Global trends inspire transformation

How schools are dreaming up a new future for education.

BY Joanne Brookfield

Using real-world examples often helps students learn bigger concepts. In maths, subtraction could be taught by asking, “If an item costs $2.70 and you pay with a five-dollar note, how much change will you get?”

C ard transactions, however, have eliminated the need to calculate change and, with the pandemic prioritising tap-and-go payments, it’s possible that there are young children who have never seen actual cash.

By the time these preps leave high school, will fiat currency still exist or will we all be making purchases through blockchain technology? And will they need to learn to drive, if autonomous vehicles are commonplace?

“ These are the big wonderings I have for the future of education,” says Jeremy Otto, who was appointed last year to the newly created role of Director of Teaching and Learning at Westbourne Grammar, a non-denominational Christian co-educational day school in Truganina.

“I look at learning for students across prep to Year 12,” he says. “My role is very much strategic, thinking around how can we foster and create a culture of excellence and innovation, and what does that look like?”

W hile driverless cars are still a way off, the disruptive nature of the pandemic left schools with little choice but to embrace the latest technology to enable remote learning and continue educating online.

“ The paradigm of education has been shifted,” Otto says. “Our students have interacted with learning in a very different way and, for me, we wouldn’t want to go backwards.”

Technology certainly isn’t moving backwards, with artificial intelligence (AI) a hot topic among educators. ChatGPT, a language-model chatbot that can almost instantaneously write anything you ask of it, and DALL.E, which similarly generates images, are just two examples of how the current world for students is as challenging as any predicted one.

“ The hardest thing is, we’re competing with a world right now where AI is moving at a rate we can’t even comprehend,” Otto says. However, “we’re not shying away from that, we’re embracing that” at Westbourne, which is developing a policy of the ethical use of artificial intelligence.

“ We’re educating our students that AI is here, and going to become more and more prominent in the world as they move forward, so how do we get them to ethically engage as global citizens?”

C amberwell Girls Grammar (CGGS), which provides early learning, primary and secondary education, began work in 2018 on a “bespoke learning architecture” to ensure it continues sending out global citizens equipped to thrive in this rapidly changing world.

Principal Debbie Dunwoody says that, over 18 months and drawing heavily on the Stanford d.school design-thinking process, “as a whole staff we took into consideration relevant data and