Chris Dede, a professor of learning technologies at Harvard, foresees a period of intense disruption in K-12 education. PHOTO BY JANET STEARNS

One insight I’ve gained about making changes in schools is that education leaders believe they need additional resources to transform standard practices. However, when educators have extra assets they often use these to do more of the same: old wine in new bottles.

Transformation comes primarily when teachers, principals and superintendents have no choice, when the current model cannot be sustained and they must do something radically different. Now, civilization is in crisis, and educators cannot make every home into a remote classroom.

The challenge is whether we as leaders will use this opportunity to create a more effective, universal model of instruction based on the latest knowledge about learning, a system that provides every student the support to reach his or her full potential. If we succeed, when COVID-19 is under control, education will not revert to established suboptimal and unfair practices, but instead will sustain a “new normal” of universal, blended, personalized, lifelong learning.

A Disruptive Future

Transforming to become much better is crucial. In my co-edited 2020 book, The 60-Year Curriculum: New Models for Lifelong Learning in the Digital Economy, the authors describe the looming challenge and opportunity of a coming, epic half-century whose intensity of disruption will rival the historic period civilization faced from 1910-1960: two world wars, a global pandemic, a long-lasting economic depression and constant conflicts between capitalism and communism.

Similarly, the future of our children and students will be quite different than the immediate past: A global interdependent civilization shaped by economic turbulence from artificial intelligence and globalization, climate change, advances in biotechnology and materials science, and rapid shifts driven by worldwide mobile devices providing social media and immersive experiences.

To fulfill their responsibilities in preparing students for this turbulent, disruptive future, educators at every level are now faced with developing young people’s capacity for unceasing reinvention to face an uncertain and changing workplace and for inventing and mastering occupations that do not yet exist.

Validated at Scale

As described in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 2018 report “The Future of Education and Skills: Education 2030,” our students must develop personal dispositions for finding opportunity in uncertainty — creating new value, reconciling tensions and dilemmas, and assuming moral/ethical agency on equity and respect for diversity. A 2017 Pearson-funded white paper, “The Future of Skills: Employment in 2030,” highlights the importance of knowledge and skills underemphasized in current curriculum standards and omitted from today’s high-stakes summative tests — fluency of ideas, social perceptiveness, systems thinking, originality and conflict resolution.

This is a much higher standard for educational outcomes than what we are accomplishing with industrial-era practices and structures of schooling. We must move beyond our century-old model of one-size-fits-all teaching-by-telling and learning-by-listening to instead focus on instructional approaches that enable personalization to each student’s strengths, passions and needs.

I co-led a validation process for a suite of teaching strategies that is effective at scale. The Chicago-based nonprofit LEAP Innovations is implementing its four-dimensional “LEAP Learning Framework,” published this year, with almost 40,000 students (90 percent children of color, 80 percent on free and reduced-price lunch), working with 140 schools and training 2,400 teachers and 700 pre-service educators.

I recently co-founded an initiative, Silver Lining for Learning, which centers on sharing models for transformation that provide useful mechanisms for many alternative approaches — rather than one-size-fits-all solutions that mirror the weaknesses of our current system. For example, one of our SLL Saturday evening episodes highlights the Urban Discovery Schools, which are developing new models of blended learning based on novel strategies for design thinking and capacity building. Another SLL episode describes how China has evolved successful approaches to provide remote support for teachers and school leaders.

Three Dimensions

In that spirit, I see three themes out of many that are important in our collective efforts to evolve transformative models.

»Teaching based on guided, collaborative learning by doing.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s 2018 report “How People Learn II: Learners, Contexts and Cultures” emphasizes the importance of creating an educational ecosystem in which many different niches provide support for personalizing instruction across cultures and contexts.

With support from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education, my colleagues in the EcoLearn group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and I have developed ecosystem science curricula based on immersive authentic simulations. An example is EcoXPT, a middle school curriculum we have released for free use by teachers and parents. The three-minute video on the EcoXPT website gives a sense of how this type of immersive experience is a model of guided learning by doing, practical and scalable in both classrooms and homes.

Overall, teachers can draw on many newly released learning resources to implement digital curricula based on cutting-edge research.

»Social media as vehicles for motivated, shared learning.

Compared to two decades ago, we have a powerful, near-universal, communications infrastructure for developing new models of education: the World Wide Web, mobile devices and social media. In particular, social media enable building online communities for creativity, collaboration and sharing. This is a proven, engaging method of group-based learning, with apps tailored for different objectives, topics, preferences in how to learn and developmental stages.

The design of new models for formal education should be based on the devices and media people already are using for informal learning. For example, the National Education Association is documenting creative ways that teachers are infusing pandemic-related developments into their lessons, including the use of social media to study and express the changes in students’ lives.

As a caution about this, social media also are redefining what, how and with whom we learn in ways that challenge and alter classic definitions of knowledge (e.g., textbooks, encyclopedias, scholarly journals) — without giving much thought about the implications. In Wikipedia, “knowledge” is constructed by negotiating compromises among various points of view. This raises numerous questions: How do teachers help students understand the differences between facts, opinions and values — and how do we help them appreciate the interrelationships that create meaning? In an epistemology based on collective agreement, what does it mean to be an expert with sufficient subject knowledge to have valid views on a topic? We risk sinking in a swamp of alternative “facts” and fake “truths,” yet cannot ignore the bottom-up value of diverse perspectives and on-the-ground insights frequently lacking in top-down classic knowledge.

Our current public health crisis and turbulent future stems in part from people privileging either classic or crowd-sourced knowledge over wisdom based on complementarity. New models of education should combine the epistemologies of top-down classical knowledge and bottom-up social media to help students assume personal agency in achieving equity and appreciating diversity, in resolving tensions and dilemmas, and in fostering learning in ways that respect others’ cultures and contexts.

»Unlearning by all stakeholders in education.

Whatever models emerge, they must include strategies that help those now involved in schooling, both educators and students, to transformatively change their behaviors. The biggest barrier we face as leaders in this process of reinventing our current methods, models and organizations for these activities is unlearning.

As described by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey in their 2009 book, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock Potential in Yourself and Your Organization, leaders must help educators let go of deeply held, emotionally valued identities based on industrial-era classrooms in service of transformational change to a different, more effective set of behaviors. This is both individual (a teacher transforming practices from presentation and assimilation to active, collaborative learning by students) and institutional (a district transforming from degrees certified by seat time and standardized tests to credentials certified by proficiency or competency-based measures).

Unlearning requires not only novel intellectual insights and approaches, but also individual and collective emotional and social support for shifting our identities — not necessarily in fundamental character and capabilities, but in terms of how those are expressed as our context shifts over time. Building on work by Jeremy Bailenson, author of Experience on Demand, my colleagues at Harvard and I are studying how immersive media (virtual reality, multi-user virtual environments, mixed reality, augmented reality) can enhance unlearning in service of transformational change. I believe the success of any transformative model for education will rest on its inclusion of powerful methods for unlearning and capacity building in the people who will implement this new approach.

Addressing these three themes should help us collectively develop an educational ecosystem of alternative models that transform learning, using the dark clouds in the present to enable a bright future.

CHRIS DEDE is the Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Cambridge, Mass. Twitter: @Chrs_Dede