As I was listening to an episode of the Restart Recharge Podcast in the fall of 2022 they talked about how today’s kindergarten students will graduate in 2035 and retire in 2085. Matt Miller and Holly Clark also used this same framing at their session in AI and ChatGPT at the 2023 ASCD conference in April 2023. Of course, that was a prompt for us to think about the type of learning and content and experiences we deliver to our students. What if we taught through the lens of what a 2035 graduate might need instead of what is familiar to us as former students?
I am an Instructional Coach in a largely rural school district. We have at least four very small schools with a kindergarten to grade 9 population below 50 students. Many of the small schools are in very isolated agricultural communities. Today’s parents were former students and they attended the very same schools; back in their day, the school had double or triple the student population. These parents often want today’s schools to offer all the same courses and options as were available in the good ‘ol days with triple the teaching staff.
This year, one of these small schools had a curriculum and scheduling conundrum that really accentuated the need to help communities start to take into account the 2035/2085 lens. For the past several years, the ninth-grade students at the school travel about 25 minutes down the highway to their future high school where they take the Construction or “Shop” class option (high school in Canada is often grades 10-12). Not only do they learn construction skills considered very useful in a farming community, but they also get to know teachers and future classmates in the process. Parents feel strongly that this will help prepare students for the transition next year when they move to the high school.
When a scheduling anomaly at the high school made the timing of this construction course impossible for the grade 9 students to attend, parents were devastated and infuriated. This caused some of them to subsequently view everything that happened at the school and with their children through a deficit lens and mindset. I joined with the school leader and teachers to brainstorm all sorts of scheduling and options. Eventually, perhaps even better than the construction class, we came up with a system where the grade 9 students would travel to the high school for afternoons in the final quarter of the year and get to choose from a range of option courses begin offered at that time. Fortunately, this seemed to satisfy the parents’ concerns. Phew!
Throughout this process, I couldn’t stop thinking about that podcast with the 2035/2085 framing, so I created the graphic above for the school leader to use when she pitched this alternative schedule solution to parents. The graphic and the concept behind it seem to cause parents a momentary pause for consideration…so that’s a start. In fact, the graphic has been displayed in almost every staff room in our school district.
However, a 1985 lens remains; although parents and board members can acknowledge that the world their students will work in will be vastly different, they insist that topics like cursive writing and construction take precedence over coding, creative thinking and conceptual understanding.
As an instructional leader, I feel strongly that we have to help our parents and communities shift to be able to grasp what the future of work will look like. Very few agriculture jobs will involve sitting on a tractor or fixing it when it breaks down. Instead, jobs in agriculture will undoubtedly involve understanding data sets and marketing, writing and running code, and operating drones. There will be very few jobs even in agriculture or forestry or oil & gas that do not involve a range of computer skills.
Any advice on how to help this shift happen?
What I learned today... 