Project DELTA
Who do we wish learners to be as they engage a dynamic world marked by uncertainty and rapid changes?
How might they bring a spirit of inquiry into their explorations of global issues and ideas, and engage currently and potentially polarizing ideas with a reflective rather than reflexive stance? What would it look like to create a culture of thoughtfulness that maximizes our common humanity and supports our learners to think and act knowledgeably, compassionately, responsibly, and ethically in the wider world?
These themes pose puzzles for students not only within but far beyond school: How do young people learn, approach challenges, and understand who they are as learners and community members? Such an agenda goes beyond acquiring specific skills or discrete content knowledge to developing dispositions—the motivation and interest, ability, and awareness of opportunities to engage ways of thinking and acting in the world.
Project DELTA (Dispositions for Engaging Learning Today) is a multi-year initiative with Nord Anglia Education (NAE) to explore how NAE’s Learner Ambitions – the dispositions toward being critical, curious, creative, compassionate, committed, and collaborative—support learners to become globally-minded changemakers with the intellectual and social tools to help make the world a better place. Working with teachers, students, parents, and administrators from a range of NAE schools, Project DELTA will explore the following:
- How the dispositions toward being critical, curious, creative, compassionate, committed, and collaborative are described in the research literature
- What thinking tools best support the development of those dispositions in ways that align with teacher and learner priorities, beliefs, and interests
- Ways that those dispositions are flexibly applied or transferred by learners across the curriculum and beyond to new and different situations
Findings from the project are used to develop tools and strategies that support the development of dispositions toward being critical, curious, creative, compassionate, committed, and collaborative, and facilitate the transfer of learning that positively position learners to adapt and apply knowledge flexibly to new, unfamiliar situations.
