TL;DR

We’re looking for the most innovative schools and educators in Australia, as part of a research project at the University of Sydney.

Be part of the project by sending us an email at research@schoolhouse.edu.au and telling us;

  • Who are the most innovative educators you know? We’re searching for people who are trying to make big, impactful changes, beyond a single classroom – to a whole year cohort, a whole school, or even bigger.
  • Which are the most innovative schools you know? We want to find schools that have adopted whole new ways of doing things that are student-focused, and dramatically different from other schools.

The Full Story

When I started Schoolhouse seven years ago, the goal was to advance the cause of progressive and innovative education in Australia. Looking around, I was amazed to find that in of the fifty new high schools opened in NSW over the previous ten years, not one had been an attempt to experiment with an innovative pedagogical approach. Given this, we decided that the best thing we could do would be to open a school that showed what was possible – a small high school that

That continued to be the objective of Schoolhouse, up until about 2019. Then something unexpected happened. In the space of about a year, three different innovative schools opened – the Lindfield Learning Village, CathWest Community, and The Living School in Lismore. Beyond this were stories of otehr established high schools working on adopting significant innovations. It felt like perhaps the landscape was beginning to shift, and we felt it was important to reconsider how we might best be able to champion progressive and innovative education given this change.

As a result, we decided not to pursue the idea of starting a school, but to focus on helping existing schools transform as part of this growing movement toward more innovative and student-focused models of education. In order to do that, I wanted to understand how the schools that were successfully achieving this were doing it. There are many barriers that prevent schools from adopting innovations that disrupt the status quo – what was it that enabled some educators and some schools to overcome those barriers?

To answer that question, I embarked on a PhD research project at the University of Sydney, working with Dr. Nicole Mockler and Dr. Nicole Brunker. Having received ethics approval, we are now gathering data by interviewing educators about their experiences of adopting innovation. We will be looking at schools where dramatic, student-focused innovations have been successfully adopted. We will also be speaking to educators who have not been successful in bringing about change, to understand the barriers they have faced.

If there is a particular school you think we should be researching, or an educator you think we should talk to, we’d love to hear about it. Send us an email and let us know at research@schoolhouse.edu.au.