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Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World
How to teach big understandings and the ideas that matter most Everyone has an opinion about education, and teachers face pressures from Common Core content standards, high-stakes testing, and countless other directions. But how do we know what today's learners will really need to know in the future? Future Educating Our Children for a Changing World is a toolkit for approaching that question with new insight. There is no one answer to the question of what's worth teaching, but with the tools in this book, you'll be one step closer to constructing a curriculum that prepares students for whatever situations they might face in the future. K-12 teachers and administrators play a crucial role in building a thriving society. David Perkins, founding member and co-director of Project Zero at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, argues that curriculum is one of the most important elements of making students ready for the world of tomorrow. In Future Wise , you'll learn concepts, curriculum criteria, and techniques for prioritizing content so you can guide students toward the big understandings that matter. Future Wise presents a brand new framework for thinking about education. Curriculum can be one of the hardest things for teachers and administrators to change, but David Perkins shows that only by reimagining what we teach can we lead students down the road to functional knowledge. Future Wise is the practical guidebook you need to embark on this important quest.
288 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2014
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296 people want to read
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March 18, 2016
What should our children learn in school? That is the question this book challenges. What is WORTH learning? Their time is precious, the future uncertain. Perkins puts a box around many different strains of educational change, framing it as moving "beyond" where we are right now.
He is a store of great quotes and lines:
John Dewey in his 1916 work, Democracy and Education: “Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
(When we consider subjects and skills to learn, we shouldn't be distracted by All Possible Futures but instead focus on those subjects and skills that are) likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live.
I found this point particularly strong: It depends what we mean by worth. Maybe they are worth learning in some intrinsic sense, that is, good to know in principle. But that answer works only if they stay known. The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives—personal, artistic, civic, something else. Overwhelmingly knowledge unused is forgotten. It’s gone. Whatever its intrinsic value might be, it can’t be lifeworthy unless it’s there.
He talks about "acquaintance" knowledge ... the kind of "I think I remember that" which most of us have just a few years after leaving school. [T]oday’s world does not seem very friendly to an encyclopedic education that has little time to do much more than build acquaintance knowledge.
As someone whose children are taking maths and science and English at high school, this rang true: To generalize, multiyear curricula tend to be constructed as journeys toward expertise, with little effort to ask what topics within the discipline speak most powerfully and directly to the lives learners are likely to live.
I really liked his take on "expert amateurism": Basic education should build expert amateurism more than expertise. The expert amateur understands the basics and applies them confidently, correctly, and flexibly. So rather than know all of calculus, we know that rates of change and accumulated progress are important and we can do some basic work around those to answer common questions from real life. (Which calculus problems rarely reflect)
His challenges to the status are so well-phrased. Achievement focuses on performance without differentiating much between knowledge with clear and important lifeworthiness, like basic numeracy and literacy, and knowledge with questionable lifeworthiness. Information honors only one kind of knowledge, slighting the importance of powerful concepts and general skills, cultivates it in ways that may not stick well, and overinvests in memory in an era of fingertip information. Expertise builds sophistication in the disciplines without considering which ideas speak most powerfully to the larger lives people live.
He advocates structuring education around some big questions. Integrating different strands of learning and making it relevant. But which things are big enough? He proposes: Big Understandings are (*)Big in insight: The understanding helps to reveal how our physical, social, artistic, or other worlds work. (*) Big in action: The understanding empowers us to take effective action professionally, socially, politically, or in other ways. (*) Big in ethics: The understanding urges us toward more ethical, humane, caring mind-sets and conduct. (*) Big in opportunity: The understanding is likely to come up in significant ways in varied circumstances. One might say, a little more playfully, “big in comeuppance."
There are LOTS of references to intriguing avenues for further reading, e.g. Of course, there are many accounts of transfer and its difficulties. To mention one more with a particularly broad moral for practice, Randi Engle and colleagues contrast two instructional styles: bounded framing and expansive framing. In bounded framing, teachers implicitly and explicitly frame the learning agenda as for now, for this class, for this unit, toward the homework and the test. In expansive framing, teachers implicitly and explicitly frame the learning agenda as for later, for sustained meaning, for diverse connections. Engle and colleagues offer several lines of evidence suggesting that bounded versus expansive framing makes a big difference.
I found this very useful to help me frame what I think is important to learn. In the context of the teaching for understanding framework discussed in chapter 5, Veronica Boix Mansilla and Howard Gardner formulate four dimensions of understanding in a discipline: knowledge (good understanding of content), methods (how the discipline builds and tests knowledge), purposes (the discipline as a tool to explain, interpret, and operate on the world), and forms (facility with the symbol systems important to the discipline—for instance, the kinds of mathematics or writing or artistic expression).
I love this: In The Disciplined Mind, Howard Gardner proposed an especially broad tripartite perspective on disciplinary learning. He suggested organizing education around three grand themes: the true, the good, and the beautiful.
I recommend this if you're bumping against an educational system and want to fire up your sense of potential and help you question what's worth covering in that system. If you aren't into education, this probably isn't for you :-)
Although in most settings curriculum trundles along its traditional tracks, many teachers in many schools have gotten uppity, pushing hard on the boundaries of what’s usually taught. There are at least six broad trends—I call them the six beyonds: Beyond basic skills—twenty-first-century skills and dispositions. There’s a global trend toward cultivating critical and creative thinking, collaborative skills and dispositions, leadership, entrepreneurship, and related skills and dispositions that speak strongly to living and thriving in our era. Beyond the traditional disciplines—renewed, hybrid, and less familiar disciplines. Here we find attention to such themes as bioethics, ecology, recent ideas from psychology and sociology, and other areas that address the opportunities and challenges of our times. Beyond discrete disciplines—interdisciplinary topics and problems. Many curricula introduce students to daunting contemporary problems of an emphatically interdisciplinary character, for instance, the causes and possible cures of poverty or the trade-offs of different energy sources. Beyond regional perspectives—global perspectives, problems, and studies. Here we find attention not just to local or national but also to global matters, for instance, world history or the global interactive economic system or the possible meanings of global citizenship. Beyond mastering content—learning to think about the world with the content. Educators are encouraging learners not just to master content academically but also to notice where content connects to life situations, yields insights, and prompts productive action. Beyond prescribed content—much more choice of what to learn. In some settings, educators are supporting and coaching learners in choices about what to study well beyond the typical use of electives.
He is a store of great quotes and lines:
John Dewey in his 1916 work, Democracy and Education: “Only in education, never in the life of farmer, sailor, merchant, physician, or laboratory experimenter, does knowledge mean primarily a store of information aloof from doing.
(When we consider subjects and skills to learn, we shouldn't be distracted by All Possible Futures but instead focus on those subjects and skills that are) likely to matter in the lives learners are likely to live.
I found this point particularly strong: It depends what we mean by worth. Maybe they are worth learning in some intrinsic sense, that is, good to know in principle. But that answer works only if they stay known. The hard fact is that our minds hold on only to knowledge we have occasion to use in some corner of our lives—personal, artistic, civic, something else. Overwhelmingly knowledge unused is forgotten. It’s gone. Whatever its intrinsic value might be, it can’t be lifeworthy unless it’s there.
He talks about "acquaintance" knowledge ... the kind of "I think I remember that" which most of us have just a few years after leaving school. [T]oday’s world does not seem very friendly to an encyclopedic education that has little time to do much more than build acquaintance knowledge.
As someone whose children are taking maths and science and English at high school, this rang true: To generalize, multiyear curricula tend to be constructed as journeys toward expertise, with little effort to ask what topics within the discipline speak most powerfully and directly to the lives learners are likely to live.
I really liked his take on "expert amateurism": Basic education should build expert amateurism more than expertise. The expert amateur understands the basics and applies them confidently, correctly, and flexibly. So rather than know all of calculus, we know that rates of change and accumulated progress are important and we can do some basic work around those to answer common questions from real life. (Which calculus problems rarely reflect)
His challenges to the status are so well-phrased. Achievement focuses on performance without differentiating much between knowledge with clear and important lifeworthiness, like basic numeracy and literacy, and knowledge with questionable lifeworthiness. Information honors only one kind of knowledge, slighting the importance of powerful concepts and general skills, cultivates it in ways that may not stick well, and overinvests in memory in an era of fingertip information. Expertise builds sophistication in the disciplines without considering which ideas speak most powerfully to the larger lives people live.
He advocates structuring education around some big questions. Integrating different strands of learning and making it relevant. But which things are big enough? He proposes: Big Understandings are (*)Big in insight: The understanding helps to reveal how our physical, social, artistic, or other worlds work. (*) Big in action: The understanding empowers us to take effective action professionally, socially, politically, or in other ways. (*) Big in ethics: The understanding urges us toward more ethical, humane, caring mind-sets and conduct. (*) Big in opportunity: The understanding is likely to come up in significant ways in varied circumstances. One might say, a little more playfully, “big in comeuppance."
There are LOTS of references to intriguing avenues for further reading, e.g. Of course, there are many accounts of transfer and its difficulties. To mention one more with a particularly broad moral for practice, Randi Engle and colleagues contrast two instructional styles: bounded framing and expansive framing. In bounded framing, teachers implicitly and explicitly frame the learning agenda as for now, for this class, for this unit, toward the homework and the test. In expansive framing, teachers implicitly and explicitly frame the learning agenda as for later, for sustained meaning, for diverse connections. Engle and colleagues offer several lines of evidence suggesting that bounded versus expansive framing makes a big difference.
I found this very useful to help me frame what I think is important to learn. In the context of the teaching for understanding framework discussed in chapter 5, Veronica Boix Mansilla and Howard Gardner formulate four dimensions of understanding in a discipline: knowledge (good understanding of content), methods (how the discipline builds and tests knowledge), purposes (the discipline as a tool to explain, interpret, and operate on the world), and forms (facility with the symbol systems important to the discipline—for instance, the kinds of mathematics or writing or artistic expression).
I love this: In The Disciplined Mind, Howard Gardner proposed an especially broad tripartite perspective on disciplinary learning. He suggested organizing education around three grand themes: the true, the good, and the beautiful.
I recommend this if you're bumping against an educational system and want to fire up your sense of potential and help you question what's worth covering in that system. If you aren't into education, this probably isn't for you :-)
August 26, 2016
A poorly written 15 page essay that has been expanded into 250 pages. The material that wasn't repeated incessantly every 3 pages was trite and from the research journal of "well, duh." As is true of many of these psuedo-intellectual "exposes" it excels at offering questions and criticizing current pedagogy (in ways that most professionals are already well aware of), but offers little to nothing in the way of how the reader could change the paradigm. Oh, and it's obvious that the author has absolutely no clue about the value of mathematics.
March 3, 2019
I don't remember why this book was on my "Want to Read" list, but it clearly wasn't meant for me.
One of the reviewers said, "This is a must-read book, not just for educators, but for anyone who cares about education, or indeed, lifelong learning." Well, I actually do care about education and lifelong learning, but this was definitely NOT a must-read for me.
This didn't even seem like a book for educators, but for those who are tasked with designing curriculum, and those who are engaged in scholarly discussions around the philosophical underpinnings of education.
It was waaaay too detailed and instructive in curriculum design for the average reader. No surprise then that the review above was written by a Professor Emeritus in the School of Education at Indiana University.
The main concept of pursuing "lifeworthy" learning, and the stories and philosophy behind what that is, exactly, were interesting, and even inspiring. But I realized early on that I could have gained what I needed from this book in an article. So I did what I rarely do, and I did it with abandon.......I skimmed, skimmed, skimmed.
One of the reviewers said, "This is a must-read book, not just for educators, but for anyone who cares about education, or indeed, lifelong learning." Well, I actually do care about education and lifelong learning, but this was definitely NOT a must-read for me.
This didn't even seem like a book for educators, but for those who are tasked with designing curriculum, and those who are engaged in scholarly discussions around the philosophical underpinnings of education.
It was waaaay too detailed and instructive in curriculum design for the average reader. No surprise then that the review above was written by a Professor Emeritus in the School of Education at Indiana University.
The main concept of pursuing "lifeworthy" learning, and the stories and philosophy behind what that is, exactly, were interesting, and even inspiring. But I realized early on that I could have gained what I needed from this book in an article. So I did what I rarely do, and I did it with abandon.......I skimmed, skimmed, skimmed.
June 28, 2015
A thoughtful and engaging read about the importance of designing a lifeworthy curriculum for students. Perkins doesn't subscribe to any one particular method. Rather, he explores the larger importance of finding big understandings and questions that students will be able to take with them for the future. This text would work nicely as a book club title, or as a primary resource for an introductory course for future teachers and administrators. Highly recommended.
August 25, 2016
Didn't finish. I couldn't bear it any longer.
September 4, 2016
I loved what he said, didn't like how he said it.
March 13, 2021
I’m becoming increasingly wary of the kind of bluster of people like Perkins, and this book is a supreme example of people like him who have mastered the craft of sounding profound while really saying very little of any real importance at all. To be fair to him, right at the outset of the book he makes is clear that despite having devoted the entire book to the subject of what exactly we should be teaching kids in school, he assures us that he will make absolutely no attempt to attempt to answer this question at all, and avoid it he does. Instead, like many of his ilk he devotes much time and effort to a labourious discussion of big ideas that are effectively impossible to avoid if you’re going to grow and learn and interact with other learners.
“Much of my professional work over several decades has concerned the teaching of thinking“ 😲🤔🙄
p199
I wonder what else we can add to this list that is effectively biologically primary... I remember a colleague who made a good point about the reports we were expected to write, where we were asked to assess “speaking and listening“; her contention was why we were assessing something that we haven’t taught? What about... walking? talking? looking? breathing? Certainly the for ’4 Cs’ of 21st-century learning would qualify: creativity , communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. Here’s a good suggestion for cutting down the amount of curriculum content: don’t expect teachers to teach things that can’t actually be taught by them anyway, that will be acquired naturally over time as they are biologically primary. Like thinking]
“Much of my professional work over several decades has concerned the teaching of thinking“ 😲🤔🙄
p199
I wonder what else we can add to this list that is effectively biologically primary... I remember a colleague who made a good point about the reports we were expected to write, where we were asked to assess “speaking and listening“; her contention was why we were assessing something that we haven’t taught? What about... walking? talking? looking? breathing? Certainly the for ’4 Cs’ of 21st-century learning would qualify: creativity , communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. Here’s a good suggestion for cutting down the amount of curriculum content: don’t expect teachers to teach things that can’t actually be taught by them anyway, that will be acquired naturally over time as they are biologically primary. Like thinking]
November 22, 2020
Educating for the future and question ourselves what is worth learning is definitely crucial for changing the way schools teach an incredible amount o thing considered important but with very little practical use in real life. This books unfortunately is a collection of same ideas repeated over and over throughout 10 chapters (the author even suggests the reader to find other books of his that will certainty talk about the same things). Rather than a call to action, it’s a call to think about the educational system, which is great, but there’s little to add to what has been being discussed for the last 50 years or so. The only difference is that we now have new types of technology that can be allied to teaching with purpose, but how can we implement those new ideas to different contexts of different nations? The book does not tackle this issues but at least the author is sincere when he says that the main question of the book “what’s worth learning?” cannot be answered because there’s no formula or magic trick. If only he could suggest ways e successful case studies...
October 25, 2022
Dentro de la construcción de un currículo es importante establecer ciertas preguntas que nacen de la base donde los miembros de la comunidad deben ser capaces de proyectarse a futuro hacia habilidades y o disciplinas importantes para la vida en el siglo actual, desde esa reflexión el libro es un gran aporte que ayuda a la reflexión de aquellos hitos más que el de brindar una respuesta definitiva, y es bueno rescatar que el libro desde un comienzo manifiesta que su intención no es dar aquella respuesta sino ahondar en el construcción del pensamiento que la buscará
December 14, 2020
A well researched, eloquently phrased, and densely packed book focusing on school pedagogy. And I take the point on it being pseudo-intellectual. After all the debates on life worthiness, big questions, and knowledge buckets, however, it clearly lacks a (preferably bullet-pointed) synthesized to-do list for education professionals to implement paradigm-shifting curriculums.
March 11, 2021
I read this quite a while ago, but I recall finding many insightful, honest and useful observations about learning. Good depth for folks who are serious about the realities of "real" learning, not the academic nonsense of traditional and rather dull and meaningless content-based curriculum (but I digress - smile).
February 11, 2017
Groping Smart
Perkins outlines potential frameworks for thinking about what's worth learning. By postulating questions instead of solidifying answers he gives us a way to grope ahead smart as we move ahead in the shifting g world of education.
Perkins outlines potential frameworks for thinking about what's worth learning. By postulating questions instead of solidifying answers he gives us a way to grope ahead smart as we move ahead in the shifting g world of education.
March 1, 2017
As with most books in this subject area, Future Wise contains a core of good ideas, stretched out and twisted up in convoluted language.
May 23, 2019
For teachers dedicated to making learning lifeworthy.
June 9, 2016
I loved Future Wise and its simple call to ask big questions, make learning life worthy and transferring knowledge into being life ready. As a US History teacher it is certainly making me re-think how I teach and what I teach to my students, using their input via questions.
It is a quick and relatable read for anyone who works in youth development spaces even outside of teaching. I am definitely planning some things around this for my class next year and my youth development organization.
It is a quick and relatable read for anyone who works in youth development spaces even outside of teaching. I am definitely planning some things around this for my class next year and my youth development organization.
August 16, 2015
I haven't read anything by David Perkins that didn't make me stop and think. This is the same - a great conversation! I like the idea of considering the usefulness for all time of what is being taught and asked of children. Something I will think about for a long time.
March 3, 2016
Interesting book on setting big priorities for "Life-worthy" learning and the removal (not in all cases) of the "Niche Learning" of the industrial model. Need big picture type people to work out the details. Inquiry based learning fits nicely here.
February 19, 2021
Do you know when you have been in a profession for a while and you realize some common sense things you’ve picked up over the years? That’s exactly what this author did and then they published it. Basically listen to your students and they’ll do well. Believe in them.
April 12, 2015
An inspiration for teachers and administrators to rethink what's taught in the classrooms and why.
September 29, 2017
"This curriculum includes our Exhibit A of quadratic equations, which hardly anyone uses. It also includes a number of other hardly ever used twists and turns of advanced algebra, and then calculus itself, an entire subject that hardly anyone ever uses" (p. 31)
I find it difficult to listen to Perkins as he makes these claims that have no researched basis. This occurs frequently in this book and it is incredibly frustrating to read. I try to think about what he is saying beyond the obvious, but it is a challenge.
I find it difficult to listen to Perkins as he makes these claims that have no researched basis. This occurs frequently in this book and it is incredibly frustrating to read. I try to think about what he is saying beyond the obvious, but it is a challenge.
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