When High School is the best it can be at engaging students and
preparing them for the world ahead… what will it look like? 

This is the guiding question for NEXTschool – an inclusive, research-based, design initiative facilitated by LEARN –  that aims to transform change-ready High Schools in systemic and sustainable ways with minimum investment. The driving force of the initiative is the urgent need and moral responsibility we have to align our schools with the information age – to reconstruct the traditional structural and cultural paradigms so that schools can ‘decompartmentalize’ teaching and learning and become more proactive and adaptive in their approach to the constantly changing needs of students and their communities.

The objective of NEXTschool is the development of a framework for the high school of the future that is responsive to natural learning patterns and can function within current regulatory parameters and collective agreements, as well as government curriculum and legislation.  Ultimately, the goal is to create a flexible framework – a menu of options for possible large-scale application –  rather than a singular recipe for success. 

The idea of this ‘school of the future’ has been percolating for decades – in 2007, a staff of high school teachers created a preliminary model based on ‘clustering’ teachers and students as a learning community.  In 2017, a formal research phase brought together the findings of world experts, innovative schools and students themselves and included work of the OECD, the MIT Teaching and Learning Lab, Peter Senge’s work on Learning Organizations and Systems Thinking, Michael Fullan’s Deep Learning and the United Nations Millennium Project.  Read the full research report here.

With its core values of transparency, inclusiveness, equity, adaptability and innovation firmly in place and a commitment to the OECD’s 7 Principles of Learning, the NEXTschool initiative has moved into the “Design Phase” – where 80 stakeholders including teachers, administrators, parents, commissioners, academics and researchers are grouped in Innopods to dream and design prototypes within each of 5 sub-systems of the NEXTschool Ecosystem:

Spatial: where learning takes place
Temporal: when learning takes place
Andragogical: what and how learning takes place
Relational: who is part of the learning experience
Communal: the integration of school in society and the learning in the community     

Over the course of 5 days of design thinking, from January to May 2018, members of the Innopods led by Concordia’s Don DeGuerre and his team at People Powered Innovation Lab are collaborating to imagine, explore and refine prototypes for the NEXTschool. 

Subscribe to this bi-monthly blog as we share the progress of the NEXTschool initiative in its pursuit to transform the high school experience in Quebec English schools.

Questions or Comments?  Contact nextschool@learnquebec.ca

lizfalcoNEXTschoolWhen High School is the best it can be at engaging students and preparing them for the world ahead... what will it look like?  This is the guiding question for NEXTschool – an inclusive, research-based, design initiative facilitated by LEARN -  that aims to transform change-ready High Schools in systemic and...