The team at Vivedus have just announced an exciting new feature in the Vivedus Platform.
Leveraging OpenAI, they have created Viv-it, a personal professional coach for a teacher.
For many years educators have been promoting the notion of ‘personalised learning’ for students (with degrees of success). Now, for the very first time, teachers can receive personalised professional development.
Vivedus is a Learning Activation Model. Grounded on 70 years of academic research into creativity and 15 years of development, it is the only Learning Activation Model (pedagogical framework) built onto a digital platform and designed to activate every child’s creative intelligence.
The Model isn’t just about creative intelligence. In the words of Andreas Schleicher of the OECD, “creativity acts as a powerful stimulus to learning itself, deepening students’ absorption in their learning, activating higher-order cognitive skills and stimulating emotional development and resilience and wellbeing”.
Gabrielle Kempton, Head of Research and Development at Vivedus and long-term proponent and researcher into little-c creativity, has linked 10 dispositions to a person’s ability to think creatively. Following numerous prototypes several academic research projects, over 30 pedagogies have been shown to activate those dispositions. In a collaboration with the University of Melbourne, the team have developed assessment tools so a student’s higher-order cognitive skills can be measured.
Why is creativity so important? Apart from deepening learning, improving engagement, emotional development, resilience and wellbeing, the OECD and the World Economic Forum, along with multiple thought leaders, have all said that to remain competitive in the job’s market in a world dominated by AI, a person needs to think creatively.
All of this means teachers need upskilling as traditional approaches unintentionally condition creativity out of the hearts and minds of young people.
Upskilling teachers is no easy task, as long-term school principal and now Managing Director of Vivedus, Dr Paul Browning, knows.
“Traditional approaches to professional development have little to no lasting effect on a teacher’s practice. This is another of the complex problems the team at Vivedus have been working on—how to deliver professional development in a cost effective and impactful manner.”
The arrival of AI has provided the solution.
Project Lead at Vivedus, Guy Richards, along with the other members of the Vivedus Development Team, have trained Vivedus’ bespoke AI model, Viv-it, to become a teacher’s professional coach. Viv-it draws from knowledge across all the relevant theory of little-c creativity and the Australian Curriculum documents and Year 11 and 12 syllabuses. Then it has been trained in the dispositions, the pedagogies, and the assessment tools developed to measure creative intelligence. As a result, Viv-it has effectively become a Lead Teacher—a personal pedagogical coach.
Vivi-it is built into the Vivedus Platform, a tool designed specifically for teachers to lighten their administrative workloads, support them to design learning opportunities that will activate creative intelligence and track their professional growth. As teachers plan for learning using the Vivedus Platform, Viv-it provides them with personalised professional development, helping them to develop their practice for the benefit of the students.
“AI is the disrupter we have been waiting for in education”, said Browning.
“AI’s capacity means that we can now support every teacher to grow and become the very best practitioner for the students in their care. And with the Vivedus Platform, school leaders will know with certainty, the impact the Viv-it coach is having on the teaching in the classroom. This is truly a game changer for education”.
Principal of Omni Academies, Meg Foley, one of the first schools to adopt Vivedus, is super excited with the possibilities for teaching and learning that Vivi-it brings, in addition to all the other tremendous benefits the Vivedus Platform brings.
“It is just crazy! It’s like my own personal mentor, but what is super exciting is that it takes away the perceived judgement that a real person can bring to a mentor situation and meets you where you are at as a teacher.”
Foley goes on,
“Not only that, but with a [human] mentor you are only going to be as good as your mentor. With Viv-it possibilities are endless. It blows me away.”
