Sunanna Chand: Teachers matter more than technology

I I would love for the conversation to be more about how do we make sure that every single educator in America has the best technology at their disposal and the best understanding of how to use that technology at their disposal to be able to build human and durable skills for young folks. And then how do we make sure that young people in college, young people in high school are seeing that their education is technology enhanced and creative and interesting and like all of those things and then want to be educators, right? Because they see that they’re not just sitting bored feeling like school’s irrelevant.

I’m not interested in being here. I can’t even have my phone, which I know is super relevant to the workplace and all these places. Why would I want to go be a teacher and be stuck in this situation for a very long time?

And so without having that conversation about the talent, we also risk future talent into the education ecosystem, which I think is a is a threat but also an opportunity if we get ahead of it enough. So I’m here AIAD Studios episode I think like in the 15s now. Wow.

Yeah so still very early but who else have you interviewed Alex? Also interviewed Kumar Gar from Renaissance Philanthropy. Roy Bahad the head of Bloomberg Beta which is like the first VC to really invest in future work.

Cool. Gavin Purcell he was Jimmy Fallon’s showrunner. Lots of founders, lots of folks that are leading organizations.

Yeah. Not necessarily AI organizations like our our whole ethos is, you know, we’re trying to not necessarily be on the stage. We’re trying to build the stage for organizations that have the trust and connectivity and and the ground game to actually reach the communities across the country that are, you know, integral to our mission.

We’re trying to reach all students. It’s a very audacious goal. So we can’t do it alone.

And so it it part of this the whole thing about why do a podcast was we were both just talking about having been to the ASU GSV summit. I was on a like I think four panels. I was with some of the smartest people in our space and it’s a travesty to me that they each only got about 15 minutes to talk and you know you’re sort of getting only to a certain surface level and also you know a live panel is not something that you can go back and edit.

So you’re a little more buttoned up. This is a bit more free form. You know, you can speak freely.

Well, we can go back and, you know, make some tweaks if there’s, you know, if you put your foot in your mouth. But it it allows us to to to so so our goal really is, for folks who are following our work and wondering, you know, what does the AI readiness movement look like? You know, shining a light on the reinventure lab, I think, is part of helping them to understand, not necessarily because the reinventure lab is an AI organization, although you might say it is.

U I don’t really think of it as an AI organization and yet if we think about what is the hardest work to be done over the next 5 years it’s work that orgs like TFA are extremely well placed to do how do you move like 13,000 school districts 50 million kids 100 million parents and guardians yeah four million teachers 50 state departments of education all of them fractured not centralized In some cases, it’s not even centralized in the state. You’re you’re actually going district by district. And there challenges that come from that.

There’s also, I think, you know, benefits to to not being centralized. But the only way to reach a huge human system, maybe one of the biggest in history, right? This like very big set of people doing stuff in endeavoring in sort of one set, you know, like a general goal of getting students ready for the future.

Yeah, the only way to do it is with orgs that have been walking the walk for so how long have you been at Teach for America at the Reinvention Lab? Maybe you can, you don’t have to give us the whole journey, but for folks that aren’t familiar with the reinvention. Where were you born?

I was born in outside Chicago, Illinois. Moved to England for a few years and ended up in Cleveland, Ohio for most of my growing up. So, go Cavs.

Shout out Shaker Heights. But yeah, the reinvention lab, I was I’ve been at Teach America for 5 years now. And I was the first employee of the lab that Michelle Culver hired.

Michelle, who shout out the rhythm project, is doing incredible work and thinking about human relationships in the age of AI. And she came in with a hunch, which is, you know, F Teacher America has been doing incredible work in systems change education for a really long time, making sure that more young folks are able to access possibility and opportunity in the way that the system was designed. And she kind of started to realize like what if the system actually is designed in a way that’s not going to reach all of young folks or or what if actually we need to totally reinvent and redesign what the system looks like and do both things at the same time.

Make sure that the young folks that are going through the system right now today are getting the best possible outcomes they can in the current system and also how do we totally reinvent the system that fundamentally wasn’t designed for the type of learning that actually makes us most human especially in a world where AI is going to take over a lot of the road tasks that our original education system was designed for and so that’s kind of the task of the reinvention lab and Teach for America is both being able to improve the current system get more young people access to opportunity and thriving right now and also will really do the work of reinventing the system for 2, 5, 10, 100 years from now. I talked about it a lot. Yeah.

Did it make sense? Really good. Yeah, it’s really good.

So and so how long have you been at the reinvention lab? It’s been 5 years now. Oh, where were you before?

Was that shout out Remake Learning in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I think Remake Learning is one of the most well I believe it is the most robust learning ecosystem for the future of learning anywhere in the country. 600 Organizations.

I worked with many school districts about a 100 school districts in southwestern Pennsylvania but also museums, libraries, industry, philanthropy, government, higher ed. And my job was to network them all together and figure out how do they work in a cross systems way to forward the future of learning for young folks in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area. And I often say my heart is there are many pieces of my heart that are still in Pittsburgh and if I hadn’t fallen in love and needed to move to California I would I would still be there.

And as it happened I met Michelle at the exact moment where I was considering a move out here and she was starting the lab and it all kind of came together in this really beautiful way that I feel grateful for all the time. Yeah. And Michelle has that effect on people.

She does. She is she is a v visionary and but also someone that you just want to be in space with. Yes.

And and frankly I think the the the type of work that she built and that you’re now leading at Reinventure Lab is it’s really like right at the very epicenter of what has to get done. My guess is you’re not building a tool like all on your own. Like that’s not your core strategy.

I don’t want to assume that. Okay. It’s funny because I was at at ASGP.

I would say 95% of the conversations whether it was funders or organizations it was like all about like what are the tools that we’re building how are we going to use AI to do all this stuff and to me it r it rings quite hollow because it feels very much like well there’s this big problem that we’re not necessarily acknowledging but we all know exists which is that AI is going to like radically disrupt pathways to prosperity for kids. And I chafe a bit at the idea that AI is going to solve the problem that it created. And and so if you you then sort of ask, well, how do you solve that problem?

And I think the answer is how do you push a traditionally slowmoving molasses like institution or really a gazillion institutions and get them to evolve at at a pace that is required which I don’t know that has ever necessarily happened. I was talking to Dr. Kesha King at T-Mobile. So she’s like a longtime administrator in Houston or outside of Houston and then went to T-Mobile was leading their sort of like broadband connectivity work.

And so she was there at the beginning of you know like online learning and we were she was reflecting on you know all the analoges that we’re hearing where everybody was like it’s going to change education and it’s going to do all this amazing stuff and it was like I just had this nagging feeling in the back of my head that like like the internet’s not going to replace teaching and learning like this is sure it’s a support and she was right I would say but I’m curious if there are any analoges that you you know in your career you know, I mean, I remember the first time I used, you know, dialup internet. But I wasn’t quite in the education space and so yeah, like is there like do do you see any sort of like echoes of, you know, past new technologies and the euphoria or the excitement or the concern that we’re, you know, experiencing today with AI? I mean, 100%.

You know, I was that that girl who was building HTML websites about my favorite book series when I was really little. For those who are curious, it is anomorphs. I so I’ve been interested in emerging technology for a long time and ancestrally like I feel an ancestral connection to education, right?

My father was in community college work his whole career and so I literally grew up in the halls of community colleges. That was his educational work to think about like how do all people in community gain access to high quality education? And for him it was through community colleges.

And for me, so when I think about the connection between emerging technology and education, I often think about conversations I’ve had with him. I remember one time we were doing this big digital badge, digital portfolio initiative in Pittsburgh in the mid 2010s and I remember telling him about it and he was like, "Oh yeah, you know, we tried something like that back in the late 90s around, you know, all of these things are cyclical." And and what I often say is that a lot of the type of learning that we think about in terms of learning that makes us most human is actually really ancestral. And I think about Audrey Lord and in poetry is not a luxury where she says, you know, there are no new ideas.

There are just ideas waiting in the wings to to become known or something like that. I’m not getting the I’m butchering the exact quote. Of course, she does it much better than I do.

But I really ascribe to this idea that everything is cyclical, right? And we’re building on wisdom from from many many generations and finding new ideas, new ways to express those ideas. And when I came into education, I started teaching as a Teach for America teacher in 2010.

So it was a couple years after the iPhone came out. And it was abundant and clear to me as someone who cared deeply about education and educational access and who also was really kind of a nerd for emerging technology that the pedagogy that I was teaching wasn’t matching what young people needed in that moment. Even my first and second graders were on tablets were you know were really interested in the Smartboard as early as 2010 2011 and so I got into this I didn’t know what to do with it yet but I felt this really deep tension between what I thought that how fast I knew technology was moving and what I thought it could do for the education sphere and then where I thought education was in that moment even a couple years after after the iPhone came out.

And so that kind of started my journey to search for what felt like a type of learning that could both honor the the ways that our brain works in terms of how we learn and also find new ways to be able to help our brains learn by using emerging tools and technologies. And so I agree that even AI I think is not going to replace deep human teaching and learning. And the interesting thing about Teach for America is, you know, for those of you who maybe know Te for America, but know it kind of tangentially, you might say, "Oh, Teach for America, that’s an organization that, you know, puts recent grads in classrooms for two years to teach." And it’s true that our core program has changed a lot over the years, but it’s still kind of the bread and butter of what Teach for America does.

But what I want to do is also help everyone who’s listening to this think about actually Teach for America as really obsessed with the problem of how do you get highquality educational talent in the places that need it most. And when I think about the definition of high quality educational talent, that definition changes over time and should evolve as the tools, technologies, ways of thinking, the ways our brain works, right, evolve over time as well. And so that’s what we really do with the reinvention lab.

I think about what’s the intersection of the future of learning and the way that we as humankind are evolving in relationship to technology and what’s the intersection of that with highquality educational talent in a way that helps us think about the relationship between the talent that we believe will always be necessary to help young people thrive and the ways that technology as a tool can supplement and augment that in the most efficient and best and and ethical ways. But this idea of like product product all the time sometimes will frustrate me especially coming from a place that’s so focused on talent and has seen over now 35 years of teacher’s existence how important talent is at all levels of the education field to be able to really evolve and change you know how we how we practice education in this country. Yeah.

One of the one of the things I’ll ask somebody if you know if we get to a conversation about like well what is the role of AI and advancing teaching and learning and I just say well you know if you were to go to your district and I were to pick two classrooms or maybe someone else’s district go to a random district in the US and we have two classrooms in that district both English language arts and the only data point I gave you is one classroom every student is using their laptop tops regularly throughout the week and in the other classroom they’re not. Do you feel like you would know enough to even be able to guess which classroom which teacher is being more effective? And at least so far, I’m curious for your take on that, but so far the answer has been oh no. Like that that would always be that would be useless.

Like it actually would go all over the place. Like some teachers that are unplugged are actually the most engaged and are really thinking creatively about bringing students in through project- based learning. Some teachers that are using laptops as just like a multiple choice exam machine.

And there’s obviously lots of alternative examples right on the other in the other direction. How would you answer that? You know, just out of curiosity.

I mean, I will say that it’s a game show. So, you know, there’s there is a a winnings on the line. The Family Feud survey said, I mean, I think the the basic answer to that question is yes, very hard to tell.

I think one thing that I have been thinking a lot about though is the underlying baseline necessity of digital infrastructure for any of this. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this whole conversation about I see on the table the generation and I’ve been thinking a lot about his push to ban cell phones in schools. Jonathan hate Jonathan hate.

Yeah. And you know, that’s one of the major kind of points of his plan. And I think a lot about, well, I can’t tell the difference between if there’s a human in the room or if there’s technology in the room.

But one thing I know for sure is that if those two classrooms don’t have the same access to that technology or to the internet, then I can start to talk about predicting outcomes, right? That that something we often talk about at the reinvention lab is the type of deep learning the type of rich human- centered learning that works with our brains and also works in a time of rapid increasing technology should not be come across just by luck or luxury right and so I can’t tell in that scenario but what it makes me think is when I hear this conversation about banning phones I think of all the potential positives of that but I Think about also how in some classrooms, in some places, in America today, phones are the access to the internet and the access point to technology that will then prepare them for a technology driven future. And so, and so as long as the access is the same, I can’t tell.

But we also have to have a conversation about access, which is kind of the unsexy thing, but is also kind of part of this conversation. Yeah. Yeah.

And it’s especially relevant when you think about I was looking at the I’ve been looking for analoges and one of the analoges I you know everybody talks about the calculator. I worry that it’s too narrow to draw lots of conclusions from it. But I I think maybe more apt is the computer and like like the keyboard.

And so if you look at, you know, what school was like before, like basically the 1980s and before, students are writing about a half a page of like long form pros on per week. You get to the 2010s and it’s like 3 to five pages. And I don’t know that people say, but school is getting harder.

It’s just it’s technology is enabling you know, more more outputs in service of learning. And and it it it is really troubling to imagine if you’re that kid that doesn’t have access to a computer and is now having to handw write, you know, those three to five pages and doesn’t have spell checker doesn’t have access to, you know, the wide worldwide web for better or worse. Yeah, you start to get and and then of course the analog comes to AI where we there’s this whole like question of like do we ban it, do we not ban it?

And there’s this presumption that if it’s it’s not banned, if AI is allowed, then all the students are have access to the to not just AI but the same model because there’s enough divergence in terms of the the the quality of the models that you actually could imagine some kids having an advantage just because they have, you know, they’re paying for DPT Pro 200 bucks a month. And so it but that brings me to this like sort of deep respect for like teachers who have been concerned about students using chat GBT. I don’t think it’s cuz they’re leites.

I don’t think it’s just because they’re like not with the times. I think they’re sensing this the power of this technology. They don’t understand it.

And if there’s something that you know is has the potential for, you know, potentially maybe even probably harming learning if not if if you don’t adapt to, you know, the reality of the technology. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s actually a lot of risks of just sort of like just having sort of almost like a free-for-all.

Does that make sense? It it it does. And I without putting you on the spot for your opinion about whether LGBT is cheating, feel free to to Well, I’m I’m I’ve been thinking a lot about our conversation, a couple things.

One, I’ve been thinking a lot about our conversation we had a couple months ago where you were pushing me on shortcuts and how teachers are reasonably concerned that it’s not just about cheating, but around intellectual and cognitive shortcuts and whether or not we should how heightened our concern should be around taking a shortcut to writing that three-page pros paper and just writing it with GBT and editing it and what are we losing in that scenario and we can run this in the show notes, but I also recently listened to an hour talk that Alex told me I should listen to and he was right. So if he ever tells you to listen to a talk, you should listen to Oh yeah, David. And what I thought was I thought that airplane example was fascinating and on the short hand it was that you know there was a scenario where correct me if I’m wrong airplanes were crashing because pilots were so reliant on autopilot that they didn’t know how to fly in high altitude.

They just didn’t have the practice. And obviously there’s so many there’s so many correlations there with possibilities for education and having to have the discernment again is having the human judgment and discernment to say what things are we okay to take shortcuts on like what things are not going to be as necessary in the future maybe we can take shortcuts here but actually these things are fundamental skills that we have to learn that’s a whole because we build the technology we build in the judgment and I think one thing that that makes me think is how do we bring more again human talent right educators to the table to be building that judgment into the models but also building judgment into future curricula that is going to be a part of this this AI world. The other thing is that I don’t remember who said this, and so I might be getting the statistic up wrong, so I don’t I don’t mean to pedal fake statistics on your podcast, but it was some larger percentage than I had expected that I heard that are maybe you know the statistic, but teachers who are using AI to grade papers like that has the percentage that I heard it was something like 20%, maybe it was high enough where I was kind of shocked by it because Again, human judgment is so important in the analysis of student work.

I’ve always been worried about that stop point because there is so much I mean we think about something like writing or we think about something even like art, you know, things that are just human and subjective. It. The idea that we could run some of these things through AI and make our grading process more efficient without losing some sort of deep humanto human cognitive assessment of some of our more like fundamental human skills.

It just it that concerns me. And so I’m trying to kind of calibrate even for myself like okay what are places where we can take shortcuts and for me at least right now although my opinions are known to change assessment is an area that I’m generally cautious. Yeah, absolutely.

It’s a previous guest was basically said something to the effect of one of the skills that students need to build is they basically need to be their own CIO, their own chief information officer. And the role of a CIO is really making decisions about what tools and technology an organization uses. And circling back to sort of the thing that you the point that you made earlier about well maybe you wouldn’t know what’s which which which teacher is more effective based on just knowing whether they’re using laptops or not.

But you would be able to say that if it’s the case that the students are in the classroom where they’re not getting access to laptops that’s actually consistent across their learning experience. Even if they’re building really good competencies in ELA, they are missing something important that they’re going to need, which is the ability to, you know, use technology and also encounter all the weirdnesses that come from having access to the internet for which is which is very much for better and worse. I the the there’s so many threads I want to pull.

The one thing I also found very interesting, which is all about the shortcuts. The anal the example that David Atur gave about the folks flying the plane. It’s related to a separate story he told about or just an example he gave about expertise and you have like a crosswalk coordinator who’s making sure kids are not getting run over like very important huge societal value and then you have an air traffic controller and you know an air traffic controller makes I think something like 3x what a crosswalk coordinator makes and the question is well why because they’re both really valuable things for society but the air traffic controller requires requires more expertise.

And so, so right now our our, you know, our labor market is is set up such that you are you are commanding value for expertise. And so when we think about career pathways, it’s all about how do you build the requisite set of expertise to command that value. The the the the scary thing about AI to me is expertise being being an expert in using AI I think is going to be totally it’s going to be like saying I’m an expert in using my phone.

No doubt there will be people who are super users and you know I I see friends who post stuff on Instagram and I’m like how did you create all the but I don’t think that they’re listing you know mobile phone use on their resume and it’s probably not something that an employer would really care about. I worry that AI using AI is going to be one of those things where absolutely necessary. It’s a skill that if you don’t have it, you you are going to run into problems.

But you need something else on top of that. And and for me, the good news is it’s like it’s not necessarily new stuff. It’s actually we still need people who can read and think critically.

Peter gle.org, he says something was really I keep thinking about this a lot. It’s like writing is thinking. The point about writing is not that you’re learning how to put words into paragraphs.

And it’s like process of learning how to write is a process of learning how to actually think and how to take what’s in your head and structure it and communicate it. Engineering maybe computational thinking skills. I don’t think it’s thinking.

I think there’s like I think being a good writer makes you a really effective prompt engineer. But it’s like yeah like I think what you’re getting at is it’s not necessarily proven in the other direction. There’s maybe some assumptions that well kids just need to be sort of these like sort of super AI augmented workers.

But yeah just that sort of an eye reflection without a question at the end of it. I mean the thing that I I both thought that crossing guard and air traffic controller part of the point that he makes is it is a specialized set of expertise that is also augmented by technology that you because the air traffic controller has to have a particular set of advanced skills in technology that that expertise becomes more valuable in the marketplace. And I that that example was a little hard for me because I think there are so many incredibly valuable humanto human skills that it’s going to be a lot harder for AI to replicate, I.e.

Elder care, teaching that is not valued necessarily in the market in the degree that I think it should be. Let the record state stand teacher should be paid a lot more money. Here here and so I’m trying to wrap my head around that too.

I mean, another thing that I I thought was interesting was this conversation about how, you know, this conversation about is AI going to replace teachers, right? And obviously my answer to that is no. And part of the great example, I know I’m talking a lot about this talk, but it was it was kind of a great talk. But I I think it’s worth also saying I think the medical sphere is a really great example where you have a lot of technology.

You also just need a lot of highquality humans. I mean personally I don’t want to go into a hospital and have a computer judge me and you know rely on it for my diagnosis and treatment. It would be great to have a human in that process.

You know 10 years from now I might listen back on this podcast and think that was silly. But I’m pretty sure I’m still going to want some human judgment in my in my process of diagnosis and treatment at a hospital. I mean, for me, but certainly for my kid.

And so it just got me thinking about what what does teaching and learning look like? That is that is a type of teaching and learning that is a higher form of expertise because teachers are trained to be able to implement the highest most complex versions of technological expertise to do their job because it is one of the most important jobs that our society has. And so it deserves the highest quality technology just like healthcare does.

And that I feel like is something that would be really cool pairing pairing the talent with the tech. This is also part of the conversation last week about you know it’s almost like it was so you said 95% of the conversations it was something like that that was so geared towards the tech. It’s almost like having a conversation about hospitals just about the technology in hospitals, which I’m sure happens without ever talking about the doctors and the nurses and the, you know, everyone in that system who makes that whole thing tick.

And so I I would love for the conversation to be more about how do we make sure that every single educator in America has the best technology at their disposal and the best understanding of how to use that technology at their disposal to be able to build human and durable skills for young folks. And then how do we make sure that young people in college, young people in high school are seeing that their education is technology enhanced and creative and interesting and like all of those things and then want to be educators, right? Because they see that they’re not just sitting bored feeling like schools are relevant.

I’m not interested in being here. I can’t even have my phone, which I know is super relevant to the workplace and all these places. Why would I want to go be a teacher and be stuck in this situation for a very long time?

And so without having that conversation about the talent, we also risk future talent into the education ecosystem which I think is a is a threat but also an opportunity if we get ahead of it enough. I don’t know if that was an answer to a question. No, this is this but this does lead us it well this is like this is why I like this format is we can kind of meander a little bit and as long as you have someone that’s really smart my goal is just to sort of like draw out the insights that might not necessarily be something that we would hit if I sent you a list of 10 questions and we’ve had guests that are like insist I need to know 10 questions so I can prep and I’m like I’ll send you them but like I promise you like we’re really going to just sort of feel it out but I have actually not heard this argument maybe put as cogently as you put it in terms of like the the why we need to be pushing schools to be able to like safely and effectively and to implement AI.

In Silicon Valley, the language, especially early on, there was like some mistakes made by some companies. And the the language was AI is going to replace teachers and it’s going to help us like bridge the gap and serve all these students, but sort of implicit in that is like, well, we’re not going to need teachers because AI is going to be able to like do such a better job. And it’s a very Silicon Valley way of thinking.

And it really hit people the wrong way. And then there’s, you know, I think people have adapted. And so the the new flavor of that is AI is going to save teachers time.

It’s going to make them more efficient. And you know, and I’ve talked to unions, I’ve talked to, you know, district leaders that have gone through layoffs and this is extremely present right now. Like the conversation about AI is sure it could be cool for teaching and learning.

They’re really thinking about the impacts on their workforce on their relationship with not just unions but you know the teachers like they they are seeing and hearing what’s you know like you are basically buying into the all of the conversation about AI when you implement it. You don’t have control over what people are talking about you know outside of your your building. And I don’t know that teachers are energized by it save me time.

I think it’s like it’s a misunderstanding of what actually matters. Like to teachers, the teachers that I talk to, their goal is I want to be able to do a better job teaching my kids. I want to do a better job engaging engaging them.

I feel like kids are not they I know that they don’t think their learning is meaningful. DC public schools, I believe, is like dealing with a 40% absenteeism rate. Yeah.

So that’s what teachers are really energized by. And sure, there’s like a logical flow of like, well, if you have more time, then you can focus on those things, but it’s it’s it’s folks who are not necessarily like deep in the education space that have a very sort of like market driven view of like this is the problem that we need to help to solve and then we scale it. But the other thing is like I don’t know if you saw I forget which survey it was, but it was something like I think it was 18%.

We’ll have to we’ll have to put it in the show notes. Maybe it was 28. I think it was 18%.

Only 18% of teachers would recommend profession today. Down from I think 60% not too long ago. That’s right.

And you know AI might be shiny object and there’s a lot of like risk to getting too focused on it but it is exciting. It is an opportunity for people to build new skills and to feel relevant and to get to just be a part of this future, this moment, this like, you know, once in a generation if you’re lucky, you get to be a part of a technology revolution. You put it very interestingly like is is this actually a way for us to enlist features not just as something that we give to them and use them as sort of pawns in sort of the implementation strategy but actually sort of draw them in and help them sort of tell us like what does this look like?

How like how do you want to use it? That’s what that’s what we do. I mean does does t has the reinvention lab like how have you started to figure this out?

I mean, have you had any cohorts of teachers that are explicitly empowered to use AI? Like what? Yeah.

Any stories you can share about that? Oh man, I wish I had a little See, this is this is my one mistake I made is I didn’t bring a little notepad to to take notes on what you said because there’s so many interesting things in that thread. So a couple things.

I agree with you that the assumption of we will save teachers time and therefore we will teachers will use that time for more creative you know project based interp whatever 21st century learning is is an assumption I have yet to see validated in the real world in a way that it’s probably is happening in pockets but I go back to my experience as a teacher where I had the exact same assumption when I was a young teacher you I was so interested in technology. Let’s be clear, personalized learning and using machine learning for personalized instruction is not a new phenomenon, you know, like shout out Carnegie Melon University in Pittsburgh. We’ve been talking about these things for a very long time.

And so what is true is that I think is that often what happens is one the space that would be taken up by more creative learning is actually taken up by building the new sets of expertise to understand new technologies and be able to deploy them effectively. And then with the pace of technology and how fast it’s moving, that’s almost like a neverending new building of expertise you have to build. And either you don’t build it and then you don’t get the productivity gains or whatever you know the growth gains or you do build it and then it’s a constant process of building it.

It’s almost like that time that you would spend goes back into learning and relearning and being curious and being interested in what the next thing is because you’re so obsessed with your young folks growing at the at the highest rate that they can that that continues to be a a place of curiosity and a place of of learning for you as an educator and as a professional, right? And so so that’s like an interesting conversation of will we over the next few years validate or invalidate this hypothesis that saving time that a we can save teachers time in this way and b that if we do save teachers time it’s going to lead to xyz or another thing. I I hear that said a lot and I’m just not sure that we have the data yet on that.

The other thing I will say is is that in terms of I mean teachers are are incredibly resourceful and scrappy and what they don’t often have is the ability to weed through the noise. So you asked what for America is doing and the reality is like we had the great privilege of being at a conference last week where we probably learned about some new AI tools and like between the two of us we maybe have our arms around some small percentage of all the AI tools that are available to education. I mean, I remember walking around the Expo Center at the AI show and being like, "Okay, I’ve heard of some of these." And it’s literally my job to know about what these things are.

And if I’m imagining then being a teacher responsible for any number of young people’s lives, I definitely don’t have the time or opportunity to be exploring all these different AI tools, then being able to have the expertise skill of choosing, okay, which AI tool do I use? And then possibly wasting your time on a tool that doesn’t work well. And then that’s like burns you or possibly you use it really well for the premium version and then you have to pay to access and either have to pay out of your pocket or your district has to pay and they’re not paying for the procurement license.

And so you run into all of these different into these different kind of issue pockets for teachers. And so one of the things that we try to do at at Teach for America actually this isn’t something out of the lab but I think it’s a really interesting early pilot is work with third and fourth year educators who are Teach for America alumni. So creative, interesting teachers who are interested in emerging technology and have them paired with edtech companies both to be able to test those you know high promise AI AI tools but also to give direct feedback to developers and again this is like a beautiful combination of tech and talent right we have really high quality talent at Teach for America that’s doing incredible work in education still in classrooms and we have really great connections to edtech companies many of which are led by Teach for America alums too.

And so that connection becomes really beautiful and can lead to some really interesting things. I mean other things we’re doing is you know we’re training our alumni network. We’re going really deep in regions to work with regional networks around training around AI.

We’ve we’re training all of our incoming core members around you know baseline how do we use AI effectively and efficiently and build customized tools that are really specific to what we’re doing in our classroom which is different place to play. Shout out Playab AI. That sounds like Playab.

So Playab is Playab is an incredible shout out Yousef, shout out the Play Lab team. An incredible tool that actually spun out of the reinvention lab. So Yousef was a was an official teammate of mine for a couple of years and and now we’re just very close partners.

And I what I love about Playab is that it’s it’s it’s really nonprofit. You know, the aspiration is to be AI infrastructure for a place like schools and education. And so that’s really how we’re trying to use it with our core members, our alumni.

And we’re even doing AI workshops on college campuses. You know, we’re in I think over a hundred college campuses across the country. And part of what we want to say teachers or actually college students college students, some of them are preachers teachers, some of them are just college students.

And we are trying to say to them, listen, it’s something like 66, I think it was a Forbes article in November 2024 that said 66% of employers, you know, will not hire an entry- level person without an AI skill set. That is probably actually a lowball number. And so could we say to college students, this is something that we’re actively trying to test and validate, like, hey, come be a teacher.

Because when you’re a teacher, you gain incredible skills in an emerging technology that will put you on a path to economic mobility for yourself, that will give you these really valuable industry skills. And most young people didn’t see, I mean, if you’re a senior in college, you definitely did not see that in high school because the technology wasn’t even there, right? Which is kind of incredible to think about.

So, we’re just testing this hypothesis of like how do we both really work to change how teachers experience teaching and the combination of teaching with emerging technologies? And then how do we really talk about that and share the wisdom and go back to college students and say actually this is a really creative and interesting profession that will give you these skills and try and change the collective mindset about what education is and what it means to be an educator because really in the best of cases it is an incredibly invigorating, energizing, creative, interesting profession. And again one of the most important that we have.

Yeah, this is I’m I’m I’m obsessed with this. It’s such an interesting theory of change for this moment of how do you how do we rapidly evolve education? Well, we believe you have to invest in teacher capacity, build like the human capital and that’s why we do like the teacher PD and the trainings and all this stuff.

But actually going a little further up the pipeline and thinking about how do you actually change the the demand side where and it drives me crazy like my parents are both both educators you know and I talk to friends who are from Japan or from Norway or Denmark and you know in those countries you like try to become a teacher and if you fail it’s like okay I guess I’ll go to medical school like it is so respected and the pay is good, but it’s not even necessarily just about the pay. It’s like society has imparted this prestige. And so there’s that and that’s something that we are wfully in like the honestly the opposite side of where teachers are now almost political pawns.

And it’s it’s really sad. I mean, my mom my mom works I mean she’s one year away from retirement and she works probably 60 hours a week is wild. And there’s not, you know, in Silicon Valley, you’re like, "Oh, I work 60 hours a week.

It’s like hustle. I’m gonna like, you know, I’m getting my equity grants." And, teachers don’t get equity grants. Get a decent pension, but and it’s actually really good.

And like there’s I think there’s a lot of a very strong case to be made for education. Society is not making that case and TFA seems really well placed to be a voice in that because you have so much access to not just pre-ervice teachers and new teachers, but you’re actually bringing in folks that didn’t necessarily go to college thinking they wanted to do education. You actually maybe you’re the organization that’s figured out how do we how do we sort of pitch education as if not a vocation at least as a really impactful part of your journey.

And so what I’m hearing from you is there there probably has to be a role for AI there because it’s going to be seen as a thing that’s, you know, sexy and cool. And the other thing if I was going to try to like help, how would we make the case? If you’re in college and you’re listening and you’re wondering, well, maybe should I go into education?

I think the answer is also yes. One of the heristics that I use if someone says, oh, is my job at risk for AI? Well, the the answer and David Alur, I think one of the reasons I share that with you is because he doesn’t answer that question.

He like will he literally will punt it. He says, "Well, we don’t know." and that’s probably the only right answer. If someone is is too sure- minded about what the jobs of the future are, you might might want to ignore them.

So we don’t know what the jobs of the future are. I think a rough heristic though is open up your your calendar and how many how many meetings do you have? Or put differently, how much time out of your eight hours a day are you interacting with other people?

And how much of that is you sitting in front of a computer doing stuff? And it doesn’t matter what the stuff is, whether it’s coding or writing or analyzing or designing. If if you’re sitting in front of your computer, like that’s a problem because whatever the thing is that you’re doing in front of your computer, those are the types of things that AI is like that’s the lowhanging fruit in knowledge work.

And so you think about like what is it like to be a teacher? I mean teachers technically have calendars, but they’re like every single minute of my day is it’s either and there are components of like you know grading and so it’s not that they’re it’s not every single minute but they’re spending probably eight hours a day in front of people interacting with kids. Very complicated interpersonal dynamics of like kids and parents and administration and school boards.

I actually cannot imagine a more a better place to cut your teeth in becoming an expert in navigating the the hard the thing that AI will probably struggle the most with. And even if it doesn’t even if AI is good at like grief counseling. I was just talking to a friend of mine who’s a therapist.

This is the the woman in the the redwoods. She does grief counseling and people who’ve like lost a child and she’s been thinking a lot about AI and you know but there there are places there are there are going to be a lot of things and teaching is probably one of them where even if the person is less good than the AI like there’s something meaningful about having someone that you know actually cares so what what is the work that needs to be done because you know the reinvention is small but mighty. I mean you the impact you’ve had is incredible when you think about play lab and I think you can also take credit for you know the rhythm project in the sense of you know reinvent lab is sort of this like incubator of talent that is now going out and so so play lab that’s you Ahmed and his team they really two founded like two years ago at the reinvention lab it was so I mean I remember the I remember meeting him and you when you were both at the reinvention lab it was very recent yeah maybe two and a half years ago Now it’s pretty recent.

Yeah. And Play Lab is really, I would say, one of the leading, if not the leading nonprofit building accessible tools for teachers without profit motive. And then Michelle Culver storms out of the gates with this big idea of the rhythm project and how do we address the social emotional dimension of like human thriving and especially how do we have those conversations with young people?

Nobody there is there is no other organization in the country that is like thinking about that. Shout out to my friends and colleagues. I love them both very much.

But what yeah, what is what is next? I mean, there’s obviously lots to learn, but you’ve you’ve also been like pretty hands-on for longer than most organizations in the space. The reinvention lab is Teach for America’s future of learning R&D engine.

What does that mean? We do kind of early, I call it little R design research, ethnographic research. We work very deeply with teachers, young folks to try and deeply understand some of the larger kind of narratives and things that are going on in the ecosystem including but not limited to AI and then we develop offerings that could be helpful against that set of real you know challenges that students teachers are facing in the ecosystem.

And you mentioned chronic absenteeism earlier, and I have to shout out another colleague of mine who’s one of the original OGs of the Reinvention Lab, Colleen Katon Crawford, and she did design sprints with I I think over 150 teachers and young people over the course of August to February. And she basically was able to plot young folks on a scale of, you know, there’s a scale of are people are young people in school or are they not in school? When we talk about chronic I promise I’m coming around to the point of answering your question.

Are people in school or are they not in school? That’s usually what we talk about when we talk about chronic absenteeism and the numbers. She kind of put a y-axis on that which is do young people want to be in school and do they not want to be in school?

And so then you get some interesting quadrants, right? One quadrant is they’re in school and they want to be there. They’re we talk to young folks who are in school and they want to be there.

They’re engaged. That’s great. There’s another group of people who are not in school, but they want to be there.

We call those systemically blocked. And often when you look at the chronic absenteeism research, there’s a lot of young people that fit into that category, right? They they have to work.

They have to take care of young young siblings. They need transportation. We talked to young folks who were really benefiting from things like washers and dryers in schools, things like that.

And so you you see a lot of that systemically blocked work happening in the space. When you go into the lower quadrants, we’re really interested in those quadrants, right? Because it’s young people who don’t want to be in school and who are not there.

So any number of, you know, deans of students going out to making house calls and trying to pull on people back into school might not really make a difference if the young folks don’t want to be there anyway are going to find ways to get out of it. And then there’s another group of young folks who are there, but they don’t want to be there. And those are young folks who what we’re finding is that the line is moving up, right?

There are a lot more young folks that don’t want to be in school increasingly. As we look at, we were talking before recording started about attentional power and the rise of things like Tik Tok and different times types of new media. As we look at the rise of artificial intelligence, what we’re finding is that young people just feel so much more and more urgently disaffected by the way that they’re being taught.

And the what what I often say is, you know, when I got into this work, I felt a tension between the reality of the world and the inertia of the classroom, right? Like there’s just so much inertia in the education field to keep the system that the way it is for various reasons. And I felt that pressure between the exponential rate of change and the inertia of the education system.

And I feel that year overyear because things are moving exponentially that young people, educators, more folks are feeling that pressure to a greater degree year over year over year. And that’s why that line is increasing. And so when you talked about the intersection of teaching and learning with chronic absenteeism, what we found in our research is that’s absolutely true.

And that and you also talked about how teachers really they care about the tools and technology to the extent that they care that young people are growing. So what we learned is that you know teachers teachers like do they care that a young person is in or out of school? Yes.

To the extent that they think that being in school means that a young person is learning and growing and they care about that growth. Young people are saying, "Well, I want to grow, too, and being in school does not help me grow." And so, you have a similar interest, but a different position between teachers in schools and students who think, "Where is the right place for growth to happen?" And so what I’m hoping is that we as a as this tension grows between how do we grow students and what is the most most appropriate way to grow students and that tension comes in direct conflict with an education system that was built you know 150 years ago and was never actually built to prioritize deep human learning durable skills 21st century skills deeper learning human centered learning whatever you want to call it maybe I’m wildly optimistic That’s a character flaw of mine, but I feel that tension growing and I feel like it’s going to it’s going to get to a head, right? You talk to progressive educators, folks who’ve been doing learn education for 50 years and those folks exist and you know, we’ve seen schools pop up and collapse and it hasn’t been the right moment.

It just feels like the right moment for learn center education 21st century education durable skills is coming because this pressure is building so intensely in a way that feels like we to to your very original point we have to work together as an ecosystem to figure out okay what do we what do we build now right if this system is kind of collapsing under the weight of all of these different pressures coming in and actually what we all want is for students to grow young folks to learn how do we have the radical imagination to dream into a new way of being that actually meets that need. And if the pressure isn’t high enough, now another thing we were talking about off camera is that pressure when you put aentic AI artificial general intelligence into the mix is going to just I mean I think it’s going to add add so many more degrees of pressure to a system that is already feeling a ton of pressure from all directions. Yeah, that’s the I mean there is there is the risk that AI is the shiny object that distracts us from the work we need to from the work we need to do.

And I think that looks something like schools rushing to implement tools just because that’s the box they want to check. Implementing tools is probably important but just implementing tools is again not enough. But I think it’s meaningful that there is been this reinvigoration of conversation about 21st century skills and durable skills and there is people are now talking about school transformation without you know like the the education philanthropy space.

I just learned this this year. I should know this as someone who spends a lot of too much time fundraising. I wish I spent less.

Maybe we can get some cool sponsors. Spinrift by the way I I’ve been you know dutifully digging my Spin Drift at every episode. Eventually maybe they’ll be our our marquee sponsor.

Who knows someone at Spinrift Philanthropy? Who’s listening right now? Philanthropy, the Spinrift Foundation.

Please get a drop the link to the email address in the show notes or the comments. The philanthropy space. I didn’t realize this.

Shrinking specifically for education. Yeah, Francis Misano has done some really interesting thought pieces on this. Yes, I actually she’s she’s hosting something I think this week.

And I’m really excited to learn a lot about sort of the funding landscape now post federal dollars. Why is the philanthropy space contracted? Well, this is this is I think one of the big consultancies.

I don’t I won’t name name drop them, but one of the big education sort of like boutiques that you’ve heard of. They were saying that essentially there’s been a lot of foundations that have been working and just you know private individuals have been working on let’s say school transformation systems change you know whatever the what whatever these long threads of of work in the social impact space in K-12 have been and they’re just like exasperated like not that we’re not just seeing meaningful improvements it’s like we’re regressing and the n scores are worse than they were before like we are actually going in the wrong direction and there’s a sense of like, well, nothing is working. This is clearly not a good place for us to put our money.

I think that AI could be that shiny object that reinvigorates. It’s the almost the Trojan horse that it it’s the thing that’s going to get all these people to show up to the ASUG GSV summit and South by Southwest and it’s going to get 21st century skills back onto talking points and back onto the menu and get researchers to start to really think about all these questions. And I think I’m very confident that all the hard research into like what are the skills of the future like we’re we’re basically going to land somewhere around durable skills.

We’re going to land somewhere around schools needs to be more engaging and you know self- advocacy and you know inquiry and perseverance and persistence and creativity communication. And so if if that is the result, I’m willing to sort of just, you know, go with the, you know, like surf the wave, even though I think there’s it there’s also a lot of opportunism that happens when there is that shiny object. And and so I think the key is how do schools navigate because you made this point about for teachers, it’s not that they aren’t aware that these tools exist.

They’re getting probably emails every day from vendors that are that are shilling, you know, this or that tool. But it’s it takes I mean even for me sometimes I I struggle to like there was like one company that I saw and I was like wow this actually makes a lot of sense like it you know this feels like a legitimate like use case. I I can see the safety component that they’ve addressed.

Then I talked with like one of the top five districts in the country, the person that was leading their like Jennai work and that person was like, "Oh yeah, we like we actually like looked under the hood and you know it they there’s a lot of issues basically they’re not thinking about safety effectively. They’re not really thinking about you know algorithmic bias and and so I realized like even for me I like my spidey senses are are insufficient. So this this is like sort of like back to this like idea of well what does this future world look like where we are effectively harnessing technology to both reinvigorate the teaching profession but also to you know in imbue students with the I don’t know is it knowledge skills also just like the mentality I mean like lifelong learning is that a skill how how do we how do we talk about this orientation towards curiosity yeah I have two very concrete examples I can share one small, one larger.

One thing I’ll say is so at at ASGSV, the session that we led in the glass classroom was called from reinforce to reinvent, meaning how do we not just use AI to reinforce the current system as it exists, create faster lesson plans, but actually use it to build more human skills. And so what we did was basically build a tool on Playab in which it prompted folks to leave the conference space we were in. It was called the glass classroom and gave them an 8-minute challenge to build a durable skill.

So they chose a double skill they wanted to build and I gave them kind of a 8-minute challenge on how they might do that using the space, the literal conference town square that we were in a GSV and also using strangers, right? Getting them out of their comfort zone and interacting with other people, pulling them out of meetings, you know, interrupting people who are on their computer, stuff like that. And I will never forget a couple of my colleagues who were there, Joy Ouroro and and Elizabeth Booze did I think it was collaboration or communication or something and they stared into each other’s eyes for 60 seconds.

They had never met really before and so they were strangers kind of staring at each other for 60 seconds and Joyy’s reflections were really powerful that it felt like a really intimate experience. It felt like this deep human connection with someone that I’d never met before. It felt really uncomfortable and I kept looking at my clock to see, you know, 60 seconds felt really long and the whole presentation was 30 minutes, right?

So, it’s not enough time to deeply explore this, but the the whole idea was the the session’s 30 minutes. You’re using 3 minutes of it to be able to get this challenge that helps you build a durable skill and then going out and practicing that challenge. And the fact that an AI tool could get that type of deep intimate connection in that short of a time span was kind of mind-blowing because it’s like actually, you know, sometimes people paint the vision of the future of AI in classrooms of basically rows of students that looks exactly like a classroom might look with computers and they’re all doing their personalized learning by themselves and they’re on computers all day.

And I think that that vision is so unfortunate because really if you use AI at very strategic moments, you can unlock a whole realm of how to do durable skills in in a in a really creative and interesting way, right? And so that was a 30-minute session. So that’s a small example.

Now let’s take future shock which is a summer offering that we do around it’s basically like how do you navigate how do you help young folks build the skills in interest driven learning in lifelong learning in inquiry in in executive functioning to be able to say this is something that I really care about here are the steps that I can take to go try this thing out and actually just try it out for myself and again we have this AI tool that is called project launcher that we use it’s a 10 it’s a twoe program, right? And we use it for maybe an hour on one of those days. First, we start with community building.

We start with interest building. We really help young people work with each other and work with the facilitators to figure out like what are my interests? What do I really care about?

What am I curious about? And then you input that into the AI and it spits out options for a project you can do within the time span and then first steps to kind of get you started. And then it also acts kind of as a coaching tool.

What we generally find is like you then go from interest to let’s say there are 24 young folks in a classroom 24 individualized projects which for someone who’s been doing project based learning for a long time might think like oh my go you know you generally have to go around running around like a chicken with your head cut off trying to like get authentic projects with 24 young folks if you’re one teacher in a room suddenly AI lets you do it in an hour and then your job is really to coach both on how to help young people use that AI to continue to coach if they need to but then being able to just coach on the project and help them move forward and again has this really small strategic use of AI that opens up a whole world of being able to do durable skill development in a way that I think was legit kind of impossible a few years ago if you didn’t have you know if if you if you weren’t able to take the time to sit with every student and coach them through a project idea. So I think there are these ways in which it’s not all or nothing. It’s not ban AI or use it for everything and every young person’s in front of a computer all the time.

It’s like how do you use it strategically as a tool and then again empower the human talent in the room to be facilitators and guides of that learning over time. And that requires different capacities for educators for sure. But it doesn’t eliminate educators.

In fact, it makes them even more important in this type of meaningful relationship coaching mode. That’s going to continue to be important. Yeah.

But every story you shared and every story that I’ve heard, every story that we share of a of a teacher using AI in some amazing, creative, impactful way, there’s a teacher that’s like the main character of that story. Invariably, like I have I’ve literally never come across any anecdote where it’s like, oh, we like brought an AI in and it sort of just like totally replaced or automated this thing that you know that that helped students figure out this concept that I was really struggling with. Yeah.

But I think the tension is the teachers are in many cases behind their students. Which is like the whole cheating thing in part is like I I’ve even evolved my thinking about this where it’s even simpler. I think it’s just if the student is way better at using the AI than you are, they will always be able to outmaneuver you.

And so the the one thing you really hone in on, and this is like we actually did something in the glass classroom as well. Ours was like a like a a cheatathon where basically brought educators in. It was like you’re going to you’re going to cheat.

We’re going to give you an assignment. We want you we want you to use AI to cheat on the assignment. Yeah.

And so cool. It was and you’d be surprised like a lot of the like the the tr tips and tricks that like I’ve seen bandit about like the oh you just get you know you just have students you know grade the AI and have them sort of like edit and like revise and provide feedback on whatever the AI puts out. And it’s like, oh, that that teacher just didn’t realize that you could just also put the the prompt into another window and just ask it to like like it just and so it’s some of these things that you they’re not hard to figure out, but it’s not it’s not a set of it’s not it’s not a specific set of things.

It also is like a moving target. You know, the way you even prompt today is different than than three months ago. And will be different again.

We’ll will almost certainly be different again. And that’s you mentioned agentic AI. M we probably don’t have time to go into that whole rabbit hole.

And so how next part season two. Yeah. Season.

Yeah. So it’s like like this this this world where the goal needs to be for teachers at a minimum to be able to keep up with students. Yeah.

And so yeah, we’re we’re like, you know, thinking about what does it look like at the systems level. As we kind of draw to a close, I I’m curious like who are the other maybe surprising actors or or influencers in the space that could help with sort of pushing forward a movement to really redefine and increase the prestige of teaching and like whether or not they could directly work with the reinvention lab, but are there other folks that maybe aren’t necessarily at the table right how that could be turnkey. And I and I mentioned that because you mentioned Jonathan Hates’s book, The Anxious Generation.

And he talked about like the solution to phones and all the horrible harms that are coming from students being sort of like, you know, glued to their phones is it’s not necessarily just regulation. Like maybe regulation is a part of it. Maybe, you know, even with cell phone bans, like that’s a part of it, but he he’s also will admit that that’s not sufficient.

Yeah. And when when he’s pressed and they’re like, well, what what is a solution? The best thing he got with is we need to create this like social norms and like how do you create social norms?

There is no policy that creates social norms. There is no like PD session. And I’m curious just like given that you’re sort of like a little bit closer to the front lines if there’s anybody out there maybe it’s like who do teachers really listen to person organization?

My answer to this is going to feel well, first of all, let me just say we talked earlier about the fact that I am wildly optimistic about about this moment for learner set education, deeper learning, whatever you want to call it. And I have to say that part of the reason why I’m optimistic is because I am sitting on the shoulders of giants who have been doing this work for a long time. I mean, shout out High School for Recording Arts.

Shout out Big Picture Learning. Shout out, you know, High-Tech High. Shout out so many folks that have really built the foundation for how we think about this type of learning that we’re talking about that’s going to be ever more necessary.

And there have been so many difficult moments and losses in the journey of of you know thinking about changing the system of education and and so many technology waves even the pandemic. I mean folks were saying oh you know everything’s going to change after the pandemic and and I was you know also wildly optimistic in a time of deep trouble and despair in that as well and we didn’t quite see that difference. I still I still feel like I hold that optimism and part of that is because we have so many incredible people working in this field.

I wouldn’t say that they’re necessarily not at the table, but it’s still important to remember that you know folks have been doing this work for decades and you say this all the time. The second thing I’ll say is I think that everything you just spoke to, Alex, is why your organization is really important and why it circles all the way back to the beginning of this conversation where we need each other in this ecosystem, right? Like Teach for America is a part of this ecosystem.

But there’s so many other players in the ecosystem that we have to bring together because the reality is there are still so many teachers that are using generative AI in their, you know, in their personal life, but are not trained to use it in the ways that you’re describing. And and there’s so much exciting opportunity there to bring again creative professionals into this new technology world. And we’re going to need everyone on board with that.

And so, appreciate being on this podcast and also just just being a partner with you over, I can’t remember, maybe a couple years now I met you. And I just always appreciate your pushes, your friendship, your ability to bring people together in this work, cuz I think that’s really incredibly important. And the last thing I’ll say, and I I before this comes out of my mouth, I know it’s going to sound trit, but I I’m I’m I’m just going to say it because I think it’s important.

We need more young folks. And I know that’s always something that people say. They’re like, "Oh, there should be more young folks in the room." What I have learned and again shout out to Michelle because she was kind of the first person to really to to put this in the forefront of my mind is like we don’t just need young folks at the table on a panel saying here’s what I think about something right like we actually need young people not in front of us but also not behind us like with us at the seats of power saying here’s how I’m experiencing this every day because you’re right in a lot of ways young people are far ahead in a lot of ways they’re also not as far ahead in thinking about some of these things Right.

And it’s not there’s there’s this great there’s this great kind of quote about not having young people ahead or behind but actually just walking alongside us in this work. And it is really really hard. I mean it’s hard from a power se we’ve had young people working on the lab team for as long as it’s existed and co-designing and really building with us.

And that has fundamentally shaped the way I think about AI but the way I’ve thought about all kinds of other things that we’ve built in the lab over the years. And it is incredibly hard for a whole host of reasons. There’s a reason why it doesn’t happen all the time.

And I would be I would be both chewed out by Izzy Fitzgerald. Shout out the lead of intergenerational co-creation on my team. Who has worked on the lab since she was 16.

She’s now 20. She’s amazing. If you want to know anything about intergenerational co-creation, please reach out to Izzy.

But also I wouldn’t be in my values without saying that like young folks young folks should be on the main stages at these conferences talking about how they’re using AI. Like it is just true and and it shouldn’t be tokenized. It should not be just I’m on I’m on stage for this one presentation but then I’m going back to my life and no one calls on me again when the lights aren’t on.

Like this is sustained real work that we as education professionals, as education nonprofit professionals especially, need to build the skills, the capacity, the unlearning, the logistics, all of the things that come alongside working with young people. Because we can read all the statistics we want, but actually if we don’t understand how young folks in a day-to-day practice are using this technology right alongside us and and if they don’t have the power to speak to the things we’re doing as a field, we we do that at our own peril. That’s a mic drop.

You didn’t say we need Brad Pitt. And I mean, sure, if Brad Pit wants to hang out, I’m cool with that, too. Yeah.

We have this incredible There’s 1.8 million K-12 nonprofits. Figured that out yesterday. We have 1.8 million organizations and they’re not making lots of money.

Nonprofit work sucks. It’s hard. It doesn’t suck, but it’s hard.

It’s not suck. It doesn’t suck. It’s actually amazing.

But nonprofit work is it is not traditionally rewarding in the way that our society tends to value work. These are people that are the reason they’re doing it, the reason they don’t think it sucks because they are passionate about like the kids, the school, the teachers that they’re serving. And they may not necessarily see themselves as a part of this solution.

And I think that’s that’s sort of like the golden goose is like how do we actually create sort of again build a stage for them and let them lead us. Hadn’t thought about students though that’s really really interesting is having students walk with you and not just sort of bringing them as focus group. So as is always the case with these conversations, I actually will well will this has happened like three or four times now where I’ve left and it’s resulted in actually like meetings and discussions, you know, with my team about things that I’ve learned.

I do feel like I learned something I, you know, look forward to having sharing and holding more space with you. I’m sure it’s going to be hopefully a while. I’m trying not to travel too much.

We come across a bridge coming out in Oakland. Well, yeah. Okay, definitely.

Yeah, you’re local. So, cheers. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for being part of this like community of folks who’s really deeply thinking about this and and one thing that I appreciate about you Alex is that you have this really deep sense of intellectually intellectual flexibility like you will learn from a lot of people and change your mind not on a dime but when you get enough data and information you you learn and you change and I see you move differently based on how you’re learning and changing in a space and deeply learning from educators deeply learning from technologists and I always learn something in a conversation with you and I want to thank you for having me on the podcast. And I I want to just thank you for being a friend and leader in the space. It’s really important to have community in doing this work.

So, thank you. S Chen, thanks for joining. Thank you.