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I recently was asked to present some ideas to a group of aspiring educators on what the teaching profession held in store as they embarked on their professional lives. Since that talk, the topic has continued to germinate new thinking for me. What would the teaching profession look like over the next 30 years and what changes should we expect? Presented below are some juxtapositions and generalizations on that question – drawn in part from thinking about the Center for Teaching Quality’s (CTQ) excellent work, Teaching 2030. Many of these are, of course, already underway to a degree. However, in looking ahead I imagine these “new school” trends will be the norm, and not the exception. I look forward to your responses and reactions.
Teaching is telling versus learning is doing. There is indeed a revolution underway in how teaching and learning intersect. Past and present it was acceptable to “stand and deliver” and covering content meant that the teacher said it. On the other side of the looking glass, it won’t be considered “taught” unless the learner experiences, understands, and can apply the knowledge.
Teaching is the new law. When we compare teaching to professions like medicine and law, stark differences emerge in terms of selectivity, expectations for preparation, degrees of professional autonomy, and levels of compensation. Over the next 30 years, I expect all of these factors to change course. It will be more difficult to get into and out of teacher education programs and competitiveness for initial teaching jobs will increase. Starting pay levels will rise as we work to attract top talent into the field and professional autonomy will grow as we leave a form of education where fact/recall preparation sufficed.
“Teacherpreneurs.” A term coined by the folks at CTQ, this idea posits that teachers of the future will have a great diversity of career options, or pathways, available to them. Teachers, using their individual talents infused with the spirit of entrepreneurship, will reject the limited career options currently available and will instead develop individualized and specialized roles including mentoring, student supports, leadership, curriculum design, and policy.
Personalization will rule. Like practically everything else about our world, students and parents will demand an education specifically tailored to individual needs, interests, and talents. Students will exercise greater autonomy over curriculum pace and content as well greater autonomy in the manner by which knowledge is gained. In exchange for this autonomy, evidence of competence or mastery will be expected of students and the educators will coordinate and facilitate this personalized learning experience.
The new labor/management paradigm. We already see this shift occurring in the world’s highest performing school systems. Unions evolve to function more as professional guilds, meaning they are standard-bearers in insuring quality of the profession and take on an advocacy role less related to worker rights and pay and more related to the institution of public education. Management approaches will also be different and on a large scale. Top-down and autocratic management approaches will be viewed the same way workplace smoking and harassment once were. Instead, the norm will be inclusive and distributed leadership and the role of the people with formal leadership titles will be focused on getting the conditions right where their education professionals can do their best work.
Accountability and diminishing returns. We will see that ever increasing attempts to raise performance through accountability-based mechanisms result in small to no improvements in results. Instead, the focus on accountability will be replaced with a focus on collaborative inquiry. Genius and high performance takes root in the team setting and our thinking and innovations will increasingly center on ways to structure and enhance team-based sharing and learning and translating that into actions.
Many pathways into the profession – all of high quality. The current landscape of traditional versus alternative preparation pathways are both soon-to-be dinosaurs. Blended models and shared ideas will emerge between universities, non-profits, and education employers to create a variety of on-ramps into education. Each of these on-ramps will be very selective, emphasize strength in content, pedagogy (especially the ability to personalize learning), and clinical (or field-based) experience.
Sharing expertise is the solution. Identifying high quality educators and replicating those skills will become the norm. Isolated professional work in education will be considered heresy and models of co-teaching, continuous mentoring throughout one’s career, and meaningful involvement with professional learning communities will all be professional expectations. Learning environments will be transparent, where multiple educators will move through and within them for the purposes of sharing, critiquing, supporting, and learning.
*Thanks to the Iowa State University Education Association for the beginning ideas in this post and for reacting to my original presentation.
Nearly everyone involved in the work of improving or reforming education acknowledges the importance of the people working in our schools as perhaps the most critically important lever to improve learning. Even with technological advances, education remains primarily an endeavor driven by teachers, administrators and those in supporting roles in schools. As an extension, the success, mediocrity, or failure of our schools also rides on the qualities, capacities and talents of the people working with our students.
Hard-charging education reformers put a tremendous amount of faith in the ability of “human capital” systems to deliver educators with the abilities we need to dramatically improve our schools. Using strategies related to human resource processes like recruitment, selectivity, performance management (including evaluation), compensation, and dismissal – this “human capital” frame holds that if schools would use theses human resource processes more effectively the result would be a more capable educator workforce. This viewpoint primarily puts the individual educator as the central point where we should focus our attention and work for improvement.
Juxtaposed against the human capital frame is another viewpoint that great educators emerge from collaborative and collegial environments where educators are given the opportunity to learn from each other, plan together, build relationships among staff and students, be involved in key decisions, and work in an environment where they have the tools and resources to succeed. This “social capital” frame holds that it’s not the people that are the problem, it’s the system (or lack thereof) in which educators are working that is the problem.
It’s difficult (at least for me) to take a hard line against either of these views. It is disingenuous to argue that talent and ability doesn’t matter. Further, it is also disingenuous to say our human capital systems in education are anywhere near as effective as they could or should be. Differences do exist in educator quality that can be attributed to the capabilities and talents of individual educators. Failure to acknowledge or address human capital concerns (or the more common tactic of trying to advance some excuse or “red herring” to distract the argument) does little to advance us toward the common goal of a better education for all of our students.
It is equally insincere to argue that the systems and supports in which people work don’t matter. Anyone who has had the experience of working as part of a high quality, high functioning team or organization knows that the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts and that collective capacity trumps individual heroism when it comes to delivering quality on a consistent basis. On the flip side, anyone who has had to work in a dysfunctional environment or under a tyrannical boss knows that bad culture kills productivity and creativity.
Somehow, the debate on improving education in this country has got to reconcile these two ideas of human and social capital. Too often we place them in contrast to one another when we should be considering how they can (and should) be used to compliment each other.
We aren’t going to achieve greatness through a pure reliance on draconian, Kafkaesque systems of individual accountability. We also can’t achieve greatness through the liberal use of some professional Kumbayah circle.
Talent, intelligence, and ability matter. So do connections, belonging, and love.
For the sake of the American education system (and more importantly our children), we’d better figure it out sooner than later.
Jason Glass
