What’s happening in the world of educational innovation: HundrED Global Collection

Knowing what other people and organisations are doing to improve education in the world is a very useful exercise. It is not only inspiring and rewarding, but it also serves to analyse and reflect on the overall situation of the sector, and to learn lessons for the future. It is also important to recognise and make visible the work of thousands of people and organisations who work every day to make education better and reach everyone. HundrED contributes to this work with its reports. We, at the Observatory, want to support their work.

Through its reports, HundrED has been making visible some of the most outstanding educational innovations in development in the world. It does so with an inspirational vocation, intending to enable new ways of educating that help all children make the most of their potential, regardless of their contexts and realities. To this end, each year it publishes a global report with the 100 educational innovations that it considers to be the most important in terms of objectives, impact, results and scalability.

The ProFuturo Observatory, always attentive to the latest trends in digital education, shares HundrED’s interest in making visible all those initiatives that help teachers and children in vulnerable environments to improve their opportunities to access quality education. Therefore, in this and other subsequent articles, we will analyse the publication of this organisation and highlight those educational innovations that correspond to our field of analysis and study. In this post, we will explain the methodology followed by the organisation in the elaboration of its report and the criteria according to which we will select and classify the innovations highlighted in its report HundrED Global Collection 2022.
In the kitchen of the HundrED Global Collection
What is the making of this report that each year seeks out, analyses and highlights the 100 most promising educational innovations in the world? The organisation uses a four-stage process:

• Search: In this phase, a research team, with the support of the global HundrED community, tracks educational innovations through intensive web searches, interviews with experts, and various surveys.
• Pre-selection: to make this pre-selection, the research team reviews each of the innovations “discovered” in the previous phase. To be included among these “finalists”, innovations must demonstrate impact (they must produce a valuable improvement in their context) and scalability (they must be easily adaptable and adoptable by others in different contexts).
• Review: an “academic” jury, composed of 120 people involved in the world of education (teachers, students, researchers, academics…) from around 50 countries, reviews the finalists. The jury members evaluate each candidate by placing it on a graph divided into four quadrants, according to its impact and scalability, and explain their decision in an evaluative commentary.

• Selection workshops: the pre-selected innovations are classified according to the evaluation obtained in the previous stage, then several joint workshops are organised, where the HundrED research team evaluates which of them should be in the final collection. The challenge of this phase is to achieve a balance of approaches and contexts, and the ultimate goal is to achieve a selection that covers a wide range of effective pedagogies in education, age levels, target groups (educators, parents and students), educational contexts and geographical distribution.

To compile this year’s report, the HundrED research team and the jury reviewed more than 450 innovations that have applied to be in this HundrED Global Collection 2022, plus 2,250 educational innovations that had already been published on the Hundred.org website.

In terms of the most recurrent themes in the submitted projects, teacher professional development, collaborative learning, creative thinking, play, project-based learning, or parents and carers feature prominently in the ranking. Therefore, if we were to talk about educational trends for this year (always considering only the data from the report) we could say that teacher professional development, learning communities and environments, 21st century skills, and educational inclusion would be the central themes of the year.
The selection of the Observatory

1. Firstly, we will highlight those initiatives that, like Fundación ProFuturo itself, intervene in vulnerable contexts to narrow the education gap through quality digital education.
2. Destacaremos también aquellos programas e iniciativas que contribuyan al aprendizaje de las llamadas competencias 2030.
3. Within the 2030 competences, learning and teaching digital citizenship features prominently. Therefore, we will also focus on innovations that teach how to live and coexist in the digital world.
4. Finally, we will highlight those initiatives that use disruptive methodologies without losing sight of the technological approach. Those that are able to combine and balance pedagogy and technology in an innovative way.

These are, in general terms, the four thematic axes around which we will classify HundrED’s innovations, intending to make them known and amplify their impact and the work of all those who work every day for a better education for all. If you want to know them, don’t miss our next posts!