Collaboratively authored by Chad Ratliff and Pam Moran; originally posted on Customized Leadership.

Schools of our past are over. The biggest survival challenge facing educators right now is not Economic Storm ’09. It’s designing contemporary learning spaces for today’s learners. We understand our young people will be members of a national workforce competing in a global economy. They also need the skill-sets to be leaders and members of a global community. The needs of contemporary learners demand more from the education sector than ever before.

We educators know well that the human drive to learn and participate in a community runs deep. Over time, in villages and towns across the globe, this drive morphed into the place we know today as school. Tinkering around with schedules, room arrangements, new strategies, and different learning resources has become second nature for educators. Few of us have imagined schools being downsized, privatized, outsourced, or virtualized as has occurred within many companies in Corporate America. But, fellow Americans who worked in the steel mills of Pittsburgh or provided tech support in Silicon Valley once believed in the security of their workplaces, too.

John Maeda writes, “Boundaries that separate disciplines appear to be solid lines but up close are really dashed, and ready to cross.” Whether across our classrooms or across sectors –we can no longer afford to see only solid lines. To do so puts our profession, our children, and our society at risk. Contemporary learners will need to solve increasingly complicated global problems crossing geopolitical boundaries: poverty, water shortages, conflicts, and global climate change—to only name a few. Inside our borders, the rapid shift from manufacturing toward a project-driven service economy is clear. Contemporary learners will need to work collaboratively and be able to think quickly, critically, and creatively. And, whether young people leave or choose to stay and take non-fungible jobs in our local communities, they depend on us to equip them for successful entry into the workforce or college, or both. We can’t wait for the federal and state governments to make this happen. This is our job. Right here. Right now.

We must do everything we can to accelerate learning. This means eliminating the distance between learners and learning –a distance traditionally defined by the ratio of 1 teacher to 25 students or so. Today, the distance between learners and learning can be dramatically reduced. Great technological tools in the hands of youth can shift the learning distance from 1 to 25 to 1 to 1—no learning downtime, no arbitrary time limits. Young people should not have to power down when they come to school or stop learning when they leave. Neither should we.

Technology coupled with great learning practices accelerates achievement. So, how can we embrace technology to accelerate our work with young people in contemporary learning spaces? We can take down filters and facilitate social learning networks to create global learning communities. We can put handhelds, netbooks, livescribe pens, smart phones and other technologies in the hands of students and educators. We can learn how to best use these tools together, inside and outside of the place we call school. Indulging any resistance to using technology as tools for learning and administrative work can no longer be an option. If we attempt to maintain the schools of our past in a contemporary learning world, we will likely consign our schools to a Darwinian future in which all who can abandon them will do so for a continuum of customized options that we educators appear loathe to offer. Schools as we know them could become as obsolete as steel mills.

So, how do we turn the Economic Storm ’09 into an opportunity rather than a challenge of epic proportion? We must use the resources we have available to support innovation zone work—teachers and students aligned in research and development; figuring out learning for our future. This means redirecting limited resources to fund innovation projects: setting up model learning spaces, creating design labs to tinker with new approaches to curricula, and encouraging educational entrepreneurs in both public and private sectors. We cannot be afraid to fail, we cannot be afraid to learn, and we cannot be afraid to change.

If we transform our schools so that the distance between learners and learning truly becomes 1 to 1, we’ll create a learning grid that powers a future for our young people which exceeds our wildest dreams. After all, isn’t that why we’re here? It’s important to consider that doing nothing is a choice. Maintaining the status quo is a choice. What choices will we make? What choice will you make?