From a shared question to a global learning community

CELEBRATE EDUCATORS

Recognizing the educators who turn ideas into change

Research gives us important principles, but meaningful educational change also depends on teachers who are willing to experiment, listen to learners, and develop better ways of working.

The Innovative Teacher Award was created to recognize and celebrate these educators.

For us, innovation is not simply the use of new technology, nor does it need to be a large or expensive project. Innovation may be a new way of encouraging student agency, supporting collaboration, making assessment more meaningful, including learners with different needs, or connecting classroom learning with the surrounding community.

What matters is that the innovation responds to a genuine educational need and contributes to better learning.

The Award highlights teachers whose work might otherwise remain known only within their own schools or communities. It gives educators an opportunity to share their ideas internationally, learn from one another, and inspire others to adapt promising practices to their own settings.

The Innovative Teacher Award is therefore more than a competition. It is a platform for recognizing professional courage, creativity, reflection, and commitment to learners. It celebrates teachers not merely as implementers of educational policy, but as designers, researchers, and leaders of change.

BRIDGE TWO WORLDS

Why we created the Science of Learning Symposium

The Science of Learning Academy and the Innovative Teacher Award emerged from two complementary perspectives.

The International Science of Learning Symposium brings these two conversations together.

We wanted to create a space where researchers, teachers, school leaders, educational innovators, and policymakers could meet as equal partners. Too often, research and practice develop in separate worlds. Researchers may produce valuable knowledge that does not easily reach classrooms, while teachers may develop effective solutions that are never shared beyond their local communities.

The Symposium is designed to help close this distance.

Participants are invited to present research, practice-based inquiry, innovative educational approaches, and projects that connect evidence with real learning environments. Alongside formal presentations, the programme creates opportunities for dialogue, collaboration, and the exchange of ideas across countries and professional roles.

This is not a gathering built around ready-made answers. It is a meeting place for people who are willing to ask better questions, examine evidence, share what they have learned, and imagine what education could become.

MEET IN HELSINKI

Why Helsinki?

Finland is internationally known for educational equity, trust in teachers, and a long tradition of valuing education as a public good. Helsinki provides a meaningful setting for a global conversation about the future of learning—while also reminding us that no education system has finished learning.

The Symposium brings international perspectives to Finland and invites Finnish educators into a wider global dialogue. Our aim is not to present one country as a model for everyone else, but to learn across cultures and contexts.

By meeting in Helsinki, we hope to create new relationships between people who might not otherwise encounter one another: a classroom teacher and a cognitive scientist, a school leader and an educational technology developer, or a local innovator and an international research network.