Delivering a Cautionary Message on Innovating Education Worldwide
The movement to innovate learning in developing countries is in need of reorientation if it is to succeed in delivering quality basic education, OLE CEO Richard R. Rowe recently told the International Conference on 1-to-1 Computing in Education. Rowe warned conference participants against such tendencies as working in national silos, implementing “faith-based” programs without evaluating impact, and focusing on technical devices rather than the learning process.
Richard Rowe
Too many “silos” are being created by proponents of learning innovation because “people are thinking about their country only,” Rowe told participants in the conference, co-organized in February by the Austrian Ministry of Education, Inter-American Development Bank, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and World Bank. Gaps between rich and poor worldwide are increasingly evident to all – in part because of the internet – and “it makes us all vulnerable,” he said. “There isn’t any ‘elsewhere’ anymore. … Quality universal basic education needs to be everyone’s responsibility.”
Rowe also called for new means of evaluating learning innovations.
Historically speaking, evaluations of education have focused on students, “but we rarely evaluate the teacher and we don’t evaluate the school system in systematic ways that will result in action. That’s not a good way to think about changing institutions,” he said.
Technologically speaking, “I am an agnostic advocate for low-cost, highly effective ICTs. But I want to see the evidence. ‘Faith-based’ approaches are not sufficient,” he said.
New tests should be developed not only to measure essential improvements in the educational basics of reading and writing, but also in line with the 21st century goals of learning innovation. Such measurements would cover skills including discovery, creativity, and agency – and ideally be employed from one nation to the next, Rowe said.
A final note of caution: Innovations that do not scale to all children in a country can inadvertently increase the divide between the rich and the poor – “having the opposite effect of what we want,” Rowe said. “One of the big concerns that I have about many of the innovations you are talking about is that they do not scale with the resources that are available.”
He acknowledged the complexity of the challenge faced by all in the room. “There are no simple answers,” because learning innovations are part of a much larger system of learning that takes place in local contexts filled with political, social, and economic variables. For instance, “How can you expect a big increase in learning if the kid has a stomach that hasn’t been fed in three days?”
And even in measuring the impact of new approaches, “you can never measure your goals directly,” he said, but only with proxies.
“Be creative,” he encouraged the group. “What do the teachers need? They don’t need a lot of stuff. They need to know what to do tomorrow to help those kids really learn.”
His presentation is available here. Watch his talk here (at approximately 8:30). You can find the full conference proceedings here.
