The Future For Schools

 Welcome to an interview between Tony Ryan, and an outstanding teacher called Sophie Grant. The interview was recorded on the 6^th September, 2045.

Tony: Sophie, you’re retiring next year after an illustrious teaching career. It would probably take you months to describe the educational transformations you’ve witnessed in Australia in the past two decades. Perhaps you could share some memorable experiences from that time.

Sophie: Well… here are some that reinforced the worth and the complexity of teaching for me.

Robot Teachers

I have engaged with most of the edtech advances since 2020. We now have interactive and personalized I-Learn devices that can observe, listen to, support, and assess each student. However, one unsettling experience challenged me to reconsider the worth of some edtech. Back in 2038, I was asked to advise on the introduction of Google’s robot teachers. When I saw that device in operation, I realized just how human-centered our teaching needs to be.

The robot had access to all information ever created on the planet, but it could not emotionally engage with the kids. Even though it was equipped with the latest mindreading and voice recognition tech, it felt quite eerie to be in its presence.  Robots work well on an assembly line, but teachers are still the masters of relationship.

Tony: Staying human-centered. A special reminder for all of us. So, what other understandings did you develop about the profession?

The Power Of Education

 Sophie: I always remind myself that education has steadily made the world a better place. It sounds a bit grand to think about this given that I’m a classroom teacher, but it gives me planetary context with my everyday work.

I’ve just watched a 2044 TED talk that extolled the worth of global education. Did you know that the literacy rate in 1820 was 12%? By 2020, it was 86%; and now, it’s at 98%. Literacy is the key to a quality life in any country on the planet, and teachers provide that key.

When we became so overwhelmed with the pandemic challenges in the early 2020s, few people noticed the steady improvements in some critical global lifestyle benchmarks. Educators can take part-credit for so many of those boosts in world health and wellbeing. World population today has levelled out at 9.4 billion, and will now slowly drop from here because of the focus on girls’ education back in the 2010s and 2020s in less developed countries. Poverty rates have reduced for the same reason.

With 96% of the planet’s population online (compared to 63% in 2022), we can now provide equitable lifelong learning in every country.

Tony: It’s so true, isn’t it? Education unlocks global potential, and the advances in this half-century are testament to that. What other experiences have created Ahas for you about education?

Flexible learning spaces

Sophie: I’ve just facilitated a series of real-time Global Classes with 26 children from Australia, NZ, PNG, Indonesia, Vietnam and China. It reinforced for me the stimulating learning spaces we can now offer anywhere in the world.

Learning spaces can be utilized in three key modes – virtual, remote, and physical. While the Re-Zoom remote spaces have merit in a 2-D setting, my Global Class took place in the latest WeLearn augmented environment. It was a fully interactive 3-D experience, and difficult to distinguish from real life.

As always, the focus needed to be placed on the quality of the learning, and not solely on the technology. Unfortunately, in the early 2000s, we had viewed technology as a magic elixir that would transform teaching. It was only when we combined the pedagogy with the tech that we achieved optimum results.

Tony: That’s a critical point about edtech. It has so many benefits when it directly reinforces the quality of the learning. What’s one more interesting experience you can share just for now?

Teacher Mindset

 Sophie: A powerful one for me was an everyday staff meeting on a Tuesday afternoon in the mid-2020s. A guest speaker talked about mindset. And wow, didn’t we need it. For several years, we had been commiserating with each other about the dilemmas of the profession, and with good reason. After COVID-19, we nearly collapsed as a system. The lack of relief teachers; the general shortage of qualified staff; student unease in post-pandemic times; the endless workloads; teacher burnout. So many of my peers – and myself as well – were actively looking for other work.

That presentation adjusted our attitude to teaching. We came to understand that the conversations we were sharing in the staffroom were overwhelming us as much as the actual issues. We were always telling the kids about their growth mindset, and about choosing an optimistic attitude to life, yet we weren’t practicing what we were preaching.

What happened after that meeting? There was no instant solution, but we slowly adjusted our professional narrative. The daily dialogue in a school always has, and always will be, the clearest indicator of its culture. We firstly refused to engage in toxic positivity, in which we would tell each other to ‘don’t worry be happy’. Instead, we enacted effective systemic changes that minimized teacher burnout whenever possible.

Secondly, we scanned for our successes, and the more we looked, the more we found. We began to plan for the exciting future of the school, while taking the burnout issues amongst our staff and children very seriously. As an education community, we steadily changed from being victims of present circumstances, to becoming creators of our future.

Tony: Creators of your future. A powerful mindset. Thank you, Sophie. You have been a credit to the education profession. If you could go back to the post-pandemic 2020s, what advice would you offer to educators then?

Sophie: OK… Implement a national retention and recruitment policy much sooner. Stay relevant by researching and implementing contemporary practice from around the world. See edtech as a servant, not the master. Despite the difficulties, maintain your belief in the worth of the profession. And why? The future does not just happen to us. In many instances, we create it together inside the everyday classroom.