For future-focused schools like the ����APP, WASC accreditation is more than just a prestigious label; it is a testament to the school’s commitment to high educational standards, continuous improvement, and student success. In this blog post, we dive into what WASC accreditation entails and consider the countless advantages it offers.

What is WASC Accreditation?

WASC is one of six regional accrediting associations in the United States, responsible for accrediting schools, colleges, and universities in California, Hawaii, and other territories. Since 1962, WASC has been accrediting national and international schools with a rigorous process that evaluates various aspects of and school and its operations, including educational quality, institutional integrity, and its capacity for improvement.

The accreditation process involves:

1. Self-Study: The school conducts an in-depth, year-long self-assessment using WASC’s four standards and its Criteria for Review, which identify school strengths and areas for improvement.
2. Peer Review: A team of experienced international educators conducts an ‘on-site visit’ to verify the self-study report, observe school operations, and interact with stakeholders. Of course, for our school this takes place during a week of virtual meetings with the various stakeholders groups; students, parents, educators, leadership, and includes class time observations.
3. Action Plan: Based on feedback, the institution develops an action plan for continuous improvement.
4. Follow-Up: Regular reviews and updates ensure that the institution adheres to its action plan and maintains high standards.

Why do schools need something like WASC accreditation?

When selecting the right school or committing to secondary education, it is important to determine whether this institution can provide the right education and gain recognition from reputable post-secondary educational institutions. It is an assurance of quality of learning and reliability of the school.

1. Validation of Quality Education Internationally schooling, and the evolving online schooling environment, is a tapestry of different approaches. Such choice is wonderful but raises questions for other institutions, such as universities, and for industry employers, regarding the quality and validity of the students learning. A WASC accreditation acts as an internationally recognized seal of approval that ����APP meets high standards of educational excellence. This validation assures parents that the curriculum, teaching methods, and overall educational environment are of a globally endorsed quality. Knowing that an independent, respected international body has thoroughly evaluated and approved ����APP gives you confidence in the educational choices you are making for your children.
2. Commitment to Continuous Improvement It is also worth noting that accreditation is not a one-time event but instead an ongoing process. Being accredited means ����APP must continue to demonstrate progress and innovation in its educational practices. This commitment to continuous improvement ensures that your child’s education is dynamic and evolves with the latest educational research and methodologies.
3. Enhanced College and Career Prospects WASC accreditation is globally recognized by colleges and universities. Students from accredited schools often find it easier to gain admission to higher education institutions because their diplomas are considered credible and trustworthy. Furthermore, many scholarship programs and competitive universities give preference to applicants from accredited schools, potentially opening doors to numerous opportunities for your child.
4. Accountability and Transparency The rigorous process of WASC accreditation fosters a culture of accountability and transparency within our school. The ����APP is required to document its policies, practices, and outcomes, providing a clear and honest picture of its operations. This transparency builds trust between the school and our parent and student community, ensuring everyone is well-informed about the school’s efforts and achievements.

The Specific Advantages for ����APP Families

For a progressive and innovative institution like ����APP, WASC accreditation amplifies its strengths and provides a structured framework for its educational philosophy.

1. Alignment with Global Standards ����APP’s vision of offering a global, future-oriented education aligns well with the WASC accreditation standards. The rigorous evaluation process ensures that the school’s curriculum and teaching methods are not only effective locally but also competitive on a global scale. This alignment prepares students to thrive in an interconnected world, equipping them with the skills and knowledge needed to navigate diverse cultures and complex global issues.
2. Support for Personalized Learning One of the core principles of ����APP is personalized learning, which caters to each student’s unique strengths, interests, and learning styles. WASC accreditation recognizes and supports innovative educational models, ensuring that the school can continue to develop and implement personalized learning strategies. This focus on personalized education helps foster individual student growth, making learning more engaging and effective.
3. Innovation in Education ����APP prides itself on being at the forefront of educational innovation, integrating technology and forward-thinking methodologies into the learning experience. WASC accreditation provides a supportive framework for this innovation, encouraging the school to experiment with new approaches and continuously improve its educational practices. This environment of innovation ensures that your children receive an education that is not only current but also anticipates future trends and challenges.
4. Holistic Development WASC standards emphasize the importance of a well-rounded education, focusing not just on academic excellence but also on the social, emotional, and ethical development of students. ����APP’s holistic approach to education, which includes a strong emphasis on character development, emotional intelligence, and ethical reasoning, is validated and enhanced by WASC accreditation. This holistic approach is crucial in preparing students to be responsible, empathetic, and effective leaders in the future.
5. Community Engagement and Feedback The WASC accreditation process involves gathering feedback from all stakeholders, including parents, students, teachers, and the community. This inclusive approach ensures that ����APP remains responsive to the needs and expectations of its community. As parents, your input is valued and considered in the school’s ongoing development, fostering a strong partnership between the school and families.

What This Means for You and Your Child

Choosing a WASC-accredited institution like ����APP offers numerous benefits for your child’s education and future next steps. It provides assurance that the school is committed to excellence and continuous improvement, equipping your child with the skills, knowledge, and values needed to succeed in an ever-changing world.

As a parent, you can take pride in knowing that ����APP is held to the highest standards of educational quality and integrity. Your child’s learning experience is enriched by a curriculum that is both rigorous and innovative, preparing them for the challenges and opportunities of the future.

Moreover, the focus on personalized and holistic education ensures that your child’s individual needs and potential are recognized and nurtured. The supportive and inclusive school environment, bolstered by WASC accreditation, fosters a sense of belonging and community, making ����APP a place where your child can truly thrive.

Finally, WASC accreditation is not simply a mark of distinction for ����APP but a testament to its dedication to providing a world-class education. It offers assurance, continuous improvement, enhanced opportunities, and a holistic approach to learning, all of which contribute to the overall growth and success of your child. As parents, your support and involvement are integral to this journey, and together, we can ensure that ����APP continues to be a beacon of excellence and innovation in education.

The post Deep-dive into WASC Accreditation and What Kinds of Advantages It Presents first appeared on ����APP.

Like many aspects of society, education is in a culture war. Some want to double down on traditional approaches to reading, writing, and arithmetic while others are committed to providing greater diversity through increased personalization.

At the center of this debate lies two fundamental structures in the machinery of industrial-scale education: the operational regulation of schools and the standardization of assessment practices. Both were designed to provide legitimacy to teaching and learning in an era when our ability to accumulate reliable data on curriculum and student learning was technologically limited.

Adding to this, the value of university education is coming under greater scrutiny because of the financial burden it places on students, with many undergraduates facing decades of debt. Indeed, some argue that the undergraduate degree has rejuvenated the medieval practice of indentured servitude! Not exactly what we intended when many societies increased tertiary access more than fifty years ago.

Today’s reality means older school learners and their families are reconsidering the value proposition of an undergraduate credential at a time when many businesses publicly question the relevance of traditional degrees.

Amidst growing calls to re-engineer education to better incorporate new knowledge areas and place greater emphasis on specifically human skills, current mechanisms for determining schooling’s legitimacy are stifling efforts to build rigorous future-focused curricula and credentialing. Furthermore, such regulatory constraints are reinforced by a university system struggling to acknowledge future human skills development due to its own disciplinary traditions, which directly impact innovation in the compulsory schooling and its credentialing.

Unscaling at scale

Historically, the early industrial migration from the land to the city meant it made sense to standardize quality control learning delivery and have content coverage defined by a narrow set of knowledge and skills. Transforming agricultural manual labor into an urban factory workforce required a basic level of literacy and numeracy. Then, as the industrial period matured a wider and more sophisticated set of academic knowledge and skills became important. As the scope of industrialization spread so did the proliferation of the disciplinary curriculum both in school and universities. The important point to grasp here is that while the range of disciplinary courses and programs widened, validation largely remained a standardized process.

Nowadays, digitization of a post-industrial workforce means standardized approaches to learning design and credentialing are struggling to meet society’s needs. The industrial era relied on economies of scale that at the time made perfect sense, but as we move to a world requiring greater skills diversity, the model has become limiting. Complex societal changes mean we need to ‘unscale’ education so we can enable more personalized learning pathways and modes of credentialing. However, this means changing both how we accredit schools and recognize learning through qualifications. In a later article, I will explore how such personalization can be acknowledged with more appropriate school credentialing, but here I concentrate on obstacles school regulation places on innovation.

Today, becoming an accredited school involves a lengthy process (around two years) of planning and development. It consists in applying to an accrediting body and carrying out a self-study using standards, principles, or protocols provided by the accrediting body. The self-study requires the school to collate an enormous amount of documentary evidence to support its alignment claims, and once submitted the report is studied by a team of evaluators drawn from accredited schools. Subsequently, this evaluation team visits the school to corroborate the self-study and its supporting documentation by interviewing the wider school community.

But, in most instances accreditation only offers a cursory standard, it does not scrutinize in any meaningful way a school’s principles of learning design and practices of assessment. In fact, accreditation does not provide enough legitimacy to a school’s high school diploma for most university systems, which are often driven by practices determined by ministries of education. This is why most international schools rely on external examination-based qualifications such as AP, A Level, and IBDP, which largely mirror well-established national education leaving certification. It is a standardized system relying on curriculum content and outcomes benchmarking for its legitimacy. But such standardization stifles both learner personalization and credentialing innovation in an era where both are being transformed by technology. Consider, for example, the impact GPT4 is having on both learning design and how to evidence learning and growth.

New models of regulation

At ����APP, we use a Learning Pathway Advisory program from grade nine onwards to help students curate a personal learning journey that will be reflected in their credit profile. Largely, the approach helps students understand the realities of pursuing four specific pathways: conventional universities, progressive universities; workplace; and entrepreneurism. Each of these paths requires students to build a bespoke approach to their high school transcript and it is this that we want to see have better regulation in the longer term.

Currently, with other future-facing schools, we are looking to establish a network of like-minded high schools that want to provide rigorous alternatives to the existing exam-based credential models. We are actively working with a range of forward-looking universities to build out a framework to validate interdisciplinary, challenge-based assessment practices at the high school level.

The aim is to develop a reliable regulatory mechanism to support best practices and provide pathways to a digitized wallet of pre-tertiary credentials. These credential pathways will recognize student learning across a wider range of knowledge, skills, and dispositions. We feel that existing qualifications jeopardize human flourishing because of the inflationary reality of the grade increases driven by the university admissions system. Until we address the challenge of how to better acknowledge diversity in student learning and growth, we will continue to see increasing levels of depression and anxiety because students see the vacuity of the current system.

School accreditation is a key regulatory process that could rapidly enhance high school provision. However, as it stands, accrediting bodies can only accredit school teaching and learning from an operational perspective. But, as discussed, an accredited high school diploma carries little weight because many university admission systems often demand an externally awarded qualification. In other words, schools, and their teachers, do not have sufficient legitimacy in the eyes of the university system, even though the tertiary’s own awarding powers are largely self-governed.

My contention is that by leveraging technology and improved school quality assurance frameworks schools can develop the capacity to credential a more diverse range of knowledge, skills, and dispositions. However, today’s large qualification providers have little interest in disrupting a business model that generates enormous profits using summative examinations. Their rhetoric for maintaining industrial-scale examinations often uses arguments about validity, equity, or trust. Yet today’s technological innovations raise significant questions about such arguments with their reliance on disciplinary, content-biased school qualifications.

Imagine if the world’s big-name universities worked with schools and accrediting bodies to reinvent regulatory practices instead of maintaining brand value by narrowing access using inflationary measurements provided by an industrial credential cartel.

For too long the complexities of regulation in education have been left in the ‘too hard’ bucket. When it comes to the regulation of school and credential models, we owe it to our children to try and revisit our systemic validation of standardization.

If you’d like to hear more or get involved in some of our work to shift the needle in school accreditation and qualifications do reach out to me through .

The post Education regulation: What needs to change? first appeared on ����APP.

However, drawing on such analogies and metaphors does not come without dangers. For example, our current educational worldview often leverages analogies and metaphors drawn from dominant economic models, which embed value judgments such as profit or loss, success or failure, and winning or losing.

Such binaries are at odds with what many educators and students would see as actual values of education. Such values make for an extensive list that generally endorses communal and pro-social aspects of learning rather than economic binaries promoting individualistic competition.

Consider, for example, how today’s school graduates’ lives are dominated by economic analogies, from school report cards to university admission scores.

Students are evaluated, benchmarked, and sifted using metrics reminiscent of share prices in a stock market. Moreover, the tertiary institutions using these metrics to gatekeep student access also find themselves placed in league tables such as the QS100, which further embeds economic analogies and metaphors reminiscent of the NASDAQ or FTSE 100.

Yet perhaps this is beginning to change.

New metaphors for a new world

We are entering an era where we are grasping the significance of new analogies and metaphors such as complex systems, circular economics, and regenerative principles. Indeed, economics is establishing related analogies such as triple-bottom-line reporting and environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics to evaluate a company’s success.

Interestingly, these new analogies and metaphors also introduce a constellation of values that begin to disrupt the older binaries. If an institution seriously embraces ESG reporting, for example, it can no longer use profit and loss as the main catalyst for determining a company’s responsibility towards employee wellbeing. The analogies and metaphors we use have a direct impact on the values we acknowledge.

In our work to create a new curriculum model for the ����APP, we have held this as a guiding star.

In contemporary education, three analogies are common in contemporary descriptions of lifelong learning: competency, capability, and mastery. However, an audit of the theory surrounding each reveal there is little agreement on the definition of each. Indeed, these terms can be seen as a continuum with competency at one end and mastery at the other. I argue that competency is too simple a term for a diverse range of knowledge, skills, and dispositions, whilst mastery is perhaps too presumptuous a description of what a high schooler acquires. Therefore, at ����APP, we searched for a term that denotes fluency across a range of disciplinary knowledge, future-ready skills, and sustainable values. After examining the OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 (2019) we adopted the term ‘literacy’ because it provides a more open-ended and expansive description of everything a student acquires when using our Human Literacies Framework (HLF).

Re-engineering school curriculum to meet modern-day challenges

For ����APP, the HLF addresses the problem of complexity in learning design by establishing a model that acknowledges two fundamental principles of future-ready education.

First, the HLF recognizes the iterative nature of knowledge and skills acquisition and the regenerative reality of a challenge-based curriculum. Second, ����APP’s framework articulates conceptual domains and knowledge dimensions in ways that actively prioritize a transdisciplinary approach to learning design. Having said this, the literacies model is not intended as a replacement for good examples of traditional educational practice, rather it represents a reengineering of existing knowledge areas along with the incorporation of new and emerging disciplines.

Historically, the term literacy has been industrial society’s antidote to illiteracy. At the birth of industrial public education, to be literate meant being able to read, write and calculate. This view of literacy was famously described by Paulo Freire as the ‘banking model’ of education, and arguably remains the view that still holds sway today. In this analogy, the student is a passive recipient of often ideologically curated and academically endorsed knowledge and skills. Today, however, this traditional definition stands against a backdrop of a full-blown climate crisis with its direct environmental impacts and increasing global political disharmony.

In facing such a future with optimism, ����APP has sought to expand ‘literacy’ as an educational concept by amalgamating a range of contemporary theories.

Alternative interpretations of literacy began emerging towards the end of the last century with concepts such as critical literacy, multi-literacy, and ecological literacy, and these have all influenced ����APP’s development of the HLF.

Redesigning of traditional and new knowledge taxonomies

Critical literacy describes skills explored by students through a critical pedagogy approach. ‘Critical literacy offers an important strategic, practical alternative for teachers and students to reconnect literacy with everyday life, and with an education that entails debate, argument, and action over social, cultural and economic issues that matter’ (Luke and Woods 2009). In other words, critical literacy equips learners with a sophisticated awareness of the political realities of learning. And, more importantly, the HLF nurtures both the skills to successfully navigate such ideological and economic debates about the future, and contribute to their “solutioning”.

The second influence on ����APP’s HLF draws on the theory of multi-literacy developed by Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis at the end of the last century. Multiliteracy is a set of supple, variable, communication strategies, ever-diverging according to the cultures and social languages of technologies, functional groups, types of organization and niche clientele’ (Cope & Kalantzis 2009). Importantly, multiliteracy is interdisciplinary in nature, thus dissolving traditional disciplinary distinctions in favour of more transdisciplinary concept domains and knowledge dimensions.

Finally, a third theoretical foundation the HLF rests upon is in fact three interrelated metaphors that have evolved over the last fifty years as we have come to realize our impact on, and place within, the environmental order of things. Environmental literacy, ecological literacy, and ecoliteracy are terms used interchangeably to describe various educational frameworks aimed at addressing the need to learn in ways that help us face the future as more environmentally aware and agentic citizens. Again, such uses of literacy emphasize that the future of learning is interdisciplinary because ‘literacy… is open and inclusive, and… involves the overlap and interaction between subjects of study… and ways of knowing (Berkowitz, Ford, Brewer 2004).

Essentially, the HLF is a synthesis of traditional and new knowledge taxonomies, evolving human skills maps, and contemporary dispositional priorities. The HLF preserves relevant traditional knowledge, skills, and dispositions, whilst embracing new knowledge and the regenerative reality of the curriculum.

����APP understands the dynamism of learning systems and the fluidity of knowledge, skills, and values in a rapidly changing world. We believe our worldview moves education beyond the competencies and mastery continuum by advocating that a broader range of knowledge processes be used. In other words, more powerful learning arises from ‘weaving between different knowledge processes in an explicit and purposeful way’ (Cope & Kalantzis 2009). Ultimately, our Human Literacies Framework represents one of the most authentic educational routes to a more humane society and sustainable future in education today.

The post The Human Literacies Framework – The Roadmap for a Regenerative Education first appeared on ����APP.