Stephen became a professor back in the 1980s and there have been some amazing projects, with hundreds of millions of research £ and $ during that period. Below are some recently concluded projects of various sizes - not a complete list but indicative...
education technology action group
When three ministers - for schools, business and universities asked for this challenge to be met, it was hard to say no. With a great group of wise souls, and a year, we produced a summary of how this could all happen by 2020 and where education was clearly, consensually, headed (never mind the 2025 they has asked for). Poitics being what it is, all three were moved as soon as we reported (no our fault!). Perhaps the key policy were recommended was this:
"Some things will need to move over, to be dropped, to change and to vary to allow all this to happen. We are calling for everyone to play their part in enabling this progress."
...and of course everyone is still waiting.be very afraid
Each year a selection of ingenious students - from primary to university age - were invited along - usually to BAFTA in London's Piccadilly to show and talk about the extraordinary things they were doing with new technologies in their learning, and to thus scare their civil servants and ministers a little! The last BVA was BVA Jersey and now little events happen all by themselves all over. Looking back is an interesting indicator - the children's ambition is the potent force here, not the evolving technology...
notschool.net
Inclusion, decent opportunities for all learners regardless of circumstances, making the best of the talent our young people embody... these have been elusive targets for education systems. Back in 1997 I proposed that we used new technology, on-line communities and a new organisational structure to help attain those targets and unlock the unrealised talents of so many... and we got started in 1998. Many thousands of excluded (by circumstances or behaviour) children, our Researchers, have since passed through succesfully. Project closed in 2016.
Our Researchers were full of compelling little insights. They constantly railed that "the worse you were at something in school, the more you were made to do it..." with conspicuously poor effect. And so on...
user led makeover - school learning spaces
following on from, and learning from, other learner led, highly affordable, learning space makeover projects like the Lampton School project, or Thorning School in Denmark, these three SEK schools in Spain set 3 groups of children the task of transforming their learning spaces - the project, the impact and interviews with some teachers, are all here.
wesley science centre for tomorrow
a school already remarkable seeks to build an outstanding science centre - by remodelling existing buildings - and I was delighted to be involved from early on. The vision was to make the building itself "of science" with data and the science of learning very much a focus. An exceptional team of folk saw how good it could be - with highly visible learning, a multiple floor drop zone, media walls, hydroponic vertical surfaces, rich data, great light and more. It opened in 2017 but before a brick was tweaked we had a workshop manual of what it might be like to use - to inform the evolution of what was actually built later. I certainly recommend that start and approach... use and edit theirs!
lindfield learning village - a school of the future
a wonderful project from an ambitious local community with exceptional political and media support - this absolutely will be best school in the southern hemisphere. And by the way, when I suggested that ambition to parents, the first one to comment said "why stop there?" Here's one of the many early resources that "got parents talking and engaged".
When we showed all these effective ingredients to the community, and asked them to pick their top few, they said persuasively, "if they all work, why wouldn't we have them all?l". And now, we will.
horizontal - horizon scanning for the UK government
the Blair government in the UK approached and said words to the effect of "please help us to focus on some of the coming things we probably haven't anticipated". Which is probably quite a long list (!) but we had resources and the ability to invite some wonderfuly wise souls to our wonderful space in London's Tower Bridge. Looking back, we were spot on... and they should have listened... but in the end an election intervened, and then there are new ministers, again. On reflection, our charrette work model was a very efffective one.
By way of example, surely by now someone should be thinking about a policy for psychopharmacological enhancements? Exams are not the olympics, but clearly there is no level playing field at the moment.
learning for sport
inevitably, as the evidence from work on better learning in education started to be ever more convincing - and Stephen was also successfully coaching Team GB world championship sailing squads using those methods - some elite sports started to take note and a string of collaborations from just before the Beijing Olympics developed. Most recently with the team GB Olympic Hockey squad and with the England national rugby team under Eddie Jones.
school improvement
not really a project, but an amalgam of many: a good quick summary of the range of ingredients for transforming the performance of schools and other learning institutions - as drawn from a number of our other projects
as with all these pages on the heppell.net website, it is very much work in progress; we will add to, or refine, as time goes by.
This page authored, and last updated, by Prof Stephen Heppell - latest changes made on Friday, November 3, 2017 3:30 AM
