Редакция журнала «Позитивные изменения»
Позитивные изменения. Образование. Школа будущего. Тематический выпуск, 2022 / Positive changes. Education. The school of the future. Special issue, 2022
Modeling the School of the Future: A Study of Existing School Practices by the Positive Changes Factory
DOI 10.55140/2782–5817–2022–2-S1–73–87
The share of private schools in the total number of educational institutions has increased almost 2.5-fold over the past two decades, according to a study by the Institute of Education of the National Research University Higher School of Economics. In many ways, this was a response to the market demand, with the parents becoming increasingly aware of the limitations and shortcomings of an education based on the average public school model – especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, when schooling moved home. Numerous new educational approaches that are actively offered, primarily by private schools, – especially those that classify as “alternative” schools – are another response to this demand.
Ivan Smekalin
Analyst, Positive Changes Factory
Such schools are often started by parents for their children in response to a situation where no satisfactory option exists in the market. All this raises multiple questions: What awaits the School in the future? What should it be like? Can it be different from what it is now? These and other questions were discussed in the Positive Changes Factory’s study on the School of the Future model.
DESIGN OF THE STUDY
A desk review of publications was conducted to develop a conceptual framework within which the school education could be described. In the preparatory part of the study, the authors consider sources of information about modern approaches to the organization of school education in Russia and abroad. These included both theoretical sources describing various concepts, which were used later to formulate the questionnaire guide, and narratives illustrating important case studies of educational models.
Based on the concepts highlighted, an expert questionnaire guide was compiled, with the purpose of providing meaningful content based on school case studies. A total of 20 experts from different segments of the field under study were interviewed. This included representatives of the teaching community, authors of their own educational concepts, specialists in education management. The objective of the survey was to compare different viewpoints on the prospective development of educational practices in the school and to produce a framework that would enable us to describe the school education process, so it can be modeled subsequently in the context of the School of the Future.
The case study examined 27 private general secondary education institutions and public schools with educational models different from that of a regular secondary general school (SGS). Having this sample enabled us to follow the strategy of greatest differences in case selection – without claiming to cover the entire general population, we are supposed to consider their differences rather than their similarities.
Further, the highlighted criteria formed the basis for describing the key models of school education. The models are instrumental in highlighting "growth points”, which are used to formulate a forward-looking model of the School of the Future and its characteristics.
Thus, the School of the Future model logically follows from the concepts derived from reviewing the existing educational research through expert interviews and the synthesis of selected educational characteristics into the criteria of educational models. A description of the study stages and the relationship between them is presented in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Map of the study
CRITERIA FOR SELECTING AND ANALYZING SCHOOL EDUCATION MODELS
As noted earlier, a guide was developed for the expert survey based on a desk study. The main concepts in the expert survey were:
• expected educational outcomes of the School of the Future students (knowledge, abilities and skills, or others);
• criteria for classifying the cases of existing general secondary education institutions, as suggested by the experts;
• educational models based on the criteria identified.
EXPECTED EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES (KEY KNOWLEDGE, ABILITIES AND SKILLS)
The questions were worded so as to suggest focusing on discussing specific extracurricular skills, not the academic knowledge (which is quite difficult to list). As one expert said, "the future remains unexplored," so it is quite expected that cognitive flexibility was the most frequently cited skill of the future. The ethical basis for this flexibility is respect for the others and a culture of tolerance for others’ values. Tolerance is important, not only for the other, but also for yourself, for your own mistakes, which become part of learning.
However, in addition to the learning abilities, the experts named some specific skills that are not commonly taught in school now, but which would be extremely useful to a person in life today and in the future. One of these is the content skill, which is both an educational element, designed to move away from the lecture format, and an element of project activity, the logic of which the member of the society of the future has to learn. In this chaotic world, where one has to be flexible and adaptive, it is important to learn the practices of self-care – for which it is important to have knowledge of good nutrition, cooking and one’s own resources.
Below is a list of key competencies named by the experts that a School of the Future student should possess. Each competency was named by at least two experts.
Extracurricular competencies
• Cognitive flexibility: the ability to acquire new knowledge and to solve new, non-typical problems using existing learnings
• Intuition: the ability to rely on a "gut feeling”
• Respect and understanding of the value of oneself and the others
• Maintaining and developing motivation for learning
• A culture of tolerance for mistakes (own and the others’) and uncertainty
Specific knowledge, skills and abilities
• Understanding the basic functioning mechanisms of the world around us, historical processes
• Linguistic skills for learning foreign languages
• Self-management skills and self-care practices
• Basics of Cooking and Nutritional Science
• Creative skills, content skills
CRITERIA FOR CLASSIFYING SCHOOL EDUCATION MODELS
Based on the expert survey, three groups of criteria were identified: pedagogical, inclusive, and economic.
The pedagogical criteria reflect the curriculum features: personalization, focus on academic knowledge or soft skills, distance between student and teacher, communication style with students and parents. In a broad sense, this group of criteria refers to the personalization parameters of the education process.
Inclusivity, in the broad sense, is put in a separate category of criteria as a description of accessibility/comfort of education for children with special needs[11], financial affordability for the target audience, and accessibility in terms of admission (level of "selectivity”).
Economic criteria were proposed mainly by specialists in education management, who viewed the school model not only from the educational viewpoint, but also as a market product. Therefore, this aspect includes features of the market offer: how busy the child is at school and whether he/she can attend additional classes (sections, circles, etc.), and whether the model is financially sustainable and scalable.
Below is a list of the key criteria named by experts in evaluating school models:
Pedagogical criteria
• The possibility of curriculum personalization: not possible, profiling is available (profiling classes can be attended, to choose further direction of study), a fully flexible curriculum is developed that takes into account the interests and needs of the student (individual disciplines can be chosen, not overall directions)
• Discipline content dependent on the choice of educational outcome: focus on academic knowledge vs soft skills
• Style of communication with students: teacher as a coach vs lecturer
• Communication style with parents: dashboards vs simple grades
• Opportunity to enter a university (in Russia and abroad)[12] after education: yes or no
Inclusivity
• Accessibility for inclusive children: accessible or not
• Affordability: affordability for the target audience
• Selection process: yes or no
Economic criteria
• The child's occupation in school: first half of the day, optional classes, all-day studies
• The need for additional services to enable financial sustainability: yes or no
• Scalability: yes or no
OVERVIEW OF SCHOOL EDUCATION MODELS AND THEIR QUALITIES
PUTTING THE SCHOOL EDUCATION MODEL CRITERIA INTO OPERATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
In accordance with the model assessment criteria highlighted previously, based on the review of comparative educational studies and the results of the expert survey, it was decided to summarize them as per the list below. The alignment of school models with each criteria was evaluated on a 1 to 3 scale:
LIST OF EDUCATIONAL MODELS
During the expert surveys, interviewees named a set of school models. Based on this set, reference models were selected, taking into account the frequency of expert mentions, the breadth of their practical application, and the clarity of the framework:
1. The standard Russian public secondary general school (SGS) – as a reference point and for comparison purposes.
2. A public school with profiling classes is currently the most common modification of the mass school model in Russia.
3. The British model.
4. The International Baccalaureate is a modified international version of the British model.
5. Alternative Schools.
6. The Asian model – mentioned by the experts quite commonly, the criteria mainly applying to the Singapore experience.
7. The Finnish model.
MODEL VISUALIZATION
After reviewing the literature, conducting expert interviews, and analyzing the cases of different schools, each school education model identified was assigned a score from 1 to 3 for each of the 7 criteria named above. Below are spider diagrams visualizing the full list of models and assigned scores by each criteria.
Visualizations demonstrate several important results.
First, we can notice that the focus on "soft skills” and focus on University admission never occur together in the same models; that is, they are supposedly determining the priority educational outcomes.
Second, in a broad sense, inclusivity remains a weakness in all models, even those that imply personalization.
Finally, we can see similarities in the following model pairs: the Russian and Asian models, which focus heavily on academic success; the Finnish model and the model of alternative schools focusing on "soft skills"; the British model and the International Baccalaureate as an attempt to frame soft-skills education academically.
We use spider charts to emphasize the multidimensional space of educational models. Each criteria lies in its own conceptual plane. Nevertheless, to put these models in the operational perspective, we tried to reduce the number of dimensions.
Building a single scheme to classify educational models is difficult because they differ in many ways. A striking example cited by an expert from the Institute of Education of the National Research University Higher School of Economics here would be the very different educational systems of Finland and Shanghai: while they both rank near the top in terms of educational outcomes, this is achieved through different tools – the humanistic approach in Finland and the «drilling» of the mass education system in China. It is necessary to build such a chart that could show the meaningful differences between educational models.
Components of the School Education Models
In this case, two possible dimensions could be "Centralization vs Decentralization" and "Personalization vs Massiveness". These vectors will be used to classify models based on the criteria formulated.
Chart 1. Decentralisation and Individualisation of the School Education Models
The «Personalization» vector consists of the following criteria:
• Ability to personalize the curriculum
• Educational Inclusivity
• Tracking Learning Achievements
The «Decentralization» vector consists of the following criteria:
• The teacher’s role as a mentor
• School as a center for community development
Two of the seven criteria formulated above were omitted from the above integrative vectors. These are "Soft Skills" and "Entering a University", which cannot act as components of the aforementioned vectors but describe separate, complementary attributes.
Below is a scatter chart visualizing the complete list of models and their scores along the «Personalization» and «Decentralization» axes. The number of points for each vector is obtained by adding the points scored by the model for the criteria included in the respective vector (axis). That is, for example, for the "Alternative Schools” model, the total score on the "Personalization” axis is obtained by adding this model’s scores in the following three criteria: curriculum personalization, educational inclusivity and tracking learning achievements. 3 points + 2 points + 3 points = 8 points, and so on.
The chart shows how the models relate to each other in terms of a certain set of criteria. Thus, we can see that the Russian state SGS model differs from the Asian model primarily in the degree of personalization, with the same centralization level. The chart also shows that the aforementioned model pair of alternative and Finnish schools also differs in only one plane: that is, the degree of decentralization. Remarkably, the International Baccalaureate, being a modification of the British model of education, makes a step towards alternative schools and the Finnish model in terms of decentralization and personalization.
Qualitative feedback systems help understand one’s educational path and make the learning more conscious. It is important expanding the teacher’s role as a mentor.
PROSPECTIVE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE MODEL
Based on the highlighted criteria in the analysis of school education models, the content and the qualities of the existing educational models, we put forward several hypotheses as to what the educational model of the School of the Future should include.
Project-oriented and problem-oriented technologies of education were the starting points of this study and are the key pedagogical technologies of today. They were the keynote of all the interviews and are the most general idea: to go away from classroom-lesson system toward the study of some topic in which the students get an interdisciplinary view of a specific problem researched. Project-based learning involves setting a goal for which students must independently learn new things. Of the motives left out so far, two main directions can be distinguished: 1) inclusivity in the broad sense; 2) personalization of the educational trajectory.
The School of the Future is an inclusive school open to children with a wide range of academic skills. On the one side of the scale, it includes children with special educational needs who are supported by specialists from the resource center – neuropsychologists, speech therapists, and psychologists. On the other side of the spectrum are children who manage to learn faster than others. To create a supportive environment for children of different learning speeds, mobile study groups can be created for students with different levels of achievement in different subjects so that everyone can receive the appropriate level of instructional material.
Personalization of the educational trajectory can be achieved not just through profiling classes, but through the development of a fully flexible, personalized curriculum, which the tutors help to develop. Qualitative, not quantitative, feedback systems help understand one’s educational path and make the learning more conscious. It is important to reduce the distance between the student and the teacher, expanding the teacher’s role as a mentor.
Following the peculiarities of the method for creating private schools, as described by the experts, we can conclude that the key feature of the educational model of the future is not to offer specific curriculum elements of academic disciplines, but to offer criteria for developing models for each specific school.
The methodological support for the teaching team can be provided by the "Academic Board”, a project group of people with experience in launching effective educational projects. To follow and localize the model, to train teaching teams and tutors, a methodological center can be set up. As an autonomous unit and a project team, this center is presented as an environment within which teaching teams will be created in schools. The teaching team at the school cannot be a thing in itself; training and education for teachers, including from students, are provided for this purpose. This design is focused primarily on the format of mass implementation of innovative school programs, in circumstances where there is no opportunity to attract a "celebrity principal" or assemble an equally «stellar» team of teachers, as is common with the opening of new private schools today.
A special feature of the school of the future is that, in addition to the teaching load, its goal is to form a student's portfolio of social activities, in which he or she will be assisted by mentor teachers within the school and by socially responsible projects in the school's community. Community engagement is expected to play an important role: the community centers and the school’s teaching committee will create additional education opportunities for the students, organize internships, and engage new mentors and tutors.
DISCUSSION ABOUT THE SCHOOL OF THE FUTURE
The question of what the school of the future will be like remains open. This can be demonstrated at least by a few experts saying that it is unproductive to single out any particular set of skills and competencies for the student of the future. Speaking of the model school of the future, it is necessary to understand that it is impossible to imagine the future in which the students of this school will live, to begin with. Therefore, the school of the future cannot exist in isolation from the needs of the students and their parents, business and the teaching community, and the social context, and one of the most important qualities for the school of the future is flexibility and openness to change and innovation. The school is becoming more than just a place to teach children academic skills, but a community center that engages not only students, but also their parents and residents within the neighborhood and from other parts of the city.
Future skills are by definition versatile and flexible skills that can come handy in a variety of contexts. The School of the Future teaches us not to put life on hold, but to live a community life within the school walls. Its values are responsibility for your own personal track and for your community.
GLOSSARY OF TERMS FOR COMPARING SCHOOL MODELS
Describing the cases and features of the educational process requires using reference categories from the terminology of comparative educational studies.
Project-based learning focuses on learning to handle practical problems. The student is engaged in the material through product development activities and through team interaction (Kazun, Pastukhova, 2018).
Problem-based learning represents a shift away from school subjects toward a more topical grouping of material. Students are presented with a problem and theoretical material required for solving it. The model implies high autonomy in the study of theoretical material, the motivation to learn, which is reinforced through the relevance of the problem (Ermakova, 2014).
Inquiry-based learning focuses on a central question that the student is asked to answer independently, under the teacher’s supervision. In this model, the emphasis is made not on theoretical material, but on the methods of independently answering a question (Pedaste, 2015).
The cases of schools with the pedagogical technologies listed above differ positively from the average school – not just in student grades, but in the very structure of the educational process and educational outcomes, which are interpreted more broadly than mere subject knowledge.
Educational technologies, as a set of tools to achieve educational outcomes in organizational terms, are formalized in the form of organizational models. Organizational models of schools as a way of organizing curricula, functions, and opportunities can be categorized into the types described below.
The school is becoming more than just a place to teach children academic skills, but a community center that engages students, their parents and residents from other parts of the city.
Small learning communities are based on a model in which a small learning group pursues its own personalized curriculum and is assigned to a set of teachers. The pedagogical effect is enhanced by building a sense of community among the students and between students and teachers. The small communities tool is used at the Orange School (Haynes, 2011).
The academy model sees the school as a pre-university institution, where the teacher is a leader and the student is an individual to be developed. The model involves student self-assessment and a focus on developing academic skills for university admission. The model is also characterized by its linkage with the practical sector to provide career guidance for students and continuing professional education for teachers. The Tanglin Trust School of Singapore, with its structured grading system and focus on university admissions, resembles this model in foreign practice (Hall, Clappe, 2016).
Integrated learning moves away from school subjects and is associated with problem-based learning: students take an interdisciplinary approach to a subject area, developing skills and knowledge in several disciplines at once. The so-called «Finnish» model of education fits this description (Gürkan, 2021).
It is assumed that each organizational models described above can be formulated with the help of specific criteria and can cover specific cases. The advantage of these organizational models is that they give a formal description of the educational models, leveling out country and topical differences.
REFERENCES
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3. Kazun, A., & Pastukhova, L. (2018). The practices of project-based learning technique application: experience of different countries. Education and science, 20(2), 32–59. (In Russian). https://doi.org/10.17853/1994–5639–2018–2–32–59
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6. Haynes, J. (2011). The Impact of the Small Learning Community Model on the Students, Teachers, Administrators, and the Overall Culture of High Schools. ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. Jones International University. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/openview/429f8cf09f5d5f5302c1e649e37338c5/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750
7. Hall, T., & Clappe, A. (2016). North Dakota's Experience with the Academy Model: A Successful Replication. Educational Considerations, 43(4). https://doi. org/10.4148/0146–9282.1009
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