Active Learning in Low-Cost Schools

>> Hello, everyone, my name is Gunther. And I'm here to talk a little bit about a particular school that I'm the founder of where we use active learning in a model, in a low-cost model of schools. And much of what we're doing now is enabled by Instructure Canvas, okay? So, so I'll start readily talking a little bit about our school here in Sao Paulo. It's a school chain. We, our first unit we started operating in 2018. So it's a fairly new school chain here in Sao Paulo in Brazil.

So we started the first year with around 60 students, it was a pilot unit, and the next year we had already 240 students, and now we're creating three units with over 1,200 students. And our plans are to expand in 2021. So on the turn of this year to the next year, we should have five new units and around 2,200 students. So we are growing at a pretty fast pace. We work exclusively with the Brazilian equivalent to middle school and high school.

And we offer full-time education. This is kind of strange for non-Brazilians, but in Brazil, our education system is completely, it's mostly, almost all schools operate like four hours a day. So students go like half a period to schools. And our project, or our school, offers full-time education, which is a big advantage for Brazilian students. We also work with Chromebooks.

So we have one Chromebook per student, and that's how they access our Canvas platform and our contents. And we, our students have daily English class, so every day they have one moment where they are learning English and where they're able to practice a foreign language. And that's very important for Brazilian students, especially in the low-income communities where we operate. In the communities where we operate, it's-- we would say a lower middle class of Brazil. So it's not like the lowest, it's not the bottom of the pyramid, but it's the bottom of the pyramid for the private sector.

In Brazil, the way the education system works, there is, the majority of students are in public schools, which are in general not seen as-- as good quality schools. And there is a minority that have their students in the private sector. And in the private sector, the less expensive, the lowest cost schools, that's where we operate. And it's very important for these students to learn English that this will give them, will open for the many opportunities to be successful in their professional careers, right? And we work exclusively-- all our methodologies are based in active learning. And I'm not sure if everyone is familiar with this term, with what active learning actually stands for, but I will go over very quickly so we are all on the same page, okay? Well, I'll start, when we talk about education, there are some very hard questions that we educators ask ourselves, right? We have to ask ourselves every day.

So the first question is what will the world look like in 20 years? Because one interesting thing about education is whatever we are doing, however we are working with our students today, will only have a true impact, we won't be able to see the results, the true results, in how successful they are in their lives, in We won't see them, we won't see how good or bad our education was in the next year. It takes time. It's a long-term investment that we do. So the question, what will education look like in 20 years? We have no idea, but all we know is it will be completely different than it is today. So it's a kind of-- so our jobs, try to imagine how the world will be, we don't know how it will be, but it will certainly be very different, right? So what students need to learn to be prepared for this completely different world? It also depends, we like to think of this 50-50-50, and idea where it depends on what kind of things we need the students to learn, there are some things students need to learn within the class, within this particular moment where they're studying in the classroom.

There are some things that are needed, maybe, so it can demonstrate their schools in a test. So in 50 days, around 50 days. Or and there are some things, some kind of knowledges, that students' knowledges and skills, that students have to learn and they will carry these knowledges and these skills for the rest of their life. In fact, schools have the test, the difficult test, to help students learn in all three types of learning, let's say. There are some skills that students only need to learn for 50 minutes or for 50 days.

And for 50 minutes, or 50 years. But if schools don't try to push themselves and force themselves to develop the skills that will help students for 50 years or, let's say, we tend to focus on the 50 minutes or on the 50 days. So it's always important to learn, and when we're talking about 20 years, obviously we're talking about the soft skills, the deep learning, all those concepts we are very used to talk. Next question is what kind of things students need to learn and to be prepared for life, for this 50 years idea. Well, they are very complex skills.

We're not talking about knowing how to, I don't know, name the capitals of some countries. We're not talking about these kinds of skills, we are talking about those skills the we did not learn in school. We're talking about teamwork, we're talking about believing in yourself, and believing you can be much better and have a high self esteem. We're talking about persistence, we're talking about resilience, about the students not giving up when they find the first obstacle. So we're talking about these kinds of skills that we have never learned in schools.

When we were in school, we did not learn these skills. So the question is will we be able to overcome this education gap? Will we be able to help our students learn something we did not learn in school? And the answer, if you're working with education, you probably agree with us, we have no choice. We have to do it. We have to make it work. I don't know how we'll do it, we have some ideas and we're trying our best, but we have to make it work.

That's our mission and our goal in life. If you're an educator, I'm sure you agree with me. And the next question-- and what is active learning? So this presentation, we're talking about active learning in low-cost schools. Active learning is about developing these 21st century skills we just talked, and we know a lot of these methodologies. You've probably heard some of them.

Flipped classroom, project-based learning, inquiry-based learning, blended learning, peer learning or team learning, group rotation, and many other techniques and maps. And when we talk about active learning, it's usually like a name that kind of groups together all these concepts and boils down to just one single sentence, which is all those methodologies and the mindset we need to have to make students to be stimulated, to learn actively, to be co-responsible for their learning. So what we're talking here is move away from the paradigm where students sit and watch a lecture. And move towards the kind of learning where students are always doing something. So they might be building a project.

They might be even doing exercise, or even when they have to study, you know, academical kind of knowledge, they have to develop other skills like taking those, synthesizing the whole thing, mind maps. Or organize their own time and their own schedule in a way that they can be able to deal with large amounts of study materials that they have to deal with in a short period of time. So even when they're doing very academic, academical study, they have to do it in an active manner. So in a simple, in one simple hashtag, we're talking about autonomy to our learners. Our students have to be developing autonomy.

So when we talk about active learning, that's what we're talking about, right? So the scenes you usually have to see in a school that's working with active learning techniques, is more like this, right? So you have the student studying by themselves, in this case here, we have a study room. And students, each student has one Chromebook, and on the Chromebooks they access our Canvas platform. We have content developed by our, not by our teachers, but by a central pedagogy unit. So we have like a central group of professionals that work on the content students have to watch and work on the study, on the class plans that teachers should use in their classes. And I will talk a little bit more about this, and you will see what the advantage is and why we do it this way.

But by doing it this way, you should see scenes like this. So students studying by themselves in an autonomous way, or students working on projects that are intriguing or inspiring to them, or challenging to them, most importantly. So, when we start thinking about active learning, and preparing our students for the future, you have to start from the curriculum, right? I don't know each country has their own paradigm, in Brazil, we have a set of very general skills that students should learn in a particular year. So it's not very specific. And each school can build their own curriculum based on these general skill sets that we have a standard for each year.

In our case, our curriculum is divided in three parts, right? So there's one curriculum that we call the knowledges curriculum, right? So because there are many knowledges, not one knowledge, and here we're talking about, you know, the hard school contents, right? So we're talking about stuff like the Pythagoras theorem, or we're talking about, I don't know, the history of the French Revolution, and stuff like that. So the contents, of course, doesn't make sense to memorize simply the contents. It makes sense to understand this content. So there's a way to work this, but we're talking in the end, about very school contents, right? So the knowledges curriculum. The other one is what we call the competencies, or the skills curriculum.

The soft skills curriculum. And here we're talking about things like teamwork and as I said before, self esteem, and resilience, and knowing how to research and organize and connect information and so on. And we have like a list of skills and competencies we have to develop in our school project. In the way we work with the students. And there is also room for what we call the emerging curriculum.

So the kind of curriculum that we can explain ahead, you can't imagine that there will be a [inaudible], a pandemic in the world, I couldn't imagine it, but you can't ignore it. You can't simply pertained there is nothing going on in the world and we have to discuss these kinds of things with the students. So we have built a curriculum that enables all three curriculums in the way we work with the students. So I will talk about two of these strategies that are very central, very important, very fundamental to our proposition. One is the flipped classroom, I'm sure all of you or most of you have heard about the flipped classroom.

It's this concept where students prepare themselves for the classes instead of going unprepared to the classes and then doing homework. So they have to prepare themselves, they have to study ahead of the class. And this is kind of-- fairly common in higher education when we're talking about colleges and so on. Universities. But not so common in K-12 education, right? And the way we do it-- to do it in the K-12 environment, what you have to do is you have to structure stuff a little bit more.

Because they are, you know, teenagers or children, and they need a little bit more structure so they can step-by-step gain their autonomy so they can study by themselves and do the whole thing completely independently, right? So the way we do it is we have a particular time in our schedule and we have a particular room and we have the tools and the materials to allow students to do their study plan. And we have the study plans, right? And we help them to study and we help them to achieve and we collect a lot of metrics to be telling them if they're doing good, if they're doing bad, if they're not doing anything at all. And we can help them to do this study plan. And then when they come into the classes, they already know a lot about the information they're going to study. Right? What-- one very important thing that people don't realize when talking about flipped classroom is it gives you a very important possibility to personalize, to customize your class according to your group of students or maybe even according to the needs of a particular, one special student, right? So we do this at escola mais, we do collect all the data and all the metrics and all, everything that we know about how students are doing.

And that's why it's important that we have a kind of standardized study plan that all students have to do the same study plan at the same time or the same week at least. So we can collect the data and when the student, when the teacher goes into the class to start their class plan in the next week, he already, he or she already knows what's going on with that class. If maybe one class of the sixth grade is finding everything very easy and the other class is finding everything very challenging, how do we-- we deal in different ways with each class. And teachers, the teachers already know it because of the metrics that we collect. Right? So in our way of working, our teachers do not prepare their classes.

They do not prepare their class plans. They do not decide how they're going to talk about a specific subject. What they-- so they give them, the class plan ready. What they do have to do is prepare themselves for the class. So they have to prepare themselves for the students.

Not for the contents. You see the difference? So instead of them thinking on how I'm going to discuss about the French Revolution or about the American Independence, or whatever the subject is, their preparation is why didn't this student or that student understand this basic concept that was presented in the study plan? How can I help him to better understand this based on this class plan that we already have here? Maybe I should do a one-on-one meeting with this student before class. Maybe I should start a class in a different way. Maybe I should propose a group work in the beginning of the class that will help them, you know, refresh the main ideas, and maybe one student will help the other, like the peer student helping the other one. So teachers are prepared for the students.

And that's part of putting them in the center of their learning. And teachers are not prepared for the content they have to work. They also are, of course, because they're specialists in their subject, but we give them a lot of things ready so they can focus on the students. So that's our approach to flipped classroom. And it's been very successful as I will show you very soon.

What are the advantages of doing this kind of stuff, first, it promotes the autonomous learning which we are trying to promote. It ensures, in our case, since we're a school chain, that all school units act as the same starting point. So all students are in the same start line. It ensures that we collect a lot of metrics and personalization. And it aids in school business model and cost of course.

If a huge part of the time or many parts of the time, students are in school, studying, with their Chromebooks using Canvas, I need less [inaudible], can put more students in one room because they're actually studying individually. And I have maybe some educators that are helping a large group of students to do their autonomous study. It's much more cost effective for our school. So since we're trying to operate in a very low price ticket for being able to offer this education for our families, this is very important for us. Of course, there are many challenges.

It's a very different mindset from most schools and families, so our team has to be constantly being trained and the families, we need to be in constant communication with the families also. The next strategy that we use is maker projects, right? So we use project based learning. What we do here is we develop that skills curriculum that I talked before, right? So what happens here is the students are working in projects they love, in projects they are naturally engaged, but we are not forcing them to learn anything that looks very school, you know? Like the school type of knowledge. So they are building, I don't know, their own bedroom lamps, night lamps, or maybe they're working with ceramics, or maybe they're working with developing an electronics project for their house. And none of this has directly-- is directly connected to, I don't know, the math curriculum that we have.

But of course, they are always, you know, using the knowledge, or they're always requiring new knowledge to develop that project that they need to do. And that creates interest in them to learn the other subjects too, okay? In our case we do all communicates in a maker-- in the maker lab, right, where the maker projects happen. All in English. And that's a way to start. .

. Having the students get used to learning or to listening to English and start slowly communicating. And we are not worried here in the structure of the language, we're worrying that they communicated. So they can express themselves and they can understand what other people are talking to them in English, right? In the first test, it would be very simple commands. And points and lots of visuals to help them to understand.

And little by little they start to think like this. This is one of our tests in maker projects. And so describe the tasks of each role of the members? What does the moderator does, and then the student kind of mixes, it might be funnier for Portuguese speaking spectators, but he mixes Portuguese and English. Like "O moderator help the group em todos os aspectos. " So the moderator needs to help the group in all aspects.

This is what he's trying to say. But he's like mixing his mother language with English. And that's exactly what we expect to see. And they are, little by little they get more fluent into the language. So lots of advantages.

Also, students play different roles. Complex problem solving. They learn to use materials in an effective way. There's lots of soft skills being developed here. And we use the students' interests in our advantage.

And we help them to-- we kind of-- they learn other stuff because they want to do the thing they love. That's kind of the trade-off we-- the trade-off that we do with them. Right? There are many challenges, it's a very uncommon teacher profile needed to kind of make this thing work. The teacher cannot lecture, it's impossible in a lab, the teacher to be on the, you know, whiteboard writing stuff. No one will pay attention and it's on purpose.

So it's very challenging for these teachers to learn a different way of working with students where he can't lecture. It's impossible for him to lecture. So he has to be going around and helping each of the students and going around the tables. And we have also many other learning strategies. Mentoring, weekly planning, and many others.

But all of them are aligned with one single, let's say, motto. Which is how do we do our students to be assimilated to learn actively? How do we do our students-- how do we promote autonomy to our students? That's the main question, the driving question we are always asking ourselves. Well, this is a little bit of the results, right? So as I said in the beginning, we had 60 students in 2018. about 2,200, that's our plan for the next year. This is an external evaluation that we do.

We hire a company that comes and audits kind of our learning skills of our students. The blue bar is escola mais, and the orange bar is the average of all the other schools that enroll this program, right? So what we're measuring here is how much each student advanced during a year, right? So from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, our students advanced this much in the evaluation. And the average group this much. And in the case of the eighth grade, we evaluate, we grew this much and most schools decreased. So they had poorer results at the end of the year than they had at the beginning of the year and we improved this much.

So the academic results are really, really. . . They-- we-- they are really important for us to keep moving ahead and to show we are in the right direction, right? And this is like the commercial results. So it means that families that understand what we're doing and we are getting-- we're growing a number of the students.

That was my presentation for today. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed and possibly could get some insights and some ideas. These are my contacts. Feel free to contact me if you want to know more about escola mais.

I thank Instructure for giving me the opportunity to present a little bit. And as I presented, it's-- it would be impossible to offer the kind of education we are offering at the price range we're offering without the support and the partnership and without the tools that we use from Instructure, without using Canvas. Okay? Thank you very much and we'll be in touch.