GLUU is connecting and nurturing coalitions of EdTech stakeholders and practitioners, educators, edupreneurs and policy makers to harness the collaborative power of their people. The ‘EdTech learning hubs’ will support and catalyse this network, creating conditions that encourage innovation and underpin the best practice, inclusivity and collaboration needed to reap the benefits of a 21st century education system.

Our approach enables teachers not just to be innovative within their own classroom, but to be influential on a wider stage, creating a new cadre of ‘teacherpreneurs’.

This word, referenced by the RSA in their report “Creative Public Leadership: How School System Leaders Can Create the Conditions for System-wide Innovation”, was coined by Berry et al. who described a new type of teacher leaders who combine classroom teaching with the development of connections and ideas which have influence beyond their institution: in essence a new, deliberately created cohort of ‘teacher innovators’ who have their feet firmly planted in the classroom but who are skilled enough to take deliberate risks, often in partnership with external service providers.

The key here is that the teacherpreneurs are a deliberately created cohort of teacher innovators. While experimentation and good practice will take place in any system, moving from pockets of innovation to wide adoption requires purposeful intervention to create the structures and conditions that allow innovation to thrive and be scaled.

GLUU will address this by identifying leading practitioners and putting them at the centre of the innovation and dissemination processes; ensuring that they are invested in as innovators. These teacher innovators will learn how to design rigorous assessment and evaluation processes that allow them to understand and explain their journey as well as measure the impact of their work. They will also, through the Edtech Learning Hubs, be working as part of a larger community including learners, parents, employers, and other local stakeholders.

GLUU will facilitate the creation of these communities for innovation by bringing policymakers and other system leaders into shared-goal partnerships of schools and teachers and, as part of this process, creating incentives for teachers and others stakeholders to innovate in collaboration with others.

As ‘communities for innovation’, the Edtech Learning Hubs will return teachers to the front and centre of the process of improving classroom practice, giving them the opportunity to create new approaches, and to evaluate and refine their practice through articulating and sharing their practice with others.

In doing this, GLUU will help to form new systems and cultures that empower teachers and school leaders to take risks, and to generate a return for so doing. This requires collaborative professional development to give teachers the capacity to have a sophisticated relationship with research and evidence, so that they are not just ‘doing what works’, but asking ‘what might work?’ This approach allows teachers to adapt ideas to best fit to their own context within an overall framework that allows ‘EdTech learning hub’ innovations to scale.

GLUU will in this way not just support innovation, but will ensure that innovation capability is developed and embedded in schools. Having this capacity in schools will allow for contextual adaptations of innovations that have a strong evidence base, as well as an in-house ability to innovate, incubate and scale the school’s own creative, collaborative ideas. By doing all of this, GLUU believes that the promise of the Edtech revolution – a transformation of education driven by EdTech innovation – can be realised in practice.

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