Innovation on the frontlines: on being agile, being online and being in the future.
Dr Peter Thomas, (then writing as founding director of HaileyburyX), with Lauren Sayer, (former director of Digital Learning at Haileybury and now Executive Director, Digital Learning, Research and Innovation at Melbourne Girls Grammar).
For anyone, and everyone, working in a school over the past few weeks, it has been an unprecedented time.
Whether you are a teacher, a leader, or support a school organisation in IT, digital learning or student care, you will have done extraordinary things.
We want to offer a perspective on the extraordinary from our own experience, and from our own context, in the hope it might be useful, or at least interesting.
One thing we have learned is that we are all in it together.
Haileybury
Haileybury is a school of five Australian campuses and one in China. We have 6,000 students and 1,000 staff. Like everyone, we are now moving online at a pace that no-one thought possible.
Before 2020 we already understood the role of online in the future of learning and teaching.
We have Zoom across our campuses; 8,000 courses on our Canvas LMS supporting a range of blended learning experiences; a mature digital learning strategy consisting of digital learning leaders, instructional designers and supported by an experienced team of digital learning specialists across the school, themselves teachers. We also have our organically growing edtech, HaileyburyX, which is developing online learning for students beyond our school.
However, recent events have shown that, prepared or not, moving to online is a complex and extraordinarily challenging task.
The internet is awash with either helpful advice or sage predictions for the future of learning and teaching. We are reading most of them.
We don’t want to add unnecessarily to the volume of often insightful advice, but here are some things we have learned about being agile, being online and being in the future.
We will return to it later, but we think that, based on what we have seen in our school and what we see globally, the future for education — starting now, today — will be a time of extraordinary flourishing.
The shape of the day
One thing everyone encountered immediately — and maybe within the first day, or less — of teaching online, was that the shape of the teaching day can no longer be the same.
Expecting our students to be present, engaged and productive for long periods, whatever the conferencing platform, whatever the technology, is not realistic.
Our teachers, like many teachers around the world, have been reacting tactically to the situation based on their on-the-ground, in-the-moment, assessment of what works, or doesn’t.
We’ve been using daily question stems and forums for students and teachers which have allowed us to collect large amounts of data to inform where we need to go next. Data straight from our students will ensure we are on track.
From this, there will be a whole range of different solutions that emerge to the shape of the day problem which will present challenges to current practice and curricula.
One solution will be to mandate a single, revised structure; another will be to allow for flex according to the subject, the teacher, the students and the use of a wider range of differentiated materials.
We’ll talk about this later in detail, but we think that we will rapidly pivot from real-life/online blending to online/online blending as a core part of our practice.
Being Agile
We have at Haileybury been working on upskilling on new work systems, specifically Agile.
We have written about this before, but having tools and principles for rapid delivery of value is more needed than ever before. Whether this is large-A Agile or small-a being agile, teachers need to iterate rapidly based on very immediate student feedback.
The challenge here is not to just be agile — but to communicate much more effectively.
We, probably like many schools, have been hosting daily, often several times daily, Zoom standups to share emerging best practice across our teams, subjects and our school. Some of our teams have built Kanban-style boards to capture learnings and to show and manage work in progress.
In our own case, we urgently needed to create a portal to support our transition to online, and specifically to ensure our school community got the best possible up to date communications. Our digital learning team, using Agile principles and tools, were able to deliver an MVP in six hours, followed by daily iterations.
Whatever approach one takes, time and attention are precious commodities, and whatever we can do to use the first more effectively and maximise the second, is going to be necessary. We started on the Agile path with our Microcredential in Agile Learning Design for our teachers. Our plans to offer this for any teacher, in Australia and then globally, may turn out to have been prescient. We don’t yet know.
Whether teachers become Agile, or just are more agile, what comes next will be infused with a sense of urgency and purpose around being student-centric like never before.
Curriculum design
Perhaps the critical challenge is curriculum design.
Just as previous ways of working are not sustainable, just as the shape of the day will likely need to change, curricula will and must change.
And this is where we see the flourishing will take place. Inventive, creative, resourceful teachers, in partnership with their engaged, independent, resourceful students, will act in concert to change the curriculum for online, and forever.
Back in the distant past of 10 days ago, one of our teachers did something which we found extraordinary, and extraordinarily funny.
A Mexican wave, on Zoom, with her students. Everyone laughing, everyone surprised at this newly-discovered opportunity for delight and, as we socialised it across the school, a sense of shared discovery of a small moment of joy.
10 days ago. Now we have a huge number of instances that go beyond the simple and delightful and into the complex and potentially far-reaching.
How do you teach a class on Wordsworth’s ‘My Heart Leaps Up…’ online? You invite students into a Zoom room, break them off into study groups with video and other materials on Canvas, while in the main room you hold a live instruction session for other teachers who then step into the breakout rooms as observers of the student groups. Hugely innovative, hugely successful and a practice that can be iterated on to improve how successful it is in supporting student learning.
These are two instances of successful tactical responses to online, but in order to be the most successful we can be, we will need strategic design for what the curriculum needs to be.
A part of the strategic design imperative is that blended learning needs to be completely reconfigured for online.
The blends now are not of online/offline activities but a richer set of content and experiences that deliver on student learning outcomes. Some of these will be very different uses of student interaction and engagement, like the Wordsworth example. Some of them will be about not just developing content but more effective curation using new tools that are yet to be developed. And some of them will be about rethinking what a subject looks like from the ground up.
Neither the technology and how we use it, nor the curricula we design, will emerge the same.
Superteachers
Nor will teachers.
We have written before on the idea of superjobs. We said:
Superjobs, even though created out of disruption, are a good thing. They point the way towards not a technology-centred, but a more human-centred organisation where principles like purpose, fairness, growth, collaboration and transparency can thrive. These are the principles necessary to ensure the best use of new technologies.
Teachers will become superteachers, able to not just navigate technology but to create unique interplays of technology, content and learning that are profoundly human-centered.
In our upcoming Teachers of the Future podcast, we talked to teacher Charles Coombe in San Diego, who hit the internet news with his innovative use of the game Half Live:Alyx to teach angles. While it might have been an opportunistic use of a game released a few days earlier, it was really part of his mission to use his own passions to ignite his students’ passions for learning (one YouTube comment said “This man just tricked me into watching an entire 6th-grade math lesson”).
But teachers have lots of tools to help them. Some of the most useful are those that support transparency and collaboration. In our own case, we have seen the benefits of tools like Trello that can make it much easier to make visible and share work.
It also means that we now have the possibility to move beyond individual work to truly collaborative work or what might be called scenius, the term coined by musician Brian Eno:
“Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius. Individuals immersed in a productive scene will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenes, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.”
On the future
Everyone, it seems, has a view of the future.
Some will be wildly inaccurate, some will be almost-truth, and some will be accurate. Here, for what it is worth, is ours.
We think that out of necessity, but also out of desire, learning and teaching will flourish, not diminish.
We will, very quickly, drop the word ‘online’ completely so what we do from now is just learning and teaching.
We will see a flourishing of new types of tools that support learning and teaching because the edtech industry will seek out new opportunities to deliver value when the economics of the new education play out.
Schools, and the best school leaders, will — as they have been doing — challenge some deeply-held assumptions and adapt.
And teachers will become agile superteachers, channelling their passion for teaching into new and innovative learning experiences embedded in new and innovative curricula.
