I wrote a post here that I crossposted to NWP Studio.  Tanya Baker has been a very welcoming facilitator there and this was no exception.  She wrote:

This is really lovely. I can imagine sharing this as an icebreaker too…. asking students which fears/worries they have about learning (fill in the content that you teach) and what advice they want to take with them into the year 🙂 

I think that there are two aspects of teaching writing that I have uncovered for myself at the close of my career: I am teaching research and I am teaching learners how to create personal learning networks. A third one has come to me now that I have a bit more time: learning how to cast into the future, personal, pedagogical, and professional.

I wish we could do that here at Write Now. I think Deeper Dives might work. I am thinking about doing this with my friends at EPIC learning (Kayla and Charlene are the driving forces there) although I have not broached the topic with them, I think January 2023 might be a possible start date.

If I was a better salesperson, this is where I would make the ask from my network, but this is just a strong possibility, adjacently held. Just blazing into the big nothing right now.

Tanya shot back with the classic “tell me more”.

I’m intrigued, Terry. I would love for you to say more about what you mean by that “learning how to cast into the future” and I also wonder what a deeper dive into this (or to support this? or to do this?) might look like.

Color me curious, intrigued, interested….

Ask me to teacher-splain?  Say no more.

By learning to cast into the future what I mean has two aspects. First, how do we look for the cues from the future in our own lives. Second, how do we help learners become capable of doing the same for themselves.

A deeper dive into this would entail examining the forces from the future that drive what happens now or in the near-now. For example, I have been putting my finger to the wind in the general topic of new forms of composition. I have been watching how there are amazing new forms of writing that our students and our colleagues might be doing in the near to far future. ((And that we might be getting students to teach us about.) The unusual driver for this was reading that someone was writing the alt-text captions for
Webb Telescope images. That new idea from the future provoked me to look further into my own learning network for more ‘forces from the future’ like this. And they exist.

What a potential course might look like for teachers is to do their own ‘future driving force’ project like the evolving one above. Second, your own project could be a mentor text showing students how to go about their own forecast from the future. Or you could adopt others from the collaborative course this might become. Half-baked? Yes, that is the only way I know how to teach anything.

There are many holes in this ‘zero iteration’ of a prototype course whose purpose is to show how to forecast but not predict the future.  I admit I am stealing most of the intellectual heavy lifting for this from Bob Johansen and Jane McGonigal of the Institute for the Future and Otto Scharmer’s Presencing Institute.   During the worst of the pandemic, I saw and felt an inchoate need to get a grasp on the hot skillet of the future.  These folks provide handles for that task of making the future more amenable to the present.  I would like to help do that, too.  I think of it as mental and intellectual health insurance for our students.