Innovation and Educational Public Policy
“Everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same”.
This famous quote from Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard 🐆 highlights a strong paradox : an apparent change of societal and political system might hide a certain immobilism. This discrepancy between willingness to reform and the effective reality should thus lead the cautious observer to take parsimoniously speech about innovation.
In fact, the term “innovation” is in a way a buzzword 💡 In the field of education, it is frequently used with tons of other buzzwords : just have a look at the hashtags of my medium profile:“#Education #CognitiveScience #CriticalThinking #PublicPolicy #DigitalTransformation”. They are trendy to use and widely shared by a large bunch of stakeholders — researchers, teachers, entrepreneurs, parents, policy makers… . Of course, each of us agrees on the necessity of implementing new pedagogies such as flipped classrooms ; teaching digital skills ; or promoting soft skills such as empathy or creativity…. But what concrete reflexions and actions stand behind those words? Is it really possible to truly innovate in the French educational system?
If the Ministry of Education can still be perceived as a stationary and prehistoric “mammoth” 🐘 difficult to move — as already criticized by Claude Allègre in 1997 to target the rigidity of the central administration and to strongly advocate, on the contrary, for the decentralization of the system — it has to be pointed out that several great initiatives have been implemented in the past few years. For instance, in 2013 and 2014, different working groups have been created to foster innovation and experimentation in schools. A new digital direction (i.e. the DNE) has even been implemented and has triggered some interesting realisations, such as the “Numérilab” to incubate digital projects or the “Experithèque” which aims at making an inventory of educational experimentations through France’s “régions”. The creation of the Canopé network and of the DANE mission (Academic Delegation of Digital Education) can also be listed. If all these attempts reveal a clear willingness for educational innovations, their approach remain too institutional and top-down. They thus encounter difficulties in creating deep links between local actors, in competing with digital transformations and in defending the commons.
That being said, there is still room nonetheless for being optimist and thinking about effective innovations in the educational system through a bottom-up approach.
In the context of our Innovation in Education class, we were 6 students of the Master EdTech to think about this issue: Divya Singh, Celia P-a, Manuela N. Moritz, Pascal Kolbe, Elizabeth Adjei and I, Manon Berriche. Our current reflexion reported here is part of a case-study lead by SophiePène, professor at Paris Descartes University, sociolinguist, anthropologist of digital practice and former Vice-President of the CNNum (French Digital Council).
We came up with the idea to create an “Edulab” laboratory in charge of incubating innovative ideas inside the Ministry of Education to empower local actors thanks to a call for projects at the level of “Académies”, ie. the regional education authorities.
We were lucky to present our work in front of people in charge of supporting innovative projects within the French Ministry of Education : Florence Kohler, Edouard Leroy, Matthieu Merciecca, Somalina Pa and Benjamin Gentils. And what a coincidence: they were actually already launching an innovation lab, and thus were keen on having insights from CRI (Center for Research and Interdisciplinary) students.
In this publication, the concrete details of the lab won’t be presented. The idea is more to focus on the 2 theoretical ways of thinking that have guided our research and that could possibly trigger innovations to design a new educational public policy :
- Inspiration from entrepreneurship mindset to renew policy-making
- Insight from scientific researches to promote evidence-based-education
This transversality between research, entrepreneurship and policy-making is part of the DNA of our master hosted at the CRI (Center for Research and Interdisciplinary) because maybe there come a time when more collaboration is needed. If such, current students might become the future actors of education change in the upcoming years…
- Importing State startup’s mindset inside the Ministry of Education
Through their agile methods, State sartups have demonstrated their ability to foster new ways of designing digital public services, and thus could help to implement educational innovations, step by step, from a local to national level, in order to propose a flexible regulation, without stifling innovation. Currently, State start-ups are developed inside the Interministerial Direction of digital and System of Information and Communication (DINSIC), which is in charge of the modernization of public action. It has to be underlined that a State startup is different from an usual start-up, in the sense that it doesn’t need private funding : it is financed by the administration. State Start up are thus agile structure, free from former administrative constraints and subsequently more likely to implement deep changes. To foster this move, an influence from the start-up culture would lead then to conduct a data-driven policy, which would necessarily target to an user-centric approach. You get the idea: behind this emphasis on data and user experience, the well-set horizon is to improve constantly the service thanks to a feed-back-loop process and test-and-learn methods.
The State startup Pix — which aims at boosting people digital competences by offering an online and interactive training based on an adaptive algorithm — is a relevant example of such user-centric and data-driven methods. And this project has proven its efficiency since it should replace in 2018 the attestation of digital competences (e.g. B2i and C2i) currently delivered to each secondary and high-school students of the French educational system.
Having in mind this successful example, it can thus be claimed that educational changes could be possible in a State startup mindset.
2. Promoting evidence-based education
Public policy could also promote educational changes through a more scientific approach. Several decades ago, the generalization of clinical trials led to many improvements in health recovery and gave birth to a new trend in medicine: evidence-based medicine. This scientific approach and its subsequent experimental methodology present a strong interest both for education and public policy ; it is indeed of high importance to have randomized and controlled experiments before generalizing a policy. Outcomes of such experiments will provide great measures regarding the impact of a specific public policy. Similarly to the commercialization of a vaccine or of a medicine, an innovation in education would be implemented only if it demonstrates efficiency and if it has a positive cost-and-benefit ratio.
By designating the famous neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene at the head of the new Scientific Council, the minister Jean-Michel Blanquer expressed his will to promote evidence-based education. The composition of the council has been harshly criticized because there are 6 cognitive scientists out of 21 other researchers ; some people thus fear the ascendancy of neuroscience on educational policy. The problem is that cognitive sciences shouldn’t be assimilated only to neuroscience ; they are by essence a multidisciplinary field of research👇
Researches, especially in the field of cognitive sciences, could thus help to foster well-advised teaching methods. For example, in his book, Reading in the brain: The new science of how we read, Stanislas Dehaene sheds light on how the brain processes languages and decodes words. His researches present great evidence, thanks to experimentations and brain imagery, of the strong inefficiency of the “global methods of reading” in comparison with the “syllabic one”.
This emphasis on scientific methods to trigger more rational and well-informed decisions is actually not that new : in a way, it is very close to the ideal purpose of the Enlightenments. And this is not only a national move, but actually a global one. Getting inspiration from behavioral sciences for policy making has proven its efficiency in several other countries. For instance, in the UK,the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) has conducted more than 130 large-scale trials in more than 7,500 schools in England (i.e. around 1 in 5 of all schools in the country). These experimentations has generated interested insights into effective practice.The Behavioral Insight Team (BIT) explains these empirical outcomes and research findings in a practical guide. By giving definitions, suggesting some exercices and illutsrating recent research theories through fictionnal and concrete examples, the guide aims at empowering parents, teachers and school leaders with helping children to achieve both educational and personal goals. For instance, the guide explains the importance of metacognitive skills (i.e. the ability to reflect on one’s knowledge, behaviour and thoughts) and suggest some questions parents could ask to their children to help them assessing and expanding their knowledge :
If Tom knows that Earth is a planet and has one moon, [parents] could ask “What other planets are there? Do they have moons too?” Tom might then come upwith questions of his own like “Do all planets take the same time to go round the sun?” Tom’s [parents] can encourage him to think of more and more questions and then plan how he’s going to try and answer them.
In France, this approach is still in an early stage : outside the field of education, the neuroscientist Mariam Chammat is currently and cautiously working on evidence-based policies and ethical nudging at the Direction for Public Transformation (DITP) ; within the Ministry of Education, the creation of the Scientific Council reveals an important step towards the promotion of evidence-based education thanks to scientific insights.
The approach of nudge could rise some ethical questions about choice freedom ; people’s autonomy ; blurred borders between incitations and manipulations ; etc. Having in mind the two modes of thought pointed out by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, two types of nudge can in fact be distinguished : system 1 nudges that target emotions, intuitions and automatic processing, and system 2 nudges (also called “educative nudges”) that target rationality and deliberative processing. If people tend to prefer system 2 nudges, this type of nudges tend to be less efficient. As this topic is really dense and complex, I will stop here and pursue it in another publication.
Coming back to our main subject, another important limit to innovation in education through an evidence-based approach is also that researches are sometimes difficult to implement. It could be because the efficiency of the results has been too quickly proven and lacks of meta-analysis or replications. It could also be because, classrooms conditions really differ from on to another (the question of scalability and complexity then). This is why it is important to study educational practices in real life in order to measure systematically the difficulties of research results’ application thanks to constant exchanges from evidence-based practice to practice-based evidence are important.
The chiasmus of this last sentence highlights two important elements on which this reflexion on innovation in education could be concluded :
1. the necessity of crossing scientific theories and real-life applications ;
2. this process of going from A to B and B to A may slow down innovations since such back and forth means going round and round in circles for a long time before implementing any effective change.
SOME REFERENCES :
Dehaene, S. (2007). Neurones de la lecture (Les): La nouvelle science de la lecture et de son apprentissage. Odile jacob.
Leonard, T. C. (2008). Richard H. Thaler, Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. Constitutional Political Economy, 19(4), 356–360.
Sunstein, C. R. (2016). The ethics of influence: Government in the age of behavioral science. Cambridge University Press.
Macron, E., Cazenave, T., & Algan, Y. (2016). L’Etat en mode start-up: Le nouvel âge de l’action publique. Editions Eyrolles.
Pasquinelli, E. (2011). Knowledge‐and Evidence‐Based Education: Reasons, Trends, and Contents. Mind, Brain, and Education, 5(4), 186–195.
Ramus, F. (2017).Vers une éducation fondée sur des preuves.
