The environmental scientists who consider the impact and significance of the development on our environment
• The social scientists who develop understanding of the society the company is producing the solution for and consider the psychological aspects of the design that make it more appealing and functional (This includes considering the cultural impacts, significance, and importance of not only the problem but the solution.)
The list is obviously extensive, but it clearly involves more than just a single-subject discipline. It encompasses and embraces all aspects of a holistic education, and it highlights why our end goal should not be project-based learning, STEM, or STEAM, but rather the holistic integration of all aspects of learning—both formal (the disciplines we teach) and informal (the portable and applicable skill sets)—into the following aptitudes.
• Finding, identifying, and defining real-world, relevant problems
• Understanding the origins, significance, impact, and worthiness of those problems
• Developing creative and ethical solutions that embrace the skills, passions, and abilities of a broad group of learners (both students and staff), experts, and the wider community
• Engendering the synergy among the different learning areas to develop products and solutions greater than the combined input of the disciplines
To achieve these aims requires us to undertake a number of different actions by developing schoolwide approaches to problem solving, research, collaboration, and ethics. This is why Andrew Churches and I developed the essential fluencies. These essential fluencies codify the kind of work Andrew and I do in hundreds of schools in a dozen countries to help learners strive together to solve real-world problems that matter and create a bright future for all.
I cannot stress enough that pedagogies like project-based learning, STEM, design thinking, and many others all have their value. Some of them have an almost cultlike following, largely because as teachers shift to these pedagogies, their classrooms transform, learning comes alive, and outcomes improve. I call this professional transformation: the moment at which a teacher realizes the benefits from a shift in practice and will never go back.
This doesn’t mean these pedagogies don’t represent commodities; and like any commodity, each seems to have its own packaging, marketing, and following. To support them, various stakeholders hold conferences and workshops, provide supplies, establish resources, and even design furniture labeled for them. This is not a criticism of these fine approaches. If you successfully implement one or more of them in your school and learners benefit, then I applaud you for your commitment and encourage you to continue the great work you are doing. I offer the ideas in this book for you to consider as ways to take that great work and make it exceptional by engaging in future-focused learning.
Shifts to Future-Focused Learning
Future-focused learning is a holistic (school- or systemwide) approach in which learners strive together to find and solve real-world problems that matter; they focus beyond the curriculum with the goal of gaining an interlinked real-world education and cultivating capabilities essential to ensure their success beyond school.
A common issue I encounter when consulting with schools is change fatigue. Teachers often challenge a new initiative in its early stages if it is another direction du jour or if it requires an actual commitment. This occurs because schools bring to their educators so many ideas they tout as the answer only to cast them aside in favor of a newer initiative or just let them dissolve over time. On more than one occasion, a teacher has expressed concern to me that every time the principal goes to a conference, it means a new idea will return with a huge but short-lived push that soon becomes a memory. This is a valid concern and significantly impacts teacher buy-in to any process. I’ve managed to overcome this with many schools by focusing on the ten shifts of practice I present in this book. You can implement these future-focused practices in your classroom regardless of core pedagogy; they don’t reset your practice, but rather support it.
One of the key reasons these shifts work is that the sheer scale of a new teaching initiative can be massive, and the effort required to launch it exhausting. A teacher who has been comfortable and reasonably successful with delivering content in a teacher-centered environment might be able to see the validity of a new pedagogy in learner outcomes but find it too big a change to consider.
In fact, it was in working with a teacher who was quite overwhelmed with high anxiety and fear of change that I first began to think about these shifts. He told me that using solution fluency was just too much for him to consider and he would leave teaching if he had to make this kind of change. Unfortunately, many teachers are in the same position of fatigue and fear. I wished that there were a few simple things—simple microshifts—that I could use to slowly help teachers to transform.
I asked him if, at the beginning of each lesson, he would be willing to engage in one small change (a microshift) by clearly presenting and discussing his learning intentions (learning goals) with his learners along with providing them with clear success criteria. Very quickly, his learners started to excel and asked what tomorrow’s learning intentions were, then what they were for the entire week. Soon learners were arriving in his class having already met the success criteria. Eventually, he no longer needed his carefully planned lessons because students had already moved beyond them. Upon seeing this success, he asked me what to do next; we started working with essential questions, which became his next shift of practice.
After this experience, I started using these shifts of practice with all my clients and going deeply into solution fluency with the ones who were keen and felt ready to take on this challenge as they had been incrementally successful with other shifts. By offering a range of shifts for everyone to work on, I was in fact personalizing the learning for the teachers. Which is, of course, one of the shifts I present in this book!
Structure and Use of This Book
This book presents ten core shifts of practice you can use with your students immediately, regardless of your core curriculum or instructional pedagogy. Each chapter presents a future-focused shift, explains what it is, and shows how it benefits learning. These ten shifts are as follows.
1. Essential and herding questions: Providing learning without an essential question is like offering food to people who are full—they won’t accept it if they aren’t hungry. Essential questions stimulate students’ appetite for learning. For this shift of practice, challenge yourself to incorporate essential questions in every learning activity.
2. Connection through context and relevance: Ask yourself where your students may come across a certain kind of information or a specific skill in their lives outside of school. If it’s something they’ll come across in their own world, then instantly there is a connection that brings relevance and context to the learner.
3. Personalized learning: Learning is personal, and it becomes more personal when students have a personal connection to the task. By engaging in future-focused learning, endless possibilities appear for personalization. It could be the task, the learning process, the research, the assessment, the evidence of learning created, or the role in collaboration.
4. Challenge of higher-order-thinking skills: Take it up a notch or two using Bloom’s revised taxonomy by shifting your learning tasks to higher-order-thinking tasks (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Challenge your learners to evaluate and create instead of demonstrating remembering and understanding.
5. Information fluency for research skills: We are bombarded with information every second of our lives. We assess the information and, in a split second, determine how it will affect us and our decisions.
