The modern, European school system calls for innovative, inclusive teaching methods. The FUTE project aims to deliver that in the form of a new DIDACTIC PLATFORM. The platform consists of theory, tools and a training course for teachers and student teachers including training manual. The theoretical framework is Design School Kolding's '6C-model' which incorporates design thinking and methodology. The tools are method cards - physical teaching tools developed via an original approach: user-involving, dialogue-based design methodology. The cards are an adaptation of the 6C-model. Simply put, they are a way to present abstract concepts like the design process and the composition of organizations in easily understood terms and visual models. Finally, the training course provides a solid introduction and instruction in how to incorporate the didactic platform into one's daily teaching. Seven partners from five countries, which together possess experience in dozens of European projects and capabilities in education, design, development, research and teacher training, will develop, test and implement Method Cards in a variety of school cultures and contexts in Europe. The Method Cards aim to empower teachers to take greater control over their jobs, increase their confidence in and strategic overview of their teaching plan and inject innovation, dynamism and creativity into their classes. The cards will enable and encourage teachers and students to co-create subject content. This will help motivate and interest students and increase job satisfaction for teachers, which will contribute towards retaining talented teachers in their jobs. Project activities and our methodological approach is based on design thinking, specifically user-centred design. This approach places the end user and their needs squarely at the centre of proceedings. After an initial needs analysis, completed in close dialogue with 10 pilot teachers, development work begins. Having identified very specifically which areas of teachers' competences that are best served by the Method Cards, the project partners work with the pilot teachers in an iterative loop process of: Development -> Teacher Feedback -> Product Fine-Tuning -> Testing -> Evaluation and Triangulation -> loop restarting with Development. So on and so forth until the prototype or final product is ready. This iterative loop is an illustration of the design process. The process is how FUTE will reach a viable teaching tool product that caters to teachers' very specifically identified needs and wishes for the ideal tool to assist them in their day-to-day teaching. There is a strong element of quality assurance and control in this process, which is why it is ideal for development projects. Design School Kolding is keen to bring our expertise in this process to the FUTE project. The school has worked with method compilations as a tool to streamline organizations and workflows for over a decade. Our experience with design minded teacher training has shown us the potential of this method. Working with partner organizations that are expert teacher trainers, we aim to demonstrate the 6C-model's usefulness in the modern teaching environment. We expect FUTE's didactic platform to integrate design methodology in the participating schools, streamline the organizational and planning elements of the teacher's job and increase job satisfaction. The Method Cards should make teaching less stressful and more fun, which is what attracted most teachers to the job in the first place. Students will also be impacted through teachers spending more time teaching and less time administrating, which will increase motivation and attention. The potential longer term benefits of introducing design methodology to European classrooms include increased teacher retention in the profession, increased academic performance for students and a decrease in early school leaving.
The FUTE project is a collaboration project with partners from Denmark, UK, Finland, Belgium and France, which runs from September 2017 to August 2020. The overall aim of the project is to contribute to a modernization of the European school through the use of design processes and methods, and hereby tackle challenges such as lack of preparation time for teachers which can translate into unmotivated students, who get tired of schooling, and risk to drop out before having reached qualifying youth education. The FUTE project has produced the following concrete material 1) The FUTE Needs analysis 2) The FUTE Design Process model 2) The FUTE method cards 3) The FUTE training material 4) The FUTE didactive learning platform 5) The Good Practice and Recommendations report After having carried through the needs analysis, the 6C model has as planned been adapted into a process map with 5 categories; 1) Process, 2) Analyse, 3) Ideate, 4) Research and 5) Create. The model is cyclic in nature, meaning that one can go through it multiple times to find the best way to work with the design challenge at hand. It is not a linear process, which means you can shift back and forward between steps as needed. The model is founded on two axes of knowledge; 1) going from producing knowledge about what is to producing knowledge about what could be and 2) going from producing knowledge through thinking to producing knowledge through experience. Instead of app. 100 method cards in the original set of method cards, that was based on the 6C model, the new set of FUTE method cards now contains 42 method cards, all of them specifically focusing on education, teaching and school related situations. There are 18 cards that can be used to facilitate the design process and e.g. establish the team rules, the success criteria and the way to communicate. These cards are designed to be used throughout the entire process. Six methods concentrate on collaboration and the dynamics within the team; six methods are about framing a challenge and evaluating the information and ideas, and six methods focus on communication and visual tracking within the team and on presenting to people outside the team. There are twelve method cards related to understanding “what is”. These methods focus on gathering and visually analysing information and inspiration in order to create learning and insights. Last but not least, twelve method cards can be used to help creating ideas about “what could be”. These cards can be used after you have completed the research, analysed the informa¬tion and decided what you want to focus on, because then you have a base from which you can ideate and create. This Teacher Training Module is designed to help school managers and teachers use the FUTE cards and the FUTE Design Process Method within the school, in collaboration with colleagues and pupils, and concretely within the teaching situation. The Teacher Training Module contains background information on design thinking, shows the potential of design thinking in an educational setting and provides several exercises to get acquainted with the method. Design thinking can be used in different educational settings: teachers can use this method to solve challenges in their organisation (teacher design teams), while teachers can also use design thinking as a teaching method that fosters creative and active learning (pupil design teams). After having developed all the FUTE material, all partners worked together with local schools and teachers, providing training and facilitated the implementation of local pilot projects, where the FUTE material was used in local schools and in concrete teaching and / or innovation situations. There are 4 areas where it has proven to be especially useful; a) the planning and development of learning and teaching processes, b) the creation of collaborative processes to discuss complex dilemmas in the school in general, c) reaching consensus between different groups in order to find concrete solutions to concrete challenges within the school environment or d) animating or facilitating concrete teaching processes with the pupils (best suited for pupils in lower and higher secondary education, or students in higher education) All the experiences and good practices that were gathered from the testing phase have been presented in the good experiences and recommendations report, where promoting factors as well as barriers for the implementation and application of the FUTE material. The report also contains a list of the top recommendations. The FUTE material has been evaluated by project partners and external pilot stakeholders to be innovative, easy to use and "handy", and the FUTE dadactive learning platform, that is accessible on www.fute-project.be, presents all the material both as printable material and an online version, which can be used directly from the platform.