The Future-Me instructional technique I’ve developed works to increase student engagement and active learning. The Future-Me technique possess a question where the student has to answer from the perspective of a future version of themselves. This can be enhanced using artwork/video. The idea is that the student would have to use critical thinking and reflection as well as empathy in trying to deliberate how a future version of themselves would address/answer the question posed. Creation and creativity is used in making an illustration/video of themselves answering/addressing the posed question.
The central aspect of the Future-Me technique is to focus on students actively using reflection, empathy, critical thinking, active research, and creativity. This is a new technique that is primed for experimentation with all age groups. The technique is derived from the need for hands-on active learning and to create a real event to foster the experiential learning process and to enhance the learning event thereby creating a positive educational experience.
The Future-Me technique is simple in general design and is flexible enough to work in many environments and situations. The technique basically requires a student to project themselves into the future and decide how they would personally answer a question dealing with the learning material and then present that response in a personalized creative manner. The following are the four main components of this technique.
- WHAT: What the student would be
- WHEN: How far in the future the presenter is pretending to be
- WHY: A question (or questions) that require active research and reflection
- WHERE: Location of where student would be in the future (as specific as possible)
- HOW: A creative means of presenting the students’ answers to the questions posed
Take the simple question of “what do you want to be when you grow up?”
Image that a class just covered different career fields to give students a broad spectrum of what is available in life. Using the Future-Me technique an assignment could be made that would require the student to express what career they wanted to follow in the future. They could create a video, a collage or any other creative means such as giving an in class presentation dressed in clothing appropriate for that career field and answer questions such as: the exact job, what that job entails, where they would work at (company name, location), what they would like most about their job and why they personally decided to on this career. Additionally, they would need to explain where and how they got the information for their presentation. To make even more challenging you could tell them that they would need to be prepared to answer questions about the career from the student audience.
Example:
“For my career I’ve decided to dress-up and be a heart surgeon. I would be 33 years after medical school and needed residency. This job would entail operating on adults to help them overcome complications from cardiovascular disease or some other heart complication. I will be working at Mount Sinai St Luke’s in New York, NY. My favorite part of the job would be in simply being able to help people and in many cases actually saving their lives. I decided on this career above other types of surgeons because heart surgeons have a medium income of $471,053 which would be plenty of money for my future family to live from in New York 😊 I got my information from several different website including salary.com, mountsinai.org, and YouTube. I also called a local heart surgeon and asked him questions about what it’s like. What are your questions?”
But that is just one example and the flexibility of the Future-Me technique allows the instructor to use this for face-to-face and online instruction with modification in anyway needed for the given subject matter or situation.
Imagine an online instructor is teaching a business course focusing on the seven parts of a business plan. The overall finale for the course will be for each student to submit a fully written out business plan along with a professional-looking video summary of their plan. Yet the instructor decides to personalize each step of the business plan courseware with different assignments. Having just covered step 3, Market Analysis, the instructor decides to have students write a short 1-page paper summary of their market research for their personal business, as well as to create a short one to two-minute Future-Me video where they address this step of the business plan as if they are in the future talking about the market analysis aspect of their business. The key would be in personalizing the information and using creativity within the video. As an example, see the video below:
Creative video creation/communication and learning new digital technologies, and many more skills used when using the Future-Me technique are 21st-century skill that all students need to learn (Soffel, 2016;, Anders, 2020). Yes, the example above was for a business class, but these types of skills need to occur throughout students’ educational experiences. Image all the other learning aspects associated with this student creating a video such as this. They would have had to organize the material, use critical thinking in putting the right information together and then summarizing to fit within the allotted time, they used creativity in making the video, grasping the need to be interesting and captivating. Additionally, think about how fun and motivating it would be for students to make videos like this either on there own or in groups. Students like making videos because it is active hands-on learning (Anas, 2019; Scott, Malcolm, Kirkman, & Jenkinson, 2019). Because this makes the learning that much more experiential, there will be much more of an emotional connection which will lead to long-term retention of the course material (Anders, 2019).
What are your thoughts and ideas dealing with this technique? Please share in the comments below.
Reference
Anders, B. (2020). 7 Characteristics of an excellent instructor based on learning science. Emporia, KS: Sovorel Publishing.
Anders, B. (2019). The Army Learning Concept, Army Learning Model: A guide to understanding and implementation. Emporia, KS: Sovorel Publishing.
Anas, I. (2019). Behind the scene: Student-created video as a meaning-making process to promote student active learning. Teaching English with Technology, 19(4), 37-56.
Scott, D. A., Malcolm, C. J., Kirkman, J., & Jenkinson, A. (2019, April). Use of student-created video resources to enhance science practical skills training. In 11th Annual Academic Development Symposium. Aberdeen, United Kingdom.
Soffel, J. (2016, March). What are the 21st-century skills every student needs. World Economic Forum (Vol. 10).