Creating Your Educational Future Means Calculating the Impacts: The Case of Goldilocks and the Three Bears

… the impacts of how the future you want may play out.

The last post was of the Futures Wheel futuring strategem. A related technique is the Cross Impact Matrix.

It is what it sounds like; call it a spreadsheet if you will. It is a device to help futurists project the probable outcomes and impacts on people, systems, or groups that could be affected by the future you are aiming for.

Let’s take up the case of Goldilocks. She has had an argument with her parents and has run away. She wanders into the forest and comes upon the the Three Bears’ house. She is curious, hungry, and tired and wants badly to go into the house. The possible futures she is considering are to enter their house or not to enter their house.

Now look at the graphic:

Goldilocks

I apologize for the quality of the graphic but I’ve no doubt you see how this works:

1. You put the probable futures under consideration along the vertical axis.

2. You put the people, groups, systems, sub-systems, premises likely to be affected by the  probable futures you are considering along the horizontal axis.

3. You, hopefully in groups, begin to fill in the boxes to show how you project how the future will impact or effect the the people, groups, systems, sub-systems, premises you have identified.

4. Doing so helps the futures-based educator to begin to plan for the consequences of the future they prefer.

Here is another model: Last week Apple announced that it was going into education by making it easy to download e-texts to their IPads. As a futures-based educator how do you project the possibility / probability of moving towards giving every student an IPad?

Before you do this, and this is fodder for future posts. What would be the your preferable future? For example, do you project this probability as an opportunity to re-tool your educational system to promote an instructional program grounded in the P21 framework and / or do you consider the preferability of saving textbook expenditure monies? The sample cross impact matrix below is limited of course by space considerations. Go ahead, give it a try,

IPad Cross Impact

The Devil’s in the Details or It’s the Implementation that Scares me.

Those of you familiar with the futures forecasting technique below will need to bear with me as I begin to introduce futures forecasting techniques as they may be appropriate.

In the previous post I said I was fine with the P21 model. It recognizes the need to retain that which is good about our present education system; welds it with a universal mindset of higher expectations and then most laudably, identifies its most important paradigm by coalescing competencies and literacies cores that are grounded in its best estimation of what the future will require of 21st century citizens, American -based or global – based, your call.

And the yes-but was my wondering aloud of how or whether the translation from the theoretical to the real will be successful. We all know that the latest “innovations du jour” often flop in our society because of our near universal attention deficit order syndrome that demands that a change be quick and easy.

So, if thoughtful educational planners mean to make this or any other worthy futures oriented model take root we have have to consider those 3 P’s I wrote to in a much earlier post: What’s Possible?. What’s Probable? What’s Preferable?

For sure, most things save making pigs fly, are possible. But that won’t probably happen. The probable part requires some analytical thinking; data analysis, etc. I

It’s what’s preferable that counts. And so working backwards, which by the way is another likely futures forecasting strategy I will speak to in later post (see Cornish), if we know what we want (vision?), what we prefer, then we need to chart all the 3 P’s to recognize what might happen along the way and more specifically, what path we prefer to follow.

The futures wheel below begins to in the most rudimentary terms, lay out the 3 P’s of implementing P21.

For those of you unfamiliar with this process the first point to remember that the graphic below is NOT a brainstorm activity! For sure, there are more nearly right and more nearly wrong “forecasts” in all these little circles. That is when thoughtful dialogue and assessment of points of view must be filtered lest you write any old thing down.

But aside from that proviso there are relatively few procedures to remember:

1. Put the “future” or the development you are considering in the center of the wheel.

2. Begin to project the possibilities, probabilities that you foresee in the circles next to the center.

3. Begin to project the possibilities / probabilities OF the possibilities / probabilities.

4. When you think that you have a good sample, put a check in what you think that are likely probable futures.

5. Then put a star in those forecasts that you think are most preferable!

Here is an example.

1. Mary wants to go out with John. Put that in the center of a futures wheel.

2. There are at least three futures to write into circles around the center

- ask him out

- ask a friend to ask him out for her

- never ask him out

3. Now project probabilities from those:

- ask him out – he says yes, he says no

- ask a friend to ask him out for her – he says yes, he says no, he goes out with Mary’s friend

- never ask him out – he asks her out, Mary pines away.

Take a look at the Futures Wheel below. It is very rudimentary for sure but now it gives you a chance to “fill in the blanks” yourself.

So what might an implementation of P21 look like for us? What do you think? What do you think about your own futures-based thinking?

FUTURE IS US

 

“The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent it.” Return to the P21 Model

That quote belongs to Alan Kay, a Xerox Corporation visionary whom Steve Jobs admired very much (Kindle, 12476).

And it brings me back to the P21 model I am using as a baseline for exploration of a futures based school system.

We will get back to the other process / thinking skills systems more specifically as the foundation for the P21 model and for interdisciplinary curriculum design. However I thought it was a wise time to pause for a blogging moment to remind myself and the reader  that the vision behind these cyber – conversations is to create a tipping point (see Malcom Caldwell!) or a critical mass that makes the conversion from inadequate schooling and backwards facing curricula (see Toffler) to schools and school systems, however constituted, that prepare children for the future we choose to design instead of a future that happens TO them.

The link below contains a brief audio of Tim Magner, Executive Director of P21 who was interviewed by the American Way Magazine.

In it he argues that their model, a combination of as he puts it “the 3 Rs,” plus specific new core competencies is well suited to invent that future we all should want.

I think that some would argue that Magner’s rationale may be too economically based. That is, the model he advocates has its justification in the needs of our economy’s restructuring to the benefit of our students and to their eventual employers.

Perhaps some would say that in the United States, education’s rationale may be partially economic but that it is also grounded in citizenship values and in producing well rounded individuals.

I can embrace both points of view since I do not think they are mutually exclusive. But as a person I once worked with often said, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” When he used it , he was basically saying that if one wants X or Y to happen then one will have to work very hard and very wisely to make it thus.

That is my fear of the P21 model. It’s fine. I support it.

It’s the implementation that scares me.

American Way Magazine interview

Listen to Tim Magner’s interview on American Way Magazine’s Executive Report, which was featured by American Airlines in their November-December issue. Tim explains why 21st Century Skills are cruicial for all employers to consider.

http://www.p21.org/storage/flash/American_Way_Magner_Interview.mp3

“Ms. President, Should We Launch the Missiles?”

And the value for Edufuturing I think it pretty obvious. Tomorrow’s students will need to make reasoned, futures-oriented, consequence-calculated, choices that must be grounded in clear, moral, and healthy values not only for their good but also for that of the societies they will be leading.

 The decision-making model I offered in the last post was taken from the National Council for Social Studies. It is a great model to “teach” but it is I think really a poor model in practicality.

Think about the decisions we each face every day, from ” Which color socks should I wear?”, to “Should I marry him ?” to ” Should I launch the missiles?”.These sorts of decision-occasions don’t lend themselves to a linear approach as I offered in the previous post.

But if you accept the proposition that we are morally obligated as educators, to have our students practice and master decision making skills then we are equally obligated to use experiential – decision-occasion teaching strategies to ensure that they will be intellectually equipped towards making futures based sound decisions.

I have another blog, http://seriousgamesdotme.wordpress.com/, that elaborates on this. But the purpose here is to dramatize the rationale for teaching PAST the content TOWARDS the process of among other systems of thinking skills, decision making.

Process Drives Content and Content Drives Process. Decision Making

In keeping with the premise-flags I’ve raised the past few weeks I want to reinforce one above all at the risk of alienating a fair chunk of you too. And that is that process is more important than content. The systems of thought I highlighted in the previous post indeed give the learner the reason to learn and acquire content in the first place.

To use the trial-as-teaching-strategy yet one more time, the creative, futures-based; process-based teacher would use such a strategy to help learners engage information, not for information’s sake, but in order to solve a problem. In this case, to weigh evidence to come to a reasoned conclusion.

If students wish to be successful at the targeted process, of necessity, they’d be obliged to  find the right facts and information to prove or to disprove their case. Thus working from the top of Bloom’s pyramid, assessment / evaluation, down to the LOTS, the Lower Order Thinking Skills actually have a reason to be learned in the first place!

The first process we will explore thoroughly and again through the P21 lenses as appropriate, will be Decision Making.

The Decision Making process, as they all are, is not nearly so straightforward as it is sometimes considered. If we took it on a flat and linear basis, and I throw a cautionary red flag up here, let’s think about what a decision might look like:

1. It begins with Facts or  data.

2. These suggest a goal.

3. The goal suggests several alternatives.

4. The decision – maker must apply futuring skills to consider the if-thens of each choice.

5. Based on the decision-maker’s values and feelings, (s)he chooses and acts on a decision most aligned and most considered to likely meet the decision maker’s goal.

6. If the choice does not achieve the goal, the decision maker might reconsider and try a new option.

Let’s flesh that out:

1. The king has imprisoned the fair maiden and instructed her to turn straw into gold. She cannot and fears terrible punishment. Rumplestiltskin shows up and says that he will do it for her if she will promise him her first born child.

2. Her goal is to survive.

3. Her choices are to say yes, to say no, or to lie and not intend to keep her promise.

4. She reasons, if she says yes she will need to keep her promise. If she says no she will fear punishment from the king. If she lies she might survive and manage to keep her first born.

5. She wishes to survive. She chooses “yes”.

6. She not only survives, she marries the king’s son and has a child. Now Rumplestiltskin shows up and demands what she promises!

The good teacher, now seizes the moment and involves her class in her decision , her values, the extent to which she had considered the consequences of her choices.

So now the fairy tale, goes beyond its considerable fairy tale elements and is elevated above the fable’s “facts” and becomes an opportunity for helping her students recognize how decisions may and often are —- made.

And the value for Edufuturing I think it pretty obvious. Tomorrow’s students will need to make reasoned, futures-oriented, consequence-calculated, choices that must be grounded in clear, moral, and healthy values not only for their good but also for that of the societies they will be leading.

But ah, if decision making were only as simple as I have depicted above. Next post.

What Does the EduFuture Want? What Does it Demand?

I had intended to explore each of the process skills I had cited in the previous post but was fortunate enough to run across a blog post that was made for the points I have been emphasizing here.

The blog is http://www.angelamaiers.com/. This professional has reviewed The World Future Society’s ( a group I will increasingly refer to) http://www.thefutureofwork.net/assets_70_for2030.pdf

They envision jobs like,

- Bio-botic Physician

- Chef-farmer (agri restauranteur)

- exozooloogist

and others that obviously do not yet exist.

Where are the college degrees? Where are the “teaching certifications” to prepare youngsters yet unborn to be able to successfully succeed at occupations of the the century’s fourth decade?

For sure such jobs have “content” perhaps yet codified or identified. However if one looks deeper you can recognize how such specialized occupations will require individuals who have also been taught how to think decisively, creatively, and authoritatively.

Can we look at the present education-mirror and assure ourselves that the present educational system, P-21, has the capacity to systematically expect this of our future graduates or will we rely on the roll of the dice for this to happen?

Does the Process Drive the Content or does the Content Drive the Process?

Here, we will deviate for a post or two before we return to the P21 framework because I feel it’s important that you get a baseline for what P21′s literacies and competencies are about.

I can cite lots of things you already know about the future at this juncture. One of them goes something like this; that X per cent of the jobs your children will have haven’t been invented yet.

Maybe it’s easier to work backwards say twenty years. What jobs have emerged over that time period that probably didn’t exist twenty years ago? All you have to do is think things technology and realize that a host of industries and jobs have emerged that didn’t exist in anyone’s eye-gleam two decades back. On the flip side, what jobs that existed twenty years ago no longer exist?

Be careful, it would be easy to say “Ok, that means that we have to teach content-based; facts-laden information about technology to prepare our citizens to be competent and qualified for these jobs.”

On one level that is certainly true. But there are so many other levels. Consider the oft quoted futures forecast that workers will change jobs eight times over their working lives or  that folks will move three to five times over their lifetimes. Assuming that these trends persist across the perfidies of economic cycles, uncertain politics, and a restless world what do these patterns suggest of the really appropriate kinds of educational futures we owe our children?

I would argue for process based education, even at the expense of some treasured content-silos that we currently persevere about in spite of their irrelevance and non-utility.

By process, I echo a Bruner, quoted in a previous post, that is, ways of, kinds of thinking. The umbrella term would be Critical Thinking but I’ve come to believe that the term’s elasticity has stretched it beyond recognition of a common understanding.

So I choose to offer that we should break down the term into subsets, or kinds of thinking that are important, no, critical to have our children practice and master. Some of these processes are;

- Critical Thinking (as it was originally intended)

- Decision Making

- Inquiry thinking

- Logic

- Creative Problem Solving

There are others that I don’t want to overload!

What they have in common is obvious, that each emphasizes thinking, reasoning, analyzing, forming conclusions, identifying actions. How they are different is pretty obvious too. Each honors thinking but each more specifically honors an emphasis of a particular kind of “thinking-muscle” directed toward particular kind of skills need.

I’ll do at least one post per. But my overall purpose in this post is what is important here: Of course content and facts and data and information, all kinds of information always have value for our very individual and collective existence; especially if you mean to go on Jeopardy or win the local Trivial Pursuit tournament. Ah, but the content’s real value lies in the thinker’s ability to harness their sum and give the person the ability to apply the right kind of process to the right kind of situation or job expectation.

How else could anyone keep their sanity if they are switching jobs and moving so often? Individuals with abilities to think in process will not suffer the stress of future shock that affects us all.