Teacher training for the 21st century
What kinds of qualities and skills will future teachers need?
I have been pondering what kind of teacher training would be most valuable for producing the kinds educators who will be needed in the coming years.
My own teacher training as a doctoral student consisted entirely of observing my own teachers, who were focused on transmitting information. They modeled how to lecture and how to respond to questions with answers. I got the most out of my one-on-one meetings with my dissertation advisor, who knew virtually nothing about the field I was exploring, and thus mostly listened to me and offered very general, mostly methodological feedback.
In the 21st century, one thing we know is that we can’t go on doing the same old, same old. The old answers are not going to work. The old questions don’t even work! We will need teachers who can help students articulate their own questions, which will lead to new, previously unknown answers.
What kind of training will such teachers need?
Future teachers will need to be comfortable with uncertainty. They will need to have a certain fearlessness about being in the dark, trusting that the darkness will hold them until the light emerges.
Future teachers will need tremendous resilience—the ability to roll with punches, to duck and let the big waves thunder over them, popping up again with laughter and determination when it’s all clear.
Future teachers will need to model empathy and compassion for the suffering of others in the Earth community, showing how to care deeply without becoming paralyzed by pain, shame and guilt for their own relative well-being.
Future teachers will need to have a certain Pied Piper quality, the ability to lead others in a joyful, playful journey of exploration. If we tear down the prison-like institutions of mandatory public education, we will need teachers who can work independently and in free-form communities of learning, nourishing young people’s natural curiosity and innate desire to learn.
For most of human history, children learned by watching their elders, being guided and mentored to master the critical roles that would keep their community healthy and strong.
However, in the 21st century, human society has gotten so complex and specialized that it takes a global village to live well in most places on Earth.
We rely on systems that most of us have no idea how to build or maintain. There’s a reason that engineering is booming as a field of study today: our society needs these highly trained specialists to keep our current systems humming, and invent new and better ones.
My son, an engineer, quickly learned that the soft skills of human relationships are critical to the success of any project. But he received virtually no training in how to communicate with others and mediate conflicts and misunderstandings—critical skills, it turns out, for getting things done right on the job site.
In our complex 21st century world, we will need teachers who can not only model effective communication, but also teach students how to work collaboratively and find solutions to disagreements in productive, community-building ways.
When young people look out into the world in these early years of the 21st century, they do not see many good models for human society.
In cyberspace, con men, trolls and flame wars abound. In real life, old men send young men into battle in wasteful, totally unnecessary wars. In business and politics, whoever has the most money wins, and if you follow the money it always leads back to an abusive, exploitative relationship with the natural world, our Mother Earth.
Even in medicine, we focus on treating symptoms like cancer, diabetes and heart disease, without paying enough attention to the causes of these modern ailments—so often the result of unhealthy practices like synthetic chemicals in the air, water and soil; imbalanced, artificial diets; and lack of the good physical activity that our animal bodies need.
In such a world, we need teachers who are bold enough to resist the pressure to conform to the status quo; who are willing to pick up their Pied Piper flutes and lead people of all ages in a different, healthier direction.
To find teacher training programs for the kinds of teachers we’ll need in the 21st century, you have to look far outside the ivory tower walls.
In my next post, I will highlight some of the individuals and organizations that are doing this good work. It’s time for us to bring all these little streams of “blessed unrest” together, to create a mighty river of change!
I follow “Integrated Schools” as I feel they are doing the most important work—and there is a lot of important work. However one chooses to come at our problems we need to face racism and deal with it continually. They (IS) has a great book reading group. I have recently read some of the work by Linda Hammond-Darling and “Other People’s Children” by Lisa Delpit. Yours is a great question! Teachers will need to hear many different voices, recognize and honor differences in culture, know their own core subject matter, and how also to find from whom and where each unique person might best learn according to his/her interests. (Based on ideas in “The Universal Schoolhouse.) So much to juggle! I would include knowing about Sociocracy in order to hear everyone at repeating integrals and come to conclusions if not based on consensus, then on consent about how to move forward. Rinse and repeat. I would hope for future teachers to have the qualities and skills to educate community members and politicians, standing strong when needed.
I say YES, YES, YES, to Education Reform at all levels. We need to give up the old linear top down models of teaching and learning and go to the Holistic, systems-based curriculum. All your points are well supported and articulated. Thank you. I especially like the idea of teachers as Pied Pipers, leading their followers toward what I like to call "The Open Fields of Wonderment." Normally when I think of a Pied Piper nowadays, I imagine misinformed so-called leaders, leading their followers toward a cliff and pushing their constituents toward a dark abyss while they continue doing their "mischievous" deeds unimpeded. BUT, Pied Pipers can also lead us to the edge, where choices can be made, where all deep learning is possible. I think to get to this mode of learning and decision-making, we need to experience a personal inner shift in consciousness, one in which we can feel comfortable with uncertainty and "not knowing," --and a willingness to start from "Beginner's Mind." It's hard to admit that how we learned and how we taught in the past, no longer works. We see it in the dualities and divisions all around us. Check out Iain McGilchrist who has much to say about this in his new book The Matter with Things. He looks into questions like HOW do we pay attention, grow, and learn? At present, I think the questions we could ask are these: "Why does the old teaching/learning mindset no longer work? Where did we go wrong as a society and why are we still enslaved to that mindset? How can we change our thoughts and actions to find out what actually works. Recently I've been reading David Korten's book, Change the Story, Change the Future: A Living Economy for a Living Earth. I think this is great book for future teachers who are curious about the stories that have kept us locked in the old ways of being and doing. Yesterday at the annual Equinox Gathering with Fritjof Capra he recommended this article by Korten. I am now reading it as we speak. You can find "Ecological Civilization From Emergency to Emergence" at David Korten's website: https://davidkorten.org