Silver Lining for Learning

Adam Kenneth Dubé, a McGill learning sciences professor studying AI and society, joins app researcher Emma Liptrot and child-AI researcher Nandini Bharadwaj. They examine gaps in ChatGPT research, how teachers choose AI-powered learning tools, and how children interpret and trust voice assistants. The conversation explores agency, learning processes, regulation, hidden AI influences, and designing safer technology for young people.

Steve Lee, CEO of SkillUp Coalition, helps workers without college degrees find promising career paths. Richard Hendra, MDRC data science leader, evaluates programs that advance economic mobility. They discuss AI-powered career navigation, fragmented workforce data, measuring real-world outcomes, hidden bias, and why human judgment still matters. A candid look at testing, redesigning, and responsibly deploying tools for non-degree pathways.

The Worthy Educator Initiative with Walter McKenzie, Heather Lageman, and Leigh Reagan AlleyThe Worthy Educator launched in July 2024 to serve mid-to-late career educators doing the work in schools and classrooms around the world. A community with no costs to participate and no limits to its potential to influence and inform education, it is approaching 1,300 education professionals sharing questions, answers, resources and opportunities to advance our profession to fuel its transformation to meet the needs of society in the digital age.Its most recent initiative is Roadmap 2031, nailing down everything we know and believe about public education, beginning with a committed core of veterans serving on our panels, following the energy of everyone attending, moving from an honest assessment of the state of the profession to a call for action, and having practitioners lead and inform this work because the map in hand has to match the terrain on the ground. Real educators doing the real work are in position to chart this course.The Worthy Educator is also known for xSELeratED, a monthly feature on putting social-emotional learning (SEL) into practice, now a three-book series:School Seasons xSELeratED is a calling to a collective pause, a purposeful inhale, and an invitation to return to ourselves, to each other, and to the legacy we build individually and together. It is our refocusing on the work of education not as knowledge, outcomes, and achievement, but as connection, belonging and healing. This is intentional, purposeful work: the integration of head and heart, skills and relationships, academic rigor and human well-being. The book is developed as a monthly guide of reflexive practices that span the entire school year, serving not as something extra, but as an essential companion for well-being, growth and fulfillment.xSELeratED Students is the companion to School Seasons xSELeratED: A Year of Community and Collective Growth for Educators, and whether at the hopeful beginning of a school year, in the weary middle, or at the edge of a goodbye, we want everyone to know that no one enters this work alone! xSELeratED Students is our attempt to make learning more intentional. It is not another program to complete or a script to perform. It is a seasonal path, a way to notice what the year is asking of the people in the room and to meet that moment with language, reflection, relationship, and action.And the xSELeratED Schools Framework provides big-picture architecture and shared language for this work, supporting educators, leaders, and teams to move from isolated strategies to an integrated, schoolwide approach centering relationships, repairing harm, and providing everyday opportunities for everyone to be seen, valued, and understood. Designed for PK–12 teachers, leaders, counselors, teacher-educators, and others, this framework helps school communities speak one SEL language, notice growth, and respond with care—together. Use a page tomorrow or plan a yearlong arc. Start small and build. The work is big, the steps are clear, and we walk them together.Reading & ResourcesThe Worthy Educator – the official online home of our caring community.Roadmap 2031 – the web presence for this initiative, including downloads, supports and resources.xSELeratED – the official monthly feature offering practical applications of social-emotional learning in the lives of educators and the students they serve.The Worthy Educator Press – offering many resources related to the xSELeratED initiative centering on the practical implementation of social-emotional learning in schools.Episode Guests Walter McKenzieWalter McKenzie is the founder of The Worthy Educator, a thriving community of leaders in education supporting each other to have impact and build lasting legacies in their work. Before leading community programs at ASCD, he served 25 years in Massachusetts and Virginia public schools: 14 years as a classroom teacher and 11 years as a district director and assistant superintendent. He also served as a senior training specialist for the Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C., and its field offices around the nation.In addition to his work in public education, Walter is an internationally known presenter and author. He has been instrumental in launching and leading online professional development programs and postgraduate professional education courses, and he has actively facilitated online educator communities and web-based interdisciplinary instructional projects over the past forty years. Heather LagemanHeather Lageman is a Maryland-based author, educator, coach and advocate for well-being and professional growth. With over two decades of K-12 experience spanning classroom, school, district, and state levels, she brings a human-centered lens to systems leadership.Heather writes about education, leadership, personal growth and creating healthier, more supportive communities for educators and students. Dedicated to empowering students, educators, and leaders with the skills they need to thrive, she has co-authored the School Seasons xSELeratED series with Walter and Leigh, and The Hope-Centered Educator: A Guide to Professional Renewal and Personal Empowerment with Janice Bradley (May 2026). Leigh Reagan AlleyDr. Leigh Alley is an internationally recognized teacher-educator, scholar, author, and advocate for wholeness-centered education. She serves as a Coordinator of Graduate Programs at the University of Maine at Augusta, where she created the world's first dedicated Master of Arts in Teaching Whole Child Education. Her 25-year career spans classroom teaching, organizational leadership, school improvement, and higher education, united by a commitment to creating the conditions in which children and educators can thrive.Dr. Alley's work advances whole-child and whole-educator approaches through social-emotional learning, trauma-sensitive practice, resilience, and relational school cultures. She champions mattering, belonging, and psychological safety as essential to learning and well-being. Her scholarship and advocacy seek to transform educational systems through compassionate rigor, human connection, and an unwavering commitment to the dignity and potential of every learner and every educator. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org

AI is entering schools rapidly, but the real challenge is not simply how educators can use it. The deeper question is: What do existing policies, institutional structures, and expectations allow schools to do differently?In this episode of Silver Lining for Learning, we talk with four Australian educators and school leaders who are members of the Courageous Minority, an international community exploring how meaningful educational transformation can happen from within existing systems.Together, they bring perspectives from classroom teaching, school leadership, digital learning, curriculum, and policy. We discuss the tensions between innovation and regulation, teacher judgement and system requirements, experimentation and accountability, and the possibilities that still exist within schools for doing something genuinely different.Can AI help schools move beyond simply making traditional education more efficient? Can it support greater student agency, authentic problem finding and solving, creativity, collaboration, and more personalized learning? And where can educators find the space to experiment when institutional structures seem designed to preserve existing practices?This conversation is about both the constraints schools face and the possibilities that courageous educators can create within them.GuestsBrett Dascombe is a Geography teacher at Wavell State High School in Brisbane with more than 25 years of experience in Queensland education. He connects classroom learning with industry, universities, and communities through student-led geospatial projects and contributes to curriculum, assessment, and teacher learning around emerging technologies.Peter Howes is Principal of Ballina Coast High School in northern New South Wales and a member of the NSW Secondary Principals’ Council Executive. With more than 30 years in public education, he is a strong advocate for student agency, community-connected learning, and the principle that education should be done with students, not to them.Marnie McCormick is Deputy Principal (Learning) at Wavell State High School in Brisbane and a member of the Australian Council for Educational Leaders Queensland Executive. She has worked in public education for 20 years and is particularly interested in how schools can respond thoughtfully to AI while sustaining human relationships, critical thinking, creativity, and educational purpose.Nick Pattison is Digital Learning Leader–Junior School at Haileybury in Melbourne, where he leads digital learning and innovation across four campuses. A STEAM educator and doctoral researcher at the University of Adelaide, his work explores how emerging technologies, including AI, can foster creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving in young learners.Readings:Fast AI, Slow Learning: Reflections from September Courageous Minority MeetingWhat Is Worth Teaching When AI Can Already Do It?The Courageous Minority Report 2: A Few Courageous Conversations in July Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org

Some middle school students today can explain how self-driving cars see the world and how ChatGPT knows the meanings of words. We’ll talk with the people behind AI4K12.org and the AI4MiddleSchools.org  curriculum that teaches students how AI works.David Touretzky and Christina Gardner-McCune are among the researchers first formalizing K-12 AI Education as a field of research and practice. What began in 2018 as a question about what K-12 students should know about AI led to organizing the AI4K12 Working Group, composed of K-12 computing teachers, university researchers, industry representatives, and tool developers. AI4K12.org is shaping the fabric of AI Education nationally and internationally. Dave and Christina are now leading a mutli-institutional partnership, AI4MiddleSchools.org,  spanning 8 states and counting, to teach middle school teachers and students how AI works. They are joined by Christi Scarborough, a middle school CTAE (Career, Technical, & Agricultural Education) teacher from Georgia, who began her AI journey as a science teacher in the AI4GA.org research practitioner partnership project, the forerunner of AI4MiddleSchools, funded by NSF. Christi is now leading her school district’s effort to infuse AI across the curriculum, developing AI curriculum, and coaching and teaching new middle school teacher leaders and teachers in the AI4MiddleSchools.org project. Why should middle school kids learn about AI? AI is the new electricity. It powers much of modern technology, so educated adults need to understand how it works. In 2018, the AI4K12 Working Group formulated the Five Big Ideas in AI to make AI understandable to K-12 teachers and students. The Five Big Ideas and their grade band progression charts help people understand where AI shows up in their everyday lives, and the concepts that underlie it. Take for example a robo-taxi. Through exploring Big Idea 1, Perception, students learn about the devices a self-driving car uses to sense the world around it, and grapple with the difference between sensing and perception.  (Perception is the extraction of meaning from raw sensory data, and requires AI.)Big idea 2, Representation and Reasoning, explores how computers represent knowledge as data, and how they use algorithms to operate on that data to solve reasoning problems. A self-driving car, for example, represents the world using a map, and employs search algorithms to reason about the route it will take. Another Big Idea 2 example is how the meanings of words are represented using large lists of numbers called “embeddings” which are created by machine learning algorithms. Neural networks such as ChatGPT use these embeddings for reasoning.How do we teach K-12 students about concepts that until eight years ago were discussed mainly in graduate-level university courses? We find ways to simplify the concepts and connect them to students’ everyday encounters with AI. Reading & ResourcesAI4K12.org - Artificial Intelligence for K-12 (AI4K12) Initiative. Introduces the Five Big Ideas in AI, and national guidelines for teaching AI across four K-12 grade bands. Includes a curated a AI resource directory.AI4GA.org - Artificial Intelligence for Georgia Project - NSF-funded Middle School AI Curriculum and Teacher Professional Development Project.AI4MiddleSchools.org - A multi-state AI teacher capacity building project focused on equipping teachers, schools, and district leaders to teach AI in every middle school and support teachers in a multi-year professional learning community.  The project is building infrastructure to scale through state, regional, and non-profit partnerships.   Dr. David S. Touretzky is a Research Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His current research focus is K-12 AI and robotics education. After founding  AI4K12.org in 2018, Touretzky and his colleagues introduced the Five Big Ideas in AI and developed national guidelines for what children should know about AI and what they should be able to do with it. He and his students have created numerous online learning resources such as Neuron Sandbox, Diffusion Demo, and Word Embedding Demo that promote hands-on experimentation and learning about AI. Touretzky was named a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery, a Senior Member of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2022 he shared the AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator of the Year award with the three other members of the AI4K12.org Steering Committee.Contact: [email protected] media: #CMUCSD @CSDatCMUWeb: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst  Dr. Christina Gardner-McCune, University of Florida, Associate Professor Computer ScienceDr. Christina Gardner‑McCune is a trailblazer in K–12 AI education and an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Florida’s Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. She is a co‑founder and co‑chair of the AI for K–12 Initiative (AI4K12.org), where she co‑led the development of the Five Big Ideas in AI and the national AI guidelines that help students understand, evaluate, and create artificial intelligence technologies. These resources are now shaping AI curricula, standards, and learning pathways around the world.Christina is deeply committed to building AI teacher and student capacity through her AI for Georgia (AI4GA) and AI for Middle Schools scale‑up projects. Working alongside educators, she and her team have co‑developed a middle school AI curriculum and equipped more than 200 teachers and 9,300 students with the foundational skills needed to become AI‑enabled professionals.Dr. Gardner-McCune was recognized as a 2023 CSTA Hero and 2022 AAAI/EAAI Outstanding Educator (shared with the AI4K12 Steering Committee) — honors that celebrate her relentless commitment to inspiring the next generation of AI and computing professionals. Christina isn’t just preparing students and teachers for the future—she’s helping them shape it.Dr. Gardner‑McCune holds a PhD and MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and a BS in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University.Contact: [email protected] Media: Instagram - UF CISE Department - @uf_ciseLinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-gardner-mccune/https://www.linkedin.com/school/uf-herbert-wertheim-college-of-engineering/posts/X -  https://x.com/Dr_GMcCune Christi Scarborough, Career, Technical, & Agricultural Education Teacher & Robotics Coach, Veterans Memorial Middle School Christi is a veteran educator with 24 years of classroom experience and currently teaches Computer Science—with a focus on artificial intelligence—to middle school students in the Muscogee County School District in Georgia. Before moving into computer science, she taught science, math, English language arts, and social studies, giving her a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective on how AI can enrich learning across subjects. Although this is her first year formally teaching computer science, Christi has spent the past three years integrating AI concepts into her science curriculum, helping students learn how AI works. Beyond her classroom, Christi coaches teachers and plays an active role in building AI teacher capacity across the country through the AI4MiddleSchools project. She supports educators as they learn to integrate AI into their instruction. She is helping her districts prepare for emerging AI‑focused coursework. Christi is deeply committed to expanding AI education in Georgia and is working toward the adoption of statewide middle school AI standards. She was teacher of a 2025 Teacher of the Year for Muscogee County and a coach of multiple award‑winning FLL and FTC Robotics teams. In 2026, Veterans Memorial had the highest rated FTC Robotics Team for middle schools. Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org

As AI becomes increasingly powerful, concerns are growing about how best to prepare students to think for themselves in an AI-mediated world. How do we help them become thinking, feeling, flourishing, and responsible citizens? How do we equip them for life’s quandaries without telling them what to think or do?This episode will feature Quandary team members who have been thinking about, working on and researching these questions for more than a decade. Quandary, an award-winning, free online game and app played more than 2.5 million times, has been proven through independent research to cultivate important ethical decision-making skills, such as fact vs. opinion discernment, perspective-taking, reflection, and concern for others. The game, set on the fictional planet Braxos, is built around ethical dilemmas with no one right answer. Recently, thanks to a Tools Competition EdTech prize, the team built and researched three game innovations designed for the AI age: a new episode focused on AI ethics; an Episode Builder to create your own dilemmas, characters and setting; and an in-game AI chatbot, designed to deepen reflection and learning. The Silver Lining for Learning conversation will focus on the team’s learnings and questions about preparing students for an even more complex world.Readings and Resources: Quandary websiteQuandary overviewEpisode GuestsLacey J. Hilliard, PhDLacey Hilliard is a developmental scientist and an associate professor in the Psychology Department at Suffolk University in Boston, MA. She studies how children learn about identity, fairness, and social issues. Her research focuses on how families, schools, and media shape children’s understanding of social groups, and how adults can better support children’s positive development. She also collaborates with educators, schools, and community organizations to create and evaluate educational media and tools to help children and adolescents navigate social challenges and ethical questions. She has worked as a researcher with the Quandary team on multiple projects, evaluating student learning and growth alongside game experience in middle schoolers, creating and evaluating supplemental materials for educators, and, recently, learning how newly developed Quandary innovations can foster ethical decision-making in high schoolers. Her work has been published in Child Development, Research in Human Development, Applied Developmental Science, and Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences.Shelly J. LondonShelly London, Quandary founder, is a retired senior corporate executive and foundation president emeritus, as well as an adjunct professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business since 2008, teaching ethics-related courses. She conceived of the idea for Quandary while a fellow in the 2009 inaugural cohort of Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative.  She has spearheaded the creation of award-winning social impact initiatives that have been proven effective and supported millions, including The Family Dinner Project.org and the Webby-winning Understood.org, a comprehensive digital resource for parents of children with learning and thinking differences. In 2019, she received the Senator Robert Dole Humanitarian Award for service to people with disabilities. She serves on the advisory board of Making Caring Common at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and on the board of trustees of the American Ballet Theatre, America’s National Ballet Company®.Scot OsterweilScot Osterweil is a research scientist in the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program, and a Creative Consultant to the MIT Education Arcade and the MIT Game Lab. He has designed games in both academic and commercial environments.  Designs include the acclaimed Zoombinis series (math and logic), Vanished: The MIT/Smithsonian Game (environmental science), Labyrinth (math), Kids Survey Network (data and statistics), Caduceus (medicine), and iCue (history).  He is a founder, President, and Creative Director of Learning Games Network (www.learninggamesnetwork.org) where he led the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Language Learning Initiative (ESL), and where he designed Quandary, named Game of the Year at the 2013 Games for Change festival. He co-authored the book Resonant Games (MIT Press) and served as the play consultant on the Emmy Award winning Amazon TV series Tumbleleaf.   Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org

Beth Zemble, ValuesLab’s literary scholar and curriculum designer, and Ariadna Trapote, its CEO and education innovator, explore what children need beyond knowledge in an AI-shaped world. They discuss stories as moral practice, universal values across cultures, respectful disagreement, ethical decision-making, and how ValuesLab uses technology to help children build character through reflection and repeated choices.

When conflict, displacement, economic challenges, and climate shocks disrupt schooling, maintaining opportunities to learn becomes both urgent and extraordinarily difficult. Technology can help connect learners with teachers, resources, and one another. But what does it take for these approaches to work when electricity is unreliable, connectivity is limited, and communities face ongoing insecurity? Who gains access, and who risks being left further behind?In this episode of Silver Lining for Learning, we discuss the recent report Tech-Enabled Alternative Education for Out-of-School Children and Youth (OOSCY): Evidence from Southeast Asia, alongside our guest's ongoing work on educational technology (EdTech) for Education in Emergencies (EiE). The conversation explores how technology can support alternative pathways to learning, what teachers and learners need to use it meaningfully, and how approaches must adapt across diverse crisis contexts. We’ll consider practical challenges involving infrastructure, language, safety, and teacher support alongside deeper questions about equity and sustainability. How can governments and their partners connect immediate responses with stronger education systems? And how can evidence guide investments that expand access to quality, inclusive learning for those hardest to reach? Watch or listen to this episode and find out.Resources:Tech-Enabled Alternative Education for Out-of-School Children and Youth (OOSCY): Evidence from Southeast Asia. Andrew Swindell and Kate Radford. 2026.EdTech for Education in Emergencies: A Guidance Document for Education Specialists. Kate Radford, Andrea Jetten, Sharanya Ramesh Vasudevan, Amal Hayat, Aime Parfait Emerusenge, Asma Rabi, Laila Friese, and Haani Mazari. 2026.Curated Resource List: Using EdTech in Crisis-Affected Settings . Jennie Taylor and Andrew Swindell. 2026.Citations:***Swindell, A., & Radford, K. (2026). Tech-Enabled Alternative Education for Out-of-School Children and Youth (OOSCY): Evidence from Southeast Asia. EdTech Hub. https://doi.org/10.53832/edtechhub.1191. Available at https://docs.edtechhub.org/lib/63QAD5XV.Radford, K., Jetten, A., Ramesh Vasudevan, S., Hayat, A., Emerusenge, A. P., Rabi, A., Friese, L., & Mazari, H. (2026). EdTech for Education in Emergencies: A Guidance Document for Education Specialists. EdTech Hub. https://doi.org/10.53832/edtechhub.1161. Available at https://docs.edtechhub.org/lib/T22ZEING.Taylor, J., & Swindell, A. (2026). Curated Resource List: Using EdTech in Crisis-Affected Settings. EdTech Hub. https://doi.org/10.53832/edtechhub.1226. Available at https://docs.edtechhub.org/lib/9Z7JTIFN.Episode #279 Guests:Kate Radford has 20+ years of experience in education, technology, and international development. Since 2010, she has specialised in scaling multi-stakeholder innovations to tackle the global learning crisis. At EdTech Hub (see https://edtechhub.org/our-team/), she supports ministries of education and education in emergencies actors develop and evaluate tech-enabled education programmes. She previously founded Can't Wait to Learn, an award-winning EdTech program for children affected by conflict, and has private sector technology and manufacturing experience. Kate has a BA in Germanic Studies and European Politics and a master's degree in developmental studies both from the University of Melbourne. She can be contacted at: [email protected] and at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-radford-9336a1b3/.Andrew Swindell is a Specialist at EdTech Hub (see https://edtechhub.org/our-team/), providing senior-level policy, research, and technical guidance to Ministries of Education and non-governmental partners on technology-enabled learning systems. In this role, he has led multi-country research examining how EdTech can improve outcomes for out-of-school children and youth (OOSCY) across Southeast Asia, and national secondary-level AI curriculum design research for the GPE Tech4Ed initiative in Tajikistan. Andrew holds a PhD in Social Science and Comparative Education from UCLA and has worked in both online and in-person settings across the USA, Bangladesh, Liberia, Thailand, and Myanmar, specializing in emergency and forced migration contexts. He has published on topics like AI, digital literacy, education in emergencies, and curriculum studies in both popular and academic outlets, demonstrating an ability to convey rigorous evidence-based findings and complex ideas in varied formats for different audiences.  He previously taught K-12 in Thailand and Myanmar, and held roles with the U.S. Department of State, UNESCO, and the PAL Network. He can be contacted at [email protected] and at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/swindellandrew/. Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=W9EAKiYAAAAJ&hl=en Join the conversation at silverliningforlearning.org

Giselle Byrnes, Massey University’s Provost and a historian of higher education, joins Mark Nichols, an open-learning leader and ICDE president. They explore the Tākina Accord’s vision for inclusive, scalable education, from Indigenous knowledge and lifelong learning to student voice, digital access, quality assurance, and responsible AI. They also examine how policy can support flexible models and meaningful success at giga-scale.

Conversation about the EU Article 50 watermarking mandate and what machine-readable markings mean for detection and transparency. Debate over whether watermarking solves or worsens academic integrity dilemmas. Discussion of credit, authorship, and whether AI can be treated as a co-author. Practical concerns about industry motives, deepfakes, and shifting assessments toward process and authenticity.