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Classroom Connection: Future Stories with David Christian

Becca Horowitz

What does it mean to teach the future?

After our event with David Christian, we’d love to hear what ideas are sticking with you. Whether you joined us live or are just thinking about these big questions, jump in:

How do you help students make sense of huge topics like evolution, interstellar travel, and the risks and rewards of an unknown future? When you explore questions about the future, do you focus more on claim testing, continuity and change over time (CCOT), or another historical thinking skill?

Share a question, strategy, or classroom connection that helps students think big without losing sight of the human story.

And if you're looking for ways to foster future thinking, try our Lesson Plan: Future Complexity and Unknowns podcast Episode 9: The Future.

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  • A college professor teaching Kant gave me the frame I've used ever since: there are only three clear times in our life: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We learn from yesterday to act today, so we're in a good position to succeed tomorrow.

    What it unlocks in the classroom is modeling. If we can find comparable historical moments, we can start to make educated predictions,  pattern recognition grounded in evidence. A lesson on Rome or the Industrial Revolution stops being about the past and starts being about now.

    My students are living this. Their community is facing a real water shortage. Jobs they're training for may not exist when they graduate. These aren't hypotheticals, but they're urgent. So when we study how industrialization displaced skilled trades, or how Rome managed resource scarcity at the edges of empire, the question isn't "why does this matter?" They already know why. The question becomes: what did people do, what worked, and what can we try?

    History becomes a modeling tool. That's what teaching the future actually looks like.

  • in reply to Drew Fortune

    Beautifully written,  , and such a great way to approach the teaching of history.  Thank you.

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