The Future Teacher

I think a lot about the role of the teacher and how it really doesn't match up well to the needs of students or the structure of the ideal school. Teachers are asked to do so many different things with such diverse skill requirements that every teacher is weak in at least one critical area, even if he or she is amazing in other areas.

Think about it---if a teacher is a great lecturer, we expect her to also be great at data tracking. If he's great at lesson plan writing, he also has be great at one-to-one tutoring. If she's amazing with building fair and accurate assessments, she also has to be great at talking to parents.

Is this really realistic, let alone ideal?

With technology, regulations and school practices changing, I see the role of the teacher shifting. For this change to benefit teacher and students, we, as teachers, need to know what we want our profession to look like. What should a teacher's job be? I would argue that in the future school a teacher has 3 primary responsibilities:

·      Learning resource curator

·      Class captain

·      Student (and parent) advisor

I arrive here by asking the question: what can the teacher, and only the teacher, do?

Answer: The teacher is the interface between students and their learning objectives.

Not the answer: build resources from scratch, hands on skill building or information delivery, write and grade assessments or design and manage data trackers.

Why?

Because books, videos, adaptive learning software, experts and classmates can all be the source of information.

Because only the student himself can do practice required to increase skills.

Because professional designers, scientists, developers, and writers can create lesson plans, games, assessments and curricula that are standards-aligned and proven to improve educational outcomes.

However:

ONLY the teacher can modify, curate and adapt resources to the unique needs of her specific school environment, especially on the fly.

ONLY the teacher can communicate to a class the importance of a learning objective and can coordinate a group's efforts to all achieve that objective.

Finally, ONLY the teacher can reliably intervene and support a student who is struggling emotionally when the adaptive software fails.

If my predictions are true, then the most important skills of the future educator will be the ability to curate and utilize a variety of learning resources, manage a class of self-paced learners, and personalize coaching to the individual student.

The teacher will never be obsolete, because these are the critical, human functions that only a teacher can provide, and a trained, professional teacher will always do it better than any other person.

Do you agree with my assessment? If you are a teacher, how much does your current role resemble that of my "future teacher"? Are you advocating for the necessary support and resources so that you can do these 3 jobs of the future teacher as well as possible? 

Thinking about the Future

Where do you think the United States, and the world, will be in 5 years? 20 years? 50 years? 2,000 years?

Thinking about the future is such an interesting, and yes, important exercise.

Yet while students often take some 8 years of required history courses, why don't we mandate the study of the future? Is it because we don't have concrete "material" as the focus of examination? Is it because we don't have a "theory" of the future?

I think a history course provides an excellent platform to engage students in a conversation about the future. Unfortunately, the future is not part of the standards, and students only learn about the future through disorganized and shallow attempts at application and relevance. 


It is time that social studies in K-12 education develop a more robust discipline of futurism. At the core of such a course, the following enduring understandings might be a useful starting place:

• Nothing about the future is certain.
• Projections about the future can influence present action; in part for this reason, they are almost always wrong. 
• Patterns, trends, and data can point to likely scenarios in the future. 
• When the future arrives, it becomes the present. It is thus always out of reach. 

A discipline of futurism would help students determine what kind of careers they might assume; how long term planning can be personally beneficial; how to evaluate hysterical and cynical claims about fate; and how individuals shape their own destinies. 

A study of the future would serve as a valuable interdisciplinary experience. History provides a sense of possibility and limitation of change and continuity; literature and art expand the imagination and show how people in the past imagined their future; math and science teach how to evaluate the past and present to predict and shape the future. 

Students need to dialogue to form the narrative of their personal concerns and ambitions. Talking about and studying the future might offer a very interesting way to accomplish this.