The Future of Education (private feed for michael.b.horn@gmail.com)

Many in education—and many beyond—are talking about Alpha School right now. Alpha has been featured in dozens of articles in the mainstream and education media outlets. Its leadership has appeared on countless podcasts to explain and dissect its school model and explore the bigger opportunity to rethink schooling.On this episode of Class Disrupted, Mackenzie Price, co-founder of Alpha School, joined me and Diane not to explain Alpha School’s model, but instead to dive deep into how Alpha School is leveraging AI to radically rethink the school experience (Mackenzie has joined me in conversation before; you can check it out here if you’re curious). The intent behind this conversation is more on how AI itself is being leveraged at Alpha—from the core academic block to the afternoon spent in real-world projects and life skills development. What’s possible now in school design that wasn’t possible a decade earlier thanks to AI?Chris HeinSo when the school shut down and went to remote learning, we were really fascinated by how quickly our kids adjusted to e-learning and how hard of a time the teachers seem to have with just the basic tools and systems and then how to translate their curriculum to a digital format. But the thing that really jumped at me was my wife and I were having conversations with our kids every day saying, hey, what are you doing?Why are you guys playing video games? Or why you, like, want to go outside and play? It’s midway through the day and they’re like, we’ve already done our work. And we were like, that can’t be right. And so we double checked their assignments and their tests and where they’re at. And it was like, no, they got all their work done in a couple hours. And then it really made Teresa and I question, why does it take them eight hours a day at school if the school is teaching them the same content and administering the same number of tests and they’re able to get through it in a few hours?Michael HornThat was June 2020, and Diane and I were broadcasting during the height of the pandemic, and we were hoping that parents would realize that schools could be rethought dramatically, including by helping people realize that what we tend to think of as, quote, the academics could be done in much, much less time than the six plus hours that kids spend in traditional schools. Five years later, and thanks to a startup school network, Alpha School, the two hour message finally seems to be spreading like wildfire. So with that as a prelude, Diane, first, it is great to see you as always.Diane TavennerIt’s good to see you too, Michael. I’m a little disoriented by us changing up our normal intro, but. But in a good way, change is always good. That take from season one is honestly priceless. It’s taken us a bit longer than we had hoped, but we do seem to be getting some momentum towards some of the big opportunities that we saw in education back then and still are hopeful for now.Michael HornYeah, no, I think that’s right. And I’m glad you’re accommodating my whims on changing the format up on you today. But I am particularly excited because we have on our show today MacKenzie Price. She’s of course one of the co-founders of Alpha School, and MacKenzie’s been on my Future of Education podcast and substack before and we actually both have sub stacks named the Future of Education. We independently name them, so we’re vibing already. But MacKenzie, it’s great to see you again, welcome.Scaling Education with TechnologyMacKenzie PriceWell, thanks for having me. And, you know, it’s so interesting that you tell that story about the way, you know, education was done during COVID And we were pretty lucky because we’d started Alpha school back in 2014. So when the pandemic hit, you know, it happened to be during spring break. So the kids who hadn’t brought their laptops home came and picked them up at school. And we really had a very smooth rest of the school year because the kids already were doing their learning on the computers. And then we just said, you know, afternoons, we’ll just, we’ll, we’ll call it, you know, do whatever you want at home. But what’s interesting is a couple years ago or in 2022, when we really launched our learning platform with the advent of generative AI, we realized, okay, we can actually scale this. We can go beyond just, you know, a local school that’s doing a reasonable job of educating kids, and we can, we can scale it bigger.And we were originally talking about the idea of 2x learning. You know, you can learn twice as much, you can learn twice as much. And even our own families were like, we don’t, we don’t care. Like, why does my kid need to learn twice as much? It’s not a big deal. And we, we’d have like, parent conferences where we’d be saying, hey, if, if your son, you know, hits his, his goals, he can be learning twice as much. And they didn’t care. And then we had this unlock idea of let’s call it two hour learning and say, hey, if your son hits his goals, he can be out of here in two hours and freed up to go do the rest of the things, you know, that he wants to do during the day. And suddenly the parents are like, Johnny, come on, get with it.Let’s hit our goals. And it was that mind shift of, you know, let’s get your academics done in two hours. And as a side note, you’ll learn twice as much, but let’s do that for two hours. And then one of the code names we actually had for our learning platform was Time Back. And we went through a whole process in the last year trying to make sure, what’s our new name going to be? What are we going to call this? And ultimately we landed back on exactly what it is that we’re giving kids, which is Time Back to go do all these other exciting, interesting things during the rest of the day. Because it doesn’t take all day to educate kids. You can not just do academics, but crush academics in a much shorter period of time when you’ve got this personalized, mastery-based tutoring.Transforming Education ModelsMichael HornWell, and I think you’re speaking to, like, there’s many reasons why Alpha has done what many education startups struggle with, which is jumping into the mainstream narrative. And that sense of giving kids back their most precious resource, time is clearly part of it. AI is another part of it. And that’s where we want to dig in with you today, just given the focus of the podcast that we’ve had here. But let me perhaps frame it this way. We now have two school founders on this show, you and Diane, who have each created models that at one level I think look awfully similar in certain respects. If you mix in, say, Rocketship Education or something like that, which was founded in 2006 and is an elementary school model.We can take that and Summit Public Schools that Diane founded and Rocketship and say, hey, a lot of the structures that Alpha Schools has at one level, like a relatively limited block of time on learning academics and content in ways that are personalized for the learners, large blocks of time for projects, a big focus on skill development and habits of success or life skills like growth, mindset, agency, and so forth, those are things that were present in models like that. But then we come to at least one big difference, which is, yes, Alpha was originally designed, as you said, right before the mainstream use of AI, just like Summit and Rocketship were. But Alpha is now aggressively developing AI powered dashboards, AI powered learning applications, AI powered knowledge interest, working memory graphs for students. And so, given our focus on the podcast in this particular season around AI, I just love to dive into the AI parts of the model with you. Even as we’ll say up front, like AI is clearly inextricably linked to the other elements of the overall Alpha model. Pulling them apart is not fair to you all. But just given that we’ve heard so many podcasts with you about Alpha, and we suspect most of our particular listeners have as well, I think digging into that AI question in particular, and this is maybe the framing we can bring to it, which is, what does AI allow us to do today? That was not possible in the best of the personalized models from a decade or two earlier.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.MacKenzie PriceYeah, I think that’s a great way to frame it, because artificial intelligence in the learning science world now is what I believe is like the microscope to biology. It is the tool that is finally enabling us to integrate all of these learning science principles that have been known for many, many years can result in kids learning 2, 5, 10 times faster. It just was never possible to incorporate in obviously in a teacher in front of the classroom model, but even more importantly, even in an individualized adaptive app type setting. And so to give context to that, you know, when we first started our school back in 2014, we knew that we could use apps. So we were using things like Dreambox and Khan Academy and Freckle and Grammarly and Egump, a lot of the apps that were kind of out there. The difference was it was still hard to manage the way that kids worked through the apps. And so one of the things we found is that there’s a lot of what we call anti-patterns that kids will do when they’re using apps. It could be things like topic shopping.You know, they jump in and say, hey, I’m going to go to, you know, I’m a fourth grader, but I’m going to try some fifth grade material just because it’s kind of interesting. Oops, it got hard. I’m going to back out of that. I’m going to jump into some third grade material or I’m going to kind of mess around on this or even more just not engaging with the apps. You know, you could have everything from a kid not even sitting in front of his computer or picking his nose or, you know, just rushing through the explanation and not reading it. And that’s where a lot of the big difference is. One thing to kind of just be clear about, we do not use a chatbot in our education platform. Chatbots in education are cheatbots.And it was interesting. I actually had a big event last week in Austin. The National Governors Association came and toured and we’re learning all about our schools. And I made that comment, you know, we do not use chat bots. They’re cheat bots. 90% of kids are going to use them to cheat. And a couple hours later, there was another vendor who’s basically built a chatbot for education that was like, well, you know, I put him in a, put him in a little bit of an uncomfortable situation. But I think that’s really important to know.And one of the things I really don’t want to see in our education system is we slap a GPT on every kid’s computer and suddenly say we’re an AI first classroom. Right? And I was actually talking to a Stanford professor a few weeks ago who said, you know, here’s the problem that we’re seeing. Educators are using, you know, chat features, ChatGPT to create lesson plans, you know, and do these things. Kids are using ChatGPTs to write their stuff. Professors or teachers are using ChatGPTs to grade it. And so basically the AI is just talking to each other. Right. And we’ve taken the human out of it and that is totally not what we’re doing.So there’s kind of two features that I can go into around how we’re using AI in our model.Diane TavennerYeah, let’s take this piece by piece. MacKenzie, that will be that context is super helpful. Let’s start in the morning block where you’ve already gone a little bit with some of the apps and whatnot. You all roughly have about three hours where students are doing sort of two hours of head down learning that quote academics my language for that is content knowledge. So forgive me if I slip up and use different lingo. And as I understand it, and as you were just sharing, you’re using these apps or adaptive learning products and you named several for us there. But there are some places where you are using apps that, as we understand it, you’ve built for yourself. And this tracks with my summit experience.Our first choice was always to buy quality products. Second choice was to partner with startups or companies that wanted to work with power users. And last choice was to build our own when it didn’t exist. So I’d love to unpack. Where is it that you’ve determined there wasn’t something good enough and that you have literally built your own application and are using it right now? And are those AI native applications?AI-Powered Personalized Learning SystemsMacKenzie PriceSo we’ve definitely had a number of years to test out a lot of different apps, see what worked well, what didn’t work, where there are gaps. And what I would say is we’ve curated over this period of time which apps are best for which grade levels in which subjects. Not all apps are created equal, but to kind of start at the very beginning where we’re using AI, we are using AI to be able to assess what a student knows and what they don’t know. So any student who comes into our Alpha school to start takes an NWEA math assessment. We also do math assessments three times a year for all students and that’s how we’re measuring growth. But what we do is we take the information that comes through that assessment as well as some other initial assessments that we’re able to do with students. And from there we have AI tools that will basically build out the personalized lesson plans that say, all right, here’s where a kid needs to go, here’s how we whole fill, which of course is a very common issue. Even our students who come into us with, you know, A’s on their transcripts, you know, can be three years behind in academic content.Right. Actually we found out students who came in to us this year from other schools, if they had a B on their transcript, they were between three years behind and seven years behind. Which actually shows, you know, grades mean nothing anymore in this day and age. So we take the assessment and we have an AI tool that basically builds that out. So what does that look like?Diane TavennerAnd that’s a tool you all have built internally, is that Time Back?MacKenzie PriceThat’s a tool that we built out. We have built that tool out and that is using standardized third party assessments like Max.Diane TavennerYeah, the results. And you’re ingesting the results on that.MacKenzie PriceExactly. So they build that. So the experience for a student, a student sits down in the morning during their core block of academics and they will log into a dashboard. We have a time back dashboard that a student logs into and says, okay, it’s time to do math. Now in some of our classrooms, kids get a choice of what subject they want to take on first. Other of our classrooms, you know, we have a set thing. Okay, we’re doing math first, then we do reading, you know, then we do language.Diane TavennerAnd is that based on age?MacKenzie PriceDepends on the age. Yeah. And, and so it’s, it’s always interesting. You know, what we’re really working on creating is self driven learners who understand their skill of learning to learn. So like if you talk to some of our fourth and fifth graders, you’ll hear some of them say, hey, I usually will choose to take on my hardest subject first when I’m fresh and I’m ready. Right in our kindergarten and first grade classrooms, you know, that’s more, okay, it’s math time, it’s reading time, you know, and it’s kind of subscribed there. But basically what will happen is a student will go into the dashboard, click on the subject that they are going to take on. So that’s math as an example.And then the dashboard takes them to the app that has been determined is the one that is right for them and what they’re doing. Now when I say right for them, we also as a school have kind of used certain things. For example, Math Academy is a third party app that we love. We think Math Academy is amazing. They’ve been fantastic partners to work with and it works really great for basically third through high school. We were Using another app for our younger students, earlier this fall, we were using Synthesis, which, you know, that’s a sexy app that, you know, parents kind of like, because kids are doing interesting things. We were seeing, though, like, I don’t know if we’re getting the results we want.So we’ve made changes, you know, to that, but they’ll go to the level that they need. So you’ve got a fifth grader who maybe needs to go back and revisit concepts from third grade. You know, they have to hit this fast math, you know, concept, or they’re looking at these fractions or whatever it is. So it takes them to that lesson and they’re doing that. So that’s the first use of AI that we have. Now the second use that we use is the vision model. So what’s happening is we’re using an AI tool that we have built that tracks the screen and is actually watching to understand how is a student moving through this material.So, for example, when they are doing reading comprehension, are they rushing through the article? Are they just scrolling to the bottom of the screen and randomly guessing, or are they taking the time? And of course, you can tell this is a reading article that normally would take, you know, 69 seconds to read. And this kid just answered it within 10 seconds. Okay, now we’re realizing we’re. We have an anti pattern, which is basically an improper use of engaging with the apps. So we’re looking at that in terms of the vision model to see how kids are learning. When they get a question wrong, are they watching the video? Are they, you know, taking time to read the explanation? And then our AI tutor creates coaching for that student.So it’ll say, hey, buddy, we’re realizing that, you know, you’re not reading the explanation when you get a question wrong. If you take this time to go forward, here’s what it would do. And so we’re basically giving coaching. Now. The other thing is, in our schools, we also have our cameras turned on and they are recording the students. So they’re seeing if you know, the…Monitoring and Progress TrackingMacKenzie PriceIf the computer has been, you know, quiet for a minute and a half, is it because the student’s not even in front of their computer, or is it because they’re goofing around with their buddy next to them, what is it that they’re doing? And so it’s able to do that. Now our families have the ability to turn that feature off at home if their students are using that feature at home or if they’re working at home, they can turn that off. But in our schools, we do require that that be turned on. And so we’re able to kind of look at the coaching. Now students will basically walk through each of their core subjects, generally in about 25 minute Pomodoro sessions, and then they’re done with their academics in that two hours. The other feature that we’re using with our AI tool is we can really well analyze and understand how a kid is progressing through the material. You know, what percentage completion are they on each of the different apps, you know, and grade level subjects, things like that.How many minutes do we anticipate? How many weeks will it take before they’re finished with, you know, fifth grade math? If they put an hour of homework in a night, here’s how much shorter that will take. And one of the things that people love about that, not only do our students get to really see and understand, they have a sense of ownership over their academic journey. But of course, parents can log in, you know, every day if they want to, to be able to see what is my kid working on. What, you know, did he hit his goals? And then what. What we’re also tracking in the way that goal setting works is students are getting experience points, xp, to borrow, you know, a term from video gaming. And so the goal is that they get 120xps per day, which is 120 minutes of focused work. That’s one XP is equal to one minute of focus work.And so that’s what we’re working on. And then when you ask about the apps that we’re using, we have built Alpha Math, Alpha Read and Alpha Write are some of the apps that we’ve incorporated into our model. And then we’ve got some other things that, you know, that we’re continuing to roll out. One that’s actually available to the public for free is an app that we’ve built that helps encourage the love of reading, which of course is a difference between learning to read and learning to love to read. And that’s called teachtales.com and you can go to teachtales.com and basically it’s using AI to generate personalized reading material based on a student’s interests that then delivers at the appropriate Lexile level for them.Diane TavennerAwesome. There was a lot in there. So let’s.MacKenzie PriceThere was a lot. I need to work on more short sound bites. Well, I hope that doesn’t get worse as I get older.Diane TavennerWe all have things we need to work on, right? Let’s stick with those three apps that you’ve developed. So Alpha Math, read and write. Are you using those across all of your grade levels? And are they AI, are they adapt, are they AI native, are they adaptive? What’s going on with those apps?MacKenzie PriceSo the Alpha Write is something that we’ve been really excited about and we break this down just to have an idea of how the app works. We break this down with the idea of can you write a grammatically correct sentence, you know, then building onto paragraphs, then building on to essays and working through. And I will tell you, I mean, we had a lot of students, again, A students from their previous schools that come into Alpha. We had high school students who couldn’t write third grade level sentences, like, it’s just crazy how poorly this is going.Diane TavennerYeah, that’s one of the questions I think that comes up is where writing is situated in the model. So it sounds like you’ve got writing in the morning block as sort of a standalone kind of just expository approach to writing.MacKenzie PriceWe do have writing in the morning block now. Our students are also doing a lot of writing in the afternoon. So, you know, for example, they’re writing, you know, talks that they’re going to give for TED talks, they’re writing essays, they’re writing book reflections that are part of our afternoon block, which is our check chart time. So it is a common fallacy that people have of, oh, these students aren’t actually doing a lot of writing. They’re absolutely getting, they get a lot of writing in. But we’re really breaking this down into everything we’re kind of thinking about is what actually works when it comes to educating students. And where have we been doing it wrong? And that’s where I think it’s so exciting to see all these learning science principles that can come up. And you know, for example, here’s another thing that we do during these, the, the core block period.Optimizing LearningMacKenzie PriceWe’re, we’re measuring what percentage accuracy students are at to understand are they in the zone of proximal development. Right. If they’re getting more than 85% of the questions right, you know, then that’s a sign that they’re, they’re in too easy material. If, you know, they’re under 70, it’s a sign this is too hard. How do you make sure that they’re staying in the right spot? And so that’s the other part that the AI tool will kind of say, whoa, hold on here. We’re noticing that there’s something changing or that a student’s not being hit at that right level. The other thing that’s going to come in to play is we’re also going to be able to really take a lot of things around cognitive load theory principles and understand, okay, if a student only needs 5 reps of a concept in order to master that concept, they shouldn’t have to sit around and do 10 reps. And if the student needs 15, they shouldn’t only get 10.So that’s just some ideas of some of the things that are coming in the pipeline that generative AI is going to make really available.Diane TavennerSo two things I’m trying to understand and contrast to pre AI to now that we have AI because a lot of what you’re describing sounds very much like what Summit Learning was about. You know, we built thousands of playlists and young people, they actually had a lot of choices. So we were working on self direction in, you know, they would do a pre assessment, they would know what they know, they would prepare, you know, and study and learn. And then they would take a post assessment, we would assess all the things you’re talking about. So I guess I’m wondering in these apps, is that similar or is AI actually playing a new and different role here? And then I do want to get to the sort of time back coach as well because I realize it’s connected. But, are we using AI in these apps? Are these sort of still adaptive learning apps? Are they?MacKenzie PriceYeah, the third party apps that we’re using are not using, you know, an AI feature and they’re not creating dynamic content. You know that, that is created. This is, you know, The K through 8 Common Core curriculum is what’s, what’s being fed into these apps. Where we are getting to is we are going to be moving in, in 26 to dynamically created content. Obviously there’s been a problem. There’s still hallucination issues. In fact, we have a group of high school students, kind of our, our top honors students who we are testing out dynamic content and they’re able to say, hey, guess what? The AI is acting up here. Like this is totally a wrong question on that.But right now what we’re doing is we’re going through and we’re analyzing every lesson before it’s out there. So this isn’t just like an LLM creating a fifth grade curriculum. We’re still using that. Where the AI tool is really being used is around that vision model. So that’s the biggest difference is that, and that’s part of the reason, you know, if you talk to families who went to Alpha, you know, six years ago, you’ll hear a much more varied experience. Right. We had a lot of families that my kid wasn’t learning.They were goofing around. There wasn’t this connection. Now there were a lot of reasons for that. We didn’t have the motivation model locked in. We didn’t have the high standards, just expectation. But the other big part was it’s really easy to goof around when you’re learning on these, you know, in general on these apps. And so that’s the biggest thing right now is that our AI tutor is ensuring that kids are moving efficiently at the right level and then understanding what the pace is for that and creating basically new lessons that will fill academic holes, you know, and go at their pace, is what I would say. But yeah, if you’re looking at, you know, for example, a math academy, you know, type of thing, you know, that is static content that, that kids move through and kind of work on.We used to use IXL, actually. IXL kicked us off of their platform. They don’t like us for some reason. They literally won’t even tell us, they won’t talk to us. They just say, you’re off. But we had used IXL a lot. And actually one of the things I always say for families that are wanting to recreate this at home, I actually think IXL does a really good job across a lot of dimensions. They were a pretty good app.They don’t like Alpha for whatever reason, but, you know, that’s where we’ve kind of been able to figure out what this is. But I think the other question is, when you talk about things like reading, writing, it’s really helping break down our apps that we built. You know, they’re breaking down into small components. Let’s make sure a student is excellent at this and then build from there. I think in a traditional classroom, having students write a five paragraph essay is not necessarily helpful. Instead, are they really understanding the structure and mechanics of a sentence? Are they understanding what a paragraph should look like? Are they going. And we use really the idea of building blocks in all of the work that we do.Diane TavennerSo does that mean you’ve got under underlying at least the apps you’re building sort of a knowledge graph that you’re, that you’re working with in order? Yeah, I mean that again, fairly. Okay, fairly consistent. Let’s dig into that AI coach or tutor, like you said, because it sounds like this is not a traditional dashboard where young people are looking at Their own data and information. Maybe they are. But what it sounds like you’ve really got is this AI coach or tutor coming in to keep them motivated. I mean, the apps you’re talking about, lots of schools have them, as, you know, lots of schools, they just don’t get the number of minutes, they don’t get the progress. And so is you’re. It sounds like that’s the key.So that is an AI tutor or. But it’s not a bot that you were referencing.MacKenzie PriceWell, it is, but you’re not correct about. Yeah, you’re not correct about that. The AI tutor is not providing the motivation levers. There’s no motivation that’s happening through the apps. The motivation is all through our guides, our human teachers. They are focused on motivation. And just to be really clear, the reason we’re having the success that we’re having and the academic results we’re having is not because of our edtech. Our ed tech is fine, it’s whatever.But there is no magical edtech product that just immediately motivates and makes a guide or makes a student, you know, lock in and be able to learn well, We haven’t built it. We haven’t seen it yet. The key for us is that we have freed up the time of our human adults to be able to focus on motivation. And so that could be everything from, well, from the idea that students earn alpha bucks for hitting their XP goals to, I was just talking to one of our kindergarten guides the other day, and she said, you know, we have kids where when they hit, one of their goals, when they. When they unlock a goal that they.They’ve done, they have a secret sniggle, they have a secret signal, they’ll, you know, scratch their nose. And that signals, oh, you hit a goal, let’s do a silent dance party. And It’ll be a 15 second, you know, the guide is doing the silent dance party, and then they move on to the next thing. It can be individual motivation, you know, models. We had a student who, as a result of hitting her academic goals over a period of six weeks, she earned time in a professional recording studio to record an original song that she had written and was singing. So that’s the whole key. And by the way, 90% of what creates a great learner is a motivated student.10% is having the right level and pace, which is what our edtech tool does. What the AI tutor does, though, it actually does give kids the ability to go on their dashboard and each day and see, okay, I hit my rings, I filled my ring. It kind of looks almost think of an Apple watch, you know, with exercise rings. That’s what it is for each student is, did you fill your ring? Which means, did you get your XPs in that subject? And then they can go into their learning dashboard and they can see at any time, here’s how much I. Here’s how much I hit. We even have a waste meter in the corner that says, you know, you’ve wasted 20% of your time you were wasting by not engaging in the right way or not accurately doing that.Diane TavennerSo the student doesn’t actually, like, engage with the AI tutor. It literally is just powering this dashboard then.MacKenzie PriceWell, it’s powering the dashboard, and then it will pop up and say, you know, it’ll write something like, hey, watch the video explanation. You know, sometimes it’s, you know, going.Diane TavennerIt was like a nudge or something.MacKenzie PriceOne of the things that, yeah, we’ll see is that, you know, we’ll often say to students, you know, often the fastest way forward is to slow down, slow down and read the explanation. So it does that. But here’s what it’s not doing. There’s not some little avatar Dashy, that pops up and is like, hey, Johnny, you’re doing such a great job. Two more questions, and then we’re doing that. It’s not that kind of thing. The AI really is kind of under cover.And it’s again, building these lesson plans and then analyzing and understanding how a kid is moving through that.Diane TavennerBuilding the lesson plans that are in the apps or in the after.MacKenzie PriceYeah, taking them to the right spot. So it’s able to say, okay, we’re going to take you.Diane TavennerOh, by lesson plan, you’re saying directing them to specific.MacKenzie PriceDirecting directly to this math academy. And we put up these basically guardrails. That don’t allow a kid to pop out of Math Academy and say, hey, instead of doing this concept, I’m going to go play over here. I’m going to go do this. And I think that’s a problem in traditional classrooms when people are using apps. They’re given their iPad or their Chromebook, they’re put on Khan Academy, and then they’ve got the ability to kind of bounce around. There’s one other topic that I think is also important, and this is actually a lesson we learned very early on, is the idea of requiring students to do some work each day in each subject. Right.And there’s a lot of alternative education systems that’ll say, hey, if a kid doesn’t really want to focus on math for a couple months, that’s okay. They want to pursue reading. We actually believe. And this was, I’ll never forget the very first year we had a first grade student who absolutely loved math. Loved math. He was at 8th grade level math. And the problem was he needed his guide to read the word problems to him because he couldn’t read and he hadn’t read in like months. And that was one of the early unlocks where we realized, okay, we have to require, you know, time in each subject each day that students are accomplishing, which some, again, some alternative schools don’t do that.Diane TavennerYeah. So it sounds like then, the motivation is highly related to this relationship that young people have, which we know is very powerful. And then just following the directives essentially of the guide and then the technology to do what you’re telling them to do and stay on track.Confidence Unlocks Student MotivationMacKenzie PriceExactly. And then I think the next part of the motivation, kind of the deeper level of motivation is and you know, people often go, oh, is extrinsic motivation bad? And you guys know, there’s all the research that shows there’s not necessarily even that same, you know, intrinsic versus extrinsic. But what we are seeing is that as students become more and more capable, you know, and build up their knowledge, they become more confident and they do get more motivated. They suddenly realize like, wow, okay, I can be 99th percentile in, you know, math, in language, in science, I can do this, it’s not as hard. And so we find that kids, their identity really changes as they start to see that, wow, I’m capable of learning when I’m given the right level and the right pacing and I get motivated to do that. And that is what I think is the really cool unlock that we enjoy seeing when students finally realize this. Like, wow, I can do this.Diane TavennerYeah, definitely. You said that one of the benefits of this approach is you freeing up the guide time to really do the more important things. And as I understand it, one of those activities they do is one to one meetings with the young people in this morning block. This was one of them. Continues to be, I think the most highly rated element of the summit model is the mentoring model with the one to one check ins as a part of that. And over the years we started leveraging technology to enhance those check ins. I’m curious if you’re using AI in any way to support the one to one check ins and, and what that looks like.MacKenzie PriceYes, we are. So we actually mic up the guides during those one to one check ins and then they’re using, you know, we take those transcripts and we’re running them through for everything from what percentage of the time were you talking compared to the student? Right. If you’re talking too much, that’s a problem. How many questions were you asking, you know, versus stating what are some of the things that are happening there. We also actually use that technology for some of our students as well. So an example of that, one of our students in Arizona, he struggles with a growth mindset, you know and he’ll, when he’s struggling in his academic work, he’s quick to say I’m dumb or I can’t do this or whatever. And so we put an AI mic on him and then he and his guide go through daily and analyze how are you speaking to yourself? Were you being kind to yourself? And what we found amazingly is that just him knowing he has this lanyard around his neck that’s listening helps him remember, hey, speak kindly to myself. I can incorporate these growth mindset strategies.So we’re able to do that. We have guides that wear these lanyards throughout the entire day so that they can understand and then get feedback on their coaching. And so, you know, that’s, that’s a great part of it. We’re using AI. We’re very much, our organization is very much on be AI first in everything we do. How can we always take everything to the next level and build that out? And then of course the other aspect of AI, you know, that comes across in our afternoon life skills workshops is kids are learning how to use these tools that are going to help them be successful. So you know, kids are starting to build out and develop these brainless and then build out an LLM. In fact, we actually just had a pretty exciting thing happen last week.One of our students at our high school had built up an LLM around safe teen dating advice and she ran a research study with the University of Texas professor around basically how good was the LLM she built compared to a chatgpt and suburban moms and they just submitted to Nature with that research information. So it’ll be really exciting in the next couple of months. We’ll hear if that gets accepted. And that should be a pretty cool thing. So that’s the other part of this is you’ve got to make sure kids are being equipped to learn how to take advantage of all these new tools that are constantly coming out.Diane TavennerFor sure, for sure. Let’s move to that afternoon block and unpack that a little because I think I hear far less about the afternoon time, which is familiar to me, because also in the Summit model, you know, the self directed learning time seemed to get all of the publicity in the play and whatnot. It was only two hours. It was only 30% of the young person’s grade, but it got like 90% of the attention. So let’s break the afternoon into the K8 and the high school because I think those two are different in your model. Talk about the K8. Yeah, talk about the K8 afternoon, where I understand it’s young people are learning life skills. Is this a project based approach? Who’s planning this? Is it a curriculum? I think, as you just said, students are encouraged to use AI from their side.But what I’m really interested in is how are guides and educators using technology and specifically AI for this afternoon block, the dashboard here. What’s going on there?MacKenzie PriceYeah, this afternoon block is really when our guides are shining in terms of being able to plan and connect and mentor our students. And that’s done a few different ways. So when we think about In K through 8, our students are participating in these life skills workshops that are developing leadership and teamwork, financial literacy and entrepreneurship, relationship building and socialization, public speaking and storytelling and grit and hard work. And so every workshop that is created has to be able to pass two tests. One is, what is the life skill that is actually being taught and how are we going to assess at the end of the six week period whether that has happened? So, for example, you know, we’re in the week before the holiday break. We’ve got test to pass events happening at all of our schools around the country where parents and people from the public can come in and see something that’s being done that the kids have been working on and understanding. Did they learn this life skill? You know, an example that we often talk about because I think it really highlights the idea of how do you learn grit? How do you learn, you know, stick with something when it’s hard? So we have students who participate in grit triathlons. And that could be things like having to solve a Rubik’s Cube, juggling three items for 30 seconds and running a mile without stopping.And when you can see that a kid has, you know, a third grade student has been able to understand, okay, there’s an algorithm and I keep practicing my Rubik’s Cube and I start by juggling scarves and eventually I’m juggling balls and I incorporate atomic habits to, you know, walk and run. At the end of six weeks when these students are able to accomplish that goal. And it shows grit. We also do a lot of physical workshops that build out things like grit, like facing fears. For example, we’ve got a rock climbing workshop and that actually for our kindergarteners, they’re climbing a 40 foot rock wall. And when you watch the difference between a student at the beginning of that six week period, you’ve got a five year old who’s like, I don’t even think I can hold on to one of these suddenly going 40ft up. The only one more amazed by that are their parents, right? Their parents are like, this is amazing. So a lot of physical workshops that are doing, doing things and then the guides will use AI tools as part of building out those workshops. Being able to measure one workshop that we do every year that’s very popular.It’s a communication and basically uplifting others workshop. And the test to pass for that workshop is that kids go into an escape room, you know, one of these, one of these rooms where they have to, you know, solve a bunch of different puzzles and logic things and all that to go. And we mic the students up and we use AI to analyze what percentage of their language is considered uplifting and positive. You know, where are they doing that? We’ll do that in sports activities. Kids will get feedback on their public speaking. They’ll be using AI tools to build graphic novels, to build films, you know, all kinds of things that they’re working on that way. And so that’s a combination of group workshops. And then they also get individual time to pursue what we call kind of check chart independent projects.Diane TavennerAh, so it sounds like then your guides are using just AI, like an LLM to help them plan those workshops. And then are you rubric gradient or just checklist grading?MacKenzie PriceWe’re rubric grading as well. And so we have for each life skills workshop we’re grading, what is the quality of workshop. And that’s everything from, you know, the kids’ assessment of did they love the workshop. You know, we’re constantly surveying parents, kids to make sure that what we’re delivering is right. And how are these guys going? The thing that we’re calling it.Diane TavennerAnd that feedback from the rubric, is that derived from the AI or is the guide doing that? And then is that also incorporated in their dashboard?Iterating to Build Measurable SkillsMacKenzie PriceAll a combination of both things. And I think in a lot of ways what we are constantly doing is iterating. How do we build upon a workshop, how do we make, are we doing each session that kind of comes together. In fact, you know, today again, it’s the last week before the holiday break. We’ve got staff days every evening, you know, after school as we kind of plan and go through what worked, what are we doing to kind of increase, you know, love of school, the learning 2x in 2 hours and then development of life skills. So we’re working through a lot of these types of activities of, you know, how can we make this alpha life core soft skills measurable? Right. How can we understand how to measure these skills versus just kind of saying oh, you know, sure, they’re learning leadership qualities, you know, from, from something. What are the things that we can do to, to kind of build that out?Diane TavennerInteresting. One of the conversations, big conversations, is how AI can and should change the role of the educator. And you all have purposely and publicly redefined the role of the teacher to be a guide. And I’ve been tracking through this conversation. You know what I think some of the shifts are in how you think about teacher versus guide and educator and how AI is enabling that. So let me run this back past by you and see if I got it right. So the guide’s not planning any sort of lectures or traditional lessons and they’re not doing any assessment. They’re leaving that to the technology.They are doing one to one check ins and they’re getting feedback from sort of AI inputs from their recordings and things like that about how they can improve. So that takes time. We know in a teacher’s day if you’re transcripting all of those things, they’re going to an educator’s day and then they are planning the afternoon workshops. It does sound like they’re doing some of the assessment there. And they’re certainly, you know, working closely with the students on the motivation piece and engaging directly with them. And it does sound like that’s supplemented by AI. Did I get that right? Sort of the role of the guide, if you will.MacKenzie PriceYeah, you did get that right. Now there’s one other aspect of the guide’s job, in the morning academic time, in the core time. You know, I think people have this, this misconception that oh, you know, you’ve got a kid, a group of kids that are just staring at computers with no adults in sight. Our guides are there and they’re engaged, but they’re not there to teach academics. So if a kid says, hey, I’m struggling with this, you’re not going to see one of our guides saying, okay, let me, let me show you how to work through this problem. You got to carry the one. Let’s do a tutoring session on this. Instead.They’re going to be basically asking students questions to help them understand if they have used their resources. So, hey, were you able to watch the video? Did you go into the resource library to find another answer? Did you check these kinds of things out? And so that’s where they’re really providing coaching around how to go about learning to learn. Here’s one. I don’t know if you call it an exception, but one thing I will say for our younger students, our kindergarten, first and second, we have not found to this point a replacement for reading than that one to one reading time. So we have reading specialists at all of our schools for our younger learners who are working with students on reading. And our students get one to one pull out time, you know, to be practicing that reading. It’s something critical. We are seeing, you know, certainly some great progress and success around learning to read.But you know, you have to have that time reading out loud with a human. And so that’s the one thing I would say is our guides in our younger levels, we do have certified like reading specialists who are at those schools. And it’s, it’s critical.Diane TavennerWe didn’t talk about the high school afternoon time. And as I think you alluded to, and as I understand it, this is where young people are picking one project to work on for four years. And again, I don’t know if that’s a headline or if that’s accurate. I must say this is an element of the model that gives me a little bit of pause and so I’d really love to underbutt a lot of buzz. So what’s actually happening for high school students for those four hours, four years?MacKenzie PriceYou know, so we have two tracks for our high school. We have what we call an honors track. And the idea of that honors track is basically kids who kind of, you know, want to be sort of Ivy League bound. They’ve got ambitions of going into a top 20 university. And so in that program we’re basically saying, okay, we’ll deliver 1550 SAT score scores, you know, fives on at least a few hard AP courses and what we call an Olympic level Alpha X project. This is a project that is as impressive as being an Olympian. You know, what is it? So an example of that, one of our students who just got accepted to Stanford this past week. She’s the student who’s also submitting her research to Nature.If she’s accepted, she’ll be the youngest female ever and the only high school student in history. You know, to be able to do that, you know, they work on something big. Now during that time when they’re working on these Alpha X projects, there’s no question that you’ll have kids who might, they might decide to change their project 10 times during their four year experience. What they’re really developing is the skill of learning how to go deep into something and become an expert. And so we’ll do things like they’ll go into, you know, two week long sprints where it’s like, go learn everything you can learn about this subject. And at the end of that two weeks, you know, just as often as not, you’ll have kids come out and go, actually it turns out I’m not interested in that. I want to go into something else. And the other thing is these projects that kids work on aren’t necessarily what they say, oh, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life.Right. I’m going to go build this out in college or something. But it’s a project that they’re kind of, you know, able to develop and go deep and become an expert on. Now we also have a non honors track at our school and that non honors track is for kids who say, you know, I really love the idea of getting time back to just go do things I’m interested in. So for example, you know, we’ve got a student who wants to get his pilot’s license and he loves the idea of flying planes. Now does having your pilot’s license at age 15 get you into Stanford? Yeah, you know, maybe not, but it gives you time to go develop these things. So a lot of our athletes who want to have time to pursue their sports or whatever. Now what all of our students do, and that non honors program basically is 1350 SAT, which is, you know, top 10%, fours and fives on APs, you know, and time to go and develop the interests that they have. Honors students are spending about three hours a day on their core learning.The non honors track is about two hours of what they’re doing. Kids are still taking AP courses, they’re still doing all those kinds of things.Diane TavennerSorry, you lost me for a second. Where’s the AP course? Is that in the afternoon or in.MacKenzie PriceNo, that’s in the morning. That’s the core academic time is students are taking four years of English, four years of math language or, you know, foreign language, all that kind of stuff. So they’re doing that in the morning. Afternoons are for. For working on these Alpha X projects. And then we do a lot of workshops around life skills for all of our students. So that’s everything from rejection training to giving and receiving feedback, you know, leadership challenges. A lot of things that students are working to kind of build out those skills is what our high school program looks like.Diane TavennerSo in the high school afternoon, there is sort of still a framework curriculum. Maybe it’s not every day, all the days, but that you do have some of these skills that you’re doing in some workshop, being around with students.Developing Projects with Real ImpactMacKenzie PriceYeah, there’s absolutely a framework. And then for the kids who are working on their Alpha X projects, they basically go through different levels, right? So, you know, as an example of the kind of the highest level where basically these kids are getting out and they’re launching real businesses or activities. One of our students, who’s the senior this year, she’s working on getting a musical launched on Broadway. So she actually spends, you know, five, five to seven days a month in New York City, you know, working on recording with producers, meeting with potential investors, you know, doing those types of activities. So she’s kind of been released out into the wild, you know, in some ways to go work on these projects. But the other thing that we have in common is every day our students are spending an hour working on their brain lift. So this idea of whatever the interest they have, they’re staying current on research, what’s going on, and they’re using this brain lift to then build out whatever their LLM and GPT is based on this. They also work on things like creating a spiky point of view.So an example of that, we have a student named Alex who is building a plushie doll that is basically a mental health coach. And his spiky point of view that he’s built is he believes AI can actually provide better counseling to a teenager than a human counselor. Now, that’s a very spiky point of view, right? Especially when you think of all of the dangers on this. But he’s built certain things in his system that he believes are making a successful AI mental health coach. And so the idea is building out these things and being able to learn how to become an expert on using AI to build this thing out. So we have another student who’s interested in creating. He’s a filmmaker and wants to create, you know, his ultimate goal is to create an Oscar winning, winning film.And part of what he’s done is to create basically a spiky point of view around how filmmaking can be done. And he just got accepted. He reached out to a bunch of different podcasts. He got accepted and invited on three podcasts. Now a lot of rejection training going on in there as well, where there’s a lot of podcasts who say no answer, you know, or whatever it is they do. But they’re learning all of these skills during this time. Plus getting the traditional academics that, you know, students in a normal school are getting.Diane TavennerWhere would science labs fit into this model? Or, you know, projects that are in history where we know kids, you know, dates, facts, information is, is based, but you actually need to understand the big themes and trends. Where does that fit in your model?MacKenzie PriceWell, if you take things like science labs. We don’t have science labs. Our students are taking AP Biology, AP Physics, AP Chemistry. But they are, you know, watching great YouTube videos that are exploring these topics instead. We haven’t found that there’s this critical piece of getting kids in a lab doing beaker experiments, you know, as part of what they’re doing. They can watch these things. Now. Kids who are really excited about something that they’re working on, you know, in science can go in and build something out.So for example, we had a student who got really interested in cancer research and epigenetics, and she ended up going out and creating a documentary that’s been viewed over 5 million times around cancer and epigenetics. So we kind of think like everything we do at these schools is taking an interest or a passion that a kid has and figuring out how to get them out in kind of real world experience with things and how they can build. We had a student who loves physics, really interested in science, loves physics. He also went on to become a professional water skier, but he would take physics principles and then work on how he could improve his water skiing times and rope length, you know, incorporating physics principles. So there’s things they do there, things like history, for example. You know, students are taking AP World and AP European and AP US History. So they’re doing all those things. They’re getting a lot of experience on writing, obviously, as they’re, they’re learning on apps, they’re coming out with, you know, fives on their APs and doing very well, and they’re having some connected time with each other where they’re, they’re basically going through some checkpoints at the same time.Where they’re interacting last year towards, you know, basically in April you heard a lot of singing because kids had basically used AI tools to help them remember a bunch of their facts for AP world history, you know, with basically in the, in the same vein as Hamilton lyrics, you know, and, and working through those things.Diane TavennerIs that the College Board’s digital curriculum that they’re using for the AP courses? Yeah. And then, that like joint collaborative time would be in the afternoon. Is that how it connects?MacKenzie PriceYeah.Diane TavennerGot it. Awesome.Michael HornThis season of Class Disrupted is sponsored by Learner Studio, a nonprofit motivated by one question. What will young people need to be inspired and prepared to flourish in the age of AI as individuals, in careers and for civil thriving? Learner Studio is sponsoring this season on AI in Education. Because in this critical moment, we need more than just hype. We need authentic conversations asking the right questions from a place of real curiosity and learning. You can learn more about Learners Studio’s mission and the innovators who inspire them at www.learnerstudio.org.Michael HornThis has been super helpful, MacKenzie. Huge thanks. But before we let you go, we have this segment where we, where we get away from the conversation around education generally, although not always. Just things we’ve been reading, watching, listening outside of work if you can. But if not, that’s cool too. So we’ll let you have the first say at it before Diane shares what’s been on her list.MacKenzie PriceWell, I’m sure that I’m going to give you an answer that is not going to be impressive to any of your followers or listeners.Michael HornI guarantee you most of my answers are unimpressive. So go ahead.MacKenzie PriceMy absolute favorite thing to do in the evening when I get time to relax is I love to take a bath and I have a huge television that is mounted in my bathroom in front of my bathtub that is non-negotiable. My husband and I just moved into an apartment a year ago and I was like where is the TV in front of the bathtub going to go? Like I will not move into an apartment that doesn’t have that option. And I got in the bath last night and I was so excited to watch the Taylor Swift Eras documentary. So I am halfway through the first episode. My girls and I, and actually my husband too, we totally bond over that. And then actually later in the evening my daughter’s home from college and we’re watching this show called All Her Fault. It’s like about a kidnapping and it’s the gal from Succession, you know, the redhead from Succession, she stars in it. And one of the guys from White Lotus season one.So I do. We like those types of shows. We loved White Lotus. This All Her Fault. I just watched the Beast in Me. So I do, I sometimes can be known to binge some of these Netflix shows, but I do them in the format of about 35 minutes, which is how long my bathtub water stays hot for. And then I’m out of time.Michael HornAnd then you’re out.Diane TavennerThere you go. Well, I’m totally, I’m totally cheating today. I’m gonna share a novel that I’m going to read over the holidays. My favorite living authors, Ian McEwan. And he has a newish novel out called What We Can Know. And I, I’m literally counting down the days to the holidays and to being able to crack this one open and savor it. I’ll give you two sentences from the New York Times review that make me excited. Quote, it’s a piece of late career showmanship.McEwan is 77 from an old master. It gave me so much pleasure, I sometimes felt like laughing. I will report back.Michael HornAnd you’ll have to report back because I was going to say you just quoted the New York Times, which is an item for later but yeah, so, all right, I’ll wrap with mine, which is MacKenzie, to your point. We binge watched Four Seasons with Tina Fey and Steve Carell. It’s a Netflix. I hadn’t heard of it. It’s like an eight episode first season. There will be a second season based on the cliffhanger at the end. And I would say it’s about three couples, sort of 50s age group is roughly where they are and through trials and tribulations that is hysterical.A lot of predictability and yet still very funny as it went through. So we really enjoyed it and I think binge watched it in two nights. I think so.MacKenzie PriceOh, great. That might be our holiday activity too for some time.Michael HornThere you go adding to your.MacKenzie PriceI love that. I love that.Michael HornAwesome. Awesome. Well, MacKenzie, huge thanks and as always, huge thank you to you, all of you, for listening. Keep coming with your questions, comments and all the rest, and we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Two of my former students and now entrepreneurs Abdi Guleed and Kedaar Sridhar of M7E AI joined me to explore how they’re using AI to make math curricula more accessible for all students, especially those facing linguistic barriers. Abdi and Kedaar shared their personal stories and the research that inspired them to create M7E AI, a tool that works with curriculum providers to streamline and clarify math content before it reaches classrooms. Our conversation highlighted challenges districts face when evaluating curriculum, the platform’s innovative seven-factor framework for language accessibility, and the ways AI can help districts, publishers, and educators create more equitable learning experiences.Michael HornHey, Michael, here. What you’re about to hear is a webinar that I hosted for a company, M7E, that full disclosure, I’m an advisor to. It’s two of my former students that founded it. And it’s a very cool AI tool that does something different from a lot of the tools out there on the market. It’s not student facing, it’s not teacher facing. What it does is it works with curriculum providers to take their math content specifically and use the AI with a set of clear rules to reduce the language complexity so that the curriculum is actually teaching and assessing on the math skills rather than some of the language things that might run interference for multilingual learners in particular, I hope you enjoy the webinar that we recorded, find it interesting, informative, and that it sparked some questions for you about how else might we use AI that sort of steps out of the typical notion of just, hey, it’s a chatbot, and where are the applications that might take off that could make an impact in education. Let me introduce the two folks first who have been digging into this problem from both the research and product perspective. First of all, we have Abdi, I’m looking for you on my screen.There you are, Abdi Guleed. He’s a Harvard Education Entrepreneurship fellow and the co-founder of M7E AI. And we also have Kedaar Sridhar, also a Harvard Education Entrepreneurship fellow and also the co-founder of M7E AI both, as I said, former students in my class. And together they’ve built this company and product that really evaluates these existing math problems and tasks for linguistic clarity and accessibility. They flag hidden barriers that can trip up students and then they suggest, I think, importantly, revisions to keep the mathematical rigor intact, but while making the language and design more equitable. So I’m excited to bring them in. And Abdi, Kedaar, welcome. I want to get into it.The way we’ll do this is I have a couple questions for you guys up front and then I’m going to sort of give you the stage, if you will, to maybe show what you guys have developed and how you’ve been using it with some curriculum companies. But I think your own personal stories to this, I got to watch it a little bit up close. But for those that don’t know, you tell us your own personal stories about how you came to build this tool. Why did you see it as a big problem worth solving? Because I know a lot of folks don’t even tend to think about these challenges a lot of times. So Kedaar, Abdi, whoever of you wants to take it first.AI Tool Enhancing Math CurriculumAbdi GuleedThank you so much, Michael. And thank you everyone for joining us today. My name is Abdi. I grew up in Norway and like Michael said earlier as well. But I remember very clearly how math content was created and how that shaped my experience as a learner. And a lot of that stuck with me as I was growing up. And then I came to the US as a student athlete in track and field and built a career always around the core theme of using technology to make learning and organizational process more effective. I spent years working with data and AI, especially my master’s program with Kedaar, where most of our work was focused on how AI can streamline complex manual processes.So M7 education is a natural extension of that work and curriculum creation is one of the most complex and time consuming processes in education. We’ll talk a little bit more about that. And we think AI can dramatically improve both the speed and the quality. And because I personally know the impact of curriculum design, this mission is really, really important to me as well as is to Kedaar. So over to you, Kedaar.Kedaar SridharAwesome. Thanks for that Abdi. And thank you Michael. And thank you everyone for being here today. We’re excited to chat about what we’ve been working on. So I’m Kedaar Sridhar, also an international student who grew up in Oman in the Middle East. And I sucked at math like it was. I just wasn’t, I just wasn’t doing well.And turns out a lot of the things and the questions didn’t make sense from a lot of these big publishers, questions about lacrosse which I had never known or played, questions about skiing and I live in, you know, in a very hot country. And like all of these different contextual clues and things that were actually distracting me as well from what I was actually trying to do. Fast forward to, you know, I ended up coming to the US and doing my undergrad at UCLA in computer science. And I ended up in the STEM field. And I think a big focus for me is how can I improve access to that field and to those oriented careers. My career is in product and tech, but specifically I worked as well at an undergrad admissions for UCLA focused on improving access to higher education and then ended up at a nonprofit focused on STEM literacy, digital literacy, AI literacy, helping people bring into more technical careers as well. And, and so this passion, this through line for both of us has been how do we now provide a way for students, for people to access content when the thing that is being tested for is the wrong thing being sort of expressed and shown, you know, people spend more time decoding language instead of actually testing their own math ability in this specific case.And so with Abdi, you know, our master’s was in learning, design, innovation, and technology here at the School of Education, and we worked across the board, you know, across Harvard, across MIT and rest of the Cambridge schools as well, to continue diving into the space, doing research, and figuring out how do we best tackle this problem, that was very close to both of us.Michael HornSo I think it’s perfect, lLifts off, and I love that, well, you probably didn’t enjoy it Kedaar, that personal story of a kid struggling with math. But when I think a lot of people think about AI in education right now, I think a lot of people, like, the thing that comes to mind is chatbot, right. And I think a lot of people are fearful of, like, the student facing chat bot in particular. What I think is so interesting is that you all have built a tool, actually, that is like a couple layers before the student, right. To make sure that the curriculum getting to them. What I think is so interesting, though, right, is before we get to the solution and what.How AI, you’ve been able to use it to help districts and so forth, let’s focus on the problem first. And where do you see districts, schools struggling most in their current evaluation processes, especially when they’re comparing multiple math publishers or frankly, like the homegrown materials that we see or materials that teachers are taking from other teachers in all of this. Kedaar, why don’t you start off on this one?Kedaar SridharWhat we’ve heard and what we’ve also sort of experienced while, you know, speaking to district leaders and just speaking to all the, you know, all the people in the system, right. Whether you’re a teacher, district leader, or part of assessment teams, researchers, editorial teams, or, you know, publishers themselves. There is the core problem of I am a district leader or I’m an instructional specialist or a curriculum manager, and my district has its own needs, right? In my district, I have a specific type of students. Maybe there’s more bilingual students here, or maybe there’s more students that, you know, with a lower average literacy rate or a lot of these other things, but every district has such a different profile, and yet content is sort of dispersed equally to everyone.And so for something that we’ve been trying to tackle as we’ve gotten into more of these conversations, is how can we help district leaders specifically and districts themselves have visibility into all the publishers that come to them, be able to see which story aligns with their populations, which publisher and material best speaks to. And best shares that voice with the students themselves and the educators themselves. And in general. And Abdi will expand on this as well. There is just right now a very manual process and there’s limited bandwidth in general when looking at how this is best aligned not only with my district and our goals, but also coverage in terms of the broader, you know, the broader ecosystem as well.Aligning Curriculum with Diverse NeedsAbdi GuleedWhat we’ve seen, just to add to that is we’ve been talking a lot with district leaders, a lot with Kirkham developers and editorial teams, with teachers, with principals across the board. And there’s the idea when it comes to district leaders and schools mainly is there’s a heavy reliance on that idea that these curriculum developers know, kind of best. But then there’s this almost sort of like a little bit disconnect when it comes to the diversity of students in the classrooms that is changing dramatically. And we’ve been looking at it from multiple aspects of how can we help build something that could help the district leaders and others to evaluate the content, to evaluate the curriculum and be part of the design process before it reaches their specific district. And again, there are 50 million K12 students. America is very, very large. So different districts have different needs.And like Kedaar was alluding to, how can you make sure that my district and my students and the community that I’m supporting, how can we make sure that they have what they need in order to excel in their path as learners? So we’ll cover more on that in a few minutes.Michael HornNo, no, no, perfect. So I think that’s a good framing of the problem or challenge, if you will, that schools are facing. And with that, I’m going to give you guys the metaphorical virtual stage. I guess these days it is in zoom, but like three sort of central questions that we’ll have you answer. One is briefly framing what you’ve learned from the research and from working with publishers and districts. So one, briefly frame what you’ve learned from the research and from working with publishers and districts. Second, then let’s go to show, but not show and tell. Show, not tell.I want you to show a concrete demo of M7E on real math problems, what the platform sees that humans might miss in sort of a quick review. And then I think, obviously give us the, this is a tool, a free tool at the moment that schools and districts can use during adoption cycles, RFPs, internal reviews, and so forth. So show us how that actually can be used. So I’ll kick it to you with that framing.Abdi GuleedAwesome. Thank you so much.So I’ll walk through a little bit about the backstory. We touched upon that already, but give you a little bit of background on where we got started, the problem that we’re seeing. And then I’ll hand it over to Kedaar, who can show you how the platform works and how you can take part of it. So as I said earlier, there are. The first problem that we see here is the comprehension crisis. There are 50 million K12 students and 61% of them are below grade level in math. We’re seeing that one in four students are bilinguals. The thing that we’re seeing is that when you’re looking at math comprehension, it’s not just the bilingual students, but also, especially in the United States, where you have zonings and you can have a specific curriculum developer provide the curriculum and content to a community.Math Struggles Rooted in EquityAbdi GuleedAnd in that community could be, half of it could go to a public school that has less resources. And then the other half could be an affluent community that have more resources, but they’re both getting the same curriculum. What happens is the affluent one will get probably better scores than the other one, even though they are could be bilinguals, but you also have a lot of native speakers that live in that community, which then adds to a lot more, many more, millions of the students that struggle with math because of linguistic barriers, because of the exposure they’re getting to their personal experiences. Like Kedaar mentioned earlier, lacrosse, if that’s one thing, or badminton or whatever it is, if you don’t have been exposed to that or don’t have experience in that, it becomes sort of a barrier to you to solve the math word problems. When we did a lot of research, we found out that this also has been done before us. But we highlighted and we improved upon it, which is the problem is not so much about the students mathematical ability, but more so on the content and the way it’s presented to them. Then when we had conversations with teachers across the United States, we also realized that teachers don’t have a lot of time to scaffold every single student.We’re talking 20 or more students in the classroom. So what they do to try to make things work is simplify the word, the problems in a simple way to the students, use Google Translator or other methods to help the kids to get through the problem. Again, there’s not enough time for that level of scaffolding. But then this creates more teacher burden, extra work and inconsistent instruction across the classroom. And then when we had conversations with the publishers, we see they spend a lot of time with the editorial team to build the curriculum for that specific state and that specific district. But at the same time, the editorial team is also. There aren’t enough people in the editorial team who have the experience from these different classrooms in this diversity of classrooms that is growing in the United States.So there’s a lack of scalable workflows to evaluate and revise that content for every single student. So we’ve seen that as a problem in conversation with the publishers and then the districts. One of the most important piece there is how can you as a district leader or person, part of the district evaluation team or procurement team, how can you evaluate multiple different publishers when they’re coming with you with curriculum materials in order to make sure that this content actually fits with your student cohort? And of course you all have your own rubrics. But how can we make, how can we elevate that and try to figure out ways to stress test it before it even hits adoption or any decision making? Our journey started from a product practicum here at the Harvard Ed School. A publisher came with a problem. They have 15 million plus students and they looked at we had this growing 25% bilinguals and a lot more many students that are in the classroom. How can we make sure that the language is not a barrier and are there things that we can do to build and develop so the workflows of every area becomes simplified and more comprehensible? We, like I said, we spoke with educators, researchers, editorial team, district leaders to confirm that it’s a systemic issue. And then we went through 300 plus research papers as well as publishing our own research that came out a few months ago.And essentially the mission for us as we touched upon multiple times is to make sure that we can remove the unintentional linguistic barriers without simplifying the mathematical rigor. So when we’re saying making it easier or more comprehensible, we’re still making sure that the mathematical rigor is there, but we can use a different language that is maybe more universal and not cultural. So research highlighted that precise vocabulary plus clear syntax equals better comprehension. So our solution, which Kedaar will show you more about, is to evaluate and to revise curriculum language before even reaching the classroom. These are some of the feedback that we’ve been hearing from the teachers across the U.S. again, every student struggling with math word problems, even native speakers. Some of the teachers, because of the not enough capacity, they ask other students to help their friends to see if there are ways to help everyone in the class when they’re not, when there’s not enough time. Curriculum developers don’t have that insight.That’s what I touched upon earlier in terms of the editorial team could consist of few people, but not everyone has that experience from every single classroom. So what you’re seeing with M7E and we’ll explain what the seven criteria in the M7 is is to strengthen the math content before it reaches the classroom. So it’s an AI powered curriculum intelligence platform to evaluate and revise based on the seven factor framework that we built through this research. And then making sure, like I said earlier, we keep the mathematical rigor and without altering the math, maintaining standard alignment, original cognitive demand and rigor, helping the editorial team from the publisher aspect of it to streamline their workflows but also offering a clear and reliable signal of student content comprehensibility to support adoption. And HKI aligned procurement decisions for the districts and review teams. And then of course along the way they’ll also help reduce the teacher burn and then create something that can scale across the systems upstream. And we’ll see, we’ll show you how it works pretty easy with publisher schools, districts and others. And I’ll give you over to you Kedaar.Kedaar SridharAwesome. Thanks for that, for that Abdi, for that framing to kick off how we’re thinking about this from a system level. So the actual seven factors that come in and you can see them on the screen here are what we’ve been able to synthesize through all of our research and our interviews and looking across the fields of translanguaging to linguistics, to mathematical language routines to best pedagogy and learning sciences. And a lot of it as part of what we’ve been doing in classes and research labs and sort of associations involved with the Harvard Education School and beyond as well, we figure out that sort of synthesize these seven criteria in order to create comprehensible math language. And it’s all about like Abdi touched upon, removing the unintentional barriers or the hidden barriers, specifically things that were not intentional pedagogical choices. Right. If something is meant to be there, that’s great, but if something sort of slips through and then creates this hidden barrier that can impede student comprehension and learning, that is what these criteria are working on sort of preventing to happen in the first place.AI-Powered Educational Content OptimizationKedaar SridharThese criteria are then further broken down into 60 to 80 different sub criteria as well, all aligned with, you know, with sort of the latest research and our own findings and interviews in the field as well. To dive a bit deeper, we’ve actually built our own linguistic comprehension model. So this is where, you know, where we see the value of AI. How can we build something that is scalable but is fully based on the research and how we’re able to fine tune this with not just our criteria but also the common core standard guidelines, different state guidelines specifically, as we’re trying to make sure that we have that alignment there. Being able to get live classroom feedback so from our testing on the ground, along with the research that we’re working with, taking in teacher observations, taking in student comprehension, and then being able to sort of iterate upon those outputs as well, getting editorial teams to review our outputs as well, and constantly evaluating if you know that what we’re producing has those benefits and has those sort of increases in comprehension that where you set out to achieve. As we sort of train this, the goal is can this LCM be something that evaluates math content for comprehension and those barriers and identifies misalignments in general with what the actual guidelines and whether it’s grade guidelines, state guidelines and those kind of factors as well there. And then being able to produce that revised content that is optimized for this comprehension, but specifically focus on reducing cognitive load when it comes to things that don’t concern the math part of it or the math comprehension part of it. So I’ll stop sharing the slides here and actually just dive into what we built and the actual platform itself, which is live, which is something that we have educators and districts already employing here. So this is M7E AI.This is the curriculum evaluation platform that we’ve built here. And the goal is again, as we’ve said before, how can we now provide an easy way for districts to upload sample units, word problems assessments, any sort of curriculum content, sample items that they’re getting from publishers as publishers are making their claims or sharing content as well, and then being able to get a district summary and sort of the high level features, the strengths and the weaknesses of whatever has been uploaded, getting deep evaluation based on the criteria and then even getting revisions that can help support student learning at a broad level as well. So we’ve built this for superintendents, curriculum directors, review committees, you know, sort of school boards as well, anyone that is making those adoption procurement, an evaluation oriented decision specifically. So just as an example, we’ve uploaded an open source math curriculum. It’s grade four fractions and something that you’re able to do, whether it’s uploading a bulk set of files or different sorts of components that I highlighted earlier, you’re able to pick the specific grade level from K to 12 and then even the state standard. So whether it’s California Common Core, Florida Best, Texas TEKS, and we’re working on getting more and more, you know, specific state guidelines in there as well. But most of the country uses the Common Core. And what we found important is actually the learning goals and standards not just for the curriculum, but what are my goals as a district or what are my goals that I’m trying to sort of enact across this, this curriculum as well.And this is helpful to share more context about the profile of the district or things that we’re looking to achieve in general. So for this great four fractions content, we have a couple of learning goals as well as a couple of standards that align to sort of the Common Core there. And what we’re able to get is a summary report. And I won’t go fully, you know, I won’t read this out to you, but at a high level it’s giving you a snapshot of what actually makes sense in the content you’ve uploaded. What does that linguistic structure look like? What are the main issues and key strengths as well? What I will say, and I can scroll down just for some, some context here is when we revise it, we take an original problem and then revise it based on all of the factors that you saw in that sort of linguistic comprehension model. So in this specific case, you know, here’s an example of two kids that are planning on going for a run, right? And immediately you’re able to see soccer practice, after school activities, these sort of different names as well. And what our goal is, is with testing with students that we were, you know, working on with, they got stuck at, oh, soccer practice, I don’t do that. And also after school activities, my school doesn’t offer that.Right. So being able to even again universalize what we’re doing across the field here and then making it very simple in terms of they just want to measure these distances, we’re still keeping the students and we’re able to get to the core of what the math problem is asking specifically. And now there is no, you know, it’s still a three part math problem. Comprehension is not changing, but we’ve already removed a lot of those contextual barriers that actually prevent them from comparing a lot of those fractions there. So if we jump back to the District report. We’re now able to see, you know, there are strengths in terms of cohesion and labeling, but really gaps in terms of those contextual references, different formats as well, and you know, any exclusionary measures that might be taking place as well. We follow up with implications for district adoption and review, in terms of how this matters for the guide, how this sort of aligns with the Common Core guidelines for that specific state and what might be helpful in terms of revisions, as if this is something that you’re choosing to adopt as a district.And then finally recommendations that districts can sort of follow in terms of how to revise, what parts of it to adopt. Maybe there’s parts of it to adopt and parts of it to revise, a lot of factors like that as well. And then that’s sort of the high level overview. And then it’s sort of a deeper evaluation based on the criteria as well that, you know, the seven criteria that we identified earlier in terms of why or why not it passes each criteria and sort of general notes in terms of the main issues that were found. So this is more the instructional design, you know, curriculum developer oriented level, instructional issues specifically, and then recommendations for further improving it as well. So we wanted to give all the context as district leaders, you know, and as curriculum managers in general.We are trying to create a transparent model that is clearly showing why we made revisions or why we made changes or how we’re doing a lot of this evaluation specifically. And that’s why we’re able to explain all of this. And then these reports can be exported. So at a high level, this is what we’ve been able to accomplish so far with M7EAI. And we just want to be able to help, you know, districts make better decisions and give them, you know, empower them with the tools that can help them find success for their students.Abdi GuleedYeah. And Michael, before you jump in, you asked the question, how can school industry leaders use this kind of tool? So essentially where I think I said in the email as well, we’re offering for free to district leaders and schools to use the platform. The way you would do it essentially is just contact us and then we’ll help you set up and get started and then.work with you from there.Michael HornPerfect. So they can just reach out directly over email from. From that response. Perfect. Okay, let’s go to Q and A. Elmira. I think that they may have answered the role of AI in evaluating this, but if so, I’m going to go to the second question, but if I have that wrong, I’m going to bring you back in. But we have a question around. So the tools aren’t evaluating curricula in terms of pedagogy, like linguistic scaffolds, math language routines, teacher moves and so forth.Is that correct? And so just I think tighter definition on what, where it is reviewing and where it isn’t.Kedaar SridharOkay, I can tackle that. Perfect. So we actually. And this is, this is, again, this is just an example here, but in terms of the recommendations, it’s not just the language recommendation, but it’s also pedagogical recommendations and also the formatting of content. So we’re providing feedback on even the images used or the diagrams or anything in that sort of context there. A lot of times our revisions actually end up providing more scaffolding because again, if something’s an intentional pedagogical choice, we don’t want to be eliminating it. We want to be further explaining it at a high level as well. So whether it’s providing visual support, clarifying instructions, providing more scaffolding, those are the things that we’re also looking for in addition to the linguistic side of things, and also checking for math correctness and the math principles there as well.And sort of what we want to be very clear about what each revision is supporting, whether it matches the learning goals that were put in and the standards, but being also focused on the linguistic side of things, comprehensive wise. Hopefully that answers that question. But we are definitely working to provide more visibility as well into the pedagogical side of things.Michael HornPerfect. Let me ask this next question that is in the Q and A. And then, Christian, I’ll get to you after that. This question has to do with AI mediated personalization. As tools like this become more common, do we risk siloing students’ learning experiences? So take the point about content delivery being responsive to context. Right. Like Kedaar, your observation around, you know, skiing while living in the Middle East. But if most students mediate their learning in this way, you mentioned scaling this technology. Do we risk opportunities for negotiated understanding? Do we lose something important if 30 students in class engage with a given math problem by interpreting 30 different personalized descriptions of the problem? Would it not be beneficial to everyone for students in Oman to learn something about skiing, while North American students gain exposure to Omani racing or falconry or something like that? So I will let you both answer that question or whichever one wants to take it.Kedaar SridharAnd just to be very, very. Just to clarify what we’re doing here, we aren’t personalizing for every student. Right. The goal is how do we make content universal across various groups of students? Because this all started with the static textbooks that we were. The publisher came in and these textbooks are published and they don’t have review cycles for maybe it’s four or five years, different cases for different publishers. But how do you turn content that is static, printed, even supplemental digital content to some extent as well, into something that could be understood by various groups of students? Because like Abdi mentioned, an affluent, you know, an affluent area will be getting the same sort of curriculum as a less affluent area. So how do we sort of equal the playing field on that aspect? Abdi?Transforming Education SystemsAbdi GuleedYeah, I think there’s so many products that now are hitting the classroom for teachers, for students. When we looked at the ecosystem, we’re thinking more of if the ecosystem consists of four players: you have the students, you have the teachers, you have the curriculum developers and district leaders. Where can we make a system level change? And we didn’t get out there to say we’ll create a personalized product for students or for the teachers. It was more so when we started with this at the Harvard School, the practicum, the publisher was doing, what Kedaar just said is textbooks, depending on what publisher it is, they review them every two years, every four years. And those are the core programs that students learn. So we’re looking at how can we make you, how can we make the content, these textbooks, more universal so every student can bring their own, can leverage their translanguage and like Kedaar touched upon in order to understand the content in front of them and not let that be a barrier. And if we, we spend a lot of time figuring out what are these seven criteria. It was actually five in the beginning and then it became six and then became seven.And then we changed what the seven and the six was based on the feedback from the researchers across UC Berkeley, UCLA, MIT, Stanford, etc. And we came to understand that this is something that these seven criteria can be helping across the board, every student to understand any content in front of them. But yeah, nothing very personalized to every student. It’s just across the board, every student should be able to understand any type of math if they leverage the M7 framework.Michael HornOne other quick thought and then I want to go in. So Christian, I’m going to come back to you in a second. I want to go to one other question in the Q and A because it streams perfectly. And then I haven’t forgotten about you. Just one other observation, which is this is always relative to the content or standards objective that is trying to be taught. Right. So skiing for Omani students might be something worth teaching, but it might not be part of the math purpose. Right.It might show up in social studies or something else. And so it’s not to take that out, but it’s to make sure that relative to the objective that is trying to be taught, that we are making sure that we are, in fact teaching that. And then when there’s intentional interference or complexity, you can say, yes, we’re keeping that because there’s an instructional purpose here, as I understand it. I think this goes into the next thing, because this is actually already done a lot with people who write standardized assessments. They have whole teams that are trying to make sure questions are not biased or unintentionally asking something, testing for a different objective than the one that they hope to. And so it goes to Rebecca’s question, can this resource be used to review assessments? So, Kedaar, Abdi.Kedaar SridharYeah, yeah.Michael HornShort answer is yes.Kedaar SridharYeah, it could be used like. It’s like anything from overall curriculum to teacher notes to any instructional, you know, external scaffolds, worksheets, problem sets, anything that is content based, that is student facing, that is, you know, that is sort of in those different sort of categories as well. And we take a lot of account into specifically, you know, looking at an assessment versus an instructional material. Right. Because an assessment is more in the silo of the student, whereas an instructional material is in the context of a teacher and being able to understand what the teacher’s role in the classroom is as well. And so these are all things that we’re continuously building into the platform as well.Abdi GuleedYeah, and we’ll share with the group here. We tested grade four, 17 units, 17 lessons plus four assessments. And we’ll share that after the call is 200 pages long. But quickly you can review and see how the original was and how we revised it and the context around that. But, yeah, assessment can be also used absolutely.Audience, Partners, and ReceptionMichael HornOkay, perfect. Let’s do lightning round. We’ve got three questions that I think all connect and then we have two questions that are somewhat different. So the three questions that connect are who’s your target audience? Right. Sort of. There’s publishers, there’s schools and districts. How do you think about them? The related one is: has or would M7EAI ever partner with another established organization with a similar mission? Are you all a for profit company? How would that work? So still. And then Julie asks how has this been received by the publishers? So maybe you can sort of walk through each of those relationships because I think you have precedent on all of them.Abdi GuleedYeah, I can jump in, Kedaar. So it’s been received very well by the publishers. It’s been more like almost very surprising that they’ve been very. They essentially love the way we approach the problem because there’s stuff that they’re already working on. And if you go back to the whole story, it started with a publisher coming to us and sharing the issue that they are facing, the challenge that they’re facing. And now we’ve been across multiple publishers in this space and it’s been just received really well and we continue continuing to work with each and one of them.Michael HornLet me give my answer of what I think it is for you guys and then you can correct me since it’s your all company. Yes, for profit, but yes you have partnered with mission aligned nonprofits in particular as a tool to help them evaluate curriculum. You can give some specifics in a second but I think it’s a commercial relationship with the publishers and right now it’s giving this tool away to schools and districts to sort of up level the field and help them ask the question of publishers more, more, more to bring it into the criteria. Is that, how did I do guys?Abdi GuleedYeah, perfect. So yeah, essentially going back to the system level of change, I don’t think that would happen just us working with the publishers. I think it’s like a whole community drive. So working with schools, doing the RCT and then also working with district leaders, seeing the value of it. Working with a nonprofit, working with other organizations. You asked the question about other organizations that are similar. We were absolutely open to working with them as well. It’s more like anyone that’s helping with making the change and improving the comprehension level for students.We’re for that. Publishers. Yes, there is a commercial piece there, but for schools and districts there’s a free product.Michael HornOkay, let me ask this question. I’m going to switch gears. So there’s a question. Could a homeschool parent or a small micro school use this tool doing math with their child or would it be too time intensive?Kedaar SridharDefinitely. I mean, this is, the goal is how do we now reduce the time that it takes to figure out if content is good and if it isn’t, you know, best serving my child or best serving the students, how can we now revise it to make sure that it has a lot of those, those factors in there, given my child’s, you know, age and developmental sort of persona and, you know, the main, the key learning goes, I want to get there. So whether you’re a micro school or a parent, there’s definitely scope for, you know, uploading, you know, content that you would be teaching anyways or being able to revise it to best meet your child’s needs in that sort of aspect as well.Michael HornOkay, perfect. So then Peter has an interesting question. Can the technology go the other way? For example, could content become very specific for an art school or a ski academy or a tennis academy where young Olympians or similar athletes are being taught? Which is perhaps not something you guys have thought about, but I don’t know, maybe you have.Kedaar SridharYeah, it’s. I mean, yeah, it’s not something we’ve necessarily thought about, but it’s definitely very doable. Right. I think it’s very making, you know, it’s. The goal is how can we best transform content to best fit the needs of the audience. Right. Or the needs of the learners themselves and cater to them. So I think in that respect, you know, if the goal is, oh, wow, we actually have a focus now, let’s now shift language to best serve that focus or that content area, that domain sort of area.Yeah, Very, very doable.Abdi GuleedI’ll just add to that. I think it’s very doable. Peter, I think if you, in what Kedaar was shown earlier, we have this specific area that can essentially help the output, the evaluation and the revision. So in the learning space, if you can focus on and say, I am very specifically focused on art school or ski academy or etc. And these are the learning goals that we have for them, then the will take into account that with the standards and then give you the evaluation in a series. So we haven’t done it, but it’s absolutely doable.Michael HornOkay, let me ask the last question and then we’re going to let you guys have the final word as we wrap, which is M7E intended to be used by students with dyslexia, ELLs, other learners with specifically defined needs, or do you see applicability for all students?Abdi GuleedSo currently, the way we’ve been thinking about M7E is to be used by district leaders to evaluate the material that they’re thinking of in their district, to be used by curriculum developers as they’re thinking of creating new material. But also in the study round that we’ve been doing and still doing, teachers can use it, but it’s not a student-facing product. And it’s also not a teacher-facing product, even though teachers are using it to give us feedback. If you guys remember, very early on we were showing you the linguistic comprehension model that we’re building and on one side of is classroom, feedback that fits into the model to give us feedback on how to improve it, how to continue to develop something that is really relevant to the classroom. But it’s not intended to be used by students or teachers. It’s more for the ones creating the product.Kedaar SridharAnd what I mean, what I’ll just add there, in terms of the beneficiary, it is all students, right? The content that we revise or, evaluate, is best, is intended to serve all students, regardless of their linguistic background, regardless of where they’re coming from. Because if we can improve it for some students in terms of these buyers, it actually helps and you see improvements across the board for all students. So that’s the goal.Michael HornPerfect. All right, so we’ll wrap there. Huge thanks for a series of really interesting, thoughtful questions. Huge thanks to Abdi and Kedaar both for sharing the original research that went into this. And then the practical side of this work as we explored how to make sure that math materials aren’t just aligned to standards where there’s a lot of good work already, but also that students can be able to understand them by getting the linguistic complexity correct and getting away from these hidden linguistic barriers, especially for multilingual learners. But as Kedaar and Abdi just said, for all.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Lynn Liao and Taryn Campbell from Cambiar Quest joined me to talk about their approach to scaling real-world work experiences for secondary students through micro-internships. This is an important topic because while people like me have been arguing for more real-world learning opportunities for middle and high school students, how to source those opportunities and make sure they are meaningful such that it’s not a burden on businesses and other organizations is a real challenge.Lynn and Taryn discussed how Cambiar Quest handles this in their partnerships with schools and local businesses to create team-based, class projects that help students develop essential “durable skills” like communication, critical thinking, and collaboration. They shared insights on how the program reduces burden on partnering businesses so that it’s widely accessible, the scaffolding provided for both students and educators, and the strong positive outcomes they’ve seen so far. It’s early in their learning journey as you’ll hear. Highly recommend.Michael HornWelcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through that, today, I’m delighted. We have two guests who’ve been at the front lines, I think it’s safe to say, of really thinking what that looks like in the current era, current age that we are entering as a society. We have Lynn Liao, she’s the managing director at Cambiar Quest. And Taryn Campbell, the director at Cambiar Quest. And so first I’ll just say Lynn, Taryn, welcome.I’m delighted to have you both here.Lynn LiaoWe’re thrilled to talk to you. Our mission is so aligned with what you just described.Michael HornWell, it’s going to be a fun conversation because you all, the three of us, had a chance to talk maybe a month or so ago and frankly, I had no idea the breadth of the work that you all were doing. And I think it really answers a key question that I think is so important at this moment in time. But we’ll get to that in a moment. Maybe let’s just set the foundation for folks. And Lynn, I’ll start with you. Just what is Cambiar? What is Cambiar Quest, sort of set the stage for our audience so that they know the organization in which you work and the work you’ve been up to.Essential Durable Skills for SuccessLynn LiaoSure. So Cambiar Education is a venture studio that is seeking to change the marketplace for education so that the products and services that truly make the biggest difference for students and educators and parents really succeed. And we know that that is not always the case in how the marketplace works right now. Our goal, our, our big vision is to have a life changing impact for more than a million students. And we do that both by incubating entrepreneurs who are creating these new ideas and supporting their development and growth. And we also direct run programs. So Quest is an example of a direct run Cambiar program. Quest is solely focused on career exploration and development for students, very much in line with what you described your mission is.So we are really, we have multiple programs where we help students really build the durable skills necessary for career exploration and for them to really be the ones navigating their way to the future that they are seeking. And then we can dive more into the micro internship, which I think is the program we’re focusing on today.Michael HornYeah, yeah. No, I definitely want to do that. And before, before maybe we jump in that you mentioned durable skills. As we discussed when we had this offline conversation about a month ago, everyone has a definition for durable skills. Maybe ground us in how you all think about durable skills and how they port from one context to another or maybe which don’t and have to be specifically engineered.Lynn LiaoSure. I’ll toss it to Taryn just so we make it a three way conversation.Michael HornPerfect. Go ahead, Taryn.Taryn CampbellSure. I think we think about durable skills like, what are the key things that kids need to be able to do to navigate their life? They need to be able to communicate with people that they don’t know. What does it mean to work in a team and to work alongside others? How do you think critically about the decisions that you’re making and understand how to break problems down into smaller pieces? What does it mean to take initiative? Right. And so I think there’s a million different definitions and words for some of these core key concepts. Whether people call them durable skills, 21st-century skills, sometimes it’s pushed into social and emotional learning. Right. There’s a million definitions out there, but we’re really talking about the foundation that really all kids and all adults need to be successful both in school and the workplace.Michael HornAnd what strikes me about that and Lynn, this may be the perfect place then to start talking about the micro internships is one of the things that I’ve come to is for, you know, kids to really understand how to communicate real world context is incredibly important. Being in real world situations, but also frankly, like to develop agency and things of that nature. They need to know what’s even possible in the outside world. And most of us as high schoolers, middle schoolers, just don’t. So maybe that’s the.Lynn LiaoYeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. So our micro internship is a team based project where students work with a real employer on a current business challenge they’re facing. And what’s different about it is it’s actually embedded in class time. So when you think typically about an internship, a student goes off site. Maybe they’re learning from osmosis, like many of the things you’re talking about. But because they’re very brand new to the world of work, there’s really limited time for a manager to truly support someone at that skill level. So students are picking up things, but they’re not really digging into the skills that Taryn was talking about. So we’ve created a really scaffolded experience where we’re hyper focused on Students building those critical skills.So critical thinking, communication, collaboration. And because it’s in that work context where they’re directly talking to an employer, it raises the stakes in such a way that it actually really juices the learning. I was stepping back to reflect because we have 30 hours for our micro internship. That’s typically what we spend in an average school year. For a high schooler, it’s about a thousand plus hours. I bet you if you ask an average high schooler, they do not remember anything about most of those hours. And our goal is completely the opposite. We want every one of our 30 hours to be high impact, sticky, memorable.Learning Through Challenges and GrowthLynn LiaoAnd that’s oftentimes where the deepest learning comes from. It’s like context rich, it’s unique, it’s something they, they’re slightly uncomfortable, but we also work super hard to support them to get through that so that on the other side, they’re reflecting exactly what you had mentioned, Michael. Like, they’re able to say, not just like, oh, I worked on some project. Instead they’re able to say, I supported a client to figure out how they’re going to reach more customers for this new product. And I was able to actually take in this really tough client feedback and do a 180 and come up with a new presentation by the end. And I was really proud of myself for being able to do that. So that’s the kind of thing that we’re really seeking, that students can talk about their own competencies, whether that’s to a future employer on a college app or even frankly, just to say it to themselves. Right.To feel like they have that sense of personal power and sense of agency as a working, working professional.Michael HornCan you talk a little bit about maybe a couple case studies? Right. Just to give our listeners a sense of what kinds of businesses are they working with. It was a pretty diverse group, as I recall. So maybe just a couple examples. And Taryn, maybe I’ll kick it to you for this, to give a few examples, but then also maybe you know that scaffolding that Lynn talked about, like go deep into one of them where like day one, how are you making sure that they’re able to competently do this so that they’re actually getting something out of it.Taryn CampbellSure. So the first thing I’ll say is all of our content is industry agnostic. Right. So we have built it to make sure that there are no technical skills that students are required to have to be able to engage. And so we have worked with really small mom and pop shops like a local ice cream shop that is around the corner where they were trying to figure out, how do I get more of the foot traffic passing by my store to actually come in and buy ice cream, to really large advanced manufacturing firms… who’s trying to figure out, you know what, we have a talent pipeline challenge that we’re trying to solve. How do we get more young people interested in advanced manufacturing? So what does that look like? What insights can students help us gather and synthesize? And so those are two totally different ends of the spectrum, right? One highly technical and industry related, one really community based. And we see engagement from students regardless of the type of project that they’re engaging in. And what we do at Cambiar is we help right size.What’s the right grain size for a business challenge? We write up a project brief alongside those employers and then they come in at three specific points in the project. So they come in at the beginning to launch the project, live with students. Students get to ask questions based on their project brief and say, okay, who are these people? What are they asking me to do? What do I need to be clarified? Then they work with their teacher. Every lesson is scaffolded. So there is very much a, like, how do I introduce myself to an adult I’ve never met? What does it look like to write a great question to an employer that’s coming in and giving me a business question? They practice it with each other, then they practice it with others to get feedback, and then they do it live. I think another sort of hallmark when we talk about scaffolding skills here is we have a hallmark of the program is that they all have to do, every student has to go and do live interviews with a client or a stakeholder related to their project challenge. So that means they are interviewing adults, students, community members that they may or may not know.And that is terrifying for students, right? They’re like, wait, what? I can’t text them. Wait, I have to do it in person, live? And so we really break it down, right. What’s a great interview? What does a great question look like? How do we write some of those questions together? How do I come up with my own question? They practice with each other. They practice with mentors and others who push into the classroom. And then they go out and do it live and get feedback. And they’re doing this collectively in teams. And so that’s what we mean when we say we really break it down. We don’t just say, go forth and do an interview and come back to us.We help them every single step of the way so that the next time they have to ask somebody a follow up question or introduce themselves to an adult, they’re like, oh yeah, I’ve done that before. I know how this works. Right. Lynn, curious if you have anything to add.Lynn LiaoI think the one other thing I would add, I know Michael, we had talked about the importance of scalability. This is sort of a micro aspect of that. But we really think a lot about what is the skill that we want students to build. And as Taryn was breaking down, it’s around. It’s essentially a form of active listening. It’s maybe not the most exciting thing, but I think most on the surface. But if you think about what it takes to be successful in life, being able to access somebody else’s understanding and knowledge is absolutely critical. And so being able to think on your feet, really take in what are they saying to me or not.That’s really core. Spending time finding people to schedule interviews, like scheduling and coordination is a necessity, but it’s not the core thing. So in our modeling, part of the right sizing is finding a business challenge that has stakeholders that students can interview that are widely accessible. So that’s one of our screens when we think about it, because sometimes we’ll have a potential client that has kind of a niche product like let’s say it’s a medical service. And it only applies to people who have this certain condition, you couldn’t interview anybody versus we’ll go to somebody like our regional hospital. They were asking anybody under 18 what their most pressing health needs were. Right. So like that, that’s a way that we address it at the front end so students can spend their time on the thing that’s actually the highest value add to them versus something that could end up being a blocker or hurdle for execution.Michael HornI think that’s super interesting. It gets into something else that I was thinking as you guys were talking about, which is like lessons learned as you guys have implemented this. And Taryn, maybe I’ll go to you first on this. But I’m also thinking, not just the lessons you’ve learned, but also how you help a teacher in a school put this into action. Because I think something we’ve talked about in the past is, you know, teachers are really good at their instructional, you know, their content area. I teach ninth grade, you know, math, whatever it might be. Doesn’t mean that I know how to help scaffold a student through these sets of conversations or set them up to build social capital in the ways that you’re all describing.So I’m curious, like, lessons you’ve learned both to really help this go smoothly and be implemented well and maybe to get the spread up, as Lynn was just talking about, in terms of scalability.Taryn CampbellYeah, I think we’ve learned a lot with each different sort of cycle that we run. We take a look back at our content curriculum and training and say, okay, what worked and what didn’t? I think we have created really detailed lesson plans where we have set the content and then you sub in the different client challenge or business problem that students are working on. And we’ve gotten it down to scripts, if that is what teachers need, as well as accompanying slides. So really, they are only focused on understanding who is the client and how do I serve as a coach. Actually, right to your point, it is a shift from direct content teaching to how do I support students to wrestle through this on their own? Because there is no right answer. And so we’ve created a hybrid training for all of our facilitators that has a pretty condensed, asynchronous component that walks them step by step through all of the materials, all of the coaching stances and coaching moves. It’s essentially a playbook for how to facilitate. And then we supplement that with live facilitation training.So really, walking each facilitator through, we’re going to go through the exact same activities that your students go through, and you’re going to wrestle with it, and we’re going to do it with past student work products and past client challenges so that they can try it on because it is new for them. And we’ve actually seen pretty awesome results with facilitators who are brand new to teaching, go through the training. And when we look at the scores coming out of their student surveys, we see that students are still gaining at the same rate that other students are. And so that’s exciting to us because it tells us that there is something in our content that has solved for some of the variation in facilitator experience. We’re still working and improving and tooling, tooling up on that front, but it’s really, really promising early signs.Michael HornWell, I want to get to impact in a moment, but maybe a dumb question, which is how many cycles have you gone through? How many students or teachers, businesses have you been working with? Give us a sense of the scope so far.Lynn LiaoYeah, for, let’s see, last spring. Oh, Taryn, you might have to help me with this one for I think it was about a couple hundred, about 200. And then we’re on track this school year for about a thousand and next school year we’re, our trajectory is about 3,000.So essentially.Michael HornYeah, yeah.Lynn LiaoSo we kind of like our approach was to go really slow and close with the first spring set. And then we did a major overhaul for the summer, got really strong results and then we felt really ready now to be growing it.Michael HornWell, so you just mentioned results. So maybe talk about impact that you’re starting to see from the program as you’ve gone.Impactful Program with High ApprovalLynn LiaoYeah, absolutely. So are immediately like what Taryn mentioned that we do a post program survey right away with kids and have consistently got really strong feedback from them. So with over 90% recommending to a friend, 96% saying that it’s more engaging than the typical coursework. And really importantly, given our focus on durable skills, every single student, 100% of students say they’ve grown in at least one durable skill. But even better, 87% say they’ve grown on three or more. Because we’re really trying to get them to grow in all of these. So that’s really important. I think what’s intriguing as we’ve had and really kind of meaningful to us is that not just right at the close of the program, now that we’ve had a little distance, we’ve stayed in touch with our partners. Another good sign of our impact is all of our partners, our implementation partners, meaning schools after school programs, intermediaries have all continued and most of them have increased their enrollment.So with that we’ve been able to. They’ve been able to keep track of some of their students, like if their students were sophomores or juniors, you know, versus seniors who had graduated. And they’ve shared that students have said, have retained the kind of what I described earlier that they were. It was so great to hear that there were students who were juniors who did this program in the spring who were writing on their college applications about the experience. Like exactly what we had mentioned, like these. This is what the challenge that I faced going through it. This is what I learned about myself. This is what it means about my skills.So really good to hear that there’s been retention essentially of the core learnings and students are able to talk about the impact.Michael HornSuper interesting. Oh yeah, go ahead, Taryn.Taryn CampbellYeah, the other thing I’ll add is we also have client partners who have actually gone forward with student suggestions to implement them. Right. So some of their folks are actually continuing to work with that school and some of those student groups to implement their ideas on how to expose more students in high school to advanced manufacturing to get them excited about it so students get to see the full arc. I was asked about this challenge. I actually came up with a solution that my client enjoyed and now we’re getting to put it into an action which is really, really cool.Michael HornYeah, that’s, have you seen any students get internships then as a result with some of these clients and so forth is like. Is sort of their stage two in some cases.Taryn CampbellI think that’s the goal, right, is maybe not for every single one. We go in saying that we don’t. That is not part of the expectation. But I will say in all of the ones where I have at least pushed in, there have been students who have followed up with employers say, like, I am interested in helping you run your social media strategy. I am interested in helping you figure out how to connect with more community impact and X, Y and Z strategy.And often the businesses that we work with are open to those conversations. Right. For several of those that we have that are seniors, where that would have been a possibility. The seniors were like, I wish I had done this earlier because I’m going off to college now and I can’t spend my summer doing this. But that is definitely on our roadmap.Lynn LiaoMichael, I just wanted to break in. Can I share just a couple student quotes? Because I think this captures what you mentioned around identity and a sense of agency. So this came from. Yeah, two different students. I feel more prepared for college and careers after high school because this felt like a real job where I was held to certain standards like you would for a job. Another student said, I feel a lot more confident because I now feel that I belong in these big spaces. So I think that speaks to what you mentioned at the beginning, which is there’s such a divide between the world of school and just a lack of transparency. It’s just likeA world that’s behind a wall for many students. And this micro internship is meant to give them a boost so they can walk forward into the opportunities you’re talking about. So a lot of their feedback is indicating that they’re having a mindset shift to be much more open and feeling more ready to dive into those next opportunities.Michael HornNo, it’s really cool because you’re, the fact that students would feel more comfortable right. In those settings talking to those people, making those connections and then the employers or the clients. Right. If you will on the other side, excited to continue to engage, do this again, implement an idea, whatever it is, in some ways, that’s the end customer. Right. Like, so you’re getting both sides of it. I want to go back to the clients in a moment, but the other question that’s occurred to me as we’ve been talking is how you integrate this in a school. Like, you know, there’s not a ready block in many cases.There’s blocks for college preparation, there’s blocks for all sorts of things. One of the big arguments that I’ve been making is that middle and high schools need to become much more permeable with the outside world and have a lot more opportunities for real work experience. Because my observation, frankly, is students with means are going to get access to that in a world of AI where we’re requiring several years of experience before that first job. And if you don’t have that, I’m not sure where you get it unless your school does it. But I’m curious, like, where do you, you know, where are the modular interfaces where you find time for that?Lynn LiaoYeah, totally agree with what you’re saying. And that’s actually why we fought really hard in designing this is, we wrestled through what to do, because when we think about a scalable solution, I think many in this, like ed take age, think, like, put it online, just package it, and like, roll it out everywhere. And when I think about that, I think the students who have access to other opportunities are going to be the ones who take that online opportunity. So by placing it into a school, it then became incumbent on us to figure out where does it go in school. So we’ve really designed it to be flexible and easy to implement. So it’s 30 hours. It can be implemented however the school thinks it makes sense. So we work with them to kind of think through that.A typical might be twice a week over, you know, 10 to 12 weeks, just depending on what their blocks are. Some of them have extended them. Some of them do it really, like, in a tight burst. We’re just learning right now, I’d say about, like, what really works best in all varieties of classes. So we’ve definitely been working with different CTE pathways. So it can fit in as an introduction or as a capstone project for some CT courses. It can go into other kind of core classes like economics, financial literacy. We’ve done an English class, we’ve done a Spanish class.I think Taryn, you maybe rattle off a few others. But, like, we’re pretty open and it’s really just wherever the teacher feels like they can dive in and have like a meaty project based learning experience for students and where the school is seeking a career, a supported career connected learning opportunity.Michael HornLet me ask this question which is let’s, let’s flip to the client side now and maybe, Taryn, I’ll start with you on this and Lynn, jump in. It strikes me that it’s great to say schools need to be doing more real world work. Career connected learning for all. Like all the slogans that I can imagine that I’ve probably written at some points as well. But you all have made the observation several times like, hey, a manager is really busy, they’re not going to be able to give this kind of feedback. Right. And we know that a lot of managers like, I mean take my town offices.Right. I’m sure there’s dozens of problems that they would love to solve, but they’re like, yeah, I’m not having a 17 year old come in here because I gotta execute against this thing tomorrow. Right. As opposed to train up someone with how to even present themselves at a workplace, an interview on our behalf, et cetera, et cetera. So like talk a little bit about how you’ve reduced that friction. I mean if I’m doing the math right and you have say even with the 200 students that you ran through the program at first, that’s probably like 40 or something different projects that you’ve got going or something like that. Maybe I’m wrong on that, but. So I love you to talk through how you’re enabling so many different clients to work with these projects.Taryn CampbellSure. So we actually have an entire class of students attached to one client and one project.Michael HornOkay, gotcha.Scalable Project-Based Learning ProcessTaryn CampbellOne, it allows the teacher who might be new to this project based learning to this coaching stance. Focus on really understanding one core client challenge and then working with the whole class to scaffold and understand. How do we write these questions? How do we ask our client X, Y and Z? Right. And it allows for the groups to compare against each other how things are going. Every group, depending on who they interview, ends up in a totally different place, which is also very cool. There’s a value add for our clients at the end when they don’t have to sit through the same presentation over and over and over again. They actually get five, six, seven ideas that are brought back to them based on what student teams come up with. And I think one of the ways we make it scalable for local businesses is we say that the all in-total time is about six hours.That’s inclusive of prep time. Right. So we get on the call, we all brainstorm sort of what are some business challenges? How do we right size up for high school students? We write the client brief for folks. We are working to figure out how to leverage AI to help us do that in the future. But we write the client brief for folks and the client comes in three times. They come at the beginning to launch it live with students. They come in at that interim point that Lynn had talked about to give feedback. And let me tell you, they give real feedback.Collaborative Student Projects SimplifiedTaryn CampbellSometimes it puts students on their heels a little bit and then they come in at the end to get the final presentations and to hear what students have ultimately come up with. And so that’s really manageable and really reasonable for folks. We try to work with organizations and companies who have more than one individual. So even those mom and pop shops, if there’s like at least two or three employees that are employed there, so that if there are scheduling hiccups, which we know are all too common in schools these days, there’s always somebody to fill in and come in and do the live portion because we think that matters. And so six hours, people like, oh yeah, I have six hours across two months. I can do that on three different dates. And we’re not asking them to manage the students. We’re not asking them to walk students through the project.We’re asking them for their viewpoint and their feedback, which they don’t actually have to prep for. Anytime the client has come in, we’ve created playbooks and guides to say, hey, here’s what you’re walking into, here’s what students are doing in their class, here’s what’s expected of you, and here’s a template for how you might structure a conversation with the student so everything feels like it’s plug and play and designed to be really easy for clients to come in.Lynn LiaoOne additional thing on the value prop for the businesses. Oftentimes this right size business challenge is one where the business is in particular seeking youth perspective or perspective of people our students have easy access to. So like the. We’re not purely saying to the business, do this because it’s a nice thing to do for your community. We are thinking do this because it’s a nice thing to do for students in your area, but also because it’s great for your business. You’re getting fresh perspective, you’re getting access to early talent. So some of the organizations we work with are seeking a talent pipeline and want more exposure to students. So like there is a real win for them that’s pretty concrete that we can pitch and make more explicit to businesses too.Michael HornVery cool. Let’s wrap up with this question that’s on my mind which is look, if schools want to learn more, they want to put this into place, right? Like how should they get in touch with y’all? What’s, what’s the process from their end to get this up and running? Because I think that’s the ultimate goal, right. We want a lot more schools, students, local employers engaging in these projects together. So what’s the first step for schools that are interested after hearing this?Lynn LiaoI think the easiest thing is they contact one of the two of us. We have a smallish team right now, so we’re heavily based in Los Angeles initially, but we’re also in several other states right now. So in Tennessee, Texas, we’re in St. Louis, Missouri, New Orleans. So like just depending on the depth, there’s different places we can go. So they should just like reach out to us. We’re open and like our whole goal is expansion. So if you can find the right size and scale, we’re happy to dive in.Michael HornPerfect. So jump on, Cambiar Education contact y’ all and then go from there. Basically. Terrific. Lynn Taryn, any final thoughts that you all want to make sure we hit as, as we wrap up and then we’ll, we’ll conclude from there. But this is, I, I’m fascinated by a lot of facets of this, so I could keep going, but I want to make sure you guys have the last, last word, if you will.Lynn LiaoI think the thing I want to say is like we don’t see this as a replacement to a deeper internship or a true job where a student is really diving into something that is aligned to their personal interests and passion area. Because even the way we’ve constructed it, because it’s a project for the entire class, some students are going to be more interested than others. But I do think this experience fills a big gap in kind of the current career connected learning, work based learning offerings that are easy for schools to do because essentially most of those are easy for schools to do because they’re passive. It’s like a career panel or job shadowing. Students just sort of have big eyes and are listening but they’re not doing. So I really do think we’ve worked hard to make this something that is super high leverage. Again, like every hour of the 30 hours makes a difference for students and the hurdles for both employers and educators. We worked so hard to slim down, so it should be very low friction.So like, maybe this is just encouragement to any of the listeners who are interested in implementing to come talk to us. And like I said, every partner who’s worked with us has wanted to continue working with us and to expand. So that’s probably a good sign that it is meeting that bar.Taryn CampbellI think the thing that I would hope to leave folks with is the in person still matters. And I think there’s especially for some of these core skills around communication. You can practice all day with an AI chatbot and that’s great, but unless you actually go out and put it into play with a real person in front of you, it’s all for nothing. Right? And so how do we get kids more of those opportunities to like to do the hard thing? They all drag their feet. They’re like, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this. And then the confidence that you see on the other side where they walk taller and they actually want to keep going to do more interviews and more interviews and you have to stop them. I think that’s that to me is the exciting energy that you see when you do programs like this. And so just really excited to talk to you, Michael, and share the work that we’re doing.And hopefully this inspires more people to get into the career connected learning space.Michael HornWell, thank you both for the work that you’re doing and frankly the doing of it for students I think is really what’s so exciting about this. And all these skills you mentioned, not the least of which active listening you said, gee, that can be sort of a throwaway. It’s not right. Like we need more individuals in society being able to do that and you all are facilitating that. So huge thanks, Lynn Taryn. Check it all out at Cambier Quest and thank you so much. We’ll see you next time on the Future of Education.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Diane Tavenner and I interviewed Paymon Rouhanifard, CEO of Timely, to explore how AI optimization can transform master scheduling in schools. The conversation unpacked the critical role that master schedules play in shaping student experiences, resource allocation, and district priorities. Paymon explained the pain points schools face with traditional scheduling methods and how Timely’s AI-driven approach saves hundreds of hours while enabling systemic change and better use of resources.Although this was Paymon’s first appearance on Class Disrupted, this is his second appearance on the Future of Education. You can check out his first one here.Diane TavennerHey, this is Diane, and you’re about to listen to an interview that Michael and I had with my friend Paymon Rouhanifard, who is the CEO of Timely, which is a company that’s helping schools figure out how to do their master schedules in a way that’s aligned with their values and what they’re trying to do to support their young people. And I love this interview. I think it’s so fun for us to really talk with someone who deeply understands schools and how they work and the operations of them and what’s going on and who is really trying to add value using AI in a way that feels very concrete and specific. And I just think you’re really going to enjoy Paymon’s thoughtfulness and his deep understanding of education and this really specific application of how AI is being used in education. Diane TavennerHey, Michael.Michael HornHey, Diane. It is good to see you. And I’m truly excited for today’s guest, someone we both know pretty well, who has been doing some very interesting work, some of the early innings of which I got to see up close because his company was incubated as part of Workshop Venture Partners, where I’m an advisor. And like Laurence Holt, he’s been on my Substack before, the Future of Education. So I’m excited for this conversation to dive a little bit deeper into what he’s doing and how it interfaces with AI.Diane TavennerI agree, Michael. I’m excited to have Paymon on our podcast. We met when Paymon was leading Camden and I was leading Summit. And it’s interesting because I think fortunately for me at that time it was in a learning space where we met, and I did a lot of learning from Paymon and with Paymon, well, I’ll speak for myself. I did a lot of learning and feel really grateful that he’s here with us today. And so let me just tell those who don’t know a little bit about who Paymon is. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Timely, an education technology company that helps schools build better master schedules through AI optimization. Prior to that, he was the co-founder of Propel, which offers tuition free health care job training and is currently the chair of its board of directors. And as I said, he was the superintendent of Camden City Schools in New Jersey, among other roles in public education, from teacher to administrator.And so Paymon, welcome. We’re so happy to have you here.Paymon RouhanifardIt’s really great to be here. Thanks for having me.Michael HornWell, so I’m excited because let’s level set our audience and start at a high level and just help us understand exactly what Timely does and what problem it’s solving for school districts and school systems.AI-Powered School Scheduling SupportPaymon RouhanifardWell, as Diane just mentioned, we help middle and high schools build their master schedule using AI optimization and dedicated support from a team of former educators who have built schedules before and also support with data integration. And I think to really understand our work, you have to understand the importance of the master schedule. And there’s sort of two parts to it. Part one is every school, including elementaries, although they have slightly less complicated schedules, but every school in the country has to build their master schedule every year, typically in the spring for the following fall semester. And it is an incredibly painful exercise at the school level where folks have just historically been using really clunky tools. And then the second part of it is the opportunity for systemic change and the connection to the central office to think about resource allocation more strategically, to think about priorities more strategically. And so there’s sort of those two components to it. But tactically, what we do is we help middle and high schools build their master schedule.That is a painkiller at the school level. And again, can kind of enable key priorities at the central office.Diane TavennerThat’s awesome. Paymon, one of my, I’m going to disclose something weird here. I am like a fanatic about the master schedule. When I used to build the master schedule, I was like a lunatic around it. So I’m actually very nerdy and excited about what you do. And one of my concerns is that most people, when they talk about AI in education, the only image they have in their mind is literally a chatbot, you know, that’s mostly focused on the students or the teachers used in the classroom. And, you know, as Michael and I are shifting our conversation from sort of big picture AI to actual practitioners and the usage of AI in education, I really wanted to talk with you, and I’m glad we’re doing it first, because you’re working on the system of school, if you will, and your instance of AI is not a student directly interfacing with it, but has a massive impact on the student’s experience.Because literally the master schedule is everything. I don’t think people realize that. It is sort of the infrastructure that controls almost everything. And when you’re in a district and you realize that, you realize all the power is in the master schedule. Right? And so tell you said it’s a pain point for schools, but paint that pain point a little bit more for us. Like, what problem were you setting out to solve for them, yes, it’s, like, laborious and kind of hard. But you know what? How does solving this lead us in a direction that you believe in in schools?Master Scheduling: The Complex PuzzleThe Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Paymon RouhanifardYou know, we often say that those who know about master scheduling really know, and Diane, really appreciate that you’ve been in the guts of it in your prior lives. And if you were to ever talk to an assistant principal at a middle or high school and you asked them about the master schedule, like, their eyes will get widened and then they’ll, like, have a lot to say. Typically mostly horror stories about how hard it is and how they lock themselves in a room every spring and don’t leave that room for weeks, and they’re bruised and battered and they have a final master schedule. And so the reason for that is the schedule is just a really complicated puzzle to put together. What courses you’re going to offer. What courses students need to graduate depending upon the graduation trajectory they’re on, what credentials teachers have and what courses they’ll be teaching, what rooms are available, what other constraints in terms of collective bargaining, consecutive periods taught. There’s just course requests, you know, from students might be kind of most fundamental to solving this equation, but it is a lot of different variables. And folks are using tools such as Google sheets, whiteboards, sticky notes.We’ve seen giant Magna Tile boards with a lot of our district and charter partners, and we take pictures of them and save them for posterity. And so that’s, again, speaking at the school level, of what a painful exercise it is to put together a really complicated puzzle that is fundamentally a math problem to solve. It’s a mixed integer, linear math problem.Diane TavennerYeah.Paymon RouhanifardAnd to your point for the systems level, that’s, I think, where it gets really interesting and I suspect a thread you may want to pull on.Diane TavennerDefinitely. Let’s start a little bit with just understanding more. You just said it’s a math problem, which is now we’re getting into AI. I don’t know that everyone realizes that AI is really mathematical in many ways, but help us understand where the AI is in Timely and what, you know, do people in the schools even realize that you’re using AI?AI Optimization Over Generative AIPaymon RouhanifardYeah, I would say because of the AI boom that we’re in. A lot of folks understandably believe that we use generative AI, but we don’t. And we use AI optimization technology, which is under the broader banner of AI and machine learning. And so the reason for that and implicit to the question you just asked is large language models being predicated on words are not really good at math. And I think we’ve all seen stories of the large language models struggling with basic math and hallucinating. And we’re solving a really, really complicated math problem. And so we are training off of a local set of data, using AI optimization to do that heavy lifting, to ultimately solve that math problem school by school. And so we don’t use a chatbot, but instead we think about it as a series of inputs in terms of course data, student course requests, staff room information, and then you layer on a number of constraints in terms of, we’re telling the AI optimization engine.Here are the things that we know have to be fixed. This teacher needs a prep in 8th period. This common planning period needs to be at the start of the day, whatever it may be. There’s a million different examples of that. And once you enter those constraints, you push a button and then it solves that math problem for you.Diane TavennerAnd I’m assuming it’s also pretty quickly Paymon, because I remember, oh my gosh, back in the day, I mean this would have been in the like early, early 2000s. I mean there was like a, I had a computer program that did this, but literally I could only run it a few times because it would take, you know, sometimes 24 hours literally to run it. I would have to put my stuff in there and then hit a button and then go away for 24 hours and cross my fingers that something would come back. I’ve also done the post it notes on the board too. So like, I don’t, if you haven’t done this, you don’t appreciate how insane this process really is. And oh, by the way, everyone’s mad at you when you’re done because you never did it right.Paymon RouhanifardYeah, you can’t, you can’t please everyone with the master schedule. And yeah, I mean, we, we, we, we obviously like to track a lot of data, outcomes oriented organization. And what we see is on average, folks are spending hundreds of hours, hundreds of hours building that master schedule. And so, you know, there’s a process in terms of onboarding, ingesting data, setting those constraints, and that takes a little bit of time. And then you push the button. And on, on average we’re talking about, sometimes the schedule is built in 30 minutes, sometimes it takes a couple of hours.Diane TavennerYeah.Paymon RouhanifardAnd in the grand scheme of things, you’re saving hundreds of hours. And so at the school level, it really does create that, that sort of time efficiency.Michael HornSo I want you to double click a little bit more about why this wasn’t possible previously because you mentioned Google Sheets, Diane mentioned the software program that would take 24 hours to run. We know that there have been a few startups in the master schedule space. You know, maybe a decade ago, I think there were a couple that got funded and stuff like that. What is different about this moment where you could use this AI optimization that wasn’t possible say five, 10 years earlier, that you’re able to take a process that’s hundreds of hours to a 30 minute of output and then I imagine some iteration?Improving Clunky School Scheduling ToolsPaymon RouhanifardWell, I would say there are two things happening here. Certainly the technology, as we all know, has gotten better over time and even in the last two to three years, significantly so. But I would also add that because we are a focused solution and when you think about the status quo and in what ways we’re disrupting people, for the most part they’re using these clunky tools because the solution that they purchase to solve their master schedule is the student information system. For the student information system, the scheduling module is one of many, many different things it does. And so if you talk to any superintendent, assistant superintendent, head of a charter school about their student information system, usually they tell you it’s clunky, it’s hard to use, it’s a necessary evil, it’s the repository of data, it’s the source of truth. And then it has an attendance tracker and a grade book tool and a master scheduler. And what we’ve learned through lived experience. A former superintendent, my co-founder, was a teacher in Boston Public Schools, who’s our chief technology officer.Pretty much everyone on our team has had school based experience. We know that that status quo has not allowed folks to build schedules that are easy to build and two, are strategic and connect at the systems level. And so it’s about creating a dedicated systemic solution that frankly could have been built sooner. But now with better technology and a more dedicated approach to solving the problem, I think it’s allowed us to gain some traction.Michael HornIt’s super interesting. I’d love to hear some stories about districts and charters and how they’re taking advantage of this, how they are allocating resources differently, perhaps to better optimize the use of time and space and the impact you’re seeing and numbers like what you know, how many schools are you serving and what are the sorts of stories that show how they can now rethink use of time, space, resources across the school when they get to play with the master schedule in a way that they hadn’t before.Paymon RouhanifardI’ll start by just saying that when I think about the moment we’re in with AI and connecting it to priority moments of innovation and sort of mass adoption of technology. So I’m thinking about certainly post Covid and adoption of technology across schools in a significant way, the personalized learning movement before that. What you see is a lot of different solutions entering the marketplace. And I would argue that most of those solutions, and this is not a critique, but most of those solutions are at the individual level. They’re used by classroom teachers, used by students. Rarely do they connect across all schools in a systemic way. Rarely do they connect to the central office in a systemic way. And sometimes and oftentimes I should say that is the nature of innovation.You need to have a very dedicated point solution and really figure that out in the same way that we started. I think what makes scheduling unique is that it’s not just about the painkiller at the school level and helping your AP and your counselor save their summer, basically to get their summer back and not have to be banging their heads against the wall, but because the schedule should reflect your fundamental priorities as a school district. So when you, when you zoom all the way out, 80 to 85% of your budget is your personnel. And the schedule governs how your personnel are interacting with students. And that fundamentally reflects the student and teacher experience, your academics, your budget and your staffing priorities. And so the schedule before Timely was always this black box that was created on a Magna Tile in one school, in a Google sheet in another school, in an Excel spreadsheet in your third school, and so on and so forth. And then they’d use the student information system to kind of do the last mile and put it in and call it a day. But never did the central office get the opportunity to, to connect those dots and to think about what are our district wide priorities academically.What are our staffing and budget priorities and how can we reflect that in the schedule that again governs 80 to 85% of your budget. And so that’s, I think, what makes Timely really unique. You know, in this moment where we have a lot of point solutions that are serving individuals. In terms of where we are as a company. Michael we started with a really small pilot serving a handful of schools three school years ago. The following year we served about 80. You know, last year we closed around 300. Right now we’re up to a little over 400 schools across 17 states. So we’re still a young organization, but we’ve, we’ve seen a lot of momentum and we’re really grateful for that.Michael HornBut I know you got a couple of great case studies. Maybe just give us a couple examples of how schools have used that to allocate resources very differently or things they were surprised by before they looked into it through your tool and then all of a sudden said, holy cow, how can we change this?Paymon RouhanifardI’ll give you two examples, one district and one charter. We worked with a district in West Texas, Lubbock Independent School District, which has about 25,000 students. And like many other urban and rural school districts, it has seen declining enrollment as their special education population and emerging bilingual population has increased in terms of a percentage of the total enrollment. So one way to think about that is overall budget declined, but the needs of students has increased. And so doing more with less is a very common refrain in district lands across the country. And so what Lubbock did, across 14 middle and high schools, through implementing Timely and building a scheduling process alongside us, they identified 37 vacant positions, teaching positions that they were planning to hire for, but realized they didn’t need to hire for them. And the reason for that is they identified staffing inefficiencies through the master schedule. And by the way, I felt this acutely when I was a superintendent, where I walk into one of our high schools and I walk by a class with six students and another one with 33 students.A lot of variants, a lot of inefficiencies, because that schedule is so hard to build. And you skip a lot of those steps because those steps are just so hard and complicated. And so what Lubbock did was they eliminated those 37 vacant positions and three things that are really important to call out. One, the average class size target was the same as the year before. They didn’t eliminate any course offerings to students. A student choice was not impacted, and three, no teachers were impacted because these are vacancies. So strict inefficiencies that led to bottom line savings. And they took those bottom line savings and reinvested them into new academic priorities.37 positions in West Texas dollars is about $2.2 million. On the east coast and west coast, it’d probably be close to $4 million. So really meaningful savings. The second example, charter management organization, Noble Schools in Chicago. Seventeen campuses, largest charter management organization in the city of Chicago. They’re solving a different problem. They felt that their staffing model was tight enough, resource allocation was less of a priority for them, but they needed to solve that pain point at the school level.And in particular, they had a big challenge with directors of operations being trained and supported because there was a lot of burnout. It’s a really hard job. Directors of operations for charters tend to be the equivalent of an assistant principal without academic responsibilities. So they’re in charge of master scheduling and a whole array of other operational tasks. And so for them, they had a lot of new schedulers, new directors of operations, and this allowed them to mitigate that attrition risk and to kind of create a more sustainable role. And I think what was really cool, 11 of the 17 schools had a new director of operation. And those 11 gave us a perfect 10 out of 10 NPS. And so making a job easier, creating greater productivity, and certainly still giving Noble the opportunity to think about resource allocation more strategically, although that just wasn’t as much of a priority for them.Master Schedule as InnovationDiane TavennerI love those examples because they feel very, very familiar to me. And I think anyone who’s been in that, has had these experiences and would recognize like what a big deal it is. You just, what you just said, what a gift you’re giving. And I think in this moment in time where everyone’s kind of enamored with the tech, they forget how hard it is to literally just run schools every day. This massive, complicated operational challenge. And like you said, the master schedule is an expression of your values and what you care about, in so many ways. And so I think what you’re describing, and correct me if I’m wrong, Michael, because this is your area, but is you really built a sustaining innovation? I mean this is an innovation for how we do, you know, do the most important thing that controls what all these people are going to do for a whole year, all day, every day. And so that’s one framework we talk about a lot.Another thing, a newer one Michael and I are kind of playing with, is this idea that, you know, most of our, well, I would say all of our schools in some way shape or form fit in this, this original kind of industrial model of schools. And we’ve talked for a long time about how to break out of that industrial model. I think some of us are hopeful that with the advent of AGI, we will kind of be able to invent that post industrial model by. I don’t think we’ve seen it yet. I’m wondering how do you think about, how do you, or do you think about that kind of post industrial model, for example, Paymon? Like, you know, I think in that new model we probably don’t conflate time with credit. And so we’re much more probably in a competency based progression. Does Timely move in that direction take us there? Of all, like, how do you, how do you think about the product and its evolution and where it might take us?Michael HornAnd Paymon, while you gear up for that, I’ll just geek out for one second because I think it’s interesting. It’s a sustaining innovation for a school, but you’re clearly disrupting the landscape of how we schedule today. So it’s like it’s one of those things, right, where you’re doing both depending on the paradigm or framework. You’re looking at it through it, which is fascinating.Paymon RouhanifardDiane I love the question and coming from you, I’m always, I’m always a little circumspect because you study this point, obviously, so do you. Michael and so I’m not sure if I’m going to have anything new to offer that you haven’t already thought through. But I will say what gets me really excited about the work that we do is ultimately we are a tool that can operationalize the hopes and dreams of the district of a charter management organization of an independent school. We don’t have a view as to what their delivery model should look like. We don’t have a view into what their strategic plan should be. If they ask us for advice, we’ll certainly give it to them. But we want to operationalize those hopes and dreams. And so to the extent that they’re innovating and certainly we have a lot of partners that are pushing the envelope, I, I will say, and we can come back to this or we can leave it alone the moment we’re in and not just, not just with AI, but just where districts are and declining enrollment and, and, and a lot of fiscal pressure.I can’t say I’m seeing as much innovation as we did pre Covid.Michael HornThat’s interesting.Paymon RouhanifardYou know, having said that, we have partners that are trying to rethink the teaching profession and are trying to give a full day of professional development for teachers, which is not an easy thing to do in the construct of a traditional school district. And we’re a tool that helps operationalize that. We have partners that are thinking about, oh gosh, first year teachers. We see so much attrition and it’s really expensive and it’s really disruptive. How can we in the master schedule build in a set of professional development supports, mentor teacher who has a prep that coincides with the first year teacher to observe and vice versa for that first year teacher to see the mentor teacher and then build in common planning time. That is very intentional for first year. These things are really hard to do using sticky notes and Google sheets. And so we’re helping operationalize where that innovation is happening.And maybe those are more modest examples of innovation that would, you know, competency based and kind of eliminating seat time. But ultimately Timely is vision agnostic strategy agnostic. And that gets us really excited.Diane TavennerMe too. Because I think that when people build something with a complete point of view, then it’s not... You actually close down innovation. Right. You don’t. You don’t address the problems that exist. You don’t let people really imagine what’s possible and support them in that. Let’s.I can’t resist. I got to go back. Why do you think there’s not as much in it? Why are you not seeing as much innovation, what’s happening on the ground? And do you feel like it’s shifting at all?Paymon RouhanifardI’m gonna come back to why I think it’s shifting. I just think in a lot of states. Well, across all states, we all know that the overall enrollment across all school types has been declining over the last five to seven years. And that’s a combination for a lot of factors, but the declining birth rate being a big one, of course. And so that leads to smaller budgets. And in urban and rural quarters in particular, you see a commensurate increase of the percentage of students with an IEP and percentage of students who require multilingual support. And so that fundamentally shifts the mindset of district leaders.Diane TavennerYeah.Navigating Fiscal Pressures in EducationPaymon RouhanifardAnd makes it hard to innovate when you’re trying to do more with less, when you’re trying to, at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy. And you’re just trying to make ends meet in a lot of ways. And so what we see across the country is how can we address this fiscal pressure by doing the least harm possible. And that certainly opens the door for Timely to be of real support. And we’re incredibly proud of that. And so I think at the same time, when priority number one is we want to avoid teacher layoffs and we want to make sure we deliver resources to the students who need it the most. It’s kind of hard to get to the next series of priorities. And I think that’s just the moment we’re in until things start to level out.What is exacerbating this is in a lot of states. And you all, I’m sure, know this. I frankly know it probably better than I do the expansion of vouchers and ESAs and kind of additional fiscal pressures on top of the macro shifts that are happening. And so whether you’re in Texas or Louisiana or Florida or Arizona, I mean these, there are a lot of states who are passing, these are innovations in their own right at the state level, but create some fiscal pressure on districts and I think that just again makes innovation hard.Diane TavennerI agree with you certainly in the existing system, which is, yeah, makes me sad. Well...Paymon RouhanifardI’m sorry, I’m sorry I took it there.Michael HornNo, let’s switch, let’s switch gears because.Diane TavennerI don’t know about you, but I, I just spent last week in several schools actually on the east coast, which is, you know, we’ve often talked about this east coast, west coast sort of difference. It’s always fun to be, be on the east coast and notice the similarities and differences. And I’m feeling a little bit more optimistic than I have for the last five years. It has been rough, rough, rough times, as you know, and it does feel like there’s a little bit more, you know, sort of energy back in things. But, that’s totally anecdotal. So what are you optimistic about? You know, what do you see as possible? You know, where, where is the hope going forward?Paymon RouhanifardWell, look, in spite of those macro conditions, you know, I, we are really fortunate to partner with some incredible organizations who are figuring out how to navigate these conditions. And you know, I think both things can be true, which is it’s a tougher environment to innovate and innovation, what’s that old saying? Necessity is the mother of innovation? I think we’re seeing a lot of interesting work happening across different parts of the country and we’re serving schools coast to coast. And I, and I, and I think the moment we’re in with AI, we’ve seen super, super interesting solutions that we necessarily partner with inside of, inside of districts. And so, you know, whether it’s folks pushing foundational skills, literacy, and building that into the master schedule through block instruction and seeing organizations like Amira and Ello, you know, better serving students whether in school or at home, you know, we’re seeing a lot on those fronts. And we’re seeing, I would say, districts that are thinking much more long term in nature, which frankly is refreshing. I do think that there’s been a little less and I don’t have the data to back this up, but I do see folks who are much more like superintendents tend to churn pretty quickly. But I’ve seen a bit more longevity in those roles. And perhaps that’s because the kind of traditional education reform playbook isn’t being implemented as frequently.But I think what that means is that folks are kind of more playing the long game and thinking much more intentionally about resource allocation, strategy, academic priorities. So there’s a lot to be hopeful for and we’re delighted to be working with a lot of different district and charter partners in spite of these tough conditions.Mitigating AI RisksMichael HornContinuity and longevity definitely allows you to do things that you wouldn’t otherwise do if you’re sort of thinking about, oh gee, two years and a pile of dust sort of thing. But let me ask this question. You mentioned a couple AI tools in there as well that have you, you know, give you reasons for optimism. I’m curious. Sort of the same premise, but like around what you’re seeing, the conversation is very concerned around AI and how it will have negative impacts. And where do you think that conversation is misplaced or where do you think that conversation is spot on and we ought to be thinking about, you know, AI is a danger, if you will, to education.Paymon RouhanifardWell, look, I think in terms of teacher anxiety that, that I think as far as the teachers who I’ve spoken to who worry AI is going to take our jobs and it’s going to kind of fundamentally change the profession in ways that may not be comfortable, to me, I think that’s misplaced. And you know, I see solutions like Course Mojo, which is a dramatic boon to classroom facilitation and can really empower the teacher to better deliver instruction and to better support students’ holistic needs. So that’s where my head naturally goes in terms of teachers using AI as a copilot and fundamentally being able to deliver instruction in a more effective manner, to differentiate it and really kind of let the content delivery happen in a much more seamless way that puts less pressure on the teacher. I think the flip side of that is we just need to ensure the other part of your question, Michael. We need to ensure that there’s coherence inside of classrooms, across classrooms and across systems. And I think that’s always the challenge with education technology. Going back to kind of earlier waves of adoption of tools. Again, a lot of different point solutions, point solutions are necessary.Timely is an example of a point solution that has the systematic connection. But when you’re using a lot of disparate point solutions to ensure that there’s an integration and an intentionality of bringing those solutions together. And so I think a lot about core curriculum and do these supplemental tools actually holistically and intentionally integrate with core curriculum, for example? And I think that’s still a real risk that we’re facing.Diane TavennerWell, and just, I can’t, I have to just ask this because I really worry about the technical capabilities of schools and school districts to do the integration of all of these point systems. You pointed out, rightly, Paymon, that you know, the big giant system enterprise system that supposedly does everything, does most things terribly for us and doesn’t meet our needs. And these thoughtful point solutions are more and more especially developed by educators who really understand it much better. But do I have the skill set and the people in a school or a district to integrate all of those things? How, how are you finding the folks you’re working with and their ability to do that?Paymon RouhanifardI think they’re struggling with this and it’s rare to find a district that has intentionally and thoughtfully integrated their ERP with their SIS with their HR data and so on and so forth. And, and frankly what you see is they’re, they’re kind of constantly switching out those systems and bringing in new providers that might be marginally better, but frankly I would argue are kind of do the same thing as before. And so I think it’s a real issue now with AI agents. Could data integration be much more productive and efficient in the future? I’m hopeful. It’s still a little bit early to say, but the guts of the system where those data sets come together to inform decision makers and to allow for these systems level changes, that’s still an ongoing challenge, but I think it just starts with the mindset of really optimizing for, and solving for coherence and thinking about core curriculum and supplemental solutions in a very intentional manner and, and on a parallel track trying to bring those actual data systems together. I’ve seen districts do this. It takes playing the long game and going back to Michael’s point, like maybe we’re not rocking the boat as much as we were before with standard based reform, which is like its own thing and comes with trade offs. But if there’s greater longevity for district leaders, this is an example of something they can actually take on to really bring those systems together and to do the work of building them.Diane TavennerAwesome. You should interrupt me, Michael, because I could talk to Paymon all day.Michael HornI was gonna say. Well, no, I feel like we’re just starting to have a bunch of revelations here, but this has been great. Should we switch to our final segment, Diane?Diane TavennerYeah, we’ll have to talk.Michael HornHave you back on. That’s the answer.Paymon RouhanifardAll right. That’d be fun.Diane TavennerWell, as you know, we every, basically every episode, Michael and I try to turn away from work a little bit. I’m going to fail miserably today and share what we’re reading, watching, listening, and we’d love to invite you to do the same.Paymon RouhanifardSo I’m reading two things. I just started reading them and I, and I have to admit, like early stage, kind of founder mode. I’m not making as much time for leisurely reading as I’d like to be, but I guess one book is work related and probably doesn’t even fit the question, but Predictable Revenue and it kind of shows you like, in terms of startup mode. I mean, I’m at the foundation business hierarchy there too. The other book I’m reading is The Lion Women of Tehran, which is about friendship, two women, but it’s set in Iran, which is where I was born. And in the context of it being from the 1950s and, and into the 80s where there was a lot of political change happening in Iran and our family lived through a lot of that. And so in the 50s, there was a big political tug of war where they took control of oil away from Great Britain. Really sort of charismatic prime minister who led that, which led to an even greater U.S.involvement and then, and then the Islamic revolution in 79. So you kind of understand people’s lives in the story about this friendship as a lot of dramatic changes happening in the country.Michael HornFun fact, Diane, before you go, the author of that book lives in Lexington, Massachusetts, is that right?Paymon RouhanifardYeah. Yeah. Wow.Diane TavennerWow. Amazing. Wow. Incredible.Michael HornOver to you, Diane.Diane TavennerWell, thanks for sharing those Paymon. I wrote them down. All of your reqs are always good. So here’s an interesting one. I’m going to admit I’m not technically reading this book, but it’s being read in my house and it’s constantly being discussed at family dinner night and it’s called the Scaling Era. An oral History of AI 2019-2025 by Dwarkesh Patel with Gavin Leech. And for sort of the insiders in the AI world, Dwarkesh has a podcast that they sort of all listen to. And this is this fascinating book and it’s kind of, it’s beautiful and weird and funky.It’s like the recordings from the podcast, but they’re reorganized and it’s part like AI encyclopedia and notes guide and, and part story and oral history. It’s really interesting. So you know me, I don’t really read non fiction cover to cover, so it’s like spots and conversations. Pairing that with, I did just finish the last episode of the Last Invention podcast, which I’ve already promoted here, but I just say it again because I was only two episodes in when I first mentioned it. I think totally worth it for those who haven’t gone in yet to understand the moment of time we’re living in and kind of what’s going on. I think it’s really well done and valuable and great journalism and yeah, highly recommend.Michael HornAnd Diane, when you’re not, you know, working on Futre, we’ll have you take our podcast of seven seasons or whatever and create a book out of it as well with all sorts of crazy excerpts. I also failed on the not related to work front. I guess I alluded to this on an earlier show as well. So I’m sort of exactly where you are on this, Diane. But I finished up the founder of the Florida Virtual School, Julie Young, her draft manuscript that is part memoir and part startup story or creation of Florida Virtual School, and then her work at ASU Prep as well. And I’ll say it was, it was quite an energizing read, I know she’s going to have more edits before the book actually is out, but I’m excited for it to be out because I think for people to read it, it’ll be a bit of a breath of fresh air and it’ll cause some grappling with some of the central messages and conclusions that she has. But, I think it’ll be really good for the field to sort of go back, if you will, to the past a little bit and think about a thoughtful use of technology and education and how it looks a little bit differently from from some of our assumptions around that today, I think.So that’s been on my mind and I will just say, Paymon, this has been a hugely stimulating conversation. I have a couple of pages of notes from this of things that I want to follow up on. So huge thanks for joining us. Huge thanks for the work you’re doing at Timely and for all of you joining us and listening to us as always keep the questions coming. Keep the comments coming. Diane and I have been energized by it and it has led to us choosing our guests from your questions directly and thinking a lot about the comments that you’ve made to us. So huge thanks as always.And we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Diane Tavenner, founder and education leader reimagining K–12 with learner-centered models. They question whether AI is truly changing schools or just being layered onto old systems. Short discussions cover cheating and admin uses, three emerging school models, how Montessori and micro-schools fit, accountability barriers, and paths for system replacement versus incremental change.

Irina Jurenka, the research lead for AI in education at Google DeepMind, joined me and Diane to discuss the development and impact of AI tutors in learning. The conversation delved into how generative AI, specifically the Gemini model, is being shaped to support pedagogical principles and foster more effective learning experiences. Irina shares insights from her team’s foundational research, the evolution of AI models over the past three years, and the challenges of aligning AI tutoring with the learning sciences. Irina closed with reflecting on how these innovations may shape the future of education for the next generation—with a hope for a thoughtful blending of technology with the irreplaceable role of human teachers.Diane TavennerHey, this is Diane, and you’re about to hear a conversation that Michael and I had with Irina Durenka from Google DeepMind. She’s the AI research lead for education there, and I think you’re going to love this conversation. It was fascinating for us to talk with someone who is literally working on the large language models from the education perspective, and at Google, no less, one of the most ubiquitous ed tech products in the world at this point, and her perspective on where AI is going, where her work is going, how it’s going to be, how she imagines it’s going to transform schools or not transform schools, and what’s important. Turns out to be a really interesting dialogue. I think you’re going to love it.Diane TavennerHey, Michael.Michael HornHey, Diane. It’s good to see you.Diane TavennerIt’s good to see you, Michael. I’m really excited for the conversation we’re going to have today. I find that while almost everyone is talking about AI, almost no one seems to know what they’re actually talking about, especially in the circles that I think we sometimes run in. And so I’ve always found that technology is a bit of a black box to many educators, and I think AI is exacerbating that. But today we get to talk with someone who works on and in the black box, if you will, and understands its intersection with learning. She just understands that just about as well as anyone I know. And so bringing both of them together is Irina Jurenka, and she’s joining us on the show today. Welcome, Irina.Irina JurenkaThank you.Diane TavennerIrina is the research lead for AI in education at Google DeepMind, and we’ll unpack all that in a minute to help people understand what that means there. She’s exploring how generative AI can truly enhance teaching and learning. And it’s not just by providing answers, but also by helping people learn more effectively and equitably. She recently led a landmark study called Towards Responsible Development of Generative AI for Education, which looks at what it takes to design AI tutors that are actually good teachers. Before DeepMind, Irina earned her doctorate in computational neuroscience at Oxford, studying how the brain processes speech and learning. Her work beautifully bridges neuroscience, machine learning and education, all in the service of a simple but powerful goal, helping every learner reach their potential. We’re so excited to be in dialogue here with you, Irina, welcome.Irina JurenkaThank you. I’m really excited to be here.AI for Equitable EducationDiane TavennerI thought we would just start with some really basic things to help people understand what you do. And so let me start with asking, is it fair to say that you’re both a learning scientist and a technologist? Is that how you think of yourself and will you explain to us what a research engineer does or is and help us to understand sort of your team and what you do?Irina JurenkaOf course. So I actually don’t think of myself as a learning scientist. I would say maybe I’m a beginner learning scientist. I’m definitely just starting to learn about this field, but I’m very lucky to be working in a company where we do have learning scientists on the team, and we also work very closely with teachers. So we actually just hired a teacher on the team and there is another teacher who is consulting us, and we work closely with the academic field as well. So Kim Collinger and others are advising us, which we’re very privileged to be in a position to have such amazing advisors. My role in education is relatively recent. I only started this project around three years ago.Diane TavennerYou know, we hear the term research engineer and you’re a research lead. What does that mean? You know, I think a lot of us are accustomed to the terms, you know, software engineer, but in the age of AI now we hear this term research engineer. So I’m wondering if you can help us understand.Irina JurenkaOf course. So I work at Google, DeepMind, right. And DeepMind has always been effectively an academic lab. So when I joined 10 years ago, it was a very small group, it was incredibly academic. So I joined as a research scientist and essentially my job was to do a foundational AI research and publish papers. That’s kind of where we’re coming from. And now we kind of much more integrated within Google, but we continue on the same mission. So what DeepMind brings to Google is this research expertise.So on my team we have scientists and engineers, but really like the line between them is blurred. And what our job is to really think about what are the fundamental scientific problems around language models and in our case, on intersection with education, where we really need to do this foundational scientific work to understand what are the big problems, how do we find tractable solutions and also work out the solutions to these kind of big scientific problems.Diane TavennerSo I guess one question I know, Michael, that has been coming up for you and some of the conversations you’ve been having is do you engage with or interact with or directly influence the products at Google? So many of us in education are so familiar with so many Google products and what is the intersection of your work and for example, Google Classroom or many of the other products that we in the education field use?The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Irina JurenkaSo I find it very exciting to be in a company as big as Google where there are so many amazing teams doing incredible work. We really focus on the research because that’s the value that, you know, my team can bring. We do work closely obviously with the products because they build on top of the foundational models. In our case, Gemini. We talk, we advise, we help explain kind of what Gemini is capable of, how to best elicit the kind of more pedagogical capabilities out of it. But of course the teams are amazing and they mostly bring kind of work on the products in their own teams.Diane TavennerGot it. That makes sense. It’s been just about three years since most of us in the world were first really introduced to AI via the first release of, or not the first, the one that we’re familiar with of ChatGPT, and you shared with me in previous conversations that the arc of your team’s work over those three years has been really interesting. You just referenced the three years again. Tell us what you’ve been working on and what’s emerging from that.Irina JurenkaYeah, we actually started the project about six months before the ChatGPT moment. So, yeah, things have definitely changed for us. Some things stayed the same. So from the beginning, we saw that the biggest impact we could make, or Gen AI, the newly emerging Gen AI we thought could make, was through AI tutoring. There are, I can go into details, like why we think it’s the most impactful thing, but maybe we can address that later. But when we started, language models were very different. Yeah, so I remember doing our first demo about six months after we started, and it was very hard to keep the AI on track.Advancements in Guided LearningIrina JurenkaSo we had to practice a lot, find the right kind of queries to ask. And even then, you know, it was always. We had to be at the kind of tip of our seat just to make sure that it doesn’t go off the rails when doing a demo. And of course, now the AI is so much more powerful. You know, we have launched products like Guided Learning on Gemini app, which millions of users are already engaging with, and it’s mostly staying on track. You know, we haven’t seen any major problems so far, so it’s kind of just the technology itself has changed so much and we kind of had to keep up with these things. So when we first started, a lot of our work was trying to deal with kind of the very rough language models and make them do something useful in learning. And you will know how the stakes are so much higher in learning than in other use cases.So we really had to think, how do we control this kind of unruly beast beneath us? And now, of course, you know, a lot of that work was essentially had to bin because it was no longer necessary. And we really concentrate on how do we bring the layer of pedagogy and adherence to learning science principles into Gemini to make sure that it really works towards increasing learning outcomes rather than negating them.Michael HornIrina, I’d love to jump in there because at first I think it’s fascinating that you guys do this much foundational research, because we always hear that sort of the domain of the universities. But here’s DeepMind and then Google after the acquisition, right? Investing in over a decade of foundational research. There’s nothing near term about that. And I’m interested in this work on the tutoring because a lot of the sort of critics, I guess I would say of the AI tutors are sort of one of two approaches. Either oh, who’s actually going to use that? Why won’t they just default to Gemini straight on? Right. And two, even when they do use it, it’s maybe overly procedural, is the critique I hear a lot.And so I’m sort of curious, what are you learning about the actual usage in the wild? What are the guardrails that you’ve thought are important? What’s been surprising against those critiques that are everywhere these days?Irina JurenkaYes, thank you for asking this. We are definitely very aware of the negative perceptions and maybe negative use cases of chatbots in learning. So I was just reading an article from the Guardian earlier today where they surveyed 8 to 18 year olds in the UK and what was interesting, I think just over 60% of first responders said that they perceived AI as being a negative addition to their learning journeys. And it’s for all the reasons that we’re already aware of. AI is just too keen to give away answers. It takes away the cognitive load. Well, not like it takes away the productive struggle. It leads to kind of cognitive offloading of tasks.We know that that’s not helpful for learning. So we kind of saw this trend when we started this project because I think at the end of the day, AI is optimized to be an assistant, right? So it’s successful when it takes away the burden from you as the user. And we know that in learning the opposite is true. You have to engage, you have to put in the struggle to actually see a difference to your learning outcomes. So what we realize is that if we don’t do the foundational work and the research to make sure that AI can deal with these two very different use cases, the kind of capabilities of AI in learning won’t just emerge from all the other work.Michael HornIt’s so interesting. So stay with it then, like as you’ve been putting it in this very specific use case right around the tutor. I am curious, like why did you choose tutoring given that it is so different from the other LLMs. Right. Sort of that assistant purpose. And how are you constraining it to make sure that it’s the most useful tutor. Right. That a student could have access to as opposed to maybe its natural instincts based on its foundation?Irina JurenkaSo we chose the tutoring use case because the way we call it, it’s kind of learning or education complete. So what that means is that in order to tutor well, you kind of need to know all the different types of subtasks or capabilities that are important for education. So you need to be able to plan a lesson, you need to be able to ask good questions and provide good feedback and check the students’ work, among many other kinds of things about metacognition and active engagement. So if we really manage to figure out the tutoring use case, then the resulting kind of underlying model Gemini can then be used for all these other tasks. A great way to bring one single goal to optimize for that can then result in broader benefits for learning.Michael HornSuper interesting. Let me ask this question then. How does it integrate with Google Classroom? Because you all have this incredible install base effectively right across schools. I think probably in terms of K-12 schools, you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the largest install base of sort of learning management system instances. So how does this tutor that you’ve built, how is it integrating with Google Classroom to actually directly serve students? And what are the guardrails you’re putting around that as well?Safety and Educational FocusIrina JurenkaSo in terms of guardrails, I just want to say that we really take this very seriously. There’s a wide range of safety and guardrails work happening across Google DeepMind and Google at all levels from the model to the products. And Gemini in itself has a lot of safety and kind of trust and safety work going there. What our team actually does is bring an educational and learning specific angle into this Gemini model. As an example, when we try to optimize the model for tutoring, we kind of realize that a good tutor really engages the learner. They ask a lot of questions. So we brought this bias towards asking more questions to the model, but that resulted in an unintended consequence in the sense that not only does the tutor want to ask questions, it also wants to encourage questions from the student. And then a student might ask a question that’s actually harmful, so it could say something really toxic.Ask a question about that and what the tutor would do before we did the kind of work to mitigate it. It would say, oh, that’s an amazing question. I’m really glad you’re thinking about this. And now and then it will kind of bring it back and say, actually maybe there are other things to consider here. But that initial statement was just not helpful. So we had to then go in and kind of bring extra supervised data and kind of take that unintended behavior out of the model to make sure that it’s actually safe. This additional layer of work is really important. And of course then there’s the product layers and other ways to kind of mitigate safety issues.Diane TavennerThat’s super interesting. I so appreciate the example. And I was gonna ask you about, you know, what is this? What are you seeing now, three years in? You know, you talked about at the beginning you had these sort of rough models and they would kind of, it sounded to me like get distracted and kind of, you know, go off. But, three years in, it sounds like you’re learning a lot of things and so you’re iterating. So what is it looking like now? And how are you feeling about the learning that’s happening when young people are engaging or people are engaging with the products now? And then maybe we can talk about where you think it’s going as well.Gemini: Guided Learning ExperienceIrina JurenkaThe work that we’ve done is on the Gemini model side. What we hope that comes out of it is that Gemini is useful for learning products, both for Google, but also for external parties who build ad tags, who build on top of Google. For the internal products, our team in particular really worked in collaboration with the Gemini app to bring the guided learning experience to users. We really wanted to bring an easy way for anyone out there to get kind of this more pedagogical behavior out of the models without having to engineer a very complex prompt. And so with guided learning, it’s really a one click way to get the model to act more like a tutor, so to guide you through the information rather than just give it to you as a wall of text. And we worked with learning science experts to make sure that this experience really adheres to the five kinds of learning science principles that we have identified as important. Again, our hope is that this actually helps students internalize the information much better. And we are working kind of very closely to try to measure the efficacy of how well that’s actually coming together.But what I want to give you is a personal anecdote on how I ended up trying guided learning. And I was actually in Stanford a few months ago and I saw this statue of the Burghers of Calais, which I’ve never heard of that story before, so I was curious to learn more. So first I kind of just pulled out my phone and used Gemini to ask about this historical event. And it just gave me kind of the standard answer of kind of a longish response. Think of it as like a Wikipedia kind of type answer. So I read through it, it was interesting, but I realized I’m actually personally really bad with history, in fact. So I realized that that information went kind of into my head and immediately left it, and I didn’t remember anything. About 10 minutes later, I was trying to tell the story to somebody else, and I realized I don’t remember anything.So I again pulled out Gemini, but this time I switched on guided learning to see how different the experience would be. The difference is like guided learning doesn’t just give you the answer. It kind of engages you in a dialogue. It brings you in over kind of maybe five to ten turns of conversation. It kind of walked me through the same information, but this time I realized actually that I remembered it like a week later. I could still remember the facts. I remember the interesting things it brought in. It kind of brought the connection to the War of the Roses, which the first article didn’t bring in, just because of how I selected kind of the options ofWhere my curiosity led me, to me, it was very visceral how I tried to kind of learn the same thing from the Gemini, like a vanilla experience and guided learning. And one of them actually made me remember better without me even trying.Diane TavennerInteresting.Michael HornThat’s really cool. One really quick question on that. Like, what are the five learning science principles that you guys have prioritized to create that sort of experience? Just so we can enumerate it?Irina JurenkaSo the five learning science principles that we’ve identified is to inspire active learning, to manage cognitive load, to adapt to the learner, stimulate curiosity and deepen metacognition. And we realize that this is not the comprehensive list. There are other important areas of learning science that we are considering to bring to kind of forefront of what we’re optimizing for. But these are the first and the most important five learning science principles that we have been working towards so far.Diane TavennerIrina, one of the things that I like about talking to you about is that you talk about pedagogy and you said up front, you know, you had this hypothesis about tutors being sort of the way to go. I’m curious about that because we’ve also talked about, there’s other kinds of ways to learn. And so I’m curious if you guys are exploring other ways and how you think about that and why tutors and yeah, anything you can share around that?Irina JurenkaYes. I’m actually curious to hear from you, given your experience, what you think would be exciting, other ways of learning for us to consider. The reason why we started with AI tutoring is because of. I guess this is where the strength of current GenAI model lies. It’s kind of text, chat base interface that we’re all familiar with. So we thought, okay, how can we leverage what’s already mature to make a difference in education? But we also realized that as new capabilities in AI are emerging and also maturing. For example, we have these demos of live experience where it’s kind of video and audio and you essentially can just talk to AI in the same way as you would talk to your human teacher. We are also thinking about how to kind of, how to bring that to users in an interesting learning experience.But yeah, I would be very curious to hear from you what you think would be a good thing.Learning: Content vs Skill DevelopmentDiane TavennerWell, I mean I think when I think about it, and it’s hard to really parse how different this might be from a tutor, but I think about this type of learning more in kind of the factual content, vocabulary, the what I would call the content knowledge you need for learning. And then I often, you know, kind of crudely though separate from skill development. So how do you actually communicate effectively or write effectively or analyze problems? And you know, I historically have taken a project based or problem based approach to that. So you start with, kind of a big problem that you want to solve or a big question that you have and then you engage in a project that gets you an outcome or a product. And so that was pretty long winded. But maybe, maybe the most immediate would just be like, and maybe a tutor can do this, but really helping to teach someone to write effectively or communicate effectively. I think right now at least I, and I think other people are using it to just take what I’ve written and write it better. But I’m not sure that it’s really teaching me yet, giving me that guided practice and that feedback and whatnot.So that might be the more near term version that I’m thinking about.Irina JurenkaYeah. So first for the skills acquisition, we really hope that guided learning type experience could actually help with that. So your example of helping you rewrite a piece of text with guided learning, it won’t just rewrite for you, it will guide you towards how to rewrite it so that you do it. So it will ask you to think about certain things, ask you certain questions. So hopefully a student can learn from just that experience. Another thing I mentioned earlier, that kind of metacognitive abilities are important to us to kind of make sure that the tutor optimizes those things as well. That’s kind of another layer where hopefully a student will kind of be able to take a step back and understand, okay, how did I get to this? How did I rewrite this? What was important? How did I think about it so that next time they can actually almost like, guide themselves and won’t need the tutor anymore.Diane TavennerThat’s so interesting. Last season, Michael and I interviewed the woman who leads the Harvard Writing center, and what you just described was her concern of what was not happening and what would be missed. And so it’s interesting, the evolution, I think. I don’t know, Michael, if you’re.Michael HornIf you’re tracking the same thing. Yeah, I think. I mean, I think it’s interesting, right? And it’s all a question of. I think. And this may be where you want to go, Diane, like, how do we put this in the hands of teachers and students, right, in productive ways so that they’re not just jumping to the shortcut, but actually engaging in the difficult learning that you all are creating these experiences for?Diane TavennerI think that might be a good place for us to go and sort of, you know, bring this conversation, at least for now, to a conclusion. So, Irina, you are a new mother. And I know that when I became a mom, it changed how I viewed my work as an educator in ways that I couldn’t even have imagined. And so, you know, I’m curious, what, if anything, has changed for you in that. But even more so, what do you imagine your child’s education will be like? You know, when you think about the next 5, 10, 15, 20 years, what will it look, the same? Will it look different? What do you want for it? What do you hope for it? You know, how do you think about that?AI, Change, and Human ConnectionsIrina JurenkaThat is a great question. And I have this at the top of my mind. I think we are in a very unique situation, and kind of we’re living through a very interesting period of time where the pace of change is so fast. I think even for us working in this industry, it’s kind of head spinning, and it’s even hard for us to catch up with all the progress. It’s very hard to predict where AI will be in five to 10 years, what the role of education will be. We are actively thinking about this. I think what’s becoming clear is the importance of human connections and building, kind of making sure that our next generation grows up as complete humans so that they’re not just automatons who, you know, provide prompts to AI and just kind of live in this AI driven world where AI really is still a tool that helps human flourishing and helps prove and increase human connections. So I think for my child, I would want him to still go to school and to still have experiences learning how to communicate with his peers, how to talk to his teachers and be inspired by his teachers.I hope that AI can be something that helps him maybe learn faster and learn more and kind of really personalize his learning so that when he’s really passionate about something, he can go off and go deeper with AI and maybe be able to do these projects that are not supported at school, but he can do at home with his peers. And AI can serve as kind of this facilitator and help them again achieve more interesting outcomes with their projects. But at the end of the day, I think I want him to have the breadth of experiences and knowledge and just learn how to be a good human.Diane TavennerThat’s a beautiful place, I think, to wrap.Michael HornI was going to say we have this section, Irina, where we wrap up, where we share something that we’ve been reading book wise or watching on TV or movie, podcasts, whatever. And so because we didn’t prep you beforehand, we’ll let Diane go first with hers and then we’d love to hear what’s on your. What’s on your bedside table or in your ear or something like that. If you wouldn’t mind sharing.Diane TavennerSo, this is kind of a funny one. I’m. I’m listening to slash reading a book called The Five Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life by Sahil Bloom. And if you’re wondering about the types of wealth, according to Sahil, they are time, social, mental, physical and financial. And I’m actually reading this as with a group of other people who are sort of in our, depending on who you talk to, last half, last quarter, quarter of life. And we’re exploring this question this year of how do I do my quote, best work in these chapters? So this is one of many things that we’re using as a prompt to sort of create a rubric for ourselves, if you will, and self evaluate.And I’m reading it now in prep for our next get together, so fascinating. I’m not sure if I’m like a wholehearted recommendation on it, but, you know, it’s kind of, it includes a lot of the ideas that I think exist in a lot of other places and it’s a good reminder.Michael HornFair enough, Fair enough. Well, it’ll get marked down either way and we’ll track it. Irina, what about you?Irina JurenkaSo I will be honest, I am struggling to find time to read given that I have a one year old, but I actually did manage to get through a book recently, and it was Neil Stevenson’s novel Diamond Age. I’ve been recommended it many, many times given the work I’m doing. So I finally managed to read it. And so just if you haven’t heard about it, it’s about this world of the future where somebody designs essentially an AI tutor. So it’s kind of this book that is given to a young girl and the book essentially teaches her everything throughout her life. And I think what’s interesting, my takeaway from this was that there were three kinds of maybe original versions of the book that were given to three girls. And then they made, I guess, a copy that was given to everyone, which wasn’t as good as. And the difference was that in the three original versions there was a human who was like essentially voicing out the text to the girls.And in the other versions it was like 100% AI. And what was interesting is that the human behind the book, even though they were just voicing what the text that the AI was producing according to the book, made a difference. Those three girls, especially the main character, who had this consistent one person who was guiding her throughout her whole life, actually built a connection with that person and grew up to be a much more successful, kind of, much better individual than anyone else. And it’s this importance of still having a human in the loop.Michael HornVery cool. I love it. I’ve heard a ton about that book, so I need to add it to my list I think now. I’ll just say I’m going to shock Diane here because we always make fun of me for not being current on stuff, but I actually not only did I watch seasons one and two of the Diplomat over the summer, season three came out and I’m already done, so I’m ahead. And so I am going to stay in my Netflix binging, I guess, at the moment, but I’m feeling rather impressed with myself and that I got my Google sweatshirt from back when I lived in Silicon Valley on for this recording.So with that, Irina, I think Diane and I could both talk to you all day and just like learn from this. So really appreciate you joining and scratching the surface with us of all the things going on at DeepMind. And for all of you tuning in, we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

One programming note: I will be publishing just one more general update before the end of the year—on Friday, December 26th—which will be free for all to read. I hope many of you are able to unplug for the most part and spend some time with loved ones over the next several days. I’ll be back in your inbox in the new year on Monday, January 5th with an article for paid subscribers. We’ll then get back to our regular publishing schedule. Thanks for all this year—and happy holidays. For now, enjoy this conversation that my colleague, Danny Curtis, hosted. — Michael B. HornDanny Curtis sat down with Tommy Hodges, dean at the University of South Carolina’s College of Education, to discuss the innovative CarolinaCrED teacher education program. Tommy explained how the program leverages a competency-based, micro-credential approach to better recognize the skills that aspiring educators bring from diverse backgrounds, while personalizing their training to fill specific skill gaps. The conversation explores the collaborative design with school districts, the data showing strong retention and instructional quality among program graduates, and the unique advantages and challenges of developing such a program within a large university.Danny CurtisWelcome to the Future of Education. I’m Danny Curtis and you’re joining the show where we are committed to creating a world in which individuals can build their passion, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. And to help us think through that today we are so excited to be joined by Tommy Hodges, who is dean at the University of South Carolina’s College of Education and recently the interim Dean at the College of Arts and Sciences. And I’m so excited to have him on to learn more about the innovative commodity based teacher education program that he helped to create at U of SC called CarolinaCrED. Tommy, thanks so much for joining us.Tommy HodgesDanny, thanks for having me. It’s an honor.Competency-Based Teacher EducationDanny CurtisAwesome. Well, let’s jump right in. So I’d love to start just by hearing in your own words what Carolina CrED is and how it’s different from other teacher certification programs in the state.Tommy HodgesYeah. So Carolina CrED is a broad umbrella with a number of outreach programs. So we’ve encapsulated a number of different entities that are grounded first in community based needs. So it includes the Carolina Teacher Induction Program, which provides induction supports. It includes an alternative preparation program which is really where much of the focus today, I can talk in some detail around the microcredential work that we’ve done there. That is a career changer program that’s predominantly focused on rural regions across the state, but it also has personalized and tailored degree programs that are offered through it. So we see a number of our different outreach efforts in the College of Education having their intellectual home inside Carolina CrED.And then one of those is the MCrED or the Microcredential Enterprise. So that is something that’s now supporting upwards of nearly 300 aspiring educators across the state. To date, the Carolina Teacher Induction Program has supported nearly 1,000 teachers. And then countless individuals have participated in those contractual degree programs too. So really has these multiple arms of it, one of which being really grounded in the microcredential enterprise and then others of them also picking up pieces of that.Danny CurtisYeah. And I want to stay with the model here. Could you talk through a bit, the role that competency-based assessment and education plays within the Carolina CrED model?Tommy HodgesYeah. So I would like to believe that teacher education has always somewhat been competency based, certainly through accreditation. We’re deeply interested in the outcomes that we have for our teacher candidates and their ability to engage in high quality instruction with kids and children in the community. But what I would say we’ve lacked is a recognition of the skills and competencies that individuals already walk through the door with. So we design degree programs as if everyone needs the same kind of thing at the same pace, at the same dosage. And where the competency based learning for us has been a key driver, again through the alternative preparation, where it has its origins, is that we’re able to identify an individual who maybe was a paraprofessional inside the school, or an individual who maybe was a wildlife biologist, a park ranger doing educational programming. Individuals from a multitude of different fields and disciplines, they bring skills with them to the table, that one we don’t need to replicate, but more importantly, we need to harness and build off of to help build out and round out their skill set.And so when we design the microcredentials associated with our alternative preparation, it’s done so in a way that we identify the skills that an individual already walks through the door with, and then we can in some ways prescribe to them the kinds of things that they need to help build skill gaps around in order to be competent educators. They do that. Some of it’s independently, some of it’s with practicing teachers, and some of it’s with the institution, but all of it creates a hyper personalized experience for the learner.Danny CurtisYeah, that’s a really helpful overview and really excited to dig into a number of different pieces in there. But before we do, I want to go deeper on some backstory. So taking us back to the before times, what were you seeing in the state that gave rise to this idea and motivated action on it? And I’m also thinking if this were easy, we would see a lot more programs like this in other states. What were those barriers or those changes that needed to be made that you were able to overcome in the creation of this program?Tommy HodgesYeah, part of it originated in policy. So prior to 2019, there was no mechanism for an institution of higher education to be able to deliver an alternative preparation program or any preparation pathway recommend for certification an individual that was not a degree completer, meaning they had to complete a bachelor’s degree, they had to complete a master’s degree, Unlike other states where they may have like a postbacc certificate that has a certain number of hours. And so we had one hand tied behind our backs up until 2019. And there was a policy change. So we were thinking deeply about what we wanted that to look like. And we had a partner at the time, it was the Center for Teaching Quality. It’s now known as Mira Education, a national nonprofit who had already gained a good bit of ground in competency based learning for the in service space. And through our partnership with them, they pushed us to consider what might it look like if you foregrounded microcredentials rather than traditional three credit-hour courses and a 36-hour master’s degree.Alternative Teacher CertificationTommy HodgesFortunately, our state department of education was willing to think creatively with us as well. And so we put forward a plan and gained approval for an alternative preparation program for individuals who held a bachelor’s degree almost exclusively outside of education to be able to gain teacher certification at a timeline that was up to them, that it was paced according to their need and according to the kinds of skills that they came in the door with. And then that was approved in February of 2020, which is a very interesting time to try and launch something in the months that followed. So a lot of our beginning thinkings were done in rooms, kind of like we’re in right now, in some sort of a virtual environment with one another, but trying to think through what we wanted this thing to look and feel like. But what we knew from the very beginning was that it was an antiquated model to think that again, the three credit hour course and 36 hour master’s degree was going to be tenable both from a cost efficiency for either districts or individuals, or perhaps more importantly, philosophically about the kinds of skills that individuals entered with. So that’s where we began. What we didn’t really anticipate was the momentum that that would gain inside of districts to engage in learning for their in service teachers. So once they saw the modularization of the program for pre-service teachers who wanted to gain teacher certification, they loved it for their practicing teachers just as well.So they were able to develop thematic learning experiences. We were able to tailor the microcredentials according to their needs. And then we engaged with some nonprofits in the state that also wanted to engage in microcredential learning. So then it became about supporting organizations in their professional learning in ways that the traditional academic offerings in an institution just don’t afford.Danny CurtisYeah, I want to stay with this professional learning piece. Yeah, obviously these microcredentials afford a new way of certifying new learning and upskilling. I’d be curious to hear how are districts engaging with your library of microcredentials to facilitate that type of professional development?Collaborative microcredential DevelopmentTommy HodgesWell, one of the things that we committed to early on is that we were not going to have to come visit our website, type in a credit card number and buy a microcredential and have it scored. That our engagements were going to be at the organizational level because we’re committed to systemic change, not one off kinds of pieces. And so our engagements with, particularly at the school district level, we’re doing a deep dive into essentially a needs assessment around where do they want to take their school, what are opportunity gaps, what are ways in which they want to see their professional staff in the school grow? And then how might we take our existing menu of microcredentials or in some cases help build out new microcredentials that supports the kinds of professional learning that go on inside the schools? Those microcredentials were developed hand in hand with those district partners. In fact, at times we would rely on district expertise to help us develop them and in fact score them as well. So it’s not an enterprise in which the college is simply saying here’s a solution for you. It is a truly interwoven collaboration with those districts and defining what’s needed, defining what would count and be valid for them, and then working with at the state level, ensuring that there’s recognition, the competencies that teachers are developing along the way.Danny CurtisSo now that we are a few years in, I’m curious to hear what are you learning and what are you seeing in terms of the impact of this preparation program?Tommy HodgesOne of the pieces that we can look pretty directly at is the staying power of educators who go through this pathway. One of the concerns with many of the alternative preparation pathways that exist right now is that they tend to have individuals who come in for one or two, maybe three years and then they’re back out again, and then you’re having to replace them with yet another novice individual. And we know that the long term health and success of schools and the kids that they serve is built upon having a stable workforce that’s there over an extended period of time. And so again, we’re five years in. But what we see is when we compare the retention of educators who come through the alternative preparation pathways that are more conventional programs, they are essentially the same. We know that there’s staying power with the alternative preparation. We know that there’s quality there because we have the data on their teacher performance as well. And we’re able to make those comparisons in addition to their ability to be retained.So both in terms of instructional, the quality of instruction that’s being delivered as assessed by school principals, we know that it’s on par with our traditional programs as well as their longevity in the field.Danny CurtisWith any competency based program, obviously a big part of the challenge is in the certification of learning. It is so crucial and so difficult to identify and validate learning that is happening across very different contexts with very different learning products and evaluate that against a common learning standard. So I’d love to just kind of double click on that process you all are using and hear more about how you’re validating learning within the program.Tommy HodgesYeah, so certainly we are doing validity and reliability checks on the assessments that are included there, as well as the rubrics that are included. Multiple individuals score each piece of assessment that comes in to make sure that there’s some consistency in that. But we’re also a part of the microcredential partnership of the states. It’s a connection of states that are invested in this competency based work and seeking to make sure that we’re not engaging in sort of a wild west enterprise where everybody has their own sort of version and there’s not some level of consistency. Certainly we want to retain autonomy. Part of that autonomy allows you to innovate rapidly. But there ought to be an overarching framework for what constitutes sort of a bite-sized piece of learning. How it’s measured and how it’s accumulated and valued.Personalized Coaching Drives SuccessTommy HodgesYou’d want some degree of consistency across the enterprise. And so we worked with again that microcredential partnership with the states, with four or five other states in addition to our own to help really think through that and create some standardization. So I think that’s helped. At the end of the day though, I think the difference maker in all of this is the extent to which there’s deep personalized coaching. So it’s not just the standalone competency pieces. Is there an individual who’s shepherding that process in an intellectually honest way? Not someone who’s got a full time job? And oh, also in addition, I’ll moonlight as a coach or a mentor, but truly making sure that individuals have dedicated FTE time that they’re providing modeling, coaching, feedback and direction to those novice individuals. At the end of the day, to me, that matters as much as, if not more than, the accumulation of that knowledge.Is it being directed in such a way that supports that individual? And the only way I have seen in multiple iterations, whether it be traditional teacher preparation or more alternative that I’ve seen that work abundantly well is through robust coaching.Danny CurtisYeah. The theme that I’m hearing throughout is this really deep partnership between schools and the university from identifying the credentials that would be of value in terms of the microcredentialing and upskilling to the shared process of assessment. It sounds like you all have really forged this together with districts as well as your other partnerships.Tommy HodgesYeah, it’s truly been a joint venture. And again, it’s not the ivory tower. Swoop in and say, here’s what you need to be doing. We’re the university and we’re here to help. It’s really doing a genuine partnership with those districts to make sure that we’re delivering in real time the things that they’ve identified as a need.Danny CurtisYeah. And that leads into one of the other differentiating factors of this program is that you all are doing this out of a large university system, which is different from many other alternative certification programs. And so I’m wondering, what are those different considerations that you need to make within your context that others and other large university systems might be able to learn from?Rethinking Higher Education’s ResponsivenessTommy HodgesWell, I can say at the very beginning, it took a commitment on the part of central leadership of the institution to say, yes, you can do things differently and you can think about this differently, and we’ll support that within our ecosystems. Because quite frankly, higher education as an enterprise is not exactly the most nimble of organizational structures. So I have my concerns with the industry as a whole and the extent to which it has changed the way that it thinks about the ways it brings its knowledge to bear in the service of communities. I think that part of the challenges that higher ed faces today with its value proposition, with some of the threads of anti intellectualism that we see are, are fair critiques, although I think they’re misplaced. They’re fair in the sense that we haven’t exactly been very responsive to the needs of communities and thinking about how we diversify the ways in which our knowledge is put forward to the general public. Our products again are three hour courses and they’re 120 hour bachelor’s degrees and 36 hour master’s degrees. And what if an individual doesn’t want or need that, but they want to engage with the university in a substantive way to help build out skills to either upskill or career pivot, whatever that might be, and how can the institution serve those individuals well? And I think higher ed has a ways to go and being responsive to that because of some of the bureaucracies that exist. But we were given a great deal of space to think and think differently.So we were able to prop up an ecosystem that allowed us to think nimbly and responsively and then to support individuals as they engaged in that work in a way that was different than many conventional sorts of programs. So central commitment being one of them and then two, I think we harness the power of a team of people who were hungry for doing something different as well. And so I think we had a, we’ve given the space and a coalition of people that really wanted to see it get done and we were able to do that.Danny CurtisI’m curious to learn more about what does that space look like in this context. What are the areas in which you were able to gain some autonomy and maybe be more nimble outside of the larger university system?Tommy HodgesYes. So everything from platform LMS to the CRM for gathering individuals and the ways in which we collected interested individuals and marketed to them around possibilities, did matchmaking with districts. So all the platform work, we were able to work in distinct platforms that gave us a level of flexibility that the conventional post secondary platforms couldn’t. And so oftentimes our platforms are ones that are used outside of traditional academia and those have been very fruitful for us, but done so in a way that matches our institutional branding and look and feel. And then we were able to develop a team of individuals to help guide that work that sits a little bit outside our traditional academic departments. And that’s where that Carolina CrED ecosystem comes from. But we also have interface with faculty too, who either help lend their own expertise to that enterprise, help lead it in some ways, or conduct research with the data. So there’s a lot of different intersection points that faculty can have in there too.Integrating Standalone Systems EfficientlyTommy HodgesThe danger that you run into, and I said there’s always these tensions, the danger that you can run into when you create something that’s kind of standalone like that is that it continues to stand alone. And then it does. Its knowledge and its experience doesn’t bleed into other parts of your enterprise. It doesn’t learn from others and others don’t learn from it. And so I can say that part of. And it was easier to kind of keep it separate in this first few years because you’re trying to upstart something new and it needs its space. But as it’s began to mature now, we’re beginning to think about how do we better integrate this into our sort of quote unquote traditional way of doing things at the institution and how can we create a more modular environment for every student that interfaces or every individual, maybe we don’t even categorize them as a student here, but every individual that interfaces with the institution. And so I think there’s a willingness to think about that now too.But certainly in the early days, I would say it was startup-ish and had its independence and had its own sort of ecosystem and support from central administration to do that. And then at the same time, I think now we’re kind of looking for that bleed.Danny CurtisYeah. So it sounds like this integration and continued evolution is part of what you’re seeing down the road. What else is in this vision for how this program or others like it continue to evolve?Tommy HodgesYeah. So I think some of the questions. And so I’ll put on my arts and sciences hat for a second and my leadership in the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences here at USC and say one of the concerns right now is the liberal arts and the humanities. And there’s some real concern with regards to the value that individuals are seeing in society right now around the liberal arts degree. I think we’re looking at higher education as preparation for workforce in many ways, which can be a good look, but I think it’s a narrow look at what post secondary attainment can afford an individual. I look at it more as preparation for life and civic engagement. And part of that life and civic engagement is employment. So it’s important, but it’s also important to recognize our rich histories, our art, the accumulation of human knowledge across a range of disciplines, and to be able to imagine employment in fields that don’t even exist today.Liberal Arts: Bridging Skills & PurposeTommy HodgesAnd what better place to do that than through a liberal arts degree? But again, some individuals are looking at it like this major has a one to one correspondence to this job, which has this income, which relegates post secondary attainment to a very transactional sort of relationship with an individual, rather than this constant sense of becoming an understanding about who we are and who we are in relation to our histories, our cultures and humanity at large. And so I think that for me, the next iteration of this work will be to help individuals see how that genuine core liberal arts degree does in fact help prepare one for the workforce. And so I think if we begin to look at some of the competency based pieces that employers are looking for, and then we marry that with those traditional liberal arts degrees. Now we’re coupling together two aspects of the work. One sort of civic and societal readiness and contribution with workforce and skill based readiness as well. If we can accomplish both of those together through that layering approach at the undergraduate level, then I think we’re really onto something. And so that’s really where I see us headed next in terms of the microcredentials working with industry partners on those.So those aren’t, again, those aren’t an internal endeavor much like the ones for educator preparation, but we’re really thinking deeply about how do we engage some of our large employers who can give us some keen insights into what they’re seeing with individuals who are coming out and then ensuring that we’re gap filling there and for students to be able to illustrate saliently when they’re in job interviews how those experiences that they had while they were at the university help contribute to their readiness.Danny CurtisYeah. So interesting to hear you talk through this, know, tension between job readiness and, and more liberal arts oriented education that has always been present in postsecondary education, but is really magnified by AI and, and other technologies that are accelerating changes in the workforce.Tommy HodgesAnd I would say AI is the perfect example of, you know, key triggers that we don’t predict particularly well that a good liberal arts education is nimble and responsive too, and actually probably prepares one even better than some of the more professionally directed degree programs that we might have on campus.Danny CurtisWell, I look forward to watching as you and your team down in South Carolina try and strike that balance and continue to evolve these innovative programs and really appreciate you joining us today.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. 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Laurence Holt joined me and Diane Tavenner to unpack the current landscape and future potential of AI in K–12 education. The discussion centered on the three main AI use cases Laurence sees emerging in schools: generating materials, providing feedback, and AI tutoring. The conversation explored the vital difference between feedback and grading, the importance of instructional context for effective AI tools, and the complex challenges in cultivating curiosity and self-efficacy in classrooms. We also delved into why AI tutoring isn’t yet transformative for most students, the limitations of current chatbots, and the need for school model redesigns and tools that support social learning and durable skills.Michael HornMichael Horn Here. What you’re about to hear is a conversation that Diane Tavener and I recorded with Laurence Holt, and I wanted to highlight just a few parts of the conversation for you as you begin to listen. First, Laurence named three three primary use cases for AI today in education. Number one, generating materials, number two, feedback. And third, is AI tutoring, now the only one of those ready for primetime, in his view, feedback. We then dove into why it’s crucial not to conflate feedback with grading and how, if we do so, it will actually undermine stream student motivation. Another part of the conversation that I thought was important to highlight is that Laurence observed that to be instructionally useful, AI applications need to deeply understand what students or teachers are trying to get done and then build with that in mind. That means the tool needs to have a lot more context than a chatbot that any of us would just fire up on its own.And Laurence doesn’t believe we’ve gotten to the point yet where the tools we have understand the instructional context or have the right data on students. Finally, I thought the conversation around why AI tutoring is still falling short was very telling, particularly Laurence’s implicit observation that a lot of the blame is on a system of education that deprioritizes curiosity, developing self efficacy, and creating the time for true learning, and that it will take a lot to overcome that. Hope you enjoy our conversation on this episode of Class Disrupted.Diane TavennerHey Michael.Michael HornHey, Diane. Good to see you as always.AI’s Impact on SchoolsDiane TavennerIt is. And what a fun season we’re having here on Class Disrupted. I’m hearing all sorts of comments from folks, I know you are too, about the conversations we’re having, which so far I would say have been pretty expansive at a higher altitude or a different perspective, which people love. But there’s also a bit of a craving for a closer look at what’s actually happening in schools. Which is why I’m really looking forward to our conversation today because we get to stay sort of at that bird’s eye view with someone who’s been tracking the full range of new AI powered companies, products, tools, programs and schools in K12, but also has been going deep with a few of those use cases. And I think it’s going to be an awesome transition into what I think is, I guess, spoiler alert, the next part of our season where we’re going to go deep with a number of folks who are sort of much closer to the action.Michael HornYeah, indeed. I think that’s a good summary, Diane. And the person we have on today is someone I’ve gotten to feature on in my writing, my work in the past just because he seems to constantly be doing really interesting explorations and finding out really interesting angles on, on things that maybe were accepted wisdom and then we find out that they aren’t what we thought. So I’m thrilled he’s joining us today. He’s none other than Laurence Holt, who is a senior advisor at XQ Institute and the Teaching Lab. And along with several others, he created an EdTech Insiders map to track over 60 use cases for Gen AI in education and over 300 Gen AI powered education tool. He was previously chief Product officer at Amplify. And again, what I love, Diane, about talking to Laurence is that look, he’s an engineer by training who went back to school to understand how people learn.So dug into the learning sciences, neuroscience, cognitive science, and then spent years creating products that worked for or as he often says in his own words, didn’t always work in classrooms. So I love the background he brings, his experience, his humility, his humor and his ability to dig deep. So welcome Laurence, good to see you as always.Laurence HoltGreat to see you both. Long time listener, first time caller, so welcome.Michael HornNow we won’t get to say that again, so I’m glad you’re here. Let’s start high level with the EdTech Insiders map and what it tells us. What are you seeing out there in terms of emerging tools and products? And have the use cases changed much in the past year or two? Just sort of help orient us to what are the big areas for entrepreneurship, product development and so forth?Laurence HoltYeah, that’s actually you hit a really interesting area straight up with a number of use cases. So we actually organized this map around use cases, meaning instead of just listing all the tools that are out there, thinking about what AI could genuinely help with and then cataloging are those indeed things that people are creating? And so you can, you know, anyone can see that for themselves. It’s on EdTechInsiders AI. It’s free with the help of our friends at Overdeck and we started in June 2023. So just after really six months after ChatGPT, Jacob Klein and I were trying to figure out how do we track all of this stuff that is bubbling up. And the first version had 40 some use cases and now we’re up to 60. So it’s not actually been that many.We’ve added hundreds of new tools. The number of use cases is slowing, which I think tells us that the sector has gone broad. We’ve sort of had a look at almost anything that you could improve with AI. And now we’re going more deep. And in particular, the areas I like to think of are sort of the big three use cases that have emerged over time, only really one of which is sort of ready for primetime is AI good enough for. And the three I think of are generating materials. And when you interview teachers, there’s a survey, there’s a great Gallup survey that shows that’s the main thing teachers say they’re doing with AI, so creating quizzes, assignments, lessons, role plays.There was a teacher who wanted to, a science teacher wanted to teach vacuums in middle school, and AI suggested to her that she should do a role play where the kids were 1930s vacuum salespeople going door to door and had to explain to families like, how does this thing work? Which I thought was like, that’s a really cool case. So that’s on the map. And there are lots of others that might tweak your interest. But generating materials is number one. Number two is feedback. So actually commenting or giving input to students based on their work. So not just right or wrong, not just multiple choice, but could be their writing, it could be their math written work, which AI can now do.It could be a presentation they’ve made, so they’re just able to get way more feedback than previously. And then the third is AI tutoring, where we’ve seen just a huge upswing in the number of tools. A lot of them were around coding originally. We’re now seeing a lot around early reading and math. So those are the big three areas.Michael HornSuper interesting. I’m curious if you see differences in these by grade level or subject areas, or also if you’d give some commentary on those three big areas, like where are they really good today, these AI tools? And where are they still primitive and not ready for prime time and maybe won’t be ready for primetime?Laurence HoltYeah. So I think the one that is very definitely ready for primetime, in my view, is feedback. And this is partly because if you look at the amount of feedback the average student gets on their writing or their math homework, it’s actually very low. And the reason for that is because it takes a huge amount of time and teachers just don’t have the time to do all of that grading. Right. So in a way, any feedback at all would be better. But there have been studies that show feedback is already, AI feedback is already as good as, say, a median teacher.And if it’s on writing, you know, writing is the thing that LLMs, large language models are really good at.Michael HornDoes that depend on grade level or is it sort of equally distributed across a student’s, you know, age for how good is it’s feedback?Laurence HoltI think it’s been tested mostly in middle and high.Michael HornOkay.Laurence HoltBut I think, I mean, we’re certainly seeing feedback on your reading in very early grades. So I think it’s like a lot of these things, it’s kind of a jagged frontier that AI is good at and you wind up with specific point cases where it’s very strong and others where it’s not so great. So I really think of feedback as the first sort of, you know, fluoride in the water opportunities for AI. If we could just make feedback available free to every student K12 in the US or beyond K12, that itself could be transformational.Feedback vs. Grading in LearningThe Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Diane TavennerLaurence, let’s spend a moment on feedback because I actually totally agree with you, but I think that sometimes people don’t understand the importance of feedback because I think feedback gets conflated with grading. So to your point, like as a teacher, there’s so much work to do and it takes so much time to get feedback. And oh, by the way, I’m actually not held accountable for feedback. I’m held accountable for grading and getting things in the gradebook. And so often I think grading just like, did you do 1 through 10? What you get, you know, gets conflated with feedback. But feedback is actually at the heart of learning. So just spend a minute there about how this could be literally game changing if we could get regular, constant quality feedback to kids that we’re just, we literally cannot and are not doing right now.Laurence HoltYeah, no, you hit it exactly, Diane. Because in most studies, meta analysis of what drives learning, feedback is either at the top or very close to the top. And if you think about it, whenever you’ve learned something, it is often because you didn’t do it very well. And someone explained and pointed that out to you and told you how to do better or maybe multiple ways of how to do it better. That’s the fundamental cycle. Grading, however, if it means coming up with a score we know can have a detrimental effect. It’s so strange that these two ideas, which are very closely related, actually have almost opposite effects. This grading can result in students focusing on the grade and they almost.They only read the feedback in as much to justify why they got the grade they did rather than actually taking it on board. So a critical part of feedback is having another chance. So if I, if you produce a page of writing and I give you feedback on it, I really need to give you a chance to revise that to incorporate the feedback. That’s the learning. And with AI, it’ll very happily generate and go over and over as long as you like.Diane TavennerExactly, exactly. It’s transformational. That was at the core of Summit learning when we built it was this idea of revision. We called it revision and redemption because it was such a break from sort of traditional. You know, I remember as a teacher having my red pen, I was an English teacher and I would spend, you know, labor over giving all this feedback. And then kids would look at the grade and then in the garbage it would go because there was no reason for them to read the feedback in their mind. The whole system was oriented, you know, towards just getting the grade and moving on.Super helpful. How many of these, you know, tools, products, etc on your map go beyond Chatbots? You probably know that I’m very skeptical of Chatbot. Michael and I both sort of sit in this camp of it feels like that’s all anyone or not anyone. Lots of people only understand AI to sort of be a chat bot. And it’s so much more. So how, how, how are you seeing the division happening there? Is there hope that we’re moving beyond Chatbots? What, what’s it look like?Horizontal vs. Vertical AI ApplicationsLaurence HoltYeah, I think that goes to the sort of, sometimes it’s called sort of horizontal versus vertical applications, where horizontal is ChatGPT. Right. You can ask it anything and it’ll do a, you know, decent job in many cases. But then that has actually, I think, been the case for the, maybe the first year plus of what we were seeing on the map. Most tools were either chatbots or they were kind of thinly wrapped versions, let’s call them, of existing large language models which, you know, and again, those models, underlying models get better, so the tools get better. But to go further than that, we need, and it’s not just our sector, I think all sectors need to start thinking about vertical applications, which is much harder. And that involves deeply understanding what, what kids or teachers are trying to get done and building with that in mind. It means a lot more context than a chatbot that you just fire up has.And in particular, I think we have not yet got to the point where we have tools that understand the instructional context. Like what am I trying to teach today? Where are we in the curriculum? The pacing calendar and number one, and then number two, data on students. What is it in particular that my class needs? That’s different from everyone else, either in terms of interests or maybe assets, gaps? There are, I think of, no tools at all today that can take all of that into account and then use that to suggest the next most effective step for you or craft an activity or suggest a warm up. They are mostly doing that based on really, you know, almost no info.Michael HornSo let me, let me ask this. You listed two other use cases that you’re seeing as sort of the big ones out there, generating materials and AI tutoring. I’m curious how both of those measure up in terms of effectiveness. It seems to me that I’ll give you my prior and then you can push back on both. But on the generating material side, it seems like this is actually one of the things that the HQIM high quality instructional material movement has almost been trying to push back on, right, is we need more coherence, not sort of just lots of random walks of materials. So I’m curious how that plays itself out in classrooms.And then on the AI tutoring one, it’s one that several of our guests have mentioned that they’re quite bullish about. But I confess at least what I’m seeing about like in actual schools, it seems like it works great for the autodidact learner who’s gonna choose study mode. But most people are not engaging outside of, you know, when I’m walking my dog and have a nice conversation on a just in time topic that I, that I’m curious about, I, I don’t see a heck of a lot on, on the AI tutoring that that has me convinced that this is really working. But I’m curious your take on both of those because you’ve looked at them much more seriously than I have.Laurence HoltYeah, I’m hopeful for both, but I don’t think either are there yet in materials we’ve got. I think if materials means give me a quiz on, you know, on unit rate for my sixth graders, AI is pretty good. But if you go beyond that and you want it to adapt a lesson, let’s say to take in particular context such as, you know, my kids need a reminder of fractions and also need to learn unit rate. That’s a really hard task that involves knowing, learning science, knowing developmental psychology, empathy, what active learning, engaging kids as well as the content knowledge. The models are pretty good on content knowledge. You know, they win Math Olympiads but they don’t know the rest of those things. And we lack evals, which is the AI community term for an evaluation, a way of measuring whether what the AI just gave you is actually good. In particular, we lack that for materials.They’re actually worsening the coherence problem right now, for the most part, tending to generate yet more stuff. And the teacher’s left trying to fit all those pieces together.Michael HornGotcha. What about on the tutoring front? And I know you’ve been running some personal experiments here I think so I’m really curious to learn from you.Laurence HoltYeah. I have been working recently with a group of middle schoolers in the Bronx, many of whom are multiple years behind in math. And I wanted to have the experience of being a long way out of my zone of proximal development, like they are. They’re being taught on grade level, but they’re missing many pre-building blocks. Yeah, yeah. So I thought, well, what am I? Where am I? Horribly outside of my ZPD. And of course, you won’t be surprised to learn lots of places where I’m. But one in particular I chose was quantum mechanics.So I asked Claude actually give me a graduate level problem on quantum mechanics. And it did. And I could make absolutely no sense of it. So then I said, okay, so you’re my tutor. And I won’t understand all the math, but I want to make sure I get an intuitive sense of what’s happening here. Step me through it, Never tell me the answer, and let’s see how far we can get. And it took, honestly, about 45 minutes. But it was a fun 45 minutes.And I kind of solved it with so much scaffolding, I’m not sure it was me that solved it, but I definitely got a sense of what was happening. I then said, give me another problem. And I couldn’t make any sense of that one either. But I had the feeling that after maybe, you know, 10, 12, 20 of those, I might start to be, at least I’d be ready for a course on quantum mechanics. So what I think I took from that was obviously I had something you guys talk about a lot which is curiosity that kept me going for 45 difficult minutes. And I knew how to ask and answer the questions.And when I could just say, nope, I could not understand what you said at all. Let’s try again. Remember, all I have is high school math. And Claude would go with that. But the thing that I took away from it that I really had, that I see is much harder to get in middle school is I had this utter conviction that I could get it however long it was going to take. I thought, really, there’s nothing here that I couldn’t, given the time I could get. So I just kept going. Whereas of course that’s not true of a lot of kids who’ve been told for years that they don’t know math and no one around them is a math person.And so they may not have that same sense of self efficacy to battle through.Diane TavennerIt’s what you’re saying so important I want to make sure people aren’t missing this. Let me think how to, how to ask a question that is, is going to surface that.Curiosity Stifled in EducationDiane TavennerSo, we have a system of education that in many ways disincentivizes curiosity. Right. Like we have so become so focused on like students, well so many things. But like basically the well run classroom means that every five minutes or so a teacher is prompting a student to do something. There’s like never a moment where they’re actually just following their curiosity or doing that for a reason. And so so many of the pieces you just said, whether it be mindset or belief in myself or curiosity, are not things that we’re encouraging or cultivating. And in fact we’re actively discouraging in our classroom. So one of the things I get confused about is how do we think AI is actually going to come in and quote, change education when the uses of AI right now require all are literally counter to what the system and the model is.I know we are thinking about this. That wasn’t a good question.Laurence HoltNo, I get it.Michael HornWe can riff. We can riff. Go for it.Laurence HoltYeah. So I think often when I see kids asking a question out of curiosity in class, it is seen by the teacher as sort of not on topic for today. Right. When I’ve got to get through this material and I’ve heard some really great questions that got passed over. One of them in a lesson on the human body and the circulatory system, a kid asked, so the body stores some of these things like energy, why doesn’t it just store oxygen? Then I could breathe underwater. And that’s like, okay, that’s a really good question. But the teacher had to move on. So AI of course very happy to answer those things all day long.And I think JM this goes to something that I see in the classrooms that are used, not all of them, but the ones that are starting to use AI now I see a sort of AI effect which is the energy shifts. So if you go from a sort of teacher led discussion with only a few kids involved to okay, now let’s write some short answers on this close reading we just did. And AI will give you feedback on that and engage you in a conversation. And kids really are on task and are. They may not always be on point because they kind of follow their interests and AI has the job of kind of nudging them back. When I ask kids, do you like, would you rather go back to the old way of teaching? They say no, because, well, firstly, interestingly, they say because I get more time with my teacher, which is interesting and counterintuitive. The reason being the teacher’s spending less time just leading whole class sessions and actually can now circulate.And then the second thing they say is, I don’t think anyone has ever paid such attention to my thinking as this, which, you know, which again, sort of makes sense that who has time in a school when you have a class of 25 kids, but they really feel like it’s someone, they say someone is paying attention to what I’m thinking and engaging with it. And that’s new.Michael HornThat’s promising though. I think what you’re just outlining, it goes to an intuition that Diane and I have had, I think, which is we’ve been most excited around AI in sort of the potential for using AI to create de novo school designs or de novo classroom designs that escape. Right. The traditional model. And that our contention, I think, has been that getting into new models, would be actually very key to cracking the 5% problem that you’ve written about around edtech usage. Right. It may be great in the study, but only 5% of students in fact use it in the recommended doses. And it’s not just simply layering the AI over the existing practice such that you still have the whole classroom model and perhaps not the room for that sort of individual attention you just described in many ways.Maybe you have to describe the 5% problem a little bit more in depth from your perspective for our listeners. But like, is that similar to how you see AI? Maybe could solve it, but it’s not the AI, it’s actually the redesign itself. What’s your take on that?Laurence HoltYeah, so much there. I guess I first want to say one of the issues, there’s definitely several issues that we face with these sort of AI enabled classrooms that don’t really require a new school model. I mean, I think that helps, but you can still introduce that into your high school English class. But one of the issues is when you walk into the class, it looks like a lot of kids looking at screens. And that’s not what anybody. That’s not what school ultimately should be. We don’t want to be doing that all day. And I think we lack tools that can be more social.So imagine actually what I’m doing is I’m debating with two other students this idea I have about what we just read, and there’s an AI helping and nudging and just making us better collaborators and listeners. That feels like A, that’s a really important, durable skill, but B, it’s just a better way of learning. So we don’t, right now there are no tools that do that. I think they’re coming because technically it’s possible. But the 5% problem to turn to that, Michael, that I wrote about was simply the finding that there are many tools out there. Khan Academy, iReady, IXL, several others that have actually great evidence that students learn when they use them, if they use them at the recommended dose. So it’s a dosage question.And that dose is usually just as little as 30 minutes a week. And so they’ve shown that if for kids who use it 30 minutes a week, they will learn, they will accelerate their learning. But then when you read the small print, it turns out that the percentage of kids who use these tools 30 minutes or more a week is about 5 or 6%. It’s extremely low. And so the question is why? And the truth is we don’t know why. But when it goes to implementation, enactment and any good. So there’s literature is full of practices that we know can be more effective in classrooms, active learning, long list of things that, when done well, are very effective, but it’s extremely difficult to scale them. So the really interesting question, I think for AI is can it make it easier for teachers to implement well, things that they, in my experience, would love to be doing, but the preparation would take too long. The core program doesn’t really allow it. So I think that we haven’t. Again, that’s another area where we haven’t seen any tools so far. There are some that will listen to your class and give you feedback on it as a teacher, but so far they are fairly rudimentary. I think I’m really excited about that area getting much deeper.AI in Classrooms: Challenges & PotentialDiane TavennerI’m gonna ask you to spend a minute more here on two examples you gave because again, I think they’re so powerful and I think they illustrate some of the blockers and challenges we have and maybe why people don’t build these technologies. So the one you just said of how do we have three students in a, you know, high school English class who are having a debate or a discussion and what can AI do there? Where they’re not looking at the screen. But I think what you’re hinting at, what comes to my mind is AI can actually listen to that conversation now, literally. And it can then offer feedback, literally real time, to the three participants about everything from their amount of participation to the quality of their answer. It can prompt more questions when they get stuck. In my mind, people aren’t building this because they’re terrified of privacy implications. What’s the hardware that we’re actually using that does that, what does that do to a classroom and all that? What do you think the blockers are and the limitations to this type of, you know, you’ve built things on the commercial side before.You know, how’s this market going to actually emerge I think?Laurence HoltYeah, I think demand is the question here. And the map that we created is really about supply side. It does give us some signal on, you know, if we see lots more AI tutors, then someone must be using them. And we do see that. But for this kind of social learning tool, there are some examples out there, but in a way, we haven’t structured the curriculum or the lessons that have been written today. We’re not written with any of this content capability in mind. So I think it’s up to publishers and others to start rethinking what could this look like now we have these capabilities. What you described, an AI listening to me could be, it could be sort of like Alexa, but maybe less annoying. It could be your Chromebook.The technology is already there and it’s actually already in the classroom. We now have great bandwidth in many classrooms, not all of them, but it’s more. At what point do I turn to that? I think that is a question comes back to coherence because I know if I just introduce these new clever tools into my classroom, I may actually be damaging coherence. We might not be getting, giving kids learning experiences that reinforce the big message, the things, the big ideas that we’re trying to learn. And that comes back to my sense is the core curriculum providers really need to rethink how all of this can work for the new age. And I’m very excited about that.Diane TavennerInteresting. Super interesting. We’re talking about limitations and what you are seeing, what are you not seeing at the moment that you wish you were seeing? You know, you just alluded to some things that aren’t getting built yet, which is these more collaborative, what else, what you know, when you look at your map, what categories are not there that you wish exist?Laurence HoltYeah, great question. Right from the start, we deliberately included use cases that we couldn’t find any tools that did. And there are still many of those gaps have been filled, but we touched on some of the big ones. Social learning is still extremely sparse. Coherence tools for coherence, tools that help you implement. We talked about, I think also durable skills, you know, things that are close to both of your hearts. I know durable skills and experiential learning, which, you know, such an obvious use case that these tools could help with.But again, there’s a demand question. If I’m trying to get through the academic content and even that’s quite difficult to do in a year, in 140 days of school, then where am I supposed to fit in an opportunity for kids to learn to collaborate or to be creative or to think critically? Even though again, coming back to feedback, AI can listen to your collaboration and give you very simple pointers. It can help you be creative, it can listen to your presentation and help you improve it. That’s all possible now. It’s just finding a place for it in the minutes in a school day and maybe adjusting priorities so that that’s something that we care about. But I would love to. I know you guys focus on this a lot and I think part of what you’re seeing is it’s happening maybe more in micro schools and some other places, but do you see that any signs of that happening in, you know, in the sort of typical traditional public school?Rethinking Educational ToolsMichael HornNot a ton. I mean, I think where I see it, Laurence, is like when I think about some of the tools that have been out there, they’re more around, they’re more efficiency plays. Right. So they are framed to listen to the conversation in the classroom and be a teacher’s aide to the work that they’re already doing, which that’s a perfectly good use case and probably helps a lot in a traditional classroom, but it’s not doing the sort of rethinking of helping a student move from novice to expert learner and be able to have these sorts of conversations. I’ve seen some entrepreneurs approach me with the belief that they have these tools, but I’m not sure there’s a market for it at the moment. I don’t know. You know, to your point, maybe if the core publishers of which there’s, you know, it’s a different number and different names than it was 15 years ago, which is a good thing. Maybe if they led with it, maybe there’d be something different.But right now it feels like that’s a really cool application. How are you going to get it into market is my observation.Laurence HoltYeah. One of the CEOs of a big publisher said to me when I asked, why don’t you already include durable skills and more and better experiences in your curriculum? And he said, just as soon as a large district calls me and says that’s mandated, I’ll do it.Michael HornRight. Yeah. Because they’re following as well. It is why I think that the de novo designs, what John Danner, for example, is doing at Flourish is where this is a focus of his. But that’s going to be a small market for the years ahead. So I don’t think you’re going to see maybe the commercial volume for some time.Laurence HoltYeah, we’re working on it. That’s what, I advise, as you mentioned it XQ Institute. And that’s our key focus. So we’re confident we’ll get there.Diane TavennerI hope that you’re right because I personally am not seeing anything that feels exciting or interesting to me yet on school design and that really sort of has a sense of what is possible now. And then designs around that. That said, lots of conversations with lots of amazing people and some upcoming events where I think we’re going to try to design with big imagination and see if we can just hopefully, you know, inspire some, some new models and directions. So.Laurence HoltI knew it. Diane’s solving the whole thing.Michael HornShe’s going to spur the field to design lots of different models. Yeah, that’ll be good. We just need a lot more creativity in shots and goals and these areas. I think that’s a big piece of it.Laurence HoltSo, and it is a really, it’s a sort of target rich environment. Really. The number of new opportunities that now you could not have imagined three years ago. Things that are possible are all over the place. So I really think this is the time to be trying to grasp them.Diane TavennerAwesome. Well, we could talk to you for very long. Many, many, many more minutes or hours. And so let’s make sure this is, this isn’t the last time that you come back, Laurence.This season of Class Disrupted is sponsored by Learner Studio, a nonprofit motivated by one question. What will young people need to be inspired and prepared to flourish in the age of AI as individuals, in careers and for civil thriving? Learner Studio is sponsoring this season on AI in Education. Because in this critical moment, we need more than just hype. We need authentic conversations asking the right questions from a place of real curiosity and learning. You can learn more about Learners Studio’s mission and the innovators who inspire them at www.learnerstudio.org.Diane TavennerBut for now, let’s wrap today. And as you know, we have this tradition of sharing books. We’re reading things we’re listening to. We try to stay outside of work. And I’m so proud of myself. I’m going to do that today, Michael. For it’s a miracle. But let’s start with you.Anything interesting to share with folks that’s come across your screen or through your ears lately?Laurence HoltYeah, so much. But I’m going to. I’m going to pick something a little nerdy.Michael HornOkay, good.I’ll be the opposite of it from what I’m thinking about at the moment, so.Laurence HoltWhich is I’ve been sort of revisiting some classic books that I really felt I should, I should have read. Brothers Karamazov is one that people tell me is, you know, just so amazing. And indeed it is. But I never managed to get to the end. But I’ve been doing that with an AI co reader. Now there are, and there are apps that let you do this, but I’ve actually found that that always winds up feeling like you’re sort of trying to impress your professor. Which. Which I don’t want to do when I’m reading. But if so I just have now Kindle open in one half of the screen and you know, and GPT say open in the other.And while I’m reading, I just ask it questions. So for instance, Dostoevsky was talking about the fourth estate oppress and how they were worried about it. And so I was asking GPT why were they worried about the 19th century? It didn’t pan out that way. Yeah. And we got into a conversation about is the same true about our worries about social media?Diane TavennerYeah.Laurence HoltYou can tell I’m optimistic. But it was just a really interesting experience. I would encourage people to give it a shot.Michael HornThat’s cool.Diane TavennerI love that. Yeah. Not dissimilar in that. That book in particular. Wow. I have quite a memory of a piece of that book that was very provocative for another day today. So Slow Horses is this great series. This is not the one I’m recommending though.But I hear about it all the time because the lead character ‘s name is almost identical to mine. So everyone always asks me about that. I have no relation whatsoever. But those people who are behind Slow Horses have now created Down Cemetery Road with Emma Thompson. So if you’re, if you’re waiting for the next season of Slow Horses, actually highly recommend this. It’s. The first season’s not even done yet, but it’s great. And Michael was showing me up and being more up to speed, so I had to come back with a little competition there.And, this one just started in October, so I’m on it.Michael HornYou are on top of it. That is awesome. Well, I’m gonna go back a little bit. I’ve been just sort of watching movies and shows with my kids, and so I’ll see your Emma Thompson and go to 2022 with Matilda the Musical. That’s one of the ones that we watched recently along with Lego Masters, a few series, and Karate Kid because I had to bring it back to a classic.Diane TavennerThere you go.Michael HornAnd give him a little education while we were at it.Laurence HoltWas it the original Karate Kid?Michael HornYeah, yeah, yeah. I was tempted to give him one of the more recent remakes. There have been a few now. But I said we got to start at the beginning just so you have some cultural references for what’s to come in the rest of your life. So with that, Laurence, huge thank you for joining us. Fantastic conversation. We touched on a lot, a lot more to dig into. But I like that we left it on an optimistic note as well.And for all of you joining us, we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Amanda Kocon, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer at Edmentum, joined me and Danny to explore how digital curriculum can help scale career-connected learning for all students. Amanda discussed the driving forces behind the shift toward career readiness in K–12 education and emphasized the need to close exposure gaps and lower switching costs for students exploring different career paths. She detailed Edmentum’s recent acquisition of MajorClarity and their partnership with Interplay, which is enabling districts to integrate CTE courses, simulation-based trades training, and comprehensive college and career planning tools. I was excited to dig into how exactly we can scale opportunities for all students to have broad, student-driven career explorations in every district to ensure every student graduates with valuable skills and real career options.Michael HornWelcome to the Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential and live lives of purpose. And to help us illuminate that today, I’m thrilled that my co-conspirator Danny Curtis is here because we’ve got a very good conversation teed up today. Danny, good to see you.Danny CurtisIt’s great to be here, Michael. Always nice to chat with you and especially today because we get to talk about one of our favorite topics.Michael HornExactly. And you and I wrote this piece, I don’t know, about a year and a half ago at this point, I think, for Education Next, where we said, look, career-connected learning really should not be a “for some,” it’s really a “for all,” increasingly. And I think we’ve also though, been puzzling how do we help schools actually execute on that vision? And we’ve found someone that I think can start to shed some light on that. So I’m excited about this conversation, Danny.Danny CurtisYeah, me, too. We wanted to bring on a guest today that is going to help us think through one approach to scaling up more career connected learning and helping districts overcome some of those challenges that they encounter when they do make the decision to move towards career connected learning. And so we are really delighted to have Amanda Kocon, the chief strategy and operations officer at Edmentum, a K12 online learning provider, join us here today. Amanda, welcome.Amanda KoconThank you. It is tremendous to be with you, Danny and Michael.Elevating CTE for Workforce ReadinessDanny CurtisAmanda, as we mentioned up-front, we along with many others nationwide have been pushing for more career-connected learning in K–12. And as we’ll discuss you all at Edmentum, have a big announcement and have been doing a lot of work there. But before we dive into the work you’ve been doing, I want to start with the big picture “why.” In your view, what is driving this shift towards career readiness in K–12?Amanda KoconIt’s the question right now. Right. So if we think back to when Edmentum started this journey of really leaning into career connected learning for all, which is an important part of the story, we started paying attention to what was being provided to kids. So we are at our core a digital first curriculum company. We are a 60 year old plus ed tech company. We’re one of the oldest. We actually started our journey in workforce redevelopment and then focused many years later on the K12 space. But it’s always been sort of part of our DNA.We have always provided CTE courses and curriculum as part of our sort of comprehensive catalogs of offerings. And one of the things about almost four years ago now that we started talking about was what’s the sort of quality of offering that we have and how do we make sure that the same level of intention and rigor and learning design that is going into our core courses, so think your core four, your electives even, is also going into CTE. And so we started this build out in part to say what kids that are thinking about a path direct to direct to the workforce, whether they stop at college or not. Very few people exit high school and retire. It really is career for all. And so how do we get kids better ready with better materials, if you will? And so that’s where we started the journey. I think a huge part of the why for us was paying attention to the nearly 50% plus of that, like really won’t go to college and how do we make sure that they exit high school with something of value? So that’s when we started really building out our own CTE course catalog that we’ve built out over the last three years. And a huge part of that for us was then beginning to realize that as you think about what’s available, how do we combat, two things in particular, so we had started with like, what’s the curriculum that we need to deploy? And then we said, there’s two issues.One is a massive exposure gap. Kids actually don’t have a sense of what’s possible. The second thing we really focused in on is what’s the switching cost? So if we move kids, any kid, through a program of study, if you will, where they don’t learn academic, technical, durable skills and they don’t have a sense of what’s possible post secondary, we probably are going to continue to fail these kids. We will exit them from high school, but they won’t actually be future ready or job ready.Danny CurtisYeah, you lay out a really compelling rationale for this movement towards career and connected learning. And now I want to really zoom in on the offerings that Edmentum is providing in this area. You all just made a big acquisition, the MajorClarity College and Career Readiness platform. And there’s a lot to unpack here. But I want to start with the vision behind the acquisition and the opportunity that it represents. Wondering what challenges have you seen districts face as they implement and scale these programs? And what is the role that digital tools and curriculum play in helping them to address those challenges?Scaling Work-Based Learning SolutionsAmanda KoconSo I think one of the big challenges you laid out, actually, in the intro, which is how do you at scale, bring sort of the level of awareness, exploration, planfulness, curricular apps and programmatic options and then begin to manage what is the holy grail, which is work based learning for kids, in the middle school and high school arena. We, as I said before, started with what is true to us, which is we could become really good high quality digital curriculum providers. So we’ve built up as a starting place over the last three years, well over 200 semesters of CTE courses that is inclusive of 57 pathways and building. And that was an important starting place for us. But we also knew that in order to land a solution that allowed teachers, educators, counselors, superintendents to think about the programs that they offer and how to do that, not just in one building, but across all of their buildings. And we can get into a little bit why that matters in a second. We needed to actually bring the tooling and the solutioning that surrounds our curriculum that sort of integrates better with what is available in a brick and mortar, plus what we can bring that can be digitally or virtually available. And so for me, the whole vision has been let’s bring these two things together.How do we bring the workflow, the tooling, the planning, the career exploration starting in middle school and integrate that with the curricular options that are additive, not reductive in a place so that you have truly an interconnected solution of content, curriculum and tooling. And so the putting these two things together, it has been the vision. And so we’re very excited about the acquisition of MajorClarity and putting these two companies together.Michael HornSo I want to make sure I’m understanding the different pieces, right? Because 57 pathways, 200 semesters of content is already a lot.And so that’s like, I think if I’m hearing you right, that’s like the additive we can’t give exposure to learn about X. Here’s a way to do it. And so then now you have the MajorClarity piece of it that it sounds like makes this more integrated. But I want to make sure you’re putting a pin in it, like, how does this actually work for schools? And sort of what differentiates the Edmentum approach from, you know, because this is a hot space, as you know, a lot of folks are doing different stabs on what college and career readiness mean to them. What differentiates this approach with this integration?Amanda KoconIt’s a great question. So for us, our ability to use MajorClarity really as the entry point. So I’m going to just take you through the student’s journey. So starting in, starting in middle school. And that is where we have decided to start for now. It doesn’t mean we won’t move down into elementary, but you all know that in middle school is really the first opportunity the kids have to change classes. There is actually truly time for things like college and career exploration. And career exploration in particular, whether that’s advisory or in electives.We have interesting inventories that allow students to really think about what they are interested in that generates over time, both in that moment and later, sort of a fit score. Here are some things that you might want to investigate. Edmentum has built out elective courses which help students. Actually we’ve done these with America Succeeds. So they embed durable skills. We’re the first ones to bring it down to middle school. We think middle school is particularly important for students as they start to understand what are those work based skills, terms, terminology. How do you think about and understand what it means to develop communication skills and collaborative skills and even metacognition? How do you understand how you learn starting in middle school? As you start to think about what you might be interested in.When I talked about switching costs, this is a particularly important moment. And the reason it’s particularly a moment for students is the sky’s the limit. We still have plenty of time. If you have a student who’s behind in reading or who needs some help in math, now’s the time we can begin to do some interventions so that they can have the job they really want versus the job later. In high school they are left with right because they only have one or two options at that point. And so we started in middle school with assessment beginning early exploration. As you move through, you begin to think about how you’re planning your programs of study, your academic study, whether you’re interested in pursuing a particular pathway. We have the digital courses to both allow you to do that online.That includes one of the biggest pressure points we hear from schools is I don’t have consistent CTE curriculum and or I can’t get a CTE teacher. So Edmentum as also the operator of two fully virtual schools can work with districts to ensure that we have a CTE teacher who is available to do virtual instruction, if you don’t have somebody in person. As you move through that, you start to do things like test drive activities so you can get a sense of the day in the life sort of rich video, rich understanding we’re going to continue to build that out. We’re very excited to do more than just here’s a doctor, here’s a lawyer, here’s a veterinarian. But here, when you think about what you’re interested in, what your particular assets and leanings are, are other ways you can think about curating both a program of study and a job. As we move through. All of this is localized to the local labor data and so you’re starting to see what’s available locally. That’s not to say that kids in the future won’t also have virtual work experiences, because they will. But we want to localize it as much as possible as well.As you move through from a learning perspective, that’s where I’ve talked about sort of the rich catalog. It reminds me, and you guys will appreciate this, of the early days of blended learning where you have to sort of talk to people about, yes, you are curating some experiences which are taught very explicitly by a CTE teacher. You are going to do welding in person. Some of the things that are part of that journey, however, in the early pathways are things that you actually can do in more of a flipped classroom model that you can actually do digitally that kids can do asynchronously. This is one of the places where we have partnered with Interplay, which is one of the key providers. We met with them. They are somebody who really focuses on helping skilled trades employers get employees ready to be job site ready. We brought that down in high school.Career and College Readiness PathwaysAmanda KoconThose have rich simulations so you can get a pathway around plumbing and electric mechanical, early on and get exposure so that you’re actually job site ready. So think about academic CTE programming, which we’ve talked about, as well as the skilled trades, and begin to get some exposure around those things. As you move through that, you then have all the tooling that you would expect out of a college and career readiness. So we’re not asking kids to pick one path or another. We’re actually saying when you’re doing your programming and you’re thinking about your academic planning, we will lead you into a set of tools and capabilities that allows you to plan your college. So which colleges of our interest, which community colleges might be of interest? How do you think about scholarships, fit, application? We integrate with a common app and that sort of set of tooling. And on the career side, you’re able to do technical school exploration, you’re able to focus on work based learning. And ultimately all of this is building a portfolio over time.So that kids have something of value and that something of value is everything from micro credentials, sort of mini courses that they can take, I think like four to six hours of mini courses that can drop into a resume builder. So they’re beginning to build a resume which I will tell you is as important if you are going to college as it is if you are going directly into the workforce.Michael HornSo Amanda, a lot of what you just described, right, is like a broadening of horizons followed by a series of student driven exploration to make choices. Let’s start at the beginning of the funnel because you mentioned the durable skill piece of that and I’m super curious just to have you question quickly drilled into like what do you mean by durable skills? Because it’s a bit of a catch all term and people mean lots of different things and I, I’ll just give my bias up front so maybe you can answer the question, respond to it a little bit is. Some of the durable skills, it seems to me, are more vocation specific than we might admit. Right. And some are pretty generalizable. And so I’m sort of curious how you think about what do you mean about it and which ones transfer and which ones are actually like this is what this means in this context. This is what it means in this other one.Amanda KoconYeah, we’ve tried to focus, I mean it’s an interesting question both for durable skills and where we’ve tried to focus, even the curricular decisions we’ve made. So we’ve tried to focus, not to double use the word, on those things that are actually durable. And so how do you think about building again it’s like communication. How do you understand what it is to have good collaboration skills, good problem solving skills, good those things that actually are transferable, across not just a job, but across industry. And so we focus there in part because we wanted to make sure we’re anchoring kids on really that understanding of what are the skills beyond the academic skills or the technical skills.Michael HornSo it’s more about helping them even recognize what it looks like when you do this. Even if how you do it might change.Amanda KoconHow you do might change, how you demonstrate it might change. But to be able to think about how do I understand, let’s say like a communication skill, what good communication skills look like? How do I demonstrate that in my work and how do I begin to build just the recognition of those things so I can build towards that. Similarly, on the curricular side, we’ve actually really tried to focus in on what are durable higher paying jobs. That is where we have focused our energy in terms of there’s lots of providers that can provide other things. But we’ve tried to focus on just from a pure mission and landing what is going to be kind of evergreen in a rapidly changing work environment. How do we think about those things?Michael HornGotcha. And you mentioned before that you had an eye toward the 50 plus percent who are not going to go to a traditional college. But are you targeting all schools or is it like segmented? How do you think about that?Serving All Students EquitablyAmanda KoconWe are targeting all schools. And again, the reason I raise that is because we want to serve all kids. Edmentum has always, as a company that really is about learning acceleration, who does a lot of work in intervention. In particular from elementary school to high school, we’ve often served kids who have been under-resourced from the quality of the resources they get. And so when we focused in on where can we be uniquely positioned, what’s sort of at the core of what we do well? It really is, those are our kids, the kids that need something different. The kids who may or may not go to a four year college, they may go directly in the workforce. They may enlist, they may have other paths. What I would say is, and I know I’m speaking to the converted on this, that is increasingly more and more kids.Right. Like, and so I think that moment is one we’re working hard to meet. We really do think though that, like informed decisions as early as possible is super important. So with the help of our partners in the school district, not only are we able to say this kid is interested in this and wants to pursue this, and we can sort of tap into that intrinsic, not just extrinsic, motivation. And we use that then to help kids actually catch up. Right. And get ahead and chart that path that we think is possible for all kids.Danny CurtisAmanda, you talked earlier about the possibility that opens up when you get students started down these paths at an earlier age. And I agree that you’re getting students to test drive and to be thinking about these potential paths at an earlier age in middle school, there’s a lot of benefit to that. And I think there’s probably a balance to be struck because, you know, career planning is not linear for a few different reasons. One, job markets are dynamic careers. Jobs are always changing. And so developing a static job and career identity in a dynamic job market can pose some problems. And then also students are young and still developing and so their minds are likely to change. And so I’d be curious to hear how you think about building these services and structuring these services when these plans are so subject to change.Amanda KoconWe want as much as possible, everything we are doing and how we are partnering with educatives to be expansive and not reductive. And so we’re very focused on, it’s not this career path or nothing, that the job market we are moving kids into is going to continue to evolve and has been. I would say that the pace of the change is actually probably faster than ever. And what I would say, Danny, is that’s important truly for all kids. I mean, to the extent that you can get. That’s what I was talking about a little bit, those two things. So one of them was, you know, what is the exposure gap? Early on you have kids, particularly kids from less resourced environments, not actually even having a sense of what’s possible from a jobs perspective.You know, I sort of have a running saying, if you go into an elementary school classroom, you will usually hear kids want to be, you know, a doctor or veterinarian or a teacher. And it’s because it’s what they have most exposure to. Right. And as they develop a sense of possibility. I will also say, though, that it is our, I think it’s our duty increasingly in the high school arena to make sure that all kids come out with something of value and they are able to demonstrate why, I think that the soft skills, the durable of the professional skills, which reduces that switching costs. I am, let me just say this. I can do math.I can do math. I am literate when I talk about academic skills, those help kids learn and relearn. You want these learners to relearn and relearn throughout their life. I’ve got some soft skills, some professional skills. I can talk about those and know what they are, and I can show up with them on a resume in an interview. And I’ve got some technical skills. I actually have a sense and have learned how to acquire and develop those. If we do that, I think we’re doing better when we think about what secondary education in particular needs to look like.Danny CurtisYeah, the breadth of exposure is so important. And I’m also really excited to learn more about how you are deepening experience with this partnership with Interplay you mentioned earlier. You all are partnering with Interplay to create simulation based coursework aligned to a number of professions, specifically in the trades. And so I’m wondering, could you talk us through what the trade prep program is and how it figures into your larger suite of offerings and would love to hear about how it’s scaling access to these professions it’s aligned to.Skilled Trades Education InitiativeAmanda KoconYeah, this one is in its early days. I would, we like to call this year the day, the year of working really, really closely with school districts on how do we bring these, how do we bring these to life. So there are very few school districts that can set up true programs around the skilled trades for a bunch of reasons including age, right. What age kids can actually get hands-on experience in some of these industries. What’s really exciting is we are bringing down into our sort of pathway the ability to use interplay courses and curriculum both directly with a student, but also to be mixed in with a CTE director on the ground. That allows kids to get exposure both in terms of taking just an overview course of what are the different kinds of skill trades, how do I think about those? What might be of interest? Then being able to go through some of that coursework with the simulations. The simulations are pretty slick.It was the first company that I saw that I thought really landed it without the hardware. A lot of the companies you need to have very specialized hardware. This you do not. You just need to have a regular laptop. And that was pretty cool. It is also one of the few that is being used as much as it is by employers. Now with MajorClarity, what I’m able to do is connect that workspace learning opportunities. So employers in a place in the skilled trades, you all know that it’s very hard right now to get an electrician or a plumber.Interplay is coming at that by helping those employers build a pipeline. We’re trying to connect then that pipeline in K12. I was out in a district just a few weeks ago and I asked the question, you know, I spent a lot of years as the head of strategy for an organization called TNTP. We did a lot of teacher work and teacher recruiting work. So one of my favorite questions to ask a superintendent or a head of HR is what’s the hardest thing to recruit for right now? What I did not expect was that the answer was boiler operators. And I said, well, I’d like to hear some more about that because that’s not typically, I hear, you know, special ed.Michael HornYeah, I was gonna say special ed, Math elementary.Amanda KoconYeah, exactly. And that was the first thing out of this head of HR’s mouth. And I said, well, tell me more. And he said, they’re all retiring. All of the folks who maintain our facilities are retiring. And I said, well, what about a grow your own program? What if we could bring Interplay into your CTE programming where you could get kids job ready, field ready and we could partner them with some of these folks who are retiring as their work based learning in your school district. And you only have to keep them for a couple years post graduation and then they are amazing. If we partnered this was particularly, you know, we partner with some of the union and the employers in this particular place.We would be amazing, you would be an amazing path. Not just you know, for, for these employers if you will and for these kids but frankly a path into the middle class because these are very high paying jobs. The other thing to really focus on is these are not, these are not low paying jobs. These are very high, family sustaining jobs. And so you could see their eyes light up like wait a second, I could, I could do something right by kids and get them literally a pretty incredible local job, help fix the pipeline problem that these employers and that the union themselves have come and said like is an issue for these skilled trades. And in the meantime I could have some assistance maintaining my buildings.Michael HornLove it. All right, last question as we wrap up here. I’m curious. You’ve been dancing around in a variety of ways but like how schools should or do integrate these offerings and you’ve talked about the room for electives and things of that nature. But just like maybe impose your own view of what a good integration looks like and what’s like sort of a bad integration right where it’s not maybe a strategic or giving these kids a true view of what college and career readiness that on ramp looks like for students.Thoughtful, Planful Programming MattersAmanda KoconListen, I would say a good integration is where we see really thoughtful, it doesn’t need to take a long time, but thoughtful top down programming. You’re really thinking about what’s the connective tissue in terms of the tooling, the insights, the data, the reporting that allows me to understand what kids are interested in, how I get them in the courses and the programs that are of most interest and then how do I get them some work based learning experience. And I mean that for all kids. And that thoughtful programming I think is our best implementations, I would say our poorest are where you’re transactionally trying to solve for a particular program you don’t have in sort of a half hearted way or serving up CTE as just a way to get to graduation. And so it’s a last minute effort versus a planful program. And so I would say, you know, increasingly we’re seeing folks really want to do more planful programming. I do think like anything, implementation and planful programming are often hard to pull off. And so we are working really hard to make sure we’re getting, whether it’s us or somebody else that’s coming in and helping to advise on how we stand these up.We are working really hard to do that. And if we’re going to really bring the promise of career, connected learning and opportunities for all, it has to be about really rethinking what the sort of job of a high school is at the end of the day and how do we think about landing that in the day to day. It’s not sexy, but it is the day to day planfulness, programming, scheduling that happens with kids.Michael HornYeah, it seems like it is the question to be asking right now because we see the disengagement and so forth. This seems like a way at that. It seems like a way at the pathways. Like it just seems like a big answer to a lot of problems right now that high schools are facing. So Amanda, huge thanks for coming on and talking about these efforts and we’ll keep a close eye as it continues to develop and you continue to move forward in these different directions giving this comprehensive suite of offerings. So thank you and for all of you tuning in. We’ll be back. Next time on the Future of Education.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Alex Kotran, founder and CEO of the AI Education Project (AIEDU), joined us to dive into what true “AI readiness” means for today’s students, educators, and schools. We explored the difference between basic AI literacy and the broader, more dynamic goal of preparing young people to thrive in a world fundamentally changed by artificial intelligence. The conversation ranged from the challenges schools face in adapting assessments and teaching practices for the age of AI, to the uncertainties surrounding the future of work. The episode leaves listeners with some key questions about the role of education, the need for adaptable skills, and how we can collectively steer the education system toward a future where all students benefit from the rise of AI.Diane TavennerHey, Michael.Michael HornHey, Diane. It is good to see you as always. Looking forward to this conversation today.AI Education and Literacy InsightsDiane TavennerMe, too. You know what I’m noticing, first of all, I’m loving that we’re doing a whole season on AI because I felt like the short one was really crowded. And now we get to be very expansive in our exploration, which is fun. And that means we’ve opened ourselves up. And so there’s so much going on behind the scenes of us constantly pinging each other and reading things and sending things and trying to make sense of all the noise. And just this morning, you opened it up super big. And so it works out perfectly with our guest today. So I’m very excited to be here.Michael HornNo, I think that’s right. And we’re having similar feelings as we go through the series. And I’m, I’m really excited for today’s guest and because I think, you know, there are a lot of headlines right now around executive actions with regards to AI or, you know, different countries making quote, unquote, bold moves, whether it’s South Korea or Singapore or China and how much they’re using AI in education or not. We’re going to learn a lot more today, I suspect, from our guest, and he’s going to help put it all in the context, hopefully, because we’ve got Alex Kotran, excuse me, joining us. He’s the founder and CEO of the AI Education Project, or aiEDU. And aiEDU is a nonprofit that is designed to make sure that every single student, not just a select few, understands and can benefit from the rise of artificial intelligence. Alex is working to build a national movement to bring AI literacy and readiness into K12 classrooms, help educators and students explore what AI means for their lives, their work, and their futures.And so with all that, I’m really excited because, as I said, I think he’s going to shed a little bit of light on these topics for us today. I’m sure we’re only going to get to scratch the surface with him because he knows so much, but he’s really got his pulse on the currents at play with AI and education, and perhaps he can help us separate some of the hype from reality, or at least the very real questions that we ought to be asking. So, Alex, with all that said, no pressure, but welcome. We’re excited to have you.Alex KotranI’ll do my best.Michael HornSounds good. Well, let’s start maybe just your personal story right into this work and what motivates you around this topic in particular, to spend your time on it.Alex KotranI’ve been in the AI space for about 10 years. But you know, besides being sort of proximate to all these conversations about AI, you know, I don’t have a background in software, computer science. I don’t think I have ever written a line of code. I mean, my dad was a software engineer. He teaches CS now. No background in technology or CS, no background in education. And so I actually, I had funders ask me this when I first launched aiEDU like, well like, why are you here? Like, what’s, what’s your role in all of this? You know, my background is in really political organizing. I started my career working on presidential campaign, went and worked for the White House for the Obama administration, doing outreach for the Affordable Care act and other stuff like Ebola and Medicare and, and then found myself in D.C.and after I just kind of got burned out of politics for reasons people probably don’t need to hear and can completely understand. And so it wasn’t that I was so smart to like, oh, I knew AI was the next thing. I just was like, I really want to move to San Francisco. I visited there, visited the city like twice and just fell in love and sort of fell into tech and an AI company that was working in cleantech. And so I was sort of doing AI work before it was really cool. It was like back in 2015, 2016. And then I ended up getting like what at the time was a kind of a really random job that I had a lot of mentors who were like, I don’t know, Alex, like AI, like this is just like a fringe, you know, emerging technology kind of like, you know, 3D printing and VR and XR and the Metaverse, you know, is that really like what you should do? And I just had like, nah, I just want to learn.It seems really interesting. And that’s why I joined this AI company essentially working for family office for the CEO. It was like sort of a hybrid family office, corporate job, doing csr, corporate social responsibility in the legal sector. This is the first company to build AI tools for use in the law. And so I was sort of charged with how do we advance the governance of AI and sort of like the safe and ethical use of AI and the rule of law. And so I basically had a blank canvas and ended up building the world’s first AI literacy program for judges. I worked with the National Judicial College in Stanford and NYU Law, trained thousands of judges around the world in partnership, by the way, with non profits like the Future Society and organizations like UNESCO. And because my parents are educators, I, you know, and my parents are foreign immigrants as well.And so they always ask me about my job and really trying to convince me to go back, to go to law school or get a PhD or something. And I was like, well, no, but, you know, I actually, I’m, I don’t need to go to law school. I’m actually training judges. Like, they’re, they’re coming to learn from me about this thing called AI. And my mom was like, oh, like, well, that sounds so interesting. You know, have you thought about coming, you should come to my school and teach my kids about AI. And she teaches high school math in Akron, Ohio. And I was just like, surely your kids are learning about AI.That’s, you know, my assumption is that we’re at a minimum talking to the future workers about the future of work. I just assume that, you know, like, you know, judges who tend to be older, like, they kind of need to be caught up. And after I started looking around to see, like, is there other curriculum that I could share with my mom’s school, I found that there really wasn’t anything. And that was back in 2019. 2018/2019. So way before ChatGPT and thus AIEDU was born when I realized, okay, this doesn’t exist. This actually seems like a really big problem because even as, even as early as 2018, frankly, as early as 2013, people in the know, technologists, people in Silicon Valley, labor economists, were sounding the alarms, like, AI is, you know, automation is going to replace like tens of millions of jobs.This is going to be one of the huge disruptors. You had the World Economic Forum talking about the fourth Industrial Revolution. Really, this wasn’t much of a secret. It was just, you know, like, esoteric and like, you know, in the realm of like certain nerdy wonky circles. And it just, there wasn’t a bridge between those, the people that were meeting at the AI conferences and the people in education. And I would really say, like, our work now is still anchored in this question of, like, how do you make sure that there is a bridge between the cutting edge of technology and the leadership and decision makers who are trying to chart a course not over the next two years, which is sort of like how a lot of, I think Silicon Valley is thinking in the sort of like, very immediate reward system where they’re just, you know, like, they’re, they’re looking at the next fundraise. But in education, you’re thinking about the next 10 years. These are huge tanker ships that we’re trying to navigate now and we’re entering.I think this is such a trope, but, like, we are really entering uncharted waters. And so, like, steering that. That supertanker is hard and I suppose to really belabor it as maybe AIEDU is sort of like the nimble tugboat, you know, that’s trying to just sort of like, nudge everybody along and sort of like guide folks into the future. And that demands answering some of this core question of the future of work, which hopefully we’ll get some more time to talk about.Michael HornYeah, I want to, I want to move there in a moment, but I, but first, like, I maybe I don’t know that all of our audience will be caught up with all the, you know, sort of this macro environment right where. Where we sit right now in terms of the national policy, executive actions as it pertains to AI and education. They’ve probably heard about it, but don’t know what it actually means, if anything. And so maybe sort of set the scene around where we are today nationally on these actions? What if it is actually meaningful or impactful? What if it is maybe more lip service around the necessity of having the conversation rather than moving the ball, just sort of set the stage for us where we are right now.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Alex KotranIt’s really hard to say. I mean, there’s been a lot of action at the federal level and at state levels and schools have implemented AI strategies. The education space is inundated with, like, discussion and initiatives at working groups and bills and, you know, like, pushes for, like, AI and education. I think the challenge now is, like, we really haven’t agreed on, like, to what end? Like, is this, you know, are we talking about using AI to advance education as a tool? So, like, can AI allow us to personalize learning and address learning gaps and help teachers save time, or are we talking about the future of work and how do we make sure kids are ready to thrive? And there are some that say, well, they. We just need to get them really good at using tools. Which is a conversation I literally had earlier today where there was like a college to career nonprofit and they were like, well, we’re trying to figure out what tools that help kids learn because we want them to be able to get jobs.I think like AIEDU, like, our work is actually, we don’t build tools. We don’t even have a software engineer on our team, which we’re trying to fix, like, if there’s a funder out there that would like to help fund an engineer, we’d love to have one. But our work is really systems change. Because if you like, zoom out and like, this is, I think, where I do have this skill set. And it’s kind of like, again, it’s a bit niche.The education system is not. It’s not one thing. It’s like, it’s sort of like an organism. The same way that like redwood trees are organisms. Like, they’re kind of all connected, the root structure. But it’s actually like you’re looking at a forest that looks very different, you know, that’s not centralized. You know, every state kind of has their own strategy. And frankly, every district, in many cases, you’re talking about, you know, in some cases, like government scale, procurement, discussion, bureaucracy involved.Advancing AI Readiness in EducationAlex KotranSo if you’re trying to do systems change, this is really a project of like, how do you move a really heterogeneous group of humans and different audiences and stakeholders with different motivations and different priorities? And so our work is all about, okay, like, setting a North Star for everybody, which is like defining where we’re actually trying to go, what. And we use the word AI readiness, not AI literacy. Because what we’re, what we care about is kind of irrespective of whether kids are really good at using AI. Like, are they thriving in the world? And then like, how do you get there? Like, like most of our budget goes to delivering that work, you know, doing actual services, where we’re building the human, basically building the human capital and like, the content. So like training teachers, building curriculum, adapting existing curriculum, more so than building new curriculum, but like integrating learning experiences into core subjects that build the skills that students are going to need. And those skills, by the way, are not just AI literacy, but durable skills like problem solving, communication, and core content knowledge frankly, like being able to read and write and do math, we think is actually really important still, if not more important. And then sort of the third pillar to our work is really catalyzing the ecosystem.And because the only way to do this is by building a movement, right? Like, sure, there. There’s an opportunity for someone to build a successful nonprofit that’s delivering services today. But if you actually want to change the world and really solve this problem on the timescale required, you have to somehow rally the entire, there’s like a million K12 nonprofits. We need all of them. This is like an all hands on deck moment. And so our organization is really obsessed with, like, how do we stay small and almost like operate as the intel inside to empower, like, the existing nonprofits so that they don’t have to all pivot and, like, become AI because, like, there’s just not enough AI experts to go around. If every school and every nonprofit wanted to hire an AI transformation officer.Like, there just wouldn’t be enough people for them to hire.Diane TavennerYeah, they’re still trying to all hire a good tech lead in schools. We’re definitely not getting an AI expert in every school soon. So you’re, you’re speaking my language, you know, sort of change management, vision, leadership 101, etc. I’m wondering, you know, sort of not necessarily the place we were thinking we’d go in this conversation, but I think it’d be fun to go, like, really deep for a moment that I think is related to your North Star comment. What does school look like in the age of AI? When kids are flourishing, when young people are flourishing, and when they’re successfully launching? I think that’s what the North Star has to describe.And you just started naming a whole bunch of things that are still important in school, which feel very familiar to me. They’re all parts of the schools that I’ve built and designed and whatnot. And so I think one of the interesting things is maybe we’ll then build back up to policy and whatnot. But, like, what does it look like if we succeed, if there is this national movement, we’re successful. We have schools or whatever they are that are enabling young people to flourish. What do you think that that looks like?Alex KotranYeah, this is the question of our day. Right. I mean, I think this is where, I mean, just to go back to this, like, state of play. I think, like, we’re kind of. It’s very clear that we are in the age of AI, right? This is no longer some future state. And frankly, like, ignore all the talk about AI bubbles because it kind of doesn’t matter. I mean, there was, there was like, there’s always a bubble. There was a bubble when we had railroads.There was a bubble when we had, like, in the oil boom. There was a bubble with the Internet. You know, there probably will be some kind of a bubble with AI, but that’s kind of like part and parcel with transformational technologies. Nobody who’s really spent time digging these technologies believes that there’s not going to be AI sort of totally proliferated throughout our work in society in like, 10 years, which is, again, the timeframe that we’re thinking about. The key question is, though, like, what is it? Like, what does it mean to thrive? And so there’s more than just getting a job. But I think most people would admit that, like, having a job is really important. So maybe we start there and we can also talk about, you know, the, the social, emotional components of just sort of like, being able, being resilient to some of like, the onslaught of synthetic media and like, AI companions as other stuff. One of, if not the most important thing is, like, how do you get a job and like, have like, you know, be able to support yourself and, and that question is really unanswered right now.Uncertainty in AI and Future JobsAlex KotranAnd so everybody in the education system is trying to figure out, like, well, what is our strategy? But we don’t know where we’re going? Like, we really do not know what the jobs of the future are. And like, I’ve, like, you hear platitudes like, well, it’s not that AI is going to take your job, it’s that somebody using AI is going to take your job. Which is a kind of a dumb thing to say because it’s, it’s correct. I mean, it’s like, it’s like, basically like, okay, either AI is going to do all the jobs, which I don’t like, like, that actually may happen, some people say, sooner than later. I just assume it’s going to be a long, long time if it ever, if we ever get there. And so until we get there, that means that there are humans doing jobs and AI and technology doing other aspects of work. So, like, what are the humans doing is really the important question. Not just like, are they using AI? But like, how are they using AI? How aren’t they using AI? Until we get more fidelity about what the future of work looks like, what are the skills you should be teaching? Because, like, you know, like, I think a lot about, like, cell phones.And you go back to 2005 and you can imagine a conversation where it’s like, and all this is completely true, right? In 2005, it would be correct to say that, you know, you will not be able to get a job if you don’t know how to use a cell phone. You will be using a cell phone every single day, whether you’re a plumber or a mathematician or an engineer or an astrophysicist. And yet I think most of us would agree that, like, we shouldn’t have, like, totally pivoted education to focus on, like, cell phone literacy because, like, nobody’s going to hire you because you know how to use a phone and AI like, probably is going to some degree get there. I mean, it’s already sort of there, right? Like, sure, there are people who will charge you money to teach you prompt engineering, but you could also just open up Gemini and say, help me write a prompt. Here’s what I want to do. And it will basically tell you how to do it.Diane TavennerI mean, we. You’ve seen this. You might not be old enough to remember this, but I was a teacher when everyone thought it was a really good idea to teach keyboarding in school. It’s like a class. What we discovered is actually if you just have people using technology, they learn how to use the keyboard. Right? Like, it happens in the natural course of things and you don’t have a class for it. So what I hear you saying is like, your approach is not about this sort of, you know, there’s some finite set of information or skill, you know, not even skills in many ways that we’re going to teach kids. But it’s like, what does it look like to have them ready for the world that honestly is here to today and then keeps evolving and changing over the next 10 years? And so where to even go with that, Michael because.Michael HornI mean, part of me wonders, Alex, like, if I start to name the things that remain relevant, what, like, maybe the conversation to have is like, what’s less relevant in your view, based on what the world of work and society is going to look like?What’s the stuff that we do today that you know, will feel quaint? Right, that we should be pruning from?Diane TavennerYeah, cursive handwriting. That is still hotly debated by, by the way.Alex KotranBut, you know, although you get like Deerfield Prep and they’re going back to pen and paper.Michael HornRight. So that, I mean, that’s kind of where I’m curious. Like, what practices would you lean into? What would you pull away from? Because, I mean, that’s part of the debate as well. Like our friend Andy [Smarick], I believe at the time we’re recording it, just had a post around how it’s time for a, you know, a pause on AI in all schools. Right. Not sure that’s possible for a variety of reasons. But, like, what would you pull back on? What would you lean into? What would you stop doing that’s in schools today, as you think about that readiness for the world that will be here in your, we’re all guessing, but 10 years from now.Alex KotranNow, what to pull back on? I mean, look, take home essays are dead. Don’t assign take-home essays like the detectors are imperfect. It’s like, and as a teacher, do you really want to be like an, you know, a cyber forensics specialist? Like that’s not the right use of your time. And also you’re using AI. So it’s a bit weird to the dissonance of like, oh, like empower teachers with AI, but then like, we need to prevent kids from using it. But I think they’re like low hanging fruit. Like, okay, don’t assign take-home essays.The way to abstract, that is students are. You can call it cheating, let’s just call it shortcuts. What we do need to do is figure out, okay, how can AI, how is AI being used as a shortcut? And whether you ban it in schools, kids are going to use it out of school. And so teachers need to figure out how to create assessments and homework and projects that design such that you can’t just use AI as a shortcut. And there’s like, this is a whole separate conversation. But just like to give one example, having students demonstrate learning by coming into the class and presenting and importantly having to answer questions in real time about a topic. You can use all the AI you want, but if you’re going to be on the spot and you don’t understand whatever the thing is that you’re presenting about and you’re being asked questions like, you know, that’s the kind of thing where sure, use all the AI. If it’s helpful, you might just.But ultimately you just need to learn the thing. But like the more important question is like, I don’t know if school changes as much as people might think. I think it does change. I think there’s a lot that we know needs to change that is kind of irrespective of AI. Like we need learning to be more engaging. We need more project based learning. We need to shift away from just sort of like pure content knowledge, memorization. But that’s not necessarily new or novel because of AI.I think it is more urgent than ever before.Michael HornI’m curious, like what’s. Because I do think this is also hotly debated, right? Like in terms of the role of knowledge and being able to develop skills and things of that nature. And so I’m just sort of curious, like what’s the thin layer of knowledge you think we need to have? Or, or like Steven Pinker’s phrase, common knowledge RightAnd what’s the stuff we don’t have? Like we don’t have to memorize state capitals, right? Maybe.Diane TavennerNo. Yeah, I don’t think we need to memorize State capital, because, yeah, but keep going.Michael HornYeah, yeah, I’m curious now. It’s like, right, like as we think about, because we do have this powerful assistant serving us now and we think about what that means for work. And I, but I guess I’m just curious, like, what does that really mean in terms of that balance, right? Like, what iis all knowledge learned through the project or this, you know, how do we think about, you know, and it’s a lot of just in time learning perhaps, which is more motivating. I’m curious, like, how you think about that.Alex KotranI think this needs to be like, backed by, like research, right? Like, sure, it probably is, right, that you don’t need to memorize all the state capitals. But then I think you, you start to get to a place where like, okay, well, but do you even need to learn math? Because AI is really good at math and I think math is actually a good analog because I don’t really use math very much or I use relatively simplistic math day to day. I, I think it was really valuable for me to like, have spent the time building computational thinking skills and logic. And also just math was really hard for me and it was challenging. And like the process of learning a new abstract, hard thing. I do use that skill, even some of the rote memorization stuff. You know, my brother went to med school and like they spent a lot of time just memorizing like completely just like every tiny aspect of the human body.They like have to learn it. It’s actually like, I think doctors are really interesting, a great way to kind of double click on this because if doctors don’t go through all of that and don’t understand the body and go through all of the rote process of literally taking like thousand question tests where they have to know like random things about blood vessels. And even if they’re never going to deal with that specific aspect of the human body, doctors kind of like build this sort of like generalized set of knowledge and then also they spend all this time like interacting with real world cases. And you, you start to build instincts based on that and, and you talk to hospitals about like, oh, what about, you know, AI to help with diagnosis? And one of the things I hear a lot of is, well, we’re worried about doctors losing the capacity to be a check on the AI because ultimately we hear a lot about the human in the loop. The human in the loop is only relevant if they understand the thing that they’re looped into. So, yeah, so like, I don’t know, I mean, maybe we.Diane TavennerYeah, you’re onto something. You’re spurring something for me that I, I actually think is the new thing to do and haven’t been doing and aren’t talking about. And that is this, let me see if I can describe it as I’m understanding it, unfold the way you’re talking about it. So I had a reaction to the idea of memorizing the state capitals because memorizing them is pretty old school, right? It calls back to a time where you aren’t going to be able to go get your encyclopedia off the shelf and look up the capitals. Like you have to have that working knowledge in your mind, if you will, to have any sense of geography and, you know, whatever you might be doing. And it was pretty binary.Like it really wasn’t easy to access knowledge like that. So you really did have to like memorize these things. Math, multiplication tables get cited often and whatnot for fluency in thinking and whatnot. So I don’t think that goes away. But it’s different because we have such easy access to AI and so there isn’t this like dependency on, you’re the only source of that knowledge, otherwise you’re not going to be able to go get it. But it doesn’t take away the need to have that working understanding of the world and so many things in order to do the heavier lifting thinking that we’re talking about and the big skills. And I think that, I don’t think there’s a lot of research on that in between pieces, like, how do you teach for that level of knowledge acquisition and internalization and whatnot? And how do you then have a, you know, a more seamless integration with the use of that knowledge in the age of AI when it’s so easily accessible? So that feels like a really interesting frontier to me. That doesn’t look exactly the same as what we’ve been doing, but isn’t totally in a different world either.It is restricted, responsive and reflective of the technology we have and how it will get used now.Rethinking Assessments and Learning StrategiesAlex KotranYeah, it’s, it’s a helpful push because like, what I’m not saying is that I know everything in school is fine. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to a superintendent who would say, oh, I’m feeling good about our assessment strategy. Like, we’ve known that and because really what you’re describing is assessments like what, like what are we assessing in terms of knowledge, which becomes the driver and incentive structure for teachers to like, you know, because to your point. Are you spending five weeks just memorizing capitals or are you spending two weeks and then also then saying, okay, now that you’ve learned that, I want you to actually apply that knowledge and like come up with a political campaign for governor of, you know, a state that you learned about and like, tell us about like why you’re going to be picking those. You know, tell us about your campaign platform. Right. And you know, like, how is it connected to what you learned about the geography of that state? So it’s like adapting, integrating project based learning and more engaging and relevant learning experiences. And then like the mix and the balance of what, what’s happening in the classroom is sort of, and this is the, the challenging thing because it’s like the assessments will inform that, but it’s also there the assessments are downstream of sort of like it’s not just about getting the assessments right, but it’s like, why are we assessing these things? And so that you very quickly get to like, well like, what is the future of work? And because like, yeah, I mean like, you probably don’t need to learn the Dewey Decimal system anymore.Even though being able to navigate knowledge is maybe one of the most important things, certainly something I use every day.Diane TavennerOne of the things we tend to do in US Education, Alex, is be so US centric and we forget that other people on the planet might be grappling with some of these things. I know you track a lot of what happens around the globe. What can we look at as models or interesting, you know, experiments or explorations. Everything from like big system change work, which I know we have different systems across the world, so that’s different. It’s a little bit, it’s not groundswell, it’s a top down but like anything from policy, big system all the way down to like who, who might be doing interesting things in the classroom. Where are you looking for inspiration or models across the globe?Alex KotranI mean, South Korea is a really interesting case study. You mentioned South Korea. I think at the beginning of this, during the intro they were just in headlines because they had done this big push. They would like roll out personalized learning nationwide. And then they announced that they were rolling back or sort of slowing down or pausing on the strategy. I forget if it was a rollback or a pause, but they’re basically like, wait, this isn’t working. And what they found is that they hadn’t made a requisite investment in the teacher capacity. And that was clear.And so part of the reason I’m tracking that is because I don’t know that there’s very much for us to learn from what any school is doing right now, beyond, like, there’s a lot for us to learn in the sense of like, how can we empower teacher, like, how do we empower teachers to run with this stuff? Because they are doing that. You know, like, I think there’s a lot to learn from a, like a mechanical standpoint of like, implementation strategies. But I don’t know that anybody has figured this out because like, nobody can yet describe what the future of work looks like. And I know this because the AI companies can’t even describe what the future of work looks like. You know, you had like Dario Amodei at Anthropic seven months ago, saying in six months, 90% of code is going to be written by AI, which is not the case. Not even close.Diane TavennerAnd Amazon’s going to lay off 30,000 white collar workers this week,Alex KotranWhich they did.. Yes. And so you have. But is that really because of AI or is that because of overhiring from interest rates? I mean there’s like, so, so until we answer this question of like, what is like. And really the way to say what is the future of work is like, to put it in educational terms, how are you going to add value to the labor market? Like, David Otter has this like, example which I think is really important. It’s like, you know, the crosswalk coordinator versus the air traffic controller. And the, like, we pay the air traffic controller four times as much because any one of us could go, be a crosswalk coordinator like today, just give us a vest and a stop sign. I don’t, I assume you’re not moonlighting as an air traffic controller. I’m certainly not.It would take us, I think, I don’t know what the process is, but I think years to acquire the expertise. And so there is this barrier of expertise to do certain things. And what AI will do is lower the barriers to entry for certain types of expertise, things like writing, things like math. And so in those environments where AI is increasingly going to be automating certain types of expertise, then, well, for people to still get wages that are good or to be employed, they have to be adding something additional. And so the question of like, what are the humans adding? Again, we get to stuff like durable skills. We get to stuff like a human in the loop. But I think it’s much more nuanced than that. And the reason I know that is because there’s the MIT study.I think it was a survey, but let’s call it a study. I think they called it a study. So there’s a study from MIT that found that 95% of businesses, AI implementations failed, have not been successful. So really what we’re seeing is, yes, AI is blowing up, but for the most part, most organizations have not actually cracked the code on like, how to like, unlock productivity and like. And so I think that there’s actually quite a lot of business change management and organizational change that’s coming. And so actually kind of trying to hone in on what does that look like, I think is maybe the key, because that will take 10 years if you look at computers. Computers, like, could have revolutionized businesses long before, but they ended up getting adopted. I mean, it took like decades actually for, you know, spreadsheets and things like that to become ubiquitous.And like Excel is a great example of something. I was just talking to this, this expert from the mobile industry who was talking about, like, the interesting thing about spreadsheets was it didn’t just automate because there were people who literally would hand write, you know, ledgers before Excel. And so obviously that work got automated. But the other thing that spreadsheets did, where they created a new category of work, which is like the business analysts, because. Because before spreadsheets there was really the only way to get that information was to like, call somebody and sort of like compile it manually. And now you had a new way to look at information which actually unlocked a new sort of function that didn’t exist. And that meant, like, businesses now have teams of people that are like, doing layers of analysis that they didn’t realize that they could do before. And soDiane TavennerI wonder, what you’re saying is sparking two things for me. And again, we could talk probably all day, but we don’t have all day. So sadly, I think this might be bringing us to a close here for the moment. But I’m curious what both of you think on this because you brought up air traffic controllers. And in my new life and work, I’m very obsessed with careers and how people get into them and whatnot. I’ve done deep dives on air traffic controllers. And it’s, my macro point here is going to be.I do wonder if this moment of AI is also just extreme, exposing existing challenges and problems and bringing them to the forefront. Because let me be clear, training air traffic controllers in the US was a massive problem before AI came around, before any of this happened. It’s a really messed up system. It is so constrained. It’s not set up for success. Like, it’s just such a disaster and a mess and it’s such a critical role that we have. And it’s probably going to change with AI. Like, so you’ve just got all these things going on.And I’m wondering, Michael, from your perspective, is that what happens in these, you know, moments of disruption and is that all predictable and how do we get out of it? And then, Alex, you’re talking about. I was having a conversation this morning about this idea that all these companies no longer are hiring sort of those entry level analysts, or they’re hiring far fewer of them. And my wondering is no one can seem to answer this question yet. Great. Where’s your manager coming from? Because if you don’t employ any people at that level and they haven’t sort of learned the business and learned things, what do you think they’re just sitting on the sidelines for seven, eight years and then they’re ready to slide in there into, you know, the roles that you are keeping? And so are these just problems that already existed that are now just being exposed, you know, what’s going on? What do you all think?Job Market Trends and AIAlex KotranSo, first of all, we really don’t know if the, like, I’m not convinced that the reason that there’s high unemployment among college grads is because of AI. I mean, I think there was overhiring because of interest, low interest rates. I think that companies are trying to free up cash flow to pay for the inference costs of these tools. And, and I think in general, like, you know, we’re, there’s going to be like, sort of like boom, bust cycles in terms of hiring in general. And we’ve been in a really good period of high employment for a long time. I think what, what is clear is if you talk to like earlier stage companies, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine at Cursor, which is like one of the big vibe coding companies, like blowing up, worth lots and lots of money. And I asked them about, like, oh, like I keep hearing about like, you know, companies aren’t hiring entry level engineers anymore because like, you’re better off having someone with experience.And he’s like, all of our engineers are in like their early 20s. Huh. Okay, that’s interesting. Well, yeah, because actually it’s a lot faster and easier to train somebody who’s an AI native who learned software engineering while vibe coding. But he’s like, but we’re a small organization that’s like basically building out our structure as we go so we don’t have to like operate within sort of like the confines. I think there’s going to be this idea of like incumbent organizations. They have the existing hierarchy because ultimately you’re looking for people who are like really fast learners who can like learn new technology, who are adaptable and who are good at like doing hard stuff. If you’re a small organization, you’re probably better off just like hiring young people that like, you know, have those instincts.If you’re a large organization, what you might do is just maybe you’re laying off some of the really slow movers and then retaining and promoting the people that are already in place and have those characteristics. And then your point about like training the next generation, like law firms are thinking about this a lot because like you could, maybe you could automate all the entry level associates, but you do need a pipeline. But then you get to do you need middle managers? I mean like if the business models are less hierarchical because you just don’t need all those layers, then maybe you don’t worry so much about whether you need middle management and it’s more about do you need more. I think what companies are going to realize is they actually need more systems thinkers and technology native employees that are integrated into other verticals of knowledge work that outside of tech. So like, if you think about marketing and like business and customer success and you know, like non profit world fundraising and policy analysts, like all of these teams that generally have like people from the humanities. You know, I think companies are going to say, okay, how do we actually get people that like can do some vibe coding and have a little bit of like CS chops to build out some, you know, much more efficient and productive ways for these teams to operate. But like nobody knows. Nobody knows.I don’t know. Michael?Michael HornI love this point, Alex, where you’re ending and that like, and I like the humility frankly in a lot of the guests that we’ve had around. This is like the honesty that we’re all guessing a little bit at this future and we’re looking at different signals right. As we do. I think my quick take off this and I’ll try to give my version of it, I guess is you mentioned David Otter earlier at mit, Alex. Right. And part of his contention is that actually, right, it levels expertise between jobs that we’ve paid a lot for and jobs that we haven’t and more people like, as opposed to technology that is increasing inequality. This may be a technology that actually decreases inequality. And I guess it goes to my second thing, Diane, around what the question you asked and air traffic control training is a great example.But like, fundamentally, the organizations and processes we have in place have a very scarcity mindset. And I suspect they’re going to fight change and we’re going to need new disruptive organizations, similar to what Alex was just saying, that look very differently to come in. And it gets to a little bit of, I think what everyone says with technology, like the short term predictions are huge. They tend to disappoint on that. The long term change is bigger than we can imagine. And I guess I kind of wonder is the long term change what we. Alex, earlier on this season we had Reed Hastings and you know, he has a very abundant sort of society mindset where the robots plus AI plus probably quantum computing, like, are doing a lot of the things, or is it frankly sort of what you or I think Paul LeBlanc would argue, which is that a lot of these things that require trust and we want people like, yes, you can build an AI that does fundraising for you. But like, do I really trust both sides of that equation? I’d rather interact with someone.Right. There’s a lot of social capital that sort of greases these wheels ultimately in society. And I guess that’s a bit of the question. And Diane, I guess part of me thinks, you know, Carlota Perez, who’s written about technology revolutions, right. She says that there will be some very uncomfortable parts of this, right. And a bit of upheaval. Part of me keeps wondering if we can grease the wheels for new orgs to come in organically, can we avoid some of that upheaval because they’ll actually more naturally move to paying people for these jobs in a more organic way.And I, right now we have a, I’m not sure we have that mindset in place. That’s a bit of my question.Diane TavennerMore questions than answers. More questions than answers. Really. This has been, wow, really provocative.This season of Class Disrupted is sponsored by LearnerStudio, a nonprofit motivated by one question: What will young people need to be inspired and prepared to flourish in the Age of AI– as individuals, in careers, and for civic thriving?LearnerStudio is sponsoring this season on AI in education because in this critical moment, we need more than just hype. We need authentic conversations asking theright questions from a place of real curiosity and learning. You can learn more about LearnerStudio’s mission and the innovators who inspire them at www.thelearnerstudio.org.Michael HornYeah. So let’s, let’s, let’s leave. We could go on for a while. Let’s leave the conversation here for the moment. Alex, A segment we have on the show as we wrap up always is things we’re reading, watching, listening to either inside work or we try to be outside of work. You know, podcasts, TV shows, movies, books, whatever it might be. What’s on your night table or in your ear or in front of your eyes right now that you might share with us.Alex KotranI’m reading a book about salt. It’s called Salt.Michael HornThis came out a few years ago. Yeah. Yeah. My wife read it.Alex KotranYeah, I’m actually reading it for the second time. But it is, you know, it’s interesting because we. It’s something that’s, like, now you take for granted. But, you know, there’s a time when, you know, wars were fought. You know, it sort of spurred entire new sorts of technologies around. Like, the Erie Canal was basically, you know, like, salt was a big component of, you know, why we even built the Erie Canal. It’s. It’s actually nicknamed a ditch that salt built, you know, spurring new mining techniques.Technology’s Interconnected ConversationAlex KotranAnd, you know, I just find it fascinating that, like, you know, there are these, like, technology is so interconnected not to bring it back. I know this is supposed to be outside, but all I read, I only read nonfiction, so it’s going to be connected in some way. I just, like, fascinated by, like, you know, there are these sort of, like, layers behind the scenes that we sometimes take for granted that, you know, can actually be, like, you know, quietly, you know, monumental. I think what’s cool about this moment with technology is it’s like everybody’s a part of this conversation. Like, before, it was, like, much more cloistered. And so I think that’s just, like, good. Even though, yes, there’s a lot of noise and hype and, you know, snake oil and all that stuff, but I think in general, like, we are better off by, like, having folks like you, like, asking folk, asking people for, like, you know, like, driving conversation about this and not just leaving it to a small group of experts to dictate.Diane TavennerSo I think this is cheating, but I’ve done this one before. But I’m gonna cheat anyway because, as you know, Michael, because you hear me talk about it a lot, the. The one news source I religiously read is called Tangle News. It’s a newsletter now and a podcast. It’s grown like crazy since I first started listening. I love it. It’s like a startup.It started, I think when I started reading, it was like, under 50,000 subscribers or something. Now up half a million. Executive editor, Isaac Saul, who I’m going to say this about a news person I trust, which I think is just a miracle. And I’m bringing it up this week because he wrote a piece last Friday that, honestly, I had to break over a couple days because it was really brutal to read. That’s just a very honest accounting of where we are in this moment. The best piece I’ve heard, I’ve read or, or heard about it. And then on Monday, he did another piece where, you know, they do what’s the left saying? What’s the right saying? What’s his take? You know, what are dissenting opinions? I just love the format. I love what they’re doing.I was getting ready to write them a thank you note slash love letter, which I do periodically. And I thought I’d just say it on here.Michael HornI was gonna say now you can just excerpt this and send them a video clip.Diane TavennerSo I hope, I hope people will check it out. I love, love, love the work they’re doing, and I think you will too.Michael HornI’m gonna go historical fiction. Diane, I’m like, surprising you multiple weeks in a row here, I think. Right? Yeah. Because, Alex, I’m like you. I’m normally just nonfiction all the time, but I don’t know. Tracy said you have to read this book, Brother’s Keeper by Julie Lee.It’s based on. It’s historical fiction based on a. About a family’s migration from North Korea to South Korea during the Korean War. It is a tear jerker. I was crying like, literally sobbing as I was reading last night. And Tracy was like, you okay? And I was like, I think I won’t get through the book. But I did, and it’s fantastic.So we’ll leave it there. But, Alex, huge thanks. You spurred a great conversation. Looking forward to picking up a bunch of these strands as we continue. And for all you listening again, keep the comments, questions coming. It’s spurring us to think through different aspects of this and invite other guests who have good answers or at least the right questions and signals we ought to be paying attention to. So we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.The Future of Education is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.