Change Management as a Learning Problem (with Jennifer Husbands)

Two decades of working on school improvement — at High Tech High, at Chicago Public Schools, at the Gates Foundation, and now through her own consulting practice — have left Jennifer Husbands with a fairly direct view of why AI adoption in schools is going the way it's going. The technology isn't the problem. The problem is that the US invests less in teacher learning time than almost any peer system, and you cannot ask people to change their behavior in a setting that gives them no room to learn.

In this conversation she lays out what she's hearing from funders right now (humility, anxiety, and a quiet retrenchment from K-12 that she thinks is happening at the worst possible moment), why she believes the district is the only unit of change that actually scales, what role coaching and teacher-to-teacher networks have to play, and why she keeps coming back to the idea that AI is a tool, not a solution. Alex also opens the episode by walking her through a live vibe coding demo — a useful prelude to the broader conversation about how fast the underlying technology is now moving.

aiEDU: The AI Education Project

• aiEDU.org
• linkedin.com/company/aiedu/

Transcript

Move Slow When Kids Are Involved

Alex Kotran 0:00

People with education are they don't have the move fast and break things mentality. No. Which I think is good.

SPEAKER_00 0:05

We're working with children.

Alex Kotran 0:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

We don't want to break children. All right.

Alex Kotran 0:08

If I had to choose between the space moving too fast or too slow, I would choose too slow. We don't really want to experiment on kids entirely.

Meet Jen Husbands And The Big Question

Alex Kotran 0:19

Welcome to another virtual edition of AI ED Studios. I'm in the virtual studio, well, in my bedroom, but we are live virtually with Jen Husbands. Jen, I'm going to give you a chance to actually share your a little bit about your story because you've done so much and you're very much very in demand right now amongst folks in this space to just like who just want access to your smarts and also just like all the different experiences that you have sort of like brought you to where you are today is like, you know, I'd say one of these sort of preeminent, you know, advisors to philanthropy and to education leaders. But this is very much like an interactive conversation. We're going to be, you know, I think kind of brainstorming together because I think you and I both bring a very complementary but different both perspectives and expertise that we need to find a way to sort of marry if we're going to solve this whole big question about AI and future of education. Um but before we even dive into all that, I actually just want to show you some stuff. So we make we may cut this portion. Um but have you so so have have you played around with vibe coding much? Have you heard of vibe coding?

SPEAKER_01 1:21

I've heard of it very vaguely, but I have not engaged with it.

Alex Kotran 1:26

And I'm curious, like, is it coming up in conversations that you're having with folks like when you're in rooms talking about the future of AI and education, or are people talking about vibe coding?

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Is it you know I think Yusuf brought it up with me at the EFSG meeting. I think I think it was not in the larger conversation with everybody. I think it was just the two of us. And I think he mentioned it. It was him or it was you. Somebody said they're gonna be talking about it at South by Southwest. Is it you?

Alex Kotran 1:51

Oh, that's me.

SPEAKER_01 1:52

Okay, okay. But he mentioned it too in that conference room, in that like weird auditorium room. He mentioned it. That was the first time I'd ever heard of it. It was either him or Babak. Now I can't even remember, but it came up in that room and then it came up again with you.

What Vibe Coding Actually Means

Alex Kotran 2:06

Um so vibe coding is gonna show you.

SPEAKER_01 2:19

Take a feeling and turn it into code.

Alex Kotran 2:29

Um take a feeling and turn it into code. Literally that. That is vibe coding. Um the name would suggest. It is exactly what the name would suggest. Um so before I actually show you vibe coding, it's worth a um a quick primer. So yes, essentially it's using natural language, you know, English in our case, and um having the AI basically take what you're describing uh in natural language and generate, you know, anything you could generate with code. Um so that could be software, that could be um, you know, websites. And this was sort of like a it was it was quietly something that was happening almost in parallel with, you know, we had Chat GPT that came out um in you know at the end of 2022, and then we had um GPT-4 that came out in March. Um and so you know, the education sector was kind of like scrambling over, oh, like what do we do with all these chatbots? And um, you know, how do we build things on top of that like leverage these like chatbots or integrate them into different tools? And meanwhile, you know, folks in in the tech sector are really what they were focused on was, you know, this thing is really good at writing code. And they were using it to, you know, make engineers more productive. Initially it was almost like more like autocomplete, if you can imagine that. So you're like typing some code in and it sort of like will suggest sort of like, you know, you just tab to enter and it sort of like helps you write the code like that. Um and and then the capabilities of vibe coding have uh continued to move forward. And then as and then basically what happened is you had GPT 3.5 to GPT 4. And it was, I mean, do you remember do you remember, did you use 3.5, like the 3.5?

SPEAKER_01 4:19

I've not been a user of uh GPT really at all. I use I use Gemini sometimes for work. So the extent of my experience?

Alex Kotran 4:28

Yeah, I mean, if you if you use GPT 3.5, what you would have it was like very cool, but it was it was like it was like a high school student level, right? So it can like write poems and it could write essays, and it was it was cool mostly because it's just like the first time you could see just like AI almost like engaging with you as like a another sort of sort of independent agent. Um, and and it did generate stuff. Uh and then we had GPT 4, and that was like crazy powerful compared to GPT 3.5. Um, you know, it was like now suddenly you're talking to a you know college professor, uh, or at least like a you know, a like a master's student. Um and I think that's where everybody started to realize like, whoa, this is a really big deal. Um, and part of that was baked in this idea that, well, the the technologies, if it it in in a matter of three months, we went from GPT 3.5 to GPT-4, a significantly more powerful model, you know, who knows where we're gonna be in six months, one year, two years. And so there was this like anxiety, this like urgency around we need to just get people access to AI because it's just gonna get so powerful and we don't be left behind. And so there the paradigm, I think, has been really about, you know, how do we just like implement tools and give, you know, get get kids' hands-on, you know, teachers' hands on. Um, but then after GPT-4, we had GPT 4.5 and GPT-5, and then many other models, you know, like Gemini. It was like BARD initially, then Gemini 2 and Gemini 2.5, um and Gemini 3. And and for the for the non-technical user, they did get better, but it started to get better at the margins, you know, like incrementally better. Um, certainly still had all the same problems that GPT 3.5 or GPT-4 had in terms of, you know, it wasn't reliable, it got hallucinated and like made stuff up. Um, and there was a sense of like almost like stagnation in terms of like, yeah, maybe this is just sort of like roughly what we have. Um, but in the background, the coding capabilities of AI kept getting better. Um, and like in and in particular uh last year, uh Anthropic released something called Claude uh 3.7 Sonnet. And this was an incredibly powerful tool for coding. And it it really is what kind of like unlocked the um almost like the Cambrian moment where we're now half of all of the spend on AI right now is just for for for like coding purposes. Um and and then in the summer of 2025, a bunch of companies, including a Google, which this is what I'm showing you, is Google's AI Studio. Um, they updated the user interface to be a lot more user-friendly because before you could vibe code, but it was you were still sort of like in an you know, a coding terminal and you would see lines of code, and it was just it was overwhelming to somebody who had never done anything with code before. Um so they changed the user interface, and now you get um it's just very, it's very very user-friendly. So I'm actually gonna walk you through um I'm gonna walk you through the process of designing something. Um and we're gonna do a little design thinking together.

Picking A Real Problem To Build

Alex Kotran 7:43

And and I just want you to sort of think about, you know, something that um just like a problem that you have day to day, this doesn't have to be even work-related. Like just to give you an example, someone was telling me they just um they just separated and they have two kids that they take care of um every other week, which makes it really hard to figure out what food to put in the refrigerator because you're like buying all this food for your kids and then like it kind of goes bad. And um, so he always have he always has like has to figure out like what could I make with what I have in the fridge. Um and so one thing that we built together was like a um like a recipe generator that would be like sort of help him sort of like plot out, you know, like what to buy and like you know how to sort of like you know organize it. Um but yeah, any anything that we could just like just right out of the gate, kind of like try to try to hack on together.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

I mean, I hate packing. Okay. I hate packing, and I have to pack often, as you know, because I travel, both for work and for pleasure. So like there's gotta be a way to make it less painful. I don't know. Okay. It's kind of a boring, boring challenge. Oh, that's a great one. A real one for me. So Yeah, people can send me a list, but I just well, the where the trip, where am I going? Is it a business trip? Is it a personal trip? Is it you know, what's the climate like? What's the weather forecast? I'm always on, like, you know, snap doing like a screenshot of weather channel to say, like, all right, four days in DC looks like this, or you know, three days in LA or five days in Mexico, you know.

Alex Kotran 9:11

Yeah. Um so I'm actually gonna use just like a just a regular LLM, this is Gemini, um, to help us come up with the idea first, because that's always like, you know, I think it helps actually do some ideation. Um what what are some of like the what makes packing hard? Like why do you hate packing so much?

SPEAKER_01 9:29

I think it's I think it's kind of an executive function problem because I think it sort of like requires me to think ahead and plan ahead for multiple days. Um and that feels exhausting. So I procrastinated to the last minute. And then I'm stressed.

Alex Kotran 9:50

All right, let's um and so one of the things you're seeing me do here is you see this drop down. I don't know if you've used you, you said you use Gemini.

unknown 9:59

Yeah.

Alex Kotran 10:00

Um so a lot of people have like, you know, when they're tempted to like, yeah, you know, I've used Gemini and it's just it's okay. I don't, I don't think it's that great. Um, and I said, well, like it's like pull up your computer, let me see, show me some of your your prompts. And I looked at all their prompts, and all their prompts had just this, this drop down they were doing fast. So fast is the the weakest model for Gemini, also the fastest and the most cost effective. That's the title. Um but if you want to really see the the magic, um, you want to click on pro. Yeah, I only use a M Pro.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Um oh so you're like let's you're already, you know, because it's tied to my work, it's tied to my suite. It's tied to my suite. Uh uh, so I just use it. I've only used it for work, and I use it for personal, so I'm always in my my admin suite, so I have more tools there.

Alex Kotran 10:47

Okay, so let's see. A visual outras outfit Tetris app. I loved it. Um a backwards plan or timeline generator.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Yeah.

Alex Kotran 11:00

This one I feel like.

SPEAKER_01 11:01

When do you have to do your laundry? Like when do you have to, you know?

Alex Kotran 11:04

The vibe check packing auditor. I mean, avoid stuff with like vision because like that can be a little bit more complicated.

SPEAKER_01 11:13

Okay.

Alex Kotran 11:14

Um I don't know about this one. Sensory friendly event manager. Not too worried about that. Um, so let's let's go with this backwards planner. The reason I'm not doing this with the Tetrasap is once you it'll just take it'll be long, it'll be it'd be cool, but I couldn't do it in like 10 minutes.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alex Kotran 11:32

Um, okay.

SPEAKER_01 11:33

Timeline generator seems like a good idea.

Alex Kotran 11:36

So I like the So I like the backwards planner timeline generator. Can you generate a starter prompt for me to drop into AI Studio to get to an initial MVP? Okay. I know what MVP is. Importantly, I don't want to use any API connections for this initial build.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

I don't know what that means, but I'll take your word for it.

Alex Kotran 11:59

Um and by the way, we're we're talking about AI skills, and I kind of roll my eyes sometimes when people are like, oh, we're gonna do like a prompt engineering workshop. Um I roll my eyes because I feel like the only thing you really need to teach somebody when it comes to prompt engineering is that you can just ask the AI for help with whatever it is. So it's like, I want to do a I want to do a write a prompt to do XYZ. You just say, How do I help me write the prompt to get to that end goal? So it's so it's almost like if you if you are able to articulate the problem you want to help solve, that's almost all you need to know. Right. Um but there's a bit more to it, right? This like this intuition of like some of these um, you know, some of the reasons I didn't go down some of these other paths is because I've I've like experimented enough that I've built that intuition. Um, so we have our prompt. Um where do you put that? And then we're gonna go to AI Studio. So

Live Build Of A Packing Timeline MVP

Alex Kotran 12:50

this is AI Studio.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Okay, okay, okay, okay.

Alex Kotran 12:52

Um if you go you if you if you log in initially, you'll come to this place, it'll be home. Um you want to go to build, okay, which is actually where we're gonna describe your idea. Just call it a webinar.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

So what's funny? We didn't say anything about neurodivergence or ADHD, right? And it's like time blindness, executive function, and I'm like, whoa yeah. That's uh that's kind of it.

Alex Kotran 13:38

Okay, then I click build. So with vibe coding, you'll usually have pretty much all the tools look roughly similar, by the way. This is another vibe coding app. Okay. Um, if you want to see an example of this. Um and looks roughly the same, right? You have your your chat bot, your your chat uh box here, um, and then a preview. So it literally will like code and build the tool um or the application of the software or the website. Um, and you'll sort of see it in real time as it's developed. And so, unlike if you've used like a website template, have you ever used like Squarespace or Wix or anything like that? Um so in Squarespace, you'll go and like actually click and you can like change the text and like it'll be like a text editor. Um, the way vibe coding works, it's almost like you have um your engineer sitting right next to you. And so you wouldn't go in and change the title. You might say, I don't want it to say vibe coding sandbox, I want it to say you know, vibe coding playground. And you would literally just type that in there and then it would change it.

SPEAKER_01 14:35

Okay, okay.

Alex Kotran 14:37

Um so we have so this is where the preview is gonna show up. It's like literally doing the coding right now. Okay. Um creating some metadata. Okay, here we go.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

Um do you have a trip coming up that we could uh I am going to South by Southwest EDU, which hopefully I'll see you. Uh so I am leaving on March 8th, returning on March 12th. And then you're there this is uh so we have like some like functionality so you can like check the box.

Alex Kotran 15:28

Okay. Um so this is now like truly the first the first output. And what happens now is you start to like iterate on it. You say, Oh, I'd like to be able to upload um a uh my flight information and have it like sort of like add that to the plan. Um you might wanna you might say, oh, during the like pack, like for the like whenever there's more detail there for sure. Yeah, I want to be able to add like a to-do list underneath each of these sort of like uh like the sort of like the the cards on the timeline. Yeah. Um and it'll just build that stuff for you.

SPEAKER_01 16:08

Okay.

Alex Kotran 16:09

Um so if we took more time, we could we could pretty much build the app for you. Yeah. Um and I can send you this afterward if you want to hack it.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Yes, yes, I'm curious. Yes. I want to play with it.

Alex Kotran 16:20

But the where's my meter study?

SPEAKER_02 16:27

It is here.

Alex Kotran 16:30

Um

Why AI Coding Leaped Ahead

Alex Kotran 16:31

so this is this is kind of what happened as I was kind of talking to you about. So um what you're looking at here is um a benchmark that uh this organization uses to um figure out like how many times can LLMs complete uh coding tasks, um, and how long does it take to complete the task. And basically what we're seeing is that the um uh like the time horizon is increasing.

SPEAKER_01 17:08

Um it's getting longer.

Alex Kotran 17:41

So um the the one of the big limitations with with uh with using AI to code is that um are you familiar with context windows? So um let's say you were gonna write an essay uh or a an op-ed um about you know something about education, um, you could upload like background information to help it write. Um over time, the um the length of how much background information you could upload has increased. So it used to be that you could only upload like 400 words, and then that increased to like 800, and then um then you could upload like you know a six-page document, and and now you're able to upload like, you know, a whole book. Um well with coding, the way that that has played out is you know, you could use AI to do tasks that would only take you, let's say, 10 minutes or 15 minutes, but the minute you get to like longer tasks, like something that would take you, let's say two hours, there's so much code that you're writing in that two-hour process, it's all it's creating all this context. Um and the AI just fails. Uh so um the higher on the chart, it means like the the the longer the task that AI can successfully complete.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

Ah, okay. Okay, okay. Thank you for clarifying. Um that's impressive then, and maybe a little scary for some people. Very, very, very much in terms of jobs.

Alex Kotran 19:08

So we're we're getting to you know pretty sophisticated tasks. Yeah. Um, you know, and and kind of my example of like, you know, cloud cowork being written in a week, it's like and almost entirely generated by AI. Um it has gone from a helpful tool to support and augment engineers to a tool that can attack that can almost wholesale replace work that an engineer would do. Um and again, this this happened middle of last year. Yeah. So it's a quantum leap, as they say. It is, and and the combination of that with the user friendliness of being able to literally just like type in something you want and you have this, and you can now share it just like you would share like a Google Doc. Um, you can publish this, by the way, as like an application with its own URL, and you could share with friends or with your um with your child or anybody that might want to use it.

Education Infrastructure Versus AI Speed

Alex Kotran 20:01

Um so I that's mostly I mostly just want to share because that's what's on my mind is we we don't like we we have to come to terms with this technology is moving way faster than the infrastructure of the educ of education. And that I think that's the segue to sort of like the conversation I'd love to have with you, Jen, is you know, how how do we make sure that the education sector is actually thinking the long game and not just so focused on the the shiny objects, the tools of today, as we're thinking about like what does school transformation look like? What does the you know building capacity look like? Is it capacity to use tools like magic school, or is it something a little bit bigger that is reactive to whatever the tools might look like in one year, in two years? And then there's a whole separate thread that we may or may not have time for, which is what are the implications for the future of work, right? If like these, if like you know, you can complete six hour tasks now with AI, what are people going to be doing? Like, will they be doing anything? Um, is a question people are asking.

Jen’s Path Through Policy And Practice

Alex Kotran 21:09

But before we get into all of that, uh, Jen, could you give us sort of like a maybe like a short jot through through your journey and like sort of what brought you to this place where you are today where you're you've you've been sort of pulled into these like really interesting, you know, high-level conversations about sort of charting the future of education. And go back as far as you want. We can, you know.

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Um thank you. This is fun. I'm happy to see you, happy to be doing this. And there's certainly a very long version of the story that I could tell that I'll try to tell a bit abridge version. But I do think it's important. The roots are important, right? Like I grew up in the suburbs of Philly and my parents split when I was nine. And my mom moved into Philadelphia and my dad lived in the suburbs, which is ironic because my mom was white living in a predominantly black neighborhood, and my dad was black living in a predominantly white neighborhood. Um, but I saw education inequity firsthand because of the experience. Of existing in these two neighborhoods. The opportunities available to young people in those two settings were night and day, completely different. So I think that informed me, you know, through undergrad. I was the first someone to be a journalist, but I decided I ended up switching to focus on education based on some classes that I took late in college and then work experiences post. I worked briefly in the private sector and then I worked for an AmeriCorps program. Very eye-opening opportunity. I was able to visit all the sites in Philly and New York and be in schools. And I was like, okay, this is it. You know, red savage inequalities. I just okay. This is what I want to do with my life is think about this, this work on this issue. So I went to grad school and earned my PhD in education policy and administration at Stanford, ended up doing my dissertation on San Diego, uh, a high school reform initiative that was happening then. And I ended up studying that. So I moved to San Diego and worked on that for a couple of years, postdoc. And then I ended up getting hired after doing a consulting project for high tech high, ended up getting hired there. And so that was definitely a cutting edge kind of place to end up, especially in 2004. I think it had opened in 2000. So, you know, explosive growth, numbers of schools, and also Yeah, just for our listeners who haven't heard of High Tech High, yeah, can you give me a high tech high? To me, high tech high kind of call it like it's the education's perfect storm in some ways, in that the the thinking behind it, the founders, brilliant people who came together. They had an architect on the design team, they had uh philanthropy uh who was excited to support this effort in a big way. They had uh land that was going from um that was sort of being decommissioned, whenever like a naval plate base. So they got like built, you know, a dollar, one of those, like, you know, they got land and space for a great price in a great location. And so it was like all these things came together. And the vision was to create project-based learning-focused schools, uh, public schools. And so they started with one and then they added a middle school, and then they added another high school, and then they and now I think across the sort of San Diego region, I think there's uh 14 schools or something like that. So continues to be an innovative place. Uh, when I was there, they got approved to um certify their own teachers, which was the first charter approved to do that. So that was part of my job. And they had a large Gates Foundation grant to try to replicate back when we thought you could replicate a perfect storm. We have gotten a little smarter since then. Uh, but there were schools that were started in that high tech high network that are still going strong, and many have closed uh from that initial network. You know, it would actually be interesting to study the sort of trajectory of that whole uh network of schools that we helped to start. And then the founder of High Tech High, Larry Rosenstock, wanted to start a grad school. He just was like, let's I want that.edu. Let's start grad school. And so we uh kind of I had to figure out how do you start a graduate school in a K-12 charter context in California? And we did. And that that grad school is still going very strong. But San Diego was not sort of for me uh ultimately. So I moved to Chicago and worked at Chicago Public Schools and then kind of moved around as many of us did, sort of after Arnie Duncan left Chicago and went to DC to join the first Obama administration. Um, you know, things kind of got unsettled in the Chicago context, but ended up leading a nonprofit and then going to the Gates Foundation, uh, where I was for six years on the Networks for School Improvement Strategy. So I ran the community of practice, this national community of practice. There was about, I don't know, 21 grantee organizations in there. And so a real focus on secondary schools, um, using continuous improvement, moving particular outcomes that were sort of, you know, codified in the strategy, uh, working with teams that were working on these things, doing capacity building, convening, stuff like that. And so then my strategy was ending. So my role was ending. So the question was, what's next? This is 2024. And I decided to start my own consulting practice, you know, kind of I've been doing adult learning work and education, you know, for 20 plus years. So I thought, you know, and I've now seen it from philanthropy, I've seen it from a district perspective, I've seen it from a nonprofit charter, been an ED of a nonprofit, I've been an employee of a nonprofit. So I was like, I think I have lots of a good almost 360 perspective on some of these things, you know, I think I can be helpful. Um, so I started my consulting practice, which is called Steward Education Advisors in uh September of 2024. And then I met you uh at one a convening that I was helping to plan uh for the Education Fund or Strategy Group in partnership with Ed Council and the rest of history. I'm here.

Alex Kotran 26:10

And here you are. Yes. Yeah, and and yeah, education EFSG Education Fund and Strategy Group. I mean, this is I mean, these are some of the most sort of uh sort of pivotal philanthropies in the education space coming together. I mean, I remember you and I met, this was months and months before at Grandmakers for Education, actually, when you had mentioned. Um, and so there was a lot of planning that went into this, and it was it was reflected by the way, hold on, I have a cat who is um wanting to get out of interaction.

Philanthropy Mood Anxiety And Humility

Alex Kotran 26:43

Yes. Um I mean I'm curious, like where where are folks' minds right now? Like, is is it is it excitement? Is it like are are folks just sort of like still feeling a sense of like you know confusion or anxiety? Or do the do people is there a plan? I mean, I just you know it's been the three years on since you know Chat GPT and language models kind of were thrust upon us, like truly just from your vantage point.

SPEAKER_01 27:11

Um, about AI? About AI, yeah. Of course, of course, unfortunately. From my perspective in general in the world right now, uh, but with AI specifically. You know, oh boy, that's a good question. I think that there is definitely anxiety. I think with any um any technology, anything that moves really fast uh makes people anxious because they're like, I don't know what this is, I don't have control over it. There's a lot of unknown there. I think that when you're working with smart people, you know, then I these thinking about these people in philanthropy, they want to be ahead of the curve. And there's no way to be ahead of this curve because the curve keeps shifting. And so I think that sort of there's like there's almost like a humility that you have to be like, okay, I'm not gonna be the person who knows the most about this, but can I know enough to at least be helpful? And so I think that there is, I and I think probably like there's almost like an adoption curve of people, right? Like there's some folks who are like, all right, let's do this, let's get on it. There's people who are like, ooh, let's wait and see. You know, there's laggards, there's so I think there is definitely, I don't think there's certainly not one reaction. Um, I do think that there's a pretty universal awareness that this is a thing we need to pay attention to. But I think there's a lot of trying to learn and figure it out and see what's happening. I I don't feel like folks, my experience is I don't feel like folks feel like they have a good handle on it. And so, and it's like a second step, because it's like, especially in education, if you're thinking about, you know, what are folks doing, what do they need help? First, you have to kind of understand the lay of the land if you're gonna think about where you might step in and support it. And so I think that things are still sort of um, they haven't quite um gelled. Um it's a tricky time. I think it's a tricky time. And because that is laid on top of a world that feels like it's in crisis and is actually in many ways, right? And in ways that have huge impacts on education, both structurally and students' lives and communities specifically. You know, so like I think if this were coming at a time that there wasn't all this other stuff, maybe people would be able to attend to it in a more disciplined way. But it's like one thing amongst lots of things that feel very urgent right now. So I think that is part of what's sort of steining having a more uh organized response to it.

Alex Kotran 29:23

Yeah, I mean, I mean, education is always hard because there's like it, there's always crises. I mean, even if it's just like, you know, a school bus strike or, you know, a like, you know, my mom taught in Akron Public Schools and just and she does she was like an assistant principal for a while and like dealt with like discipline and just like you know, this the stuff that she had to deal with on a day-to-day basis, setting aside like the macro challenges, like even the day-to-day in good times is very complicated and it's hard to be focused. And then you layering in literal, like, you know, it's like budget cuts. And then um, I actually just presented at a school on uh last Monday, and there was like the the national walkout on the previous Friday in protest of what ICE was doing in Minnesota. And you know, it's like I was actually going there to present. It was like uh the the the teachers, the staff were all together, and so it was like a staff, you know, learning opportunity. And um, like the first 20 minutes were you know, folks kind of like just debriefing on all of the stuff that happened around that and like the way that the um, you know, just like how the teachers are feeling and you know, like what it meant for those teachers who didn't want guys and it was just like just as a way to demonstrate, you know, he were here to learn together. Um, but that was a conversation that had to happen, right? It's like it's like you can't, as a school leader, you can't just say, well, this AI thing is really important, so we're gonna just ignore the other stuff. And funders, I'm sure, are getting a lot of emergency appeals right now, whether it's organizations that are, you know, having to mobilize, you know, for what all the various, you know, needs that are that the moment is requiring from activists, from uh nonprofit groups, but then also just like because of budget cuts. Yes, exactly. You know, it's like there are most funders that I've talked to are not in a growth mindset right now. Like they're not thinking about how do we expand, they're thinking about how do we keep folks' lights on and you know, and they're getting hit by new tax laws that are changing their ability to give. Yeah, it's very hard. Yeah, and yeah, substance where we managed to get, I think it was like what 40 or 50 funders to take two and a half days together and create that shared space. And it's interesting, you you you I one of the things you said struck me, it's like it people with education are not like it it they don't have the move fast and break things mentality. No, which I think is good. I I I think I would rather that we're working with children. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

We don't want to break children. Right.

Alex Kotran 31:49

So yeah, I don't know, I mean, I don't know about you. I think if I had to choose between the the space moving too fast or too slow, I would choose too slow, even though there's there's risks with that as well. Because yeah, we're dealing with kids. We don't really want to experiment on kids experiment on kids entirely.

SPEAKER_01 32:06

Right. And then you still have the adoption curve there, because obviously we have schools, districts, places that are really seizing this moment, you know, like we had folks from Gwinnett County, like they're doing really interesting forward-thinking stuff about how to integrate this in. We got micro schools, you know, I mean there's lots of, you know, so there's there's again the curve. And then there's a but I think that yes, the bulk of the curve is still on the slower adoption end of things for sure.

Alex Kotran 32:30

I mean, this feels like a crazy moment, and it probably is maybe the fastest technology has ever changed in the history of humankind. I mean, I'm trying to think of maybe if it was there ever like a faster takeoff, and I can't quite think of anything. Maybe like the nuclear bomb in terms of how quickly that changed geopolitics, but you know, all the other industrial revolutions played out over like, you know, two to five decades. Not how would you compare it to the internet, the advent of the internet? Well, I mean, think about I mean, I remember when my parents had dial-up. Yeah. And I remember when we had broadband, and that was like five years later.

SPEAKER_01 33:07

Yeah, yeah. And then I remember when I got my first smartphone. It's a lot slower. The progression was a lot slower. It wasn't six months from one, you know, release to the next that changes everything or whatever. Yeah, it was it was much slower. That makes sense to me. Yes, that's right.

Alex Kotran 33:19

But still, I mean, like, I think that's like part of, you know, if you're I'm a student of history. I mean, and as you look at sort of like as we've had more, like, you know, we've had a couple industrial revolutions, you know, under our belt. This really does feel like an industrial revolution. Um, the time scales do get compressed each time. Um, because you're in in each case, you're building on top of, you know, everything that came before. So, you know, AI already had the internet, and so Chat GBT was able to hit, I think, like 100 million users in like an hour or something, um, because everybody's already connected and sharing it on TikTok and reels or whatever. Yep. But I the reason I bring that up is because this is not the first time that education has had to make sense of new technologies and figure out how do we sort of transform. Um, and I'm curious if like, did it feel like this? Like, was there the same kind of like scramble and mix of excitement and anxiety about getting computers into schools or getting internet into schools?

SPEAKER_01 34:17

Yeah. I don't, I think it's I think it feels pretty different. You know, I remember the first Apple, you know, computers coming in when I was in elementary school. That's you know, where I am, Gen X. I think that why this feels different to me, especially thinking about like ed tech. Like ed tech was sort of about how to deliver content better. You know, I mean it was sort of not fundamentally changing the the nature of things, you know, maybe some of the the how, but not as much the what. I think that this is changing so many things. It can change how you teach your kids. It can change how your kids respond and and produce content, it can change in the kinds of jobs that are available to kids, it can change what kinds of information and resources are available to kids outside of school or in school. Like it's changing so many facets of life at the same time. Whereas I think those other pieces were much more like circumscribed. And I was like, this is gonna change how you teach math. You know, that's still a thing, and that's still, you know, not inconsequential. But this thing has so many dimensions to it and so many ways it can change our lives that I feel like it's just it feels so much bigger.

Alex Kotran 35:28

Yeah. You mentioned Quinn County, you like there's there's actually like a really long list of schools that are, you know, forward thinkers that are actually doing like walking the walk. And they may not have all the answers, but they're like, hey, we have to try something. In part because the kids are sort of forcing them to, right? Because like at the end of the day, the kids are using this, using this stuff, you know, with or without you. And even if you block it and ban it and have all the academic integrity policies in in school, they can just go home. And so that's become a trigger to schools that are like, you know, they've been pushed over the ledge. And and there are some like amazing stories. And I I it's but it's not enough, right? Like it's it's it's there's a long list, but relative to the you know, tens of thousands of school districts across the country, um, it's still a really, really small segment

What Schools Need For Real Adoption

Alex Kotran 36:15

of them. Yeah. What do you see as like the most important conditions that need to be in place for a school to go from being sort of on the back foot to the front foot?

SPEAKER_01 36:25

I think that uh I think leadership is huge. I think how who the leaders are, what the leaders sort of know, their sort of like growth mindset and openness. And then the way they sort of think about introducing, you know, new tools or or new approaches to their staff, I feel like that is sort of the crux of a lot of change. You will have some bottom-up places where you'll have teachers, teacher leaders who embrace things and bring them to their colleagues or bring them to leadership. So it's not always a top-down thing, but I think the role of the leader, if you actually want something to diffuse across more than one classroom, I think leadership is really important. And when I think about, even when I think about my career, which a lot of it has been about diffusing innovation, you know, it may not seem obvious, you look at my resume, but I mean, working at High Tech High was about how do we get more schools to use project-based learning. You know, even when I was at Academy for Open School Leadership, how do we get more schools to be thoughtful about, you know, really turning around the lowest performing schools? You know, some of what we did was probably, I would feel differently about it now in the rear view, but that was an urgent sort of push and coming from the feds. And so I feel like what I've observed in an effort to try to disseminate innovation is that resources are only useful to people when they're useful to them. It's very simple sounding right. So you can have all the resources in the world, but if I don't see it's gotta be user-centered at some level, right? If I don't see how this thing is gonna help me do my job better, help my kids learn better, help me prepare my kids for the future better, then I'm gonna probably not use it because we still, you can still close the door in a classroom. And so I think that I think, and I even see this just in the general world, you know, like a lot of AI stuff is being pitched or like being put on my phone. And I'm like, I don't want this. How do I turn this off? Like, I don't want it's not helpful to me. It's not because I don't like AI or don't want it. It's just I don't want that right now. I don't, that doesn't help me use this app that is so like if we keep foisting it on people, then I think you're gonna not see the kind of uptake you want. I think you have to work with people to figure out what is the problem you're trying to solve, or how can we use these tools to help you do your job better or to free up your time to do the things that that are only being able to be done by a human, right? Like I remember, I can't remember, it was someone I think at the ESSG meeting that shared some data. I think it might have been useful about like teachers using a tool to do the first pass review of these essays and give the kids feedback. And then the kids turn in the revision and then the teacher read the final versions or whatever, you know, and how the students' grades went up. Now, I don't know all the details of how that happened, but I'm just like, how can we think about the things that that's that so to me, that is meeting a teacher's need, right? Like you can do the first pass on essay and kind of get rid of like the easy like grammatical mistake, grammatical mistake, like stuff like that. Do that. I don't need to do that, right? You can do a computer do that. Get the kid to improve it, then let me get in there and give that human level of feedback that that probably a computer can't provide. A computer doesn't know you as a kid. They don't know your learner, whatever. So I think that how do we make those kinds of cases to people that like it can make maybe more efficient, make let you use your time and way it just separating out those sort of uniquely human things that humans need to do, and then things that maybe could be done using another modality and present that to teachers in a way that feels helpful, that doesn't feel you're trying to take my job away, you're trying to de-skill me, you're trying, you know, like I just I think there's you have to kind of sell it and you have to sell it in a way that feels user-centered. And I feel like uh kind of a lot of what I've seen doesn't feel that way to me. And I think that, you know, and I do think there is a diffusion of innovation even within schools. Like you can have you have your early adopters. So, like, okay, go to where it's warm, have those people pilot some stuff, and then the kids start talking about this cool thing they're doing in so-and-so's classroom. And that teacher's like, wait, what are they doing? I want to do that too. I want kids talking about my class, like, you know, like it. So I think it's sort of like, you know, some people say, like a wedge and spread, you know, like you got to get in there and then you gotta spread it. But just doing it completely top down or not making the direct connection to how is this gonna make my life better, my kids' life better, the world better, whatever it is, you know, if without that um rationale behind it, I think it's it's gonna continue to be a hard sell. We know that, you know, people don't have time, they don't have the resources, you know, like we know that we're going into a challenged environment, particularly in public schools that serve students with the highest needs. So how do you take this environment that already is stretched very thin and allow people uh sort of uh incentivize people to want to try something different when they feel like they have no bandwidth, not even enough bandwidth to do what they need to do day to day? I mean, that's probably not you know the most innovative thinking, but that's just that's where I think we are, is that we we're not selling it well.

Alex Kotran 41:20

Well, yeah, and I think, you know, the the startup founders would say, well, we are we are making the case and they're doing all this marketing, and no doubt there's probably some AI involved in sending out all the emails and because the teachers I talk to are it's it's not that people aren't trying to show them how AI could help them. It's like they're being bombarded with hundreds, maybe thousands of um, you know, companies trying to convince them that this is going to be helpful. But I think what you're saying is really important. It's it's the like who is communicating that is very uh like it is pivotal, right? Like if this is coming from another teacher, the level of trust there is it's it's it's not even like comparable, right? Compared to like because teachers get pitched up all the time, whether it's AI or otherwise. Yeah. Um 100%. And teachers also get told to use a bunch of stuff. Uh that is actually like the practice of teaching is essentially the practice of sort of like operating within an extremely rigid and frustrating bureaucracy, which has gone through, you know, with no child left behind, this sort of obsession with measurement at, you know, at the expense of well, project-based learning, among other things. And so it's not so simple as, well, you just need an administrator who is creating an AI initiative and making sure that teachers are all using AI. Because a savvy administrator, and certainly the savvy ones we talk to, will say, Well, I could do this, but I know that's actually not the best path to success. This needs to be at least partially homegrown. And like that wedge and spread is interesting, like that teacher-to-teacher.

SPEAKER_01 42:50

Yeah, or it could be a coach, you know. I mean, like an instructional weekly, like a yeah, yeah, yeah. We see improvement, literacy improvement. You know, if you, you know, unpack what's happening in like Mississippi, there's a lot of coaching. So what would what could be the role of kind of an innovation coach or an AI, someone who sits with you almost like a therapist, safety, what's going on? What do you need help with? What's not working, you know, and sort of then says, here's some things that you might try. I can help you. Let's do this. And then I think then you could see some uptake, right? If there, again, it's a human, you know, this, I think for this whole thing to work, especially in education, there has to be a human interface, you know, between these major points, like between teacher and student, maybe between, you know, product and teacher. There's a human interface, you know, like between principal and teacher, you know, I just think that there has to be, I think there's a humanization aspect to it or that is being perhaps missed.

Alex Kotran 43:42

And that all sounds sounds well and good, but the the the the well, the challenge in education is just the scale, right? So you have what, fifty million kids? Four million teachers, uh I think forty thousand districts. I I used to have that this number down I uh many, many thousands of districts, and it's all decentralized, so you can't just go top down. Yes. Or better and worse, frankly. And so it is easy, it's easy to go to to look at one school and say, okay, like we could sort of map out how this could play. But then if you're trying to reach, you know, the the really large, you know, audience of communities that are going to need this support, it feels a bit intractable. And and one of the pieces of your work at Gates, which is really focused on community practice models. And one of our like sort of strategies and theories of change, which is, you know, going rather than doing breadth, like actually going really deep with like subsets of teachers. We have like our Trailblazer Fellowship. But what we found is that it's not just about that one teacher changing her practices, it's that that teacher is now connecting into a community of other teachers, and then they are bringing other peers along and they are supporting their administration and like making the case because now they're an exemplar that the principal wants to celebrate and it becomes less about how do we get AI into our school and how do we support more teachers to do what you know Stephanie is doing. And, you know, our Trailblazer cohorts are about 25 and they run for 10 weeks. So there's no way that we're going to trailblaze our way to every teacher. Um our big bet is that you're not just teaching that teacher, you're building that alumni network and you're building these sort of models and case studies.

Scaling Through Networks Districts And States

Alex Kotran 45:15

But I'm curious, like, what are the other sort of secrets to the success of a community of practice model? And this could be you your advice to us, or just more sort of more broadly for like what the space needs.

SPEAKER_01 45:24

Well, I mean, there's I think there's two pieces. A community of practice is the spaces where you bring the people together, right? To learn, to share all of that. But it's it's net you have to have a network. Right. I mean, the network piece is really important. So in this case, then I would say I love the idea of having like teacher leaders within schools who can try to model and share and sort of demystify these the technologies within their building. But then you need to network the schools together and have the teachers from across the schools talk to each other. And then maybe you even have something above that, right? So I think your question about sort of how do we the scale question. I think in my dissertation research, even though we weren't talking about AI, but we were talking about improvement, school districts. School districts are a very important unit of change. And I think, you know, like I know Gwynette is an example that's often cited, and I hope that there are others, and I'll be happy to cite the others once I learn about them. But I think that if you have ownership at that district level and then you have activities like this happening at the schools, and then you're bringing them together to amplify it, that is a big unit of change that then becomes an example that you and I have both heard of, that other people are going to visit and learn from and get their documents and see how they're, you know, thinking about it and they're attracting funding. And it, you know, like so I think the district is an important unit of change. Of course, some districts are one school, right? Like so districts are, you know, range hugely in size. But if you're trying to get at numbers, and if you're trying to get at numbers of kids further from opportunity, then your urban districts are a good place to start. You also obviously have rural districts as well with a lot of underserved young people, but it's a just a different kind of a challenge. Uh and I know that you guys have done some work in rural and indigenous communities, so you know a little bit about that challenge. And then I think what's happening now with the sort of devolution of, I mean, states have always held the sort of constitutional authority for education, but the interplay between states and the federal government in our current moment is interesting. And I think that states are going to have a lot more. I mean, it's tricky because we know in terms of policy, there's some barriers. But in terms of practice, I think states are going to have a lot more ability to say, hey, this is what we are doing. This is how we're taking on this challenge. And that could set the stage for what the districts do. So I think that, you know, to tackle the problem of change, I would say it's definitely not a school by school. We cannot solve anything school by school, not happening. So I believe school districts, because if there's a reinforcing infrastructure between what's happening in the school and what the district expects, then you're going to see more traction. And then the moment we're in, as as challenging as it is in so many ways, I think presents an opportunity for states to be innovative and to put a stake in the ground around some of these issues in a way that could also stimulate philanthropic funding. It could stimulate, you know, local policy. But to sort of to your specific question, the community is important. I need to feel like I'm not alone. I'm not the only one doing this. I need to know if I run into this problem, either someone I can ask that probably has used the same app or the same program that might be able to say how they fixed that problem or how they dealt with this privacy issue, or are you getting weird answers or whatever? Like that is really important for the social aspect of learning. And even in the research on the work that we did at Gates, it's not out yet, but it's going to suggest that the networking of schools together was actually a driver of change. And I think that's going to be very important. And I think that's very relevant here.

Alex Kotran 48:46

Yeah, this um this idea of networking schools together, it it's it's exciting to me because it's not that we have to build all these networks. Like there are a lot, like there's so many, there's so much connectivity between schools. And like our rural work being the example of like, you know, how do you reach, you know, all these like tiny, like sometimes 300 student districts? And well, there are small and rural school associations in not every state, but I think most states. There are myriad nonprofits that serve small and rural schools, whether that's state nonprofits or national nonprofits or regional nonprofits, who in some cases have spent decades building that network and they know exactly who the nodes are and who the who would you want to have in the room if you really wanted to get something that's gonna get some uh, you know, take some momentum out of a meeting. Um, so I think part of our obsession is like, how do we build on top of all of that work that's been done as opposed to try to create something new? Um what about like within a school? Because like one of the other things that you've you've done in your career is you've actually like, I mean, you talked about your work at like high tech high, but the the the like the change management that happens within a school, like you know, the we see a lot of instances where there's lots of like like leaders at a school who are like, we want to use more AI or do AI stuff, or you know, there's lots of AI initiatives out there. But you know, much of the time when we talk to folks, you know, why like what you know, why is this sort of slowed down, or like, you know, what are your biggest blockers? And it's they're just not getting the buy-in, you know, from teachers, or they're or the teachers are worried or anxious, or like to your point, they're they hear their administration talking about, you know, you should use more AI to help you save time. And what they're hearing is we are thinking about AI as a way for us to be able to invest less in our teacher workforce. And so they're thinking, is my job now at risk once the AI is able to, you know, replace enough of my time? Yes. Even if the administration is absolutely not thinking that, right? It's just like there's there's just a lot of anxieties that they have to work through. Do you feel like the change management is is that is that getting enough attention in terms of like the problem statement about AI? Because I I think I guess that this question is coming from a place where I feel like we spend so much time talking about the capabilities and the tools and the challenges with respect to how do we make sure that we have the policies in place so that teachers can safely deploy these tools to do X. And there's this other question of like, how do you create the condition for like a culture of innovation, right? Which is more amorphous and less, you know, it's it's it's not a it's not necessarily like one outcome that you can point to, but it feels feels pretty important if we're talking about like orienting schools not just for what we have now, but for, you know, whatever the world would look like in two years, let alone like five.

Change Management Is An Adult Learning Problem

SPEAKER_01 51:34

I mean, change management is about changing behaviors, right? And behavior change is a result of learning. So if you want to manage this change, then the people that you want to change their behavior need to learn. Right now, how much time do teachers have to actually learn? Right? Like the US has one of the lowest investments in teacher time that is not non-instructional time. You know, they get like maybe one period off to eat. You know what I mean? Like, you know, they might have some time for meeting, whatever, you know, maybe like my school, I know they're closed on next Tuesday because it's teacher PD day, but that's one day a quarter. You know what I mean? Like, so if we want to change to see that change in behavior, we have to let people learn. And learning is social and learning takes time, and learning takes trial and error. And learning goes better if you have someone helping you learn, whether it's a coach or a peer or a principal or whoever. So I think the question is, are the structures in place to bring about the kinds of change that we want to see? Is the entity designed to, does it have the slack? Does it have the space and time and expertise that's needed for people to learn in order to change their behavior? Is there any space for trial and error? Like, what if I learn this thing and I kind of screw it up the first time? Like, what's gonna happen to me? Am I gonna get in trouble? Am I gonna mess up my kids? Are they gonna mess up their grades? Like, what are the consequences of it? Right. Like, so I think that there's a structural problem in the way our schools are set up that makes learning really hard. And if we don't learn, we're not gonna change. And especially when it comes to using something that is so new, people need practice with it. They need reps, they need to figure out. I mean, it was, I mean, it's it's a different example, but even with project-based learning and high tech high, we are asking people to teach in a way they've never been taught. And so we had to get them to understand and have some experiences of learning through projects. So they were like, oh, this is really cool. Okay, cool. You know, and when you ask people, you know, a lot of times when they think back to your most impactful education experience in your whole life, it's almost always a project. Right. So, like, how do we expose people like to they use it in your own life? You, you know, like just get them familiar and comfortable with the idea of how these things can actually be helpful. And it's not about taking away your job or your husband's job, or it's not making it so you don't have to cook dinner anymore. It's just trying to make it easier for you to cook dinner and know what to cook and have what you need in the kitchen. Like that could help me, right? So it people need to have, I think, the experiences that sort of like desensitize them around the fear of it to then think, oh, now I see how this can be helpful. Now I see. And sometimes having a peer who is successfully using it can be a great way to see. You're doing it with my kids in our school with our constraints, and you're doing these cool things. I want to try it. So I just I think the change management problem is really a learning problem. And we need to think about how to create opportunities for learning in a very constrained environment that is not really set up for adult learning very effectively.

Alex Kotran 54:40

Yeah, it's funny because this is like you start to get to how interconnected all of this is. Yes. With with I think learning at the center, because it's, you know, one of the one of the things you mentioned is it's really hard to get, you know, there's only like one teacher PD day per quarter. Right. And we we did work with Prince George's County and we we like we had funding for three years. We had like, you know, buying from the superintendent and like all these folks on leadership. We did massive training with like you know, hundreds of teachers over the summer, and they were meeting with their team to schedule the next training. We were like, oh, we were thinking maybe it's like August or you know, September. And they were like, oh, we were thinking March. We're like March. Like that's no, no. We were like, we were like, what we were thinking maybe every other month, if not every month. And they were like, no, like we yes, we have these training days, but we have a teacher shortage, which means we have a substitute teacher shortage, which means we have fewer in-service days that we can take. And by the way, we have all this compliance of this compulsory training that has to get in. And so we were fighting initially for like one hour out of that training. And it led us to this realization that, you know, that working within just sort of the confines of that system wouldn't be enough. And we had to sort of think about how do we push towards sort of that, towards that culture of innovation and the and and those learning opportunities. And you're only going to convince the administrators by, you know, getting some teachers who were who were making the case for the learning themselves, as opposed to, you know, us as outsiders coming in and saying this would be helpful, which is what worked. And we've trained like, I think, over 3,000 teachers now in PGCPS. I don't know if you you've ever met Jeff Riley, who was the chancellor, formerly the chancellor of the Massachusetts Department of Education. And we went down the rabbit hole. We were talking about the MISPAP. Are you familiar with the MISPA Maryland? Uh it was like the most famous standardized test because it was like the one standardized test that students actually looked forward to taking. Interesting. Because it involved all these group projects and it was uh had a lot of project-based learning. It was, it was measuring critical thinking and like collaboration skills. And it ran like, I think, from like the mid 90s to 2002, and it was a casualty of No Child Left Behind because it didn't provide student level data. It only provided at the school level. And it was deemed like, well, that's just not good enough data for us to use. And and so that was just as a side, I just think that was like fascinating. It's not that we can't measure critical thinking or we can't measure, you know, like project-based learning or like the the durable skills that come from project-based learning. It's just it requires like a bit of a change in sort of like aperture. Um, but the other thing he said is that because you were talking about the fact that, well, I think only 18% of teachers today would recommend the profession to someone else. So down from like that low 60s, yeah, not too long ago. Yeah. And one thing that Jeff said is, well, you know, part of like when I was a teacher, one of the best things of being a teacher was, you know, the fact that we got to learn together. And we're there was so much more of an emphasis on, you know, shared learning. And like professional development wasn't this sort of boring like compliance exercise. It was like truly like it was a chance for us to advance our profession. And so it it's sort of interesting. Like, if we can nail the like like getting learning right ultimately is going to make teaching more fun, yeah. If it's truly learning and not just like, here's a tool that we want you to use. And creating a the ability, like creating the infrastructure to learn is an answer to the question of, well, what happens if the technology looks completely different in two years? Because then you lean back on your learning infrastructure that you've built as opposed to to update.

SPEAKER_00 58:03

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 58:05

Exactly. I mean, I like that some of the work that's happening, like with the let's say you're your district, you know, you've a list of math or whatever, you know, you have a curriculum that you write. How do we help you use this better? How do we help you understand this? How do we help you make it make sense to your students? How do we help you create, you know, activity, whatever? Like, I think that, yeah, like when teachers can see that, this is something I kind of have to do. So, how do you how do we make it better and give me space to learn that and learn that with other educators? Like that kind of approach, I feel like that that's the type of thing that can have some traction. It's gonna take some resources.

Funding Priorities And The Silver Bullet Trap

Alex Kotran 58:38

Do you feel like like philanthropy is talking and thinking about, you know, like teacher capacity and like professional development and you know, communities of practice and like change management and you know, all these things. Is it like at the top of the list of priorities? Is it you know, like how does it sort of compare to, you know, or is it even part of the conversation around AI? Because they're obviously investing. I mean, like there are no doubt, like lots of funders do invest in those things. What I for me, sometimes it's not always the same person, though. You're sometimes you're talking to the person on the AI team. Yeah. And they're like, oh, you should talk to so-and-so on the like K-12, you know, teacher capacity team. And it's like, aren't those the same, like those are the same to me, but I like uh how do I answer this question?

SPEAKER_01 59:26

Uh uh diplomatically, I would say that I think that sometimes the folks who are proponents of technology and want to see more of that technology in schools are not people who understand how schools actually work. And so either those functions are very separate, the tech and tech adoption and the and the actual like work of schools and teacher learning, or the tech adoption overshadows the uh there's kind of almost an assumption if we build it, they will learn it and they will come, you know, and it's like, no, it needs to be also attended to. And so I feel like we're starting to crack that nut a little bit with the like curriculum. Like people are understanding if we want to do high-quality curriculum, we have to pair it with learning. It's not just going to implement itself, right? Like I so I feel like we're seeing some shifts, but I also see this like retrenchment, and it's showing up like in data that there's a step back from K-12 investment. Um, that either folks are going more into the technology and stepping away from like the actual like work of teachers and students, which is a concern in its own right, or they're going, oh, well, we need to actually not just be thinking about schools, we need to be thinking about like housing and healthcare. And and and I'm like, well, yes, that's true, right? Kids don't live in schools, kids live in communities and they need all those things. But that doesn't mean that we should, it's it shouldn't be a zero-sum game where because we now care about these other things, we care about less about sort of like K-12 than what's happening educationally. I feel like that sort of core technology of schools to teach our student content is losing market share in philanthropy right now, at a time when actually it is really important that it not, and it makes me nervous.

Alex Kotran 1:01:08

It makes me really nervous. Yeah. Um, I feel like oh, sometimes like a Trojan horse because we're the AI education project, and we don't we're not here to help you implement AI tools. I'm gonna change my tune on that because I think we are getting closer to that. But it's more about we're here to help you do, you know, make sure that you are implementing them in a way that is teacher-centered and advancing on these things. But most of our work is, you know, like high-quality teaching and learning practices that happen in core subjects, and you're really getting into, you know, building durable skills and you know, career connected learning. And the more people dig into our work, they're like, this is like none of this is terribly new or innovative, which is almost by design, right? Like, actually, we like like our goal is not to go into schools and say we were we're here to revolutionize your district, because that isn't they have lots of disruption happening to them. Yes. Like that, like disruption is not the thing that gets them excited. But but uh the we I literally have gotten counseled and they said, like, well, look, uh, I don't hate it was this was like a bigger consultancy, but you know, literally like sort of like verbatim, they were like, we this is a really tough, like your your your angle is really tough. Like systems change and school transformation, uh, it's just losing a lot of people are not excited about it anymore. Like funders spent you know a long time investing in it, feel like a lot of them feel like they haven't really seen you know a ton of you know outcomes from all that investment, and it just feels intractable. And I worry about this, like the idea that, well, maybe AI is the silver bullet that will allow us to sort of like skip past all of that and just you know use this technology to solve all the things. And I think most smart people like will recognize that it isn't, but I suspect that there's almost like maybe it's others in the organization or you know, I I don't but maybe is that like a misplaced concern that because I know funders are sufficient like the folks I've talked to are do not really think it's a silver bullet. Like I think they're actually like appropriately skeptical. But you go to these conferences and it kind of does feel like it's you know, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:10

Well, who's doing the selling and who's who's doing the talking, you know, at those in those spaces, right? Are we talking to educators? Are we talking to young people? I mean, I think young people know, you know, I have a young person, right? I have a 13-year-old. Young people know that this is part of their future. And I think they want to understand it and they want to have agency as to whether or not they use it. So it's it's not gonna go away. I just think it's a tool. Chalkboards were a tool. Laptops are a tool. They're a t it's a it's a tool, and it's it's uh it's a set of very powerful tools and very evolutionary tools because like you can we you and I created a tool at the beginning of this call. Like, you know, like you can, you know, it's not it's not a static tool, right? It's it's a dynamic tool, which is different than than most of the tools that have been introduced that are much more static in nature. So it's exciting, but you there is no silver bullet for sure. We know this. And I think if the more that we see it as a tool versus a solution, I think the better off we might be because solutions have been pitched to teachers for a long time, and none of them have been solutions. You know what I mean? It's a tool that helps you do things better, helps advance what you your goals for your student, you know. Like I just again, it's that user-centered view. And I think that those users are teachers and students. You know, I think this is not just an adult game. Like you said, there's ways in which the kids are probably w way out ahead of the teachers on some of this, depending on their access, depending on their savviness. So, how are we thinking about you know, ensuring that it is being seen as a tool and not an answer? It's I have a I have to go.

Final Take Tool Not Solution

Alex Kotran 1:04:48

Well, thank you so much for sticking with us.