It’s not unusual for schools these days to engage their faculties in summer reads. SAIS schools are assigning books covering the gamut: Brain Rules, The Anatomy of Peace, Teach Your Children Well, To Sell is Human, The Falconer. A collective read is often an effective professional learning strategy, engaging the faculty in conversations around a central targeted focus.
However, Collegiate School in Richmond, Virginia is tacking a different course. Led by Academic Dean David Colon, Collegiate is forgoing reading for “signaling.” Yes, you read that right. They’re filtering through the noise to find the signals that lead them to predict the future and how they might best prepare students to thrive in that brave new world.
Partnering with The Institute for the Future, Collegiate is intent on generating conversations about the nature of the future and how the school is prepared to integrate the disruptions and innovations that mark each new age.
Collegiate “Summer” Reading 2013
Collegiate’s faculty is charged this summer with two tasks 1) think like a futurist and 2) collect and submit signals.
What are signals? According to The Institute for the Future, a signal “is typically a small or local innovation or disruption that has the potential to grow in scale and geographic distribution. A signal can be a new product, a new practice, a new market strategy, a new policy, or new technology. It can be an event, a local trend, or an organization. It can also be a recently revealed problem or state of affairs. In short, it is something that catches our attention at one scale and in one locale and points to larger implications for other locales or even globally.”
Collegiate is asking its faculty to think about signals in two ways:
1. In the context of society at large. How will the signal impact the world in which we live?
2. In the context of your role(s) as an educator. How will the signal impact education?
Essentially, Collegiate wants its educators to act as detectives this summer and examine the world around them with critical eyes. In late summer, they will re-group in pre-planning to share their artifacts, their discoveries, and their predictions.
Inspired by this summer homework assignment, I took Collegiate’s challenge.
Does the signal I’m hearing from today’s youth sound a weaker reliance on the written or spoken word and a stronger emphasis on the photo to tell a story? Teenagers, it seems, assume the role of casual “daters” when it comes to technology, enjoying an app for a time but ditching it in a heartbeat when a more attractive, interesting technology comes along. They don’t get wedded down to anything, choosing instead to see what suits their needs in the present moment. The ease and speed with which they become proficient with technology explains their willingness to flirt with new applications, even to the point of creating them when they have a need unmet. Facebook offered connection via words and photos, but it demanded somewhat of a commitment. Twitter, with its enticing ephemeral nature, offered a level of anonymity and a voyeuristic thrill. Now, the hot number is Instagram: a picture tells the story, perhaps with the addition of a short comment that rarely approaches the 140-character tome expanse of a tweet.
So how does the manner in which teens approach technology portend implications for the future and how will that signal I’m receiving impact education? That desire to ask questions is the type of mind-set we seek to engender in our students and which Collegiate faculty are building both in their students and in themselves.
Quite an innovative approach to the collective summer faculty experience. Wonder what it signals for the future of education!
