— Youth, Education & Training, Poverty team of the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust (the Trust). The Trust is one of the world’s top ten charity donors, focusing on improving quality of life of the people in Hong Kong through providing immediate relief to those most in need and proactively initiating projects that anticipate future community and social needs. 

“Education innovation has been a big buzzword in the sector, but it is also such an “umbrella” concepts that make it mind-boggling to comprehend,” said my manager. It is true, but the consultant in me also believe that there are ways that can help us frame some of these floating ideas, and gain a more structural view of this topic. I ended up spending around one week to learn about what education innovation means to a philanthropic organization like the Trust:

Implication #1: Education innovation does not have to always come with disruptive changes, it can also spur from stepwise improvements in the all aspects within the world of education.

When we look at various definitions of education innovation, this notion is often emphasized:

“Innovating is a fundamentally different way of doing things that result in considerably better, and perhaps different, outcomes. Both the ‘different’ and the ‘better’ must be significant and substantial. Educators need to think of innovating as those actions that significantly challenge key assumptions about schools and the way they operate.”

– Elliot Washer, Co-Founder of Big Picture Learning

“In the world of education, innovation comes in many forms… innovations in the way education systems are organized and managed, … innovations in instructional techniques or delivery systems, such as the use of new technologies in the classroom… innovations in the way teachers are recruited, and prepared, and compensated. The list goes on and on.”  

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– Department of Education, USA

One of the teachers who was working with the Trust shared that her way of implementing Positive Education in her primary school. Positive Education is an approach to education that draws on positive psychology’s emphasis of individual strengths and personal motivation to promote learning . For her, it was nothing around, say, introduce a wellness APP to students, or any new digital initiatives. It was about taking small steps in daily life like changing the way teachers write comments on report cards, or replace tests with continuous assessments.

Education innovation can take place at any level and scale — the crux is to make meaningful, impactful, and positive changes to student’s learning.

Implication #2: Education technology can enhance learning experiences through multiple ways

One of the most interesting challenges I had in this analytical piece around education innovation, was to find a simple way to understand the education technology landscape. After sifting through multiple frameworks online, here is what I have come to — 3 broad aspects that can be further broken down to 8 dimensions.

The blue ones (learning and assessment, collaboration, experience diversity) are around digitalizing how we deliver education. Red ones (academic resources, character and competency building, career planning) focus on the content (in a broad sense, not just the learning materials) we deliver. The green ones (learning analytics, administration) are tools with which educators can use to optimize their delivery and operations.

While there are numerous tools for educators to experiment, I believe key success factors for these categories vary from one to another. For the blue ones, the most important factor would be integration of these tools into day-to-day interactions with students. Providing the right incentives for teachers to adopt and incorporate into their teaching would be critical given the supplementary nature of these tools to the core curriculum for the red category. As for the green ones, adequate training accompanied by user-friendly features would be important to ensure teachers would not deem these tools as extra administrative burden. Obviously some of these key success factors also apply across categories.

Implication #3: Education innovation can come in three main ways — technology is just one of the means

It is so easy for us to think that technology is the only answer we need for innovation, because of the highly visible change we are able to see when we apply it. But when we take a step back, there are more possibilities:

N.B.: mgmt. = management

We should always bear in mind the fact that education technology is simply one of the many means to an end: our goal should be innovation that leads to the improvement of educational outcomes.

While innovation in education delivery is also gaining traction, like the Positive education example elaborated above, building innovation capacity of the sector is particularly important and relevant for Hong Kong as teachers face a high level of capacity constraints. As much as teachers believe that they are a driving force of innovative activities, things like an administrative burden, lengthy curriculums to cover, numerous tests and exams to design and grade… often limit teachers from thinking outside the box. One of the many initiatives launched by the Trust is an education innovation initiative called Innopower@JC, a fellowship program for teachers and social workers, that aims to build the innovative capacity of teachers and social workers in Hong Kong. 

What does this all mean to a philanthropist?

As I take a step back and reflect upon these implications, I see that a philanthropist playing important roles in a field like education innovation where there is still a lot of unknown:

Encourage public dialogues to raise awareness so that parents and educators are more open to experimentation, especially the use of education technology.

Build innovation capacity to enable teachers to become actual driving forces of innovation — both in terms of capability development and resource provision, which can be particularly effective in supporting proliferation of “small-step” innovation in schools.

Pilot alternative philosophies to gather evidence that support implementation of new education delivery methodologies, through building potential models around how learning and teaching can look like in the future.

Develop advanced curriculum that complement, or even replace the core, by tapping into the vast connections with academia and innovators in the sector.

Accommodate social inclusion especially for underserved students (e.g. those with learning disabilities) by investing in extra resources that cater for diverse learning needs.

A philanthropist is uniquely positioned with its high level of impartiality and influence on societal issues. It also has abundance resources to mobilize and can be relatively more risk-taking as compared to governmental institutions.

It is great to see that there are numerous philanthropic organizations that commit to improving education, and have been doing a combination of the above to promote education innovation. While philanthropists take lead in the innovation process, all stakeholders within the sector need to be on board and play an active role in this experimentation process. It is hard for us to seek for a fail-safe solution — we have to start somewhere. We have been waiting for a century, and still waiting, to break through the traditional classroom setting that was first designed during industrial revolution. It is time for us to accelerate on education innovation.