When it comes to crisis, Nassim Nicholas Taleb deserves to be heard. Often, one of the few people awaiting the global monetary crisis of 2008 coined the term “black swan” to refer to a rare and unexpected catastrophic event. .
Since then, Taleb has advocated for a radical replacement in the way we think and design our systems to not only survive, but also thrive on volatility, uncertainty and randomness. As he wrote in 2012: “If antifrility is the asset of all those herbal (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving them of volatility, randomness and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die or explode. We are weakening the economy, our health, political life, education, almost all of Array. . by possibility and volatility.
While resilient formulas can cope with these sudden adjustments and shocks, it’s more appealing to take a look at those that thrive when unforeseen global variability forces their disruption. better, I asked: how does “antifrility” apply to education?Can there be a formula design technique in education that considers that our schools and the organizations that use them benefit from forced disruption, whether it’s a pandemic or a crisis that pushes academics and teachers out of the classroom and leaves school leaders with no options yet to throw away their playbook titled “How to Run a School”?
Addressing this factor means getting out of any debate about the goal of schooling or the political agendas that lead to reform, forces us to look at schools as microcosm of society, in which learning intensifies and rushes to gain the obligatory adaptability and versatility, know-how, which allows us to face and face existing and long-term challenges. Similar to the extensive one-square-foot technique for gardening in which development situations are optimized, schools are designed to provide young people with an environment where opportunities Mini-challenges prepare them for the complexity of the global conversion that awaits them.
But what if making schools more resilient and resilient wasn’t enough?
Since March 2020, I have been working with a Qatar Foundation (QF) peer organization to perceive the effects of school closures on other facets of education. At 14 QF schools, we discussed how stakeholder relationships, program balance, and feedback quality were affected by a sudden shift to distance learning. The aim was to look for imaginable data that could only count the eventual reopening of schools, which took place in August, and to design a formula of aids that would ensure continuity of coaching and learning regardless of developments. Covid-19 pandemic.
What emerged was a set of recommendations for learning designs through combined models and the use of generation to foster engagement by addressing student-to-student relationships and getting a better assessment for learning. But the report was also the catalyst for a verbal exchange on the existential consultation of how “anti-fragile” our pre-university schooling formula was.
Schools within QF come with academies that offer foreign bachelor’s programs; others focus on educating academics with special information needs; and schools with models of experimental or progressive programs that challenge the fundamental characteristics of general education. QF’s initiative to open Academyati (meaning ‘My Academy’), a progressive school where students are not organized into levels, have much more than they need to be informed and where educators are called collaborators, reflected our goal of shaking up the prestige quo long before the coronavirus crisis made it necessary.
In order for this eclectic organization of schools, with its multinational organizations of educators, to reach consensus on any subject, one would think that they have a constant set of guiding principles; a firmly established ethic that allows for non-unusual direction and technique for decision-making. That’s not the case.
So what I make of the school’s QF formula an attractive case for examining anti-agility in education is the fact that school governance is weakly coupled with head office leadership. This is a specific configuration and the result of consistent backup. and onwards between the autonomy of these schools and the overall strategic direction of the organization. It is also the result of a pragmatic commitment to school growth, inclusive and student-centered approaches to training and learning, without imposing what deserves to be seen as on the floor.
Essentially, in the absence of uncompromising authority with a universal approach, schools can expand their own reaction to emerging challenges, while influencing the decisions of others and thus self-regulating the balance between consistency and model diversity.
In the face of a sudden interruption, a formula like this triggers multiple attempts to solve the challenge rather than a desperate search for maximum effective solution. The closure of QF schools imposed by the pandemic without delay triggered the desire to document the effect of this evolution on learning, to verify the choice of technological solutions, and to expand and implement other combined learning models, all while engaged in a larger-scale conversation about what works and why. These were mechanisms that were not part of any plan, but catalyzed through a crisis within a school formula, supplied to receive and appreciate them.
Over the next few months, as maximum education systems seek tactics to get things back to normal, at QF, my colleagues and I will be thinking about how to deliver education and at any time, by creating partnerships with universities, study labs and open “Multi-university campus projects where learning paths are not linear. Custom and inclusive fixes.
We will do this by conceptualizing and perfecting the characteristics that make our formula “anti-fragile” and communicating our intentions to interrupt schooling clearly and consistently. And we will because it makes learning more sustainable, regardless of swan color. .
Mehdi Benchaabane is the Director of the Qatar Educational Development Institute Foundation. He leads a team of professional specialists and curriculum experts.