Philanthropy leaders from Germany promote knowledge exchange about education
A senior delegation of philanthropy and government leaders from Germany came to Stanford and Silicon Valley last month to learn about the future of learning. The trip wound up being as much about bridge building as about knowledge exchange: the sharing of ideas laid the groundwork for Stanford and leading German education organizations to work together in the future.
“Our problems are indeed big,” said Bernhard Straub, the CEO of the Robert Bosch Foundation, or Stiftung. “But America has problems and solutions we don’t even think about — It puts our situation in perspective. We have much to learn from each other.”
“These discussions have given us a huge boost,” Stanford Vice Provost for Digital Education Matthew Rascoff told the guests. “I can see what my colleagues and I are doing through a different lens because of your many insightful questions. This dialogue was an important step toward collaboration.”
The decision to visit the Bay Area arose from an understanding that the two nations’ education systems have important similarities. Both Germany and the United States face a pressing question: How can students be best prepared to thrive in rapidly changing societies where new skills may be key to success? Both countries are trying to determine what types of skills to prioritize, with a particular focus on the “Four C’s” —communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity.
The Bosch Foundation and Stanford Digital Education organized the five-day immersive learning tour for a German delegation composed of foundation and government leaders from the educational field to exchange ideas on a diverse range of views on the future of learning and education. The visitors met with experts in such areas as artificial intelligence, learning science, edtech and school design. They traveled to a charter school in Oakland, spoke with a top Silicon Valley venture capitalist, lunched with the head of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, mingled with for-profit and nonprofit start-up founders and much more.
In addition to Straub, the delegation consisted of three other representatives from the Bosch Foundation, Dagmar Wolf, Andreas Dammertz, and Carolin Genkinger; Ekkehard Winter, the executive director of Deutsche Telekom Stiftung; Nina Smidt, CEO of Siemens Stiftung; Udo Michallik, secretary general of the German Kultusministerkonferenz, which is equivalent to the Council of Chief State School Officers in the United States; and a scholar of change in education, Boston College Professor of Education Dennis Shirley, a recipient of the Richard von Weizsäcker Fellowship from the Bosch Foundation.
At many of the sessions, the German visitors heard of efforts underway to reinvent U.S. schools with policies and tools that emphasize the Four C’s, which are also an integral part of the German school curriculum. Although there are still uncertainties regarding how to teach such skills, one speaker, Lisa Kay Solomon of Stanford’s d.school, warned that the biggest risk was not changing. She and other d.school instructors advised embracing “ambiguity,” while encouraging teachers to try new methods, to structure classrooms in new configurations and to ask new questions, all as part of a push to promote students’ agency.
Conversation leads to action
The visit paved the way for action, as well as conversation, and already there’s talk of Stanford Digital Education organizing a visit to Germany. “I would very much enjoy continuing these conversations,” said Nina Smidt, Siemens Stiftung’s CEO, who sees ample opportunity for deeper collaboration. The foundation has been working with the Hasso Plattner Institute D-School in Potsdam to apply Design Thinking in STEM subjects. "Together we have created an extensive program of analog and digital training courses for teachers in Germany and South Africa,” she said. “In multi-day workshops, teachers are introduced to the basic principles of design thinking and co-create ways to implement it for STEM lessons." She hopes to involve representatives from Stanford d.school in these efforts.
As with the visit to Stanford’s d.school, other sessions provided examples of bold changes. Jennifer Carolan, co-founder and partner at the venture investing firm Reach Capital that specializes in ed tech, explained in a session that the demand for innovation in education had allowed for start-ups she supported to grow into global corporations, putting her firm’s performance in the top quartile for the industry. She said that the success was achieved at high risk: the majority of firms that she invests in would not become thriving businesses. In another session, leaders of California Educational Learning Lab, an office of the California state government that is focused on spurring innovation in higher education, told the delegation how they were investing in programs to spur student engagement — looking to “light fires rather than fill buckets” — but acknowledged that the outcomes were unknown and that it’s still looking for the best way to evaluate them.
The lack of a clear roadmap for the Four C’s and a way to assess the educational outcomes of the new endeavors led one member of the delegation, Winter of Deutsche Telekom Stiftung, to wonder whether such change efforts might include instances of “Stricken ohne Wolle,” or “knitting without wool.” Nonetheless, he left impressed by the activity. “The entrepreneurial spirit can be felt everywhere,” he wrote in a post after the visit. This “willingness to innovate is contagious.”
Winter noted that “excesses in the autonomy in schools and the concentration on soft skills are clearly recognizable in the USA.” Still, he asked, “Can't we in Germany find a good way between these extremes and at least free our schools from bureaucratic chains, some of which are based on decades to centuries old, long-outdated educational traditions and control models? Should we not only allow innovations, but welcome them?”
Michallik, the German government education official, echoed this sentiment in a post on LinkedIn. While admiring the Silicon Valley approach of developing for-profit companies to fix U.S. education, he perceives that Germany’s economy and school systems are quite different. “The American model is not for Germany,” he said. But the American approach could still inspire a change to the more regulated status quo in his country: “Strategies and models that are appropriate for our system” — for instance, a framework of public-private partnerships — “are required to unleash innovative power,” he said. And he and the others spoke admiringly of efforts in the United States to give teachers and local schools more autonomy, as they saw in their visit to the Envision charter high school in Oakland.
Catalysts for improving education
The three foundations have been at the forefront of innovation in education in Germany. Five years ago, they laid the foundation of Forum Education Digitalization to drive sustainable digital transformation and systemic changes in the education sector in Germany. The forum consolidates public discussion on the process of digitalization in education, creating a pedagogically driven strategy for the German education system.
Individually, the Bosch Foundation hosts Das Deutsche Schulportal, the largest German-language online platform dedicated to spreading best practices into the educational system for teaching and school development. The Deutsche Telekom Foundation established a new approach to training math teachers that was adopted by all federated states in Germany and is now being carried out by the German Center for Teacher Training in Mathematics. And Siemens Stiftung is committed to driving high-quality education combining STEM subjects with 21st century skills with partners in Africa, Europe and Latin America, creating projects and networks on a co-constructive basis and delivering local solutions to global challenges.
Smidt found a potential ally for her foundation’s long-standing efforts to provide open educational resources (OER) on STEM: that work mirrors the 20-year-old OER initiative that Larry Kramer, CEO of the Hewlett Foundation, and his colleagues discussed in their meeting with the delegation. She said that the two foundations share an approach of open design, as seen on the CREA portal (Centro de Recursos Educativos Abierto, or Open Educational Resource Center) that the Siemens Foundation supports and that allows community members to help co-design free digital teaching materials.
The Hewlett Foundation visit also included another shared interest. Delegation members had been looking forward to hearing Kramer and colleagues talk about “deeper learning,” a concept pioneered by the Hewlett Foundation that traveled across the Atlantic, to be embraced by German educators. Deeper learning is similar to the Four C’s and extends beyond mastering basic core competencies to cover thinking critically and solving complex problems, communicating effectively, working collaboratively and learning how to learn. The visitors head more about how the foundation’s efforts have evolved and how it is fostering teaching and learning, working in partnership with schools, educators and communities.
The need for 21st-century skills was underscored by the delegation’s sessions about artificial intelligence. Would it change education as we know it?
Speakers told the delegation that ChatGPT, the new artificial intelligence “bot” that can converse with users via text, would change what students need to learn about writing, not eliminate the need for them to know about writing. “I wouldn’t call it a replacement but a rearrangement,” explained Associate Professor of Education Victor Lee. “We’ll need to bolster higher-order thinking skills that involve critical evaluation and careful judgment.”
Later, in another session, Parth Sarin, a Stanford graduate student who is working with Lee and others on an introductory high school course about AI, suggested that students learn the limitations of ChatGPT by playing with it, debating with it as if it were a fellow student and identifying the ways it doesn’t work. “It’s not all knowing, and it’s not infallible,” they said. “We’ve learned from co-design sessions with teachers that an especially effective way to learn about this kind of technology seems to be by having students try to break it.”
Members of the Bosch Foundation said that the course could fill a vital need in Germany and raised the possibility of working with Stanford Digital Education to do a pilot of it in the foundation’s network of schools. “It looks like the future is really understanding how to use these tools in the classroom,” said Andreas Dammertz, a senior education advisor at the Bosch Foundation.
A new theory of change
A narrower understanding of AI’s role in the classroom — that it will be an incremental change not a devastating disruption — informs a broader theory of change for education, as suggested by Daniel Schwartz, dean of the Graduate School of Education in a session with the delegation.
The 21st-century school is not going to arise from a sweeping transformation, spurred by top-down edicts from the government, or bottom-up movement from parents and teachers or even from adopting a radical new technology. “The idea that you’ll change schools wholesale? No, you can’t,” said Schwartz. “There are too many stakeholders.”
The dean offered an alternative. “Compare change in schools to the changes that have occurred in a kitchen over the last 100 years or so,” he suggested. Over time, the kitchen changed dramatically as people added refrigerators, ranges, dishwashers, and microwaves. “It happens piece by piece,” he said, noting that Chat GPT is the latest game-changing appliance to be added to the counter.
“Change doesn’t come from a big-bang systemic change, but from innovation,” agreed Straub of the Bosch Foundation, describing it as a multidirectional “inside-out” process that could complement the top-down framework for change.
“Exactly,” said Schwartz. “Who doesn’t want a new microwave?”
Published April 10, 2023
Jonathan Rabinovitz is communications director for Stanford Digital Education.
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