Why Banning AI in Class Is the Wrong Fight (with Carole Basile)

The AI tutor will not be the end- all beall. You will still need people. It has to be a team member, but it has to be a team member.

There has to be a team for it to be a member of. All right. We’re here with Dr. Carol Bazil.

Dr. Carol Bazil is the dean of Arizona State’s Marylu Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation. She’s been in that role for I think it was like 10 plus years now. 10 Years.

And and before that you actually spent over a decade in the corporate world. And in addition to holding an a PhD in education and curriculum instruction. And so you have this interesting mix of this background as an educator.

But you’ve also seen how the corporate world operates and you bring a lot of that organizational insight into into this work. Carol, yeah, really excited to to have you on the show. Thank you, Alex.

Glad to be here. Dr. Bazil, can I call you Carol? Yes, please.

All right, we have a lot to cover. I mean, Arizona State University, well, I should say welcome to the virtual edition of AIE Edu Studios X, the Center for Reinventing Public Education. You’re you’re I think the penultimate interviewe as part of this series that followed from the think forward fellowship.

So, I learned a lot from that fellowship. I mean, there’s so many question. I mean, I left with more questions than answers, but it was like the right questions with a lot of precision.

So I have you know some you know sort of paths to follow from that but I’d be remiss if we didn’t also take an opportunity to you know get insights from you really from a vantage point of someone who’s leading the largest public institution in the country certainly one of the largest public institutions in the world and also one of the universities that has been truly on the forefront of really thinking about what does it look like for us to I don’t know if you use the word embrace but really lean into this sort of like AI this age of AI and what does that mean for our students, our technology, our courses. And so you’re in that world, but then you’re also in the world of, you know, training the next generation of educators and thinking about how does the education profession change? A very easy job, I’m sure.

So I think a lot of this is really going to be a chance for for me, but also our audience just to to sort of like look behind the curtain to whatever extent you’re willing to to like pull it back and and help us understand, you know, what what are the types of things that you are thinking about, excited about, maybe even like, you know, concerned about or or the questions that you still feel like need to be answered. But maybe you can like just zoom out a little bit and and just tell us about the you know like the work that your institution is doing and and you sort of like maybe even like your own journey with AI like you know even like the first time that you used it and like if you can even walk me through like the first meeting that you had where your team was like hey this AI thing I think we need to I think we need to do something about it. That’s a good question.

That’s a good question. I’m not even sure like it probably wasn’t that long ago and I don’t even remember when we first started thinking about AI but I think in some ways it feels like it’s always been here right I mean people started recording Zoom meetings right with AI you know you had all these kind little things that were happening people were saying oh you can write a letter oh teachers can do lesson plans oh you know and you start experimenting right with with what this can do and then that right is just only like oh my god like not even the tip of an iceberg it’s the tip of the tip of the tip of an iceberg, right? When you think about what AI can do, what it’s going to do, the ways in which people are using it, we certainly see a lot of people trying to to solve problems very quickly.

So, a lot of solutions in some ways, looking for problems. So, I think we’re trying to sort through all of that, but I I think we’re we are embracing it. I think we’re doing more than leaning in.

And I think we are embracing AI in all the ways in which we think makes sense for us. And that’s everything from thinking about AI literacy and equity and the ethics of AI and you know all of all of those things and really thinking about how we how this is going to enhance how we think about building systems with AI and how AI becomes really central to building new kinds of education systems. And can you walk me through like so ASU had a big announcement with OpenAI.

What can you just walk us through like what is the sort of the current state of ASU’s sort of AI strategy right now? I mean there’s there’s there’s been some announcements. I’m sure there’s a lot of work that’s being rolled out, you know, in phases.

Yeah. I don’t I don’t want to speak for my CIO but but I think you know like I say I think ASU is embracing everything about AI. ASU is also embracing lots of other kinds of technology.

So when you look at work that we’re doing in the realms of learning thinking about things like Dreamscape learn and immersive learning and the use of VR and AR and all those kinds of things that also has to be part of this conversation. And it’s not just AI. So, but but I think there is a lot of thousand lights blooming right now at ASU because we’ve opened this up.

We’ve made these tools available to everyone. So, we’re seeing not only people working on trying to think about, you know, faculty thinking about courses and students and how do we build better human relationships and how do I mentor students better and student services, right? That then is thinking about AI and how do we do outreach to students in better ways and how are we building you know AI bots that are you know able to address the things so that the people behind them actually have more opportunity right to build better human relationships with students and then there’s things on the operations side right so strategies around how we operate how we become more efficient how we use AI to help us to do all kinds of things that we were not able to do before and so But I think you just see it on all these different levels.

It’s not just at the teaching and learning level. It’s it’s also in all of these studentf facing, faculty facing, operations levels as well. Yeah.

And you’ve done I mean like you have you have a framework for principal innovation for like ethical decision-m built around like this question of like you know not just what can we build but what should we build and that predates AI I believe. Yet. So you actually had a lot of the like infrastructure because I think maybe this is a question like to what degree do you see these AI tools that are that are cropping up and do you feel like this is totally new versus to what degree is this just sort of the latest flavor of edtech that education has been you know navigating for you know decades.

Well I think we’re still so principled innovation started in 2016 when I started here. That is that was a college initiative that has become a university initiative. It certainly has helped us to drive innovation to think about you know how how we think about principled innovation what we do why we do it how we how we move forward making sure that we’re making the right decisions to move forward and I think this iteration of AI which is you know probably not the certainly not the last not the first not the last it’s certainly been around for many many years in and it’s been inside lots of things that we’ve used it just now was much more prevalent in terms of being much more useful and it’s kind of like when everybody got a PC, right?

It was like, oh, all of a sudden, you know, computing became accessible to everybody. Well, now AI is accessible to everyone in some way, shape, or form. And I think people are still just learning about it, right?

We’re just trying to figure out what it can do and how it can do that. So I do think you see a lot of experimentation and I think what’s going to need to happen is we we’re going to need more strategy around how are we using it, why are we using it and so I think we as a college have really said look everything we do around AI has to be in service of building better human relationships right so how do we get advisers right to have more time to spend with students how do we get faculty you know to to build better relationships what is it about the data that we’re learning from AI when students are doing assessment learning about what, you know, their logic, learning about how they think about things, what their interests are, what misconceptions they have. How do we take that data and how do we start to use that data to build better human relationships?

How do we use that to personalize learning? How do we use that to to deepen learning? And so, I think that’s a direction that we’re headed.

And as this becomes more and more sophisticated, I think we all have to to think about that. But it also has to be in service of how do we actually change the systems that we’ve been trying to change for for decades and not been not been able to. You say it like it’s so obvious and and obviously we’re at AID we deeply we’re deeply aligned with this idea that we need to be focusing on the human advantage and the human side of the equation.

I don’t think that that is necessarily where the the discourse naturally goes. I think actually that so either and and the fact that you were even thinking about principled innovation as early as 2016 I think is instructive because this is there is like a learning journey I think that happens from sort of like you know beginning to kind of make sense of the tools and capabilities and then sort of like working through well what are their capabilities versus what are their limitations and I think eventually you naturally get to that place where like okay these are powerful but they have lots of limitations and we need to be thinking about you know the the role of people h and the character of people and the character of people, people’s integrity, people’s intellectual curiosity, people’s morals, people like that’s part of principled innovation as well. It started with thinking about, you know, how does this help us to shape people’s character because you can see all the bad side.

You can see, you know, where this can go on the, you know, on the really bad side. And you can see where this can go if we really embrace this in a way that helps us to build human potential. What have been your like secret tools, not technical tools, but sort of like rhetorical tools to help bring folks along who might be a little bit too distracted by like the shiny objects of technology.

Cuz I’m sure that like every day you’re getting bombarded with all manner of vendors and technology initiatives that you should be considering and and and you know saying having to say no to all these things and staying focused on this idea of actually because what I’m hearing from you is I mean I feel like we we have the same conversation in 2005 or 1995. I mean like this feels very evergreen in terms of you know like teaching is a human profession. It’s and I think there’s a decision that that needs to be made and has not necessarily been made yet by everybody in the space as to like you know is the future of education still going to be human centered or is it going to be AI centered?

How have you been able to sort of champion that and is it is it truly from the top down or have there been allies you know across your organization or maybe even like individual teachers that have been like helping you to sort of like live live forward these principles that you’re saying? Well, I think it’s like you, you know, speed of the leader, but I think, you know, but it’s also about having a vision for all of this and a bigger vision than just AI and technology. So, there’s always been distractions.

Always. There have always been lines of people around my office wanting me, right, to build something more into teacher preparation, to do something more, to do the next technology, to require all my students, right, to, you know, to have whatever the latest device is, right? That’s always been the case.

And so that part that’s easy. I know how to deal with that. The thing about this is that this isn’t just a device.

This is now something that has the potential to really change the way that we see things. So I was with a a a company a couple weeks ago and we were looking at all the features of this of this learning system. And one of the things that the the thing right that really really struck me was this idea of all the data they were collecting because you could see all these things about all these kids and what they were doing and how they were engaged.

And once you’ve seen that kind of data, you can’t unsee it. And so then the question is now we have something new. Now we have something we’ve never seen.

Now we have metacognitive data from learners that we’ve never had before. And the question is what are we going to do with it? And so we can take that data and we can say look I can’t as a teacher right I can’t look at that data and then I’ve got to say oh my gosh I’ve got 25 kids in my classroom or 180 right if I’m a secondary teacher whatever that number is.

I can’t possibly personalize my classroom for every single one of those kids. I can’t be everything to all kids at all times. And so this is where we also then say if that’s true, then how do we start to think about what’s the role of a teacher?

How do they work together? How do we think about who educators are? How do we start expanding?

And then how do we prepare them? That’s a systems change, right? All the work that we’re doing around strategic staffing right now comes out of that.

So all of that then has to change the way we do things. We’re learning from these systems. The systems aren’t just they’re not just passively doing things.

They have to we have to look at what are we learning from them. What do we have that we didn’t have before that would also h help us to get to whatever it is wherever it is we want to go. And so as a leader you’re always thinking about that vision.

You’re trying to figure out what should the what should the system look like? Whether it’s whether it’s higher ed system whether it’s a K-12 system. You always have to be thinking about what’s next and what’s the what’s that going to look like and then you think about the technology and how’s the technology help you to get there.

So we have a faculty member here who does work in in possibility thinking, right? He’s a creativity scholar. Around the world, there are now things called possibilities labs.

His thinking is how do we use AI to help us think about possibilities, not tell us the answers. But if you and I are in a room, we only know what we know. I could use AI and I could figure out how to how to use it and create it as, you know, create the tools to be able to help me now think about possibilities.

Now I’m sitting in a room full of, you know, a team member, a superintendent in their team. Now I’m not creating a strategic plan anymore. Now I have tools to actually help me think about what are the other possibilities for what we could be doing.

That’s really powerful in some sense, right? And so it isn’t just, oh, okay, give me the answers. It’s now it’s like now I’m going to use this in a ways that actually help me get to the next the next horizon.

I mean, everything you’re saying resonates. I do I do worry that schools and and universities they’re hoping that there’s going to be just some checklist or some you know like framework or like list of benchmarks that will answer these questions. And what I’m hearing from you is this is much more something that’s driven by people and comes from actually like building the capacity of your human workforce, your teacher like the experts that you have.

Like I think maybe the biggest cohort of experts in the country is our teacher workforce. And it strikes me that, you know, even even what you’ve said right now really stands out from most of the conversations that I’m hearing about AI where it I think people will give lip service to some of the things that you talk about, but it really comes as almost like the afterthought after spending all this time talking about the possibilities of the technology by itself. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, to what degree do you feel like ASU is an outlier in your approach or do you just feel like you’re just an early mover and are are others very going to just sort of like eventually catch on and sort of like get get behind you? I don’t know, Alex.

I I I don’t know. I This is This is me talking, you know, I mean, but I think, you know, Michael Crow would say similar kinds of things, right? And given given where ASU is moving with all of this certainly we’re embracing all of this but it is always it’s always for him for me for you know people who are leading here it’s always about building human potential it’s always about building the capacity of people right the capacity of our students our faculty our staff but it always has to be about that and it is always then about access.

How do we liberate our content? How do we get it out there? How do we get it to more people?

How do we become more accessible? How do we become more inclusive right in terms of who can h who gets the content right that we have I think AI help will help us to do that. So I I think I don’t I don’t know if people will catch up, right?

I I don’t know if people will think the same way, but it certainly is the way that we are thinking and I’m hoping that we are I’m hoping we’re leading that. We have a lot of people who come here to see what we’re doing. And so I always hope that people take back, you know, the things some of these things that the way we’re thinking about it and the way that we’re we’re really trying to to engage in this in big ways, but in very healthy move people move people ahead, right?

Build for human flourishing. But, you know, we’re not just giving lip service to that because that is that that is what this has to be about. It’s it’s also the I mean even when I talk to teachers unions and folks that you would naturally expect to be quite resistant to AI when framed as a through the through through the lens of how do we work backwards from human potential there’s everybody’s aligned with that like I don’t think like there’s there’s actually a lot fewer lites than people assume I think that some people are being called lites when in fact in reality they are just being you know appropriately cautious that we don’t get so distracted by technology in isolation that we don’t think about ultimately what’s more important right which is like the the human component who are ultimately using the technology I to that end like Arizona State University yeah you at the end of the day it’s not you you you can’t determine sort of what the the broader system does but you have done a lot I would say maybe maybe more than almost any other school to try to help create I think space for this conversation to happen and I’m thinking about the AI and education learning futures collaborative obviously the think forward fellowship at CRP you know the the ASU GSV summit which has become like the preeminent summit where folks outside of even just attemp are coming.

Have you learned anything that surprised you at, you know, across any of those convenings? Like just sort of are there interesting things that people are doing that just opened your mind as to, you know, what might be possible? Oh, I think there’s a lot of interesting things.

I mean, I think that’s the that that right now is actually the beauty of the moment, right? Is that people are feeling like they can jump in and they can just start to do things. I think the the the worry the big worry I have is they’re doing things for now in the system that is now and they’re not thinking about how do we build things and how do we get the system to change to what we need or to what we want right so it depends on on what it depends on where you are with all of that but it’s always interesting to me to go to all of these things right to see what people are thinking about how they’re thinking about it what’s new what’s next because it’s it’s it’s just going to change so much.

They can’t help a change. I mean, you look at the last h 100red years and everything has changed. The next hundred years, it’s going to be remarkable.

Won’t recognize it. Yeah. I I’ve been on this sort of historical jaunt where I I’ve been obsessed with the kerosene lamp because there was this period of time where, you know, there was an oil boom and it wasn’t because we were selling oil to cars for gasoline.

It was actually because of kerosene lamps. How Rockefeller made his first fortune. And I think you’re kind of alluding to this idea that like, you know, we have this amazing kerosene lamp version of AI.

We don’t necessarily know what the combustion engine and cars and planes, what that version will look like for AI. And this question of like, well, how do you build backwards from that when you don’t know what you’re building backwards from? And yeah, I guess investing people feels like very good bad.

I mean like just getting into sort of like the like the next generation education workforce. Like when you close your eyes and imagine like you know the best schools the best classrooms in the country 10 years from now is is AI a team member alongside educators like with distributed expertise is it changing the composition of school teams? Yeah, I 100% it does.

It has to if people are people if people are smart about using AI and it isn’t about building lesson plans. It isn’t like everybody you I hear people say that all the time. Oh, this is great.

My teacher can first of all they shouldn’t be creating their own lesson plans like like there should be really curriculum people who actually have expertise right in this actually creating lesson plans. But again, I think it comes back to the one to the data. We will have more data.

We will be able to have I think a broader set of assessments around actually knowing who people are, who individuals are, who individual kids are and what they can do and how they think about things. And I think I think our systems have to be built for that. And I think we’re seeing in this whole movement of parents, right, who we’re seeing more people homeschooling, we’re seeing more people pulling their kids out of school to do micro school, you like all those kinds of things.

I think are just they’re a sign and I of the fact that people aren’t getting what they want for their kids. A lot of that is around I think special education, kids that have very very specific needs. But I do think right that at the end of the day what people are going to want for their kids is going to be a personalized education system that allows their kid to flourish.

That allows their kid to to hit barriers and helps them to get past those barriers. It allows kids to to follow whatever interests they have and their passions because it’s it it doesn’t matter in what way. I had somebody I was on a podcast one time and somebody said to me, "So, what do you think?

Should we teach history chronologically or should we teach history like pick one thing and go deep?" And I said, "Well, why are those the only two answers?" Because it’s not how we learn. So if I read a book then I pick something out of that book there’s something else right that takes me a different direction and then a different direction and then it takes me somewhere else and that’s how I that’s how we learn because we just start making connections to things and then you want to go deep in some things because people have really you know big interests in a certain thing they should be able to go deep and others people should be able to to collect you know information the way they want to collect it because you’re never going to know everything And so we have to allow for that and we have to be able to build these education systems that aren’t one teacher and one classroom and a bunch of kids sitting in rows of desks or even in small groups, right, with one teacher who only knows what they know with their that experience. It’s going to have to change.

You’re going to have to be able to to dynamically group kids. You’re going to have to be able to to do project based learning, problem based learning that we’ve been talking about for decades that we’ve never been able to get to. The schedules are going to change.

The things it’s got to look, you know, it it has to look different. And with that said, kids all need to learn math. They all need to learn to read.

They all need some, you know, you got to have some basic skills and more than basic, right? So, that all has to continue to happen. But when you think about then AI coming in to support all of that, that’s a different ballgame because AI can support basic skill learning, but there have to be people ready to help kids when they get stuck.

Or when they’re ready to move on or when they, you know, when they hit a barrier because AI won’t be won’t be the end all be all. The AI tutor will not be the end all be all. You will still need people.

AI can help kids go deeper. AI can help personalize. It will be able to do so many things.

It has to be a team member, but it has to be a team member. There has to be a team for it to be a member of. Yeah.

I cuz you’re you’re basically hitting on like my anxiety which is as you described like the best classrooms of the country are I think you walk in and it’s like yeah you don’t actually see the AI like you’re you’re going to see teacher facilitated learning and students working on projects and doing socratic seminars and building projects that are connected to careers and their community and the like and the the question of like well how would we get there from where we are right now which is you know in many cases a far cry from that I think well AI could is going to be a tool in the background that unlocks the capacity and the time the ability to differentiate. But I do worry about the allure of AI to purely address the existing gaps in service of the status quo which itself is clearly I totally even in like even in the best case scenario it’s only just okay and and it’s you know we’re quickly moving away from this like you know knowledge acquisition as the barrier to expertise right like expertise is no longer going to be predicated on like what you know it’s also like how do you apply what you you know, within human environments and also how do you just learn? Like you said something that was really interesting to me because I actually had a debate with a school leader last week.

Because I said something to the effect of Yeah. What you said, which is like I don’t know that what we teach changes that much. I still think kids need to learn math, science, English, social studies.

You know, I think how we teach needs to change though. I think like you know the teacher sitting in front of the classroom and lecturing that model you know in multiple choice tests and his response was he’s like well I think you might be wrong there because I think we the only way for us to unlock the time in the day to be able to incorporate the types of dynamic learning that you’re talking about will require us to go back to the drawing board and and decide like do we actually need to hit this like m long long list of standards that were assessed on and and so I’m curious like how you deal with this tension of you know ASU as big as you are you know you don’t necessarily have control over the assessments and the standards in every state that create maybe not all but I think many of the constraints that you know teachers and administrators are working within and I like do you see any part of your role as actually trying to shape sort of how those assessments and standards evolve or are you sort trying to kind of push the envelope within those contexts. Yeah, I I think we’re trying.

I mean, I think we’re trying to, you know, to look, we’re trying to be thought provokers here, right? I mean, that’s what you you know, that’s what a lot of us do, but I also think that we are trying to push the system. The work that we’re doing around strategic staffing, all the schools that we’re working in and trying to get people to think about teams, those schools are right shifting those barriers.

They’re changing their schedules. They’re thinking differently about how teachers work together. They’re thinking differently about how they group and regroup kids.

They’re thinking about how to use AI, right? To help them to do those kinds of things. And so I think we are trying to push on that.

I can’t get there fast enough. I can’t get there. I can’t get to the scale I want fast enough.

Right? But, you know, we’ve had over 2,000 people come to visit, right? And look at schools and work with us and talk to us and we’re across the country now and in the Netherlands and other places, right?

It’s beginning to think about what these environments could look like. And we’re only at the tip of then how AI needs to be a partner in all this and how AI needs to be part of the team because we’re just now trying to figure out how to get teachers to work in teams. The rest of the world works in teams, not in education.

It’s the most incredible thing to me, right? We all distribute expertise and schools schools don’t even think that way. And so when you have a a school leader who’s saying, "Oh, okay.

Well, that would require us to do X." Yes. Yeah. Yeah, it would go do that.

Go change. Go figure out how what the organizational go design something different so that you can you can do both. But you can’t keep thinking about one teacher, one classroom miles.

You can’t you can’t Yeah. I mean you you you very get quickly when you talk about like AI readiness, you very quickly get to systems change and school transformation. And it’s actually for us it’s been a challenge because you know I think and and very often when we’re talking to whether it’s funders or administrators you know they’re meeting with the AI education project they come into this meeting ready to have a conversation about you know AI and their school and we essentially are trying to lead them to really this is a conversation that the same conversation that you’ve been having for 20 plus years like this is a conversation about project- based learning this is a conversation about making sure that learning is actually engaging and meaningful to students and connected with their interests but also connected to like careers that are relevant and and up to date with the career pathways that those students have.

It’s about professional development which is you know has lots of room for improvement in many schools. Yeah. And I think in some ways to me that’s comforting because it’s like actually this scary new confusing technology.

It isn’t this isn’t about revolutionizing school, right? This is about evolving and we’ve kind of known what we where we need to go and and and now hopefully this is sort of just the nudge out of the door that we’ve always needed. Yeah.

But I I I’m curious for your take on my instinct is that people are exasperated from the difficulty of that that like we’ve been trying talking about 21st century skills and project based learning and school transformation for all of this time and it’s and it’s been hard and I think for a lot of people the feeling is we largely have failed at that and so I think people are a little bit disappointed Ed when you when they have to accept that AI isn’t going to be this silver bullet that just sort of like fixes all of these hard things cuz even if people are the center and that’s inspiring it’s also people are really hard and you can’t scale you know you change management right like this is like a peopleto people work I am convinced nothing’s going to change until the structure changes until people think about the organizational design of schools It has to change. You can’t organize schools with a principal and a bunch of teachers and teachers who have 25 who are assigned 25 kids and think that you’re going to be able to do any of the things that we think are good for kids. I just don’t think you can do it.

You’re never going to have every teacher that can do everything. Just you’re just not. And it doesn’t even make any sense.

And they’re all walking in with different levels of experience and expertise and and you know, so my kid gets the the long-term sub and your kid gets this, you know, the former engineer who’s like really gung-ho about math and science. Well, great for your kid. Why doesn’t my kid get that person, too?

And not that the long-term sub is bad. Maybe it’s a great long-term sub who actually knows how to teach kids to read. My kid’s already reading.

My kid doesn’t need that. My kid really wants this other piece. Or maybe the person, you know, or a kid gets, you know, somebody who’s really, really strong in math and science and engineering, but has no idea how to help kids learn how to read and they need the other person.

It’s not it it isn’t the structure is not right. And and so that’s where we’re coming in and trying to figure out how do we how do we begin to shift those structures and how do we use AI to help us to do that? But we keep thinking about school in the same way, in the same structure.

It’s the same at the university. The university is exactly the same way. And in some ways, I always tell this story about a school, a private school that built a beautiful $30 million new school.

And in the middle of that school, they built a lecture hall. Why did they build a lecture hall? Cuz we’re preparing kids to go to college.

And they have to learn what it’s like to sit and be lectured to in a lecture hall. Well, that’s crazy. That’s crazy.

And so, universities also have to change our practice. Our faculty, right, are now thinking about how to work on teams. We’re trying to think about, we’re trying to be more flexible.

We’re trying to say to students, you don’t have to come in Monday, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Thursday. Maybe there are other ways to do this. We use online that we use hybrid that we like.

There are other ways, right, that that our students can learn and there are other pathways that they need to take because we need to be more learner centered and we need to model what that looks like. And so it is the education at large. But it is amazing to me, right, that that K-12 often is following universities because that’s what they think like that schools ought to look like when in fact they need to be looking beyond the university to say what does the workplace look like and how do people work and what does that look like?

Well, lo and behold, guess what? People in the workplace are working on teams. They don’t work in isolation.

They may be working at home, but I’m guarantee that you’re working on a team, right? And on your team there is distributed expertise. Wouldn’t it be better if schools looked more like that?

If we’re going to talk about workforce and workplace and and all those kinds of things, like if we’re really going to talk about these skills, don’t we need to model them in our education settings? Of course we do. But there really isn’t durable skills, but you’re not modeling durable skills.

Yeah. They’re not seeing their teachers right critically think. They’re not they’re not seeing all that out loud.

But when teachers start working in teams, then they start to see that it all becomes more apparent and when you have AI and again when you’ve got data that’s coming out that you’ve never had before now you’ve got it just it it is going to you can’t not see it and if you don’t see it and you don’t address it then you are not being very ethical in your practice you can’t see all that and then say to a group of 25 kids okay everybody turn to page 63 and think everybody’s going to be on page 63 3. You can’t do that anymore. And AI is making that more and more transparent every single day.

So you can focus on academic integrity. You can think all those things, but you know what? The system has to change.

Assessments have to change. I hear faculty here talk about academ, oh my god, they’re cheating. Come on then.

Change your assessment. That’s on you. That’s not them.

That’s on you. You change what you’re doing. That’s going to force the system to change.

How much of that comes from because that is exactly my take. I I I take qualms with with talking about the use of AI is cheating. I think it is I I I actually largely speaking I think teachers anxieties are are are well placaced, right?

It’s like the I I I think teachers are not lites. They are deeply concerned about the way the fact that AI has the ability to remove productive struggle. Yeah.

But I think the solution that they are being presented or that they naturally fall to is one of deterrence when also we don’t have a good way to deter like there isn’t there isn’t a dete detectors don’t work right and and the idea that you can sort of like design guard rails for tools that are so powerful that they’re literally building entire companies and like applications like the AI is going to be able to get around whatever guardrails you try to put in anyways. Of course. But then you’re not then you’re not looking at the right things.

And it’s not about output. It’s about input. Yes.

Right. I want to know I want to know their logic. I want to know what they said to AI.

I want to know what their where they went. I want to know where their misconceptions were. Do I need Do I still need multiple Do I still need summitative assessments?

I don’t know. Maybe not. How do you feel about my diagnosis?

I don’t know. I’m just saying. I’m just saying like maybe not.

Maybe it changes everything and I think it’s going to be and I I think we’ve got to bring curriculum companies and assessment companies and you know people have got to come to the table here around this. They they have the opportunity to really change these systems with what they build, what they what they write, how they do it, how they think about these things. Yeah.

Yeah, the curriculum companies are are almost the elephant in the room because, you know, you go to a lot of these these convenings and there’s all the nonprofits and the foundations and there’s the schools and you know, especially the for-profit curriculum companies. Do you have any hopeur standards and all of that, right? Like that’s And is that because of state standards that like basically the curriculum companies like well we have to teach to the standards?

Yeah. But it doesn’t, right? I mean they’ve just always done it in the way that they’ve done it right.

I mean it’s you know chapters are written in some linear format but AI it would help you to not be writing things in linear form well because books are you know force you to to create something right that’s linear AI you to not do that right I mean wait but this is really this is vexing because what you’re saying is here there’s a lever right there’s a driver and a lever around some of this right that you have to talk about because it it goes back to, "Oh my god, this is great. Now my teachers can, you know, create their own lesson plans." Well, wh why? And no, that’s not great.

Yeah. And then you better be teaching them how to critique those lesson plans and all, you know, but I’ve just never thought teachers should be creating their own lesson plans, but I don’t know if they do because the curriculum isn’t flexible enough or because, you know, you’re trying to diff you’ve got to differentiate for kids and bec, you know, and so all of that it’s it’s great, right? And all the curriculum now that with AI, you go, okay, great.

I can get it to a I got a kid in eighth grade, but he’s reading at a third grade level. So, I can I can get it to him in a third grade reading level. Okay, great.

How are you helping him to read? How are you helping him to get to an eighth grade reading level? I mean, it feels it feels hard to imagine curriculum.

Who is thinking about all that, right? Teachers. Yeah, but what you’re describing is really like dismantling the business model of curriculum companies because I don’t know that I don’t know that you need a curriculum provider to I well I do think you still need a curriculum provider.

I do think you need validators. I mean I do think you do need validators. People who do have expertise who know what’s right, what’s not right.

I mean I AI is not perfect, right? Like like I don’t want to say oh okay like just learn everything on AI cuz I I there’s a lot of junk out there too. I mean you have to be careful with that and I do think that there is an instructional part to the curriculum right that is also really important but I think the instructional piece is going to it’s changing and the curriculum companies have to go with that they’ve it it’s it’s not about the content it’s about the way things are taught and how do you personalize learning and what do you do when you know and they’ve try they try to do that a little bit but certainly not now they have the opportunity to really really lean into that.

It kind of feels like creating curriculum for a one teacher, one classroom model of schools, right? That’s that, you know, and so this is the, you know, this is sort of the, you know, the hamster wheel we always end up in because these companies are building for now because that’s what sells. And so the question is, how do you get out of that?

How do you get out of that flywheel to do something different? I mean, doesn’t it it feels kind of like the what the music industry experienced with the shift from, you know, CDs and and records to streaming to Spotify to Spotify and you know, I think but isn’t it I mean I feel like curriculum companies are right to be anxious because even though I completely agree that there is a role for a core set of highquality instructional materials that you know even if If you’re using AI, it’s not creating new lesson plans. It’s helping you draw from, you know, a database of like vetted learning resources and and perhaps tailoring or packaging them in like a certain way for you.

But but that is a very different pricing model, right? Like you’re companies are charging like what is it? I mean, I I don’t even know what the cost per student.

I mean, I think it was like, you know, you know, one textbook per student and their their contracts are sort of like predicated on that. And I just I just wonder if they’re going to be able to justify those type of costs when you know like it’s it should be a lot cheaper. Yeah.

I don’t know. And then you see other people, right, that are developing things that are different kinds of curriculum now, right? So you got all kinds of things that are happening, right?

But when you see things like Course Mojo, when you see things like, you know, we’ve been working with CK12, we’ve been work, you know, I mean, there’s there are other there there’s there are other things out there, lots of people, right, that are thinking now about curriculum and about what this what the systems are, right? It’s not just curriculum. It’s not just a textbook.

It’s not just content. Now, it has to be a different kind of system. And where is AI, right?

And it’s and I think it’s more than an AI tutor because we’ve seen all those. We’ve seen like hundreds of those. I get pitched so many times like, "Oh, we’re building an AI teaching tool for blank." Yeah.

I the you and me both. The one place that I I do think there’s I’m very interested in the the role of AI. I don’t know if tutor is the right word, but coaches specifically for like neurodeiverse students, English language learners, which is not a small I mean like I think 20% of the student population is dyslexic.

I mean we’re like this is a huge population of students that and you alluded to this that are not being served by the current system. So people sometimes ask like oh are you anti-AII in schools? I’m like absolutely not.

But I feel like the like my role as I see as I see your you’ve you’ve seen taken your role to be is like championing this like teacher and human- centered trajectory for the conversation and like making sure that we’re working backwards in the right place. Yeah, if you’re always asking that question of how does the how is the AI being used in service of building better human relationships and better humans like you just have to ask yourself that question every time every you know tell me that and I’ll tell you whether or not you have a tool that is valuable. Yeah.

I I just wanted to close with like I think the maybe one of the most acute problems is like we you and I have just sort of commiserated on like how important educators are in this whole equation and we’re dealing with a shortage of educators and a huge shortage of educators across the country and the the I think the percentage of educators who’d recommend the profession is down from like 62% several years ago to 18% I think as of last year. H how do we fix that? And my mom is a teacher and so I always like I’m always a gasast at the like the the popular rejection of education as a profession to be respected and honored and I worry that AI is actually taking us in the wrong direction.

And so it feels more important than ever to figure out how to address that. I’m just curious like from your vantage point. Well, one, we should stop talking about there’s a teacher shortage because it’s not a teacher shortage.

It’s a shortage of people who want to do the job. There are hundreds of thousands of certified teachers out there that are choosing not to do this job anymore. And so when you start to think about it that way, then you have to say to yourself, what is it about the job, right, that people can’t, they just can’t do?

What is it that they can’t do? It’s isolating. It’s inflexible.

You can’t serve students in the way that you want to. You have to take on too many hats, too many roles. It’s it is a it the job is not humanly possible.

And I’ve been saying this now for years. And so I go back to it’s the organizational structure that’s wrong. It’s the workplace that’s not right.

It’s the learning environment that’s not right. And so you can’t think about this is not a retention. It’s not a recruitment or retention issue even.

And people are going to change jobs, right? They’re going to change jobs more often. People aren’t going to they’re not going to stay in this job for 30 years.

And oh by the way, women have a lot more options today. Yes. Right.

But but could you keep them a little longer? Could you attract more people to come back? Could you think about people coming back part?

We we are leaving so much talent on the table that it it’s it’s just it’s stunning because we cannot figure out how to change the workplace. We cannot ch we can’t change the organizational structure of schools fast enough. We’re still in an antiquated model, antiquated linear, you know, horizontal model.

It doesn’t make any sense anymore. And when you think about AI and you think about again all everything that we are learning from AI and all the data that that we it is now going to be at our fingertips about every single student that organizational structure just doesn’t make any sense to put kids first and say all right what do we know about every one of those kids then how are we going to teach them I guarantee you you’d come up with a different you’d come up with a different structure and you’d come up with a different way to think about how to use AI than you are doing today. I guarantee it’s not just how do we how do we make sure that teachers in teacher prep programs are learning to use AI.

It’s it’s like no they we need to design the place where they are ending up. Correct. Correct.

And they need to learn how to design. So we had a group of high school kids. Oh, right.

Right. We had a group of high school kids and we said, "All right, if you could design, you know, schools, right? Here’s the, you know, we’ve been working with XQ.

You know, we’re talking about the design principles of XQ and we said, "Look, you can use these and you could build they and they they don’t go very far. They don’t they just can’t get very far because they only know what they know." And so this idea of using AI to think about possibilities is huge. And you also have to get them to see other other ways of doing this.

And there are schools out there, right, that look different, that are trying to do some things differently. We just started here a school with Steve Levit called the Levit Lab. That’s going to look different.

You see alpha schools, you see like, you know, you see Khan, you see like people are really trying to think about this. It’s just not it it isn’t it’s not getting to mainstream fast enough and then you’re seeing declining enrollments and you’re like all of these things is just it it is it’s all connected. We just don’t see them and talk about them as being connected, but they are all connected.

I I think people because we don’t variance of kids. We are not thinking about kids as individuals and their human potential and how do we help them get there. We haven’t built that system.

I I think people do understand that it’s connected fundamentally because I’ve been with so many administrators where the com like once we sort of bring this frame of you know like this like human- centered approach to AI readiness they I’ve not talked to a single administrator who’s like I think our testing regime is good I don’t think it needs to be changed I think our I think everybody like acknowledges that I think there is an anxiety to take that on because it feels so intractable and there’s like a precise just a precision to a conversation about AI literacy that is lost once you zoom out and start to say okay we need to talk about standards and assessments and that’s easy your teacher pipeline cuz that’s easy you think it’s easy to talk about AI literacy and let that be yeah literacy is easy right it’s yeah sure we can do literacy but that’s that’s not going to fix everything like that it’s like doing smartphone literacy yeah yeah smartboards okay I there’s a lot a lot to uncover, a lot to think about, a lot to map out. But I do think these are design problems. I think these are fundamentally these are design problems and AI has to be part of the design.

And I’m normally, you know, I’ve I’ve historically been very like, you know, roll my eyes at thought leadership as a as a as a thing that organizations do as an organization does a lot of thought leadership. Listening to you talk, I really now understand like this is this is a time where we need voices that are actually like orienting the space towards like what the conversation should be. So I just want to thank you for one like you know holding holding true to that and not getting distracted by the shiny object.

Is there anything you want to close with? I think that was a perfect close for what it’s worth but no I think it’s fine. Okay.

Great conversation app for sure.