The Rings of Destiny

There’s refreshing transformation that’s sweeping across modern education systems: the conscious move away from defining student success merely through the lens of academic achievement. In this We’re placing our spotlight on Future Design School’s innovative concept, the “Portrait of a Future Ready Graduate.” This is found in their groundbreaking Future of Education Report — Special Edition.

Imagine equipping students with not just academic knowledge, but with an impressive portfolio of lifelong learning skills and a keen adaptability for a multitude of future pathways. That’s exactly what the Portrait of a Future Ready Graduate does, by drawing together essential transferable skills, competencies, and attitudes that go beyond academics.

The heartbeat of this transformative approach is the “Conscious Pursuit of Learning,” a self-motivated quest for knowledge and personal growth. We’re talking about raising students who are not just learners, but pioneers, harnessing metacognition, self-regulation, responsible decision-making, and resourcefulness.

This revolutionary portrait is illustrated through interconnected ‘rings’, each depicting a distinct facet of student development:

1. Wellbeing: The cornerstone for learning, wellbeing is a springboard to personal growth, encapsulating identity, optimism, and psychological safety.
2. Social Emotional Learning: Building on wellbeing, this ring stresses on emotional intelligence, decision-making, and self and social awareness. It’s all about growing individuals who are well attuned to their emotions and social cues.
3. Learning Skills: This ring underscores the critical tools needed for deep learning engagement and lifelong knowledge acquisition. Metacognition, constructive doubt, goal setting, long-term memory, self-reflection — the works.
4. Character Development: This aspect grooms great learners and citizens, fostering ambition, curiosity, empathy, resourcefulness, and stewardship.
5. Future Ready Attributes: Here, we encapsulate the transferable skills necessary to navigate our fast-paced world, including collaboration, communication, creativity, critical thinking, design thinking, entrepreneurship, equity and inclusion, and global and future vision.

Future Design School are helping schools across the globe to adopt and drive these future-ready strategies. They’ve worked with over 50000 educators in 60+ countries. The full report is definitely worth a read and it resonates so much with us at Edufuturists. There is very much a shared ambition that seemed to be articulated in our podcast with Les McBeth too: to encourage students to continually embark on a conscious pursuit of lifelong learning and personal growth, free from the shackles of standardised assessments and strangulated curricula.