Table of Contents
American Historical Association
Teaching materials
Clements High School
OECD Education 2030
Seeking volunteers
American historical association
David Staley, professor at Ohio State and Teach the Future Board member, hosted a panel on teaching the future in history at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Jan 9. The session was written up by Colleen Flaherty for InsideHigherEducation.com.
Teaching materials
The primary strategy for this first year was to develop easy-to-use materials for teaching the future. We are happy to say that we have completed the development of 20 such modules. We have one set of Elementary modules, 10 Secondary, and 9 College. They further break down to 4 Activities, 6 Lessons, 7 Units, and 3 Courses.
There are still a few modules being developed, and we are always open to teachers who want to contribute more. And we are still paying a modest stipend for new modules.
The next step is to find a developer to put the downloadable modules into an online database. With that, the first phase of this project will be complete. After that, we need teachers and schools to use them!
Clements high school
Nancy Liscum, a senior English teacher at Clements High School, taught an excellent unit on the future of the English language. Peter Bishop and Principal David Yaffie attended the students’ presentation that included a Baseline forecast and future disruptions that could create Alternative futures. Nancy is planning to write up this lesson to be included in the Teach the Future database of teaching materials.
Dr. Bishop also appeared in an art class and class for student leaders at Clements.
OECD Education 2030
The Education Division of the Organization for Economic and Community Development (OECD) in Paris is conducted a study to identify the 21st century skills that students need to be successful in the future. Dr. Bishop was one of 14 expert contributors and the contributor selected to present their findings to the stakeholders on October 19.
The unfortunate result, however, was that Dr. Bishop found no reference to foresight or futures thinking in any of the 10 lists of skills he discovered nor in any of the lists turned in by the other 13 contributors. So it is clear that futures thinking is not even on educators’ radar screens, much less in their classes and schools.
Seeking Volunteers
Teach the Future is developing new modules for teaching the future, but we are not the first. We have found more than a dozen excellent collections of teaching materials and toolsets that could be used to teach the future. We need to have a description of each of them before we publish them so we are looking for volunteers who would like to write up 300-word descriptions of the Collections we have found. If you are interested, select one or more Collections from this file that has not been taken, and email Dr. Bishop at peter@teachthefuture.org about your selection. We’ll send you a small token of our appreciation for helping us Teach the Future!
So stay in touch, and join the conversation on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media platforms. And contact us through the website or directly to peter@teachthefuture.org.