ten trends 2017

Ten Trends in education 2017

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CORE's Ten Trends 2017

CORE’s Ten Trends for 2017 are now available to view and use for personal reflection, research or as a catalyst for staff discussion.

Every year our team at CORE invests time drawing together ideas from a range of areas to create our Ten Trends. There’s a lot of value for our staff in doing so as it ensures we are keeping abreast of current trends and developments and thinking about how they may impact on the education sector. In addition, when we share these with the wider community of educators, they provide a catalyst for further exploration, debate and discussion in staffrooms across the country – and further afield.

We believe these trends are a way of assisting educators and others to gain a broader perspective on the changes taking place in our schools and society. Every day we are challenged by new things happening and new technologies driving some of this – and this exponentially changing world can often be overwhelming. By taking some time to examine the trends, and to examine both the positive and negative impacts of each, we can be better prepared to respond to the changes that may occur, to understand the drivers behind them, and to work in ways that ensure a human response is made.

This year we’ve placed a greater emphasis on explaining the importance of the five central trend areas in our diagram. These are really the domains in which the things we identify as trends are having an impact – and where we are seeing the changes occur in our educational institutions and in society generally. For each of these five domains we have focused on two things that are illustrative of these trends – one of which is impacting on our lives in the immediate future, the second being a little further off, but worth watching!

Another change this year is that we have decided to publish our trends as a PDF document that you can download from the CORE website. We’ll still be publishing them electronically on our website – including video material, but we’re now publishing these in PDF format in response to feedback received over the past couple of years from educators and school leaders who are keen to use them for research or as conversation starters with staff.

If you’d like to be a part of some wider discussions around these trends,  I encourage you to join the Ten Trends group in edSpace, our new online community space, where educators from across New Zealand are taking time to engage with each other in discussing things that matter to them, their learners and their communities.

Derek Wenmoth interviewed by Anaru White about CORE’s Ten Trends 2017

Links:

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big-data-landscape

Big Data and analytics can change education in three positive ways

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big data

Big Data is described as the huge sets of electronic data that is available for analysing, whereas Analytics, according to Wikipedia, is "the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data."  New technologies make it all possible, as they provide massive storage for any kind of data, enormous processing power, and the ability to handle virtually limitless concurrent tasks or jobs.

What does this mean for education?

Analytics profoundly shape the educational reality that they measure. What is measured and reported through the use of infographics or dashboards becomes more important than what is not reported. All levels of education are becoming data-driven organisations. ‘Big Data’ and the use of analytics can provide insights into some of the gnarly challenges associated with improving equity and excellence.

The key thing is human assumptions underpin data collecting, analysing, interpreting, and reporting, and these assumptions are then applied to the tools and analytics. For example, in the national and international analytics it is assumed that literacy, mathematics, and science achievement are essential life skills and signal that a country is preparing young people for the future. One problem with this is that readers of the reports may ‘forget’ things such as literacy is of service to the curriculum (and is not the curriculum). For example, in New Zealand, student success is about students being “confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learner” (and achievement both leads to and is because of student success) (NZC and expanded in ERO indicators).

For learning organisations to be data-driven organisations, all assumptions should be transparent and checked to ensure that they align with the purpose of education and the outcomes we want for our young people:

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CORE's Ten Trends 2016

Ten Trends 2016

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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:

Ten Trends 2016 overview

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Ten Trends 2015: Global Connectedness

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In our globally connected world, the challenge for us as educators is to prepare our learners to take advantage of all that global connectivity offers and encourage leaners to question, investigate, and act as global citizens. At the same time, the globally connected world offers educators  a wide range of professional learning opportunities to learn about new technologies, new learning and teaching approaches, emerging pedagogies, and the chance to build connections with other educators. Last month (October) provided a good example of this.

Throughout October, educators in New Zealand and beyond were able to prepare themselves to support globally connected learners by participating in Connected Educator Aotearoa New Zealand (CENZ), a global professional learning event. The CENZ goals include:

  1. Helping more schools, kura, and ECE services promote and integrate online social learning into their formal professional development.
  2. Stimulating and supporting collaboration and innovation in professional development.
  3. Getting more educators connected (to each other).
  4. Deepening and sustaining the learning of those already connected.

But the professional learning clearly doesn’t begin and end with the October event. There are many ongoing opportunities for educators.

Starter Kete: the Starter kete takes a 31-days approach, providing background information, links, and activities to assist you to get more connected every day. This can be for your own professional learning or for school leaders to support their staff to embed new practices in their teaching and learning.

Connected Educators NZ

The Toolkit for staff: a toolkit full of resources and materials designed to help spread the word and get staff involved during 2015 and beyond. While the focus is on October’s events, there is information about how schools, kura, ECE services, and clusters/networks can launch their own events complete with examples and ready-to-use tools to assist you in finding other educators interested in collaborating.

Online communities: Collaborating through discussion in professional online communities sits at the heart of many educators’ personal learning networks. New Zealand online communities offer workshops, webinars, and social networking conversations. Examples of online communities include:

There are also Twitter chat communities such as: #edchatnz, #leaderchatnz, #engchatnz, #scichatnz, and #KIDspeakNZ.

Find, join, and participate in a community that suits your needs, locally, and globally. Check out the Global Community Directory, the Connected Educators global list. Browse, explore, and add your own event.

Video record: lastly, there is a growing record of global connectedness being posted on CORE’s EDtalks website and Youtube channels, including a series of live-streamed seminars, and interviews with people who participated in CENZ activity at ULearn15.

Edtalks

Teachers are challenged to engage, enable, and empower learners in a technology-rich and fast-changing environment. They strive to provide appropriate learning opportunities that consider learning dispositions, essential learning areas, and key competencies.

Collaborating with and learning from other educators in New Zealand and around the world can enable us to engage with rich discussions and varied perspectives. Connecting globally can open windows on new pedagogies and practices, and ways that new technologies can assist us to engage in new ways with learners’ expectations and needs.

There are a plethora of opportunities for both students and teachers in being part of a global village of learning, information-sharing, and creation opportunities.

CORE’s Ten Trends:

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Ten Trends 2015: Maker Culture

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Let me tell you about a little annoyance I have in my life — maybe it’s in yours as well. No matter how carefully I fold them, knot them gently or, carefully place them, my earbud headphones always unravel in my bag and (like a little octopus) wrap themselves around everything in sight. So when I need them, I end up emptying my whole bag just to disentangle them.
Every. Single. Time.

So rather than accepting a future of pulling everything out of my bag when I need my earbuds I chose to do something about. My two options were:

  1. hope someone has created the perfect solution for me (and made it available at a reasonable price) or
  2. take destiny into my own hands, learn a few things and make something myself that solved the problem.

This second option, which taps into human-kind’s innate ability to make tools and solve problems, is at the heart of what’s known as the ‘maker movement’.

Let me give you a bit of background: the maker movement takes advantage of the fact that technology is at the point now where previously industry-level prototyping tools (modelling software, 3D printers, electronics, laser cutters) are now affordable for many schools.  So we literally have the tools available to us to help our kids be inventors.

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