I’ve more recently come to terms with the idea that I am a millennial in my mid-30s, because often I find myself saying, “Well, when I was in college…” and quickly realizing I have become the person I rolled my eyes at when they talked about how students learned. The one who starts a sentence with, “Back when I was in school…”.

Somehow, I have become that person.

I grew up in the generation where calculators were still a little taboo and Wikipedia could never even be thought of as a reliable source. If you needed to research something, you went to the library. If you needed to find an article, you searched through databases. If you didn’t understand something, you had to figure it out or find someone who could explain it to you.

And now, we have so many tools at our fingertips.

We have ChatGPT, online databases, digital textbooks, YouTube tutorials, Grammarly, and countless other tools that have completely changed how we access and interact with information. Even now, as a PhD student, I learn and work in ways that I never did just four years ago when I was getting my master’s degree.

As both a student and an educator, I am learning how to meet the moment in education.

So, What Does It Mean to Meet the Moment?

The conversations around this vary depending on where I am and who I am around. There are educators who are deep in their desire to bring back blue books, handwritten quizzes and tests, and classrooms where technology is limited. There are others who are leaning into what almost feels like an inevitable movement toward more technology. I don’t think either way is right or wrong.

But we do have to meet the moment.

And when I say, “meet the moment,” I don’t mean that we need to throw out everything we know about teaching and learning. I don’t think every new technology needs to make its way into the classroom just because it exists. There is value in slowing down, thinking critically, writing by hand, having conversations, and doing difficult things without immediately looking for an easier way.

But I also don’t think we can pretend that our students are learning in the same world that we did.

Because, they aren’t. The way students find information, communicate, work, and even create, has changed.  So maybe our responsibility isn’t to recreate the education we had. Maybe it is to figure out what education needs to look like now.

We Have to Teach Students How to Think in a World Full of Answers

One of the things that fascinates me about AI is that finding information is no longer the difficult part. We can get information almost instantly, but and the harder part is knowing what to do with it. Is this information accurate? Is it credible? What is missing? What assumptions are being made? Does this actually answer the question I was asking? How do I know?

Those are educational questions.

And they are questions that educators have been asking for a very long time. AI hasn’t created the need for critical thinking, but it has made the need much harder to ignore. This is part of what it means to meet the moment. Instead of only asking students to produce something without technology, we can ask them to show us how they think or explain their choices, defend their ideas, and reflect on the process. This doesn’t necessarily mean we are lowering expectations, because maybe we are just shifting them.

I Don’t Want to Go Back

We, as educators and students, talk about education in a very nostalgic way. We remember when everyone was paying attention and taking notes or going to the library. We see it as having to actually “do the work”. But then I have to remind myself that every generation probably looks at the one after it and thinks, “They don’t learn the way we did.”

And they’re right.

Education has always changed alongside the world around it, and our role as educators has never been to stop that change but to help students navigate it with curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, and reflection. While also being open to the fact that the methods we use to develop those things may look different than they did when we were students.

We are not going to get education back to the way that it was. So, maybe the question is whether we’re willing to meet our students where they are and help them figure out where they need to go next. Maybe the question is whether we’re willing to meet our students where they are and help them figure out where they need to go next.