Day 1 ⏐ Session 4

Learning to be different:
lessons in shifting education systems

This session turned its attention to shifting education systems opening our eyes to the wider purpose and possibilities of learning. Education models have not kept up with the pace of change and and as Vishal Talreja puts it, when it comes to education, it’s “not just the rules of the game, but the game itself [that is] changing”.

Sharing their perspectives and experience around this, we hear from Valerie Hannon, Global Education Leaders Partnership (UK); Gregg Behr, Remake Learning Pittsburgh (US); Rod Allen, Vancouver Island University (CA); Vishal Talreja, Dream a Dream (IN) and Loni Bergqvist, ImagineIf (DK)

“It’s the story stupid! What I’ve realised is that there is a public narrative about purpose [in education], which is so powerful… it holds the system in place even when you’ve got multiple cases of interesting, beautiful exceptions which show that things can be different and far improved when you do things differently ”

— Valarie Hannon

---

Resources

Rod Allen 

• Observatory of Public Sector Innovation  

• Free Range Humans (podcast)   

• The Deeper Learning Dozen (website and white paper)

Vishal Talreja

• When We Thrive, Our World Thrives - Stories of Young People Growing up with Adversity (Book) 

• Dream a Dream Website

Loni Bergqvist

• Imagine If

Valerie Hannon

• Thrive: The Puropse of Schools in a Changing the World (book)

• Future School: How Schools Around the World are Applying Learning Design Principles For a New Era (publication)

Gregg Behr

• Remake Learning

• The Grable Foundation 

• When You Wonder, You're Learning (book)  

• The Pittsburgh Principles 

---

Quotes from the session

• “System shifts are happening in the context of a bigger shift that's going on... that might be a demographic change like an ageing population that starts to put pressure on the kinds of systems that we have for health and for care. It might be a crisis, like a pandemic, but it might also be a change or a shift in social norms and values.” (Jennie Winhall)

• “We were winning at a game, but we're actually playing the wrong game and that the things we were doing were probably necessary for young people's development, but not sufficient” (Rod Allen)

• “We could have taken a problem solving approach. How do we fix the current system?… [instead] we went down a dreaming place. What could we have? What could we do? We held those conversations for a long time.” (Rod Allen) 

• “We reached a furious agreement… we wanted our young people to be the best for the world, not the best thing in the world.” (Rod Allen) 

• “…can we connect what happens in schools with what happens in museums, libraries, early learning centers, after school programmes in creative industry and on campuses of higher education? (Gregg Behr) 

• “Meet people where they are and bring them together in unexpected places.” (Gregg Behr)

• “We started with wanting to transform children's lives who are growing up in adversities. We didn't have a systems thinking approach when we started off…” (Vishal Talreja)

• “It took me eight years of work with children in adversity, children who had run away from home and live in violence and abuse, to realise that at the core of it was that this girl experienced in those four days a space of safety and a space of care and empathy” (Vishal Talreja)

• “A lot of our work really started with this idea of purpose and really having conversations around what is most important for our kids. Not just in terms of the future, but just in terms of the kids that are sitting in front of us today” (Loni Bergqvist)

---

Emerging questions

1. How might we frame the issues we're grappling with to create a sense of possibility?

2. Why and how do people become animated in an endeavor to change a system?

3. When we're engaging people in this change, who are we making that invitation to and what are you inviting them to be a part of?

---