Round Square shares BDS’ School Model

The following text was published in the last edition of the Newsletter distributed by Round Square among member schools all over the world.

Towards a New School Model
Summary of Chapter 4 in: Towards a New Education, by Alberto C. Taquini, PhD, et al.  Buenos Aires: BDS, 2014  (originally published in Spanish)

This BDS’ Model was presented and discussed at Harvard Graduate School of Education in August 2014, with a later authorities’ encounter in Harvard’s Project Zero Teachers’ Conference held in California (October 2014).  

Why a ‘New School’ is Needed
Dramatically significant social changes provoked by disruptive technological innovations have transformed higher education and the labour world, and therefore claim for an entirely new school model, the traditional “industrial school model” being no longer valid.

Schools should basically redefine their mission, transform their methods, make the most of virtual learning environments (duly blended with fruitful motivating face to face encounters), and, above all, help students “learn to learn” on an autonomous yet collaborative basis, for that is precisely what they will be due to do for the rest of their lives, in ever-changing contexts developing at faster and faster speed.

Belgrano Day School in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has been working in this direction for the last 12 years now, and has outlined a new school model around the great objective of learning to learn, applying it not only to students, but also to teachers and to the school as a whole. After all, how could a school possibly become a nurturing learning environment if the school itself does not become a “learning institution”? Only by example do we teach…

Key concepts in the new school model include:

• Various forms of blended learning and the flipped classroom.
• A switch from teacher-centred practices to students’- centred practices.
• An ever-growing Virtual Learning Environment (VLE, nurtured by teachers and students alike) making the most of cloud computing, social media, gamification, and “glocal” interactions with a flexible platform behind (we moved from Mooddle to Schoology this year). Some BDS projects that illustrate  this ample use of the VLE include: Micro-fiction contests using Twitter; a Facebook group for Model UN participants; the “Virtual statistics for real life” project; the “Dual Baccalaureate” Program with the US by which Middle & Senior students can take a few extracurricular online courses to obtain an American High School Diploma together with BDS’ Diploma & CIE qualifications; videoconference exchanges and shared projects with schools around the word (e.g. quad-blogging, a project on immigration in North and South America shared with a public school in Chicago, etc). We encourage pupils to bring their own device to school, as of grade 4.
• The use of Visual Thinking routines and Design Thinking methodology practices.
• Ongoing media literacy training as of Kindergarten (the school provides some ‘order’/ structure, and values- scale based reflection to what young children bring along naturally and intuitively, in terms of visual/audio-visual stimuli and skills).
• Hands-on experiences and field trips, also to be shared in the VLE, as a bridge from school to reality, and vice-versa.
• Growing autonomy and less supervision as students move on through the sections (Kindergarten, Primary, Middle & Senior –again, the frontiers between sections tending to blur, with more and more cross-section projects in progress, like a Robotics Workshop joining Primary and Middle School pupils together, the school play, or the BDS orchestra).
• New teaching roles and tasks. Despite natural resistance to change, the teaching profession has turned upside down, moving from “know-it-all” lecturing to ICT assisted new teachers’ roles as: facilitators/mediators between students and knowledge (understood as skills rather than as content/data, although skills do need content to set foot upon); information organizers and guides; one-to-one or group tutors, positive feedback evaluators, procedure rather than content-oriented models, etc.
  BDS believes in cross-discipline within the school model, and has hired professionals from various fields currently working with/as teachers: ICT system experts; business administrators; psychologists; communication specialists /journalists; an audio-visual designer; a professional librarian, researcher and document specialist; an educational specialist with an engineering background, etc. Diversity works wonders in schools, too!
• All of the above oriented towards learning to learn, the practice of human values (including RS Ideals), and internationalism on a global scale.
  Belgrano Day School actively promotes students’ exchanges with RS schools around the world, and looks forward to expanding its growing Exchange Program still further.

Having thus stated some of BDS’ Model highlights –not to be understood as a finished model, but rather as one under permanent construction-, let us now focus on what we mean by “learning to learn”, the ultimate educational goal.

Learning to Learn: the ABC

With “all the knowledge of the world” at hand in the cloud, what matters now is to help students reach it, choose what to grasp and what to disregard/discard, and to apply knowledge to problem-solving, in increasingly more complex scenarios.

The goal of learning to learn implies developing a) critical thinking skills, b) self-regulation skills and c) social skills —all to be used in real/virtual contexts (the difference between the two becoming dimmer and dimmer) on a “glocal” basis. Space and time barriers (i.e. school classrooms and timetables) also tend to fade away.

Critical thinking skills include conceptualizing, analysing, applying, synthesising, validating and evaluating information gathered from (or generated) by observation, direct experience, research, reflection, reasoning and/or communication in all its forms. Critical thinking is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subjectivity; principles like clarity, accuracy, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reason, depth, breadth, and fairness… Common sense. Yet “common sense” tends to be anything but common, and therefore needs to be trained. As neuroscience has so widely proved, the brain seems designed NOT to think (that is, to economize thought), and more often than not works on “automatic pilot” rather than creatively, while true critical thinking should foster creativity which, on the other hand, becomes all the more important in ever-changing scenarios.

Both meta-cognitive skills (understanding how we understand, “looking into” one’s own learning process) and affective aspects are intrinsic to learning to learn. Motivation is always affective: we are driven by emotions and affection, which get the learning mechanism started, and should therefore actively foster positive emotions, and  healthy affectionate intra / interpersonal bonds.

Self-regulation everything to do with dealing with one’s own emotions, passions and impulses. It involves the capacity to set up appropriate objectives (and persevere to achieve them), cognitive flexibility, attention control, suitable inhibition of impulses and quick information processing leading to fluency, efficiency and adequate response time.  It obviously develops gradually with maturity as of Kindergarten and through Primary school, the Middle & Senior years being best described as of “high horse power” but still poor stirring … Training (and trusting) teenagers’ autonomy is indeed a major challenge!

Both critical thinking skills and self-regulation flourish (and are best put to the test) in interpersonal / social on and offline contexts. The most significant learning situations occur in collaborative environments.

To read more about how these principles are brought down to earth in everyday school activities, visit our site and blog: www.bds.edu.ar .

Source:
(Spanish full version of) El Modelo Belgrano Day School. Hacia una nueva educación.
Full English version of Chapter 4, “Towards a New School”.