What might teaching look like in ten years? How might choices that we make about teaching today affect the design of learning? Teachers’ experiences of their profession? Most importantly, the extent to which we are able to support all learners in achieving their fullest potential?
Of late, much attention has been focused on teachers’ effectiveness. As we face dramatic changes to the fundamental structures of education, we need to be intentional about how we design for adults’ roles in supporting learning. In doing so, we need to look far beyond today’s debates to examine how decisions that we make today might impact the profession. Education is facing a crisis point as it continues to operate largely according to an industrial-era design that no longer reflects societal or economic needs. This crisis point is not one of teacher or school performance. It is one of system design. My new paper explores four scenarios for the future of K-12 teaching in the United States. Each of these scenarios represents a plausible future for K-12 teaching reflecting different drivers of change that are at play in the world today. When we emphasize one set of key drivers versus another, thereby changing our fundamental assumptions, we get very different narratives about how the future might look. We could end up with:
- An expected future, “A Plastic Profession,” which extrapolates from today’s dominant reality to project what teaching is likely to look l
ike in ten years if we do not alleviate current stressors on the profession and do not make significant changes to the structure of today’s public education system. Read now >> - An alternative future, “Take Back the Classroom,” which explores what teaching might look like if public educators reclaim the learning agenda by helping to shape the regulatory climate to support their visions for teaching and learning. Read now >>
- A second alternative future, “A Supplemental Profession,” which examines what teaching might look like if today’s public education system does not change significantly but professionals from other organizational contexts become increasingly involved in supporting young people in engaging in authentic and relevant learning opportunities outside of school. Read now >>
- My ideal future, “Diverse Learning Agent Roles,” which explores how a diverse set of learning agent roles and activities might support rich, relevant, and authentic learning in an expanded and highly personalized learning ecosystem that is vibrant for all learners. Read now >>
Over the course of this week, I’ll be highlighting each of these scenarios through a series of blog posts. I hope you will join me in exploring how the choices we make about education today could create dramatically different scenarios for how teachers teach and how learners learn.
To explore the ways liberatory education could take shape 10, even 20, years in the future, read our sixth anchor forecast Imagining Liberatory Education Futures.
