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Introduction

Many of education’s most popular authors and keynote speakers seem to speak of little else than what is wrong with education. The constant dialogue on why with so little discussion of how fatigues me, and I also believe most educators are weary of hearing what they are doing wrong. In 2011, I decided to no longer discuss the problem without presenting a solution. In the void, I put forward the essential fluencies as a solution, and I have been amazed how quickly they have spread through systems around the world. These fluencies, which represent essential future-focused (21st century) skills, include solution fluency, information fluency, creativity fluency, media fluency, collaboration fluency, and global digital citizenship, and I first published about them with Ian Jukes and Andrew Churches in Literacy Is NOT Enough (Crockett, Jukes, & Churches, 2011). The truth is, we developed these fluencies as a response to a much broader consideration, a question that we have posed to thousands of educators all over the world; that question is, “What are the most crucial skills our students need to live and succeed in the transforming world of both the present and the future?”

I believe if we are to achieve positive transformation, we need to focus on a bright future and work together to create it. I assume that you are reading this book because you want to know precisely what that change looks like and how to get there. As such, I will not take time to discuss the why in this book, but only the how. I do this by pinpointing ten core shifts of practice—practices rooted in future-focused learning and the essential fluencies—that you can implement with your learners regardless of your established teaching pedagogy. I support these shifts with many details and examples.

It is the hard work of teachers working to shift their practice with the essential fluencies that keeps me committed to support them with my work. I hope this book contributes to the positive work you are doing and your relentless desire to improve. So, before we begin, it is important to understand how the shifts of practice I present in this book fit into many popular teaching pedagogies, how these ideas connect to future-focused learning, and how I’ve organized this book so you can make the best use of it.

The Missing Piece in Popular Pedagogical Approaches

For some years, many schools have used the idea of problem- and project-based learning by bringing into classes and subjects real-world, contextual, and relevant projects. For the most part, these are single-subject approaches. For example, the International Baccalaureate Group 4 subjects have students in various disciplines within the sciences work collaboratively to investigate a problem (“IB Group 4 Subjects,” n.d.). These approaches are beneficial since they bring in a series of processes that enable students to address problems and develop projects. Other examples include Apple’s ongoing support for challenge-based learning (Digital Promise, n.d.), the Buck Institute’s support for project-based learning (Buck Institute for Education, n.d.), and so on.

Similarly, the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) initiative is a cross-curricular approach to integrating some of the sciences, namely the traditional sciences, mathematics, technology and applied technology, and science in the form of engineering. STEM originated in the United States as a solution for dwindling numbers of graduates in these disciplines (U.S. Department of Education, n.d.).

An evolution of STEM is the science, technology, engineering, arts and design, and mathematics initiative (STEAM), which adds aesthetic and design considerations in the form of art to bring together function and form. STEAM represents the next evolutionary step of STEM (STEM to STEAM, n.d.).

Although all of these pedagogical approaches are laudable and beneficial, none actually address the bigger focus. The real world, except for academia, does not divide itself up into neat compartments or disciplines. A technology company does not employ only technologists. It brings together a raft of different skill sets that span all the disciplines we have at school and more. For example, to develop a new product you absolutely need the engineers, technologists, and mathematicians but you also need the following.

• The artists and designers who make the product both functional and aesthetically suitable

• The economists who examine the financial viability of the solution

• The historians who understand the framework that the problem is set in and who consider the prior developments and frameworks that may or will impact the solution

• The wordsmiths and linguists who develop and present the proposals, arguments, manuals, media releases, and press kits and packaging that accompany any product

• The media experts who fashion the messages into social media, traditional media, and so on

• The legal experts who investigate and protect the concepts, intellectual property, and copyright

• The environmental scientists who consider the impact and significance of the development on our environment

• The social scientists who develop understanding of the society the company is producing the solution for and consider the psychological aspects of the design that make it more appealing and functional (This includes considering the cultural impacts, significance, and importance of not only the problem but the solution.)

The list is obviously extensive, but it clearly involves more than just a single-subject discipline. It encompasses and embraces all aspects of a holistic education, and it highlights why our end goal should not be project-based learning, STEM, or STEAM, but rather the holistic integration of all aspects of learning—both formal (the disciplines we teach) and informal (the portable and applicable skill sets)—into the following aptitudes.

• Finding, identifying, and defining real-world, relevant problems

• Understanding the origins, significance, impact, and worthiness of those problems

• Developing creative and ethical solutions that embrace the skills, passions, and abilities of a broad group of learners (both students and staff), experts, and the wider community

• Engendering the synergy among the different learning areas to develop products and solutions greater than the combined input of the disciplines

To achieve these aims requires us to undertake a number of different actions by developing schoolwide approaches to problem solving, research, collaboration, and ethics. This is why Andrew Churches and I developed the essential fluencies. These essential fluencies codify the kind of work Andrew and I do in hundreds of schools in a dozen countries to help learners strive together to solve real-world problems that matter and create a bright future for all.

I cannot stress enough that pedagogies like project-based learning, STEM, design thinking, and many others all have their value. Some of them have an almost cultlike following, largely because as teachers shift to these pedagogies, their classrooms transform, learning comes alive, and outcomes improve. I call this professional transformation: the moment at which a teacher realizes the benefits from a shift in practice and will never go back.

This doesn’t mean these pedagogies don’t represent commodities; and like any commodity, each seems to have its own packaging, marketing, and following. To support them, various stakeholders hold conferences and workshops, provide supplies, establish resources, and even design furniture labeled for them. This is not a criticism of these fine approaches. If you successfully implement one or more of them in your school and learners benefit, then I applaud you for your commitment and encourage you to continue the great work you are doing. I offer the ideas in this book for you to consider as ways to take that great work and make it exceptional by engaging in future-focused learning.

Shifts to Future-Focused Learning

Future-focused learning is a holistic (school- or systemwide) approach in which learners strive together to find and solve real-world problems that matter; they focus beyond the curriculum with the goal of gaining an interlinked real-world education and cultivating capabilities essential to ensure their success beyond school.

A common issue I encounter when consulting with schools is change fatigue. Teachers often challenge a new initiative in its early stages if it is another direction du jour or if it requires an actual commitment. This occurs because schools bring to their educators so many ideas they tout as the answer only to cast them aside in favor of a newer initiative or just let them dissolve over time. On more than one occasion, a teacher has expressed concern to me that every time the principal goes to a conference, it means a new idea will return with a huge but short-lived push that soon becomes a memory. This is a valid concern and significantly impacts teacher buy-in to any process. I’ve managed to overcome this with many schools by focusing on the ten shifts of practice I present in this book. You can implement these future-focused practices in your classroom regardless of core pedagogy; they don’t reset your practice, but rather support it.

One of the key reasons these shifts work is that the sheer scale of a new teaching initiative can be massive, and the effort required to launch it exhausting. A teacher who has been comfortable and reasonably successful with delivering content in a teacher-centered environment might be able to see the validity of a new pedagogy in learner outcomes but find it too big a change to consider.

In fact, it was in working with a teacher who was quite overwhelmed with high anxiety and fear of change that I first began to think about these shifts. He told me that using solution fluency was just too much for him to consider and he would leave teaching if he had to make this kind of change. Unfortunately, many teachers are in the same position of fatigue and fear. I wished that there were a few simple things—simple microshifts—that I could use to slowly help teachers to transform.

I asked him if, at the beginning of each lesson, he would be willing to engage in one small change (a microshift) by clearly presenting and discussing his learning intentions (learning goals) with his learners along with providing them with clear success criteria. Very quickly, his learners started to excel and asked what tomorrow’s learning intentions were, then what they were for the entire week. Soon learners were arriving in his class having already met the success criteria. Eventually, he no longer needed his carefully planned lessons because students had already moved beyond them. Upon seeing this success, he asked me what to do next; we started working with essential questions, which became his next shift of practice.

After this experience, I started using these shifts of practice with all my clients and going deeply into solution fluency with the ones who were keen and felt ready to take on this challenge as they had been incrementally successful with other shifts. By offering a range of shifts for everyone to work on, I was in fact personalizing the learning for the teachers. Which is, of course, one of the shifts I present in this book!

Structure and Use of This Book

This book presents ten core shifts of practice you can use with your students immediately, regardless of your core curriculum or instructional pedagogy. Each chapter presents a future-focused shift, explains what it is, and shows how it benefits learning. These ten shifts are as follows.

1. Essential and herding questions: Providing learning without an essential question is like offering food to people who are full—they won’t accept it if they aren’t hungry. Essential questions stimulate students’ appetite for learning. For this shift of practice, challenge yourself to incorporate essential questions in every learning activity.

2. Connection through context and relevance: Ask yourself where your students may come across a certain kind of information or a specific skill in their lives outside of school. If it’s something they’ll come across in their own world, then instantly there is a connection that brings relevance and context to the learner.

3. Personalized learning: Learning is personal, and it becomes more personal when students have a personal connection to the task. By engaging in future-focused learning, endless possibilities appear for personalization. It could be the task, the learning process, the research, the assessment, the evidence of learning created, or the role in collaboration.

4. Challenge of higher-order-thinking skills: Take it up a notch or two using Bloom’s revised taxonomy by shifting your learning tasks to higher-order-thinking tasks (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001). Challenge your learners to evaluate and create instead of demonstrating remembering and understanding.

5. Information fluency for research skills: We are bombarded with information every second of our lives. We assess the information and, in a split second, determine how it will affect us and our decisions. Information-fluency skills slow down this process so we can dissect every aspect of assessing information and learn how to do it better. It is a fluency built for maximizing the usefulness and credibility of all forms of research.

6. Process-oriented learning: Use other essential fluencies as the learning process to challenge learners to solve real-world problems that matter, dive deep into inquiry, or create something amazing. The microshifts in this chapter feature uses for solution fluency, media fluency, and collaboration fluency.

7. Learning intentions and success criteria: Whether working in one subject or across multiple key learning areas, the impact of being transparent with curricula is amazing. No matter if it’s curriculum lists, learning intentions, standards, or objectives, putting them out front for the benefit of your learners is an essential shift in future-focused learning.

8. Learner-created knowledge: Learner creation means learners are creating new knowledge as part of a learning task, a new product, or a new solution. It’s also about developing the evidence of learning as well as the criteria.

9. Mindful assessment: Mindful assessment is fair, clear, transparent, deliberate, and purposeful. It enhances learning by focusing on formative assessment as well as reflecting on the learning process. We must rethink the bond between teaching and learning by assessing the crucial skills our learners need to thrive in life beyond school, as embodied by the essential fluencies. We do this through the practice of mindfulness with both assessment and feedback for improvement.

10. Self- and peer assessment: Reflection on learning is a skill we can internalize and grow with by practicing it during our school years. That’s why encouraging learner reflection through self- and peer assessment adds such a powerful dimension to learning. Self- and peer assessment stress and reinforce the importance of collaboration, reduce workload, and increase engagement and understanding. In addition, learners’ insights and observations become highly valued since they help them reflect on and understand the processes of their own learning.

Within each chapter, you will find three specific microshifts that detail specific activities you can engage your students in along with reflective questions for you to consider after trying them. I call them microshifts because each is a single activity that can help nudge your practice toward a permanent transformation in relation to the broader shift of practice. Each chapter concludes with a series of guiding questions for further reflection or for a book study with your colleagues or learning community.

Finally, the book’s appendix also presents additional microshift ideas for you to consider, seven small shifts of practice you can implement to further each core shift in this book. All in all, this book contains one hundred microshifts that you can immediately use in your classroom.

As you work through this book, or after you complete it, I recommend starting with the low-hanging fruit by considering only one of these shifts. Reflect on the microshifts and additional microshift ideas and either choose one or develop your own microshift to trial. You might choose whichever shift is easiest to implement or the one you are most excited about. When you do this, consider what you hope to see happen before-hand and afterward, and reflect on whether this occurred or if a different outcome occurred, be it favorable or unfavorable. You may then choose to adjust your approach and attempt it again. Eventually, through a process of application, debriefing, and adjustments, you will find that the shift becomes more entrenched in your practice and improves learning outcomes. When this happens, move to whichever shift you want to explore next.

Although I do focus this text on communicating to you as an individual, it’s important to understand that I developed these shifts of practice as a way to assist entire faculties to transform their learning. As such, these shifts are particularly well suited to teams. As a group, you can identify a shift, collectively implement it using multiple microshifts, and reflect on its outcome by working together to quickly identify what elements and processes lead to success with your unique learners and learning environments. When using these shifts as a group, note that because they overlap and interrelate heavily, not everyone has to work on the same shift. Having each member work on a different shift of practice as an alternative to everyone working on the same shift also leads to rich professional conversations.

For example, with my clients, I work the shifts through a continual action-research cycle. We assign a learning conversation facilitator to a group of teachers. These facilitators may be administrators, heads of faculties, learning coaches, or any other authority figure who makes sense in your organization. What is most important is a structured process with accountability.

The facilitator meets with each teacher to identify the following: Which shift will you undertake? How will you trial it with your learners? What key indicators of success are you looking for? By when will you accomplish these indicators? The final step before adjourning is to set the follow-up meeting based on the timeline the teachers have set for themselves.

Each teacher then works to implement the shift and collect evidence of success. At the follow-up meeting, teachers reflect on the evidence they collect based on the key indicators for success they identified in the initial meeting. After discussion, the facilitator works with the teacher group to determine the next steps, and the cycle repeats until both the teachers and the learning conversation facilitator agree to move to a different shift.

To help facilitate this kind of work, my organization developed a new application platform (Wabisabi, https://wabisabizen.com). If you opt to try it out, I recommend that you access the Professional Growth section, which documents this process. The valuable content in this section is a direct result of the effort and outcomes of transforming teaching practices using these shifts.

It doesn’t matter which shift you implement first, only that eventually you work through them all. By focusing on these shifts, you will transform education from explicit teaching to future-focused learning for your learners, one microshift at a time.