Project-Based Learning: Bringing the Real World into the Classroom
Project Based Learning (PBL) is nothing new, but it has recently resurfaced as a reliable and meaningful way to both engage all students and focus on deeper learning. Drawing on constructivist and experiential learning methods, PBL focuses students on meaningful task completion that is different from simply “doing projects” in the classroom. In fact, […]
The Promise and Challenges of Education in Sub-Saharan Africa
Whether or not we live in Africa, all of our futures will be affected by the success or failure of education on the continent. Progress has been made, but not enough. Around two years ago, we decided to start an investment and advisory group, Caerus Capital, drawing on our mutual experience working with the International Finance […]
The Urgent Need for Innovative Solutions in Education
My first teacher was my mother. This is not just because my mother taught me how to make my way in the world, but because she started the school I attended throughout my childhood. The school was a simple but tidy place, about a mile from my childhood home and steeped in my mother’s Christian […]
Encouraging More Play-Based Learning
“Play is the highest form of research.” — Albert Einstein Early childhood education (ECE) is a new and growing field of study and research in Qatar. However, there is a growing body of literature and research that demonstrates that both the quantity and quality of care and interaction that a child has in the early years […]
Restoring Hope, Rebuilding Futures: the Vital Role of Education
Special Focus : Accelerating Innovation in Refugee Education Migration and displacement dominate our news media, and for good reason: launching its annual Global Trends study, UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency reported that that 65.6 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide at the end of 2016 – a total bigger than the population of the United Kingdom. 22.5 […]
Making Early Education a Priority for Refugee Children
The United Nations calls the Syrian refugee crisis the greatest humanitarian crisis of our time. Within this context, one problem is front and center: the lost generation of children, forced from their homes by war, their lives and hopes blighted by trauma and destruction, their basic right to education unfulfilled. And we know that […]
Simple Questions, Complex Challenges
We have spent too many years now speaking of the need to transform the education model, a model that is failing to meet the needs of the third millennium. While many sectors are suffering disruption of their activities, the education sector seems to be comfortably ensconced in its ancestral ways. The small adjustments that […]
The Death of Education, But the Dawn of Learning
Education is dauntingly complex. There are simply SO many variables. Even a windy day changes the whole school. We also know from today’s greater knowledge of physiology and cognition that relatively small changes in temperature, hydration, noise, light levels and more can profoundly impact on attention and learning in one part of a room, […]
How Movement Improves Intelligence
Want smarter kids? Let them move! In too many classrooms around the globe, children are expected to sit through the day while passively absorbing huge amounts of information. A quiet, almost petrified student has been synonymous with concentration and productivity. Sometimes, even sitting up is not enough; children are required to avoid any “unnecessary” noise […]