The Classroom of the Future: We don't Know What it will be Like?

In a conference I recently attended, there was an interesting topic introduced by members of the United States Department of Education: We don’t know how to train the teachers of tomorrow because we don’t know what the classroom of tomorrow will look like. 

Maybe like this?

Teaching is one of the oldest and most revered professions, have people recently really found a way to change it so dramatically that we don’t know how to train teachers anymore?

Well, actually the answer is yes. And technology and standardization are at the center of the debate.

Technology is rewriting the way people think about learning. Instead of viewing knowledge as something one person has that must be transferred to another person, suddenly knowledge can be approached independent of the minds that used to house it. This is mostly because housing information is what computers were invented to do in the first place.

MIT has been recording their courses since 2001, and currently has a database of educational material (from one of the world’s top universities I might add) that spans over 2000 courses. ItunesU, an Apple-based educational platform, has over 2,400 courses available and is growing in educational content daily.

The current push for educational content is to have one unified system, one place where all knowledge can be stored and accessed. You know, like Wikipedia. (please detect the sarcasm...)

But technology isn’t just changing the classroom by replacing textbooks with a single-source knowledge bank, technology is changing how we deliver that learning as well. Video-based online learning, text-based online learning, adaptive computer course, self-paced computer courses, and a slew of other delivery options exist as alternatives to the standard classroom lecture. Some people even think that by the year 2050, there won’t be any classrooms and there will be no need for lectures.

But like I said, technology is only half of the changes that the teachers of the future are facing.

The debate surrounding the standardization of education is fundamentally a question of whether we use resources (teachers, districts, parents, technology, etc.) to make sure that every student is receiving an education of equal quality, something that might be observed if every student watched the same video lecture, or if every student needs an individualized education that cannot be adequately measured or tracked, something that might be observed if every student were given a set of wooden blocks and told to make whatever they wanted. While these represent the two extremes, they adequately introduce the sides of the debate and the problems faced by both sides. 

"Best. schoolday. ever!"

And all of this is why the Department of Education is worried that future teachers who are currently in school will find themselves in the same boat as the computer science majors: their education will be outdated by the time they’re done getting it.

With so much in flux right now, it is difficult to know what future teachers will have to face. Will they become tutors for students that take courses provided by a central database? Will they be responsible for incorporating media, software, and other technologies into a social classroom experience? Will teachers even exist, or will they be completely replaced by instructional designers (designers of online or computer-based learning that does not require a teacher)? Or will their profession remain unchanged, preserved by its strong roots in tradition and the expectation of previous generations (“I want my child to have the kind of education I had.”)?

With all these possibilities, what will the classroom of tomorrow look like? My prediction is that in the future we will only see more division, maybe even to the point that the education system becomes a competitive market.

The teachers I have had the opportunity to interact with (yes, even the older ones) are happy for new methods and future changes, as long as we can find a way to help them do their job, and ultimately improve the lives of the next generation.

What do you think? What is the future of the American classroom? Is teaching a dying profession?

Leave a comment with your thoughts.