When we think about innovation in education, we immediately think of the classroom. Although there is a great need and a strong desire for improvements there, innovation doesn’t always happen in the classroom.

In this article, we’ll discuss educational innovation from a wide range of perspectives—including pedagogy, of course, but also management and operations, for example. Ultimately, I hope this content will provide insight for the institution where you work or for the school where your children study.

In recent years, some countries have stood out in this area, such as Finland, which provides a less formal and more collaborative environment with individualized instruction; Singapore, which makes extensive use of technology and has focused on teacher training to provide a better education for its students; New Zealand, which emphasizes student-centered learning and the incorporation of Maori culture into the school curriculum; and the United States, which has long used project-based learning, alongside personalized learning and classroom technology, to name a few.

It’s worth noting that innovation doesn’t necessarily involve technology; rather, it refers to any improvement made to products, services, and processes. And that’s exactly what’s happening at Alpha School in Austin, which was founded by MacKenzie Price 10 years ago.

There, education—depending on the students’ age group—is project-based and involves various subjects, but what really caught my attention is that they have only two hours of class per day. That’s right! Two hours to gain the same knowledge as in a full school day, without any loss in academic performance.

On the contrary, during the remaining time—in addition to working on their projects—students have the opportunity to hone their social-emotional skills, thereby improving their chances of success in the job market and in their personal lives. Here in Brazil, Lumiarfollows the same approach, which has also sparked interest in the model among other stakeholders.

In Beijing, The Future School Programis taking a similar approach when it comes to projects. Since 2011, Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) has been adopted, and the traditional classroom format—with lectures by a teacher—has been phased out, giving way to individualized teaching and learning, making excellent use of technology to make this possible.

And since we're on the subject of technology, we've seen some interesting developments—and others that have had a truly significant impact.

About 10 years ago, augmented reality was just beginning to make inroads into innovation in schools; shortly thereafter, virtual reality came knocking, followed by mixed reality—which combines both—and which we’ve seen more clearly with the launch of Apple Vision Pro. 

However, despite their potential to improve learning—especially when combined with personalized instruction—the costs still make it impractical to adopt these technologies on a large scale.

Those who already use these immersive environments, however, appreciate the possibility of, for example, learning about a particular culture through virtual educational trips or seeing, in three dimensions, a water molecule floating right before their eyes. On the other hand, the developers of these technologies believe that they will no longer be just a novelty, but will achieve the impact they deserve within the next two years.

Artificial Intelligence Applied to Education

When discussing the impact on education, it’s impossible not to think of Artificial Intelligence and all its applications in the classroom. In fact, it enhances approaches that have already found their place, such as gamification, which motivates students—as Duolingo does—and, when used effectively, can even gauge how they feel emotionally—as the Brazilian company U4Hero does.

Or, furthermore, it gives new momentum to the much-desired personalization of education—which has the power to improve each student’s performance by understanding how each one learns, as the Brazilian company Blox does, for example. But that’s not “all” that AI does. It’s capable of much more, but it must be used very strategically so we don’t run the risk of diminishing our young people’s critical thinking skills.

Some possible applications include, for example, analyzing the goals and characteristics of adult language learners and using AI to help teachers devise the best strategies for these learners’ comprehensive and accelerated development—as Wort Idiomas has been doing, albeit on an experimental basis.

Or helping educators create lesson plans—often tailored to individual students—based on an understanding of their colleagues’ experiences and best practices, which has been done using ChatGPT itself. Or, as the Spanish-Italian company Learn with Leo does, tutoring students in virtually any language as they work on their assignments and studies.

But, one practical classroom application that I really love is when teachers, going against conventional wisdom, instead of banning ChatGPT from their classrooms, embraced the innovation a year ago (which is practically an eternity in the world of Artificial Intelligence) and began analyzing how students asked the AI for information and, most importantly, how they verified the truthfulness and accuracy of that content. These are just a few examples. There are many more out there, and much, much more to come.

And just so we don’t end up focusing solely on the obvious—AI—data analysis is another crucial trend that can enable us, among other things, to understand—in a way that was never before possible—how each individual learns, their unique challenges, to identify patterns, and to scale high-quality, effective education—along with cloud computing—so that it reaches even those in places we aren’t used to looking.

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Article originally published in Fast Company. 

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