Позитивные изменения. Образование. Школа будущего (Тематический выпуск, 2022)/Positive changes. Education. The school of the future (Special issue, 2022)

It is like IKEA: you can read the instructions first, or you can just start assembling the stool and see what happens. I think that today’s children do not concentrate on the material as well, if they have not done anything with their own hands. Therefore, the school should be more practice-oriented in this regard, in my opinion. In principle, this isn’t something new. Because it is already there in an ordinary Western school, it just takes time to appear in our country.

Today's kids use apps extensively, where you can skip something quickly, move to other levels, go at your own pace. Can the School of the Future work as a learning app?

It seems to me that there should be some kind of variability, so that the child can study at his or her own pace and depth of learning the disciplines. Some schools already have this.

Now because all children have very different preschool experiences, they start school with very different levels of preparation. Some kids are cognitively overwhelmed, their heads already "bursting." Some children have just learned the alphabet. Plus, there are children with dysgraphia, dyslexia. There are a lot of children who have learning difficulties, who have a hard time working with text information. In this regard, the perfect school for me is not one that selects the best kids by giving them a bunch of tests at the entrance, but a school that will tell them: "Okay, come in." Just "come in," that’s all. And then, after testing the child, after working with him/her, they will build a certain learning path.

What does it look like in practice?

Let’s suppose there is a cohort of students. The children are divided into two subgroups, or even three, if the school can afford maintaining that much staff. That is, instead of three small classes of 12 people, we have one class, but with subgroups of 12. One subgroup consists of children that are ahead of the curriculum, the second group has students of average performance, and the last subgroup has children that have, for example, difficulty mastering spatial concepts and mathematics, in particular. In the last subgroup, we introduce correctional initiatives: we work with didactic material, use game aids, give visual supports.

Or, for example, the Russian language. There are kids who have a knack for the languages, then we just go with them through a good program at a fast pace. There are children with dysgraphia, with dyslexia, these are curated by a speech therapist. Also, a child can be in an advanced math group, but as regards the Russian language, he/she can be in a group of children with dysgraphia and dyslexia. And some kid can be in the top group in all disciplines.

This way, all children learn together. That is, in fact, instead of three classes there are several levels for each core subject. For some lessons, the children get together in one big classroom, do some projects together, communicate together. But I did not see that in elementary school, only in middle school. Yet things are not exactly implemented like that in practice. I believe that education should become fully personalized (and in fact, it already is, if you look at the rise of the tutoring institution). But how do you reconcile the personalized track with the need to socialize and interact with children? Probably, the School of the Future is an attempt to combine collective activity with an individual academic route.

You described three big blocks in the educational program of the school of the future: academics, creativity, and health. And you spoke in sufficient detail about the academic part – the educational process happening at different levels. What would be the characteristics of the other two components, health and creativity?

The perfect school for me is not one that selects the best kids by giving them a bunch of tests at the entrance, but a school that will tell them: “Okay, come in.” And then they will build a certain learning path.