It would be disingenuous to consider fresh approaches to teaching and leading in our schools if the system itself is designed to graduate young adults with only minimal skills, no continuity of learning, no sense of themselves, no understanding of the world around them, and no self-mandate to make things better. The reality of our current school model doesn’t always mesh with our lofty ambitions, though we have the expertise and wherewithal to do better. The hard work begins for each of us by admitting that our schools are not there yet and that they could be so much more if we tapped into our collective energy and expertise.
Still, the progress we seek will never happen without some subtle and not-so-subtle changes to our current systems, including curriculum, assessments, professional development, student scheduling, teacher leadership, and community partnerships in ways that make our work more intentional and devout around learning for all kids. These changes will be heavy lifts for all of us, for leading schools in the new century will require all or some of the following changes that are not always found across our industry:
- Teacher Leadership
- No matter what we do to improve our schools and school districts, teachers must lead the way. They are the lifeblood of our industry. Yes, the influence of inspiring district leaders and superstar principals is profound and their roles will continue to shift and expand. Still, our industry will not find widespread and lasting success without genuine teacher leadership. The best school districts will figure this out. They will empower their employees to lead because, if they do, they will tap into a creative energy and collective innovation that only practitioners can bring. And if they do not, they will risk losing their best teachers and staff members to other districts or other professions.
- Student Leadership
- There is simply too much research and too much common sense to not afford students ample opportunities to collaborate and lead. Whether we call them learning communities, social networks, or something else, these planned opportunities for deep discussion among students must be built into our school schedules in some form or fashion. This may include time for students to team and collaborate without direction and instruction from a teacher. Yes, students need PLC time (or PLNs) too.
- Curriculum Shifts / New Century Skills
- We are never going to inspire, engage, and motivate children if they view their subjects and lessons as disconnected or even random. We must identify the key skills and concepts that students must master and then ensure that we have viable, relatable curricula that overlap subject areas, even if that means covering less material than we do now. This includes cross-training among teachers of various grades and subjects. A key readiness measure for students in the next century will be their ability to communicate effectively, solve complex problems, think creatively, innovate, pitch their ideas to others, and accept critical feedback.
- Flexible Scheduling / Inductive Learning
- Schools must be designed around each student’s needs, including flexible school days and alternative learning environments. If nothing else, our recent experiments with learning options during the pandemic taught us that much. There will be very little room in the future for cookie-cutter lessons and assignments. Learning will become greatly inductive, project-based, place-based, and personalized. Assessment will be wide and deep, from informal talks to juried presentations. While rigorous classroom instruction remains first and foremost, it is prudent that we provide students more time for personal reflection, independent research, and peer-to-peer interaction. In fact, the day may come where we provide students a day off campus (perhaps at a local college, museum, or business) learning in different environments, researching topics of their own choosing, and developing original business ventures.
- Student Sabbaticals / Field Experiences
- The future of personalized learning may someday lead to deeper, richer curriculum threads that connect lessons to students’ lives, families, passions, and ambitions. This may lead to scheduled “breaks” from school where students have the time (a day or week or month) to take part in deep research activities or longitudinal projects that go far beyond the canned research papers that we find in most schools today. This may include career exploration activities at local tech companies or short stints as docents at local museums. Of course, this is not to suggest that these longer breaks from school will occur at home unsupervised. Such opportunities could be supervised off campus with greater participation from our community partners or through planned teacher sabbaticals. If in-person options are not viable, virtual opportunities will remain an easy option for us in giving children a portal to explore the world outside of school.
- Volunteerism / Activism
- The future of our schools will certainly be connected to the promising practices occurring now in revitalizing our neighborhoods and building sustainable communities. This will require our schools and communities to collaborate in giving students purposeful opportunities to volunteer and support their neighbors. These partnerships can provide our students with rich lessons in self-respect, empathy, and pride through community activism and citizenship.
Change Begins With Leadership
Of course, none of these ideas alone will rid us of our struggles. Still, they are a start. They are part of a set of workable solutions designed to make learning more engaging and relevant for children. In the end, going to school should be fascinating for kids. As much as it can be, learning should involve a series of experiences that are transcendent, even sublime. We need less of: “The teachers made me do it.” And we need more of: “Wow, I discovered something new today,” or “I found something out about myself, about what I stand for, and I plan to do something about it.”
To this end, many promising trends are emerging across the globe. In 2018, the Ministry of Education in Singapore announced to great fanfare that the country is shifting from a highly structured, highly competitive school system designed to rank and order children to something much more personal than that, with an ambitious plan to graduate children who are highly skilled, but also creatively minded and well-rounded. This dramatic shift includes an emphasis on applied learning and social development and a lesser focus on things like class rankings. The system redesign is scheduled to be fully in place by 2023.
We find similar changes arriving in Finland, a long-standing leader in innovative practices. The country has scrapped traditional school subjects for a multidisciplinary approach that it calls “phenomenon-based” teaching. In essence, Finland is taking a thematic approach by teaching content and skills though broader topics like climate change and community building. In the United States, innovation is afoot across many states, from the whole-child movement to our creative experiments with relevant, personalized learning experiences.
Practitioners in the field must be the ones to shape what this change looks like, even if disagreement and debate are required to get us there. These difficult decisions about the future of our schools need to be brought forward for debate not because they are easy, but because they are hard (with all due respect to President Kennedy’s inspiring quote). No matter where we land, we owe it to each other to get it right.
In fact, we have been through this before in our history, and we have made some strides. To provide a glimmer of hope that what is possible is possible, even probable, let us back go back twenty or thirty years ago and celebrate how far we have come as an industry. Let us be reminded how much better we are now at planning rigorous lessons, inspiring higher-order questions, and requiring a greater distribution of student responses.
This growth in instructional best practice is evident among our teachers, but also among our leaders. Our school principals and assistant principals are much better equipped today than ever before in observing teachers, providing meaningful feedback, reviewing academic data, and making instructional decisions around facilities, scheduling, hiring, and professional development. We have a long way to go (we always do), but don’t ever buy into the notion that we have not made some significant strides. That is why the industry may be ready to go all in.
Sometimes, change arrives suddenly and we must remain open to it, bringing along with us a genuine sincerity and trust that things will be better for teachers and children because of it.
