The future lives in every educator’s classroom and school. Today’s first graders will graduate in 2040. The future is ours to create. What does becoming an educator / futurist entail, and what are some personal and professional starting points?

The future isn’t predictable, but that doesn’t mean we can’t prepare for a variety of outcomes. We’ll do some unique scenario-planning activities to build your capacity to deal with whatever might come next.

Developing and flexing our imagination muscles is the key to overcoming the challenges we face as well as taking full advantage of the new opportunities at our fingertips. Let’s start by understanding deeply how and where imagination lives in our current school experience.

It’s not enough to envision a future that is better or different. The most powerful visions for our future our those that provoke a deep yearning to live it. Creating an “Irresistible Future” for your school community is a powerful way to keep the energy for change moving forward.

Many of our challenges spring from a narrow range of voices informing and making decisions about the future. But what if we acknowledged and embraced the needs and desires of other entities like nature and future students? Let’s see what that entails and create some first steps to expanding our influences.

What will be our legacy, and individuals and institutions, on society and the planet that our current students will live on in their adulthood but four or five (or more) generations into the future? We’ll look at some ways to ensure that our schools are seen as “good ancestors” who helped mitigate current challenges and contributed to the betterment of the world.

What does it mean to have a culture that is literate at futuring? What kinds of practices and technologies do those cultures employ to stay focused on relevance and impact? Let’s create some starting points for building those cultures in our schools.

How will we build the practice of imagination into our daily school experience? Why is it important to do so? What might change if we spent more time imagining collectively about the future of our school and of our world? Let’s get a start on building some structures and practices that make imagination a fundamental part of our days.

ChatGPT isn’t the only AI tool worth wrapping your brain around. From an imagination standpoint, generative art, music, and photo tools can also be interesting starting points for breaking out of our boxes and seeing the world differently. We’ll look at some tools that enhance our creativity and provoke conversation through a school and education lens.

What if you were able to travel into the future and bring back an artifact from 30 or 40 or more years ago? What questions might that artifact provoke? Design fiction let’s us flex our imaginations and, importantly, bring the future into clearer focus.

Given the continuing explosion of AI, “prompt literacy” is a new required skill to navigate the potentials. How might we use prompts to create different visions of what education might become? And how can we weave those skills throughout our school community?

Most know about “oral histories” and their importance in helping to us to understand our lives today. But what if we explored oral futures as a way of helping us see pathways forward differently? Learn about the tools and techniques that will expand the possible ways we might sense the future.