I recently had the opportunity to attend the Learning Environments Conference in Sydney. This was largely attended by architects from around the world but also Principals and Ministry officials from New Zealand and Australia.

The key notes were of the highest quality including Pasi Sahlberg and Claire Madden. Pasi is a Finnish educator and author who has worked as a school teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and policy advisor in Finland and has studied education systems, analysed education policies, and advised education reforms around the world. In education circles he would be considered in the top 10 educational thinkers.

His message was threefold.

1. Equity - Is the biggest driver to a successful education system. New Zealand once sat in the top 5 education systems in the world but has slipped to just out of the top 10 over the last 18 years due to the lack of equity within our system and wider community.

2. Small data - Big data is being used more and more for commerce and policy decisions. You only need to think of Facebook and how they operate on big data to influence all sorts of things. However, to really understand what is happening you need to look at small data. Talk to students, parents and teachers to really understand what is happening in our schools.

3. Building collaborative cultures - The importance of collaboration not only between students is vitally important but between teachers and principals is extremely important to a successful system. This is exactly what we are doing with our PBL project between the 5 schools in our wider community.

Claire Madden (www.clairemadden.com) is a social researcher, keynote speaker and media commentator interpreting social trends and implications of generational change. Claire is the author of Hello Gen Z: Engaging the Generation of Post-Millennials.

She presented confrontational data and themes that confront children who were born between 1995-2009 the Gen Z's and the Alphas 2010 - 2018.

They live in a world where Wi-Fi is the only one they have ever known. Digital is their default, Siri is their personal assistant and with over 6 billion Google searches every day, access to any piece of information is only ever seconds away. They are digital linguists, social networkers, global collaborators and sensory engagers, but are also missing the physical social connections that all humans aspire for.

I am always interested in the research behind the massive investment worldwide on new classroom spaces. One presenter thought it would be nearing half a trillion dollars on classes and schools. Despite this massive investment their is little research to support these spaces improve student performance.

I was pleased to see Melbourne University has created a research team to focus on this issue and are already producing some interesting results. I have included a graph below from one of their recent publications which reflects the direction that we are heading in. A combination of open classroom space with break out spaces. As with any statistics and graphs they can be misleading. What was measured here was engagement from a teachers perspective rather than student outcomes. It also had a number of other limitations statistically but this team are at least starting to ask some hard questions.

The highlight as always is visiting schools and talking to students and teachers who are actually using the space. I visited four schools which were a mixture of Public and Catholic and all had adopted the philosophy of either single class and two classes mixed together with a variety of spaces to collaborate as a whole group or small group while also considering the needs of the individual. I have attached some of the pictures below and as nice as it would be to have some of these outside learning areas, the Sydney weather is much more conducive to these than Dunedin!

See picture for more information