Ideas for sustainable school education explored at QF’s Teaching & Learning Forum
RECOMMENDATIONS that could help make learning in schools more resilient have been explored in the second phase of atar Foundation’s ( F) Teaching Learning Forum, as educators gathered online to look at the actions they can potentially take.
Held by the Education Development Institute (EDI), part of F’s Pre
niversity Education, the first stage of the forum which took place in October saw participants tackling the question of how learning can be made more sustainable both amid and after COVID-19.
The newly published recommendations developed under six streams
Personalising Teaching and Learning Building Inclusive and Accessible Learning Communities Fostering Community and Individual Wellbeing Glocalizing the Curriculum Identifying and Solving Problems and Redefining Communication have now been analysed to assess how they can potentially be taken forward within schools, curriculums and specific education areas.
Speaking at the second stage of the forum, Dr Abdulaziz Al Horr, director of the Diplomatic Institute at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said: “The issue of identity is a worldwide concern, and the challenges differ between societies.
“We cannot import a specific identity-making project and apply it on a certain community, as we must have sufficient understanding of our society
its data, its strengths and weaknesses, its history and geography to enable us to formulate a proper national identity project. There are societies that have already succeeded in finding solutions to reach a common concept of identity.
“Building a national identity is not
a state project, but rather a community one. Creating an identity requires a lot of societal, practical and behavioural projects and programmes, not just knowledge content that we communicate to children and test them on.”
Also speaking at the forum was Eric Sheninger, associate partner with the International Center for Leadership in Education, whose work is focused on how the digital age can move schools forward.
“How do we create schools that work for kids, whether or not we’re in a pandemic ” Sheninger asked. Explaining how the Fourth Industrial Revolution is defined by automation, advanced robotics, and Artificial Intelligence such as Siri and Alexa Sheninger explained how students in today’s world need digital skills for the future.
Participants in the forum also heard from Dan Kindlon, a faculty member at Harvard niversity and founder of Edumetrics Inc., a company that helps schools to assess students, teachers and their environment and education specialist and activist Nayla Khader Hamadeh, president of the Lebanese Association for History, whose work is focused on designing and implementing new approaches to teaching history.
A total of 58 recommendations across the six streams have emerged through the forum, with those relating to ‘glocalising’ curriculums including linking what is taught in schools to the
N Sustainable Development Goals and atar’s primary challenges using local issues as the basis for learning opportunities offering “authentic” learning experiences through schools teaming up with organizations in fields such as industry, environment, and culture and creating partnerships between schools within atar and beyond to understand global issues from different perspectives.
Ideas for shaping the personalisation of teaching and learning included providing students with the opportunity to have a say in lesson planning, forming closer connections with parents to ensure they recognise their role in their child’s education and setting aside time for social conversations with students, as well as academic ones. In making learning communities more inclusive and accessible, participants suggested pathways such as creating interdisciplinary projects that allow students to learn from people with different skillsets, and promoting student agency through greater self-monitoring and involvement in setting goals.