Rethinking the Teaching Profession for a New Generation

At the June open session of BE²’s Education Workforce Special Interest Group, members gathered for a presentation and discussion with Professor Yuli Tamir on the global teacher shortage. Professor Tamir, President of Beit Berl Academic College in Israel and a former Minister of Education, shared reflections from her forthcoming book Where have all the teachers gone? on declining interest in teaching and what this may signal for the future of education systems.

The session focused on a question that is increasingly urgent across countries and contexts: why is teaching becoming less attractive as a career and what would it take to make the profession compelling for a new generation?

Looking beyond familiar explanations

Many discussions of teacher shortages begin with familiar and important concerns: low pay, heavy workloads, declining professional status, overcrowded classrooms, and difficult working conditions. These remain central challenges. However, Professor Tamir invited participants to look beyond these surface-level explanations and consider whether deeper social and generational shifts are also changing the appeal of teaching.

Her presentation highlighted three broad drivers behind the current crisis.

First, she pointed to changing career preferences among Generation Z and emerging Generation Alpha. Younger workers may be less attracted to rigid, hierarchical, long-term career structures and more likely to seek autonomy, flexibility, purpose, and rapid growth. This creates a mismatch with traditional school systems, which are often bureaucratic, conservative, and compliance-oriented.

Second, she explored the implications of generative AI and digital tools for teacher authority. If teachers are no longer the primary gatekeepers of knowledge, their role must evolve. In this framing, the value of teachers lies less in delivering information and more in helping students interpret knowledge, ask better questions, navigate uncertainty, and develop judgment.

Third, the presentation addressed the effects of political polarization, contested social issues, parental demands, regulatory pressures, and democratic backsliding on the teaching profession. In many systems, teachers are increasingly expected to navigate social and emotional conflicts. This can make classrooms feel riskier and less professionally sustainable.

From institutional authority to relational trust

A central theme of the session was that the teaching profession may need to move from a model based on institutional authority to one based on relational trust. In the traditional model, teachers derive authority from their formal position in the school system. In the emerging model, teachers must earn authority through expertise, authenticity, ethical judgment, and their ability to guide learners in a complex information environment.

This shift has important implications for teacher recruitment and retention. If future teachers are seeking more autonomy, purpose, and flexibility, then education systems may need to redesign the role itself, not only improve incentives around the existing role.

Professor Tamir emphasized the human dimensions of teaching that cannot be replaced by technology. As AI becomes more capable of generating answers, lesson plans, summaries, and learning materials, teachers may become even more important as guides, mentors, and sense-makers. Their role is not only to transmit content, but to support students in deciding what questions matter, how to evaluate information, and who they want to become.

Rethinking time, space, and the structure of schooling

The discussion also explored alternative models of schooling that challenge the traditional classroom format. Participants reflected on approaches such as the Agora model in the Netherlands, where learning is organized around student choice, projects, and relationships with guides rather than fixed subjects and conventional classrooms. The conversation also touched on AI-supported school models in the United States that aim to reduce time spent on routine academic delivery and create more space for student-directed project work.

These examples raised broader questions about how education systems structure time, space, teacher roles, and student agency. If schools are organized in ways that give students more independence and teachers more flexibility, could teaching become a more attractive and sustainable profession? What would need to change in curriculum, assessment, accountability, staffing, and leadership to make this possible?

At the same time, participants noted that redesigning teaching must be grounded in the realities of different education systems. Ideas that may be feasible in well-resourced settings may look very different in low-income contexts, where shortages, class sizes, infrastructure, and system capacity pose additional constraints. The discussion also raised questions about how to balance teacher autonomy with evidence-based approaches, including structured pedagogy in foundational literacy and numeracy.

Implications for education workforce reform

The session underscored that addressing teacher shortages will require more than recruiting larger numbers of teachers into the current system. It may require rethinking what the teaching role offers, how teachers experience their work, and how systems recognize the relational, intellectual, and human dimensions of the profession.

Several implications emerged from the discussion:

Education systems need to better understand the motivations and expectations of future teachers, including their desire for autonomy, purpose, flexibility, and meaningful professional growth.

Teacher policy should look beyond compensation and training alone to consider job design, professional agency, working conditions, and the emotional and social pressures placed on teachers.

Technology and AI should not be treated simply as substitutes for teachers. Instead, they should be integrated in ways that strengthen teachers’ ability to support critical thinking, ethical judgment, creativity, and human connection.

Efforts to redesign the profession must engage teachers themselves as active participants. If teachers are treated only as implementers of reforms designed elsewhere, systems may miss the very agency and authenticity that could make the profession more attractive.

Continuing the conversation

The Education Workforce SIG will continue to explore these questions in future sessions, with particular attention to how global evidence, policy dialogue, and cross-country learning can inform more effective approaches to education workforce challenges.

Professor Tamir’s presentation offered a provocative starting point: the teacher shortage is not only a supply problem. It is also a design problem. If the profession is to attract and retain future generations, education systems may need to rethink not only who becomes a teacher, but what it means to teach.