Thoughts on International Education

There are few more pressing issues facing education, and humanity in general, than the environment. Us educators are a powerful bunch. We all know this, but when it comes to environmental activism our power manifests itself in an undeniably important way. At my school, well over 1,000 people come and go from campus on a daily basis. We have a serious carbon footprint as an organization. This footprint pales in comparison to the footprint that our students will leave on the world as they grow old. We can safely assume that most of our students will live for another 70 years, consuming and polluting as they go. We can also assume that our students, with the access that they will have to the world’s best universities and the opportunities that will open from there, will have considerable influence over others in days to come. Our environmental education has the effect of compound interest. By making our students good environmental stewards, we can have an exponential affect on shaping the future. Lowering the environmental impact of schools as organizations is critical to this education because it will teach students by example and set standards for the new normal. Any organizational efforts we can make to lower our environmental impact now is essential and any changes we make now will be small change compared to the vast impact education can have on our collective future.

Relationships are the oil that makes the machinery of schools run smoothly. In schools, to put it very crudely, our input is human (little people), almost all processing is human (the various permutations of teacher / student interactions) and the outcome is human (graduates). It is the most human of endeavors: this makes relationships paramount.

To paraphrase educational change guru Michael Fullan (who has the extremely rare distinction of being an internationally renowned intellectual and Canadian at the same time!), any change initiative within schools that does not improve relationships will not be successful in the long term. I have also read recently that researchers have found a correlation between the health / quality of professional relationships on staff and student learning. If true—and I must admit these two statements seem pretty obvious when you think about it—our schools should do everything possible to support the development of high quality professional relationships. International schools bring unique challenges in this regard as it is not uncommon to have over a dozen different nationalities of teachers on staff: all with their own unique experiences, styles and paradigms. Making relationships work in this context can be hard work; but it is essential.

Which brings me around to another reflection on the topic of relationships: email and blogging. Email is a great tool, but my experience has been that as a work tool it is generally relationship neutral (at best). Rarely do I see email interactions within a school improving relationships. Normally they just maintain them. However, I have seen a quite a few occasions where misinterpretation of an email damages relationships. Face-to-face communication on the other hand is often the best way I know of to improve relationships. And if the improvement of relationships is a goal unto itself, then we should be always looking for ways to improve relationships and getting away from our computer screens more often may be a partial answer.

But then there is blogging. I have been impressed to see that some people have actually been reading my blog. I have also received some very nice and interesting comments from people from around the world. This demonstrates first hand the power of Web 2.0 technologies. Through this technology I have been able to do something I could not have done before—connect with other interested professionals around the world and develop a relationship of sorts. This is very ‘cool’ and shows me a very new type of oil.

It has been noted that newborn babies are entirely dependent upon someone else to clothe, feed and change their diapers. And if that baby is lucky enough to live a long life, the same dependencies may again reappear in old age. This, I suppose, is the circle of life.

Like life, I think formal schooling’s approach to learning also completes a circle. A good early learning program will have a very constructivist approach, with an open and negotiated curriculum design. Advanced university degree programmes are also highly constructivist with learners formulating their own research questions and professors only serving as guides to the ‘answers’. In between, formal schooling often has varied degrees of more content-driven, prescribed curriculum framed by standards. In other words, you start with constructivism, and if you are lucky enough to survive formal schooling long enough you go back to it. Perhaps the Greeks had something like this in mind as the original word “curriculum” comes from the Greek word for ‘race track’.

The latest brain research provides another perspective on this observation. From birth to age five, humans experience a major synaptic growth period. Neural pathways are being formed and a constructivist approach to learning can harness these natural processes. But there is second, massive growth period that gets less press.

One of the most significant findings of modern neural research is the high level of synaptic growth that occurs in adolescents between the years of 10-15.  Adolescents go through a massive phase of neural growth at this time, and when you throw in the concurrent (and legendary) hormonal changes into the mix, the challenges of educating this group cannot be under-estimated. Middle school students are not simply short little high school students, nor tall primary students, they form their own distinct cohort and we are only beginning to recognize how different they are.

I would suggest then, that if one were to look at the academic education continuum and map this against neural development, there should be three key phases of strong constructivist emphasis: year 0-5; 10-15; advanced degrees. (The latter is justified not by brain research but instead by the assumption that a learner capable of advanced degree work has been fully readied for the challenges of full-on constructivism.) More prescribed and content driven curriculum should fit around these periods.  Thus, when the brain’s pathways are being developed, we should try to maximize this process.  Outside of these times, we should be aiming more to ‘fill the bucket’ with content knowledge and pushing students to develop their cerebral muscles in the form of higher level thinking skills.  Unlike most other schools around the world who are bound by political mandates and other restrictions, international schools are uniquely positioned to lead in this area.  I hope we do!