Futuring Your School
|
BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly UpdateFebruary 14, 02024, No. 165 (Read online) Futuring Your SchoolHey, What do you want the experience that kids have in your school to be like in 25 years? What do you want kids to feel? To hear? To see? To smell, even? That's an inquiry that we're doing quite often these days with communities who are sensing that schooling needs some serious reimagination but aren't quite sure what that looks like. And what's been somewhat surprising is how easy it ends up being to actually imagine something different. One StoryAlthough there are variations on the theme, we currently have basically one story about education that most of us in the global north live and many in the global south aspire to. It's an efficient and supposedly effective calculus: come to school, pay attention, do the work, get good grades, go to college, get the degree, get a job, and become "successful." And that happens via age-separated, time-limited, subject-driven, teacher-led, externally assessed rhythms that are deeply ingrained in our collective edu-consciousness. Everyone knows that changing these institutional bulwarks is incredibly hard, no matter what the timeframe. But 25 years out seems to offer enough time to allow most of the short-term constraints to fade and create space for some radically new thinking about what a day in school might be. And guess what? What we're finding is almost no one wants an experience for children (or adults) in that future that's age-separated, time-limited, subject-driven, teacher-led, and externally assessed. Instead, it's a lot more about being in nature, about community interactions, and about doing work that matters. Shocking. Tangible FuturesIn this moment when it's becoming more and more pressing to interrogate our practices, our relevance, and our impacts on an increasingly challenged world, being clear on who you want to become is a prerequisite for starting that work. Making that vision tangible through writing headlines or recording oral futures or creating artifacts from the future can deepen your commitment to realizing it over time. Like a few months ago when Homa ran a "Dream Summit" at an international school in Southeast Asia and asked the parents, students, teachers, and leaders assembled to write headlines from the future at their school. One read "Students Get a Chance to Relive an Alumni Experience: They Were Forced to Go to Classes With Specific Subjects at Specific Times." We love that. Bottom line, you and your school communities need to be visiting the future on a regular basis, not just to exercise your collective imagination muscles, but to remind yourselves of what's most important for the children you serve. So, what does that sound like? What does it smell like? Looking 25 years into the future allows you to answer those and other questions in ways that give you direction, energy, and hope. Onward! Will and Homa What We're ReadingA few links to fuel your inquiry: Research Shows What State Standardized Tests Actually Measure by Peter Greene "What conclusions can we draw from this addition to the research on the subject of test scores?
First, we can once again recognize that the standardized tests used to make definitive statements about student learning and teacher effectiveness, to assess the quality of administrators, to declare a school “failing,” to pinpoint student academic weaknesses and strengths— these tests are in fact simply reflecting the demographics of the students’ families.
Second, if policy makers must insist that the big standardized test scores must be used for this wide variety of policy purposes, research like this suggests that the best way to improve test scores for students from less resource-filled backgrounds might be to provide them with wider and deeper experiences aimed at building background knowledge, rather than bombarding them with test prep exercises and workbooks.”
Passion Projects and Peer Feedback: A Recipe for Work That Matters by Nate McClennen and Mason Pashia "These passion projects have yielded impressive results. One student shared “I really like the mastery projects because you can do ANY IDEA YOU CAN IMAGINE!” Through co-authorship and intentional rubrics, the students are given just enough information to get started and just enough flexibility to follow their curiosities wherever they may take them. For example, one student leveraged their love of video games to explore Ancient Mesopotamia through the game Sumerians. Their critical question revolved around the historical accuracy of the game. Unprompted by the facilitating staff, this student sent an email to Dr. Irving Finkle, a scholar at the British Museum and asked questions about the game and how it compared to research on Mesopotamia. In another history project, this one at the middle school level, a 6th grader completed a humanities inquiry project that centered on the building techniques of Roman Aqueducts. They then used this lens to investigate the water system of their city. " The Loss of Things I Took for Granted by Adam Kotsko "Defeating the open conspiracy to deprive students of physical access to books will do little to counteract the more diffuse confluence of forces that are depriving students of the skills needed to meaningfully engage with those books in the first place. As a college educator, I am confronted daily with the results of that conspiracy-without-conspirators. I have been teaching in small liberal arts colleges for over 15 years now, and in the past five years, it’s as though someone flipped a switch. For most of my career, I assigned around 30 pages of reading per class meeting as a baseline expectation—sometimes scaling up for purely expository readings or pulling back for more difficult texts. (No human being can read 30 pages of Hegel in one sitting, for example.) Now students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding. Even smart and motivated students struggle to do more with written texts than extract decontextualized take-aways. Considerable class time is taken up simply establishing what happened in a story or the basic steps of an argument—skills I used to be able to take for granted." Learn With BQIFree Events in our BQI Community!Join fellow educator-leaders from around the world as we tackle a wide variety of topics in our free webinar series. Here's what's upcoming: FEBRUARY OFFICE (THERAPY?) HOURS this Thursday with Will Richardson. RSVP HERE! Will We Be in Your Neighborhood?Homa and Will would love to connect at any of the upcoming events they're speaking at: February 16-18 - American International School of Johannesburg. (Homa - Symposium) February 20-22 - Zurich International School (Homa) February 27 - American International School of Vienna (Homa - Board development and parent engagement) February 28 - March 1 - NAIS Annual Conference, (Homa- “How School Leaders Can Navigate Complex World Events Like the Israel-Hamas War") April 12 - BCSSA Spring Forum in Vancouver, BC (Will - Symposium on Student Agency) WORK WITH US!Let BQI help you unlock the opportunities that are rapidly unfolding in education and the wider contexts. Everyone is talking about the challenges and the difficulties that are breaking systems and people. Leadership navigates change with fearless inquiry, futures thinking, imagination, and diverse relationships. That takes new skills, lenses, and dispositions and we are here for it. We help school communities:
Why not think about having us work with your staff, leadership team, or board on some BIG Questions worth pursuing? We're working to design healthier, more just, more relevant, and more sustainable futures for school communities. Get all the details here. Onward with hope, Homa and Will |
Big Questions Institute Newsletter
If you're not already a free subscriber, sign up below!
BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly Update May 8, 02024, No. 172 (Read online) Imagination as Strategy Hey, Have you thought about the role of imagination in decision-making, especially for the prickly, wicked decisions? Would you agree that a well-developed imagination is crucial to making the best decisions you can for yourself and for others? If that’s the case, how do you develop and exercise imagination, even for the most serious questions? If we don't spend time imagining the potential...
BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly Update April 24, 02024, No. 171 (Read online) When the Conversations Get Serious Hey, The complexities and the uncertainties of this moment we're living in are creating a real urgency to engage in hard conversations about our lives today and what the future might hold. To not "go there" and acknowledge that our lives on the planet are fundamentally different from what they were 20 or even five years ago is to deny the "depth and magnitude of the problems we...
BIG Questions Institute Bi-Weekly Update April 7, 02024, No. 170 (Read online) It's Just a Can of Soda, Right? Hey, In times of challenge and complexity, we must dig deep into our values to figure out what the most relevant, appropriate, fair, and effective response might be to any given development. This is the essence of leadership. That's why it's especially important for school communities to not look away from the big picture and even the seemingly insignificant realities we find...