Carole Basile on Why Schools Have to Be Redesigned, Not Just Re-tooled

Everyone wants a checklist for AI in schools. Carole Basile thinks that's  the wrong instinct — because the real problem isn't the technology, it's the 19th-century structure we're dropping it into.

Dr. Carole Basile is Dean of ASU's Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, where she's spent nearly a decade rebuilding the education workforce around teams of educators instead of one teacher alone with 25 kids. Before higher ed, she spent over a decade in the corporate world — and that organizational lens runs through everything here.

In this episode: 

• Why "embracing AI" at ASU means building human relationships, not replacing them
• The metacognitive data we've never had before — and the ethical obligation that comes with seeing it
• Why there's no teacher shortage, only a shortage of people who'll do an impossible job
• "Principled innovation": the what-should-we-build framework ASU started in 2016, before the AI wave
• Why the AI-cheating panic is a signal to redesign assessments, not police students
• The curriculum-company business model AI is quietly threatening — and the "Spotify moment" for textbooks
• Using AI for possibility thinking — expanding what a team can imagine, not handing over the answers
• Why K-12 keeps modeling itself on universities instead of on how the world actually works

Dr. Carole Basile — Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation, Arizona State University: https://education.asu.edu

aiEDU: The AI Education Project

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

Transcript

Cold Open: AI Needs A Team

SPEAKER_01 0:00

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

Alex Kotran 0:14

All right,

Meet Dr. Carol Basile

Alex Kotran 0:15

we're here with uh Dr. Carol Basile. Dr. Carol Basile is the Dean of Arizona State's Mary Lou Fulton College for Teaching and Learning Innovation. Uh, she's been in that role for, I think it was like 10 plus years now.

SPEAKER_01 0:28

10 years.

Alex Kotran 0:28

And and before that, she you actually spent uh over a decade in the corporate world. Um and in addition to holding uh an uh a PhD in education and curriculum instruction. Um so you have this interesting mix of this background as an educator, um, but you've also seen how um the corporate world operates and you bring a lot of that organizational insight into into this work. Carol, yeah, really excited to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Thank you, Alex. Glad to be here.

unknown 0:55

Dr.

Alex Kotran 0:55

Bazil, uh, can I call you Carol?

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Yes, please.

Alex Kotran 0:58

All right. We have a lot to cover. I mean, Arizona State University uh well, I should say, welcome to the virtual edition of AI EDU Studios X, the Center for Reinventing Public Education. You're you're, I think, the um penultimate uh interviewee as part of this series that followed from the uh Think Forward Fellowship. So I learned a lot from that fellowship. I mean, there's so many questions. I mean, I left with more questions than answers, but it was like the right questions with a lot of precision. So I have, you know, some you know, sort of paths to follow from that. But I'd be remiss if we didn't also take an opportunity to, you know, get insights from you really from the vantage point of someone who's leading the largest public institution in the country, certainly one of the largest public institutions in the world, and also one of the universities that has been truly on the forefront of really thinking about what does it look like for us to, I don't know if you'd use the word embrace, but really lean into this sort of like AI, this age of AI, and what does that mean for our students, our technology, our courses? And so you're in that world, but then you're also in the world of you know, training the next generation of educators and thinking about how does the education profession change? Um, a very easy job, I'm sure. Um, so I think a lot of this is really going to be a chance for for me, but also our audience, just to sort of like look behind the curtain to whatever extent you're willing to um to like pull it back and help us understand, you know, what what are the types of things that you are thinking about, excited about, maybe even like, you know, concerned about or or the questions that you still feel like need to be answered. But maybe you can like just zoom out a little bit and and just tell us about um the you know, like the work that your institution is doing and and you sort of like maybe even like your own journey with AI, like, you know, even like the first time that you used it, and like if you can even walk me through like the first meeting that you had where your team was like, hey, this AI thing, I think we need to uh I think we need to do something about it.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

That's a good question. That's a good question. I'm not even sure. Like it probably wasn't that long ago, and I don't even remember uh when we first started thinking about AI. But I think it in some ways it feels like it's always been here, right? I mean, people started recording Zoom meetings, right, with AI, you know, and you had all these kind of little things that were happening. People were saying, oh, you can write a letter, oh, teachers can do lesson plans, oh, you know, and you start experimenting, right, with what this can do. And then that, right, is just only like, oh my god, like not even the tip of an iceberg. It's the tip of the tip of the tip of an iceberg, right? When you think about what AI can do, what it's going to do, uh, the ways in which people are using it. Uh, we certainly see a lot of people trying to solve problems very quickly. So a lot of solutions, in some ways, looking for problems. So I think we're trying to sort through all of that. But I I think we're we are embracing it. I think we're doing more than leaning in. I think we are embracing AI in all the ways in which we think makes sense for us. And that's everything from thinking about AI literacy and equity and uh the ethics of AI and you know, all of all of those things, and um really thinking about how we how this is going to enhance how we think about building systems with AI and how AI becomes really central to building new kinds of education systems.

ASU’s AI Strategy In Practice

Alex Kotran 4:20

And can you walk me through like so ASU had a big announcement with OpenAI? Um what can you just walk us through like what is the sort of the current state of ASU's um sort of like AI strategy right now? I mean that there's there's there's been some announcements, I'm sure there's a lot of work that's being rolled out, you know, in phases.

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Yeah, I don't I don't want to speak for my CIO, but but I think, you know, like I say, I think ASU is embracing everything about AI. ASU is also embracing lots of other kinds of technology. So when you look at work that we're doing in the realms of learning, thinking about things like Dreamscape Learn and immersive learning and uh the use of VR and AR and all those kinds of things, that also has to be part of this conversation. It's not just AI. So, but but I think there is a lot of thousand lights blooming right now at ASU because we've opened this up, we've made these um tools available to everyone. So we're seeing not only people working on trying to think about, you know, faculty thinking about courses and students, and how do we build better human relationships and how do I mentor students better and student services, right? That then is thinking about AI and how do we do outreach to students in better ways? And how are we building, you know, AI bots that are, you know, able to address the things so that the people behind them actually have more opportunity, right, to build better human relationships with students. And then there are things on the operations side, right? So strategies around how we operate, how we become more efficient, how we use AI to help us to do all kinds of things that we were not able to do before. And so I think you just see it on all these different levels. It's not just at the teaching and learning level, it's it's also in all of these student-facing, faculty-facing, operations levels as well.

Alex Kotran 6:20

Yeah, and like and you've done, I mean, like you have um you have a framework for principal innovation, um, for like ethical decision making built around like this question of like, you know, not just what can we build, but what should we build? Um, and that predates AI, I believe.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

100%. Yeah.

Alex Kotran 6:38

Um, so you actually had a lot of the like infrastructure, because I think maybe this is a question. Like, to what degree do you see these AI tools that are that are cropping up? And do you feel like this is totally new versus to what degree is this just sort of the latest flavor of ed tech that education has been, you know, navigating for you know decades?

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Well, I

Principled Innovation Over Shiny Tools

SPEAKER_01 6:59

think we're still so principled innovation started in 2016 when I started here. Um, that is that was a college initiative that has become a university initiative. It certainly has helped us to drive innovation, to think about, you know, how we think about principled innovation, what we do, why we do it, uh how we how we move forward, making sure that we're making the right decisions to move forward. And I think this iteration of AI, which is, you know, probably not the certainly not the last, not the first, not the last. It's certainly been around for many, many years. And and it's been inside lots of things that we've used. It just now is much more prevalent in terms of being much more useful. And it's kind of like when everybody got a PC, right? It was like, oh, all of a sudden, you know, computing became accessible to everybody. Well, now AI is accessible to everyone in some way, shape, or form. And I think people are still just learning about it, right? We're just trying to figure out what it can do and how it can do that. So I do think you see a lot of experimentation. And I think what's going to need to happen is we we're gonna need more strategy around how are we using it, why are we using it. And so I think we as a college have really said, look, everything we do around AI has to be in service of building better human relationships, right? So, how do we get advisors, right, to have more time to spend with students? How do we get faculty, you know, to build better relationships? What is it about the data that we're learning from AI when students are doing assessments, learning about where, you know, their logic, learning about how they think about things, what their interests are, what misconceptions they have. How do we take that data and how do we start to use that data to build better human relationships? How do we use that to personalize learning? How do we use that to deepen learning? And so I think that's a direction that we're headed in as this becomes more and more sophisticated. I think we all have to think about that. But it also has to be in service of how do we actually change the systems that we've been trying to change for for decades and not been not been able to.

Alex Kotran 9:08

You say like it's so obvious. And I and obviously we're at AIDU we we deeply we're deeply aligned with this idea that we need to be focusing on the human advantage and the human side of the equation. Um, I don't think that that is necessarily where the the discourse naturally goes. I think actually that So either. And and the fact that you were even thinking about principled innovation as early as 2016, I think is instructive because it this is there is like a learning journey, I think, that happens from sort of like, you know, beginning to kind of make sense of the tools and capabilities and then sort of like working through well, what are their capabilities versus what are the limitations? And I think eventually you naturally get to that place where like, okay, these are powerful, but they have lots of limitations, and we need to be thinking about you know the the role of people, how how and the character of people and the character of people, people's integrity, people's intellectual curiosity, people's morals, people like that's part of principled innovation as well.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

It started with thinking about, you know, how does this help us to shape people's character? Because you can see all the bad side, you can see, you know, where this can go on the, you know, on the really bad side, and you can see where this can go if we really embrace this in a way that helps us to build human potential.

Alex Kotran 10:24

What have been your like secret uh tools, not technical tools, but sort of like rhetorical tools to help bring folks along who might be a little bit too distracted by like the shiny objects of technology? Because I'm sure that like every day you're getting bombarded with all manner of vendors and technology initiatives that you should be considering and and and you know, saying uh having to say no to all these things and staying focused on this idea of actually because what I'm hearing from you is I mean, I feel like we we have the same conversation in 2005 or 1995. I mean, like this feels very evergreen in terms of um, you know, like teaching is a human profession. It's and I think there's like a decision that that needs to be made and has not necessarily been made yet by everybody in the space as to like, you know, is the future of education still going to be human-centered or is it going to be AI-centered? How have you been able to sort of champion that? And is it is it truly from the top down, or have there been allies, you know, across your organization or maybe even like individual teachers that have been like helping you to sort of like live, live, live forward these principles that you're saying?

SPEAKER_01 11:36

Well, I think it's like yeah, you know, speed of the leader, but I think, you know, but it's also about having a vision for all of this and a bigger vision than just AI and technology. So there's always been distractions. Always. There have always been lines of people around my office wanting me, right, to build something more into teacher preparation, to do something more, to do the next technology, to require all my students, right, to, you know, to have whatever the latest device is.

The Data You Cannot Unsee

unknown 12:04

Right.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

That's always been the case. And so that part, that's easy. I know how to deal with that. The thing about this is that this isn't just a device. This is now something that has the potential to really change the way that we see things. So I was with a a a company a couple of weeks ago and we were looking at all the features of this uh of this learning system. And one of the things that the the thing, right, that really, really struck me was this idea of all the data they were collecting. Because you could see all these things about all these kids and what they were doing and how they were engaged. And once you've seen that kind of data, you can't unsee it. And so then the question is, now we have something new. Now we have something we've never seen. Now we have metacognitive data from learners that we've never had before. And the question is, what are we gonna do with it? And so we can take that data and we can say, look, I can't, as a teacher, right, I can't look at that data and then I've got to say, oh my gosh, I've got 25 kids in my classroom or 180, right, from a secondary teacher, whatever that number is. I can't possibly personalize my classroom for every single one of those kids. I can't be everything to all kids at all times. And so this is where we also then say, if that's true, then how do we start to think about what's the role of a teacher? How do they work together? How do we think about who educators are? How do we start expanding? And then how do we prepare them? That's a systems change, right? All the work that we're doing around strategic staffing right now comes out of that. So all of that then has to change the way we do things. We're learning from these systems. The systems aren't just, they're not just passively doing things. They have to, we have to look at what are we learning from them. What do we have that we didn't have before that would also uh help us to get to whatever it is, wherever it is we want to go. And so as a leader, you're always thinking about that vision. You're trying to figure out what should the what should the system look like, whether it's whether it's a higher ed system, whether it's a K-12 system. You always have to be thinking about what's next and what's the what's that going to look like. And then you think about the technology and how's the technology help you to get there. So we have a faculty member here who does work in in possibility thinking, right? He's a creativity scholar. Around the world, there are now things called possibilities labs. His thinking is how do we use AI to help us think about possibilities, not tell us the answers. But if you and I are in a room, we only know what we know. I could use AI and I could figure out how to how to use it and create it as you know, create the tools to be able to help me now think about possibilities. Now I'm sitting in a room full of, you know, a team member, a superintendent in their team. Now I'm not creating a strategic plan anymore. Now I have tools to actually help me think about what are the other possibilities for what we could be doing. That's really powerful in some sense, right? And so it isn't just, oh, okay, give me the answers. It's now it's like now I'm gonna use this as in a ways that actually help me get to the next the next horizon.

Alex Kotran 15:22

I mean, everything you're saying resonates. I do I do worry that schools and and universities, um they're hoping that there's gonna be just some checklist or some you know, like framework or like list of benchmarks that will answer these questions. And what I'm hearing from you is this is much more something that's driven by people and comes from actually like building the capacity of your human workforce, your teacher, like the experts that you have. Like I think maybe the biggest uh cohort of experts in the country is our teacher workforce. And it strikes me that, you know, even even what you've said right now really stands out from most of the conversations that I'm hearing about AI, where it I think people will give lip service to some of the things that you talk about, but it really comes as almost like the afterthought after spending all this time talking about the possibilities of the technology by itself. Yeah. I mean, to what degree do you feel like ASU is an outlier in your approach? Or do you just feel like you're just an early mover and are are others very gonna just sort of like eventually catch on and sort of like get get behind you?

SPEAKER_01 16:31

I don't know, Alex. I I I don't know. I this is this is me talking now, you know, I mean, but I think you know, Michael Crow would say similar kinds of things, right? And given, given where ASU is moving with all of this, certainly we're embracing all of this, but it is always, it's always for him, for me, for you know, people who are leading here. It's always about building human potential. It's always about building the capacity of people, right? The capacity of our students, our faculty, our staff. But it always has to be about that. And it is always then about access. How do we liberate our content? How do we get it out there? How do we get it to more people? How do we become more accessible? How do we become more inclusive, right, in terms of who can who gets the content, right, that we have. I think AI help will help us to do that. So I I think I don't I I don't know if people will catch up, right? I I don't know if people will think the same way. But it certainly is the way that we are thinking. And I'm hoping that we are, I'm hoping we're leading that. We have a lot of people who come here to see what we're doing. And so I always hope that people take back, you know, the things, some of these things, the way we're thinking about it, and the way that we're we're really trying to engage in this in big ways, but in very healthy move people, move people ahead, right? Build for human flourishing. But you know, we're not just giving lip service to that. Because that is that that is what this has to be about.

Alex Kotran 18:02

It's it's also the I mean, even when I talk to teachers unions and folks that you would naturally expect to be quite resistant to AI, terrible. Um, when framed as a through the through through the lens of how do we work backwards from human potential, there's everybody's aligned with that. Like I don't think like there's there's actually a lot fewer Luddites than people assume. I think that some people are being called Luddites when in fact in reality they are just being, you know, appropriately cautious that we don't get so distracted by technology in isolation that we don't think about ultimately what's more important, right? Which is like the the human component who are ultimately using the technology. To that end, like Arizona State University, yeah, you it at the end of the day, it's not you don't you you can't um determine sort of what the the broader system does, but uh you have done a lot, I would say, maybe maybe more than almost any other school, um, to try to help create, I think, space for this conversation to happen. And I'm thinking about the AI and education, uh, learning futures collaborative, obviously the Think Forward Fellowship at CRPE, um, you know, the ASUGSV summit, which has become like the pre-eminent summit where uh folks outside of even just ed tech, but even in like in philanthropy and uh K-12 are coming. Um have you learned anything that surprised you at, you know, at across any of those convenings? Like just

Building Systems For Human Potential

Alex Kotran 19:27

sort of are there interesting things that people are doing that just opened your mind as to you know what might be possible?

SPEAKER_01 19:34

Oh, I think there's a lot of interesting things. I mean, I think that's the that that right now is actually the beauty of the moment, right? Is that people are feeling like they can jump in and they can just start to do things. I think the the the big worry I have is they're doing things for now in the system that is now, and they're not thinking about how do we build things and how do we get the system to change to what we need or to what we want, right? So it depends on on what it depends on where you are with all of that. But it's always interesting to me to go to all of these things, right? To see what people are thinking about, how they're thinking about it, what's new, what's next. Because it's it's it's just gonna change so much. They can't help but change. I mean, you you look at the last hundred years and everything has changed. The next hundred years, it's gonna be remarkable. Well, recognize it.

Alex Kotran 20:28

Yeah, I I've been on this um sort of historical jaunt right. I've been obsessed with uh the kerosene lamp because there was like this period of time where, you know, there was an oil boom and it wasn't because we were selling oil to cars for gasoline, but it was actually because of kerosene lamps. That's how Rockefeller made his first fortune. And I think you're kind of alluding to this idea that like, you know, we have this amazing kerosene lamp version of AI. We don't necessarily know what the combustion engine and cars and planes, what that version will look like for AI. And this question of like, well, how do you build backwards from that when you don't know what you're building backwards from? And yeah, I guess investing people feels like very good, bad. I mean, like, just getting into sort of like the like the next generation education workforce.

AI As A Teammate In Classrooms

Alex Kotran 21:14

Um, like when you close your eyes and imagine like, you know, the best schools, the best classrooms in the country 10 years from now, is is AI a a team member alongside educators, like with distributed expertise? Is it changing the composition of school teams?

SPEAKER_01 21:30

Yeah, I 100% it does. It has to. If people are people, if people are smart about using AI. And it isn't about building lesson plans. It isn't like everybody, you know, I hear people say that all the time. Oh, this is great. My teacher can first of all, they shouldn't be creating their own lesson plans. Like, like there should be really curriculum people, people who actually have expertise, right, in this, actually creating lesson plans. But again, I think it comes back to the one to the data. We will have more data. We will be able to have, I think, a broader set of assessments. Around actually knowing who people are, who individuals are, who individual kids are, and what they can do and how they think about things. And I think, I think our systems have to be built for that. And I think we're seeing in this whole movement of parents, right, who we're seeing more people homeschooling, we're seeing more people pulling their kids out of school to do micro-school. You know, all those kinds of things, I think are just um, they're a sign and I of the fact that people aren't getting what they want for their kids. A lot of that is around, I think, special education, uh, kids that have very, very specific needs. But I do think, right, that at the end of the day, what people are going to want for their kids is going to be a personalized education system that allows their kid to flourish, it allows their kid to hit barriers and helps them to get past those barriers. It allows kids to follow whatever interests they have and their passions, because it's it doesn't matter in what way. I had somebody, I was on a podcast one time and somebody said to me, So, what do you think? Should we teach history chronologically or should we teach history like pick one thing and go deep? And I said, Well, why are those the only two answers? Because it's not how we learn. So if I read a book, then I pick something out of that book. There's something else, right, that takes me a different direction and then a different direction, and then it takes me somewhere else. And that's how I, that's how we learn because we just start making connections to things. And then you want to go deep in some things because people have really, you know, big interests in a certain thing. They should be able to go deep. And others, people should be able to collect, you know, information the way they want to collect it, because you're never gonna know everything. And so we have to allow for that, and we have to be able to build these education systems that aren't one teacher and one classroom and a bunch of kids sitting in rows of desks or even in small groups, right, with one teacher who only knows what they know with their that experience. It's going to have to change. You're gonna have to be able to dynamically group kids, you're gonna have to be able to do project-based learning, problem-based learning that we've been talking about for decades, that we've never been able to get to. The schedules are gonna change. The things, it's gotta look, you know, it has to look different. And with that said, kids all need to learn math, they all need to learn to read, they all need some, you know, you gotta have some basic skills. And more than basic. Right? So that all has to continue to happen. But when you think about then AI coming in to support all of that, that's a different ballgame. Because AI can support basic skill learning, but there have to be people ready to help kids when they get stuck or when they're ready to move on, or when they're you know, when they hit a barrier, because AI won't be won't be the end-all be-o. The AI tutor will not be the end-all be-o. You will still need people. AI can help kids go deeper. AI can help personalize. It will be able to do so many things. It has to be a team member, but it has to be a team member. There has to be a team for it to be a member of.

Alex Kotran 25:10

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

Standards And Assessments Must Evolve

Alex Kotran 26:41

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

SPEAKER_01 27:43

Yeah, I I think we're trying. I mean, I think we're trying to, you know, to look, we're trying to be thought provokers here, right? I mean, that's what you, you know, that's what a lot of us do. But I also think that we are trying to push the system, the work that we're doing around strategic staffing, all the schools that we're working in and trying to get people to think about teams. Those schools are right shifting those barriers. They're changing their schedules. They're thinking differently about how teachers work together. They're thinking differently about how they group and regroup kids. They're thinking about how to use AI, right, to help them to do those kinds of things. And so I think we are trying to push on that. I can't get there fast enough. I can't get there, I can't get to the scale I want fast enough, right? But, you know, we've had over 2,000 people come to visit, right, and look at schools and work with us and talk to us. And we're across the country now and in the Netherlands and other places, right? It's beginning to think about what these environments could look like. And we're only at the tip of then how AI needs to be a partner in all this and has how AI needs to be part of the team, because we're just now trying to figure out how to get teachers to work in teams. The rest of the world works in teams, not in education. It's the most incredible thing to me, right? We all distribute expertise and schools, schools don't even think that way. And so when you have a a school leader who's saying, oh, okay, well, that would require us to do X, yes, yeah, yeah, it would. Go do that. Yeah, go go change your schedules, go figure out how what the organizational sort of go design something different so that you can you can do both. But you can't help you. You can't.

Alex Kotran 29:25

Yeah, I mean you you you you very get quickly when you talk about like AI readiness, you very quickly get to systems change and school transformation. And it's actually for us, it's been a challenge because you know, I think and and very often when we're talking to whether it's funders or administrators, you know, they're meeting with the AI education project. They come into this meeting ready to have a conversation about, you know, AI and their school. And we essentially are trying to lead them to really, this is a conversation that the same conversation that you've been having for 20 plus years. Like this is a conversation about project-based learning. This is a conversation about making sure that learning is actually engaging and meaningful to students and connected with their interests, but also connected to like careers that are relevant and and up to date with the career pathways that those students have. Um, it's about professional development, which is um, you know, has lots of room for improvement in many schools.

SPEAKER_02 30:24

Yeah, yeah.

Alex Kotran 30:25

Um, and I think in some ways, to me that's comforting because it's like actually this scary new confusing technology, it isn't this isn't about revolutionizing school. Like this is about evolving, and we've kind of known what we where we need to go, and to and and now hopefully this is sort of just the nudge out of the door that we've always needed. Yeah, yeah. Um but I I'm curious for your take on my instinct, is that people are exasperated from the difficulty of that. That like we've been trying talking about 21st century skills and project-based learning and school transformation for all of this time, and it's and it's been hard. And I think for a lot of people the feeling is we were largely have failed at that. And so I think people are a little bit disappointed when you when when they have to accept that AI isn't going to be this silver bullet that just sort of like fixes all of these hard things. Because even if people are the center and that's inspiring, it's also people are really hard, and you can't scale, you know. Alex,

Redesigning Schools Around Teamwork

Alex Kotran 31:31

nothing you change management, right? Like this is like a people-to-people work.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

I I am convinced nothing's gonna change until the structure changes, until people think about the organizational design of schools. It has to change. You can't organize schools with a principal and a bunch of teachers and teachers who have 25 who are assigned 25 kids and think that you're going to be able to do any of the things that we think are good for kids. I just don't think you can do it. You're never gonna have every teacher that can do everything. Just you're just not. And it doesn't even make any sense. And they're all walking in with different levels of experience and expertise, and and you know, so my kid gets the the long-term sub and your kid gets this, you know, the former engineer who's like really gung ho about math and science. Well, great for your kid. Why isn't my kid get that person too? And not that the long-term sub is bad, maybe it's a great long-term sub who actually knows how to teach kids to read. My kid's already reading, my kid doesn't need that. My kid really wants this other piece. Or maybe the person, you know, or a kid gets, you know, somebody who's really, really strong in math and science and engineering, but has no idea how to help kids learn how to read. And they need the other person. It's not, it's it it isn't the the structure's not right. And and so that's where we're coming in and trying to figure out how do we how do we begin to shift those structures and how do we use AI to help us to do that. But we keep thinking about school in the same way, in the same structure. It's the same at the university. The university is exactly the same way, and in some ways, I always tell this story about a school, a private school that built a beautiful $30 million new school. And in the middle of that school, they built a lecture hall. Why did they build a lecture hall? Because we're preparing kids to go to college, and they have to learn what it's like to sit and be lectured to in a lecture hall. Well, that's crazy. That's crazy. And so universities also have to change our practice. Our faculty, right, are now thinking about how to work on teams. We're trying to think about, we're trying to be more flexible. We're trying to say to students, you don't have to come in Monday, you know, Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Thursday. Maybe there are other ways to do this. We use online, that we use hybrid, that we like there are other ways, right, that our students can learn, and there are other pathways that they need to take. Because we need to be more learner-centered and we need to model what that looks like. And so it is the education writ large, but it is amazing to me, right, that that K-12 often is following universities because that's what they think. Like that schools ought to look like. When in fact, they need to be looking beyond the university to say, what does the workplace look like? And how do people work and what does that look like? Well, lo and behold, guess what? People in the workplace are working on teams. They don't work in isolation and maybe working at home, but I'm guaranteed that you're working on a team, right? And on your team, there is distributed expertise. Wouldn't it be better if schools looked more like that? If we're going to talk about workforce and workplace and and all those kinds of things, like if we're really going to talk about these skills, don't we need to model them in our education settings? Of course we do.

Alex Kotran 34:58

But there really isn't a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

They're not seeing their teachers, right, critically think. They're not, they're not seeing all that out loud. But when teachers start working in teams, then they start to see that. It all becomes more apparent. And when you have AI, and again, when you've got data that's coming out that you've never had before, now you've got it just it it is going to you can't not see it. And if you don't see it and you don't address it, then you are not being very ethical in your practice. You can't see all that, and then say to a group of 25 kids, okay, everybody turn to page 63 and think everybody's gonna be on page 63. You can't do that anymore. And AI is making that more and more transparent every single day. So you can focus on academic integrity, you can think all those things, but you know what? The system has to change. Assessments have to change. I hear faculty here talk about academic oh my god, they're cheating. Come on, then change your assessment. That's on you. That's not them. That's on you. You change what you're doing. That's gonna force the system to change.

Alex Kotran 36:12

How much of that comes from because that is exactly my take. I I I take qualms with with talking about the use of AI as cheating. I think it is I think I I I actually, largely speaking, I think teachers' anxieties are in are are well placed, right? It's like the I I think teachers are not Luddites, they are deeply concerned about the way the fact that AI has the ability to remove productive struggle.

unknown 36:38

Yeah.

Alex Kotran 36:39

But I think the solution that they are being presented or that they naturally fall to is one of deterrence when also we don't have a good way to deter. Like there isn't there, there isn't a detect detectors don't work. Right. And the idea that you can sort of like design guardrails for tools that are so powerful that they're literally building entire companies and like app applications. Like the AI is gonna be able to get around whatever guardrails you try to put in, anyways. Of course.

SPEAKER_01 37:09

Um But then you're not then you're not looking at the right things.

Rethinking Cheating Through Student Input

SPEAKER_01 37:13

And it's not about output, it's about input.

Alex Kotran 37:15

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 37:16

Right? I want to know I want to know their logic. I want to know what they said to AI. I want to know where they went. I want to know where their misconceptions were. Do I need do I still need multiple? Do I still need summative assessments? I don't know. Maybe not.

Alex Kotran 37:33

How do you feel about my diagnosis of it?

SPEAKER_01 37:35

I don't know. I'm just saying. I'm just saying, like maybe not. Maybe it changes everything. And I think it's gonna be, and I I think we've got to bring curriculum companies and assessment companies, and you know, people have got to come to the table here around this. They that they have the opportunity to really change these systems with what they build, what they what they write, how they do it, how they think about these things.

Alex Kotran 37:59

Yeah, the curriculum companies are are almost the elephant in the room because you know you go to a lot of these convenings, and there's all the nonprofits and the foundations and this the schools and you know, the especially the for-profit curriculum companies. Do you have any hardware?

SPEAKER_01 38:13

Standards and state standards and all of that, right?

Alex Kotran 38:15

Like that's and is that because of state standards that like basically the curriculum companies are like, well, we have to teach to the standards.

SPEAKER_01 38:23

Yeah, but it doesn't tell them how. Right. I mean, they've just always done it in the way that they've done it, right? I mean, it's you know, chapters are written in some linear format. But AI, it would help you to not be writing things in linear form. Yeah, because books are, you know, force you to to create something, right? That's linear. AIDS you to not do that, right?

Alex Kotran 38:47

I mean, wait, but this is really this is vexing because what you're saying is basically over here.

SPEAKER_01 38:53

There's a lever, right? There's a driver and a lever around some of this, right? That you have to talk about. Because it's it's it goes back to, oh my god, this is great. Now my teachers can, you know, create their own lesson plans. Well, what why? And no, that's not great. Yeah. And then you better be teaching them how to critique those lesson plans. And all, you know, but I've just never thought teachers should be creating their own lesson plans. But I don't know if they do because the curriculum isn't flexible enough or because, you know, you're trying to differ you've got to differentiate for kids and because, you know. And so all of that, it's great, it's great, right? And all the curriculum now that with AI, you go, okay, great. I can get it to a I got a kid in eighth grade, but he's reading at a third grade level, so I can I can get it to him in a third grade reading level. Okay, great. How are you helping him to read? How are you helping him to get to an eighth grade reading level?

Alex Kotran 39:42

I mean, it feels it feels hard to imagine curriculum companies.

SPEAKER_01 39:46

Who is thinking about all that? Right? Teachers.

Alex Kotran 39:50

Yeah. But what you're describing is really like dismantling the business model of curriculum companies. Because like I don't know that I don't know that you need a curriculum provider to I Well, I do think you need to.

SPEAKER_01 40:08

I don't think you need validators. I mean, I do think you do need validators, people who do have expertise who know what's right, what's not, right? I mean, I I AI is not perfect, right? Like, like I don't want to say, oh, okay, like just learn everything on AI, because I I there's a lot of junk out there too. I mean, you have to be careful with that. And I do think that there is an instructional part to the curriculum, right? That is also really important. But I think the instructional piece is gonna, it's changing. And the curriculum companies have to go with that. They've it it's it's not about their content, it's about the way things are taught. And how do you personalize learning and what do you do when the, you know, and they've tried they try to do that a little bit, but certainly not now they have the opportunity to really, really lean into that. It kind of feels like the um, creating curriculum for a one teacher, one classroom model of schools, right? That's the you know, and so this is the you know, this is sort of the you know, the hamster wheel we always end up in because these companies are building for now, because that's what sells. And so the question is how do you get out of that? How do you get out of that flywheel to do something different?

Curriculum Companies And New Business Models

Alex Kotran 41:22

I mean, doesn't it? It feels kind of like the um what the music industry experienced with the shift from you know CDs and and records to streaming. To Spotify. To Spotify. And you know, I think but isn't it? I mean, I feel like curriculum companies are right to be anxious because even though I completely agree that there is a role for a core set of high-quality instructional materials that, you know, even if you're using AI, it's not creating new lesson plans, it's helping you draw from a database of like vetted learning resources and and perhaps tailoring or packaging them in like a certain way for you, but but that is a very different pricing model, right? Like your curriculum companies are charging like, what is it? I mean, I I don't even know what the cost per student. I mean, I think it's like you know, you know, one textbook per student and their their contracts are sort of like predicated on that. And I just I just wonder if they're gonna be able to justify those type of costs when, you know, like it's it should be a lot cheaper.

SPEAKER_01 42:28

Yeah, I don't know. And then you see other people, right, that are developing things that are different kinds of curriculum now, right? So you got all kinds of things that are happening, right? When you see things like course mojo, when you see things like, you know, we've been working with CK12, we've been working, you know, I mean, there's there are other there there's there are other things out there, lots of people, right, that are thinking now about curriculum and about what this what the systems are, right? It's not just curriculum, it's not just a textbook, it's not just content. Now it has to be a different kind of system. And where is AI, right? And it's and I think it's more than an AI tutor. Because we've seen all those. We've seen like hundreds of those.

Alex Kotran 43:12

I get pitched so many times like, oh, we're building an AI teaching tool for blank.

SPEAKER_01 43:17

Yeah.

Alex Kotran 43:18

I but the the You and me both. The one place that I I do think there's I'm very interested in the the role of AI, I don't know if tutor is the right word, but coaches, specifically for like neurodiverse students, English language learners, which is not a small, I mean, like I think 20% of the student population is dyslexic. I mean, we're like this is a huge population of students that, and you alluded to this, that are not being served by the current system. So people sometimes ask, like, oh, are you anti AI in schools? I'm like, absolutely not. But I feel like the like my role as I as I see your, you've you've seen taken your role to be is like championing this like teacher and human centered. uh trajectory for the conversation and like making sure that we're working backwards in the right place.

SPEAKER_01 44:08

If you're always asking that question of how does the a how is the AI being used in service of building better human relationships and better humans, like you just have to ask yourself that question every time. Tell me that. And I'll tell you whether or not you have a tool that is valuable.

Alex Kotran 44:26

Yeah, I just wanted to close with like I think the maybe one of the most acute problems is like we you and I have just sort of commiserated on like how important educators are in this whole equation. And we're dealing with this shortage of educators and acute shortage of educators across the country. And the the I think the percentage of educators who'd recommend the profession is down from like 62% several years ago to 18% I think as of last year. How do we fix that? And my mom is a teacher and so I was like I was aghast at the like the the popular rejection of education as a profession to be respected and honored. And I worry that AI is actually taking us in the wrong direction. And so it feels more important than ever to figure out how to address

Teacher Shortage Is A Job Design Problem

Alex Kotran 45:15

that.

SPEAKER_01 45:15

I'm just curious like from your vantage point well when we should stop talking about there's a teacher shortage because it's not a teacher shortage. It's a shortage of people who want to do the job there are hundreds of thousands of certified teachers out there that are choosing not to do this job anymore. And so when you start to think about it that way then you have to say to yourself what is it about the job right that people can't they just can't do. What is it that they can't do? It's isolating it's inflexible you can't serve students in the way that you want to you have to take on too many hats too many roles it's it is a it the job is not humanly possible. And I've been saying this now for years. And so I go back to it's the organizational structure that's wrong. It's the workplace that's not right. It's the learning environment that's not right. And so you can't think about this is not a retention it's not a recruitment and retention issue even And people are going to change jobs right they're gonna change jobs more often. People are gonna they're not gonna stay in this job for 30 years and oh by the way women have a lot more options today. Yes right but but could you keep them a little longer could you attract more people to come back could you think about people coming back part time we we are leaving so much talent on the table that it it's it's just it's stunning. Because we cannot figure out how to change the workplace we cannot change we can't change the organizational structure of schools fast enough. We're still in an antiquated model antiquated linear you know horizontal model. It doesn't make any sense anymore. And when you think about AI and you think about again all everything that we are learning from AI and all the data that that we it is now going to be at our fingertips about every single student that organizational structure just doesn't make any sense to put kids first and say all right what do we know about every one of those kids then how are we going to teach them? I guarantee you'd you'd come up with a different you'd come up with a different structure and you'd come up with a different way to think about how to use AI than you are doing today.

Alex Kotran 47:44

I guarantee But it's not just how do we how do we make sure that teachers and teacher prep programs are learning to use AI is it's like no they need to design the place where they are ending up.

SPEAKER_01 47:55

Correct correct and they need to learn how to design so we had a group of high school kids right we had a group of high school kids and we said all right if you could design you know schools right here's the you know uh we've been working with XQ we're you know we're talking about the design principles of XQ and we said look at you can use these and you could build they and they they don't go very far. They don't they just can't get very far because they only know what they know. And so this idea of using AI to think about possibilities is huge. And

Possibility Thinking And What’s Next

SPEAKER_01 48:30

you also have to get them to see other other ways of doing this. And there are schools out there right that look different that are trying to do some things differently we just started here a school with Steve Levitt called the Levitt Lab. That's going to look different you see alpha schools you see like you know you see con you see like people are really trying to think about this. It's just not it it it isn't it's not getting to mainstream fast enough. And then you're seeing declining enrollments and you're like all of these things is just it it is it's all connected we just don't see them and talk about them as being connected but they are all connected I I think people under variance of kids we are not thinking about kids as individuals and their human potential and how do we help them get there.

Alex Kotran 49:18

I haven't built that system I I think people do understand that it's connected fundamentally because I've been with so many administrators where the con like once we sort of bring this frame of you know like this like human-centered approach to AI readiness, they I've not talked to a single administrator who's like I think our testing regime is good. I don't think it needs to be changed. I think there are I think that everybody like acknowledges that I think there is an anxiety to take that on because it feels so intractable and there's like a precise just a precision to a conversation about AI literacy that is lost once you zoom out and start to say okay we need to talk about standards and assessments and that's easy your teacher pipeline.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

Because that's easy and to talk about AI literacy and let that yeah AI literacy is easy right it's yeah sure we can do AI literacy but that's that's not going to fix everything like that it's like doing smartphone literacy um yeah yeah smart boards um okay I don't know I I there's a lot a lot to uncover a lot to think about a lot to map out but I do think these are design problems.

Alex Kotran 50:26

I think these are fundamentally these are design problems and AI has to be part of the design and I'm normally you know I've I've historically been very like you know roll my eyes at thought leadership as a as a as a thing that organizations do as an organization does a lot of thought leadership. Listening to you talk I really now understand like this is this is a time where we need voices that are actually like orienting the space towards like what the conversation should be um so I just want to thank you for one like you know holding holding true to that um and not getting distracted by the shiny object is there anything you want to close with I think that was a perfect close for what it's worth but no I think it's fine. Okay.

Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_01 51:11

It's good great conversation for sure