By Barnett Berry

In America, the debates over teachers and their profession have been raucous, especially of late. But the struggles (over who enters teaching, how they are prepared, and how they are paid) are anchored in 20^th-century policies based on 19^th-century principles of student learning.

Many reformers propose a “superhero fix” for our highest-need schools, placing young recruits in challenging classrooms for just a few years. However well-intentioned, it’s a solution that dodges the real problem: teaching in the 21st century is complex, challenging work. And we need millions of well-prepared, highly savvy teachers who teach in schools designed to spread their expertise—whether with colleagues down the hall or in virtual communities. If we truly want the profession to benefit our students, we must reframe the reform narrative. We must enact aggressive policies driven by a new vision for teaching and learning.

Reimagining Teaching and Learning
Over the last decade, the Center for Teaching Quality has evolved a great deal. We began as a think tank to advance the teaching profession, and we’re now an action tank that cultivates teacher leadership for 21^st-century schools. I have had the privilege of working closely with an expanding group of classroom experts in our virtual community, the Teacher Leaders Network, which now includes more than 1,200 educators.

With generous support from the MetLife Foundation, I have undertaken a remarkable intellectual journey with 12 of these accomplished teachers. We coauthored a book on the future of teaching and learning, TEACHING 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools—Now and in the Future. We looked forward 20 years, when today’s young teachers will be middle-aged, hopefully still teaching while also leading their profession. (And having the time, space, and rewards necessary to fulfill both roles.) My coauthors and I reached for fresh “third way” solutions that transcend current policy debates: ideas that not only address the issues we see today, but also anticipate the trends predicted to shape education tomorrow.

Our team determined that effective teachers (now and in the future) must know how to:

• Teach the Googled learner, who has grown up on virtual reality games and can find out almost everything with a few taps of the finger;
• Work with a student body that’s increasingly diverse (by 2030, at least 40 percent of students will be second-language learners);
• Prepare kids to compete for jobs in a global marketplace where communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving are the “new basics”;
• Use sophisticated tools to measure student learning and fine-tune instruction; and
• Connect teaching to the needs of communities as economic churn creates instability, pushing schools to integrate health and social services with academic learning.

In our book, we envision how new technologies and transformed school organizations can elevate the teaching profession. We highlight promising ideas from reformers and practitioners on different sides of today’s debate. We present robust ways in which education could respond to likely future events. These “emergent realities,” as we call them, reveal how schools—and the teaching profession—could change to better meet 21^st-century demands:

Emergent reality 1 foresees a transformed learning environment in which digital tools allow students to learn 24/7 and to develop in-demand skills. Many of the same tools allow teachers to learn from each other anywhere, at any time. And—as importantly—such technologies help teachers share more accurate data about student learning with policymakers and the public, boosting accountability.

Emergent reality 2 posits that expert teachers will create seamless connections between learning in cyberspace and in brick-and-mortar schools. These educators know how to reach the “iGeneration” student and how to serve as community organizers. Even as online learning explodes, an unstable economy and growing socioeconomic divides will require that teacher-leaders build strong school-community partnerships, connecting students and their families with a wide range of integrated services.