2023 was full of innovations – with AI taking centre stage certainly in the UK, and considerable debate on how to harness ChatGPT. Listening to the conversations of educationalists has been fascinating, but equally exciting is the sizeable increase in the volume of educational innovation conversations on social media.
We reflect on some of the best innovations that have caught our attention across the world of international education.
In no particular order, here’s our five:
Riverside School in India have won the T4 Education Innovation Prize for their positive, student-centric approach: I CAN and the FEEL, IMAGINE, DO model.
The program flips the mindset to empowering students to believe that they can achieve, with particular focus on cultivating empathy, creativity and social responsibility. When they start thinking about projects, they start by asking the question – ‘who is it for?’, and ‘how will it help the world?’, and relate the learning in the classroom to their daily life.
Prior to her post injury return to Arsenal and England, Beth Mead MBE travelled to several Cognita family schools in the UAE earlier in the year to meet students as part of Cognita Middle East’s world-class enrichment programme, ‘Enrich ME’, for which she is the Founding Ambassador.
The innovative partnership allowed Beth to inspire many students both in football and leadership via motivational sessions and a Q&A.
During our visit to Charterhouse Malaysia we saw the open-minded relationship between what students ask for and how the staff react. When student’s ask for something, the answer is never no, rather the students are tasked to write a plan to make it happen. They are given ownership over projects, and learn how to overcome hurdles. An extension of this mindset has been the launch of The Incubator. The Incubator is an entire floor of the school, designed to encourage creativity through hands-on experimentation.
The 2023 annual COBIS conference included a panel of young people, interviewed by COBIS Chair, Lord Knight. At AMC we are very familiar with the idea, having materialised it at Future Fwd in Warwick in 2022, and it is wonderful to see COBIS and subsequently FOBISIA both include a student panel in their annual conferences.
Delegates discussing the future of education are enabled to anchor their discussions in real time issues and solutions put forward by the students themselves.
A world leader in pushing educational innovation, we had to include MISK Schools’ latest achievement – their campus buildings are designed with an emphasis on wellbeing, and they are the first school project in the Middle East to receive a precertification from the International WELL Building Institute pbcTM.
The buildings are assessed over ten categories: air, water, nourishment, light, movement, thermal comfort, sound, materials, mind and community, both for students and staff.
