The Minerva Schools at KGI were established in 2012 by Ben Nelson with the aim of disrupting higher education. Minerva’s development was driven by a variety of factors including: inequality in college admissions, high college tuition fees and courses that left students less prepared for work. How has Minerva attempted to address these issues?

What sets Minerva’s curriculum apart from those of other universities?

The curriculum imparts universal cognitive skills and frameworks that are valued by employers such as critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communications and interrelation. These are further broken down into 80 habits of mind and foundational concepts. The way students learn them through salient contexts, ranging from food and water scarcity to unbridled scientific and technological advances to complex social and geopolitical dynamics. For example, in the first year, students grapple with big, multifaceted questions, such as “How can we feed the world?” or “Who should own information?”. The students actively engage with these questions, using the aforementioned habits and concepts, such as searching for the right problem, breaking it down, conducting a gap analysis, understanding constraints and analogies, and applying heuristics. Minerva students also partake in residential rotations to 7 different cities, where they engage with local civic organisations to tackle local issues.

What features does Minerva’s online learning platform have to enhance the overall learning experience of students?

What makes the Minerva education unique is that it combines an intentionally designed curriculum, with a pedagogy fully based on active learning which is then delivered over our platform, called Forum™. This is why we do not license the platform on its own, but rather partner with academic institutions who want to transform their education, through curriculum and pedagogy. The platform enables this, as it was intentionally designed for educational purposes. The interface allows live polling, breakout groups that the professor can listen in to, live collaboration tools, and quick reaction emojis. In addition, the professor has a different interface which allows him/her to see the “talk time” of each student in order to engage those who have been quieter. All these tools provide essential data points and information for continuous evaluation and feedback that the professor can then share with each student.

How does Minerva’s admission process differ to most traditional universities?

In addition to high school grades, Minerva considers each applicant’s accomplishments outside of class, their performance on a series of cognitive challenges, and their conduct during a video interview.

The process was developed with equity in mind, as we believe that talent is equally distributed. The admissions committee does not look at SAT or ACT scores, parents’ earning power or net worth, nor the typical applicant essay because all of these have been shown to bias toward wealthy applicants. Wealthy applicants are able to enlist the cadre of tutoring, test prep, and essay editing service providers that is beyond the reach of their less-privileged peers. High school transcripts, extracurricular accomplishments, and cognitive tests are less biased measures of talent, ambition, and grit, and are far better predictors of future success.

Although we do not have quotas, our student body is very geographically diverse (roughly a quarter each coming from North America, Asia, and Europe, with the remaining quarter coming from Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East) and almost equally male and female.
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What evidence exists demonstrating the positive contribution that Minerva has had on its students?

Our first graduating class graduated last May and over 90% were employed or accepted in prestigious Masters programme within 6 months of graduating. Our students are encouraged and assisted in getting internships as of their first year, so when they graduate, most of them have had a few internships. We also work with some employers to incubate innovation labs that would be staffed by a group of our students.

What are the Minerva Schools’ goals for the future?

On the university side, our goals continue to provide the best education experience to our students. With Covid-19, we are fortunate that our academic component does not change and there is no disruption to our students. Obviously our global rotations’ experiential component was moved to a virtual environment and we will continue that until it is safe for our students to resume their in-person global rotations.

​Minerva also partners with academic institutions who are transforming their education, through licensing our pedagogy, curriculum and platform. This often entails co-design and tight collaboration with our partners. We do hope that we will continue partnering with other academic institutions as many seize the opportunity to re-think the experience they are offering their students.

An interview with Conrad Wolfram, physicist, mathematician and technologist, Strategic Director and European CEO/Co-Founder, Wolfram Research.
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Conrad is a leading advocate for a fundamental shift of maths education to become computer-based or alternatively introduce a new core subject of computational thinking. He founded computerbasedmath.org and computationalthinking.org to fundamentally fix maths education for the AI age — rebuilding the curriculum assuming computers exist. The movement is now a worldwide force in re-engineering the STEM curriculum.

Dr Robert Massey has experience in teaching History and Politics in private schools, prisons and universities. His contrasting teaching experiences reinforced his belief that anyone has the potential to become an expert learner. The author of From Able to Remarkable: Help your students become expert learners, shares more on the techniques he uses with his secondary school pupils to foster expert learners.

How can educators create deeper learning experiences and foster expert learners?
In my book From Able to Remarkable (Crown House Publishing 2019) I write about the idea of pupils becoming expert learners. If we want deeper learning experiences, by which I understand more long-lasting and meaningful experiences, we can’t just look at teaching. The modelling which teachers display, as Ron Berger showed us in An Ethic of Excellence, can be modelled in turn by pupils: adults lead, students learn, students lead. Giving children the chance to become more self-aware learners is, for me, vital in moving learning forward in any context or subject.

What made you decide to write From Able to Remarkable and what issues does it address?
I wrote this book because I had to. There is very little available for educators who want to stretch and challenge what are often called ‘gifted and talented’ pupils. Since those are the pupils I see every day, I wrote it for myself and my colleagues. The book draws on evidence from behavioural psychology, as summarised by for example Daniel Willingham in his book Why Don’t Students Like School? and by research evidence drawn from experts such as Professor Dylan Wiliam in Creating the Schools Our Children Need. But evidence only helps to a certain degree. The other key ‘evidence’ is classroom practice, so I’ve drawn on skills and techniques adopted by colleagues which work on a Friday afternoon — the toughest test of all!
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What approach can teachers take to create context-specific strategies to support expert learners?
First, hook yourself into a community of educators and learners so that you don’t feel alone. Whether this is in your college or school, or via social media such as Twitter (which personally I find very useful), there are certainly other educators looking at the same issues and problems as you are and trying to find solutions. Secondly, dip into some of the many blogs or a book or two which looks relevant to what you are doing and see what you can take from it. Finally, be yourself. It’s no good modelling yourself on a brilliant educator such as Doug Lemov. Your students would love to know more about you (within reason!) and your learning experiences. I think all educators should be looking at excellence for their own children and their classes. No one will consistently set that standard for you so you will have to do it yourself, so be sure that you know what excellence looks like and aim for it.

Gordon Davis is the Head of Geography and Deputy Head of Year of an Academy in inner London.

A few years ago, my department was on a geography field trip with students from my school. We were conducting measurements of footpath erosion at Studland Bay. It was with curiosity that I posed the following questions to the group, “How many of you have seen a beach?” and, “How many of you have seen a sand dune?” Approximately half had been to a beach in their lives and a mere eight out of the eighty-four students had seen a sand dune. I was stunned into silence at the realisation that we teach and assess many students on abstract topics that are completely disconnected from their everyday experiences and realities. This highlights a significant proportion of students are at an immediate disadvantage within the current education system for not having exposure to certain experiences that many take for granted. How can we best promote inclusivity and equity in education through the learning experiences that we design for our students?

The new buzzword of the current Ofsted framework is cultural capital. Ofsted defines cultural capital as the knowledge that children need to be effective citizens. When inspecting a school environment, Ofsted wants to observe ways that a curriculum moves beyond one that is simply tokenistic that “all pupils, particularly disadvantaged pupils… the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life”. Cultural capital is an ambiguous and controversial concept. The term was coined by the sociologist Bourdieu. He described cultural capital as the skills, knowledge, and behaviours associated with the dominant culture. Bourdieu argued pupils from families who are more familiar with the dominant cultural codes in a society are likely to have an advantage in the education system.¹ Ofsted’s use of cultural capital has sparked a mixed response.² Rather than delve further into the complexities of this umbrella term, I will share the whole-school strategic approach I took to design a curriculum that promotes the holistic development of our students, regardless of their background and situation, through outdoor experiences.

The Power of Volunteering
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One way to design for the holistic development of all students is through promoting student voice, where the thoughts, views and opinions of students are incorporated into projects. This empowers students to take ownership of their learning and become stewards of their curriculum and school experiences. I use student voice to develop outdoor learning experiences and community engagement activities. I ensure the experiences are designed so that they are learner-centred and provide opportunities for collaborative work. I find this promotes student engagement and knowledge development. A recent project involved the students growing food in a community garden to promote healthy eating. This project created a connection to key curriculum content in geography and science. It also enabled them to develop a diverse skill set and competencies such as working collaboratively, public speaking, project management, and building positive relationships with the wider community. Student voice enables our students to no longer be ‘othered’ in curriculum design but lie at the heart of its future and be catalysts in its creation.³
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Outdoor learning initiatives have provided our students with experiences that could not be replicated in formal learning environments. We have started to implement the Duke of Edinburgh scheme and diversify volunteering opportunities. We have celebrated our successes, and this has been recognised in the media. Outdoor learning now forms a major part of our school curriculum. students get to interact with the world and develop their ability to observe the different natural and human environments they encounter. It has developed an appreciation for conservation of biodiversity.

I am experimenting with an outdoor programme designed with colleagues (which is still in its infancy) — that acts to create a holistic curriculum available to all students. This would help to establish skills of cognitive (processing information and formatting understanding) and effective communication (opinions, principles, awareness, and empathy). With these opportunities embedded in our curriculum, it can be argued that our school is focusing on more than ensuring our students achieve just five grade 9–4 GCSEs. It is also fostering the development of ‘the whole young person’.⁴

Through outdoor learning experiences, the students become equipped with invaluable skills ranging from leadership, collaboration and self-led learning. These are skills that not only benefit our students in the classroom but are easily transferable to further studies and the world of employment. Volunteering also benefits our students by making them stand out from other applicants when applying for jobs, admission to college, scholarships, apprenticeships and universities. It also supports internal schemes, such as the Jack Petchey Award or V-inspired, and our current initiatives such as the Duke of Edinburgh Award. It enables cross-curricula links and student cohesion across the school.

Examples of practice
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I have worked with a team of teachers at my school to implement a monthly volunteering programme; either through the Duke of Edinburgh volunteering arm of the award or under the idea of community stewardship. This is done in addition to providing outdoor experiences for all students including pupil premium and SEND students. Examples include trips to the Thames wetland (with Thames21) to conserve marginal habitats, litter picks in the local community and planting trees in the school ground from the Woodland Trust to promote sustainability. We have previously volunteered with students on Christmas Day delivering gifts to Ronald McDonald House hospice and King’s College London and collaborated with Thames21 to dispose of plastic in the River Thames Estuary.
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These volunteering experiences not only nurture the holistic development of students but enable them to build a curriculum vitae that shows academic and vocational skills that benefit further employers and educational institutions. Charlotte is a classic example of how volunteering has shaped her future pathway. The number of hours she dedicated to the conservation project saw her receive the Jack Petchey Award. This led to an experience at Howletts Zoo where she was a zookeeper for a day. These micro experiences led to her studying Zoology at university. She is now studying for a Masters in Conservation, Biology and Ecology.
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How to start
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Promoting volunteering or youth social action can be implemented in a range of different contexts. It can be informal or formal activities ranging from volunteering, fundraising, campaigning or supporting peers within the school. Youth social action is seen as activities that make a positive difference to others or the environment. An example of this is through the work of one of our former students, Yetunde Kehinde, who has become a youth social activist for the charity Action for Conservation (https://www.actionforconservation.org/). The case study link to the short educational documentary guides teachers and educational practitioners to the way they can develop their own project within their schools. You can see the film and the accompanying resources I have created at: https://www.youth-social-action.careersandenterprise.co.uk/case-study-curriculum-links.⁶

The short film follows the journey of Yetunde, Michael Heath (Thames21), Laura Kravac (Action for Conservation) and myself as a leader of volunteering in school on how we have supported and nurtured volunteering and youth social action.
I advocate the following to get started:
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1. Go to the local community or contact friends groups that want to get involved with students;
2. Start small with local projects with companies that specialise in habitat management or volunteering, such as Thames21 or Friends of Footscray Meadows;
3. Find engaged staff to help pioneer the projects;
4. Enable student voice throughout to steer projects in the local community;
5. Reward and recognise the efforts of the students through social media and external agencies, such as awards from Jack Petchey or V-inspired;
6. Be a reference when students apply for college, university or employment.
   

These small steps and resources can give schools a head start in planning youth social action projects, whatever the setting.

Final thoughts

I am not claiming that this is the only way to promote a curriculum that supports the holistic development of students from all backgrounds. Serious changes are required at all levels to improve inclusivity and equity in education. Here, I am suggesting how micro changes can be made at the school level to make learning more inclusive and equitable for students from diverse backgrounds. Our school has developed a curriculum for our students that appreciates that outdoor environments can provide invaluable learning experiences that formal environments cannot achieve alone. Volunteering or ‘youth social action’ is about empowering the students to take ownership of their school experience and develop key life skills. Student-led outdoor learning experiences can play a key role in moving from a tokenistic curriculum, to one that contains creativity and intellectual appeal for all students, irrespective of social, economic or cultural background.⁷
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Gordon Davis

Mark Martin (@urban_teacher) has taught ICT for over 10 years and supports teachers in using technology to improve teaching and learning. Here Mark shares ideas on how schools can deliver impactful CPD for both new and experienced teachers.

What would you like to see more of in CPD for teachers today?

I would like to see more of a focus on design thinking and co-creation. We need to change the type of CPD sessions where presenters just talk at passive observers. I’m not a fan of the top-down model of training where more ‘experienced’ staff talk about generic teaching resources and one-size-fits all answers. What you’ll find is when people are more actively involved in the learning process, they are more motivated to take ownership of their professional development. We need to work with new teachers and support them with coming up with tangible solutions for specific teaching challenges. Schools could also provide opportunities for key stakeholders in education such as trainee teachers, experienced teachers, the senior leadership team and edtech companies, to get together to discuss current issues in education and collaboratively design real strategies to overcome these challenges.

Can you remember a particularly impactful school CPD session?
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There was one where groups of teachers had created market stalls. They shared good practice on the new strategies they had trialled in their lessons. Everyone walked around the school and saw the amazing things that were being done within particular subjects. It provided a great opportunity for teachers to discover and experiment with something they might not have tried with their students. It also opens up opportunities for interdisciplinary teaching.

How can schools avoid delivering CPD sessions on content that teachers already know?
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It’s a shame when teachers go to a CPD session and they hear about something that they’ve already learned previously. Schools need to strive to keep CPD sessions new and fresh. Before you deliver the CPD session, skill check your team. Create a short survey to find out exactly what they would like to develop. Carefully word the questions and allow teachers to self-assess their strengths and areas for development. Using this information, teachers can be grouped according to their interests then targeted CPD sessions can be delivered to these groups. You’ll find that there will be less resistance and more openness from most teachers when their opinions are used to design the sessions.

When I transitioned from teaching in a local comprehensive to a special school, the clarity and directness of the visual explanations used in the special school became immediately apparent. Throughout my childhood, my architect father would deliver daily sermons on the principles of design and demonstrated how sketching could play a powerful role in problem-solving. It was at the special school where I applied this knowledge and began experimenting with visual designs to engage my pupils. Later, in the 1990s, I discovered that I had actually been putting Allan Paivio’s theory of dual coding to practice all along.

What is dual coding?
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Dual coding can be traced back to two stories. The most well-known dual coding story dates back to Allan Paivio’s research from the early 1970s. This involves combining a word and an image to form a single unit of meaning. As images and words are processed separately in their distinct channels, this makes for what Professor Paul Kirschner calls double-barrelled learning. The double encoding that happens through this tethering of word and image, leaves a double memory trace and, consequently, offers double the chance of being retrieved. What is less well known is that Paivio’s experimental subjects were dealing with very simple words, with no conceptual challenge at all. So, for the encoding and memorisation of simple content, this story of dual coding is useful but hardly has great significance when dealing with the cognitive challenge that represents teachers’ everyday work in classrooms.

The second less well-known dual coding story with far more educational significance is related to his later work — particularly Mental Representations, 1990 — he writes about the differences in structure and consequent processing of verbal and visual information. While he did not do any research into this in the same way as in his earlier work, he considered it significant. Its significance was explored a few years before by Larkin and Simon in 1987. They established what they termed The Visual Argument based on their findings that well-formed diagrams were more cognitively efficient than text alone. In their experiments, subjects given such a diagram were more rapid and accurate in finding answers to comprehension questions than those presented only with text.

​The lessons to be drawn from both stories is that the earlier story is about the visual capacity, while the second story is about the visuospatial capacity. Processing text, with its linear structure, places more challenge than the non-linear arrangements of diagrams on the subjects’ cognitive resources. As philosopher, Bertrand Russell, pointed out in the 1930s, a diagram, its elements and their relationships are immediately and explicitly available to the viewer. In the parallel situation of the same information being articulated in text alone, the necessary complexity of the syntax involved inevitably increases the difficulty of comprehension. Thus, the findings a half century later of Larkin and Simon in 1987 as mentioned above.

Why do teachers need to know about dual coding?

Even if teachers never use dual coding in their classrooms, they can benefit enormously from learning about it because through the theory they can better understand the significance of the role of schema in teaching and learning. As the term schema is currently being revived in teachers’ lexicon, it seems crucial that we start to investigate its structure and processes. Studying dual coding — in the sense of story number 2 — does this very effectively.

Teachers can use dual coding initially in revealing their schema of the topic under question when introducing and explaining it to their students. That way, students have the fleeting and vanishing words of their teacher (the transient information effect, in the context of cognitive load theory). Then through a process I have termed Recount and Recall, students can study and reproduce the graphic organiser in such a way that results in perfect or near-perfect recall. For details of this process, see my forthcoming book with Tom Sherrington, Teaching WalkThrus: five-step guides to Instructional Coaching.
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Equally, at a later stage, teachers can give their students a partially completed graphic organiser, in which the missing parts can be filled in with a multiple choice style format with an array of plausible options below the visual.
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Free dual coding resources

My website — www.olicav.com — has 16 sections that cover topics such as posters, powerpoint, graphic organisers, diagrams, course modules, walkthrus, sketch notes, portraits, quotes, icons, illustrations, videos and podcasts. Most of the resources are freely available to download, subject to a Creative Commons agreement.

I currently present on different aspects of dual coding at international, national and regional researchED events. I lead training sessions in schools and colleges, and have recently collaborated with Tom Sherrington to produce Teaching WalkThrus: five-step guides to instructional coaching, a practical guide on 50 teaching techniques that convert Rosenshine’s principles of instruction into daily practice. The publication will be released next month.
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Enrol Yourself gives participants the opportunity to collaborate in a multidisciplinary peer group. In formal education, students studying on the same programme often come from similar professional and educational backgrounds. Zahra and Jacob believe homogenous learning groups are of much less value in terms of learning than more diverse ones. Diversity of skills, backgrounds and perspectives only enrich the learning experiences of Learning Marathon participants. The peer-to-peer learning gives participants the chance to share and construct new knowledge.

The Learning Marathon curriculum is always evolving to meet the specific needs of each cohort. It is co-created with participants at the beginning of every Learning Marathon. Everyone maps their skills and goals. The group then discusses and votes on which workshops will be of most value to them. From this, a personalised programme of learning that spans 6 months is designed.
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The Learning Marathon provides participants with a safe space to experiment. Participants decide on what ‘good enough’ looks like to them. The role of an expert tutor doesn’t exist in a Learning Marathon. The co-founders stress that the roles of all participants are of equal importance to the Learning Marathon. This environment enables participants to feel safe enough to take risks; try out new ideas; express themselves; tackle challenges; and be vulnerable.

Learning with a purpose

Each participant comes to the Learning Marathon with a specific learning question. This question frames their exploration and learning — and it’s essential that the question is of great importance to the individual. For example ‘how might I create a boardgame that communicates important messages about the climate crisis?’ or ‘how can I use movement and dance to overcome limiting thinking habits?’. Each Learning Marathon enables participants to get to know a group of new people through the lens of their most burning question. New relationships are formed around the things that matter most to them.

Addressing local needs

A large amount of funding is available for programmes that provide learning opportunities for young people up to the age of 25. The co-founders noticed how this provision drops off a cliff for similar programmes for over 25s. “In the 21st Century we are facing huge challenges, not least widening inequality and the climate crisis. These challenges will not impact everyone equally. Those who typically have fewer opportunities will be impacted the most. There will be huge changes to society including loss and creation of jobs due to automation and accelerating technological development,” says Zahra. She believes adults are going to need to learn like never before if they’re to continue to thrive — or even stay afloat. “If people need to rely on our traditional models of learning for this, the majority will be screwed. We need models of learning that devolve power and opportunity to communities to do it for themselves, to reduce costs and redistribute agency.”
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Enrol Yourself addresses this challenge by placing peer-to-peer approaches at the heart of everything they do. They train all local hosts who initiate and run the Learning Marathon in their local area. Everything they do is designed to be distributive, locally-led and empowering at the grassroots level. The programme encourages people to take their learning into their own hands, alongside their peers.

The impact of Enrol Yourself
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More than 130 people have now participated in the Learning Marathon in London, Birmingham and Bristol to date. Enrol Yourself measures the impact that each Learning Marathon has on learner wellbeing, resilience and 21st Century skillset. Their alumni tell them they are 38% more professionally effective, 27% happier and 23% more entrepreneurial after participating in the programme. They also report that the process has improved their mental health, helped them set up side hustles and businesses, helped them change careers, find new jobs, allowed them to make new friends, helped them feel more purposeful, less lonely… the list goes on.