The Course Catalog of the Future
The curriculum at most schools evolves slowly, even when the world is changing rapidly. I often wonder why, in 2023, we still silo most academic disciplines, beginning in kindergarten and continuing through high school graduation. The world’s challenges and opportunities are decidedly transdisciplinary in nature, and there is almost no career - outside of academia - that asks us to compartmentalize the skills and information from one discipline. Perhaps more curious to me is that there are emerging skills and information that feel urgent and students aren’t learning them at all.
When I think about the world as it is now and will be in the future and not the way it has been, I imagine a course catalog that looks vastly different from what most schools teach today. It would be grounded in skillsets, habits and mindsets. It would be geared toward active, transdisciplinary learning focused not on what students know, but what they can do, and it would help students navigate the issues of today, not the early 20th century’s industrial landscape. It also would acknowledge that the entirety of human knowledge can be carried around in our pockets.
To that end here are three high school course descriptions I would hope to see in a modern, relevant, and engaging course catalog. What would you add? (We'd love to feature either courses you currently offer or those you would like to offer in the future.)
Improvising with Human and Artificial Intelligence
If you want to be a successful collaborator, partner and coworker in a modern workplace, you’ll need to have the habits, skill sets and mindsets of an improviser. And now, with AI being one of your most helpful and brilliant collaborators, you’ll need to learn what it means to improvise with a non-sentient being.
In this class you will learn how to:
Accept offers from your human and AI partners, “say yes” and build on these offers.
Ask better questions that maximize ChatGPT and other AI platforms.
Make your partner look brilliant - even if your partner is a robot.
Identify misinformation and recognize factual errors your AI or human partners might share without blocking them or shutting them down
Detach from your ideas and be open to ideas from your human and AI partners
Learn how to both lead and follow, headline and showcase others
Learn when human partners and when AI partnership would be more helpful in solving certain times of problems or generating ideas and opportunities
During this course, we will engage in improv games and activities as well as work collaboratively on real world problems where we can practice and apply these skills in real time.
We can all learn a lot about collaborating with both our human and AI partners. This class will ensure that you can maximize your collaboration skills to be the most effective collaborator and problem solver around.
This class meets Monday-Friday for three weeks during X block.
Your Brain on Media
This class combines media literacy, behavioral economics, and neuroscience to explain what happens to your brain when it encounters media of all kinds. Whether you are watching a mainstream news channel, reading a newspaper or scrolling through TikTok, your brain will respond in a variety of ways. This class will address many topics including:
Why you can’t stop scrolling
How Social Media impacts your memory, your attention span, your sleep and your mental health
Dopamine, serotonin and other chemicals your brain releases when it encounters media and why social media users’ brains are similar to those of gamblers and drug addicts
How algorithms support and deepen our cognitive biases
How to identify misinformation by examining sources and through lateral research
If it Bleeds it Leads: Why fear is a powerful tactic of media
How media rewires our brain
How to make choices about what kind and how much media is safe to consume
How engaging in media forms across political and social lines builds empathy and more productive discourse
How you can impact change through lobbying
This is a semester-long course and students will receive upper level science credit.
The Future
History class will never seem more relevant as you use some of the same skills sets and mindsets of historians to study the future and build a new skill set by learning how to think like a futurist. In this class students will:
Learn how to hunt for signals
Build scenarios based on the World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report and other significant signals
Engage in simulations
Create artifacts from the future
Understand how historical contexts have driven human behavior and what that might mean for future challenges and opportunities
Explore future technologies and other drivers that are on the fringe today that might be mainstream tomorrow
Design for preferred futures
Read and write short science fiction
This course is year-long and combines history, literature, creative writing, and technology.
Even though many school leaders I speak with fully admit to the antiquated curriculum and pedagogy at their school, they struggle with mobilizing the change against an overwhelming inertia. “People are tired." "There is no appetite to design new courses.” “The colleges want to see the traditional classes on transcripts.” “Parents won’t like it.” “We don’t have time for new courses.”
All of these things are both true and not true. There will always be resistance and status quo bias, and much of that resistance is grounded in fear and a perceived threat to our value proposition as educators and institutions. But if our job as schools is to do what is best for our students and to prepare students for the future, we can do better. We can be more creative. We can take some risks. We can pilot new classes that range from a year long course to a three week seminar. We can draw on the energy of our early adopters who are excited about this work. And when you hear those voices in your head or at the faculty that say, “But we can’t!” it's your obligation as a leader to say, “Yes we can.” That is what leaders do.
