Developing Effective Future Educational leaders: Stressing the Need for Futures Thinking Tools

Futures thinking is a method of developing the capacity of school and system leaders in education to function as future thinkers. We need to include education leaders in discussions about global and local trends and provide them the opportunity to debate what their desired futures might look like in response to the current societal trends. The goal is to use scenario analysis and futures thinking to help establish a group of future literate education leaders who will discuss and influence policy formulation as well as further develop performance and development practises and cultures. Strand one of a new PhD research study Future Schooling and Futures Thinking: Emerging Forms of Learning Educational and Schools’ Leaders Perspectives makes this clear and has provided many unexpected results from the data collected. The researcher aimed to understand how the system and school leaders would respond to scenarios of future schooling the scenarios as constructed in the OCED Schooling for Tomorrow scenarios, the HolonIQ five scenarios for the Future of Learning and Talent, and the Sanborn et al. Future of Education: Four Scenarios.