The Future Never Spoke

Emily Dickinson wrote so poignantly, “The Future — never spoke — / Nor will He … / But when the News be ripe — /Presents it — in the Act — /Forestalling Preparation —” As educators, we are always asking ourselves, how do we prepare children for the future? We often answer ourselves by relying on our past and our deep mesorah. Sometimes, we rely on what we term our intuition, which is often an unconscious accumulation of our past experiences, knowledge and observations. And yet … over and over again, world events remind us that the future is unpredictable and full of surprises.

Visionary and Imaginative Leaders

How can educators be visionary, imaginative and future-forward? At this time of the year, I have often written and spoken about Yoseph, as well as the Maccabim, and their leadership. They anticipated the future of the Jewish people, rather than the situation immediately in front of them. They were able to imagine an alternate future for the Jewish people that differed from the status quo and it made people extremely uncomfortable. In both cases, this essentially led to internal strife and a type of civil war. Yoseph’s brothers could not comprehend the Jewish people in golus. Many Jews could not understand the Maccabim making a fuss over some religious restrictions when overall, it was a time of great peace. This message rings very deeply for educators in particular, with its fierce competing ideologies.

Curious and Compassionate

As educators, we are obligated to have a future-forward and optimistic mindset. What does that mean? We need to approach our students from a place of wonder and curiosity. Use our imaginations! We must be the educators our students need, and only use the past as a positive goad. I repeat this frequently and it bears repeating: What stories are we creating in our heads? What do children need right now? While we need to acknowledge our own discomfort with change, it is our primary responsibility to adapt to the needs of today’s children. A child’s reality is determined by the adults in his or her immediate interactive circle.

Principals need to approach their teachers from a similar perspective. Leadership requires imagination and at the same time, the ability to self-reflect on our creative narratives. We must teach with dignity and confidence. All people live up (or down) to the stories and expectations they sense from us. Our tone of voice, our word choice, and our body language communicate feelings. It is vital to start fresh each moment, be wholehearted and act from a place of positivity and freshness, no matter what is occurring in the outside world. How many times does a teacher anticipate a behavior from a student or a principal expect a certain outcome from a teacher and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as they engage in creating the very circumstances they most wish to avoid?

Mutual Trust

What is the foundation for a future-forward school? That is mutual trust. Mutual trust sets the stage for an environment where teachers can feel safe to experiment and take risks in their pedagogy to adjust to the individual ethos of a particular class. Mutual trust creates classroom communities where students can not only make mistakes in their learning, but fail, perhaps spectacularly, and use those errors to spur their learning further. How many adults feel that they have that kind of safe space for learning in some portion of their lives? I would venture to guess that it is not common, but schools need to be that kind of place for both students and teachers.

Informal Communities of Practice

One of the most evidence-based educational practices is creating opportunities for teachers to engage in educational conversations informally. In schools that have positive, mutually trusting cultures, these conversations lead to many of the best changes because of the pro-social context and from the positive peer/colleague pressure. When educators share their struggles with fellow educators, they often get concrete ideas they can take back to their own classrooms.

Rich and Productive Conversations

I witness this constantly in my daily practice. A most creative case is the station rotation model that the teachers implemented in lower elementary school. I am fascinated by how so many stations reflect the expertise of one particular teacher and her influence on her cohort. It may be a technique from linguistics, such as feeling sounds in our noses or throats. It may be from social-emotional skill-building, such as writing compliments for each other’s work. It may be a gifted writer’s thoughtful writing prompts or a math whiz’s journal creativity. Each of these teachers’ spheres of influence is not only their own classroom, but rather reverberates through many classes by the medium of informal communities of practice.

This style plays out differently in middle school. I observed three middle school teachers sparring about grading. One teacher espoused a philosophy of allowing students redos of tests to mastery. One teacher believed in individualizing and students only taking the test when they determined that they had studied to sufficient mastery. Finally, the third teacher in select cases allowed a student who failed to retake a test for partial credit, but otherwise regularly did not allow students to make up assignments for full credit.

Questions that arose in this conversation included: Should everyone be getting an A? Does that make grades meaningless? If the goal of a test is mastery, is it like a driving test? Is a test like going through a red light and getting a ticket from a police officer? How important is mastery for this topic? How do we teach children the practice of responsibility? Each teacher contributed valid and important information to the conversation. Because they came from a place of curiosity, they did each discuss a small change they were going to make to their practice and observe the outcomes.

These thoughtful conversations occur between administrators and teachers, as well, and are much more productive of long-term classroom change than top-down directives.

Future Value Calculator

The nature of the future is that we will not know the true effects of our current actions and choices until it is the past. That requires reimagining our educational framework.

In one of the stories from the Gemara I shared with my students recently, the chachamim questioned Abba Chilkiya about why he gave one son a small piece of bread and one a large. It seemed most unfair! Abba Chilkiya explained that each son needed something different. His older son was very hungry because he learned all morning in yeshiva where he got no food, so he got the larger piece of bread. In contrast, his younger son was with him in the field all morning and got to snack while he worked, so he received the smaller piece. What had initially appeared as unjust to an observer was completely reframed with that clear explanation.

As thoughtful educators, our goal is to anticipate our children’s “hunger” and prepare to satiate it. Our children are the future of klal Yisrael and worthy of our deepest investment. To calculate the true future value of the Jewish people is to take the measurement of our investment in our children.

Chana Luchins is principal of learning at Rabbi Pesach Raymon Yeshiva in Edison.