would play in achieving them.
Are we not all literacy and numeracy teachers? Des McNulty from Labour believes that Scottish education is 'in a mess' because of decisions from the current Government and from Local Authorities themselves. He wants add 1000 extra teachers to lead on literacy and numeracy, despite the fact that when I was a teacher under his Government I distinctly remember them spearheading the approach of "every teacher is a teacher of literacy and numeracy".
The best practice from around the world shows that integrating higher aspirations for all children's literacy and numeracy throughout their curriculum leads to greater achievement in these areas, something that works the other way, too: skills learnt in one subject area are useful elsewhere.
That's why Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence is so vital: it's less something to be "implemented" from on high (with screeds of policy documents and advice sheets) and instead embraced from the teaching community, who, rightly, can expect more videoed examples from inside classrooms where the planning, the tactics and the teaching style can be observed in virtual-first-hand terms. A visit to the Journey to Excellence or Learning and Teaching Scotland websites shows that the current SNP Government have done just that, and the process of changing the habits of 150 years is well on its way - although it was always going to take longer than 4 years to see a wholesale 180 degree change in practice.
We're talking about upending existing notions of how we timetable, moving towards longer periods of learning, less movement around secondary schools, more practice emulating that of the primary school environment. This is what's increasing attainment in reading, writing and 'rithmetic in schools like the Stovner School in Norway, and countless other schools in the small-country systems we like to fetichise.
The opposite is what we see in England under Gove, whereby the Education Bill makes reference to "The Importance of Teaching" without looking carefully at what makes the best conditions for learning. Not only that, it does away with the key institutions for developing the quality of teachers in our classrooms.
Labour & Tory: Drive standards, test more McNulty's other key platitude was that he wants to "drive standards with teachers". But what does that mean? Does he, along with his Conservative companion Elizabeth Smith, want to introduce "more rigourous testing, earlier, before students move on to secondary", testing the growth of our youngsters by pulling up their roots every six weeks? Do he and Smith want to increase the importance of "passing the test" later in school, and emulate the disastrous attempts to introduce "rigour" in the United States, which has left the arts, creativity and any teaching and learning outside the test out in the cold?
Greater rigour, and a return to 'traditional methods' as Smith put it, will meet only with disdain from our students, disengaging more of them at every turn. Look at what happened in Jamie Oliver's Channel 4 "Dream School" when Professor David Starkey, no doubt one of the greatest historians of his era with unbeatable knowledge, was unable to demonstrate, let alone inspire in his students, the kinds of soft skills so often berated by those who talk of "rigour": he exhibitted everything that's wrong with "rigour" in the classroom. Soft skills, which Starkey himself sees as less important than acquiring discreet areas of knowledge, would have saved him and his students much pain and embarrassment.
And engaging kids isn't about pandering to their whims. As David Price points out in his recent post on the Channel 4 series, engaging students is about appealing to their emotions, and, without that engagement of brain and emotion, deep learning cannot occur.
"I want to do something about indiscipline… [cue: tumbleweed]" Finally, McNulty got tough: "I want to do something about indiscipline." Great. How? I do believe teachers have been trying for some time, and some of us have started to work out what it comes down to. It's about engaging students in the first place (see above, "Rigour"), involving parents more (they need to want to be involved, though - dragging kicking and screaming, parent or child, tends toward the ineffective), getting better in-class training on handling different types of students and support from better school leaders. Tell us, please, what your potential Government's role is in helping what we're trying to do already go faster, deeper, quicker.
Teaching the Teachers While only the Tories are still daft enough now to think that Scottish students want to pay for their higher education, with Labour having changed their old position recently to align to that of the SNP, it was only the SNP who seem to have made the connection between Higher Education in general and those vital programmes that teach the teachers.
The Donaldson Report, commissioned by the SNP Government shows in no uncertain terms that higher investment in (free) teacher training is the only way to achieve long-term success in our classrooms. Not more testing. Not more textbooks. Not, as the SNP have nonetheless delivered, the smallest class sizes in Scotland's history (smaller class sizes inevitably make the teacher's job in developing youngsters easier). McKinsey's most recent research, as well as their 2007 report, repeatedly points out that teacher quality remains the sole factor in differentiating the average from the not-so-average education systems. Initial teacher education, yes, but above all continuing professional development.
This is one area, everywhere in the world, where Governments, teacher unions and teachers themselves can only ever work harder. It's mostly down to money and attitudes in the workforce - teachers need to know they can take up courses, take protected time out to reflect and do so without being told at the last minute they need to take the RE teacher's class again.
It is the SNP that has led the debate on Higher Education with the belief that higher education benefits society, not just the individual, says Angela Constance. She's right.
Invest in education and, generally, you always get more out the other side, and at least make some savings on the other budgets. Underspend or spend in the wrong places in education, and you might just break even, but the costs will re-emerge in health, justice and employment later on.
Education is the only Government spending area that really represents an investment. Everything else is spend. If we invest in education, in helping teachers improve day-by-day, the rest begins to fall into place.
[disclaimer: My company is currently working with the SNP on their election campaign's digital strategy. The views on this post are my own]
In a four-part video series for GETideas I travelled the world in 24 hours and asked four educators I admire what their "two stars and a wish" for learning would be for 2011. I'll blog the films here over the next week.
Oliver Quinlan, a primary school teacher in his first year of teaching in Birmingham, UK, blew people away at the BETT 2011 TeachMeet with his stories of how he gave up the inherent need of the teacher to know what's going to happen next in a lesson, and let students follow their interests. He expands on that in this short video:
"Children coming in and following what they're interested in has resulted in some of the most powerful learning experiences in my classroom. When a child chooses to understand more about the rocks they've brought in, the learning is deep. It takes time, we need to set that time aside. I've also enjoyed spending longer on some texts, and haven't been afraid to revisit the same texts further down the line. What kids produce after a second chance at a topic, later on in the school year, is so much better than what is learnt and produced in the timetabled time.
"And that is my wish - I wish we could find more flexible, alternative timetabling methods that allow students to do these kinds of things. We need longer periods of time, the ability to not finish a topic, but to revisit it months later."
One of the biggest issues in discussing the purpose of education in this borderless forum is revealed in our original challenge: we're preparing a discussion for "the election" (in Westminster, England) in three years' time when, for the five million of us who share the same island, the elections that really matter for education happen in 90 days. If you're in the US, you've barely got two years. In Canada… In Egypt… In India… In China…
In Scotland, education is managed by our own Parliament, not by those sitting 400 miles away in Westminster. And over the past year, after taking some of the ingredients suggested by this blogger, the SNP’s Government created Engage for Ed, a now burgeoning series of blog posts, provocations and discussions between ministers, parents, interest groups, teachers, students from our youth parliament and others from that amorphous glob we call The General Public. Has it had a tumultuous effect on policy? It's hard to say. University remains free to attend for Scottish students. The nearly new Curriculum for Excellence has had some more time, effort and money spent on it to heighten its potential impact in creating a 3-18 curriculum of student-led, passion-based learning. As all the parties sharpen the instruments in their manifesto toolbox we'll see how much the opinions and ideas of those online contribute to their vision for the purpose of education.
Government policy-making, cash injections and tinkering with frameworks of schooling can only have a limited impact on how teachers, parents and pupils perceive "what education is for". Ultimately, these three vital groups make up their minds based on what they see in the classroom and what they see in the connection (or lack of it) between what goes In School and what happens everywhere else in the community: the way students interact with their community on the walk home; the way they dive into working on personal projects that actually matter to them or argue with their parents over homework whose value no-one in this triangle of learning is particularly sure.
The desire to learn is woven into the concept of contentment and that, for me at least, is the basic purpose of any education system. Contentment can flourish into happiness, riches, recognition or any other myriad of emotional and material gain. But without a content society, with an ambition to continually discover and question the world around them throughout life, we end up with society's biggest enemies: complacency, stagnancy, apathy and ambivalence.
We have an ongoing contentment problem, and the answer to it lies in helping young people discover what their passions are, giving up the artificial reins we as teachers, parents and governments use to strangle those passions and the creativity that lends itself to their growth.
Harnessing entirely pupil-led, project-based learning in this way isn't easy. But all of this frames learning in more meaningful contexts than the pseudocontexts of your average school textbook or contrived lesson plan, which might cover an area of the curriculum but leave the pupil none the wiser as to how it applies in the real world.
There is a line that haunted me last year: while pupil-led, project-based learning is noble and clearly more engaging than what we do now, there is no time for it in the current system. The implication is that it leads to poorer attainment than the status quo. But attainment at High Tech High, in terms of college admissions, is the same as or better than private schools in the same area.
The assumption that pupil-led, project-based learning offers less success in exams is a false but persistent one. John Hunter was the anatomist who defined modern medicine because, frankly, no one else had. He had a saying that has since become the mantra of the modern surgeon: "Don't think. Try the experiment."
In the piece I cite just a few of the examples I've been lucky enough to see through 2010, and as a result I've started hearing about other maker-curricula on my own doorstep: Oliver Quinlan's students, described in his TeachMeet BETT talk as they created self-determined projects around the theme of London's Burning, is just one more prime example.
Dr. William Rankin is an associate professor of English and Director of Educational Innovation at Abilene Christian University in Abilene, Texas. He describes an amazing learning tool, a virtual learning environment so successful its engagement levels can be tranched as follows:
86% of participants use it for social knowledge construction
58% for system-based reasoning
37% for counter arguments
28% for harnessing data or evidence to win an argument
When teachers ask Karen Cator "when is all this technological change going to happen" she gives a tongue-in-cheek answer: August 2012. From the urgency in the US Education Department technology director's speech at London's Learning Without Frontiers Conference, you can tell she'd like to see it happen a lot quicker.
She compares the hunger of the 150,000 innovators from all over the world who came to CES in Las Vegas to what is going on in educaton. Consumer electronics is a world of massive change: in 2010 there wasn't one tablet on the lips of those innovation-hungry folk, this year there were more than 50 being trialled and talked about. There were 150,000 professional learners getting themselves gen-ed up.
Education, meanwhile, seems to currently lack that scalable innovation that the world of touch electronics and wireless mobile has achieved. Is there a way for us to create more scalable, higher quality learning in schools? Is there a way to instil in every teacher the notion that they are a lifelong learner, with a portfolio of learning and repertoire of their contributions to the learning of the profession? Cator, to put no fine a point on it, wants every teacher in America - and beyond - to a) learn how to teach better, b) share that learning with the world, online, in public, and c) ratchet up the professionalism of teachers by removing the ties that keep their hands behind their back as they try to teach. By this, she means moving teachers to a digital learning environment where educators have every technology and tool they need at their disposal. Mobile phones, the super computers in every child's pocket, she says, must be switched on.
The School of One is one example upon which Cator pulls to show how technology can help us do more than simply tinker with curriculum or assessment:
School of One re-imagines the traditional classroom model. Instead of one teacher and 25-30 students in a classroom, each student participates in multiple instructional modalities, including a combination of teacher-led instruction, one-on-one tutoring, independent learning, and work with virtual tutors.
To organize this type of learning, each student receives a unique daily schedule based on his or her academic strengths and needs. As a result, students within the same school or even the same classroom can receive profoundly different instruction as each student’s schedule is tailored to the skills they need and the ways they best learn. Teachers acquire data about student achievement each day and then adapt their live instructional lessons accordingly.
By leveraging technology to play a more essential role in planning instruction, teachers have more time to focus on doing what they do best - delivering quality instruction and insuring that all students learn.
But in order for this model of learning to scale we need to find ways of harnessing technology - multiplying the investment in people that made School of One possible is not going to work for the many. What needs constructed in order to make learning as engaging as a video game and as effective as a face-to-face tutor? How can feedback loops be improved?
Teachers need to be more widely connected to each other, and to expertise in the field. And they need access to resources just-in-time. We need to ratchet up the teaching profession.
Productivity is more or less guaranteed by activity pitched at the right level, at the right time for each individual student. We cannot expect this competency-based learning, at such an individual level, to succeed unless we have a Mission Critical infrastructure. And that includes the cell phones in every child's and teacher's pocket.
Over the past year I've been sharing techniques, ideas, examples and resources that help educators move from a content-based, curriculum-focussed world to one where we pass more control over to students to lead with their passions. Whether it's Gever Tulley's Tinkering School model, the Albany Senior High model of Impact Projects or one of the many examples in my talk at the Global Education Conference, I'm convinced that the only way we can encourage a generation to be more entrepreneurial in their learning habits throughout life is to indulge their passions throughout formal education.
I thought Marc's response was a good starting point for the discussion, one with which no educator, hand on heart, could disagree:
If you don't know what the passions of those in front of you are then you'll never know how to teach the people in front of you.
If you don’t know what your students passions are then you basically don’t know who is sitting in front of you and that makes teaching at a really deep level, I think difficult. Its never 30 separate passions its typically clusters of passions so one thing that you can do is to put people into clusters
There ought to be times in a day, maybe the days that a substitute teacher comes in when what you say to kids is ‘your job today, is to just learn more about what you are passionate in’ and it may have nothing to do with our curriculum but it is still important because you are going to find it valuable. ... If every teacher tomorrow or the next school day takes twenty minutes out of the day and says to every student ‘what are you passionate about?’ and writes it down and then thinks about it in the back of their mind how they can use that, education will be much improved overnight.
All too often I get asked at events and roundtable discussions whether I have any evidence for what I'm sharing. The answer is: "Of course, here it is...". When I turn the tables and ask school or university leaders what evidence they have for their decision-making, on the other hand, one is repeatedly reminded that most institutions don't do enough talking with and listening to their constituents. My favourite doubting question after any presentation is: "what about the students who don't own smartphones or laptops?". My response - "have you asked them if they own them?" - is normally met with slightly annoyed silence (and occassionally an excited: "let's do that tomorrow!")
The same goes for passions as for equipment. We cannot spend enough time asking our students what they have, what makes them tick, what they think of their learning and what they need help with.
Ewan McIntosh is a teacher, speaker and investor, regarded as one of Europe’s foremost experts in digital media for public services.
His company, NoTosh Limited, invests in tech startups and film on behalf of public and private investors, works with those companies to build their creative businesses, and takes the lessons learnt from the way these people work back into schools and universities across the world.
Do you worry that your school or district could better harness its people, digital technology or physical space? Do you want some actionable inspiration, a mentor for a learning journey with your staff?
In a keynote or masterclass we can give them concrete ideas based on experience, enthusiasm fired by a vision of what can be, and backup before and after to make it happen for them.
