info@bigquestions.institute | 908.824.0050
“The future must enter into you long before it happens.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke
With a BQI Futures membership, your team gets curated resources, expert analysis, skills building, team activities, live sessions, community, and more.
The Problem:
There’s not enough time to read, watch, and listen, and even less time to think, unpack and discuss everything that's changing in the world right now and what all of it means for the future of your schools. This is even more difficult to do in isolation.
Every day, rapid change means making informed and relevant decisions for your students and communities is becoming more and more challenging.
The Solution:
At BQI, we spend a lot of our waking hours reading, thinking, and imagining what the new narratives of schooling and education will be. We’re tuned into the emerging signals around tech, the environment, the future of work, diversity and belonging, wellness, and more. We speak with leaders in education around the world every day.
The response to our “One Foot in the Future” ebook indicates we’re ahead of most others in articulating the ways in which educators and schools now have to think about and act around what comes next.
Joining BQI Futures will start your school community's journey to better understand the future and build your capacity for change.
Join a global community of educators and BQI as we create a better future together for our students and communities.
Build Your School Community's Capacity to Engage the Future
BQI Futures will deepen your understanding of this complex moment we’re in, provide 12 hours of expert-led professional learning for your team of up to 10 members, and connect you to other schools worldwide that are on similar journeys.
You'll get:
- A list of curated resources that cover the most important shifts and developments that impact the future of education. (Weekly)
- Expert analysis from the BQI team of trends you should be paying attention to most. (Weekly)
- Suggested activities, discussion questions, and projects that you can use with your team or community to build even greater capacity to confront the future. (Monthly)
- A monthly, live 60-minute virtual futures-focused session with all other “Sensemaking” schools that covers:
- Skills Building - Focus on tools, techniques, and strategies to better develop futuring mindsets and skills
- Signal Scanning - Focused discussion and deep dive into one futures context each month as it relates to schools and education
- Spotlights - Overviews of schools that are implementing futures work in their communities
- Facilitation plus Q & A with Will and Homa
- Special Guests - Periodic presentations from experts in the field of futures and education
Cost: $1,000 USD annually for a team of up to 10
Why BQI Futures is a Must for Your School Community
Our unique subscription service will help you and your school community develop the futuring literacies and lenses you need to make the best decisions you can for the future of your students and teachers. By joining us, you will:
Gain a better understanding of the current contexts that are informing the arc of the future
Develop individual and group futuring skills
Help build a futures culture within the school community
Stay abreast of current and future trends that impact education, schools, and learning
Create new stories, narratives, and artifacts of education to widen people’s apertures for what’s possible
Undertake a systematic, public exploration of alternative futures
Share understandings through exhibition and storytelling
Build capacity throughout the school community to think about possible futures
Learn how to help your students build and flex their own imagination muscles
Have fun, find more joy for the future, and build deeper connections with educators from around the world
Learn practical ways to begin to create futures cultures in your own practice and in your school community
Look What You Could Be Learning Over the Next 12 Months!
Each month, BQI Futures members can participate in a live, hour-long, interactive Zoom session where they will take a deep dive into a wide range of futuring related topics such as:
- Educator as Futurist
- 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?
- Futuring Tools Part 1 - Scenario Planning
- 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.
- How to do an “Imagination Inventory”
- 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.
- Creating “Irresistible Futures” for Your School
- 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.
- What if? Nature, Future Kids, and More at the Table
- 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.
- Being a “Good Ancestor” as a School
- 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.
- Building Futuring Cultures
- 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.
- Imagination Infrastructures Part 1
- 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.
- AI - Augmented Imagination - MidJourney, Music, and More
- 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.
- Futuring Tools Part 2 - Design Fiction
- 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.
- Prompting the Future 101
- 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?
- Writing the History of the Future
- 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.
Ready to Future-Proof Your School?
Join BQI Futures and be the change your school community needs.
Cost: $1,000 USD
DOWNLOAD THE FREE EBOOK
Why wait? Download "One Foot in the Future" and start thinking differently about your path forward!
"One Foot in the Future" will change the way you approach your work as an educator and also impact the way you see yourself as a person grappling with an increasingly uncertain future.
Contact Us
Questions? You can email us and we will get back to you as soon as possible.
Big Questions Institute
+1.908.824.0050