We are convinced that school development in the digital age must be considered as a long-term process. The focus should be on the question: “What future do we want?” New ideas should be introduced and tried out, and as many people in the school community as possible should take responsibility for the process.
We believe that this works particularly well if you try to make the big picture (e.g. pursuing the vision) tangible on a small scale (e.g. reflective use of learning apps) and focus on concrete practices. In this way, even the smallest contexts of school practice (e.g. afternoon supervision; specific design of a room in the school; a student club) can become “relevant” and the people concerned can participate in the overall project of school development in digitality at a low threshold. To this end, however, it is important to repeatedly “match” the overarching vision(s) and the details in the design and use of digital technologies.
We are convinced that it helps schools enormously to engage in a close exchange with other schools for these processes and see particular value not only in networking “similar” schools, but also, for example, schools from different national systems or cultural contexts. At the same time, we are convinced that scalable “best practices” from one school context to another are only suitable to a very limited extent for sustainably supporting school development in the digital age. Rather, approaches are needed that inspire through concrete liveliness and also (cultural) differences – in the sense of “You could do it like this. But you have to make it your own.”
Graphic recording of getting to know each other at the first school workshop (September 18–19, 2025).
Leefje Roy (https://leefje.de/home/)
Our principles
Today, school development takes place in the context of the culture of digitality.
- Analog and digital interweave.
- Knowledge hierarchies are called into question.
- Knowledge production takes place collectively.
- The dependence on and presence of datafied/algorithmized infrastructures is growing.
- The relevance of globalization effects is increasing.
In doing so, we strive for a critical and participatory design of schools in the digital age.
- Learning new forms of participation.
- Raising awareness of political contexts; social and global inequality; ecological contexts; effects of technology design.
- Making productive use of dilemmas and contradictory situations.
- Making the big picture visible on a small scale.
Technology designs are never neutral.
- In the course of development, certain values and understandings (about education) are already incorporated into the programming of every technology.
- These values and understandings (about education) affect the context in which they are used.
- School development in the digital age requires a conscious examination of these inscriptions and a dedicated design of technologies.
Protopractices
The planned platform contains four “offers”, so-called protopractices, on teaching/school development topics. In contrast to predefined “best/good practices”, protopractices are deliberately designed in such a way that they offer great scope for adaptation to the individual school context.
In tandems, two schools each test these protopractices and develop them further.
What we mean by protopractices:
- Protopractices are proposals for future practices that have not yet been realized. However, the future practices are based on existing practices. 1
- The future practices are consciously developed by and in practice. It is not a “top-down” implementation, but the development takes place on site based on local conditions. 2
- Pandey, S. 2016. “Proto Design Practice: Translating Design Thinking Practices to Organizational Settings.” ID&A Interaction Design & Architecture (S) 27: 129-158. ↩︎
- Saari, A., & Decuypere, M. (2024). Governing by prototype and proto-practice: topological configurations of future classroom labs. Journal of Education Policy, 39(5), 683-701. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2024.2304567 ↩︎
