Leading in Crisis: The Tensions that Forge
Special Focus : Reimagining Education for a Better Future Working successfully through crisis depends on real leadership. As unpredictability flows across every organizational plane, school leaders are tested emotionally, cognitively, and practically. This has been no more apparent than through the fragility induced by the ongoing coronavirus emergency. The crisis has generated conditions throughout our communities […]
The Fundamental Shift Needed to Transform Education
The cries are resounding: “Education must emerge from this global crisis transformed.” For most of us making those calls, what we mean by transformed is, ultimately: more human (and within that notion, we include more equitable). We are echoing the cries of John Dewey and countless other educators for over a century that our global system of forced, […]
Learning for a New World
As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, so do the risks we face. The COVID-19 pandemic has not stopped at national borders, and affected people regardless of nationality, level of education, income or gender. But that has not been true for its consequences, which have affected the most vulnerable hardest. Education has been no exception. Those from privileged […]
Love the Questions
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves…, Live the questions now. –Rainer Maria Rilke Revisiting Rilke’s advice to love and live questions prompted my own reflection on our current task of developing answers to the many questions requiring an urgent response at the expense of identifying […]
Future-ready Learners’ Outcomes and Assessment
As schools strive to be relevant and globally connected, school reform takes on both local and international contexts. International contexts have become widely associated with comparative results from international tests, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which purport to measure certain aspects […]
Using the Crisis to Reimagine Educational Systems and Practices
The Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman once wrote: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically […]
Creating a Better Future Through Equality in Education
‘Civilization is a race between education and catastrophe.’ – H.G. Wells Over 1 billion children are out of school in over 140 countries around the world due to COVID-19. Schools, teachers and governments have responded in creative ways to ensure students continue their education during this difficult time. EdTech companies are offering their products for free to […]
Accelerating Action for System-Change in Education
The apparent pause in the earth’s spinning brought about by the global Coronavirus pandemic, is a time for profound reflection and reappraisal of the most fundamental things we used to take for granted. It is a time to recalibrate our values and the entrenched socio-cultural norms and misguided priorities according to which we have been […]
The New Success for our Learning Future
Crises both disrupt and reveal. Every single human being across our globalized world has been impacted by COVID-19, and this moment has revealed deep structural inequities and outdated principles and priorities across societies. This is particularly true for our understanding of schooling, and how it reflects our emerging learning economies. If this moment offers us […]
Thoughts from the Frontline of COVID-19’s Education Crisis
Rarely in human history does an event help expose the inadequacies of our systems all at once. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed failings across the board. In the words of United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, COVID-19 is ‘‘exposing fallacies and falsehoods everywhere: The lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all; the fiction that unpaid […]