Cover interview: GEMS Education's IRD team

We've all heard the warnings schools today need to prepare children for jobs that do not exist yet. But if we really don't know what these jobs are going to be, what skills are schools expected to teach students? As educators across the world grapple with the challenge of educating the next generation, the forward thinking ones are working on training children to acquire 21st century skills such as collaboration and teamwork, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving.

One such school group is GEMS Education, which set up an innovation, research and development (IRD) unit to promote innovation across its schools. The school operator's innovation strategy is split into three key pillars: the first focuses on innovation in the curriculum and teaching and learning. The second focuses on teacher and leadership development, which, according to GEMS Education's newly appointed senior vice president global head of innovation, research and development, Mick Gernon, is essential for making the inroads into innovation the school operator wants.

"Leaders need to set the context, but teachers need to be trained in terms of new methodologies, pedagogy, and new pieces of technology to actually roll out within the classroom," he tells Education Journal Middle East during a recent visit to the new Dubai American Academy campus.

"The third and probably most interesting and dynamic piece is what we do in terms of changes to systems, processes, structures, so that we begin to think about schools in quite a different way and don't just think about them in terms of brick and mortar and little boxes with one teacher and 30 students. We reimagine what a school should and does look like, and then give some sort of future foresight and insight into what we think our schools should actually become," Gernon adds.

The wider IRD team have different areas of expertise and passion, which means they work together in multidisciplinary ways.

GEMS Education head of innovation strategy Christine Nasserghodsi explains: "We all have backgrounds in technology and teaching and learning and school leadership, but we are organised into two different strands one focuses on digital ecosystems and the other is more focused on innovation and entrepreneurship within the schools. But the two intersect with each other quite a lot. And we're all foresight focused, so really thinking about what the future might be, whether it's looking at digital ecosystems or broader learning ecosystems in general."

This strategy then trickles down into the schools, with each individual school having its own innovation strategy. GEMS works with a number of institutional partners, including Harvard's Project Zero, to develop a research-based strategy framework. To develop their individual strategies, schools focus on their core identity, looking at factors such as their values as a school, and what they hope to achieve for their students, and then pair that up with different strategies, resources, tools, and approaches to teaching and learning, and digital support.

Schools then map up out a two- or three-year plan that goes into a month-by-month plan with specific goals and outcomes. Furthermore, each school has a chief innovation and digital officer, who is a member of the senior leadership team, and most schools have an innovation team to support their goals.

"The key aspect behind all of that is to make sure the innovation strategy isn't a bolt-on activity; that it's something that sits right at the heart of school development because every schools will have its own improvement plans. But this is about how do we transform what we're doing to actually deliver those improved outcomes. We want to make sure that whatever the focus is around innovation and the investment we make in the school actually does tie very clearly to student outcome, and therefore we can actually see that return on investment and the impact is clear," Gernon states.

Nasserghodsi adds: "When the schools are planning their innovation strategies, they actually begin with their plans for school performance and student outcomes. From there, you can look at different kinds of challenges some require simple improvements, and others are stickier, more complex, and those are the areas that are ripe for innovation."

The team uses The Kindergarten Starters as an example. The Indian curriculum pre-KG to Grade 5 school in Garhoud is one of the lower fee paying schools across the GEMS network, and realised it needed to change the delivery of teaching and learning. When Asha Alexander became principal, she observed that students weren't being given enough opportunities to think critically in the classroom and teaching and learning was too textbook oriented.

"They really saw that as an innovation challenge and started to make some changes immediately, including getting rid of textbooks and shifting to more agile digital learning, so really looking for digital resources that are then adapted in real time to meet the needs of the students. Asha had to work with a broad cross section of teachers and parents in order for that to happen in a way that was relatively seamless. But then beyond that, she wanted to build students' critical thinking skills and build the capacity of teachers to respond to student needs in real time," Nasserghodsi explains.

For this, the school worked with Harvard Project Zero to develop an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning in Grades 3-5 that focused on school-wide projects. The school has also implemented robotics and engineering across all grade levels.

PARTNERSHIPS

In recent years, GEMS has signed a number of exclusive partnerships to drive its innovation strategy, including Singularity University, iDTech, and Carnegie Mellon's CREATE lab.

These partnerships, Gernon says, are chosen strategically. He explains: "The chairman [Sunny Varkey] is very clear about his vision for our company. He wants us to be the most innovative education company in the world. And therefore, we need to look at who are the leaders within specific areas or fields. If we look to robotics, Carnegie Mellon would be the obvious choice. We have an ongoing relationship with them and we can use their expertise in very different ways. Again, all of those things have to be driven by what difference it makes for our students.

"We can have this collection of badges of names, but if it doesn't make a difference, then we're not interested. So we are quite discerning in terms of where we go and where we look and who we talk to. Similarly, there are lots of people that come our way to say GEMS provides a perfect ecosystem because we're global, we're so large, we're diverse because we operate across four different curricula, and in very different regions and contexts and price points. I don't think there's any other company that can have that diversity and use it in that particular way. So we look at what are our priorities, do they match other people's priorities, and once we have that match, we partner with the right organisations. But the clarity has to be around how does it trickle down and what is the impact in the classroom."

GEMS is also working with Singularity University on its Global Grand Challenges and entrepreneurship opportunities, an initiative that saw over 700 teams from GEMS' global network entering the competitions.

"We ran and dovetailed this global grand challenge programme with our own innovation strands and programmes and challenges last year. That started by exposing 40,000-plus students to this whole concept that you can think in different ways, you can look at what the world's greatest challenges are, and come up with the best ideas you possibly can to impact a billion people. To actually put that in front of so many students is amazing, but the responses that then came back from that are significant. Students wouldn't normally have access to something like that. For example, we had teams presenting at the Singularity Global Summit this August in San Francisco. What's really interesting is that because of the ideas they had, they were being approached by Coca Cola and other investors... people who say they want to buy their products. Without that partnership, the students wouldn't gain that exposure on a global scale. This partnership has taken off significantly, and that will at least double the number of students participating this year," Gernon enthuses.

The team is keen to point out that it's not just the high fee paying schools that benefit from the different partnerships. All schools, Gernon says, "have been exposed to a whole range of different programmes". While most partnerships start out as a pilot on a smaller scale, the intention is to roll out the programmes across the network, first within the UAE, and eventually globally.

"That equity matters a lot. Last year when we had Carnegie Mellon's partner come out to train staff on robotics, we were able to open that up to the entire network. And then four schools that wanted to participate in the pilot applied for it and were able to have access to resources for an extended period of time, they reported back data from the pilot and then they were able to invest in resources for the following year. But that was open to all schools, and I think that's really a priority for us.

"Pilots also build internal expertise, so we now have 70-plus teachers who are trained up in Carnegie Mellon's approach to robotics and computational thinking who can then support other staff members within and across schools," Nasserghodsi says.

This feeds into the IRD team's second pillar, which focuses on teacher training. Despite the four different curricula offered by GEMS schools, the operator's approach to teacher training is the same, Gernon notes.

"We're trying to instil a sense of skills and attitudes towards innovation that can be implemented irrespective of that particular curriculum's approach. We have a network of innovation leaders, so they're drawn together, we communicate with them either electronically or we bring them together, have training sessions, and people then feed off each other. Coming together actually makes those connections for them, and there's an element of self-learning and self-development that sits behind that. So whilst we can provide an impetus and framework, really it's then dependant on the teachers themselves how they usethose ideas. And we find all of our teachers just energise each other in terms of the things they work on," he explains.

Nasserghodsi adds: "What we've found is different themes run across the innovation strategy from robotics and computational thinking to critical thinking and creativity to multidisciplinary teaching and learning or solving real world challenges. And then we bring in foresight around resources that we share with the schools, but as they build capacity, they then begin to support one another."

ASSESSMENTS AND RESULTS

The UAE Vision 2021 sets out the National Agenda for the UAE to be among the most innovative nations in the world, and innovation is now a key part of the school inspection process across the UAE.

According to Gernon, most of GEMS' school inspection reports show innovation skills rated "very high". He says: "When you look at the school inspection framework, which has innovation skills now written all the way through it, what we've taken from every inspection report for GEMS schools has been that those innovation skills are rated very high. That again is an indication to us that we're taking the right type of approach in terms of exposure, and we're doing it in a way that it becomes an everyday occurrence, not just if we have an enterprise week or tech week. It's just embedded through everything we do. Those inspection reports provide some really important data for us and that helps us in terms of our strategy as well."

Schools that rate well on innovation in the DSIB reports also tend to score higher on student attainment, Nasserghodsi notes. She explains: "We actually did an analysis of student attainment data and school performance on the innovation component of the inspections through the inspection reports… so looking at how student attainment reported by KHDA aligned with innovation as reported by KHDA. And the schools that were very good and outstanding in attainment were also schools that were most likely to be very good and outstanding with innovation. So they're really not in opposition to one another, rather they're very supportive. Going back to the original story of Kindergarten Starters — what the school did find was that student attainment in language increased significantly as a result of the innovations they implemented."

The enthusiasm around the innovation strategy has rubbed off on parents as well. Nasserghodsi notes: "Our parents are very savvy people. They know the world that they're living in is changing and they want their children to be equipped. Student performance matters to them a lot — they want their children to have high exam results and to achieve in traditional academic ways and we support that.

"When you think about innovation for school performance and student outcomes, ensuring that every student is provided an education that leads to high levels of attainment is definitely a priority. At the same time, it's important that students think in flexible ways, it's important that they can upskill themselves for jobs that don't exist yet, and I think parents are acutely aware of that and very supportive of the work we do overall."