Like all the best ideas, #themonalisaeffect® is both a revolutionary and a simple concept.

 

Across the globe, schools' Guiding Statements speak of personalising learning, and of sustaining a focus on wellbeing, and yet too many young people worldwide remain as disappointed, disaffected or disappeared as those about whom Michael Barber* pointedly wrote over twenty years ago.

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Every single student has a fundamental right to an education which understands and meets all their needs and strengths, keeping their #wellbeingfirst at all times. And, to achieve this, we need to know each student, inside out.

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However, the many and conflicting demands we place on young people today make it harder than ever before for them to #thrive and #belong in school. Therefore, our job is to identify and unearth the treasure that lies hidden within each and every child. Our job is to ensure that every single student can be seen, be heard, be known and belong.

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Just like Lisa Gherardini looks directly at every single visitor to her home in the Louvre, so should the learning and wellbeing experience we provide in schools today look directly at each and every individual student. Fortunately, if we make effective use of each vertex of the triangle of student-level data available to us, we can actually achieve this goal.

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This is #themonalisaeffect®. A revolutionary but simple lens through which thousands of school leaders and teachers, from hundreds of schools across over fifty countries worldwide, have already started #makinglearningbetter for their students.

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* Barber, M. (1996), The Learning Game: Arguments for an Educational Revolution, Victor Gollancz, London

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