High tech, high touch
Innovation in Israel’s schools
Ravit Dom is General Manager of the Amal Group, a network of more than 120 schools educating students from all sectors of Israeli society. Amal, from the Hebrew word for labour. The Amal Group is the lead partner in the Ministry of Education’s ‘meaningful learning’ reforms, which aim to connect education with employment, utilising project-based learning as part of the academic evaluation process. Dom speaks passionately about her work. “A qualification is just a ticket,” she says, “but initiative is for life.”
A qualification is just a ticket,
but initiative is for life.
At the beginning of 2013 the Amal Group established an Entrepreneurship Centre with a strong high-tech slant within its high school in Hadera. The school has a student population of around 2,000 in 60 classes in the 14–17 age group, and the new centre aims to help around 70 11th and 12th grade students prepare for the demands of work, whether as employees or as founders of their own businesses.
In the last ten to fifteen years Hadera has grown in size, and Mayor Tzvika Gendelman sees the Amal Group model as central to his urban development programme. According to Hadera high school Principal Ilana Strahl the Entrepreneurship Centre’s influence on the city is so great that, “the Mayor is talking about opening more places like this, to give more children the opportunity to learn in such a way. I really hope that one day all schools will look like this, but we must have more support from industry, from the financial sector, they must contribute to schools.”
I tell our teachers every week
that the only way to learn is to make mistakes
Strahl believes that change is needed both in the subjects that are taught and the way that teaching and learning happen. Students must learn to be more independent, so that they leave school with the confidence to achieve whatever they want. She strongly supports the hands-on, project-based approach that the entrepreneurship centre exemplifies. “I tell our teachers every week that the only way to learn is to make mistakes. So if the children are afraid to make mistakes, they won’t learn. They’ll only answer the teacher’s questions if they’re 100% sure that they are right and it’s not the right way to learn.”
“In Israel we tend not to distinguish between universities and vocational schools,” says Oded Cohn, IBM Vice President and Director of Research in Haifa. “What made Israel a startup nation is three pillars; the universities and vocational schools, the venture capital investment in startups, and the presence of global companies. It’s not about each one of those ingredients alone, it’s the combination of them and the fact that our society is open and people are collaborative. That’s the mixture which eventually creates entrepreneurship and innovation. We are piloting an entrepreneurship education project with the Amal Group in Hadera, but in order to get the scale you need government support, because you will need changes in policy.”
This entrepreneurial community’s aim is to impart innovative and creative thinking skills in the Hadera Multi-disciplinary School and attract its graduates to stay in Hadera by exposing them to the real-life local business cycle in mobile application development and bio-med. The complex partnership is led by Amal, a non-governmental organisation, and includes local and national government, local and multi-national companies, research groups, parents, kindergartens and others.
Learn more about Hadera entrepreneurial community (FR) and the ETF project.
