Редакция журнала «Позитивные изменения» – Позитивные изменения. Образование. Школа будущего. Тематический выпуск, 2022 / Positive changes. Education. The school of the future. Special issue, 2022 (страница 8)

I am not just talking about physical culture, I am talking about a culture of health. It is great when kids can learn to cook in school, for example. And not just to cook, but also can learn about the peculiarities of cooking. But then again, I have not seen this as an integral element anywhere. Some schools have workshops, kitchens, children learning to cook, but, for example, they do not understand why they do it, what it is about, they do not learn the chemical composition of food. In general, school should be about life.

What can you say about the teachers of the future and the role of the school in general? The teacher is no longer the sole source of knowledge. A good teacher must constantly change in a positive way. But often teachers do not have the time to do that. That is, they just keep replaying some experience that they have accumulated. So often a child can get knowledge faster and more effectively in extended education. And most importantly, at their own pace.

Then what is the school supposed to do? All it can do is to make sense of things. Because life is full of actions these days. The parents objectively have little time to invest in their children, to pass on their experiences, to nurture and to pass on culture. It is great if the school can share the family values. So the main block is what I call "health school”, i.e. everything that has to do with culture. This includes everything: physical culture, communication culture or emotional intelligence, mental hygiene and mindfulness.

The School of the Future should take care of the child’s health first and foremost. This is something today’s system misses altogether – a culture of mental and physical health.

What else do modern schools lack?

Oddly enough, creativity, which we understand in a broad sense – painting, music, sculpture, architecture. What our compatriots always talk about when they go, for example, to study in a British school: "I couldn’t make my kid draw, and now he is producing masterpieces.” Because first of all, they have the equipment for this and, secondly, they have great teachers who can teach anyone. Also, a good school should be technological, hands-on. The child should be able to translate his ideas into reality. And, of course, we are not talking about aprons and oven mitts. If what you can do is strictly regulated, it gets too far from reality.

It is like IKEA: you can read the instructions first, or you can just start assembling the stool and see what happens. I think that today’s children do not concentrate on the material as well, if they have not done anything with their own hands. Therefore, the school should be more practice-oriented in this regard, in my opinion. In principle, this isn’t something new. Because it is already there in an ordinary Western school, it just takes time to appear in our country.

Today's kids use apps extensively, where you can skip something quickly, move to other levels, go at your own pace. Can the School of the Future work as a learning app?

It seems to me that there should be some kind of variability, so that the child can study at his or her own pace and depth of learning the disciplines. Some schools already have this.

Now because all children have very different preschool experiences, they start school with very different levels of preparation. Some kids are cognitively overwhelmed, their heads already "bursting." Some children have just learned the alphabet. Plus, there are children with dysgraphia, dyslexia. There are a lot of children who have learning difficulties, who have a hard time working with text information. In this regard, the perfect school for me is not one that selects the best kids by giving them a bunch of tests at the entrance, but a school that will tell them: "Okay, come in." Just "come in," that’s all. And then, after testing the child, after working with him/her, they will build a certain learning path.

What does it look like in practice?

Let’s suppose there is a cohort of students. The children are divided into two subgroups, or even three, if the school can afford maintaining that much staff. That is, instead of three small classes of 12 people, we have one class, but with subgroups of 12. One subgroup consists of children that are ahead of the curriculum, the second group has students of average performance, and the last subgroup has children that have, for example, difficulty mastering spatial concepts and mathematics, in particular. In the last subgroup, we introduce correctional initiatives: we work with didactic material, use game aids, give visual supports.

Or, for example, the Russian language. There are kids who have a knack for the languages, then we just go with them through a good program at a fast pace. There are children with dysgraphia, with dyslexia, these are curated by a speech therapist. Also, a child can be in an advanced math group, but as regards the Russian language, he/she can be in a group of children with dysgraphia and dyslexia. And some kid can be in the top group in all disciplines.

This way, all children learn together. That is, in fact, instead of three classes there are several levels for each core subject. For some lessons, the children get together in one big classroom, do some projects together, communicate together. But I did not see that in elementary school, only in middle school. Yet things are not exactly implemented like that in practice. I believe that education should become fully personalized (and in fact, it already is, if you look at the rise of the tutoring institution). But how do you reconcile the personalized track with the need to socialize and interact with children? Probably, the School of the Future is an attempt to combine collective activity with an individual academic route.

You described three big blocks in the educational program of the school of the future: academics, creativity, and health. And you spoke in sufficient detail about the academic part – the educational process happening at different levels. What would be the characteristics of the other two components, health and creativity?

The perfect school for me is not one that selects the best kids by giving them a bunch of tests at the entrance, but a school that will tell them: “Okay, come in.” And then they will build a certain learning path.

Here, again, variability is the only option. For example, in the Health block, different types of sports are needed, so that children can take two or three lessons of each type during the first trimester, getting to know all the options available. For example, yoga, soccer, gymnastics and acrobatics for both boys and girls. Later on, the children would also divide into subgroups, depending on who wants to do what. In other words, there is variability: try different things, choose something to your liking. Children should be able to ask themselves a question: "What do I want?” Of course, at this stage parents and tutors should help if the child cannot make the choice, or does not want to.

The own resources management block is a kind of story in the form of workshops, internships. A mix of humanities: ethics, practical psychology, mindfulness. In order to be effective, we need to understand our psycho-emotional sphere, to manage it.

Parents come in and say: "How do I tell a child to take it easy?" A few meditation practices for children have long been described and practiced in some Western schools.

Then there is also the topic of creativity. Here I would also give them the opportunity to try different things, then choose what they want to do, what workshop and what project they want to work on.

Anna, why do you think there are no models coming to us from abroad, other than the International Baccalaureate?

It’s all coming, it has just started to appear. But it all boils down to the lack of sufficient sites to implement this. And there probably aren’t any managers who are good at it. We think of it this way: we are going to just find some good experienced teachers, «headhunt» them from public or private schools, borrow a stronger curriculum, and everything will be cool. But any good teachers can only exist along the lines of a concept that has been developing here for some time. For example, there is a concept of developmental learning, which appeared in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. It is now experiencing its second birth.

It seems to me that every parent wants something more, but in fact everyone only cares about passing the USE. The child has to enter a University (especially a boy).

When I talk to school principals, they all say that teachers who know how to deliver this curriculum are nowhere to be found. It turns out that it all comes down to the fact that you can create a school, design an interesting space, but who will come to teach there?

As regards the concept of developmental learning, how do you rate it now, in light of what is happening?

I find it interesting. It must also be developed, reworked. There are many complaints about it. There it all rests on the fact that the concept of developmental learning can only be implemented well by someone who understands what developmental learning actually is. That is, it is not just a technique that you can simply give and a person will start teaching. It turns out that people are few and far between. Because, first of all, initially it was to be subject education, actually, what I was talking about, different teachers for the Russian language and math, each working with their own stream. Where do we get them from?