In today’s complex, technology-infused, dynamic world, very little is certain. Change is constant and accelerating, requiring nimbleness, curiosity, and creativity to successfully navigate the disruptive forces that accompany constant change.

What an individual knows and can do today will likely not be enough to successfully navigate the future. To be global citizens able to tackle current and future challenges, today’s UPrep students—and their adult selves—will be required to explore and engage in learning that extends throughout their lives. To explore the importance of learning and what the future of learning might look like, we invited five educators, innovators, and entrepreneurs with a range of experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds to participate in a Q&A roundtable discussion; see their profiles below. The following is an edited version of the conversation.

How do you define learning?

RONNIE: Learning is the acquiring of new knowledge and using this knowledge to expand upon what you already know. It can be obtained through touch, taste, reading, listening, and seeing. Every day we step out into the world, read a book, watch a video, and listen to a friend, we learn. It’s the attempt to grow our vision to see more than just ourselves.

MIKAYLA: Learning is any opportunity that you get to see a perspective you haven’t seen before or move forward into an area where you don’t have all the answers. It’s like wading into a river: How far you get depends on how far you want to go. You could go to the deepest part, or you could play in the shallows.

KAZI: For me, learning includes what one might call formation of the person. In the learning process, you become transformed, whether it is your capacity, who you are, how you approach ethical problems, or how you interact with others. Learning comes in many different forms, occurs in multiple places and sites, and is about becoming a better person. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire, the author describes “praxis,” or reflection upon action. Learning is knowledge that is going to move you to understand your conditions and work toward transforming them.

SUJAL: Learning for all complex primates is a multigenerational thing; you can learn something in one generation and pass it on to the next. Learning takes place in every single thing you do down to the littlest thing; it even happens in your sleep!

How do you think learning is going to change in the next five years?

RONNIE: Our world will grow smaller. It will become easier to acquire knowledge through different learning platforms. Our job then becomes to decipher what we learn, to separate truth from fiction, and to gather facts before making decisions. Data, the ability to collaborate, trust, and flexibility will play even more important roles. Students will learn that real knowledge comes in creating prototypes, launching them, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and being willing to fail and try again.

MIKAYLA: I see personalization continuing to come forward. There’s got to be more than one way to get someone through high school or even into college. The ability for people to learn in a variety of ways, in a variety of modes, in a variety of places and times increases accessibility. I imagine we will see a continued focus and push for skills over content. And that feeds into the role of technology. It’s less about acquiring the knowledge and more about what do you do with it once you have it.

FLEUR: I’m fascinated with AI. We’ve been talking about this within the State Department and in my office a lot. It will be such a useful tool in many ways. But AI raises the eternal question: What is truth? Who gets to decide what the truth is? Which history is right, and who makes that value judgment? Who is an author, a creator? And these fundamental questions are uniquely founded in human understanding. Despite the rise in technology, we still need teachers as guides to help navigate the high-speed evolution in technological access to information. There is just so much out there, but it is not all of equal value.

SUJAL: The key thing for me is how do we continue to adapt learning for the world that’s changing rapidly with technology, with AI, and generative AI? I’m interested in seeing how the college world adapts, including post–high school training programs, coding boot camps, developer academies. I think there’s a unique opportunity for those paths—considered nontraditional—to become normal learning paths.
 

What do you anticipate the future of learning in K–12 education will look like?

RONNIE: K–12 education needs to be modeled on a hands-on curriculum where students gain real-world experience. All students must be digitally literate and know how to code and use technology to enhance their skills. Diversity in the broadest sense is a must for our classrooms and teachers. All students must know how to work together in diverse teams to be better thought leaders. I just read Michael Horn’s book From Reopen to Reinvent. Horn talks about school systems creating an administrative role whose sole function is to reimagine school. Educators need to start with the end in mind: Why are we trying to educate our students? To what purpose? How can we help students develop their passions? Once we have the end in mind, we can develop educational programs to support these goals.

MIKAYLA: I think there will be continued growth in our understanding of the importance that social and emotional learning plays, and the fact that our children are not becoming any less digitized and any less internet connected anytime soon. I think the importance that educators play in teaching our students how to be kind, compassionate, and thoughtful citizens of the world will continue to be important.

FLEUR: Education will keep giving people the skills to be able communicate effectively in person. For example, I use translation algorithms to speed up my communications, but they don’t help me on the phone. They help me translate my speech into a foreign language, but I need a native speaker to make sure it is correct and to give me a powerful parable or metaphor. You need diverse, non-machine, human perspectives: empathy, generosity, and interpersonal skills. Humor. Culture and social context. Local context. Emails are useful and Zoom conversations are better, but that face-to-face human interaction is still invaluable. In diplomacy, so much of our work is negotiating in person—there’s no substitute.
 

What do you anticipate the future of learning in higher education will look like?

KAZI: ChatGPT and other tools are going to have a lasting, damaging impact on what constitutes academic integrity and how one recognizes what is actual schoolwork. There’s also going to be a shift because of the explosion of knowledge on the internet. There will be competition we have not seen before because we no longer have a lock on knowledge as educational institutions. I think there’s going to be more innovation: People can introduce all kinds of courses. We may see many more learning institutions like Khan Academy [a free online resource that provides videos and practice exercises so students can learn anytime, anywhere]. The traditional model is not going to go away. But there are going to be innovations that challenge and disrupt the educational enterprise, grant greater access, and perhaps, in some ways, make us better.

I think the shifting demographics happening in our country will also have an impact on the future of learning in higher education. I’ve read two books recently that examine this shift and the societal impact: Generations by Jean M. Twenge examines the six generations that currently live in the United States and how they connect, conflict, and compete with one another. How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi describes an approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality. These books show us that the future population of the country does not look like the past. And we have to consider what this means for the future of learning at our institutions.
 

How do you anticipate people will continue to learn throughout their careers?

FLEUR: I anticipate increased flexibility. Classes you can take whenever, wherever, to fill a gap in your knowledge or hone a skill. I hope it’s cheaper, with wider and more equitable access!

SUJAL: My company is thinking about how we develop people once we hire them. We hired a head of learning and development as one of the first 150 employees, which is a big commitment for such a young stage of a company’s life. We did it because we have tons of workers with a bachelor’s degree in biology, who come in as research associates. This is a hands-on lab job, and a lot of these folks end up leaving after a year or two to move on to something else or return to school. We are thinking about how we can develop and retain those people so that we can depend on them to advance into management jobs.

Please share about a recent time when you learned something new.

SUJAL: One of my good friends and I have been trying to understand sleep science. My friend read a book by a well-known sleep scientist. I watched his TED Talk and read four of his papers. And we both have completely different viewpoints. I think that the interesting part of that is not just the learning tools, but the recognition that everyone learns differently.

FLEUR: I’ve learned six languages over 25 years. When I first learned Dari in 2008, there were no online resources. There were only one or two books available for English-speaking learners, and for higher-level grammar, they were Farsi, not Dari! But a year ago when I learned Turkish, I could watch Turkish TV from my sofa, I could practice vocab with an app on my phone or listen to the radio news on my way to work. Although some of our language classes are still virtual, via Zoom with native speakers, there’s no translation app that can beat a real language teacher.

RONNIE: Recently, in a meeting of all heads of school in our Northwest region, I listened to a lecture by Donna Orem, the president of NAIS [National Association of Independent Schools]. She talked about the difference between technical challenges and adaptive challenges. In a technical challenge, the problem is recognizable and easy to identify, and the solution is often based on the experience and expertise of the school leaders. In an adaptive challenge, the problem is unknown, hard to identify, and requires learning to reach a solution. Schools of the future will face more adaptive challenges and must be ready to think outside the
box to find solutions. ■

Meet the Panelists