In his new article on HuffPost, Alfonso Molina reflects on inclusion, quality and educational innovation
How can an increasingly diverse school ensure quality learning for all? And what does it really mean to innovate within a complex education system?
These are the questions at the heart of the new article by Alfonso Molina, co-founder and scientific director of the Fondazione Mondo Digitale, published on HuffPost under the title The School as a Learning System.
The discussion begins with a situation that has now become commonplace in schools: classes characterised by differences in ability levels, learning pace, social circumstances, personal journeys, and linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In this context, Molina writes, the key issue is not to eliminate difference, but to understand what conditions enable a diverse school to deliver high-quality learning for all.
This question echoes the lesson of Tullio De Mauro: quality and inclusion are not alternative objectives between which a compromise must be found. The quality of a school is also built on its ability to engage people with different starting points in the learning process. This vision, Molina emphasises, continues to guide the work of the Fondazione Mondo Digitale in schools after twenty-five years of activity.
This also gives rise to a different concept of educational innovation. It is not merely about technologies, new models or radical breaks with the past. Change can arise from the ability to recognise what already works, to verify it, make it visible, share it and adapt it to other contexts. A progressive process that transforms practices, relationships and professional cultures.
It is from this perspective that Molina calls upon the community of ‘Teachers of the School of Us’: not merely a space for exchanging good practice, but a potential infrastructure for distributed innovation, where teachers bring real-world problems, experiment with solutions, observe the outcomes and build knowledge through experience, reflection and discussion.
Even heterogeneity can thus be transformed, through an appropriate pedagogical design, into a resource for developing cooperative learning, peer tutoring, autonomy and metacognitive skills, without underestimating the weight of inequalities and vulnerabilities.
The ultimate goal is a conception of the school as a system capable of learning from itself: from its own practices, from its own mistakes, and from the diversity of the people and situations that make it up.
As Molina concludes, inclusion is not a constraint on quality, but one of the conditions through which quality can be built and continuously improved. And innovation is less and less about the introduction of something new and increasingly about the education system’s ability to learn from its own experience.
Read Alfonso Molina’s article on HuffPost
