“We should look for conflict! We need it: it improves communication skills and empathy.”

Meet Chanpil, Christina and three FCN Learning Lab’s students (South Korea)
Chanpil Junginvited me to is Future Class Network Learning Lab, a new school he founded in March 2017, based on his previous experiences in education. It was a cold day in Seoul, and Christina, an English teacher, some of her students, and him welcomed me with a cup of coffee as I discovered the place: only four rooms on a building’s third floor. It is small but luckily, they are waiting for another site, much more school-like, for next year. We sat in one of the room to have a chat.
Context of South Korean educational system
In South Korea, education is such a major concern that it has been called « an education fever ». Its educational model is seen as a model as it is top-performing in reading literacy, mathematics, and sciences according to PISA ranking, and it has one of the world’s highest-educated labor forces among OECD countries. It has been praised by the US President Barack Obama for its rigor and aroused the British Ministry of Education’s interest.
In such an efficient country, why would innovation occur? When we take a
closer look at it, such great results come at a big cost. The relentless
pressure means Korea holds another much less enviable record, that of
having the highest suicide rate of industrialized OECD countries,
particularly among those aged 10–19. It has been criticized for stifling
creativity and innovation and described as intensely and brutally
competitive. The school days are seemingly endless, as many students add
private-tuition before or after class. One of Chanpil’s students told me
that in his previous school, he would often leave school at 11 PM and feel
such a pressure that it threatened his mental health. Those extended school
days are increasing student passivity and drowsiness, which becomes another
issue for educators.
Luckily, the South Korean Ministry of Education is open to innovation and
provides a sympathetic ear to those eager to solve these problems.
Flipped classroom discovery: the Keokuro Class Project
Jung Chanpil is one of those. He was a documentary director working for
KBS, a public broadcasting company in Korea. While he was working on a
documentary on the 21st-century educational revolution in 2013, he met Jon
Bergmann and Aaron Sams, two chemistry teachers in Colorado who gave birth
to Flipped Class Learning answering one question: « what is the best use of
face-to-face time with students? » Thrilled by this exciting encounter he
led an experiment in a middle school set in a low-income neighborhood, in
Busan. He recorded the work of three teachers flipping partly or completely
their classrooms and their spectacular results with: their students
achieved a jump of 20 to 50 points on a 100-point scale compared to their
achievement the previous semester. Michael Horn, a journalist in digital
education, has nothing but praises about this experiment. In the
introduction of his article, he expresses his admiration: “I witnessed the potential for blended
learning to boost Korean students’ achievement, engagement, and happiness.
I also saw blended learning’s power to boost the morale of the teachers and
community.” The Flipped Class experiment was entirely filmed by Jung and
broadcasted on national television in three consecutive episodes during
March to May of 2014.
For his documentary, Jung Chanpil as also met Sugata Mitra involved in the
“Hole in the Wall” experiment, who has been a great inspiration to him. In
1999, the Hole in the Wall experiment was first conducted in India: a
computer was placed in a kiosk in a wall in a slum at Kalkaji, Delhi and
children were allowed to use it freely. The experiment aimed at proving
that children could be taught by computers very easily without any formal
training, what Mitra termed as Minimally Invasive Education. He then gave
an inspirational TED Talk
about this.
Following those discoveries, Chanpil launched the The Keokuro Class Project
which aims at creating a collaborative peer learning environment where
students use various methods including flipped learning. Chanpil based his
project on the P21’s “21st education Framework”, which defines the major
skills for tomorrow, and he has the support from OECD 2030 education
project, which is working with OECD countries to specify what education
should be for the years to come. Moreover, the Ministry of Education in
Korea released a new policy to officially implement flipped classroom in
science subject in public schools from 2018.
Christina, now part of the Future Class Network Learning Lab, started
flipping her classroom in 2014. She tells me about her first apprehensions:
“How could I change my way of teaching? I felt I had not enough time to
engage in such a project and I was afraid it wouldn’t be working how I
wanted. Although our school system is rigorous, I could change a little
bit, enough to see improvements: my students gained in confidence, they
were more active and comfortable. They were excited to come to my class! It
was my first step.”
The World’s Biggest Class Project
At the same time, Chanpil launched a new idea: The World’s Biggest class
project. This is a project-based learning in which students have to
identify and solve their community problem with tools they developed in
their classroom. It is designed to empower students and build a clear link
between school and real life. Students are becoming active and a part of
their community as it fosters their creative skill and their ability to
solve problems in a collaborative environment. This project is in keeping
with Ashoka’s “Changemaker” principle and applies Design thinking as it
taught in Standford D-School. It is a significant trend emerging globally
in education to make students problem-solvers in their community as I
observed in
India
(The Riverside School) or Japan (The Tohoku Project).
This project is led by teachers on their own which explains why two of the
students there during our interview had experimented it although they came
from different schools. One worked on re-designing the school’s parking and
the intersections around to keep a safe path for students entering or
leaving. The other worked on the problem of slippery hallway during rainy
days, and she created a communication campaign to get some change in
everyone’s behavior.
Future Class Network
Following the Busan experiment, Jung Chanpil created an organization called
“Future Class Network”
(FCN) which started gathering Korean educators who tried to flip their
classrooms and now is an extended community of teachers engaged in Keokuro
Class project or in the World’s Biggest Class project. In 2017, the FCN has
trained more than 5 000 teachers and has now around 16 000 members. The FCN
community continues to expand in Korea and beyond.
It is a close-knit online community in which teachers meet offline at least
once a month. «It’s crucial to give a sense of belonging, tells Chanpil. »
Sharing experiences, resources, fears, and success forms the core of this
network. In that purpose they even created different textbooks for every
subject, to help new teachers with resources when they start to get engaged
in this practice, and now they are thinking about translating them.
Future Class Network Learning Lab
In March 2017 opened the FCN Learning Lab, an innovative school
implementing all Chanpil’s projects to create an active learning
environment, where students are encouraged to collaborate and express
themselves without apprehension. This class has 12 students without any
separation of grades. “How to learn” instead of “what to learn” has become
the focus and encourages students to solve problems in the real world.
In only several months, the whole team noticed significant academic
improvements in their students that Chanpil showed me with pride when I
expressed potential criticism about student-led learning that might level
down standards. Indeed, nearly all of them improved significantly, and when
I saw their work, I was impressed: it was ambitious and creative. Students
showed me photos of them working during a lesson, and I saw collaboration
and passion. They explained how they could design the class for the others
students and I saw the pride they fell at it. Twice per semester, they
organize an exhibition to display their learning, which makes them realize
how much they learned during that period. Followed a long discussion about
communication skills as they fell it was a major change in their education
in the FCN Learning Lab: in their traditionnal school they completely lost
them trying to avoid conflict and conversation, but here, by challenge,
Chanpil has a motto: “We should look for conflict! We need it, it is very
positive, in my mind, as it requires communication and develops empathy.”