What’s in it for school teachers to work with the FUTE material

Are you tired of teaching unmotivated pupils and students?

Would you like to try teaching in a new way, but do not know how to start changing?

The FUTE method could be the solution.

All kinds of innovation and change take time – this is a fact! If you want to innovative your teaching – for example by creating variation or engage the pupils more, the FUTE material can help you to keep you on the track, obtain success with your effort and save time in your innovation process

Using design thinking in your teaching will help you as a teacher to work with the 21st century skills. The FUTE material can help you to create teaching and engage your pupils in a way where you have the role as facilitator and guide your pupils through a process where they learn. Using the cards will help you to keep the process on track and limit the feeling of “loosing control” when you change a bit your role from being a traditional teacher to becoming a facilitator of learning.

If you are a school manager, you can use the FUTE material to facilitate processes, where you want to engage your staff in order to find solutions on dilemmas or challenges where everybody as an interest and a say.

Top 10 Recommendations

Based on the input from all partners, the pilot projects and the evaluation results from the FUTE project, a list of Top 10 recommendations have been formulated as well as three basic rules for starting to work with design approaches in schools, and the FUTE material in particular.

Three basic rules

Teachers wishing to start experimenting with design thinking and especially the FUTE material would do well in recognising the three basic rules of getting started with design thinking:

FUTE and the 21st century skills

The term 21st Century skills has been widely adopted internationally by business leaders, governmental agencies, academies and most importantly in the context of FUTE, educators. Broadly speaking ´, it refers to the skills and attributes that have been identified as being essential for success in the 21st century, characterised by a rapidly evolving digital society. Skills such as problem solving, team-working, analytical and critical thinking skills are increasingly seen as more important than the traditional academic skills which are primarily content-based, and which are often measured by memory recall in Forman examinations.

Literature on the topic of 21st century skills is plentiful and provides compelling arguments to educationalists that cannot easily be ignored.  

Schools and teachers will need to a) focus on more project, problem- and phenomena based learning, b) support the development of transversal skills in their teaching, such as problem-solving, critical thinking, co-operation and creativity, and c) propose more multidisciplinary assignments for the pupils. Design approaches in general, and the FUTE material in particular, has shown to be to very useful means to support these needs.

The 21st century skills have started to influence the attainment goals and outcome objectives for the educational sector, hence the FUTE material could be a very useful tool for teachers to adapt their teaching to reach these new goals. The challenge though is that these kind of attainment goals and outcome objectives often are very top down oriented, which is not very motivating for the teachers, and adapting to a new way of teaching, just becomes another obligation instead of being an opportunity for teachers to develop and learn.

The paradigm shift has to be an accepted reality in the educational sector, both on policy, management and teacher level, and it is important that solutions and goals are set and developed in a collaborative process in order to meet full acceptance on all levels. We can warmly recommend the FUTE material to carry through this collaborative process.

Examples of how to use the FUTE material​

Within the FUTE project, the material has been tested in pilot project. The material has shown to be used in 4 main areas. 

By clicking through the tabs below you can read more about the experiences made around Europe.

Good Examples and Recommendations Report

You can read about the good examples in details and also get a more comprehensive understanding of the barriers and limitations that have led to the formulation of the Top 10 Recommendations in the Good Examples and Recommendations Report. 

The report gives a more detailed introduction to how the FUTE method can be used in very concrete ways within a school. You can use this as inspiration to develop your own design challenges in your teaching.

You can find the report here.

© 2020 FUTE/South Denmark European Office