By Dr. Tyler Thigpen and Dr. Caleb Collier
Read our new report: Reimagining Educator Competencies: Empowering Learner Agency in the Age of AI
A few years ago, one of our Guides—our term for educators—sat down with a new group of middle schoolers. She asked them a simple question: “What do you care about?”
Silence. The learners fidgeted.
Finally, one muttered, “Grades, I guess.”
It was a sobering moment. These learners were bright, capable, and full of potential—but school had trained them to care only about compliance. Their energy was spent chasing points, not purpose. They had learned how to play the game of school, but not how to own their learning—or their lives.
That moment crystallized for us what’s at stake: if we don’t change how we teach, we risk raising generations who can pass tests but lack the agency to navigate—and shape—a world in flux.
In a world changing faster than any test can measure, agency isn’t a luxury. It’s essential for young people to flourish.
Old Mindsets That Served Their Time
Traditional teacher mindsets weren’t inherently “bad.” They made sense in their time, emerging to bring order, standardization, and efficiency to an Industrial Age model of schooling. Both of us know this firsthand—we were trained within those approaches, though each of us came to them through different paths: Tyler through an alternative teacher preparation program in Georgia (GaTAPP) and Caleb through a tutoring program with Atlanta Public Schools. Over time, we—and many teachers like us—absorbed a set of assumptions, often implicitly, about what good teaching required. Here are eight of the most common:
- Control over autonomy – “If I don’t manage everything, learning won’t happen.”
- Delivering content – “My job is to explain and test what students remember.”
- Compliance equals success – “Quiet-ish students who follow rules are learning.”
- Grading as the goal – “The number on the report card tells us everything.”
- Teacher as expert – “I must know more than everyone else in the room.”
- Coverage over depth – “Finishing the curriculum is more important than exploring ideas.”
- Uniform pathways – “All students should learn the same material, at the same pace.”
- Behavior management first – “A controlled classroom is a successful classroom.”
For decades, these mindsets prepared students for predictable careers and rewarded mastery of facts. But today’s reality—rapid change, abundant information, and fluid careers—demands something else entirely. The rise of AI makes this shift even more urgent (and, for some, easier to justify), but the case isn’t only technological. It’s also deeply human. A new set of educator mindsets isn’t just about preparing students for an AI era—it’s about righting the ship of education itself, recovering the purposes and practices that were lost in the wake of A Nation at Risk and the standards movement.
The New Mindsets Learners Deserve
Flourishing in this new world requires educators to embrace mindsets that center agency and self-direction:
- Design for ownership – Create conditions where learners make meaningful choices.
- Coach, don’t control – Ask questions, scaffold challenges, and trust productive struggle.
- Measure growth, not just grades – Use reflection, feedback, and authentic demonstrations of learning.
- Cultivate purpose and belonging – Help learners connect what they’re doing to who they’re becoming.
- Guide curiosity – Spark wonder through real-world projects, not worksheets.
- Co-create learning – Plan with learners, not just for them.
- Trust autonomy with structure – Use routines and scaffolds to support—not replace—freedom.
- Model lifelong learning – Show what it looks like to reflect, adapt, and grow alongside students.
These shifts aren’t theoretical. Our own Guides say the biggest change when joining The Forest School: An Acton Academy or The Forest School Online isn’t learning new techniques—it’s unlearning old mindsets and embracing new ones. The most profound transformation is internal: moving from performer to designer, from answer-giver to co-learner, from controller to coach, from teacher to guide.
What’s at Stake—and How Educators Can Make the Leap
If we cling to old mindsets, we’ll keep producing learners who wait to be told what to do, who see learning as hoop-jumping, who crumble in the face of ambiguity. But if we embrace new ones? We prepare young people to adapt, create, and lead—skills that matter more than ever in an AI-shaped world.
We’ve already seen it: when learners have agency, curiosity thrives. They tackle real problems (like designing city gardens), set ambitious goals (like launching nonprofits), and persist through challenges (like managing their own complex workstream). They discover purpose—not someday, but now.
This shift doesn’t happen overnight. Teachers need structures, coaching, and community to navigate the transition. At Forest, we pair new Guides with experienced mentors, use self-assessment tools, and help traditionally-trained educators mourn the loss of familiar practices while stepping into a more liberating role. We’ve noticed that people coming from fields like social work, coaching, youth ministry, youth development, or social entrepreneurship often embrace these new mindsets far more quickly—because they’re already accustomed to guiding rather than controlling, and to building growth through trust, relationship, and shared purpose.
From Mindsets to Practice
These mindset shifts aren’t abstract—they’re daily choices, made in classrooms and studios, often in the quiet moments when a Guide pauses before jumping in with an answer. They shape everything: how we structure a lesson, respond to a question, or build trust with a learner over time.
But mindsets need muscle. That’s where our new Educator Competencies come in. In this companion framework we recently released, we’ve defined the skills educators need to bring these mindsets to life—everything from designing real-world projects to building cultures of belonging to leveraging AI ethically. Techniques follow mindset; both matter, but mindset comes first.
Developed through years of practice at Forest and informed by our work with self-directed schools across the country, these competencies help bring learner-centered mindsets to life. They’re not a checklist—they’re a shared language for the craft of self-directed learning: designing for real-world relevance, building cultures of belonging, coaching reflection and growth, and more.
We’re sharing them not as a final answer, but as a field-tested framework for those ready to walk this path with us. If you’re rethinking what it means to teach, to guide, and to learn—we’d love to invite you into the conversation.
A Call to Act
This isn’t just about individual teachers. System leaders—principals, superintendents, policy makers—can also reimagine what they look for, measure, and reward. Agency requires trust, time, and different forms of accountability. It calls for new ways of onboarding, coaching, and developing educators. It challenges us to design schools not around coverage, but around curiosity and contribution. It demands we treat learning standards not as rigid endpoints but as flexible waypoints.
Imagine ten years from now: learner-driven classrooms alive with learner-led projects, teachers as coaches and mentors, students fluent in reflection and self-direction. It’s possible. We’ve seen glimpses of it already.
The question is no longer whether this shift is needed—it’s whether we’ll have the courage to lead it in our schools and classrooms now, or pass it off to the next generation and hope they solve the problems we left unsolved.
Dr. Tyler Thigpen is the Co-founder & CEO of The Forest Schools & Institute for Self-Directed Learning.
Dr. Caleb Collier is the Director of Institute for Self-Directed Learning and Head of Research.
The post Transforming Teaching: Mindsets That Move Us From Control to Agency appeared first on Getting Smart.