Student-Led Futures Thinking for Whole School Strategic Planning
What’s Going on in this Picture?
WHAT:
Over 70 Gr4-12 student leaders from Western Academy Beijing prepare for a whole-school facilitation of strategic visioning workshops with parents, educators and peers. The young leaders employed tools for strategic insights and foresights by using future scenarios, the WAB school mission, and language of the International Baccalaureate to spark conversations and visual representations of a Portrait of a WAB Alumni in 2021 and beyond. This work originated from student explorations into and engagement with tools and strategies for futures literacy as part of the Inspire Citizens Future Now program.
WHY:
Futures thinking for education is a crucial component in identifying contextual, common transformative learning goals across a school or district following a challenging 2020-21 and a complex and ambiguous future. By focusing on change drivers such as globalization, sustainability, economics, work, social discourse, technology, and media, learners and educators are being presented with the urgent need to reimagine goals for learning that center on cognitive skills and dispositions for students to thrive in this landscape.
Having students engage adults in this process illuminates the sense of urgency felt by our young leaders, and helps educators hone in on the learning outcomes that are most impactful. Critical thinking, systems thinking, media literacy, resilience, empathy, balance and community-mindedness are a few of the transformative goals that are most often identified and, in turn, help schools set forth on deeper learning and a more holistic, 21st century skillset for students. Once these learning goals are clearly identified, schools can reimagine systems and pedagogies that help meet these goals.
HOW:
Engage students in exploring and interacting around futures thinking resources such as ARUP’s 2050 Scenarios
With students, unpack the common language that already exists programmatically and identify where language already exists that might support learners in navigating these plausible futures
Use a character sketch to allow students to visualize what types of things learners in 2021, and moving towards the future we want, need to think, say, observe, feel, and so on in order to thrive while also helping keep the planet and society healthy
Apply the character sketch and the preexisting language to think critically about the purpose of education in 2021 and what cognitive skills and dispositions are most essential to a learner in the community’s context
Support students in collecting and analyzing their data in order to understand both the process and outcomes of this endeavor
Train students on workshop model teaching and co-design a similar learning experience for the greater community which includes parents, educators, students, and any other stakeholder
Use this community data to identify this portrait of common learning impacts, transformative learning goals, that can help guide strategic planning, systems, demonstrable look fors, and look ats. In turn, this unified, student-centered approach will help bring a sense of essentialism to collective endeavors, while informing the community on successes and challenges in attaining these deeper learning goals towards navigating our complex and ambiguous future.
