We’re delighted to announce that Charles Tsai will be our second keynote speaker, and that the following 6 cases will be part of ReSchool. We still have several cases to unveil, and there are still a few registration spots left – get your registration in ASAP!
DAY 2 KEYNOTE: CHARLES TSAI
From Excellent Sheep to Motivated Elephants – A New Vision for Mass Education
Charles Tsai is an educator and champion of young social innovators. He started a democratic charity for youth and mentored hundreds of young changemakers through Ashoka, the world’s largest network of social entrepreneurs. He has developed social innovation tools for Ashoka, the World Bank, and Adobe’s Youth Voices. And he regularly facilitates workshops and bootcamps for schools, community organizations and foundations.
Charles is now working on launching a new type of secondary school that prepares young people to be self-directed lifelong learners. He was inspired by a program created by teenagers in Massachusetts, which he documented in the viral video, “If students designed their own schools…” His goal is to shift mainstream education away from the current industrial model to one that is driven by the learner’s own curiosity, passion, and sense of purpose.
Charles joins Quest University President David Helfand as a ReSchool keynote speaker.
CASES
Check out the first of ten case studies we’ll be working on at ReSchool! Each case represents a significant innovation in education and will be presented in 5 minutes before being workshopped by cross-cutting groups of participants.
Elaine Su – Compass Community School
Compass Community School is a disruptive new vision for community based primary school, deeply rooted in the belief that we owe it to children to expect more of them. Imagine a school that is mobile, active in the community, and that integrates high academic performance with real-life learning. Where twenty young learners ride around on bikes every day, heading out to their next learning adventure, and everyone who sees them waves because they know, respect, and cherish who they are. A non-profit, independent school, we are in the business of educating world-changing leaders of today and tomorrow.
Charles Tsai – Tiny Home School
Tiny Home School is redesigning secondary education for the 21st century. We are replacing the current factory model and standardized curriculum with an approach student-centered and self-directed approach to learning, yielding better outcomes for students and society. The pilot cohort will be made up of high school “walkouts and Aboriginal youth who want to build their own tiny house (on wheels) – through self-directed learning rather than a teacher-led homebuilding program. When they graduate, they will have a house of their own (to use or sell) and a powerful story that will shift hearts and minds.
Chad Lubelsky – J.W. McConnell Family Foundation’s RECODE initiative
We would like to explore RECODE’s potential in enabling post-secondary institutions to build the necessary infrastructure to become drivers of social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Launched in 2014, RECODE is an initiative of the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, created in collaboration with thought leaders and partners from the private, public, and not-for-profit sectors. A call to social innovation—to redesign public institutions from the inside out; to disrupt business as usual; to found and grow new social enterprises; to create partnerships across institutional and sectoral boundaries – in short, to ‘RECODE’ our culture’s operating systems in order to achieve a more just, sustainable, and beautiful world.
We are building a one year program that will allow students to experience an immersive and energetic environment as they work on collaborative city building inside City Hall. In teams of 4, they will design, execute and evaluate real projects on the ground co-created with Vancouver city staff, community members and professionals. Major outcomes will include the development of key employment skills, revealing and challenging hidden assumptions about leadership, power and collaboration.
Shaun Fraser – SKY: No Limits (Richmond Virtual School)
Personalized learning for students in Grade 11 and 12 at Richmond Virtual School. A different approach to learning combines Project Based Learning with our Blended Online Learning program. Students have the opportunity to work collaboratively with other students, community members, and two RVS teachers on cross-curricular projects in 4 courses. At the SKY program students have the opportunity to pursue their interests through a blended approach involving class meetings, online learning, and meaningful project based learning.
Oak and Orca Distributed Learning School is launching a radical new inquiry-based high school option for credits towards graduation with a BC Dogwood diploma. The school has experience with inquiry learning face to face, but wishes to reach a greater number of students by taking inquiry learning to home-learners. The challenge is to create a well resourced online learning space (in a home-learning context) where students can actively engage in true interdisciplinary inquiry and collaboration. We hope to create infrastructure for students to support them to independently engage in inquiry. We envision learning structures that guide and inspire but don’t limit and prescribe.