We’re regularly reminded that, in today’s world, the only constant is change. So, how can we best prepare ourselves and our organisations for this change? And, more importantly, how should we be shaping and providing the education experiences for our tamariki to ensure they grow up, confident in facing the changing work that they will inherit from us? Most of the time we find ourselves responding to change.
‘I find the Ten Trends videos and resource material extremely valuable and excellent PD. They provide great inspiration, and challenge my thinking about my own teaching and what I am doing to empower my learners to be successful navigators of a rapidly changing world.’ (Educator feedback on 2014 survey)
Why is it that this change often comes as a surprise? And what can we do to ‘stay ahead of the game’?
Modern educators know the value of staying relevant and connected to the world around us. We might be leading change in schools and centres, developing vision and strategic direction, or helping our communities understand new thinking in education — whenever we need to innovate and problem solve, it is vital that we ground our thinking in research and effective practices by connecting to sources beyond our immediate context.
A ‘future-focused’ approach is to engage in a process of horizon scanning, to identify and understand some of the trends that are emerging, and to reflect on these in ways that help us imagine what some of the future scenarios may be. For nine years, CORE Education has sought to support the New Zealand education sectors and beyond to look at developments on the horizon as a provocation for thinking afresh about what we are currently doing to support our learners.
Each year, CORE Education’s researchers, educators, and digital technology experts pool their expertise and combine their understanding and evidence of the ways that digital technologies are influencing all aspects of education. The result is our list of the ten trends that are expected to make a growing impact upon education in New Zealand in the coming year.
We’ve categorized our trends in five key areas that are used in much of the future-focused research: structural, cultural, technological, economic and process. The purpose in presenting these trends each year is to provide a glimpse of the ‘big picture’ within which we operate in the education system. It is important to recognise that these are trends, not specific predictions. They indicate broad developments across multiple fields that are likely to influence all our work in coming months and years. As such, they are offered to provoke further research, investigation, and discussion to help leaders and educators determine what might affect strategic planning.
We invite you to take these trends and use them as a focus for discussions among your staff, students, and community. We have found that organisations get best use out of this resource in the following ways:
- Shared reading and stimulus for professional learning sessions and events
- Reference points for teacher inquiries
- Provocation for conversation in lead teams as a prelude to visioning and strategic planning
- Accessible, dip-in reading for staff and communities
- Reference points for research
CORE's Ten Trends 2016:
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Hi there
I have just been looking at these trends and I wonder whether rather than being data-driven, the trend should be "needs driven". Data is essential because it helps us form a picture of the needs of students; and changes in technology are certainly allowing the analytics which enable better information about students. But I think the future trend is not being driven by data but being driven by the needs, interests and desires of children. So… learning starts with the needs of all children and then learning is designed to meet all their needs. Just a thought….
Hi Lesley
thanks for your comment – great to have the discussion going. Your point is a really good stimulus for the discussion that we hope will be provoked here. I couldn't agree more re the needs of learners being the focal point of our efforts in schools – I guess my perspective is that having data to support our assessment of what those needs are is important here, thus the thinking about being data-driven. I think we're talking about the same thing – but agree that the semantics of putting the data first could be a distractor.
Cheers, Derek