We often think of the role of a teacher as preparing students for the future.
Which is scary, because now, more than ever, we don’t know what the future holds.
We just don’t know what AI is going to look like in any area of our lives in five years — or even one year from now.
And it’s easy to wonder what students even need from teachers in a world where knowledge seems completely flipped on its head.
This post is about what approach you can take to teaching in this era of uncertainty — but also why you can go into school tomorrow feeling like you still have much to offer your students.
It’s Okay to Acknowledge That Some Skills Won’t Transfer
It is okay to be honest: there might be skills students are learning in school right now that they will not need in the future.
When I was a kid, one of the things we learned was library skills. We would go to a card catalog in the library, arranged by the Dewey Decimal system, and use that to find books.
They also had a machine called a microfiche machine, where you could find a newspaper from 1922 or something and look at a picture of it under a magnifying glass — reading an old newspaper off a roll of film.
This was what our teachers thought we needed to be able to access information in an advanced way.
And I would argue that unless you have a very specialized career, a microfiche machine is completely irrelevant at this point.
But does that mean learning library skills was a waste of my time?
Not necessarily.
Maybe it planted in my head the idea that humans need a way to put information in a place where we can get it in the future, and then we need a way to figure out how to get it.
Whether that’s hieroglyphics or Google or AI or the Dewey Decimal system and a microfiche machine in an elementary school library, humans still have that issue.
Our brains still only have a certain amount they can hold.
We still need to figure out how to use that limited space in our brains.
And if you’re a teacher, you need to figure out how to use that limited space in your students’ brains.
What We Want for Students Hasn’t Changed as Much as We Think
If we back up a little bit, what we want for students is very much the same as what we have always wanted for students.
Yes, we want to prepare students for the future to the best of our ability.
But that is not all teachers do.
Teachers also serve two very important functions that have a lot less to do with predicting the future.
The first is connecting students to timeless skills.
What are some of the things we would have wanted students to know fifty or one hundred years ago that we still want them to know today?
The world was different. Technology was different.
But some skills students needed back then are the same skills your students need right now.
A few of those might be:
- How to control your attention and concentrate
- How to persevere through a meaningful challenge and get to the other side of it
- How to teach themselves things, given whatever tools they have at the time
- Some basic structural understanding that will help train their judgment on what is good and bad information.
- How to avoid getting cheated—especially in an area where you know less than the person you are dealing with.
And then there are those messy human skills: How get along with people. How to understand other people. How to form a basic theory of mind of the person you’re talking to or the person you’re writing a persuasive essay for
Teachers as Role Models for Adapting to Change
The other very important role that teachers play — even in uncertain times, and maybe especially in uncertain times — is that teachers are role models of how to adapt to change as it’s happening.
On the one hand, this is where the generation gap can hit you as a teacher.
This is where you wonder if students need to learn to use PowerPoint in your classroom, then wonder if you should have switched to Google Slides already, and then think, Oh no! I should be using Canva!
The tools are evolving so fast that even the list above might sound old-fashioned by the time you read it.
The nature of the teaching job is always changing, and when technology changes faster and society changes faster, the job of teaching also changes faster.
At the same time, it is hard to predict what is hype and what’s a real step forward. Not every new idea lives up to its promise — and no one knows that better than teachers.
Who among us has not sat through the professional development about the new education technology that’s going to create miracles for students? The paradigm shift! The transformational mindset! (The easy button combined with a subtle guilt trip that you’re not working hard enough!)
Sometimes, these programs are worth getting excited about.
Other times, you front-load a ton of time and energy into something that glitches the first time you use it in front of your students. Or it causes more trouble than it’s worth. Or you spend twice as much time helping students troubleshoot the new technology, only to have your school district cancel the contract.
This is part of the real-time evolution of teaching.
And this is where you’re also a role model — because you are someone in the middle of your career adapting to very fast technological change in front of your students.
One day they will be mid-career adults adapting to their own technological changes.
So they’re watching you: Are you someone who’s going to spend a lot of energy complaining? Are you going to be a cheerleader for something that doesn’t work? Or are you giving them some emotional realism as you try to strike that balance — staying current while also not leaping over the hype cliff?
That mindset makes you a role model for your students.
And I say this as someone who’s worked with teachers for 20 years and has seen a lot of hyped-up ideas come and go.
The good news is that sometimes—sometimes!—new developments leave us with something good, even if they don’t quite live up to the hype.
A Little Historical Perspective Goes a Long Way
During moments when I really do need to cheer myself up about how things are going, I remind myself: there have always been obstacles to education, and some of them were much bigger than whatever we’re facing now.
We are only 100 years out from the discovery of penicillin, the first antibiotic.
Penicillin was discovered in 1928, and before that, 25 to 30% of kids did not even make it to the average age of high school graduation.
It was also less than a hundred years ago that eyeglasses started to become affordable enough for the average American, and that vision screening in schools began.
Textbooks weren’t mass produced and widely available until the 1920s.
In the 1930s, public library access expanded significantly.
It wasn’t until the sixties and seventies that the average school started to have a photocopier.
The 1970s is also when pocket calculators came to schools — which allowed new types of cheating, of course, but also allowed schools to teach much more advanced types of math.
And back in the eighties and nineties when I was growing up, most of those problems had been solved — but to get that list of facts I just shared, I probably would have had to spend a whole afternoon in the library, looking up books using the Dewey Decimal system, and maybe even wrestling with that microfiche machine.
So yes, there are plenty of educational challenges right now, and plenty of unknowns.
But there’s reason enough to be optimistic that you will help your students figure out how to navigate whatever comes next.