4. Toxic narratives (such as effects of negative environments on wellbeing)
5. Remaking geographies (such as volatility in times of rapid globalization and migration)
The report explores the various ways in which these drivers interact with three key players: (1) educators and students, (2) educational systems and structures for teaching and learning, and (3) various societal factors. It suggests possibilities for what modern learning could look like and poses a set of what if? provocations; for example:
What effects might artificial intelligence and automated systems have on learning and life? How might technology-enabled civic engagement reshape educational governance and decision making? How might educational accountability expand to support a broader perspective on learner development and well-being?
Building a deep knowledge base offers you a rich opportunity to engage different elements of your educational community in a futures-focused dialogue. Involvement of various school constituents is key, and having a plan to engage members of your community appropriately and inclusively is an important part of building a shared and informed understanding of the forces that will shape the future and your educational responses to them. You cannot predict the future, but you can engage with it to better understand what might emerge to affect your students and their schooling.
In addition to reading and discussing futures publications such as the KnowledgeWorks reports, you might enlist a speaker for a professional development day or an evening meeting for parents. Or, you could initiate a study group or book club with teachers. Viewing a series of thought-provoking, futures-oriented TED Talks is also a stimulating way to engage staff and parents in the process. Additionally, be sure to involve students, as they are generally keen to talk about their future.
Through deep, rich, and collaborative engagement, we can inform the hearts and minds of our communities with an eye to the future. This knowledge base is the foundation of your why? for school transformation, and you should not assume that all involved stakeholders will understand it. Without a foundation to help articulate the Why change? question and outline the drivers of change most pertinent to students’ lives, you may end up with a less powerful premise than you will need to move the work forward. In the next section, we outline a simple process for engaging your community in this important collaborative learning.
Notes From the Field
In our work with schools and districts, we note that there is often an impatience to get on with it. In the rush to identify things to implement, educators often don’t take the time to learn and to derive focus and meaning from that learning. If we asked a teacher why he or she didn’t just give all students the big ideas and understandings of the course on day one and save everyone a lot of time, that teacher would likely say something like this: “Learners need to arrive at understandings. They will never really learn if they don’t make meaning first.” That statement is correct. So, why would adult learners be any different?
Consider this cautionary note: it is important to develop a knowledge base before continuing to the next step of actually generating a vision for modern learning. Without a knowledge base, we cannot develop an informed view of the future and take appropriate actions in response to it. In the absence of solid information, community input is likely to be all over the map and impossible to forge into a unifying vision. You are likely to end up with a wide variety of personal perceptions (some informed, some not), assertions based on false assumptions and misunderstandings, and contradictory points of view that are not drawn from evidence or research. Assumption and personal preference without real knowledge or understanding will result in an unstable foundation incapable of supporting the vision of modern learning you seek.
Engaging in a Community-Based Inquiry Into the Future
A key part of our change leadership strategy involves engaging the school community in a collaborative exploration of potential futures based on a solid knowledge base. The goal of this exploration is to answer the questions: Why change? and Change to what? Visions constructed without this common rationale and foundation are often aspirational statements with little clarity, open to multiple interpretations, and full of “motherhood” statements. We believe that a vision and mission should be well-founded in a knowledge base and drive school strategy and actions.
The perspectives and interpretations from various stakeholders across the broader community enrich the collective visioning that emerges. It is our experience that leaders or leadership groups should implement a structure for fruitful engagement with the research and thought surrounding the future to maximize the effort of such an inquiry. We find it helpful to distribute the exploratory work by establishing subgroups that can delve deeply into specific areas of drivers of future change. These subgroups should include representation from various stakeholder groups and undertake the focused work that the whole community cannot. Groups of fifteen to twenty provide enough variety of perspective to engage in important discussions and collaborative learning. Groups of this size also help to parcel out various source material to ensure engagement with a wide range of research and thought. We have also worked with larger groups using this process, but logistics and facilitation can become overly complicated.
We also recommend providing a small set of informative starter resources to help the subgroups get started; however, it is also important to allow these groups to move beyond these starters if they so desire. Provocative TED Talks and materials from various think-tank organizations (such as KnowledgeWorks) are good places to begin. Your initial goal is to open eyes and challenge assumptions while helping people to understand that tomorrow will not look like yesterday (or even today). It’s important not to limit groups to a precooked set of resources, such as a limited number of advocacy materials that support one perspective or potential approach, for which you have already drawn your conclusions. At the same time, you don’t want to overwhelm people by having them start their research from scratch.
One practical technique for engaging groups in considering trends and drivers of change and imagining future possibilities is through the use of polarities and magic squares. We explore these in the next two sections.
Polarities
Polarities present a continuum displaying two endpoints reflecting different trends suggesting possible scenarios. For example, forces influencing 21st century schooling could push education to become more standardized on the one hand or highly personalized on the other. Other influences, like technology in conjunction with standardization, could cause learning to derive from a single source (such as all teachers in a school using the same standardized online curriculum) or from multiple sources (such as those teachers using a variety of open source courseware, online tutorials, mentors, internships, and independent projects). See figure 1.1 for two examples of polarities.
Figure 1.1: Two polarities.
By inquiring into various factors and trends, you can develop polarities that can help your community teams explore the numerous ways in which the future of education could unfold. Identifying these polarities is an important part of moving from developing a knowledge base to envisioning and designing a preferred future. Table 1.1 (page 14) presents potential polarities and accompanying questions.
Magic Squares
To see how the polarities and their accompanying questions in table 1.1 relate to one another and suggest potential futures, you can use a four-quadrant chart (sometimes called a magic square but more properly known as a Cartesian plane). By plotting two sets of polarities with accompanying questions, groups can workshop a variety of potential future scenarios. We have found these charts stimulate thinking and prompt rich conversations about the possible futures each quadrant suggests.