Sharing Good Practice
optimal practice to foster children’s
creativity and innovation, but the rates
of “outstanding” schools are dropping
year on year with only 14 in 2018. There
are fewer than 30,000 students of an
estimated 250,000 in Dubai, having
access to Outstanding education.
Where are we going wrong?
The move toward social learning
has long been championed by the
beacons of educational excellence
like Finland, Switzerland, Ireland for
decades and is proving successful
with long term national benefits like
improved life expectancy, increased
employment, improved satisfaction
ratings - to mention but a few.
So what does social learning
look like?
Social learning can happen anywhere
form early childhood to old age.
Social learning equips us with the
intellectual resources to think critically
and deeply about what we are doing.
It encourages us to engage with our
peers in dialogue and collaborative
knowledge building. Fostering the
ability to be philosophical.
We need to encourage
mindfulness, thinking about
thinking.
Reasoning as to the greater purpose of
our activities.
Social learning involves growing the
capacity for risk and uncertainty. If
you enter a kindergarten classroom
you find children who are constantly
engaged in trial and error, investigating
their surroundings and the tools they
find all around them - enter a senior
classroom and this is all but lost. Enter
the majority of offices in the UAE and
it is nowhere to be found.
“If you double the number of
experiments you do each year,
you double your inventiveness”
Jeff Bezos.
Why aren’t we taking more
risks at work? Is it the fear of
losing our job - losing valuable
time - losing respect?
Social learning involves careful
institutional design to counter these
fears.
Montessori pioneered one of the first
formal attempts at social learning
in education in the 1900s - a child
centered approach based on discovery
learning. This has been modified
with the British Early Years curriculum
and is developing with the American
common core and the IB curriculums.
But this isn’t far enough!
We need to encourage primary,
secondary, university students to think
about thinking - to become practiced
at understanding how we learn not
just what we learn. We need to build
this into the workplace too. Create
spaces for investigation, collaboration
and possibly most importantly - failure.
Providing opportunity to take risks,
to fail and to try again is paramount.
Be prepared for the unexpected, only
then can we foster innovation, only
then can we meet the goals of our
nation and move toward the demands
of a new existence in a future that is
fast approaching.
“One still must have chaos
in oneself to give birth to a
dancing star”
Friedrich Nietzche
Catherine O’Farrell (PGCBA, BSc-Psych, B-Ed) is an experienced psychologist &
consultant. She has worked in educational and medical institutions across Ireland,
the UK, Australia and the UAE for over 15 years. She is currently Group Head for
Athena Group in Dubai and Director of Phase 2 for the Dubai Inclusion Network.
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May - Jun 2019
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