Student-Led Futures Thinking for Whole School Strategic Planning
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 complex landscape.
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MYP Design: Media Makers for Impact
Seoul Foreign School's Voice Lab is a way to actively engage with media maker skills and make the MYP ATLs and Design Criterion come alive. It is also a way to develop global competence and concepts related to compassion. By using media to inspire audiences and have them engage with local communities and local community issues, this design class aims to inspire and encourage positive change.
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Interdisciplinary Unit Planning... WITH Students
Collaborative planning with students, especially those in upper elementary or above brings many advantages to both teaching and learning. Students often bring a lot of prior knowledge to units and if unit planning is too teacher-centric and rigid, students can be demotivated or demoralized quickly by lack of engagement and relevance. In this case, Empathy to Impact also offers a number of pathways where teachers and students can together determine points of relevance, deep research, applied skills, and collaborative or more individualized community actions, which immediately promotes critical and creative thinking though a lens of great agency.
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Transformational Learning Demonstrated in "Inspired Global Citizenship"
Committing to exploring and reflecting on qualitative data learned from student evidence around the demonstration of these critical transformational goals, schools and educators can build innovative learning experiences and assessments that are future-focused and student-centered in response to our volatile, uncertain, and complex present and future.
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Listening Beyond: How People You Don't Know Can Transform You
Inspired by Storycorps, and as part of a partnership with the acclaimed Baltimore podcast Out of the Blocks, Inspire Citizens’ learners explore and converse with senior women in the local community to capture publishable stories via their subject’s world views on culture, personal histories, happiness, family, and words of wisdom for younger generations. This transformative learning experience now exists in numerous interdisciplinary units at Inspire Citizens’ partner schools, as part of the Future Now Leadership Toolkit, as well as being a feature mentor example for an Inspire Citizens podcast: Out of the Blocks: Global Youth Media
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Photo!Bomb: Thinking Like a Photojournalist
Centered on taking action for avoiding stereotypes and single stories of diverse communities, students practice Thinking Like a Photojournalist as part of the Global Youth Media Photo!Bomb photography and storytelling learning experience and community publication.
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2030: Portrait of a Graduate, Portrait of an Educator
As part of the recent #ISTEGlobalPLN SDGs in Education Playground, Inspire Citizens' Steve Sostak and student leaders from Western Academy Beijing led an interactive Socratic Seminar on the future of students, educators, and schools. Video here.
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