I was with a group of teachers in Chicago this week, and we were talking about how AI is creeping into everything we do in life. We laughed about the Terminator, but secretly many of us (including me) were wondering if that future wasn’t too far off. The thing that we said was going to make us more connected (social media) has often made us feel more disconnected than ever. The thing that has all…
We now have AI agents that take multi-step actions without checking in. There are wearables that capture context all day. The soon-to-be-future of robotics is finally leaving the demo video. If your framework was already wobbling under a chatbot, it will not survive the next four things. So here is a better question (maybe a different question). "What does a person need in order to make good…
Most AI advice for educators is still stuck at the prompt level. You have seen the posts. "50 prompts every teacher needs." "The ultimate prompt library for principals." I have written some version of that myself (sorry!), and I do not think it was wrong so much as it was small. A prompt gets you a better sentence, BUT a workflow gets you back a Tuesday afternoon. The shift I have made over the…
The screen debate has collapsed into two camps, and both of them are missing much needed nuance. One side treats every ban as a moral panic. The other treats every device as a threat to childhood. Meanwhile the actual question, what are we banning and what are we banning it for, almost always gets lost in the noise. Robert Pondiscio waded into that noise last week with a piece more people in…
Ask a room full of educators what students need to know and you might get a hundred different answers. Ask your favorite AI app the same question and you will get an answer in three seconds, footnoted, formatted, and wrong in ways that are hard to spot. That is the actual crisis we are dealing with. We never finished deciding what was worth knowing in the first place, and now we have handed the…
Ask a student who just pulled an A in a class they hated what they actually learned. Watch what happens. Most of them laugh. Then they tell you the truth. They learned how to get the A. The content they “mastered” is already gone. This is the game of school working exactly as designed, and it is out of control. We have known this for a long time. Twenty-five years ago, Stanford lecturer Denise…
Most school leaders I talk to are asking the wrong question about AI. They're asking "should we allow it?" or "how do we stop kids from using it to cheat?" when the more important question — the one that actually determines whether your school thrives in the next decade — is this: Where are we on the AI fluency curve, and where do we need to go? Here's a simple framework I've been using with…
Here is the thing about Learning 1.0 and Learning 2.0. They each solved one side of an impossible problem. Learning 1.0 had depth but no scale. It could see your pace, your strengths, your confusions, but that attention couldn't reach beyond the village, the apprenticeship, the specific relationship. Learning 2.0 had scale but no depth. It could reach everyone on earth, but only by speaking to no…
We both look at each other. Check the driveway again. Check the street. Gone. Then I notice, my car isn’t there either… Both cars. Same night. Stolen from our own driveway. What followed was one of the most logistically chaotic weekends of our lives. Five kids. Multiple schools. Work commitments. Speaking engagements. Lacrosse tournaments. Rides that needed to happen at the same time in places…
In the last post, we made the case that distraction is a system problem. It is something that disengaged learning environments specifically help create. The device is often an escape hatch from a learning experience that wasn't worth paying attention to in the first place. That argument was about the present. This one is about what's coming. Because if the distraction problem was urgent before AI,…
The average time spent on any single screen before switching has dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to around 47 seconds today. Sit with that for just a second. It is less than a minute before something pulls us somewhere else. And we wonder why it's hard to learn anything deeply. Are you still reading this post? I kid, I kid…but, seriously, you may have been distracted! The distraction conversation…
In a recent article, I made the case that a Portrait of a Graduate only works if it's connected to your vertical curriculum, otherwise it's just fancy laminated wallpaper. But there's a reframe I want to push even further. I initially kept calling it a Portrait of a Graduate, and that's part of the problem. When we frame the portrait around graduation, we accidentally signal to students (and…
A few years ago I was sitting in on a district leadership meeting where the conversation was entirely about programs. Which reading program should we adopt? Which SEL curriculum should we purchase? Which intervention platform has the best data? The entire two-hour meeting was spent comparing vendors, reviewing slide decks from sales reps, and debating the merits of Program A versus Program B. Not…
I love this quote from President Roosevelt for so many reasons. But, mostly because it continues to be a guiding frame for me both professionally and personally. The last few decades in education have been a whirlwind. I typically share this story when speaking with groups, but as I’m headed back into the classroom a bit this fall, I wanted to share it here with all of you as well! Next year, I’ll…
There's an uncomfortable finding that keeps surfacing in education research, and it's one we need to talk about honestly. Student engagement is not always a strong direct predictor of academic achievement. So what does all this mean? Well, a kid can be deeply engaged in your class and not score higher on a standardized test. And a kid who is bored out of their mind might still pull a 95. If you've…
My favorite day of the marking period when teaching is always the same: Appeals Day. As a high school teacher I had to constantly deal with the expectations and assumptions of our current grading system. Students want, and feel they deserve, the highest grade possible. Most of the time they understand why they received a particular grade, but in English (a very subjective subject) there can be…
We've been told for years that engagement is the holy grail of teaching. And the advice usually sounds the same. We should make it fun, make it rigorous, make it relevant. But what if one of those strategies was seven times more powerful than the others? That's the finding from Kristy Cooper's study at Michigan State University, published in the American Educational Research Journal. Cooper…
I've been doing something this year that a lot of teachers are picking up, and it's so simple it almost feels too obvious. Shout out to Mrs. G, a teacher in New York who's been running a version of this too. Here's what you can do. When students turn in a writing assignment, I take their paper (long, short, doesn't matter) and I send it to Claude or ChatGPT with a simple prompt: Take this paper…
Whatever process you use, the output should be a document your teachers will actually open and a framework your students will actually understand. If it's sitting unread in a shared drive, it's not a policy. It's a formality. I built a free tool to help you just like the 20 other schools and institutions I’ve helped in crafting and revising these policies. It’s called Policy Compass. Policy…
Something is happening in education right now that should make every serious person uncomfortable. It’s making me uncomfortable that’s for sure. I wonder if you can see the same pattern happening. Every decade or so, we identify a villain, wage war on it, declare victory or defeat, and move on. All this without ever addressing the underlying conditions that made us have an issue in the first…