It is nice to have such science celebrities, committed individuals with their own views, but what about the Federal State Education Standards (FGOS) and other mandatory requirements to the curriculum? How do you accommodate this alliance?
It is possible on one condition, when you don’t have ego competition in school. I’ve often seen the “celebs" being in confrontation with the school administration. I think this kind of conflict can often be relieved by having good communication between the principal and the teachers. If you have a dialogue, I don’t see any problem with making it FGOS compliant.
Going back to the generalized image of the good school we want to see in the future, how different do you think it is from the typical school of today? There is one trend I noticed back in 2015–2016 in European schools, and it seems to me that it is now rolling over to us quite successfully, including through our joint efforts — books, lectures, education. At the center of the educational process is a person, a child. It seems to me that until recently we were like cab drivers at the exit from the airport, when the arriving passenger was shocked at what was going on. Ideally, the school is like a navigator. You say: “I need to get there and there," and the navigator tells you: “Okay, I’ll take you there using the most scenic route while avoiding congestion. Trust me, I am your guide."
A famous person once gave me a good metaphor. This metaphor applies to journalists and to psychologists, but I think it is equally applicable to teachers, because we all deal with people. When you do something, you have to remember that you are like a guide in the mountains, you’re leading people. If you keep picking paths that are only comfortable for you, at the end of the road there may be no one left behind you. You have to remember that people are following you, and you have to choose the road for them, not for yourself.
The School of the Future the ideal school is built on the fact that first you help the child to decide where he or she needs to go, you build a route, and then you help them along this route.
I think we’re just moving from a school of equalization to a school of personalized routing, trying to proceed from the child’s interests. This brings us back to the original meaning of the word "pedagogue,” which, as you may recall, is translated as "a child guide”.
The ideal school is built on the fact that first you help the child to decide where he or she needs to go, you build a route, and then you help them along this route.
Have you encountered any schools that have built a truly personalized trajectory for children, a format where the child's interests actually count?
The only perfect example I have found so far is the school I describe in "The Other School” book. That’s Kunskapsskolan in Finland, where the general school curriculum for the whole country is shaped for each individual student. This model is highly scalable, and they have patented it and have been using it successfully in England and in India. It really impressed me a lot that you could do that.
I think we had such attempts in Russia at the A. N. Tubelsky school. At least I heard a lot about it from alumni and teachers who worked there. The teachers agreed they would use their disciplines to develop certain skills in children: the skill of logical thinking, critical perception of information. Each instructor was hitting a different aspect of that goal from his or her discipline.
One of the teachers at the New School was doing a personalized route in his history classes. He was building a system where students could read more, do more work to get the next level, like in a game. At the highest level, they could deliver a lesson, like teachers.
This personalization of education, from what age it is appropriate, do you think? From age seven, middle school or high school?
That’s a good question. Psychologists now say that the age of adolescent crisis in children is shifting. If it used to be at 13–14, 15–16 years old, now it starts with children as young as 10. I guess it makes sense to say that the earlier you try different things, the better. At the very least, I’m absolutely convinced that getting experience at an early age really shapes you in the future. I can see it in my loved ones and in the children I am in contact with. And I’ve done three or four thousand interviews with children in the last three years. Those who have had an experience are very different from their peers.
Tatyana Kovaleva, professor at the Moscow State Pedagogical University, believes that the time has come for self skills, the skills needed to take care of oneself. Psychologist and professor Alexander Asmolov speaks of soft skills as a set of competencies that a person must possess in a changing world. In what proportion do you think the School of the Future can and should teach soft, hard, and self skills?
First of all, big thanks to Alexander Grigorievich Asmolov, with whom we have a very warm and close relationship; it is his merit that it is said about these skills so much.
As is often the case with social change, there can be a strong bias at first. Now some private schools are positioning themselves exclusively as soft skills schools, the preparation for the business world. But gradually we will be able to find balance between self skills and soft skills, because, for example, teachers and parents lack the skill to take care of themselves, and a lot of them experience burnout. As an Italian acquaintance of mine used to say: "How are you going to work if you’re not rested?”
These skills help us relate objects to real life. To be honest, I’m a big fan of phenomenon-based learning[3], where you learn one global topic through different disciplines, and you tie all the subjects together in that way.
You mentioned the Finnish model of education. What is its main difference from the Russian model?
We visited Finnish schools together with teachers from Russian schools. One day we came to a school that had just introduced education via VR technologies. They taught biology, geography, and anatomy lessons using VR glasses. What our teachers were most concerned about was who paid for these glasses. The Finnish teachers had no idea what they were talking about. I explained that we couldn’t have teachers spending budgets. And at some point it became clear that the key word for Finnish education is "trust," the trust of the state in teachers. The teacher can change the curriculum to suit the students as he or she sees fit. If they think VR glasses are needed, then so be it.
One Finnish teacher told us: "Historically, we have three categories of professionals in our society, the specialists who are more trusted by the country. It’s teachers, doctors, and the police." And we all went: "Oh, I see." Therein lies the difference between Finnish education and Russian education.
In Finland, teachers are legally obliged to try new methodological findings and techniques, that is, they are obliged to follow everything that is new. And I think that’s a very big difference.
I think we need to get off teachers’ back and let them live outside the box at least a little bit. When you have every other teacher complaining that everything is too hard, that makes it impossible for them to get creative.
I think we need to get off teachers’ back and let them live outside the box at least a little bit. Because when you have every other teacher complaining that they find themselves stuck and everything is too hard and they have to find ways around, that makes it impossible for them to get creative. We all like to work in a free atmosphere, without being disturbed by various issues.
3
Phenomenon-based learning (PhBL or PhenoBL), is a form of learning where students learn a topic or concept as a whole. PhBL emerged as a response to the idea that traditional subject-oriented learning is outdated and removed from the real world.