By Susan Gentz | April 17, 2018

Catherine Prince has been engaged in leading Knowledgeworks work around the future of education for the past 12 years, which includes studying and writing about the future and work with stakeholders around the country. Her role is to imagine new possibilities and think about what that looks like for strategy today.

When talking about the future of education, it’s important to ask what it looks like for students to be ready for the future along with strategies that we can use to get there. According to Prince, “the future of work and the future generally is going to be characterized by a lot of uncertainty and complexity with what we're facing. There are a lot of unknowns about the degree to which smart machines will displace people from our current jobs or change those jobs considerably."

Prince goes on to state that, “given all that uncertainty, we expect that people are going to need to be reskilling and up-skilling really frequently across their lifetimes." This means that it's increasingly important to build a strong foundation of social emotional skills along with related cognitive and metacognitive skills such as creative problem solving.

Although the idea of nurturing social emotional skills within the schools seems ideal and appealing, there are still many challenges for this kind of future workforce preparation. Prince thinks that we need to place more of an emphasis on foundational skills. She states that, “it's challenging because a lot of times people in today's schools and districts feel hampered by being able to fully pursue those kinds of attributes for learning experiences, even when they really want them." Many of the current challenges appear to be structural, like how we use time and space. Prince also thinks that, “we're also seeing challenges around our assessment and accountability systems which measure a relatively narrow perspective of success". Fostering cultures of learning among students and teachers that really relate to visions for the future of learning is important and that is something that takes time as well.

Challenges are often apparent, but there are still many things to be excited about as we think about the future of learning. Prince stated that she is, “really excited about the potential for educators and to work more closely with kind of community based organizations, employers, other organizations beyond the walls of traditional schools to kind of create community wide approaches to readiness where appropriate."

We also must consider how technology plays into the future of learning. Prince thinks that “technology can be a great enabler, but we hear so much about the tension between living in an increasingly technologically mediated world but also really needing to value deep inner connection and relationships among people." This is something district leaders across the country are dealing with, finding a balance between both of these highly important skill sets that enable our students today to be prepared for the workforce tomorrow.

Technology and the future of learning will only be as effective as the access that comes along with it. Across the country we see great pockets of innovation, and the next big step is scaling up these opportunities for every student. Prince believes that “if we could build greater public will for change, we could create momentum around the vision for the future of learning."