April Storyteller: The Future is Here: Are schools adapting?

Thank you for subscribing to Storyteller, a monthly digital series about faith, family, life, and learning. If you enjoy Storyteller, please help the community grow, like, follow, and share.

Dear Reader,

As an educator, I have been asking myself an essential question that I grapple with daily: “Do schools have an obligation to change how we teach to match the changing world landscape?”

I can still picture my first-grade teacher, Miss Williams.  She was beautiful, with short dark hair and the sweetest smile. She gave the best hugs and knew how to make learning exciting.  She ignited in me a love for school.

My growing-up years, however, soon became predictable.  There were rows of desks, and the learning was standardized with everyone learning the same thing at the same pace, wrapped in a one-size-fits-all curriculum. There was a lot of memorizing.  Tests, quizzes, and pop quizzes peppered our weeks.  In high school, teachers had to check the schedule so there weren’t too many tests on the same day as we moved from subject to subject.  We took aptitude tests to determine what our vocation might be and where our talents would lead us.  It all seemed fine, and the process was the same for every child in every school nationwide.  

Over the years, and right up to today, we have acquired volumes of knowledge and content.  If only I remembered most of it! The teachers lectured to us from a point of subject area expertise. Some were great teachers, and some were not so great!  They provided the human-centered element to education, and that was invaluable. We learned to write on lined paper, and we colored in the lines.  I was not a creative student, and word problems were often a challenge.  We learned individually.  Teams were for sports, not for the classroom.  Creativity and design happened in art class, math in Math class, reading and writing in English class, and science in Science class. I could have used a tailored education. There was a typing classroom filled, every period, with students tapping away. Not everyone was looking for a college education. I had friends looking to go to trade school, or apprenticing in a trade, beginning a vocation, or signing up for military service. 

When I arrived at college, I realized that I didn’t know how to think. I used to say that I never had an original thought until I was a college student.  I was inclined to listen to those around me and parrot the opinion that my thinking was most in line with. Though I was a good student, I was never taught to think or reason, except in Sunday School. Now, today, I have more than my share of thoughts and opinions. Part of my journey was the discovery that high school left me ready for college, but I was not ready for life. 

Over the years, I have watched schools transition from compartmentalized learning to integrating subject areas, shifting to hands-on, experiential learning, and embracing the necessity for developing critical thinking skills. This shift laid the groundwork for the major educational changes on the horizon today.

College prep high schools often have a singular purpose: to prepare students for the college entrance process and to have them ready to be successful in college. Over the decades, schools have known the pattern to prepare their graduates for the next steps. What they didn’t fully foresee was the dramatic impact that the technology revolution would bring to the world of educating young people.

Even before the introduction of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence, schools began to wake to this new realization…it has been a slow awakening. I have been reading about the onslaught of AI and working to understand how it will impact teaching and learning. The best description I found is from the book “Education for the Age of AI” by Charles Fadel and the CCR Team. Under a section titled Justification for Education, they wrote the following:

Wisdom is a key pillar for education, equipping individuals with a holistic skill set to navigate and contribute meaningfully to an ever-changing world. Wisdom should therefore be the key goal of education in this century. 

The clarity of this declaration brought me to my metaphorical knees. Curriculum design of the past focused primarily on knowledge acquisition. Today, the shift in education is from knowledge acquisition to fostering wisdom, and building a skill set in our students which will allow them to communicate effectively in a variety of venues, to work in teams and seek to understand others whose thought processes and cultural backgrounds are unfamiliar to them, to think critically and solve simple and complex problems, and to think creatively.

Empathy and social awareness are key contributors to identifying and solving the global problems they will face. In an article titled “Artificial Intelligence,” the Spring 2025 issue of the Independent School Magazine states the following: As AI starts to reshape the education landscape, independent schools face complex challenges and exciting opportunities. AI has the potential to revolutionize teaching and learning, offer personalized experiences, streamline administrative tasks, and things we cannot even imagine yet.

This article points out questions about the use of AI in schools that rise to the surface regarding ethics, equity, professional development for teachers, and privacy concerns. Policies need to be written, and thoughtful plans of action developed.

I am proud to share that my school is ahead of the game in designing and implementing a curriculum that intentionally develops the skillsets we believe our students will need to be future-ready citizens. Several years back, our middle school committed to an integrated studies program where several subject areas were co-taught simultaneously.  This year, at both the 9th and 10th grade levels, they are learning to respond to essential questions by applying interdisciplinary thought processes through a curriculum we call CoLabs.

Our students are making connections between subject areas in the past, present, and future, and learning discernment and reasoning. I took a teacher-written, detailed description of the current unit they are working on and fed it into ChatGPT to condense it for this article. ChatGPT offered the following description.  

In 10th grade CoLab, students engage in a future-ready, interdisciplinary curriculum centered on the essential question “How do ethics impact decisions?” Through an integrated study of nuclear weapons and energy, students connect History, English, Science, and Technology to examine real-world challenges. They conduct labs, analyze primary sources and data, explore environmental justice, and design apps that apply their learning in meaningful ways. Collaborative “convergence days” deepen cross-curricular thinking, encouraging students to synthesize knowledge, build critical thinking skills, and engage with complex, ethical issues that shape our world.

These students are learning to be wise.  They are not just vessels to be filled with content.   They are gaining insight and individually developing the knowledge of what is true and right, coupled with just judgment, and a call to action.

Seeing the impact of future-ready teaching answers my initial question. Yes, schools do have an obligation to change how we teach to match the changing world landscape for our students. Our obligation is to be responsive!  And, human-centered!

Thank you for being a part of my story.

Until next time,

Merry

---

New! Storyteller LIVE with special guest Mike Cobb. In this episode, we use the 2025 February Storyteller titled Diving into the Delta: A Liminal Moment in Education to guide our discussion around the change that must happen in education to prepare students for the future. 

Tune in and learn about Mike's journey from head of school to futurist, innovative learning practices in Saudi Arabia, and the importance of addressing resistance to change in educational settings. Our discussion highlights the importance of skills-based, experiential learning from early childhood through college, as well as the necessity of cultivating a culture of adaptability and agency in students.

Storyteller LIVE is more than a podcast, it's a community of friends connecting over faith, family, life, and learning. Don't miss this episode!

Listen to Storyteller LIVE now!

If you enjoy being a part of the Storyteller community of friends,

share this issue with those you know and help it grow!

Subscribe to Storyteller