This document discusses future focused education and the need to transform education systems to prepare students for an uncertain future. It argues that education must shift from an industrial, compliance-based model to focus on developing skills like critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and collaboration. Schools need more flexible structures that allow for innovation, collaboration between educators, and input from students and communities. The focus should be on designing the future rather than looking back, and allowing new practices to emerge from the bottom up through an open, adaptive culture of innovation.

1. Future Focused Education
Marlborough EdVenture | 1 February 2016

5. Improvement makes changes by looking back at the past

6. Transformation designs the future and invents ways to
achieve it

7. What do you think of when
we say Future Focused
Education?
- how is the learner viewed?
- how is knowledge viewed?
- where does compliance and
improvement fit?

9. The Creative Potential Paradigm

12. Why
Future Focused
Education?

14. Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne, 2013
At Nao robotların bir gösteriSpain'Jaume I Üniversitesi 2011.

15. Team working
Communication
Entrepreneurship
Critical Thinking
Numeracy
Creativity
Digital literacy
Leadership Literacy
Emotional Intelligence
Problem solving Foreign Language Skills

17. “Wicked Problems”
Complex Challenges
● can’t be addressed using simple problem
solving
● can only be addressed with “clumsy”
solutions by bringing together disparate
perspectives on the problem in ways that all
voices are heard and responded to
Rayner, 2006; Verweij et al, 2006 in Bolstad, 2011

19. No other generation in history has ever
been more thoroughly prepared for the
Industrial Age as the current generation
David Warlick

20. Who or what is
deciding the
future?

21. What do you think all this
means for education?
http://bit.ly/23Bszoa

22. Communication
Collaboration
Critical Thinking
Problem Solving
Creativity & Innovation
Information & Media Fluency
Claire Amos, Nov 2013

23. Explore, deconstruct and reconstruct the
New Zealand Curriculum

31. Inquiry - how can we learn more
about what to do?

32. A Framework for Transforming Learning in
Schools: Innovation & the Spiral of Inquiry
Developing collective professional agency: collaborative
inquiry matters
Grounded in learning science knowledge

33. The involvement of learners & whānau & communities
- underpinning and permeating each of the phases
Consultation versus Partnership

34. A shift from learner voice to learner agency
“Letting” versus Letting go

35. Go around looking for more questions - not answers:
1st horizon: Involving others in the long game
● Uncover the deep-rooted
contextualised/community-based problems.
● Drill into everything you do!
● have “ideas sessions” - like think tanks!
Design Thinking for
Innovation

40. 2nd Horizon: Getting there
● prototyping,
● testing out your idea with as many different people
as possible to see how that idea fits with as many
people in the community as possible
● sharing, seeking feedback and input
Design Thinking for
Innovation

41. 3rd Horizon: Reaching for the Stars
● ideation
● working out what you’re not
● strategy
● solutions
● achieving the vision
Design Thinking for
Innovation

42. “Run numerous experiments”
Synthesis / Empathy
Immersion/Exploration/Discovery
Ideation / Divergent & Convergent
Prototyping - sharing ideas for improvement,
seeking feedback

44. What might it
look like to be prepared
for the future?

45. Alright stop! Collaborate & listen...
Common signs that a network of schools is effectively
collaborating include:
• commitment to a common, needs-based goal/focus
• use of inquiry and knowledge-building cycles
• the presence of challenge and critique practices
• a focus on evidence-based needs, and
• the presence of role clarity and relational trust among
network members.

46. Collaborate
build relational
trust
Build skills &
knowledge
to learn, improve and
transform

47. Common issues seen in
clusters or networks
- the ECE elephant in the room
- the secondary elephant in the room
- not knowing each other’s contexts at all
- resentment of or by informal network leaders
- lack of role clarity and/or trust between networks
leaders/members
- overwhelming plans full of unmanageable actions and
unachievable goals
- no space for innovation, vision work or creativity

48. How might your
Community of Learners
operate if you are to be
innovative,
transformative, future
focused?

49. Making room for new practices
Socially-engineered assembly lines:
- rigid
- highly controlled
- repetitive
- creativity-killing
- building-block thinking, tweaking

50. List all of the socially engineered, assembly line
behaviours and actions in your school/service:
➔ bells
➔ timetables
➔ age-separated classroom-type setups in ECE & schools
➔ auxiliary rooms instead of learning spaces
➔ traditional assemblies
➔ rewards for outcomes instead of the learning process
➔ WILTs & WALTs
➔ uniforms
➔ subjects & achievement are seen as the process for learning

51. Making room for new practices
Schools as evolving, natural ecosystems versus factories
- dynamism
- adaptability
- permeability
- creativity
- self-correction
(Thomas & Seeley Brown, 2011, Lichtman, 2014)

52. What do innovative school
structures look like?
senior management sits back and let innovation
teams work with real autonomy
“Sometimes the teams fail; they miss deadlines; their ideas are
unrealistic; their proposed innovations are flashes-in-the-pan...
Management does not step in and direct the team to reach a
different solution” (Lichtman, p. 79)
Set broad goals...get out of the way; help to repair

53. Conditions for innovation & change
“We have an incredible staff who want to be at
school and enjoy learning from each other”
- have a mindset that you will always grow and change
- refine teaching practices & programs all the time
- reduce teacher courses, increase time for collaboration in
teams
- reduce administrative drag, play down red tape
Melissa Kapeckas, Middle School Director (in Lichtman, 2014)

54. Characteristics of
a culture of innovation
“Act Small”
- promote a culture that can evolve without express permission from the
top at every step
- bottom-up or multilateral planning
- open access to planning and information
- collaboration across more permeable, flexible departmental boundaries
- allow natural leaders to emerge and claim a spot in the decision chain
- flatten the organisational chart
Lichtman, 2014