Students are our common purpose in teaching and learning; our who and our why; the core of our work. Not just ‘students’ plural, but each and every student (with their idiosyncrasies, circumstances, attitudes, abilities and identities).

The decisions we make from the classroom to the board room in schools should all come back to the student. Ultimately in education, we are in their service.

The need for organisations in today’s world (a report from Harvard Business News) is to become more adaptable means changing the goals of corporate learning. Instead of narrowly focusing on job- or compliance-related training for all but their high-potential leaders, organisations should cultivate every employee’s ability to explore, learn, and grow. 

Bottom line, how we educate our kids needs to radically change given the massive potential of exponential tech (e.g. artificial intelligence and virtual reality).

To meet these goals many are focused on blended-learning, project-based learning, personal learning. Yet, if you move beyond the labels and talk about instructional practices that promote learning and how they move us toward the desired outcomes for learners, we begin to see that our beliefs and experiences don’t always translate to our practices.

PISA successfully marketed itself as a measure of educational quality with the claim to measure skills and knowledge that matters in modern economies and in the future world. Upon closer examination, the excellence defined by PISA is but an illusion, a manufactured claim without any empirical evidence. Furthermore, PISA implies a monolithic and espouses a distorted and narrow view of purpose for all education systems in the world. The consequence is a trend of global homogenisation of education and celebration of authoritarian education systems for their high PISA scores, while ignoring the negative consequences on important human attributes and local cultures of such systems.