What future are we aiming at? This series of 6 posts, Future Vision 2025, describes some of my personal education mission milestones. These are not predictions, they are aspirational. They are framed as significant differences one could see or make by 2025. What’s noticeably different in 2025 when one examines students, parents, teachers, learning, assessment, media & society? How and when these milestones are reached are not addressed. Some milestones are indicated by the emergence of something ‘new’ (at least at robust scale), others by the fading away of something familiar and comfortable.

Parents 2025

Parents see that 2025’s learning environments for their children are different, and superior, to what they went through as students themselves – just as they expect to see that 2025’s medical options are different and superior to what was available 30 or more years previously.

Parents are noticing positive results for their children, including a background of more general satisfaction with school and learning, and higher confidence in their ability to learn challenging content – presented by teachers with new tools and in new ways.

They are even beginning to expect improvements in schooling. Rather than dig in their heels resisting classroom changes, insisting on schooling “the way I know it worked just fine for me,” parents are starting to believe in progress – because they finally see it working in their own family. They can see and hear their children apply more of their school day “book-learning” to their every day “real world”. Parents notice that for their children, school learning is making more sense, in ways it never did for the parent.

Some parents would even be upset if they found out that their child was receiving ‘only’ the good old familiar and comfortable lecture & practice that the parent remembers from their own schooling. Because they know it can and should be better for their child. Nevertheless, the inertia and familiarity of the same-old same-old keeps it the safe, default choice for education decision-makers.

So, grass roots movements have formed among highly-involved parents of school children to encourage and support teachers through the adoption and quality implementation of proven, though unfamiliar, techniques and tools – in stark contrast to the last many decades of those same highly-involved parents’ rigid adherence to the status quo, based on their conviction that whatever is new could only be degrading learning for their children.

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