Animating Distinctiveness in Prague

Prague, Czech Republic--Almost every school I visit thinks itself distinctive and different from its competitors, but few move beyond jargon and tag lines to animate what this means. In Prague, at the International School, Arnie Bieber and his team (see Arnie's blog here) have been quietly and rapidly bringing to life what they mean by "authentic global education." In the same way that Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto, has infused meaning and life into their trademarked tag line, "Integrative Thinking," Arnie is steadily pushing ISP to define authenticity in terms of how and what students learn. The lower school division head told me today that part of "authentic" mathematics would be learning to think about real world problems the way a mathematician would. That's big for students in elementary school.

I am not sure exactly what prospective parents and teachers think when they first hear "authentic," but ISP tries to put flesh on the bones of that word in a way that resonates with what people want from a school. And that is exactly what every school must do--define, illustrate and vivify their distinctiveness. Authentic is a banal term until ISP infused it with meaning.

More and more, I am finding that world-beating progress is happening outside the United States.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad.