Diploma versus accumulated evidence of proficiency
Figure 1.2: Magic square chart.
Figure 1.3: Questions and challenges by quadrant
Once the group graphs and discusses various potential futures, you can consolidate and summarize the work as follows.
• Collect and collate the descriptions of all the different future points the quadrants describe. Together, they form a rich description of preferred futures from varied perspectives.
• Schedule time for the group to reflect on its work and package it for communication to others. Generally, it is best to transfer the completed charts into a digital format, such as a simple set of PowerPoint slides, and collate the descriptions of preferred futures to bring them together in a single document.
When you synthesize the descriptions of multiple preferred futures (each in the context of different mixtures of polarities), the result is a powerful vision for the future your community desires.
Next Steps
Once you have tasked the research and inquiry appropriately across representative groups, you must consolidate their resulting insights and deductions. You can accomplish this work of summarizing and agreeing on the core, essential elements of the research in two ways. One option is to set up an online system (such as a website where groups can post their results) that offers an efficient alternative to trying to coordinate schedules to bring groups together physically. Even a simple Google Doc (https://google.com/docs/about) can suffice for this purpose. Alternately, you can use facilitated workshops to structure each group’s dialogue and discussion to arrive at its members’ shared understandings about the future.
Regardless of the format, generative dialogue and community exploration can be an important part of opening your thinking to new possibilities and opportunities for an educational future. Community engagement in this collaborative inquiry will yield shared understandings and commitments that will be necessary to support and sustain the effort, especially during the challenges of planning and implementing the processes that will follow.
Consolidating a Community-Based and Informed View of the Future
Once the important work of engaging in a community-based, future-focused inquiry is complete, you must further consolidate the responses into shared and concise understandings about the future and the implications for learning and education. You will have created the raw material for this consolidation from some of the previous knowledge-building and generative tasks, such as working with the magic squares described in the previous section. It is best to do this as a two- to three-hour workshop so that your core leadership group can consider all the learning and insights from the subgroups. Figure 1.4 offers a protocol for facilitating a consolidation workshop.
Figure 1.4: Protocol for a consolidation workshop.
The results of this process, when massaged and streamlined, will represent not only a core definition of modern learning in your context but a community agreement that addresses both the Why change? question and the essence of a Change to what? vision. A simple technique for achieving clarity and consolidation involves the use of an if—then prompt: “If this is true, then the implications for learning are …” We’ve paraphrased this approach in figure 1.5. In other words, if our collective research and understanding that A, B, and C are true about the future for our students, then our focus should be on X, Y, and Z. Note that these statements are not one to one. Multiple If observations can combine into a single Then statement.
Figure 1.5: Sample output of developing an informed view of the future.
Because these are not assumptions (they are based in research and current thinking about the future), your leadership group should properly support and reference (cite) the insights and understandings derived from the inquiry process. One of the goals of this process is to emerge with a clear set of shared understandings and parameters for deciding on your highest learning needs and goals. This is the basis on which all future work will proceed. We very deliberately differentiate this visioning and goal-setting phase from deciding on the details of how we might achieve these goals. Too often, we have seen schools and districts rush to develop action plans for implementation before they have truly and clearly established the goals and principles (the vision) for such a selection. The result is often a set of potentially disruptive and disjointed programmatic implementations ungrounded in and unaccountable to clear articulations of the whys and whats.
Clarity and brevity are key elements of this stage. You do not need reams of documents to capture the essence of what you have learned and understood through this inquiry process. What you do need is a solid and succinct basis for shared understanding. One practical and valuable output from this process is to generate a Portrait of a Graduate, “a collective vision that articulates the community’s aspirations for all students” (Battelle for Kids, n.d.). The following are two examples from a public-school district and an independent school, respectively. The first is from the Catalina Foothills school district in Tucson, Arizona (Catalina Foothills School District, n.d.):
The Catalina Foothills School District (CFSD) is committed to building knowledge and skills that prepare students for college and career pathways. In addition to mastering essential academic content, CFSD is also focused on building a set of proficiencies that we believe students must learn in order to apply and transfer knowledge to problems or situations in the classroom and beyond the PreK–12 educational setting.
The site goes on to name specific deep learning proficiencies that include: citizenship, creativity and innovation, critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and systems thinking (Catalina Foothills School District, n.d.).
The second such Portrait of a Graduate is from the Alexandria Country Day School in Alexandria, Virginia (Alexandria Country Day School, n.d.):
