Workshops and master classes offered by Education Futures

Our method

Our approach to workshops and master classes is to lecture less and attend to participants’ learning more, meeting each learner where he or she is at in their development and creating more authentic opportunities for personal growth.

Our idea is to treat our workshops and master classes as true seminars. On a typical day, we start the morning with an interactive talk intended to give all participants a base of information needed, and we then jump into activities and group assignments where we ask:

1. What do you want to bring into the world?
2. How do you want to contribute?
3. What are the knowledge resources needed?
4. How can we work to help make it happen during our time together?

We build futures design and prototyping experiences. Learners are asked to come prepared with their own ideas, resources, and questions to share with the whole group. We don’t deliver one-time engagements where the knowledge gained disappear as quickly as it is learned. Participants in our master classes are invited to continue their work online through a facilitated Moodle environment for weeks beyond the class, earning a certificate from Education Futures upon completion.

Sample workshops and master classes offered

Personal leadership in Knowmad Society (two-day or five-day master class)
This workshop looks at the future of work, job-related learning, and how we relate with each other in the emerging knowmad paradigm. We further explore a framework for us, as leaders in our personal lives and in our greater communities, to navigate a rapidly changing society, disentangling data, information, knowledge, and innovation; and, plot a pathway for maximizing the creativity and innovation capital of organizational groups.

Introduction to Invisible Learning (half-day or full-day workshop)
Invisible learning is a conceptual framework that seeks to integrate different perspectives toward a new paradigm of learning and development, particularly in regard to the context of 21st-century human capital. This view takes into account the impacts of technological advances and changes in formal, non-formal, informal, and intermediate meta-spaces of learning. Invisible learning is not a theory but is a meta-theory that integrates different ideas and perspectives into a proto-epistemological paradigm that invites further co-creation within a “beta” stage of construction. Using this perspective as a guide, we seek to explore an ecology of options for creating educational paradigms that are relevant for the future.

Leapfrog practices in innovation leadership (half-day workshop)
This workshop explores how leapfrogging allows individuals and organizations to get ahead of the competition or the state of the art through innovative, time-and-cost-saving means. Participants learn the techniques of leapfrogging and chart their own plan and opportunities within targeted circumstances and goals.

The Knowmad Café research method (two-day master class)
As an extension of the World Café conversation activity into a qualitative research procedure, the Knowmad Café is a structured process in which groups of people address questions that face the future of their communities. In this research approach, data collected from conversations are used in open, inductive inquiry, using a digital toolset, in which data collected from many sites and regions may be gathered to provide for comparative analysis and a more complete picture of responses to study questions. Master class participants will learn how to facilitate the Knowmad Café and how to use digital tools for qualitative data analysis of this novel process. (Note: Previous research experience highly recommended.)

Futures of work: Coping with uncertain times (half-day or full-day workshop)
In an era of accelerating change, the careers and professions that students study for today may no longer exist when they complete schooling. What are the potential futures of work? How do we as individuals –and human capital development organizations—prepare for work contexts that may be radically different than exist today? Participants in the workshop will develop opportunity-focused Leapfrog actions that consider these questions.

Imagination, creativity, and innovation (two-day master class)
This blended in-person and virtual master class explores major contributions by participants of creativity, imagination, ideas, thought leadership, and invention. Creativity marshals and deploys skills that shape the products of imagination: new ideas, perspectives, insights, visions, models, and possibilities. In turn, creativity provokes imagination, which is the extension of created products into the realm of invention, or the development of entirely new ways of thinking. Innovation is the embodiment of inventions within contexts that can provide for crucial tests of applied irrelevance or applicability.