Evolving Groups of Groups & Sparking an Education Innovation Revolution in the Process!

This picture may appear to be 'just a group of Students' - but it's much more!
These groups are exploring what it will take to integrate the best in evidence
towards the goal of offering all Malagasy Students - the best in education!
What evolutionary science is showing us - is how to design the most
cooperative, learning-enabled classroom groups possible!

Evolution shows us that Life is Groups of Groups.... That is - the biological cell is 'merely' -or perhaps rather - magically - a group of molecules; an organ is a group of biological cells; an organism is a group of organs- and a society is a group of organisms

Clearly to say that Life is 'merely' groups of groups - is disingenuine. The group-stuff of Life must be the most carefully cooperative group-stuff - in the Universe! A cooperation utterly contingent on the design elements found at every scale!

As our 10-day - EvoS seminar for our Secondary Education Teacher Training Program was coming to an end - we decided to turn our group's newly found deep-time eyes towards the potentially murky abyss that is Educational Design.

• How do our Classroom Groups function?
• How can we redesign Classroom Environments to support Students in the organization of effective learning groups (from the micro-level of the neuron; to the macro-level of culture)?

A group of learners - that is -  learning in ways that connect their neurons to their culture; their ancestral past to their anticipated futures!

These are the big questions and tall aims my Students have chosen to tackle. To take on a Service-Learning Project - in which they become the Educational Design engineers for the future of Madagascar!

Armed with our Unified Human Sciences (UHS) framework; and an expanding literature review of educational best practices - the next offering from EvoS@UoT is going to kick things up a notch! In this coming round - our Level II Educational Psychology Students will explore Positive Psychology - and the Human traits of optimum well-being. They will examine these traits from across the UHS spectrum (asking evolutionary questions at multiple scales of time and space) - and from this study - they will re-engineer the Mythic Minds - introductory course they just completed; and that their incoming Freshman colleagues are about to begin!

As our Students are exploring what the Regents Academy
Experiment was all about - they are experiencing a
radically new style of education;
& they are being empowered to bring these lessons to the
larger University of Toliara community!

From our studying of educational Best Practices - we are seeing that Humans have, what scientists call; an Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness - or what we can think of in lay terms as an environment to which our genetics are best able to thrive in. This may have BIG implications for education - and luckily these implications are simply re-confirming what many educators already know!

From our studying of David Sloan Wilson's work in creating the Regents Academy Experiment; we began to glimpse how converging evidence is leading educators to a growing list of best practices in the classroom.

For millions of years our ancestors learned in very different environments than those imposed by the "Factory Model" of education - as so eloquently described in the video belo, by Sir Ken Robinson. In these varying Environments of Evolutionary Adaptedness learning environments had some basic common traits:

• We learned in small groups of mixed ages and skill ranges
• Our learning was focused on practical, experiential learning, based on the needs of our communities
• Finding a personal niche - based on one's individual strengths - a niche that is beneficial to one's community; would have been a prized virtue

Our modern day Service-Learning model, indeed, offers a clear package of best practices for our Teachers-in-Training to bring back these ancestral traits into our future classrooms. We will practice what we preach - using the Service-Learning model to understand, and ultimately re-engineer our own educational system in ways that honor our ancestry and prepare us for the future!

In our EvoS-Inspired classroom we are evolving some most interesting varieties of Student Groups. These varieties are empowered with a rigorous evidential literacy, a sense of exploratory awe befitting of anyone wishing to study the miraculous web that is Unified Human Sciences - and - a call to action; a call to improve the very educational communities in which they study and work!

For More Information:

The Regents Academy Experiment at the Evolution Institute 

The KIDS Consortium for Service-Learning; far and away the best in the business for making these kinds of projects work!

The good folks over at George Lucas' Foundation EduTopia also get it! Their evidence-based Core Concepts perfectly reflect our approach - and provide yet another platform for our Students to re-conceive what education can be!