Think Scenarios, Rethink Education

Table of contents | How to obtain this publication | Multilingual summaries

ISBN: 926402364X Publication: 7/4/2006 Pages: 200 Number of tables: 6 Number of graphs: 12

Think Scenarios, Rethink Education What happens in education today will affect the lives of individuals and the health of whole communities for decades to come. Yet educational decision-making is mostly about dealing with pressing immediate issues or seeking more efficient ways of maintaining established practice, rather than about shaping the long term. How to redress the balance? Scenario methods offer one highly promising answer. This latest volume in the Schooling for Tomorrow series goes beyond the OECD’s own set of educational futures already published. It discusses how to develop scenarios and use them to address the challenges confronting policy and practice. Its chapters give both authoritative scholarly overviews and very practical lessons to be applied, including from Jay Ogilvy, a prominent exponent of scenario thinking for the business world, and school change expert Michael Fullan. Educational readers will benefit from the detailed coverage of scenario approaches from other sectors. They will be able to relate to examples of educational “futures thinking in action” initiatives in England, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Ontario, Canada. These initiatives, with OECD active involvement, have brought together leading stakeholders in fresh ways to inject long-term thinking into educational agendas. This book is relevant for the many – policy makers, school leaders and teachers – concerned with the long-term future of education.

Table of contents

• Executive Summary

Part One: Creating and Using Scenarios to Make a Difference in Education

• Chapter 1. Education in the Information Age: Scenarios, Equity, and Equality
• Chapter 2. System Thinking, System Thinkers and Sustainability
• Chapter 3. Scenarios, International Comparisons, and Key Variables for Educational Scenario Analysis
• Chapter 4. Scenario Development: A Typology of Approaches
• Chapter 5. Futures Studies, Scenarios, and the "Possiblity Space" Approach
• Chapter 6. Futures Thinking Methodologies and Options for Education by

Part Two: Futures Thinking in Action

• Chapter 7. England: Using Scenarios to Build Capacities for Leadership
• Chapter 8. The Netherlands: Futures Thinking in Education, School Organisation, and Leadership Development
• Chapter 9. New Zealand: The Secondary Futures Project
• Chapter 10. Ontario (English-Speaking System): The Future of "Teaching as a Profession"
• Chapter 11. Ontario (French-Speaking System): The Vision 2020 Initiative
• Chapter 12. Reflections on the Practice and Potential of Futures Thinking
• Futures Thinking to Clarify Value Differences --Do Schools Need to be Reformed or Reinvented?-
• Consolidate the Foundations of Evidence-Based Futures Thinking --Using Futures Thinking
• Strategically: Inward and Outward Facing Processes 

How to obtain this publication

Readers can access the full version of Think Scenarios, Rethink Education choosing from the following options:

• Subscribers and readers at subscribing institutions can access the online edition via SourceOECD, our online library.
• Non-subscribers can purchase the PDF e-book and/or paper copy via our Online Bookshop.
• Order from your local distributor
• Government officials can go to OLISnet's Publication Locator.
• Access by password for accredited journalists

 Multilingual summaries

• English
• Japanese
• Spanish