Students who are best prepared for the future are CHANGE AGENTS. OECD, “Education 2030”, 2018 Encourage “open schooling” where schools become an AGENT OF COMMUNITY WELL-BEING. EU Commission, Science Education for Responsible Citizenship, 2015 WHAT THE PROJECT WILL DELIVER Mission Based Learning is an open schooling model, based on, but going further than, the key principles of open schooling. The new learning approach is named Mission Based Learning, and it is based on 10 years of educational innovation experimentation. The project sets out to test the qualities of Mission Based Learning through thorough experiments in secondary schools from different countries. From this experimentation it will deliver useful and practice-based guidance to teachers and schools in the process of taking action to change traditional classroom teaching, or to integrate alternative learning activities in the normal school life. In the process the project will test the educator competences developed under the Rounder Sense of Purpose (RSP) Erasmus+ project. WHY IS THE “MISSION BASED LEARNING” MODEL ABLE TO RESPOND TO WHAT 21ST CENTURY YOUNG STUDENTS NEED? Learning through strong and immersive community missions includes all the challenges the student needs to develop such skills, competences and capacity. Helping students to develop these capacities requires teachers to adopt a new role; this is reflected in the RSP competence framework, hence this will underpin the project approach. THE BACKGROUND AND NEED As documented by leading educational research and clearly stated by the EU Commission, EU’s education systems need to change dramatically and fundamentally. The education we offer the new generations is not fit to give them the competences, skills and capacity to live, learn and work in the globalised 21st century. The world that the new generations grow up in is above all characterised by constant change, unpredictable direction and serious local and global threats. At the same time, and even more importantly, the new generations of students are dramatically different from former generations: the young people think, live and learn in fundamentally different ways that the older generations. THE CORE INNOVATION The students will learn through: - addressing real-life and real-time challenges instead of working with artificial material in the classroom - paying attention to what needs to be changed, improved or even invented in the community - engaging in long term missions to create change in the community - through being entrepreneurial and through growing an innovation mind-set - through working in teams, in complicated projects, with a wide range of societal players and resources - developing increasing agency: avoiding contemplation and taking action, avoiding hesitation and demonstrating intention, purpose and direction – and avoiding “knowing about” and seeking “accomplishment” All this is underpinned by teachers who can facilitate these processes, hence the need to adopt a coherent framework of educator competences. Thus Mission Based Learning builds on two decades of educational innovation experimentation but takes innovation much further. This project allows the young students to learn from real-life engagement, from taking change action and from accomplishing important missions or projects with relevance to the students as well as the community. PROJECT METHODOLOGY The methodology combines an INNOVATION METHODOLOGY (“how the innovation will be produced”) and an IMPLEMENTATION METHODOLOGY (“how the project will progress towards its results”). This powerful double methodology has been applied in several demanding E+ projects with considerable success. At the same time the project applies an authentic and un-compromised students’ co-creation approach: co-creating the project progression as well as the project outcomes WHO ARE THE PROJECT PLAYERS? The powerful partnership consists of 9 partners from 8 countries: 2 knowledge partners, one is the coordinator 1 knowledge/practice partner 5 secondary schools from different countries 1 quality assurance partner with European experience The consortium includes high-level knowledge partners from the UK, Finland and Poland – plus a large group of dedicated secondary schools from all across Europe. The consortium pan-EU with partners from Finland to Spain to the UK to Turkey! THE RESULTS OF THE PROJECT The project will produce a long line of process outcomes building up to the final outcomes, and for dissemination. The final outcomes are: THE SCHOOL GUIDE TO MISSION BASED LEARNING - Engaging 21st century young students WHAT WE NEED AND HOW WE LEARN - Students’ video messages to educationalists WHAT (LOCAL) POLICY-MAKERS CAN DO FOR 21ST CENTURY YOUNG STUDENTS - Policy paper HOW TO HELP TRANSFORM YOUNG 21ST CENTURY STUDENTS FROM “UNTEACHABLES” TO “LEARNABLES” (Working Title) - Mission Based Learning theoretical contribution to the EU open schooling agenda
The project wanted to provide support in the form of skills and motivation for teachers who wish to adopt creative approaches to engaging their pupils in addressing real-life and real-time challenges. By involving teachers with previous experience of these approaches and many for whom this was completely new, we aimed to maximise learning opportunities among professionals. A number of process outcomes were sought in terms of capacity building for all participants. By taking a step-wise approach to developing local community projects, the project aimed to strengthen students’ organisational, team-working and communication skills and inter alia build the self-confidence of students and teachers alike in implementing this mission-based approach. The final outcomes would be simple, accessible accounts of what we learned (through reports, a project video and other materials all available on the project website) together with advice and guidance on how to implement this approach in any school. We also set out to conduct research into the project’s process and impacts so that this could be shared more widely through academic literature.
Mission-based Learning (MBL) set out to demonstrate, through international practical experiments, how secondary schools can integrate alternative learning activities into formal schooling. From these experiments we aimed to develop practice-based guidance to teachers and schools on facilitating student-led, community-based action. In doing this we also sought to build on two earlier Erasmus+ projects that have focused on student action; these were Innovation Capacity (iCAP) and A Rounder Sense of Purpose (RSP). The impetus for this project was the recognition that secondary school students are granted few opportunities to change their world, yet they are expected to engage fully as citizens the moment they leave school. This issue is growing starker with multiple global crises contributing to mental health concerns. While this might point to the need for young people to develop their agency in the face of a rapidly changing world, schools themselves are constrained from exploring creative solutions to this by rigid timetabling and a focus on measuring the academic achievements of their students. This project sought to demonstrate (a) the potential impacts of supporting young people to lead their own local community-based projects and (b) the means by which schools might achieve despite the constraints of working within the formal education system. As we highlighted in the project application, the EU Commission itself has called for dramatic change in education systems in order to offer students the competences, skills and capacity to live, learn and work in the globalised 21st Century. This project set out to answer that call.