They’ll tell you about AI. We tell you so much more.
If you follow education trends like I do, you'll see the same list of predictions pop up every year. Publications love to forecast how education will transform in the coming year, and their predictions typically center on familiar themes like AI, online learning, and STEAM education.
Here's the thing: these aren't really predictions anymore—they're just part of our educational reality.
Artificial intelligence is in education. Full stop. That will continue in 2025.
Online learning has been, is, and will continue to be part of education—though it has admittedly evolved since the remote learning dog days of spring 2020.
STEAM has been a topic of conversation since 2006, and it will continue to be as industry leaders bemoan engineers’ lack of writing skills (perhaps disciplinary literacy is a solution?)
These topics aren’t exactly trends; they’re just facts of life. So what are the actual changes on the horizon? Let’s break down some of the education trends for 2025 in a list written by an educator for educators.
Standards-driven education
Be honest: are your tasks, assignments, and assessments driven by standards, or aligned to them? Because there is a difference, and it’s a critical one.
In 2025, impress your peers at the department or faculty meeting by bringing up standards-driven education, an instructional model that places grade-level standards as the driving force behind all we ask students to do.
Sometimes, I’d have a great idea for an in-class activity, a homework assignment, or a sub plan. And I’d know it had to meet a standard, so I’d search that long pdf of them for a keyword, slap the standard’s long ID number on my lesson plan, and call it a day. Then I’d do that again and again and end up wondering why so many of my students struggled with grade-level assignments later on in the year.
The problem was how I was using the standards. If educators start designing tasks with the standard in mind (a great exercise in backward design) and make sure all parts of the task fulfill its elements, their students will rise to the challenge of grade-level tasks (even the ones that are behind).
As we’ve observed, too often teachers accidentally dilute the value of their content in well-meaning attempts to scaffold it. There are plenty of ways to implement learning supports, but watering down a task’s difficulty is not one of them. Drive with the standard and offer meaningful learning support to help your students reach their full potential.
Also? Embrace your role as a “warm demander.”
Warm demanders
Have you ever crafted a parent email using the sandwich method? You know the one: start with a compliment, mention the issue, then end on a positive note. That’s the work of warm demanders, too, just in a different context.
So, what are warm demanders?
Warm demanders are educators who maintain high (grade-level!) standards while also being sensitive to students’ emotional needs. Warm demanders understand how to strike the balance between rigor and encouragement, often using the aforementioned sandwich method to boost student confidence and feelings of self-efficacy.
Part of being a warm demander is encouraging—and embracing!—student mistakes as crucial signs of progress.
Embracing mistakes
I think most teachers do this to some degree, but I’m calling it now: an education trend for 2025 will be more conversation around the importance of learner mistakes.
Mistakes are data. They help us understand the invisible thought processes our students are engaging in, and we can use that data to adjust, differentiate, and improve our instruction.
In fact, a 2024 study found that under “particular feedback conditions,” making mistakes can be more valuable than explicit instruction. The study found that teachers who guided interactive explorations of common mistakes resulted in a higher rate of learning in students than teachers who delivered “sit-and-get” (or “sage on the stage”) instruction. .
By embracing student mistakes, teacher instruction improves. This includes mistakes made by students with learning exceptionalities, those who are English Language Learners (ELLs), and those who are still behind following the disruption of the Pandemic.
Chronic absenteeism
The pandemic may be over, but COVID recovery is certainly not. In 2025, expect a focus on chronic absenteeism.
What is chronic absenteeism?While the definition of chronic absenteeism varies from state to state and district to district, it’s generally defined as missing 10% or more of school days—even for illnesses.
Chronic absenteeism has declined a bit since reaching all-time highs during the 2021-2022 school year, but it’s still not back down to pre-pandemic numbers.
Absenteeism impacts students and schools in several critical ways:
The pandemic complicated this issue in unexpected ways. When virtual learning became widespread during COVID-19, and students had access to course materials online, some parents began viewing in-person attendance as optional rather than essential. While online learning helped during the pandemic, it may have inadvertently diminished the perceived value of being physically present in class.
Attention contagion
In this era of chronic absenteeism, educators are asking, will students show up if school is fun?
That seems to be a driving question behind efforts to increase student engagement. In 2025, expect to hear a lot about boosting interactivity to encourage attendance. The buzzword that will impress your colleagues (and boss!) is “attention contagion.”
Attention contagion is the brainchild of a Canadian research team that investigated the influence of peers on student attention in class. Their study was a fascinating look at the influence of peer attentiveness and they had an interesting finding that could impact both your seating chart and your absentee rate: when sitting near attentive peers, students in the study focused more, took better notes, and demonstrated better short-term memory.
But there’s a catch.
Students in the study did actually “catch” inattentiveness from peers, though only when sitting next to or between inattentive classmates. Students did not catch inattentiveness when sitting in front of or behind inattentive peers.
If we want to fight absenteeism through student engagement, setting the right conditions for attention contagion could be key.
Student mental health
Another ripple effect of the pandemic that will remain a trend in 2025 is that schools will build on mental health progress.
Student mental health has eroded over the past decade, but the crisis peaked in 2021, with 42% of students reporting feeling persistently sad or hopeless. Astonishingly, schools have made real progress in improving student mental health since then; that number was down to 40% in 2023, and there were similar decreases in students reporting suicidal thoughts.
In 2025, expect the push to improve student mental health to continue, and for absenteeism to have a role in that conversation. Schools remain the primary place where students receive mental health services, so encouraging attendance is critical to maintaining the positive trendline. While there is still a lot of room for improvement—particularly among female and LGBTQ+ students—educators at all levels will look to capitalize on this turnaround and invest in improvements.
Rethinking conventional wisdom
We work hard to teach our students critical thinking skills, and sometimes, the best way to teach it is by modeling. An important education trend for 2025 will be challenging some of the specific conventional wisdom that’s been ingrained in us as educators.
As more research surfaces questioning the efficacy of some beloved practices, educators will need to be willing to think critically and change tack. If we’re talking the talk of researched-backed and data-driven instruction, we gotta walk the walk, too.
Some recent studies into aspects of conventional educator wisdom found that:
No, these studies don’t mean you have to tear down your classroom posters or confiscate any remaining fidget spinners. But they do give us an opportunity to rethink some of what we’ve been doing and to ask tough questions the next time fads start dominating our industry.
When studies challenge what we've always done in the classroom, use that data to refine your approach—not replace it. After all, you know your students best, and you know what helps them succeed. In 2025, keep an eye on the research, but trust your expertise, too.
Trust your expertise while embracing growth
At the end of the day, 2025's biggest education trend might just be a return to what we've known all along: good teaching is about maintaining high standards while supporting our students' individual needs. Whether we're talking about standards-driven education, being warm demanders, or embracing mistakes as learning opportunities, we're really just describing what effective educators have always done—we're just getting better at understanding why it works.
As we navigate post-pandemic challenges and rethink conventional wisdom, remember that you're the expert in your classroom. You know your students, you know your content, and you know what works. The trends we've discussed aren't revolutionary—they're evolutionary. They're built on the foundation of decades of classroom experience, refined by research, and validated by real results.
So as you head into 2025, take what serves your students, leave what doesn't, and keep asking those critical questions.
After all, that's exactly what we ask our students to do every day.
Looking for an education solution that engages students, embraces mistakes, and is standards-driven? Check out our math, world language, and ELA curricula.
Kelly joined Carnegie Learning in 2023, bringing a decade of diverse educational experience. Her career includes one year as a high school Dean of Students and nine years teaching French at secondary and post-secondary levels. An AP French exam reader in 2017 and 2020, Kelly holds ACTFL OPI certification and is versed in various world language pedagogies, including TPRS and Organic World Language (OWL). She taught using Carnegie Learning's T'es Branché? curriculum for six years. As a content writer, Kelly is dedicated to highlighting educator experiences and empowering teachers to enhance student outcomes nationwide.
Explore more related to this author[AI, online learning, and STEAM] aren’t exactly trends; they’re just facts of life. So what are the actual changes on the horizon? Let’s break down some of the education trends for 2025 in a list written by an educator for educators.
Kelly Denzler, educator of 10 years
