Education leaders and innovators are navigating immense uncertainty. They are trying to create positive outcomes in an ever-evolving environment marked by challenges such as disinformation, a diversifying education landscape, evolving technologies and the erosion of the public sphere.
Leading the way to the future requires making informed assumptions about the shifts happening in and around education, coalescing around shared visions that are informed by future possibilities and finding steps forward within one’s sphere of influence. Even when the ground to which we’ve long been accustomed is shifting, we can harness inbound change – the kind of change that happens to us – to shape the future of learning through the visions that we pursue and the actions that we take. Those visions and actions constitute outbound change, or the kind of change that we initiate, and which reflects our values.
In such turbulent times as these, taking the first step in the desired direction will help pave the way toward broader systems transformation and positive outcomes for young people.
What’s driving changes in learning?
The drivers of change from KnowledgeWorks’ latest forecast, Charting a New Course for Education, describe inbound changes that promise to shape education over the next decade.
As people continue to integrate with AI, next-generation artificial intelligence will change how humans think and feel, challenging current notions of skill development and human relationships and requiring new approaches to teaching and assessment.
Everyday disruptions, ranging from small- to large-scale, could upend daily life in school and other learning environments, rendering conventional approaches to educational management and changemaking insufficient to meet emerging needs.
As eroding public institutions are impacted by declining confidence, economic constraints and expanding market-based competition, public education systems could need to redefine the ways they serve learners and communities.
As the relevance gap widens and young people’s realities grow further and further removed from the world of school, education systems face an urgent need to integrate students’ emerging needs, concerns and aspirations into learning.
Setting a destination
It is always difficult to look up from the pressure of the day-to-day and consider future possibilities. It’s even harder to do when uncertainty is becoming the norm. When an overwhelming media landscape is making it difficult to focus on teaching and learning and find common ground. When the ways that education functions in and is supported by society are changing.
The shifting foundation underlying education makes this a critical time to look ahead. The choices that education leaders and innovators make over the next decade will determine whether K-12 education is a strong public good that is personalized, equitable and relevant to the needs and interests of learners or whether education becomes increasingly commodified and fragmented.
That’s a weighty context in which to be steering a learning community or education system toward a shared vision. One thing that can help is to compare stated and enacted visions, checking whether the actions that people are taking align with what they say they want for the future. Taking even a few moments to reflect on vision can help ensure that education leaders continue to guide their learning communities and organizations in the desired directions. In addition, a systems thinking tool called the now vs. future tool can help with comparing current reality with the desired future and analyzing the gaps between the two.
Charting a course toward preferred futures
Even a relatively short exploration of future possibilities and their implications can help groups get clearer about what they want to bring about, what they want to avoid and how the changing landscape could impact paths forward. Identifying desirable and undesirable attributes of the future of learning can help people remember what they want the future to look, feel and sound like. That rich picture of the shared vision, or preferred future, can help guide individual and collective action toward a common end. A strategic foresight tool called the Futures Triangle helps people visualize how past present and future forces interact to shape possible futures and influence our ability to realize our preferred futures.
Identifying seemingly small shifts in behavior can help education leaders and innovators pave the way toward preferred futures and stay the course while riding waves of turbulence. As detailed in Laying the Foundation for Transformational Change in Education, taking small steps toward shaping your own mindsets and skills, affecting what happens in your community and changing how you engage with the broader education system can lay a foundation for deeper change.
In addition, planning for multiple time horizons, as KnowledgeWorks does, can make the often-daunting task of responding to the changing landscape relatively approachable. The three horizons tool can help identify ways of moving toward preferred futures while tending to current needs and making space for innovation.
Rising to the moment
These are just some of many ways of applying futures thinking to education programs. Despite the intensity of the present moment and the turbulence on the horizon, education leaders and innovators must look for opportunities amidst the challenge. They must anticipate futures that promise to enable every learner to thrive and take the first step to co-create the future alongside learners, families and caregivers, and community members.
Even when we are not intentional about it, our actions shape the future of learning. It’s increasingly urgent that we make deliberate choices about what we want it to look like and find ways to take informed action within our spheres of influence.
