Episode 55: Talking Walled Garden Education With Andrew Cantarutti

On this field trip, Roy and Martin skip the usual banter and head straight into a conversation with their guest, Andrew Cantarutti, a teacher and author who has spent more than a decade working in classrooms across Canada and around the world. Andrew thinks deeply about how children learn and how schools can more effectively support focus, curiosity, and meaningful thinking in a world overflowing with screens and distractions. He’s the creator of Walled Garden Education, where he shares simple but powerful ideas for building calm, supportive classrooms that help students slow down, pay attention, and truly learn. Join Andrew and the Stunt Brothers for a rich and thought-provoking discussion.
Learn more at stuntbrothers.ca

Keywords
education, teaching, attention, technology, AI, walled garden education, classroom, learning, cognitive development, student engagement

Takeaways

• Attention spans have drastically decreased in the digital age.
• Walled Garden Education aims to create supportive learning environments.
• Boredom is essential for creativity and cognitive development.
• AI's impact on education requires careful consideration.
• Schools need to elevate standards for face-to-face interactions.
• The role of teachers as role models is crucial in education.
• Creating conditions for desired growth is essential in schools.
• The marketplace mirror reflects societal trends in education.
• Cognitive struggle is necessary for meaningful learning.
• Evidence-based practices can lead to positive changes in education.

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Transcript

speaker-1 (00:05.88)
Good afternoon podcast listeners everywhere. Welcome to After the Bell, a Stunt Brothers production. I'm Martin Stuible.

And I'm Roy Hunt and we share your pain, having taught a combined 70 years. 70! I know, wow! So get out your marking, organize your supplies or just pour yourself a coffee. That's okay. Okay. And listen, engage and interact with After the Bell, a podcast for you, the hardworking, dedicated teacher who wants free lesson plans, free advice and a free

year.

speaker-1 (00:24.332)
I think I need something stronger.

speaker-1 (00:36.494)
Free meal. I always show up for a free meal.

Well, welcome to After the Bell. This is a bit of a departure for Martin and I. do our podcast and it's audio, but today it's a video. And we usually start off our podcast with STS, the shoot the shit where Martin and I talk about some things, but we're going to go straight to it.

straight to it

So I'd like to say welcome to After the Bell, and today we're joined by Andrew Cantarutti, a Canadian teacher and writer who has spent more than 10 years working in classrooms in Canada and around the world. Andrew thinks deeply about how children learn and how schools can better support focus, curiosity, and meaningful thinking, especially in a world full of screens and distractions. He's the creator of Walled Garden Education.

where he explores simple but powerful ideas about how classrooms can become calm, supportive places that help students slow down, pay attention, and truly learn.

speaker-1 (01:36.568)
Yeah, and Andrew, I was really excited when I discovered you. I think it was Substack. You had a great column there and you have a newsletter there. And then we heard you on the Teachers on Fire podcast as So we got to learn more. And we've been looking for a guest just like you. You know, I've read Jonathan Haidt. I've read Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, right, and got some of his ideas. And then I heard what you had to say and it was a Canadian perspective and it was just bang on with what we've been talking about. So we're really excited about this opportunity.

Yeah, well, I really appreciate being held in that company. That's very kind of you guys.

No, you definitely, you are equally to them and you're gonna have a great career bringing these ideas forward. So thank you very much. So we'll start with our ABC one, two, three, where we kind of get to know our guest and we'll start Roy with the ABC.

Thank you

speaker-2 (02:25.922)
BC. All right. A, chalkboard or smart board?

Ooh, I think we, you know what? We have to go with SmartBoard. It's just so much more capable. There's so much more you can do with it.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Okay. B, deep dive into one idea or a broad tour of many.

One idea. think it's important to remember that focusing on multiple things at a time is something of a myth, actually. We can only hold one idea in our head at a time, and I think it's important.

speaker-1 (03:02.568)
That doesn't exist. We were told that was the way to operate. Like a lot of things we discovered, actually a myth, right?

We can switch between things really rapidly, that's right.

Very good job trying to multitask.

and see questions or answers.

Questions, always questions, right? We always have to be asking why.

speaker-1 (03:24.866)
Yeah, I agree. Okay, one, two, three. What was your favorite book as a child? Did you have one? And if you did, can you share?

I would have to go with the Lord of the Rings. I love the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Yep. you reread it once in a while? Yeah. Yeah. You just find out something more in it each time, don't you? Okay, number two. Do you have a favorite teacher from your own childhood that had an influence on you and would you like to share if you did?

absolutely, all the time.

speaker-0 (03:45.206)
Every time.

speaker-0 (03:53.784)
Sure, mean there's several teachers that had a huge impact on me growing up, but one of my favorite teachers was a woman named Miss Foch, and she taught me a world religions class when I was in the 11th grade here in Ontario, and it was kind of a tour of...

the major world religions and the philosophies that ground them. And I thought the diverse perspectives were super valuable and it encouraged me to travel in my adult life. yeah, really wonderful one.

I've always thought there's so much you can learn from that and that you don't have to be a religious person, but it gives you a grounding of where we came from in so many ways because it has driven our history and understand the religions of the world I think creates greater understanding among humans.

Absolutely.

And the number three, if there was one piece of music that you had to listen to, you're on a deserted island, you don't have to listen to this all day long, but when you do, when you're tired of watching the sharks circle the island, is there one piece that you would choose?

speaker-0 (04:58.075)
that's a hard question, Martin. think I would have to go with, let's go with Let It Be by The Beatles.

Yeah.

You know, you talk, you so that was my song at school. I would do it every year in remembrance day with my class. And on the very last year when I retired a year and a half ago, the whole school did let it be for me. That must have been such an it's a classic. Well, thank you, Andrew. And we're going to get into your walled gardens and some of your ideas of the idea of what schools can be. But before that,

There you go, there you go.

speaker-1 (05:37.784)
Would you be able to share your journey, like what brought you to this way of thinking? Maybe where did you come from in terms of some of the teaching and experiences you've had? Share as little or as much as you'd like.

Sure, so before you hit record, we were talking a little bit about how we've all three been to Jeju Island in Korea. And I had the privilege of living there for four years. And while I was there, I lived there in the late 20 teens. And I had a couple of jobs while I lived there. But one of the jobs was that I worked in a boarding program at an international school. And I managed a middle school boys.

boarding house so you can imagine that was a handful. yeah, for sure. But it was really interesting when I first arrived, it was like this very regimented program in that the kids kind of came home at the end of the day. And then there was a little bit of free time but we went to dinner, they had like a very, very regimented homework block. And then they came home and then there was kind of a lights out time at the end of the night.

The thing about it was that it was like a really kind of sterile experience for the kids. They had a free for all with respect to access to their technology. So they would come home at the end of the day and everybody immediately grabbed their phones or their laptops and they would game for a couple of hours, right? And then they'd go to dinner and then they spent a couple of hours on screens doing their homework and then they came home again and then they spent some more time gaming before going to bed.

And then a couple of years later, me and a few other employees kind of tried to change things a little bit. And so we introduced a lot more structure to their schedule in that they came home at the end of the day, they had to check in their technology, they weren't allowed to use their phones or their laptops, but they could sign up for various activities. So the kids could go out to the field, which was supervised, they could play soccer, they could go to the gym and play basketball. We offered like cooking classes, one of the

speaker-0 (07:41.91)
Other boarding houses usually offered a movie that everybody could watch together, right? But it was all without access to their phones. So the kids had to socialize together, they had to connect and they had to develop, you know, they had these common experiences that they could bond over. And by the end of the year, they had just developed such an incredible connection to one another. And for my boys, it just became this brotherhood, a kind of like family.

when they had to leave at the end of the school year, they were excited to go home to their families and have the time off, but they were often tears because they were just so close to one another that they were prepared to miss one another quite a bit, right? So that was one of the big eye-opening experiences for me is like when we remove that like five hours of additional screen time in their home lives, the quality of their social bonds

just expanded to a degree that they hadn't had prior to that.

before we started talking, you spent time in Jeju Island, right? Yes. Yeah. And I know I hiked Hallasan. Have you hiked up Hallasan?

about a dozen times.

speaker-1 (08:58.326)
Yeah, was the difference. I think it was like minus three at the top. my friend, was teaching in Korea at the time. That's who we were visiting. It was one of those moments that you talk about connecting because my son graduated from high school and we had these three months together backpacking through Southeast Asia. And it was, you know, we're talking no phones, no cell phones, nothing, just doing something, having experiences that he just turned 30 a few months ago. And you just have this connection.

And there was a moment when he fell asleep on the train. We were in Indonesia. And I actually started to tear up. So I looked at him, I thought, I'm never gonna have this again. Like I was just so grateful for that moment, that human connection that I think technology pushes away sometimes.

Those opportunities that you have, sometimes when you say to your family, we're gonna go camping, we're gonna go backpacking, we don't need any of our devices, and you hear grumbling about that, then you go, and then it's those connections that you're talking about with those students. You don't have your device, and you're talking about the things that are in front of you. You're sharing a common experience. The food tastes better, the environment looks better, and...

your senses, you're more sensory and those are connections and those are meaningful connections that they run the test of time. just on a phone. mean the

The phone has this way of, it's almost as if when it's tethered to you, when it's in your pocket, it's like putting blinders on sometimes, right? And like you said, with respect to being engaged in a sensory way, when we don't have it with us, we just see and experience the world differently.

speaker-0 (10:37.89)
whether that be through the eye contact and the laughter and the smile that you see on others' faces, sometimes we don't notice these things when we're so easily distracted by that vibration in the pocket, right?

Yeah, and I'll let Roy get into the walled gardens concepts. But just when you talk about that, like I know myself now even, because I love to read and I have to put my phone in another room now. Me too. you know, I can talk about everybody and look down upon them, but all of my pile of books and if I have that phone next to there, you know, I'll read something in a book and I'll go, I gotta look that up.

something little, but the moment I pick up that phone, it's 20 minutes later that I've now checked the notification, gone here, gone down some rabbit hole. And we're all weak. We're all weak with that phone, right?

For sure, yeah, of course, of course. And that's difficult for us as adults, so we can imagine what that's like for a developing mind, right? It's even more challenging. Exactly.

Yeah. So take it away.

speaker-2 (11:32.914)
Okay, so Andrew, could you tell us about what you mean by walled gardens and why the idea is so important right now in education?

Yeah, sure. I kind of came to the idea of a walled garden education by thinking about some of the problems that we have in our educational environments today. And I always wanted to deal with those problems and diagnose them, but not leave it at a diagnosis. I kind of wanted to think of what an ideal alternative might look like. there's a lot of people, we read op-eds all the time about

the problems that we see in education today, whether that be in higher ed or in primary and secondary, and too infrequently do we see solutions. And so I thought to myself, what is it that kids need today? Because the conditions for childhood development have changed, right? They're no longer what they looked like 20 or 30 years ago. And so when I think about a walled garden,

think that the walls are there not to exclude the rest of the world, but rather they're there to create the conditions within the walls for the desired growth that you want to see against competing forces, right? And that's kind of what I hope to see in schools. We want to create the conditions within the walls of the school that allow for the developmental conditions that kids need to

Martin and I have combined 70 years plus of teaching experience, but I would say in the last at least 10 years, we've noticed a change. We noticed that there was something going on in the classroom. We couldn't when we had our discussions. We couldn't put our finger on it. it's kind of like, my analogy is when you're driving a car and you turn off the music and...

speaker-2 (13:35.82)
You turn off the air, you know, the air and everything, and you just try to listen to see how things are going. Right? And you know there's something there, but you can't pinpoint it. Yeah. Yeah. There's a squeak or there's something, but you can't, is that the left side of the car or the right side of the car? Yeah. But there's something there. And that's the frustrating part because you want to

Where's the noise coming from,

speaker-2 (14:03.606)
alleviate that squeak, you want to fix that squeak, but where is it? And what was exciting for me and I think exciting for us is you sort of pointed a direction where that squeak might be. And I think that's exciting part.

Thanks, Roy. Yeah, I think there's probably several squeaks. many of us know what some of the squeaks are, right? They're sort of the perennial things to do with class sizes and access to resources and funding and so on and so forth. But there is something that is different in the past 10 or 15 years.

that's worth acknowledging and that's the kinds of technologies that we use, the way that kids use them, their access to them, and the role that they play in their development. And I think that we haven't quite, we haven't quite assessed the consequences of that appropriately.

Yeah, and I mean, the cell phone comes in 2007, right? We're only now starting to go, maybe we shouldn't have jumped into it. Maybe now, like, look, Australia has a ban, parts of Canada are. So we take this time to change, but it takes so long. And now AI comes along, and suddenly we're all jumping on that again. Like, we have to kind of reflect what's going out there in the world instead of thinking, well, will this make sense in the classroom?

Right. And you know, with respect to smartphones, most provincial jurisdictions in Canada now have enacted some kind of a smartphone restriction or a ban. But even in those circumstances, I think most of us know that those are not being implemented successfully. It varies so much from school to school. And so we have to still deal with that. And on top of that, you're right to say that AI is this new complicating factor

speaker-1 (15:54.744)
there were so much for you

speaker-0 (16:05.774)
that it unfortunately seems like our approaches look like they're replicating much of what we did around one-to-one device programs and smartphones and we're kind of jumping on this without critically considering consequences,

Can you talk about this marketplace mirror? Could you expand upon that more in terms of how you do jump on these things? Yeah, sure. is a fascinating concept and I think it's bang on.

Thanks, thanks. Yeah, so it's the term that I use to kind of describe what I feel like the last 15 years or so have looked like. So dating back to, yeah, about 2010, 2012-ish. And it's kind of the approach that I think we take when we try to design our pedagogical techniques, how we design curriculum, and the technologies that we introduce in the classroom. So I think we tend to look to the marketplace. We tend to look at

the what's happening in the broader economy. And we say, how can we replicate that in schools and in an effort to prepare kids for the future or at least what the workplace is going to look like for them. And that's a really, mean, it makes perfect sense. And I think it's perfectly rational to go about things that way. But unfortunately,

One thing that we rarely consider when we adopt those techniques or we adopt these technologies is what kind of effect will they have on children developmentally, right? And that's the piece that's missing a little bit. So, you know, I've said it previously and I'll say it here for you guys. I like to use this little kind of comparison. You know, if I was to describe your average,

speaker-0 (17:54.07)
well-resourced high school classroom today, right? It might look like 20 to 30 students sitting at shared desks. Let's say they're working on, and they have a work block, they're working on an assignment. All of them are staring into some kind of a screen, right? They probably have headphones on or earbuds in. They're sipping from oversized Stanley Tumblers.

And so they're all kind of, they've got the blinders on, right? They're stair-screen, they're doing their own thing. Now, if you missed the part where I said I was describing a high school classroom, you could be mistaken for thinking that I was describing your local Starbucks, right? Absolutely. And the marketplace mirror is like, it's what's happening in the rest of the world, and let's try and replicate that in schools. Yeah.

So then what first drew your attention to attention as a central problem in schools?

Well, I think you read a lot of anecdotal reports from educators from primary through higher ed suggesting that attention is an increasing problem amongst kids. But the truth is that the research supports that as well. There's growing evidence. At this point, I'd call it a mountain of evidence that suggests that attention is a problem.

There's sort of groundbreaking research by a researcher out of the University of California Irvine named Dr. Gloria Mark. And I have it written down here. So she did research suggesting that our attention spans, and this is not just for children, this is for everybody. On screen specifically, our attention spans were...

speaker-0 (19:43.118)
We're about two and a half minutes in length in 2004, which actually doesn't sound that great. And today, in the past several years, it's down to 47 seconds on average. And so if we're asking for kids to attend to a specific task and that task is being mediated through a screen, we're really asking them to do something very, very, very challenging, especially if we're dedicating

half an hour for them to do something.

looking at things like sustained reading or being able to focus for a period of time. know that just recently that there's been the discussion, the students can't read chapter books. So what we'll do is we'll get a smaller book or we'll get a two page article or we'll bring in graphic novels because I think ultimately teachers and parents, they want to take away this sort of this

anxiety or the frustrations that our students are feeling, that our children are feeling, but not truly understanding what is causing it and then that by simplifying things for them, we're doing them a disservice.

I think that's kind of representative of our lowering of standards to meet the conditions of childhood today, rather than addressing the conditions, right? We're not addressing the root cause of those problems, we're simply reacting. And this is again a feature of the Marketplace Mirror model, is it's kind of a reactive, defensive approach to education. It's saying what...

speaker-0 (21:25.482)
are the conditions that kids are learning in today and how do we adjust our standards accordingly rather than adjusting the conditions so that we can elevate standards.

I think it's part of that market mirror you talk about because often we see, kids, their attention span is so short, so now I have to change what I'm doing in my class to fit that, where we forgot that learning is messy. It's really messy and it's hard work, right? And we have to gamify everything, right? We have to meet all the kids. They can't have attention spans that are longer than that. But I found just a simple little thing where with my class, I did these zentangles.

You've to really concentrate, right? And we would start to do it and they'd want to talk and stuff. I'd say, no, we're going to do this. And eventually we would do it for an hour at a time. And these were, this, my last class was a grade four class, 10 years old. It was, you could hear a pin drop in there when we got through it. They learned to focus on that because they had to really watch and think about what they were doing. And then we would talk about how they felt after. And they all said, my God, Mr. Stuible, I...

I feel good. It was a bit like meditation to them, right? They had never experienced that because they're filling their brains all the time with screens or doing things. It was a moment just to take a breath and relax.

Mr. Stuible, you gave them an opportunity to fall into a flow state, which is something that these kids rarely get to experience today. And increasingly, adults have a hard time falling into flow states as well, right? Yeah.

speaker-1 (22:58.254)
I've seen kids get picked up at school and they have maybe a five, 10 minute drive home and I see a screen instantly come down in front of them so they can watch something. Boredom is important. We need to be bored.

Yeah, it's crucial in fact, right?

And Einstein would have come up with anything without boredom, right?

You need to be born. Absolutely. That's where creativity is born.

Yeah.

speaker-2 (23:22.666)
And it's interesting when you get to a point where everybody starts to focus on something, let's say in the classroom you're doing an activity and there are two or three students who start complaining it's too quiet in here. That they're unnerved by a state of calm, which is really interesting. People are, you know, they're internally reflecting on what they're doing. There's a...

There's a sense of groundedness. There's a sense of regulation. And other students around feel dysregulated by the regulation that's around them.

Right, right, and that speaks to their experiences, right, and what they're used to, you know. I write a little bit about how our libraries in most schools have become learning commons these days, right? Yeah, we don't even use the word library anymore, appropriately so, because learning commons are different from libraries, right? They tend to be collaborative spaces. They're not quiet, right?

She used the word library, yeah.

speaker-0 (24:32.328)
and they tend to be full of digital resources, right? And the thing is, that's important. Kids need opportunities to engage in spaces outside of the classroom that are collaborative, where there are access to resources, but they also need places and they need spaces that are quiet, where they can contemplate and where they can concentrate without that additional stimulus. And it's sad today that in many schools, there really aren't any spaces

that afford that opportunity to kids anymore.

You think in schools we've forgotten about the process and we're so worried about the product? That's why we'll use AI now to even generate our writing ideas. And you're right, those writing ideas might not be a grade four, Bob typically is going to come with superheroes and comic strip characters, whatever. But it was his ideas that he had to work hard to get out. Now AI can generate this long list of things, but he didn't have to do that. He's now said to the AI, you're going to do the work for me. And so we're now finished up.

on we're focusing on the end product that might look fantastic but really is the process that we should focus on in teaching.

Yeah, so I mean, if you go back 20 or 30 years and you think about assigning an essay under those conditions, you know, we could focus on the product because the product was all about how you communicate your argument, how you cultivate evidence to support your argument and how you arrange it logically, right? But the happy byproduct of going through that process

speaker-0 (26:09.71)
was that you developed your cognitive capacities, right? You had to struggle in a desirable way. talk about, there's researchers named Robert and Elizabeth Bjork who came up with this really landmark theory of desirable difficulties, Which are right in that zone of proximal development where it's challenging enough for a kid that they can overcome it.

but not easy enough that they don't have to exercise some cognitive struggle, right? And today, if we are asking kids to complete that essay using a computer that has LLMs or AI available, that cognitive effort is no longer guaranteed, right? There are kids who are still gonna do it independently and are gonna go through most of that struggle.

But there are others that are going to take some shortcuts and then there's others that are going to take the ultimate shortcut and get the AI to generate the whole essay, right? And if they don't have the opportunity to do that heavy lifting in their own minds, then there's really no growth happening there.

An analogy that I can think about that happened to me years ago was I used to always do the science fair in the class, right? And they would, when I started doing it, they would work on it at home. We'd kind of plan it in the class, all the work would be at home. So when it came time for the science fair, half the class brought in these incredible looking things, half brought in ones that were done on poor little carboards and were falling apart. But I knew which ones did it themselves. The half that did it most of them.

their parents have done their project. So they were like the AI of the time, So in the end, I decided we would just do everything in the class. And the end products looked a lot messier. They weren't as neat, but I knew those kids had done it themselves. And that to me is the key here. They were struggling with it themselves.

speaker-0 (28:09.142)
Yeah, so I write about this and I call it so again, we talk about attention here and I've got this idea of a pedagogy of cultivated attention, right? Because attention is not something that we're just born with, right? It's actually a capacity that we can develop. And as educators, we have to be aware that that's kind of our role today in a way that it maybe wasn't 30 years ago. And so I like to use three.

Questions that can kind of guide our thinking around this. So the first is what cognitive capacity should this lesson build? Because again, we can no longer take these things for granted So do we want to work on a student's executive function, right? Do we want to ensure that they can organize their thoughts that they can schedule their work all of those kinds of things and if that's the case Maybe we need to encourage them

not to rely on the reminder that comes from Google Classroom or whatever software you might use, but rather have them practice the skill of planning out their work week on paper or even digitally, but doing it themselves so that they can develop those skills or their working memory. The research suggests that writing by hand improves working memory in a way that

writing or typing does not, right? So we have to think about that. The second question is what friction does the learning sequence deliberately introduce, right? So we were talking about how we can use these tools and they steal opportunities for kids to struggle with their own minds and to struggle cognitively in a productive way. So sometimes we have to actually deliberately introduce a little bit of friction for them.

in order to preserve that cognitive opportunity. And then the third is, as you were saying, Martin, how will assessment capture process and thinking? And so in this, I like to talk about artifacts of attention, right? So this is kind of like, if you're scaffolding an essay, you're probably going to do the majority of the work today in class for the same reasons that you mentioned earlier. But the kids are going to go through a very deliberate process of maybe

speaker-0 (30:30.83)
brainstorming their ideas on paper, maybe they're going to do a rough draft on paper, perhaps they'll annotate sources with pen and paper as well. They're going to do some peer editing and then at the end when the final product is produced, all of those things get submitted along with the final product as evidence that they actually went through that cognitive struggle in a productive way.

does the scheduling of schools, are the periods, the breaks, the times for assessments, and how does that take attention from our students in ways that we rarely question?

Yeah, so that's a fantastic question, Roy. Especially in high school environments, right? We chunk school days into short blocks, and that can be difficult for kids because sometimes we're not conscientious of what's happening in one period and how it impacts the next. So to give an idea of what that might look like is, you mentioned Martin earlier, gamification, right?

So a super engaging tool that teachers like to use with their kids sometimes because it's fun. It's just kind of it's exciting is it's something like Kahoot! Right? Yeah, or you might play that game at the end of the period in order to do some like little wrap-up or whatever But the thing is if you're doing a Kahoot! at the end of your period and like let's say it's your second period class and in the next class they're going to English and they they're expected to do 20 or 30 minutes of

reading independently, it's very, very, very hard for a student, right, to have this incredible stimulus that is... Yeah, with a fun teacher, walk five minutes down the hall, right, and then, you know, read Shakespeare. You know, so, and sometimes we don't think about that, but we need to.

speaker-1 (32:17.934)
with a fun feature

speaker-2 (32:33.762)
Here's two tablespoons of sugar, go.

Exactly, Yeah, that's right.

Just to veer off a little in different angle, just one of the things you brought up that I really, this is why I think you're a standout thinker on this and up there with the greats from what I've read, just because you're one of the few that actually made this connection with AI and the climate. Yes. And the effect on climate. I would love to hear that for our listeners, because that was just like, yeah, why do we not hear more people talking about this aspect, especially when what you'll say is we teach kids about climate and what's coming. So tell us about that.

Yeah, so AI, I think a lot of us are aware of the risks involved with AI and cognitive displacement and the sort of circumvention of effort like we've talked about. But we don't often talk about the environmental impact that comes with using these huge large language models in artificial intelligence. There is no digital technology in the world today that demands as much energy consumption as AI models do today.

And we have to take that seriously because climate change is a huge issue. But in educational environments where climate change is an increasingly important part of our curricula, we're kind of talking out of both sides of our mouths when we're encouraging kids to use these tools for educational purposes, which is dubious for other reasons. But also when we're trying to say, but.

speaker-0 (34:05.034)
you need to take the environment seriously and your behavior matters around the environment. So I've got a couple of little stats that I think will be valuable to your list. There's a really great book by an author named Karen Howe, H-A-O, called Empire of AI. And she talks about a lot of these problems. And she often cites this report

Thank you.

speaker-0 (34:31.806)
that came out last year by McKinsey. And it's about of a mouthful, so I might have to repeat it. But she states that the current rate of expansion of data centers, that power AI as we use it today, would require in five years' time adding two to six times the amount of energy consumed by the state of California annually today to the electrical grid.

So you would have to double to up to six times the amount of energy that California, the whole state consumes today to the electrical grid in order to accommodate the growth of data centers today. And unfortunately, the pace at which we're building data centers outstrips the rate at which we're building renewable energy sources.

We already know that those are going to be mostly served by fossil fuels. There's also reports that say that coal plants, which have been scheduled for decommissioning, are having their lives extended in order to accommodate this extra energy demand. And then the other factor with respect to the environment and AI is the water consumption, because these data centers need to be cooled using fresh water.

And typically they tap into public drinking water infrastructure in order to do so. And according to a report from Bloomberg, two thirds of the data centers that are planned for construction today are planned for areas that are already grappling with water scarcity. And so those are just a couple of small statistics. There are others that are absolutely astounding.

But again, when we're talking about using these for educational purposes, and then we're also saying to kids, by the way, take care of the environment and take it seriously. I mean, we have to get more serious too.

speaker-1 (36:40.142)
How do we get more serious?

I think we have to yeah, I mean I think we have to understand what the utility of these tools are for educational purposes and the truth is that we don't quite know yet and What we're doing is much of what we did in the early 20 teens with one-to-one device programs Which is this is a new thing. It's in the economy people it's going to change the economy It's gonna change the people the way people work and we're saying if you

that now we're now we won't we'll be left behind right exactly

Exactly. But you know, there's a lot of irony in that statement because the average 30-year-old professional who is making use of AI in the workplace today did not use AI during their primary and secondary educations and yet they're managing, right? So that's one thing. And then the other is that

we're only beginning to see research emerge on the effects of AI for educational purposes. So there's a recent study that came from MIT that looked at adult users of AI. They had a control group of people who didn't use AI to perform certain tasks. And then they had another group that did. And afterwards, they tested them.

speaker-0 (38:10.478)
with respect to their cognitive ability. And it showed that those who relied heavily on the AI in order to complete a given task showed measurable cognitive deficits as compared to those who hadn't. And then the other piece was that there was, this literally came out two weeks ago. There's a huge landmark report on AI and education by the Brookings Institution in the States. It's like more than 200 pages in length.

And the general gist of that is there are potential benefits of AI in education, though we don't have narrow enough tools to guarantee those benefits right now. But the risks just greatly overshadow the benefits at the moment. And so there is potential for AI to be beneficial in educational environments. But my general principle is why not be precautionary about it?

Why adopt the tool now before we know how to use it well and before the research actually supports its efficacy? Because if we are relying on it heavily today and it turns out to be damaging to kids, well, it's much, much harder to remove a tool that even teachers have gotten used to using than it is to never introduce it to begin with, right?

There's no harm in waiting, right? Exactly, exactly. And maybe later on we figure out, this is how we could use it properly. There's never this slowdown. There's never these breaks on these things that I think...

Well, and the point is, you know what, maybe we can't expect a break in the marketplace today. Maybe we can. Maybe that's too much to ask in the economy because it presents this competitive advantage. But we're talking about schools, right? We're talking about primary and secondary education. We're talking about children, right? Let's not take the risk there.

speaker-2 (40:09.806)
Well, it's interesting because when we see AI or productivity, we see that as providing us with a little bit of help. They're helpers for us, but they're helpers for us because we know how to use them. I think you used an analogy about, you you're going to climb Mount Everest, right?

You know, and you think of all the things you need, you need your backpack, you need, you need, you might need oxygen, right? You need to have some physical training. But if you just put someone in a helicopter, put them on the top of Everest, then they missed all of the steps in between. that process, that learning, all of that, that happens. As teachers, I can remember when someone said, you can use AI to help you with your report cards. All of sudden, all the air was sucked out of the room because they were like,

What? But teachers are using it as a tool to make their life easier. They're not using it to get it over with. our students don't have the capacity or the understanding to realize what they have when they put something into a chat GPT. So when it comes out, it's garbage in, garbage out, or what? They say, I'm done. Without taking any look at it, you say, geez.

This doesn't make sense at all.

We have to remind ourselves that we're role models for kids fundamentally, right? And that's one of the key roles that we play as teachers is that we're modeling the kinds of behaviors we hope to see in kids one day. And we have to recognize that we expect certain responsibilities of our students. And that's that they work hard, you know, and that they try their best, even if their best is less than they would hope it is, right?

speaker-0 (42:03.416)
but we want them to work as hard as they can. And they understand us to have certain responsibilities too. And so when I get an essay that's been written by a student and I go to AI to provide feedback, well, okay, that's a professional responsibility that my student knows that I have to complete.

And if I've shirked out that responsibility or if I've kind of offloaded that responsibility to AI, it's very hard for me to then come back to the student and say, you're not allowed to use it in order to generate ideas for that essay or you're not allowed to use it to, you know, correct your pros, right? So we have to be really, really careful about that as role models.

Yes.

So teachers as role models, so I guess as we continue, what is the situation where you believe that teachers have a role to play in this, especially when we're looking at walled gardens? Like where do the teachers fit in? Their role models, are they in a situation where they watch and say, you can't do that? What is the role of a teacher?

So I think it's about understanding that one of our fundamental responsibilities is to ensure a healthy course of development for kids, And that's something that I think schools are uniquely positioned to provide kids in a way that maybe certain elements of the rest of their development and the rest of their childhood does not offer them today as akin to what that may have looked like.

speaker-0 (43:45.134)
20 years ago. And so creating those conditions is a part of our responsibility, I think. You we talk about sustained attention. We talk about wanting kids to read deeply and extensively and engage in these habits and these kinds of activities that are developmentally beneficial to them. But then we have to ask ourselves, when was the last time our students saw their teachers reading for pleasure?

Rarely, if ever. And sometimes we also feel as teachers that if we're sitting in the Learning Commons or the library reading a book, we worry that we're being seen to be not productive. What could be more productive than showing your students that that's a behavior that they should be engaged in? So we've to take those kinds of things seriously.

and eat.

speaker-1 (44:43.99)
I remember years ago there was some school I read about that the whole school at a certain time would be reading even the custodian everybody would be getting out a book and it just that was what you did right and yeah, we could see it modeled by everyone It just became a norm right right where norm now is just not to do that to go on your phone And don't you think this all this calls for a kind of a rethink about what school should be an education because when I think about the history of public education I think it kind of began

Exactly.

speaker-1 (45:11.31)
because they wanted again to get good little workers in the workforce, What do we need? We'll start paying for kids to education now, Early 1900s, but this way we're going to have good little workers to go into our factories and build our Model T's, right? The 60s came along and there was suddenly a bit of a revolution. We need people to be critical thinkers. We need them to understand what democracy is and to make good choices. But now we've kind of gone back to that

No, let's just make people that will fit into the marketplace out there. To me, in my heart, I say, let's go back and realize at the end of the day, do we want our students to be critical thinkers and able to change? Because then, no matter what the economy does, because we're always wrong about what's next, right? We were wrong about coding. Remember all the time we spent? Got to teach kids how to code, right? Everybody needs to code. All that time that was wasted, it's irrelevant now, right? But at the end of the day, if you're a critical thinker and you...

you understand these things and you can read well and you can write well, you could adapt for anything else out there.

Yes, that's absolutely right. And I think the pendulum often swings back and forth between those two extremes, right? And I think there's, again, there's justifiable rationales for both, obviously. But the thing that's different about today is, again, we have tools that allow kids to circumvent those developmental opportunities that help them grow. So whether you're talking about training kids to work on the assembly line,

or you're talking about critical thought, under both of those paradigms, the tasks that we assign kids in schools ensured their cognitive development, right? It ensured that they had to struggles in some way, shape or form, even though maybe preparing to follow orders on the assembly line was boring and whatnot, they still had to engage with their work.

speaker-0 (47:09.696)
intellectually and they had to overcome some struggle. Today, some of the tools that we offer kids or that they have access to prevent those opportunities. And so they're no longer getting that chance to grow in the manner we might hope that they would, cognitively, socially, emotionally, physically, because all of those domains are affected by excessive screen time.

Have you seen some examples that give you hope that this shift is possible?

For sure. I'm glad you asked that, Roy. So there's a county. So first of all, there are schools that have successfully implemented smartphone bans in different jurisdictions. There's a county in Kentucky, actually, where last year they implemented a smartphone ban. And it also coincided with a concerted effort around a literacy campaign. So they were encouraging kids to read. And it was so successful.

that in the first month of the school year, library book checkouts within the county doubled over the entire previous school year. After we saw declines in PISA test scores, which measures reading, math, and science skills in 15-year-olds in OECD countries, Sweden had gone all in on one-to-one device programs and digital literacy and so on and so forth.

but their scores had nosedived. And they saw the correlation between the adoption of these tools and the amount of time the kids were spending on screens. And the second they saw that data come in, they threw it all away and they've gone back to pen and paper. They made a hundred million dollar investment in textbooks and they're seeing their scores increase again. So there are people that are looking at the evidence.

speaker-0 (49:11.598)
Denmark has decided to do something similar as well. So I do think that there's hope and I think there are schools and districts that are following the evidence and responding accordingly. But we just have to be brave enough to do so, right?

On your Substack site, you posted an article about Australia and I think there was a recent study after their cell phone ban that the sale of books has gone up. It wasn't a huge amount, but it's between 5 to 10 percent. that, again, another example of how things can change. So just to wrap up on that note, and this is probably going to be a question you'll go, can't answer this in two minutes. And if you can't, then we'll have to have you back on to give the full answer.

Exactly, exactly.

speaker-0 (49:53.28)
I'd be glad to, yeah, that'd be great.

But let's say the three of us were gonna create the ideal school for cognitive abilities and thinking and kind of dealing with the way the world is. What would be some things you would like to see in this?

Yeah, so in my most recent piece that I wrote on Substack, I drew an analogy between schools and hospitals. And I think hospitals, obviously they're very different environments. But I think the lesson that we can take from hospitals is that they're designed with purpose. So when conditions change, they respond accordingly. And they have a very clear mandate with respect to what it is that they're trying to accomplish, right? We have

patients that are dealing with a given ailment and all of the conditions of the environment are designed so that they can achieve recovery and so that we can protect others, including healthcare workers from exacerbating the problem, right? And the way that they responded to COVID, right? It's a really good indication of how design followed changed conditions, right? So they changed patient flows.

PPE requirements were enhanced, air handling systems changed, all of these kinds of things, right? so what we're talking about, overnight, overnight. so what we're talking about in schools is we've undergone a really changed set of conditions, right? And these technologies, though they're very useful and we do need to use them, have changed the developmental conditions for childhood. And I think we can use lessons from hospitals.

speaker-0 (51:34.474)
in order to guide our decisions in schools. And so I think hospitals do two things, right? They create protective boundaries when appropriate. So a couple of the things that they do is like I said, in an operating room, an operating room is a sterile environment, not just because we like sterility, but because we're trying to prevent infection, right? And so in schools, I think,

We can control how and when and why students use technologies under what circumstances. That would be a protective boundary. Similarly, like what I was saying when we were talking about learning commons versus libraries, I think both kinds of environments are beneficial, but we need to give kids access to both, right? So how we organize our physical environments is really, really important. And then...

the commercial platforms that we use as well from the tech side of things, right? So if we're using a tool like Google Classroom where the kid is getting reminders for all the work that they have to do, then we're stealing an opportunity for them to develop executive functions. So those are like protected boundaries, right?

but hospitals also elevate standards, right? So they have higher standards for hygiene than you would have in other public spaces. And schools can do the same thing, right? So, exactly. So we've got a screen-based culture today. So I think schools can have elevated standards around face-to-face time, right? So where there might be an opportunity to send an email or to even have like a meeting for a club over Zoom.

the default should probably be meet in person, right? And facilitate that face to face. I think we have elevated standards for model behavior as well. If you go on the public bus on the North Shore, chances are you're gonna see a lot of people listening to podcasts or staring at their, or swiping on their phones, right? So in schools, I think it would be great, as we said earlier, if students could see

speaker-0 (53:49.838)
teachers engaged in sustained reading, or if they peer into a classroom where there's a staff meeting happening and nobody has a laptop open. All those things I think are meaningful, right? So protective boundaries on one hand, elevated standards on the other, and I think we can go a long way.

I love your school, sign me up.

Yeah, thanks, Martin. Awesome, I'd love it.

Now Andrew, on our website we will put links to all your writings, but can you just tell the listeners where we can find these articles you've written?

Sure, yeah, so I'm actually, you can find me on Instagram, X or Blue Sky, under at WaldgardenEDU. I post there sparingly, but if you really want to engage with the long form writing that I do, the best place to go is to Substack and the newsletter is called The Waldgarden Education.

speaker-1 (54:46.35)
And what do you find different about Substack? I've only, you know, you try to limit all the things you get involved in, but I've only just come to Substack and it does feel different. I

So I think there are elements of StubSac that are very social media like, but the thing that it tries to elevate is long form writing. So ultimately it's trying to push people towards reading articles, essays, as opposed to little bite size 280 character little clips.

And from what I see at Foster's deeper discussion, find. fine. Maybe I'm just being hopeful, but they

Seems that way.

No, no, think you're right. I think you're right. Yeah

speaker-1 (55:30.306)
Well, thank you, Andrew. We so appreciate this, you coming on after the bell and giving us your valuable time in this, what is cold, cold weather for you.

reading so much about you and listening it's just nice to see you and have this discussion with you.

been a pleasure for me. Thank you both.

I really really enjoyed it.

speaker-1 (55:56.962)
The bell, there you go, Andrew Cantoruti. That was a really wonderful discussion.

It was good. We've done lots of reading and I've listened to a lot of videos and discussions about technology. And I always had, like I said, I was in the back of my mind, there's just something going on in the schools that I can't put my finger on it. wow, just what Andrew brought up was something I was like,

Yeah, and he's clearly not anti-technology and I never have been, I love technology. I embrace it, but we have to think about it, that's all.

And the whole idea that, and I know that technology fragments your attention, but I'd never thought of it in the way that, you know, pulling that away and then trying to develop a greater attention span in the classroom. attention as curriculum, an interesting idea.

to me that's the priority now is a little rethink of why we have schools, right? Can we improve critical thinking skills and improve the process and not just worry about the product?

speaker-2 (57:10.764)
And I've heard a discussion about deep thinking many times, but this really kind of, put a lot of pieces in place for me and I'm hoping for our listeners, know, it's caused our listeners to think about the teaching, think about what's going on in the classrooms. And hopefully this puts some pieces in place for them to think, that makes sense to me.

And as always listeners, give us your feedback. Go to stuntbrothers.ca, send us an email stuntbrothersrm at gmail.com. there you go. So we hope you join in the conversation. Tell us what you're experiencing in the classroom. Tell us what you agree, what you don't agree with. And we'll listen to you next time on After the Bell. This podcast is organic, taking shape with each episode. Building resiliency for teachers everywhere.

Stunt Brothers.

speaker-2 (57:59.278)
Thanks a lot.

speaker-2 (58:07.246)
That sounds great.

and our website is stuntbrothers.ca

That's stuntBrothers.ca

We will chat again.

After the bell.