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How would the world be different if children were in charge?

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How would the world be different if children were in charge?

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Ready to argue for the co-development curriculum in a live action role-play game?

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Ready to argue for the co-development curriculum in a live action role-play game?

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They'll learn in the future...But what will they learn?

What is Curriculum for the Future: The Role Play Game?

Curriculum for the Future: The Role Play Game is one in a series of three resources designed to generate thought-provoking conversations about learning and curriculum today and in the future. The game was originally designed for adults, but can be adapted for use with older students.

Curriculum for the Future: The Role Play Game invites you to take on responsibility for shaping the future of curriculum for young New Zealand learners. The game is designed to give players the opportunity to debate different curriculum ideas and possibilities. It is fast, fun, research-informed and low-tech. Players can try out ideas that might seem outlandish or unworkable in current real life. They can argue for positions that they may or may not really agree with or even fully understand. By thinking on their feet and listening to the ideas that come up during the game, players will gain insights into the complexities of curriculum design and development, and challenge their own thinking about the purposes of education and what schooling might be like in the future.

For more background on the development of this game, read the blog post The Making of Curriculum for the Future: The role play game

The role play game can also be used along with:

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Curriculum for the Future: The role play game

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Curriculum for the Future: The Role Play Game is one in a series of three resources designed to generate thought-provoking conversations about learning and curriculum today and in the future. The game was originally designed for adults, but can be adapted for use with older students.

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HAVEN'T PLAYED CURRICULUM FOR THE FUTURE YET?

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HAVEN'T PLAYED CURRICULUM FOR THE FUTURE YET?

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What are you waiting for?

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"A strangely addictive game that gets you thinking differently about education"

Curriculum for the Future: The Digital Game is designed to generate thought-provoking conversations about learning and curriculum today and in the future. It's a fun way to think about complex ideas and it's great for playing with a group of people who care about what we will learn in the future. Players get to choose a curriculum and juggle multiple points of view as they try to convince a panel of citizens.

Visit the Curriculum for the future microsite to learn more about the game

VISIT MICROSITE

PLAY ONLINE NOW

Download the app for your iPad or Tablet:

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Curriculum for the Future: The digital game

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"A strangely addictive game that gets you thinking differently about education" Curriculum for the Future: The Digital Game is designed to generate thought-provoking conversations about learning and curriculum today and in the future. It's a fun way to think about complex ideas and it's great for playing with a group of people who care about what we will learn in the future.

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When learners help shape the curriculum, will they learn less or more than when the curriculum is shaped for them?

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When learners help shape the curriculum, will they learn less or more than when the curriculum is shaped for them?

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How much involvement should learners have in decisions about what, how, and when they learn?

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How much involvement should learners have in decisions about what, how, and when they learn?

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Should the curriculum be designed FOR learners, or WITH them?

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Should the curriculum be designed FOR learners, or WITH them?

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PLAYED THE CURRICULUM FOR THE FUTURE GAME? Now use the links on this padlet to keep feeding your thinking....

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PLAYED THE CURRICULUM FOR THE FUTURE GAME? Now use the links on this padlet to keep feeding your thinking....

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There are no right answers here, but there's a lot to consider!

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READ ME FIRST! IDEAS ON HOW TO USE THIS PADLET

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READ ME FIRST! IDEAS ON HOW TO USE THIS PADLET

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Look for articles that grab you. Read them!

Look for questions that get you thinking.

Find someone to talk to about what you're reading or thinking

"Remake" this padlet! (Look in the upper right corner of your screen.

Use your own "remade" padlet to post your thoughts, ideas, reflections, and questions.

Think of questions that interest you, and do your own further research. Post your findings and thoughts on your padlet.

What about doing your own drawings, voice recordings, or videos?

Share your padlet with friends, classmates, and colleagues.

Whatever you do, make sure your use of padlet adheres to padlet's content policy

Tweet us!

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Let Students Lead: Why are local investigations important to student learning?

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Let Students Lead: Why are local investigations important to student learning?

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Simple questions can lead to great local investigations.

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This is the second installment of a four part series on local investigations in the classroom

authored by Participate. For more ideas and stories on global education, visit Global Perspectives, a new Medium Publication dedicated to stories, thoughts and ideas to empower teachers and students to be actives contributors to their communities and our world.
Local investigation practices in education are not new. Almost every good teacher knows, for example, that if students have opportunities to interview family members about their immigrant experiences, knowledge is deepened because the information is relevant to students' lives. Imagine students then comparing their own family immigrant stories with digitized primary sources available through the Library of Congress to understand how their stories align with historical U.S. narratives.

Where do you live compared to where I live?

"Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom" - from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School

What does a mayor do? How are laws made?

Local investigations serve another critical function by providing teachers opportunities to implement culturally responsive teaching strategies. Educator biases, curriculum content, assessment procedures and overall school cultures tend to privilege dominant groups within a society. Students with diverse cultural backgrounds are often framed within deficit models that view their experiences as something to overcome and contribute to a downward spiral of low achievement and marginalization.

Implementing instructional approaches that engage and serve students from all backgrounds can be challenging if inquiry-based and student-centered strategies are not central. It is not possible for teachers to know every detail about a student's background, nor it is necessary. Structuring time for students to consider and share what they already know about a topic allows teachers to better understand their diverse backgrounds and existing knowledge, and it reveals the misconceptions to address through investigations.

For example, here are some simple questions can lead to great local investigations.

Guide oral history projects based on student interviews of family members to create timelines or maps of major events in family history.

Explore the genealogy of plants common to the community.

Map neighborhoods or local communities, using Google Earth or other online mapping tool, to identify community assets and landmarks.

Facilitate virtual or in-person discussions of policy and decision-making processes with representatives from the local government..

Investigate resources provided the local chamber of commerce and research of visit local businesses to learn more about their reach.

Visit a local water utility or treatment plant to learn more about your community's water sources and what's being done to protect them.

Research local animal species and their migrations to the region, and explore other locales where these species are found.

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Let Students Lead: Why are local investigations important to student learning?

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This is the second installment of a four part series on local investigations in the classroom authored by Participate . For more ideas and stories on global education, visit Global Perspectives , a new Medium Publication dedicated to stories, thoughts and ideas to empower teachers and students to be actives contributors to their communities and our world.

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Chris Unger suggests questions you can ask students to better understand the learning environment in your school/classroom.

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Read about grassroot children's neighbourhood parliaments in India.

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children parliament, child participation, governance by children, inclusive, child rights, disability

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From "student voice" to "youth-adult partnership"

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From "student voice" to "youth-adult partnership"

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This commentary analyses and critiques the ways we tend to think about young peoples' responsibilities, roles and rights to participate in their own learning.

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From "student voice" to "youth-adult partnership" | New Zealand Council for Educational Research

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What does the term "student voice" mean to you? Does it mean listening to students' opinions? Involving students in decisions about their learning? Giving students equal say in decisions about school management and governance? This commentary analyses and critiques the ways we tend to think about young peoples' responsibilities, roles and rights to participate.

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Have you ever heard of Hart's ladder of participation? Learn more about it here

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Hart's Ladder and Shier's Pathways to Participation are two models that can be useful when developing and reviewing youth participation projects. Both models can help you decide the most suitable level of youth participation for your project. These models can be used by themselves or together to evaluate and improve youth participation in your organisation.

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A teacher muses on what can happen when she is not the expert in the room.

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I have been grappling with what the Knowledge explosion has meant for the curriculum, in other words, what we teach and how we teach it. +Rose Hipkins and Jane Gilbert independently drew my attention recently to how frequently as teachers we still say things like 'learning about electricity' ... Learning facts is no longer enough. As teachers, we need to be careful when we still treat knowledge as something we have and our students do not, something that we have to impart to our students. I find that often I still catch myself thinking and doing things that suggests that my theory-in-action and espoused theory are not quite as aligned as I would like. The question that I keep asking myself at the moment (and my students...); Google knows 'about' stuff, what can you do with this knowledge that Google can't? In other words, what value do I add that Google does not? And I'm not talking about fruitlloop websites here, I'm talking scholarly articles, encyclopaedias, scientists, government organisations etc.
Then, to add another layer to my ongoing subject teacher identity crisis ( see this blog post here), I am increasingly becoming aware of students whose expertise far exceed mine in different areas. And this is, as it should be. My students, and yours, are incredibly diverse and bring with them enormous cultural capital, experiences and knowledge. I am not the (only) font of knowledge. For example, I have a student with a huge interest in quantum particles and another with a knack for asking incredibly insightful questions and representing his research with infographics. I have a passionate basketballer and an aspiring race car driver who spends huge amounts of time volunteering at the racecourse.

On top of this is the fact that the internet has made the boundaries that we have put between silos of disciplines increasingly artificial. We filter forward rather than out.

"Expertise was topic based - Books focus on specific topics because they have to fit between two covers. So, in a book-based world, knowledge looks like something that divides into masterable domains. ... topics don't divide up neatly. They connect messily. While people of course still develop deep expertise, the networking of those experts better reflects the overall truth that topic boundaries are often the result of the boundaries of paper." - Too Big to Know by David Weinberger

What does it mean to be a teacher in an age of Knowledge explosion? An age where Google knows better than me, and in many contexts, the students know better than me, even in academic contexts? What does it mean to be a teacher and teach a curriculum, when new disciplines, new fields have been discovered, and others have been disestablished since ' someone' decided what students should learn at what level? Why year elevens should learn linear equations? Why year twelves should learn this, and year nines that? What does it mean to be a teacher in the post-normal times, where the world of people is more complex, more connected, more uncertain? To be a teacher in a world where the existing ways of thinking has produced climate change and inequality? Problems that can only be solved by crossing the boundaries of different disciplines?

It's all a bit daunting isn't it? Fortunately, I am finding that I am increasingly comfortable with uncertainty. The more I think about the future, my future, the world's future, the more I realise that pretending like there is an answer out there that I just have to find, to know, is not helpful. The world and its people are too diverse to assume an answer. I can not 'know' it all, and it is important that I stay humble and stop acting the 'knower' when I can not know. If I approach this uncertainty with an attitude that I or someone else has the answer, I shut myself down to innovation, deep empathetic problem solving and collaboration. There genuinely are situations where we can not know the answer, and it is important that I acknowledge when I am dealing with a situation where I can, and can not be the 'knower'.

But... what does that look like in practice, in a classroom?! Well, this week it looked like 50 students doing their own inquiry into ' create a robot to address a need'. Students started the inquiry independently on Friday with a reliever. From there, Steve, my co-teacher and I, split the class into two groups, those who were able to self manage and make a decent start, and those who did not. Those who struggled to self manage were then supported to work in a quiet space with regular teacher checkins. Those students who were able to self manage then self selected based on their needs into one of three workshops ran by other students. For these workshops, I invited three students to plan a lesson (with a lesson planning template and SOLO rubric) that would help their peers improve their inquiries. In other words, I wanted the three students running the workshops to use their expertise. One student ran her session about data collection from experiments. Another about how to use questions to find unique perspectives in your inquiry and how to present these through infographics. Another on how misconceptions in science can be addressed through different types of video formats with examples from quantum theory. These are year tens...

As I sat and eavesdropped on the conversations from my students, I was reminded just how important it was that I stop thinking that I 'know' more than my students. I know different things than my students, not more. I am an expert in some areas, but they are too. They are 'knowers' too, and it is about time that I move alongside my students, rather than standing in front of them. In front I might just be in their way. So for the time being, I have ditched the labels teacher-centred and student-centred, and instead, I am experimenting with what it means to be a collaborator - building collective intelligence, not just finding new ways to transfer what I know.

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I have been grappling with what the Knowledge explosion has meant for the curriculum, in other words, what we teach and how we teach it. +Rose Hipkins and Jane Gilbert independently drew my attention recently to how frequently as teachers we still say things like 'learning about electricity' ...

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UN Convention
on the Rights of the Child 

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UN Convention
on the Rights of the Child 

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In child-friendly language