Future Wheel

Our term focus is looking at miss-takes/re-takes and the learning process.  To kick start our term we've been investigating our school values - Respect, Success, Team, Fun and Integrity.  Across our school this is often a common place where we start to have a firm values base with our classes.  It's at the core of class expectations and treaties.  A shared language we have when talking about expectations, behaviour, learning and attitudes.

We have been working through a range of different tasks to use these values and examine life with and without them.

In comes the Futures wheel otherwise known as consequence wheel.  The idea behind this thinking tool is to get students to think of the 'what next...' to something happening.  What would be the consequence of this happening - good or bad.

So, we split into groups and each group took a value.  They then talked about what would happen at our school if this value wasn't used or we didn't use it.
This lead to some great discussions in groups around this value and it's importance in our daily lives.  It gave the students a chance to also consider a range of perspectives.  How would this outcome affect parents, siblings, classmates, teachers, our deputy principals, principal? What would this mean for them?

For the first time using this thinking tool with them it was a success - some of them found it very difficult to 'put themselves in other people's shoes' and think about how the outcome might affect that person.  Others were able to articulate a range of ideas and outcomes from many different perspectives.  Some were also quite simple but others had far reaching perspectives and consequences.  Such as the the lack of success leading to people not being able to become olympic athletes because they didn't know what 'success' felt like or how to achieve it.

I can see how the level of questioning with the students will become more and more important as we use this tool further.  Getting the students to work in a range of perspectives and think from different angles and mind frames (positive/negative) will be a basis of my questioning for the next time we use this tool.

The tool would be very effective in a place where you were looking at positive and negative outcomes and getting students to think on both sides of the coin.

Below are a few examples from our first session using the Future Wheel.
You can download my template here - this is A3 size.