This handbook aims to offer evidence, insights, ideas and recommendations that can be built upon to support and nurture a culture of transformative innovation within education.
Increasingly it is recognised that there is a need to innovate to enable greater creativity, flexibility, learner input and so forth, and to deliver a more personalised educational system and foster new skills amongst learners.
Greg Whitby, Executive Director of Schools for the Catholic Diocese of Paramatta in Australia speaks of the urgent need to transform how both schools and teachers understand what they do to meet the needs of the students and realities of the 21st century. Mr. Whitby has been widely recognized for his leadership in the area of learning and teaching in a digital age.
The Hadley Learning Community opened on the 1st September 2006 and is located in the community of Hadley in central Telford. HLC is a £70 million PFI project, in partnership with Interserve that represents a major investment by the Brorough of Telford & Wrekin Council in creating a 21st Century learning campus.
Jane Gilbert says that knowledge is now a verb, not a noun – something we do rather than something we have – and explores the ways our schools need to change to prepare people to participate in the knowledge-based societies of the future.
Read our staff review of Catching the Knowledge Wave?, below.
About the author
Jane Gilbert is a chief researcher with the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. She has a background in teaching at both secondary and tertiary levels.
Related items
The goal of the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) is to improve student learning and performance by supporting initiatives that address unique needs and circumstances within school authorities. AISI funding is targeted, which means it is provided to school authorities for specific local initiatives that are focused on improving student learning. About 1200 AISI projects were developed and implemented during the first two cycles (2000-2006), with over 300 more initiatives in progress in the present.
This Policy Proposal, from the 21st Century Learning Initiative in the UK, is written to assist those in positions of influence to initiate powerful changes to current educational arrangements. The circumstantial evidence for such a transformation of learning is drawn from the best in research and practice from around the world. The paper shows that better informed, and more effective, models of learning could be organised through a redistribution of expenditures and responsibilities, at a total cost no greater than current levels of expenditure.
If young people are to be equipped effectively to meet the challenges of the 21st century it is surely prudent to seek out the very best understandings from current scientific research into the nature of how humans learn before considering further reform of the current system.
This article by John Abbott and Terence Ryan appeared in the Spring, 1999 issue of Education Canada.
There is more material now about the nature of human learning than at any previous time in history. Why, therefore, do we have a “crisis” in education? John Abbott, discusses what is known about how humans learn and develop from birth through adulthood and how our education systems have it “inside out and upside down”.
This report by the Canadian Council on Learning examines many of the factors that contribute to successful lifelong learning—from early childhood, through the school years and into adulthood. It also takes a special look at the link between health and learning, and at the learning challenges faced by Aboriginal Peoples in Canada.
(NB: published in both English and French)
