On the right path

I recently had the privilege of attending the International Baccalaureate Global Conference for educators and school leaders in Singapore. There were approximately 1600 people in attendance from across the Asia Pacific region and the conference was included “deep dives” into important issues related to education globally (such as wellbeing for students and staff, managing complexity and assessing competencies essential for success in life). There were also highly practical elements of the conference where we learnt about the changes on the horizon for each programme. It was also a time for us to learn from other schools and build partnerships and networks that will benefit our students now and into the future. 

However, it was the last session of the conference that, for me at least, had the most impact. It drew together the threads of the conference, affirmed that as a school we are on the right track in terms of our learning programme and offerings for students, and generated a sense of urgency that education needs to “catch up” with the rapid changes happening within society. 

Andreas Schleicher, the OECD Director for Education and Skills, was the final keynote speaker at the conference. As always, he presented a wealth of data from PISA. He also spoke to the exponential change in technology and the impact of AI now, and into the future, on the workforce and the skills and competencies our students need. Below are my key takeaways from Schleicher’s presentation in relation to the OECD Learning Compass 2030. As a reminder, the OECD administers the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) which is readily used by governments to benchmark student achievement in relation to mathematics, reading and science. It is done by fifteen-year-olds and in 2025 HVGS students will undertake the PISA. 

In 2015 the OECD launched the “Future of Education and Skills 2030” project. The project recognised “the urgent need to open a global discussion about education” to ensure young people around the world were developing the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values that students need to be competent, autonomous and connected adults ready for their future world (not the world we are used to as adults, but the world where our children will be adults). At the time, these were the burning questions for the OECD: 

How can we prepare students for jobs that have not yet been created, to tackle societal challenges that we can’t yet imagine, and to use technologies that have not yet been invented? How can we equip them to thrive in an interconnected world where they need to understand and appreciate different perspectives and world views, interact respectfully with others, and take responsible action towards sustainability and collective well-being? (OECD) 

In developing an education vision to 2030 (now being revised and extended to 2040), the OECD identified five big challenges facing all of us: 

• Environmental decline, climate change and the resultant big weather events.
• Economic – the increasing gap between the ultra-rich and the very poor, and the impact this has.  
• Societal change – the impact of increasing migration and urbanisation on communities.
• Conflict – the rise in war and conflict around the world, and through social media.
• Technology – both a challenge and an opportunity as it increasingly transforms the world of work, ways of communicating and our connectedness. 

These challenges are interconnected: the increasing divide between the ultra-wealthy and the very poor creates social dissatisfaction and the potential for conflict and can lead to increased migration as people seek opportunities elsewhere. The increase in big weather events has a direct impact on national economies, which impacts trade and the availability of goods and resources on a local, national and global scale. As we are seeing in Myanmar, a country that already is one of the poorest in Southeast Asia and mired in conflict, the negative social and economic impact of the recent earthquake is exponential in scale within a struggling nation.  

As I read the questions above from the OECD and reflect on these challenges, I am struck by the continued urgency (perhaps increasing urgency) for education to pivot, deeply engage with and be responsive to the future that is on the horizon. We need an antidote in schools to the binary thinking at a political level that seeks to divide communities, families and schools along partisan lines. We need an antidote to the notion that all learning can be reduce to a number and that this is the most important indicator of student and school success. Our students deserve more and better. They need us to think bigger and deeper.  

In addition, with the recent tariff announcement out of the United States, now more than ever we must help our student think critically and creatively about how they will navigate an increasingly polarised world and seek to heal the rifts that are emerging at a global and local level. The project identified in 2015 by the OECD is as important as ever for Australian schools. 

Andreas Schleicher also spent some time discussing technology because understanding the impact of the rise of technology on the economy and workforce, as well as in generating both connectedness and facilitating conflict, is instrumental in understanding why education needs to be transformed. Below is a graph that may be familiar to many of you: 

This graph depicts a trajectory of workforce task changes to 2009. Just imagine the extent of this divide between routine and non-routine tasks required at work in 2025, especially with the emergence of AI. 

To address this, and be a workforce of the future, we know our students need to be highly skilled at analytical thinking and have excellent interpersonal skills. They also need to be able to think creatively (which is different to being creative). This means they need to able to consider a complex problem, evaluate potential solutions in collaboration with others, explore alternatives by engaging in design and systems thinking, and then be able to communicate potential solutions to diverse audiences. In schools within Australia we need to be talking about this alongside conversations about core literacies and numeracies. We need to be simultaneously investing in both so our young people have the best possible future opportunities. 

At the heart of the OECD project is the notion that, in the new age of technology and in the face of contemporary global challenges, knowledge is important but only useful if students have the skills, attitudes and values required to do something with it that addressed the contemporary challenges we are facing. The OECD created the graphic below to illustrate the interconnectedness of different dimensions of learning: 

In this graphic, knowledge is not just about knowing facts in history or geography, science or mathematics. This disciplinary knowledge is one building block. Students also need to have interdisciplinary knowledge. They need to know how maths and physics work together to solve an engineering problem. Or they need historical knowledge to better understand an author’s intention in a poem or novel. They need knowledge about ecosystems and the biology of river life to consider the importance of sustainability in from a geographical perspective. 

Knowledge is interconnected, and building our students' capacity for interdisciplinary thinking – for building solutions by drawing on knowledge from a range of disciplines – enables students to take action.  

Students also require practical knowledge: they need to know how to build code, write a report that synthesises ideas, conduct an experiment to test a hypothesis or how to speak effectively in front of an audience. 

Within this Gordian knot model from the OECD, alongside knowledge, there needs to be the explicit teaching of skills. With the rise of smartphones and other devices, the teaching of social and emotional skills is crucial. But we also need to teach students how to think – to develop their ability to think analytically, creatively and critically so they can meet the demands of a modern workforce and engage deeply with the world around them. Students also need to develop metacognition; this is the capacity to reflect on one’s behaviour and language. Metacognition is the process, for example, that students go through as they are internalising and acting on feedback from teachers and when they are learning how to repair after harming others. Metacognition helps us slow our thinking down and go more deeply. With the constant feed of information through social media, our students need to be deliberately reminded to exercise their slow thinking muscle. 

Back in 2019 the OECD pulled all of this together into the compass model that added a new imperative to the transformation of education: wellbeing. The model is below: 

(Source) 

Within the context of this model, wellbeing is connected to a person’s ability to leverage their knowledge, values, attitudes and skills to anticipate problems, reflect and take action. This requires students to develop transformative competencies that are inherently human, take responsibility for their behaviours and role in shaping a better world, reconcile tensions and dilemmas (what I often refer to as “wicked problems”) and create new value. The last requires a growth mindset, creative thinking and an entrepreneurial spirit that sees (and seizes) opportunities.  

At HVGS, we aspire to do all of this! We want every student to be ready for a dynamic world of work, to be committed to tackling the societal, economic and environmental challenges before us. We want our students to be highly engaged citizens of local and global communities who understand that one action or word can reverberate in ways that we might not anticipate, so taking the time to think slowly and deeply is instrumental in navigating complexity. We want every student to develop transformative, human competencies such as creative and critical thinking, collaboration, communication, intercultural understanding and compassion.    

For this reason, we are a values-driven school that is inclusive of the diverse voices and perspectives within our community. And we are an IB World School, committed to all four programmes and to lifelong learning.  

At HVGS, being an IB World School means we strive to go beyond the basics and are held to account for delivering a world-class education for the whole child. At the IB Conference in Singapore, as I sat and listened to Andreas Schleicher speak, I was inspired by a call to action, and I felt affirmed. At HVGS, we are on the right path; we are helping to create citizens of Australia and the world who value learning for the empowering and transformative impact it can have. We are also helping to create citizens who are developing the competencies they need to take responsibility, create new value and reconcile tension and dilemmas. We aspire for each HVGS graduate to raise their head high, be proud, and lean into the wicked problems we are facing and be willing to be part of the transformations needed to address these problems.