Starting the Process

Starting the Process

By Richard Beatty

As I begin the process of changing our district into a 21st Century District, I met with three other teachers today.  I showed them a bit about the 21st Century Learning and the Vision and Mission Statements I came up with so far.

Educational Vision To prepare students for an unpredictable future. Educational Mission To create leaders, equipped with 21st Century Skills, who are capable of creating a future where humans flourish.

There was a question about the concept of “preparing students for an unpredictable future”.  Does this sentence make sense?  How is that even possible?  The discussion ended with the acknowledgment that the future is unpredictable.  

My thoughts are that an “unpredictable future” is a statement of fact.  Global Warming, exponential technology growth, shifts in jobs from manufacturing and labor intensive to service and innovative work.  Our student’s future is unstable, especially when considered in light of generations over the past centuries.  The needs of our students have been identified in the 21st Century Learning concept.  Even though, it may not be the most fully developed concept, it is established and gives us a place to start.  “Four-Dimensional Learning” is the latest idea (the upgrade to the 21st Century Learning), but it is just starting out.  Preparing students to address Global Warming is a key component in “Four-Dimensional Learning”.  It addresses the reality that students will have to create solutions (that don’t yet exist) to reverse the devastating effects of a changing environment.  This reality connects my proposed Educational Vision and Mission together.

We need to prepare students for an unpredictable future.  We can do that by creating leaders who have 21st Century Skills and a keen understanding of the predicaments humans face right now, and will face in the future.  These changes are going to affect their personal and economic lives.  The skills outlined are fluid and flexible enough to enable students to adapt and innovate.  

We should not be preparing our students to merely survive, either now or  in the future.  We need to prepare them to take control of their lives and their future and change it in such a way that they, and future generations, will be able to flourish.  We need to prepare them to alter the devastation that scientists are predicting is headed their way.   

The Business world, too, is in a state of change.  Employers are looking for a people already equipped with 21st Century Skills.  Already, it is the 21st Century students who have the competitive advantage.  Business are hungry for people who can communicate, innovate, lead, and are active in current technologies.  Jobs that have never existed before are being created daily.  By time our students graduate from our school systems, there will be demands for people who can do things that did not exist when they started school.  The whole concept of being employed is also changing.  No longer are people expected to work for a single company, doing the same thing over the course of their career.  Today, many people are expected to do many different things and work for many different companies in a variety of different settings.  What it means to earn a living is in a state of flux.  Online consultants, stay-at-home jobs, webinars, multi-continent departments are just some of the new ways people are making a living.

Fear of the unknown can be debilitating, but embracing the unpredictable nature of the future can also be exhilarating and can stimulate the imagination in positive ways.  Using this energy, we can imagine a world that we want to live in and begin the process of creating it.

As the Climate Changes and as Technology grows exponentially, students are going to need skills that allow them to adapt quickly.  Our educational Vision and Mission Statements should reflect this reality, so that we are better able to prepare them to embrace the unpredictable future that are facing.

The next steps for our district will be to look up other school district’s 21st Century Vision and Mission statements, compile them and then start to create our own.  The Statements I wrote were of my own creation and not a collaborative effort.  These statements are proposals for the team as we endeavour to create unified statements. Even though we can’t predict exactly what dangers our students are going to face, nor what jobs are going to be available to them, we can isolate certain skills that will be essential to their success.  These are the 21st Century skills that are essential to our Educational Vision and Mission.

For more information:

• 21st Century Skills
• Four Dimensional Learning
• Climate Change: NASA
• Climate Change Economics
• The Economics of Climate Change
• The Sixth Extinction
• The Future of Business

v2016-04-28

My Vision and Mission Deconstructed

My Vision and Mission Deconstructed

by Richard Beatty

Richard Beatty Rethink Education
Personal Vision To make the world a better place around me.	I acquired my Personal Mission before I had a  Personal Vision.  The Mission should proceed from the vision, but it didn't work out that way for me.  This Vision Statement came after I heard these words in a podcast where principals were interviewing one another and one of them said something like “I just try to make the world and better place around me”. These words stuck in my head, especially since they were right in line with what I considered my foundational default positions which I have now labeled my “Personal Mission”. I liked the way the words sounded and used them when I was thinking about and writing my Personal Vision Statement.
Personal Mission To cause the least amount of harm as possible while contributing to human flourishing as much as possible. To believe as many true things as possible while disbelieving as many false things as possible.	My Personal Mission is really just my relabeling what has become my foundational default positions.  These words describe what I have always strove for, and what continues to drive me. Even though I just adopted them a few years ago, they seem to have been with me since I was a child.  The harm part was adopted from Sam Harris’s Moral Landscape.  The true things part is from Matt Dillahunty who chants it like a mantra.  It is my sincere believe that these are some of the wisest words ever assembled.
Educational Vision To prepare students for an unpredictable future.	The ultimate goal of any educational system is to prepare students for a future that no one can predict.  This seems like an impossible task, but there are means of achieving this ambitious Vision. The inspiration and plan of action came from reading three Foundational Texts (Link coming soon!).
Educational Mission To create leaders, equipped with 21st Century Skills, who are capable of creating a future where humans flourish.	Leading is a critical component of learning.   To prepare students for an unpredictable future, we must create leaders, equipped with 21st Century Skills, who can create a future of their own making.  One way of dealing with uncertainty is to intentionally change things to make them more certain.   The 21st Century Skills are the skills identified as necessary for a quality life and career in the 21st Century, the century we are living in now.  This is important since many of the skills emphasized in education today were important in the 19th and 20th centuries, but may not be as important today.  Many 21st century experiences did not exist 10 to 20 years ago. Preparing for these new experiences requires a shift in emphasis in necessary skills.     The leaders referred to here are students and educators (teachers, coaches, administrators, and curriculum developers).   Students must become leaders, as opposed to passive followers, passive listeners who regurgitate information.  They must become leaders to lead partners, groups, and activities as they develop their learning skills.  Students must become leaders of their own learning.   Educators must foster their own skills as leaders since they are leaders in the own classrooms, of professional groups, committees, and communities.  They must also become leaders of their own learning and development. The future of the human animal.  Humans have created a world that may shortly become inhospitable to human life.  A major shift in human activity is necessary for continued human survival.  But, survival should not be the end goal.  Humans have the capacity to create a world where humans can flourish.  We know enough right now to understand basic, and extended, and what we don’t know we have the capacity to learn.  We have the skills to create conditions where our needs are met, and where we don’t we can create.   This is the drive to learning. This is essence of education, to make the world a better place.

images:

• image 1