Futures Thinking in Education

On this Getting Smart Town Hall, we focused on futures thinking in education—an approach to strategically anticipate and shape what’s next in a sector or community. The event featured insights from Tom Vander Ark, Ariel Raz, and Sara Skvirsky, who shared their expertise and experiences in integrating futures thinking into educational practices. The conversation highlighted the importance of strategic foresight, scenario planning, and the role of innovative leadership in preparing for rapid changes driven by technology, climate change, and social dynamics.

Ariel Raz from the d.school at Stanford introduced practical approaches for cultivating empathy for the future, emphasizing the need for educators to extend empathy across time and connect with future generations. Sara Skvirsky from the Institute for the Future elaborated on strategic foresight as a tool to inform decisionmaking under uncertainty. She discussed her work with Santa Ana Unified School District in forming the Innovation Catalyst Collective, a group dedicated to transforming the education system by considering drivers of change like political polarization and climate chaos. The activity led by Sara, inspired by Jane McGonigal’s book Imaginable, encouraged participants to flip current educational norms and imagine alternative futures.

The interactive session engaged participants in a lively discussion about signals of change, the role of community members in education, and the importance of creating flexible, adaptable learning environments. Ideas such as integrating arts into standardized tests, redefining classrooms, and leveraging AI for personalized learning plans were explored. The event underscored the need for proactive leadership and community collaboration in shaping a futureready education system.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited and abridged for readability.

Mason Pashia: Welcome to another Getting Smart Town Hall. I am Mason Pashia with Getting Smart, and today we are talking about futures thinking in education.

You may have heard the term “futures thinking” before, and maybe that’s what brought you here. You may just be really passionate about education and love shaking things up. Regardless, we’re super happy to have you here and have some incredible guests along with us.

Getting Smart and Futures Thinking

Over the last decadeplus, we’ve highlighted a ton of topics, which we often call campaigns or series. These are five of those from the last seven years—math is hard. We did one on AI, one on differencemaking, which is about instilling purpose in learning. We’re currently doing one on new pathways, which focuses on connecting students to success for what’s next for them, involving a lot of future thinking. What is the future of connecting students to meaningful work? How do you connect students to credentialing experiences in the future? We did one on smart cities, about how cities can facilitate learning, and one on green pathways about sustainability.

Tom Vander Ark, do you want to share a little bit about your relationship to the term “futures thinking”? I think you’ve spearheaded a lot of these. I’m curious about how that term lands for you.

Tom Vander Ark: I love this topic and appreciate all of you joining this summer morning.

It’s been important to me for, I don’t know, 50 years. There’s a surprisingly long history of the future. The folks that started studying it in the 1950s, where I think the idea of scenario planning was really popularized by Royal Dutch Shell in the 60s. It surprisingly prepared them well for the oil shocks of the 70s.

When I started doing advanced degree work in energy finance, scenario planning and futures were a really important part of my graduate studies. To the extent that I quit the energy business and started a futures planning organization called the Center for Strategic Planning around 1984. The Santa Fe Institute launched then and really pioneered complex adaptive systems thinking. They introduced us to complexity and systems thinking that led the way to Peter Senge. His book, “The Fifth Discipline,” was probably the most professionally important book to me in the last 50 years. It outlined mental models of how we each create mental models of our present and future, of team learning, and systems thinking. I think Senge and Santa Fe introduced the idea of systems thinking as a new foundation for modern futures work.

I think this topic is super important right now because we’re 40 years into an era of exponential change. The information age was exponential change, and we have linear brains. We have a hard time conceptualizing exponential change. One of the key future skills is exponential thinking and building that into scenario analysis.

We’re about 30 years into complex systems and a real recognition of climate change—manmade and natural systems becoming very complex and interacting in ways that are super hard to predict. Now, we’re about two years into this new generative AI age, which is kicking off a new Scurve of exponential change and requiring us all to update our mental models.

Just a couple of shoutouts for things that I think are really important right now. Thanks to all the teachers on the call—English and social studies teachers who have incorporated scifi. Scifi has been and will be a really important way for us as a species to interrogate the future. Modeling complex systems is super important. We had a great podcast this week with Conrad Wolfram, where he argues we ought to stop teaching hand calculations like factoring polynomials and long division and start teaching modeling complex systems. I appreciate that.

Entrepreneurial thinking requires systems thinking and comes to the future through the lens of opportunity spotting. How and where can I help create value for my community? I think these are all important parts of future training and part of why the future ought to be a set of skills we’re teaching kids, infused across the curriculum. I’m looking forward to a dialogue about how and where we can do that.

A big thanks to our friends at KnowledgeWorks, who for 20 years have had a futures practice. We appreciate their longterm commitment to studying the future and sharing scenarios of the future with all of us. The d.school at Stanford has been another important organization that has helped us learn about design thinking and futures thinking, so we’re excited to bring this topic to life with a great panel. Thanks, Mason.

Mason Pashia: Of course. Thanks, Tom. Great context. One of the early provocations when I was in college was realizing it’s interesting that we have history classes but not future classes. In school, where you’re trying to prepare young people for the future, we don’t talk about it in a way that takes it seriously or invites them in with confidence. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. As I said on the website, we’re always talking about series. All of them have to do with the future in some way or another, even if we’re not calling them futures thinking.

Last year, I had the extreme privilege of participating in a couple of great futures experiences with each of our speakers today. So, I invited them to help share some of the things they shared with me, with all of you. We’ve got Sarah Skvorsky with the Institute for the Future. I participated in their Foresight Essentials program last year, which was super awesome and equipped me with a ton of tools for scenario planning and thinking about the future. You’re going to get a glimpse into some of that today. We focused on climate migration—how it might and will shape the future.

We also have Ariel Raz from the d.school at Stanford, which Tom mentioned. I went to a summit with them in California, where we tested some of their new tools and things they have publicly available. We’ll talk about that as well. Without further ado, I’m going to pass it over to the guests. Please drop questions in the chat. We are recording and will be publishing a transcript. Ariel, take it away.

d.school and Futures Thinking

Ariel Raz: You might have noticed that I work at the d.school—D stands for design. I don’t work at the FSchool for future, so I wouldn’t say I am an expert futurist steeped in this. I just play one on TV, play one on webinars, but I have created a body of practice trying to translate futurism into education. That’s really my perspective—having been a middle school special education teacher and having worked at the d.school, which is exceptional in bringing complex ideas into practice, like design and creativity. We also turned our attention to futures over the last few years.

Years ago, at the d.school, we started asking questions like, “What do you think is inevitable?” and “How do we cultivate empathy for the future?” The d.school is rooted in empathy. How do we extend empathy across time and connect with individuals who don’t exist yet, who live in new systems? And then, who shapes our future? Who has agency when we look towards creating and building our preferred futures?

My amazing colleague, Lisa K. Solomon, who is steeped in strategic planning and futurism with the Global Business Network and Singularity University, brought this forward with us. She had a framework: See, Shape, Share. Sarah will introduce other, deeper, more complex frameworks, but this is a nice starting point for us. How do we see the future? How do we see different futures? How do we shape our preferred future, ensuring it’s articulated and well understood? And then, how do we share it with our community so we’re moving towards a coherent, understandable future together?

If you’re more visually inclined, you can think of seeing the future as identifying various signals in the marketplace, universe, or our lives that might shape what comes next. How do we create a picture, a verbal portrait, or an actual image that is legible to our community, so they can understand it as well?

During the coronavirus pandemic, Lisa ran us through what Tom described earlier—a strategic planning process. We identified critical elements, like the virus’s spread and economic impact, to create a twobytwo matrix of scenarios. This helped us understand possible futures and prepare for them.

I’ll skip over the detailed explanation and focus on our postpandemic work. We created “Five Approaches for Futures Thinking”: seeing in multiples, tracing change across time, worldbuilding, empathy for the future, and seeking visions of coexistence. These approaches help us understand and prepare for different futures, fostering a deeper connection with the future and its inhabitants.

I’ll now pass it over to Sarah to talk about strategic foresight.

IFTF and Futures Thinking

Sara Skvirsky: Thank you so much, Ariel. Hello, everyone. I’m thrilled to be joining you today. I want to start with a slide we use at the beginning of our foresight education programs. We remind people that nobody can predict the future—it hasn’t happened yet. This realization frees us to think strategically, systematically, and creatively about all the possibilities around us today. It’s not just one possibility, as we just heard from Ariel; we’re considering many different possibilities. We need to think about what kind of world we want to create and live in. How do we turn all this chaos around us into inspiration and possibility for action?

Thinking about the future is a bit like a vaccine. You preexperience a little bit of the future right now by going through a range of different possibilities. This way, when the future actually happens, you’re more prepared. You’ve already thought about it a little bit, so you’re not starting from scratch. You can react faster and have more muscle memory to handle the situation.

For those unfamiliar, the Institute for the Future is, to the best of our knowledge, the longestrunning institute dedicated to thinking about the future. We’ve been around since 1968, and our goal is to help organizations, leaders, and communities become futureready. We’re based in Silicon Valley, but we have people all around the world, including in Brazil.

Our mission is to help organizations, leaders, and communities become futureready by providing tools to think about the future. For example, Mason went through our course last year. We also focus on research, such as the future of children, democracy, AI, and its impact on the workplace. Additionally, we offer various programs to help people engage productively with the future.

Strategic foresight is a set of tools, processes, and mindsets to inform decisionmaking under uncertainty. To think about the future effectively, you need to start by preparing. This means asking the right questions and gathering evidence on how the world might change. You then develop multiple plausible, provocative visions of the future, not just one. From these, you generate meaningful implications for yourself, your school, your community, and your organization. Finally, you plan actions based on these implications.

I’m currently working with Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) to integrate foresight into their work. We’ve formed the Innovation Catalyst Collective, a group of 50 staff members from all levels who are thinking about how to transform our system for the future. We’re looking at drivers of change like political polarization, cost of living, and climate chaos, and planning pilots in areas such as learning experience design, policy, infrastructure, stakeholder education, assessment, equity, and inclusivity

Mason Pashia: We’ve got some great stuff in the chat. Sarah, could you elaborate on the concept of signals of change? Some people are grappling with the idea that the future is both here and coming.

Sara Skvirsky: Absolutely. Signals of change are standout examples of things happening now that make us stop and say, “That’s different.” They indicate possible futures. For example, a school district in Alaska aligned their calendar with traditional harvest seasons. It’s not the norm, but it signals a future where we do things differently. We’re always looking for these signals to understand how they might shape the future.

Let’s move on to an activity by my colleague, Jane McGonigal, from her book “Imaginable.” It involves flipping the future. You pick a topic, list things that are generally true today, flip those ideas, and imagine a world where the flipped facts are reality.

For example, shoes cost money, and people take them off when they sleep. Flipped: shoes are free, and people sleep with them on. How could these be true? Shoes could be free in exchange for data, and people might sleep with shoes on due to emergencies like wildfires.

Excercise One: Flip the Future

Now, let’s apply this to K12 education. Here are 10 truths about K12 education today: learning happens in classrooms, arts are not included in standardized tests, teachers are adults, students are children, students are pushed towards higher education, there’s a national teacher shortage, different approaches based on age, lower outcomes for male youth of color, seat time as a key metric, a small portion of students have IEPs, and curriculum doesn’t reflect student cultures. Pick one, flip it, and imagine how we got there.

•  Maybe the flip is… there are no standardized tests. 😉
•  FLIP: What are schools?
•  8. Proficiency and proof of accomplishment is the key metric
•  1.  learning happens across environments
•  3. Teaching happens in parks
•  3. Teachers and students are colearners.
•  1. Classroom is defined by the learner.
•  8.  Seat time is irrelevant. The only metric is student learning (mastery of identified learning objectives). It is all about learning, not teaching, not time.
•  6. There are different approaches to education based on interests, abilities, and goals
•  Teaching is the most soughtafter profession for recent college grads
•  5. Teacher shortage  FLIP  we leverage community members and professionals and don’t require as many (or any) FTE
•  Learning is a lifelong process
•  9. All students have an IEP
•  Learning happens for HS students in the workplace so they develop technical and durable skills more rapidly to prepare them for what’s next
•  8. Out of school time is a key metric
•  9. Every student and their strengths are known and appreciated.
•  9. All students have an personalized plan for learning, some designed by themselves.
•  6  Standards and methodologies are not structured to specific ages, but to where students are and what they need.
•  6. There are different approaches to education based on your interests, passions, and skills
•  10  every student is assigned a unique curriculum at birth
•  Education is so far behind this is not difficult.
•  Learning is human nature Drill and Kill does just that kills the natural learning process. Understand how we learn, how design impacts learning opportunity
•  9.everyone deserves to coauthor their own individual learning plan
•  9. Curriculum is incredibly reflective of the community it serves.
•  Our students are telling the story of our bright future  NOW.
•  8. Flip: Students can learn anywhere, anytime, and get credentialed for their learning at their own pace.
•  3. Students and adults are teaching partners
•  3  adults and students are learners
•  4. Students are encouraged to have a positive impact on local and broader communities. This impact is not based upon a college degree
•  1  Learning happens everywhere  the classroom is where we come together to discuss, debrief, and share
•  If we agree that a learner is a cocreator in how we define our classroom, we take a step toward defining our classroom
•  Moving Lessons  walk, talk and learn
•  We can try things out for short periods of time, get feedback and engage others in making it become a reality more often.
•  Begin assessing what matters. Allow mastery not bums in seats. Do away with the ‘teacher owns the classroom’ Make learning open to the broader place and space.
•  10) AI tools and community partnerships allow students to cocreate curricula with their teachers to ensure it is relevant to their interests, identities and communities in order to grow academically.
•  8. Students in the future study the history of school and are confused by “seat time”. They ask, “What does sitting have to do with learning?”
•  8. Report cards are replaced with skills transcript  where its no longer about hours in seat and more about showing what you know
•  Public Community facilities are classrooms
•  9. Gather the entire community together and spend a week designing a process where every student is known. Maybe use the last week of the year, when testing typically happens.
•  The other factor that I think is always important with this set of ‘truths’ is … what does that look like in the city, rural, Rez  because those are places that need to be part of the calculus.
•  I’d love to explore #7 with some revolutionary parent leaders, like Sarah Carpenter at The Memphis Lift, and see what they come up with as the flip and path there
•  Might have to do that as a followup and will report back. I’m their board chair and we’re starting a new visioning process. Very timely!
•  MR review the work done originally by Greg Green at Clintondale High school. North Detroit.
•  Lack of leadership is clearly the biggest problem with education today.
•  Re: Truth = Post Covid American education is struggling with chronic absenteeism. I attended a webinar yesterday that discussed “A Crisis of Student Belonging” that I think could be incredibly useful for someone trying to flip that truth. 

Mason Pashia: Ariel, we’re about to get into your activity. Before we do, a question for both Sarah and Ariel. What factors primed SAUSD to adopt these principles meaningfully and integrate them systemwide?

Sara Skvirsky: It’s often about having the right leadership in place and getting everyone ready to run with it when the moment comes. For SAUSD, AI has been a big catalyst, showing that things are happening faster than expected, creating an imperative to prepare for the future. Chronic absenteeism and other factors also played a role. It’s about being proactive and leading the way.

Ariel Raz: At the instructional level, it’s about harnessing imagination and allowing kids to think beyond. It starts with foundational skills like noticing, paying attention, and caring for one another. As students advance, we add complexity and detail, making futurist thinking more effective by focusing on imagination and worldbuilding.

Mason Pashia: Thank you, Ariel and Sarah. And thank you, Allison, for mentioning Teach the Future in the chat.

Ariel Raz: Teach the Future is a great resource. Now, let’s talk about blurry vision bias—communicating purpose through specific, imageladen rhetoric rather than abstract language. For example, showing the amount of sugar in a glass of Coke is more effective than just listing grams of sugar. Similarly, describing the putrid odor of smoking can motivate behavior change better than abstract warnings.

Ethan Mollick’s research on blurry vision bias shows that specific, realistic images or imageladen language motivate behavior change and create a common purpose. For instance, “the future of space travel” is abstract, but “building the first school on Mars” is a vivid, understandable goal.

Let me demonstrate with a powerful project by Resistance Communications, where young girls in refugee zones were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up. They were photographed in their future career outfits and constructed narratives as if their future goals had been achieved. This shows the power of a strong image of the future.

Now, I want you to step into a time machine and picture the place where you work 10 years in the future. Describe it in detail to your breakout room members, focusing on tangible, sensory experiences.

Excercise Two: Visualize the Future

•  Kids getting water samples out of a local creek
•  Every student prepared to be the best they can be
•  No building perse, a communitybased, culturally centric experience.
•  We talked a lot about mud pits 😉
•  Our group described: An empty classroom. Multi age kids are outside in a mud pit experimenting with the viscosity of mud with local experts
•  Schools as community hubs
• We talked about the importance of individualized learning plans, along with establishing protocols about anytime, anywhere learning.
•  See Green School and collective immersive learning spaces
•  Less siloing in education—more coalitions that allow each student to access what need and want
•  Collaborations between school leaders, intermediaries, students

To wrap things up, Fred Pollack, writing post-World War II, studied the images in Nazi Germany and other European nations, developing the concept of the image of the future. This strong, purposeful visual can track societal progress or devolution.

What images do you see for the future of your school or organization? Are they positive or negative, sustainable or not? What do you expect to change or stay the same in the next 1, 5, or 10 years?

If you liked this activity, it’s available on k12futures.stanford.edu, where we house all these resources. Feel free to get in touch if you want to learn more. It’s been a pleasure to be here.

Mason Pashia: Thank you, Ariel and Sarah. Thank you, everyone else. Have a great rest of your week.

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