Thinking Long
"The curriculum encourages students to look to the future by exploring such significant future-focused issues as sustainability, citizenship, enterprise, and globalisation." The future focus principle cited above has been a feature of our NZ Curriculum Framework since it was published in 2006. Since then we’ve seen all sorts of activities and programmes introduced in schools under the banner of ‘future focus’ – including things such as TechFutures Week, Futures Problem Solving, Enviro-schools, Robo-challenges, Young Enterprise Schemes and Youth Parliament to name just a few. Despite this, however, in a comparison of the individual principals evident in school’s curricula reported on by ERO in 2011, Future Focus was the least evident. The history of our current education system is premised on the notion that we are preparing young people for their future. When schools were first established that meant preparing students with the literacy and numeracy skills they would require in the factories and other industrial settings they would leave school to work in. Two hundred years later the jobs may have changed, but the drivers remain much the same. But what if the future our tamariki will face is less certain? What about the global issues and concerns that threaten to disrupt the way we have known life on this planet for the past few centuries? What are the areas of knowledge, skills and dispositions they will need in order to face these challenges, to cope with this uncertainty, and to thrive in the world of the future? In a world where we’re focused on short-term solutions and seeking immediate gratification for our efforts, can ‘thinking long’ provide an alternative way of viewing what we do and how we go about it? Is ‘thinking long’ the key to future focused learning in our schools? In this Leaders Connect we will explore what it means to be Future Focused in our approach to our work as educators, and in the design of programmes for our students.
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Thinking Long
- 1. Inspiring the next generation of leaders, thinkers and problem- solvers derek@futuremakers.nz @dwenmoth www.futuremakers.nz http://www.wenmoth.net THINKING LONG Leaders Connect Webinar 1 July, 2021
- 2. Key links: For this webinar… • Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81789993762 • Jamboard link: https://bit.ly/3w8YOgK For further reading… • Derek’s Blog: https://futuremakers.nz/blog/ • FutureMakers website: https://futuremakers.nz
- 3. Overview 4:00 pm - Welcome and Introduction 4: 03 pm - Setting the scene We’re at a point in history that is causing a tipping point Signals - things happening on the fringe (plastics and alternate fuels) 4:13 - Breakout rooms - groups of six 12 minutes - first response - Jam board set up for each group 4:25 - One minute (max) update per group 4:35 - Breakout 2 - same groups - steal ideas from other groups to create a priority list 4:45 - Derek flicks through people’s priorities, what ideas are you going to take away? 4:58 - Thank yous and Promotion for next time 5:00 - End
- 6. Our education system is too narrow and doesn't give young people the skills they need for work and life • Do you agree? What evidence do you have? • What are the skills that our young people will need for work and life? • And should we be thinking only of skills? A knowledge-rich curriculum with a narrow focus on traditional subjects, and a tired system of assessment, can only get us so far. We must change what, and how, we teach our children. • What changes are needed – what, and how we teach? • What are the barriers? Opportunities? • What are the consequences of not changing?
- 10. The signals are talking The future doesn’t arrive fully formed over-night, but emerges step by step. It first appears at seemingly random points around the fringe, never in the mainstream. Without context those points can appear disparate, unrelated, and hard to connect meaningfully, But over time they fit into patterns and come into focus as a full-blown trend…” Amy Webb – “The Signals are Talking” Image source: OpenArt Vectors Pixabay
- 11. Plastics The most astounding thing about the anti- plastic movement is just how fast it has grown. To travel back even to 2015 is to enter to a world in which almost all of the things we currently know about plastic are already known, but people aren’t very angry about it. As recently as three years ago, plastic was just one of those problems – like climate change, endangered species or antibiotic resistance – that everyone agreed was bad, but which few people considered doing much about https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/13/the-plastic- backlash-whats-behind-our-sudden-rage-and-will-it-make-a-difference.
- 12. Hydrogen fuel "The first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution-free," declared former US president George W. Bush in 2003, as he announced a US$1.2-billion hydrogen- fuel initiative to develop commercial fuel-cell vehicles by 2020. https://www.nature.com/articles/4641262a/box/1
- 13. The signals are talking What are some of the things we are seeing or experiencing now that are ‘signals’ we should be taking notice of? “There is a strong consensus on what needs to be done, but so far very few people actually doing it.”