“How will we educate children in the future?”

This is a question that I’ve been asked for years. However, there’s often an underlying tone to it. My work has historically related to international education, and many people are too polite to directly ask, “How about educating our kids here in the United States? Why go out seeking to educate children in remote parts of the developing world — Laos, Guatemala, Ghana — when we have so many issues here at home?”

Oftentimes, these same people will pose their own answer: If we can better educate our kids here first, then maybe the developing world can eventually learn from us and progress.

But what if we instead asked: What can the US education system learn from the developing world? What if some of the best teaching methods originate not in wealthy American schools or controlled laboratories, but in rural countrysides in faraway places?

As a quick note, I use the word “developing” to refer to the fact that most of these communities face longstanding poverty, lack access to modern infrastructure and have no formalized education systems. Of course, the developing world is enormous and includes communities with diverse political, social, legal and economic situations.

But I’ve found some important similarities in the rural communities that my organization, Pencils of Promise, works in within Ghana, Guatemala and Laos. And I’ve found that they have a lot to teach us. Here are four things I think the US education system can learn from its counterparts abroad:

Motion leads to devotion

When you think about a traditional classroom in the US, you’re told over and over as a child to pay attention, stop fidgeting, sit at your desk. And yet in many parts of the developing world, children don’t have proper desks; kids are standing up, they’re sitting down, they’re moving around a classroom. In between classes, they get up, go outside, play by the river.

In short, motion is an essential part of a day-to-day activity in a classroom.

When you look at the data, what you’ll see is that a brain while sitting quietly is not nearly as activated as a brain that has just gone through only a small amount of activity — for example, a 20 minute walk. Perhaps we in the developed world need to rethink the way we educate children when it comes to physical activity. Motion doesn’t need to be restricted to recess, but also inside the classroom.

Sign language can accelerate literacy

We often think of reading as purely the act of holding a piece of paper, scanning eyes from one side to the other. But the reality is that literacy is actually the conversion of a symbol into a sound. Our brains have the ability to process (both separately and simultaneously) visual and auditory stimulation.

But what about a third element?

What about spatial recognition or movement of body? What we’re now piloting in our PoP schools, and seeing incredible results around, is the use of sign language to supplement traditional methods of teaching all students literacy skills in early childhood development. If you’ve ever seen a kid in the classroom, the hardest thing is getting him or her excited. But you watch a child learning sign language, learning through motion and moving beyond what’s happening in their brain, that’s a student who is truly learning and engaged through education.

Children learn best through teaching

When you think about a teacher in a classroom, we often have an image of a wise educator standing in front of a room of young children. But in the developing world, particularly in places without enough trained teachers, you may see children unsupervised by adults. And in that case, what happens next: the eight-year-old teaches the six-year-old.

When I was in college, the courses that I mastered most were those that I had to teach to others. That became my actual study method; I taught one of my friends the course and he would teach me a different area in return.

In a similar vein, Pencils of Promise has partnered with Sugata Mitra though Microsoft’s Work Wonders Project to bring Mitra’s School in the Cloud learning platform into our schools. We piloted SOLE (self-organized learning environment) in Ghana and it was a huge success.

Put simply, SOLE is student-centric learning, where the teacher poses a larger question (like, why is the blue whale the biggest in the ocean?) and students “self-organize” and use technology to find the answer. We saw children in rural Ghana, within 30 minutes of introducing the lesson, successfully researching a brand new topic and producing a PowerPoint to share with their classmates.

The main idea behind SOLE is that students don’t necessarily always need a formal teacher; we can use technology to spark their imagination and creativity, and they will inherently work together to learn and educate themselves.

Technology is not a solution in itself; it is an enabler and accelerator of solutions

I believe there’s an inherent capability in developing countries to leapfrog older methods of innovation in order to adopt new ones. For example, there’s often little broadband technology in developing countries; mobile brings all necessary capabilities.

In the US education system, we’re slowly shifting to a reality where tablets and other electronic devices are acceptable tools in a classroom. But technology itself is not the solution; it’s the adoption and integration of solutions that technology enables that produces the breakthrough.

Some teachers in the US stubbornly refuse to allow new innovations, saying that learning happens best with a pen and paper — even for students who will now have more or less been born with an iPhone in hand. I’ve found much less skepticism in the developing world.

In many of the areas where we work, there are no precedents to technology in the classroom. Thus, when it’s introduced, students and teachers alike are engaged and accepting.

At the same time, innovation doesn’t always correlate with technology. What we’ve learned from the developing world is that it’s okay to be scrappy. Materials are key, but they don’t make or break the teacher. I’ve seen educators excel at engaging their students with nothing more than dirt and a stick — a form of innovative thinking and teaching in its own right. Classrooms don’t need to be overrun with posters on the wall or toys in bins. Even empty rooms can be purposeful and guide children to the right sorts of learning.

SSince founding PoP in 2008, my team and I have continued to learn from the communities and countries in which we work. We’re an organization led by local teams; our four countries directors in Ghana, Guatemala and Laos are all from the country that they direct, which is something we believe to be essential to long term sustainability.

Ultimately, though, education isn’t just about what we want our students to learn and how we want them to learn, but instead about the type of people that we want to create. This is just as true in suburban Rhode Island as it is in rural Laos. And through exploring education systems in the developing world, I believe we can begin to find some of the best answers.