Education By Design
The Education by Design podcast explores the architecture of learning environments—how schools are designed, not just operated—how culture is disrupted to make way for innovation and reaching potential.
Your host, Phil Evans is a career educator and creative. His guests bring inspirational and practical ideas into classrooms, all over the world. Join him as he engages with innovators who untangle the complexity of educational systems to align with shared values, common practices, and a common language to create powerful, human-centered learning experiences.
For any formal schooling system to have an impact, the central focus must be on learning. Let's learn together.
Dive deeper on the EduByDesign Blog: https://edubydesign.com/blog
Education By Design
S1:E5 Extended "The Human-Centered Classroom — Learning With AI, Not From It" with John Spencer
What does it mean to build a classroom where students learn with AI instead of just from it? In this bonus episode, Dr. John Spencer presents ideas to explore how human-centered teaching strategies can help students reflect more deeply, think more critically, and engage more creatively—even as AI tools become part of everyday learning. We talk about project-based learning, prompt engineering, and what happens when we treat AI as a creative companion, not a shortcut.
This is a practical, reflective listen for anyone thinking about how to keep learning meaningful in an age of machine-generated answers.
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And please let Phil know what resonates with you, in the comments.
Thank you for listening to Education by Design Extended Edition. In episode five, I got to talk to John Spencer about creativity, teaching in beta, and the way project-based learning really gets to the heart of what kids are interested in and how it really helps them engage in deeper learning. In this extension episode, we take teaching in beta a step further. We're going to be thinking about approaches to teaching that help us to think of AI as a tool to help us nurture curiosity and activate skill development in the classroom. John reminds us of some really essential basics around what it means to be a teacher who engages students in their own learning. And that actually means being an authentic creative alongside students.
SPEAKER_00:Let's go back to where we left off. And then it wasn't until the next year when I was unpacking stuff and reorganizing my classroom that I saw that new teacher card and, you know, noticed that at the bottom she put expires and then never. Right. And it was this reminder of like every year is a new year. Every group is a new group of kids, but also every day is a new year. day to try new lessons that may or may not work. To me, I think that's what teaching in beta is. It's the recognition that we will very rarely get 100 percent engagement. We will very rarely have projects that are grand slams. We're going to have a lot of swings and misses we're going to have a lot of singles and doubles we're going to have a lot of moments that don't work perfectly and that is okay because our imperfection our humanity is exactly what our students need is it's the mindset of, yes, we have those permissions. It also means we give our students that permission and like a true beta cycle, we gather student feedback, right? We listen to our students, we gain empathy with them, and we revise based on this humble approach of saying, hey, what can I do to improve this? And then listening to our students.
SPEAKER_01:I think that that's something that Richard Hood said in the very first episode of the podcast that I did, that that's sort of my job is to listen to you. It's to listen to what it is that you're interested in, what it is that you need, and to, by the end of the year, you know, I want to be able to say to you that you have the skills that you didn't have before. I've seen you develop and grow those skills and that you matter, you know. Like that, you know, when you say what kids need from their teachers is just that presence of I see you and I understand that right now you need to take a walk. Go for it. Take a break, you know. Take a moment. But I think for me teaching in beta has never been more important than, you know, at this time, you know, the way that education is evolving and now– artificial intelligence is just creating so much possibility for what we can do. I feel like in my life, I'm talking to it as a companion, as a thought partner. It's a companion for my inquiry. It's a companion for helping me to think about how I might organize things differently. And I don't always agree. I interrogate what it gives to me, obviously, but There's still, you know, an element of fear. It's early days. And I'm sort of, you know, I've heard in one of your episodes you were talking about kids still need to learn how to write. You know, how does teaching in beta perhaps give us the license and the permission to sort of lower the threat a little bit when it comes to integrating technologies?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, I think it just gives you the permission to say, yeah, Let's figure out what works. Let's play around with this. Let's see if this thing is valuable. And then with that, sometimes we say, look, the lo-fi option is what I'm going with, the vintage. I remember trying a computer-based, this was years ago, a computer-based concept map program. And five minutes into it, saying, kids can't figure out how to use it. This is not better. Why not just use paper and pencil? And they made their concept maps with paper and pencil, and we busted out colored pencils, and it was amazing. And the core concept was, in the end, I look at it and I go, what in all likelihood would lead to higher attention doing this by hand or on a computer? When we are in that beta mode, we have the permission to look honestly at what's going on and modify on the fly. And I think that if I felt tied to the technology, I would have just felt like I had to. You know, we did a Wonder Day project. We call it Wonder Day, but it was a two class period project where they just pursued any question they wanted related to the social studies topic, engaged in research, and then did this podcast when it was done. And it had gone really well before. And so he was saying, you know, I would love to to try using a chatbot for this. My students have an option of using a chatbot on our AI platform, and it was a nightmare. The students just copied and pasted from the chatbot. They just asked questions, took everything at face value, and they were moving so quickly that they weren't paying attention. Well, that process, although frustrating, led to developing a slower, what we call the fact cycle, prompt engineering process. That failed lesson led to a new framework that we could use that we then introduced two weeks later that turned out to be really helpful, that turned out to work. And I think on the tech side, if we had just accepted the tech on face value or we had just rejected it and said the technology didn't work, period, we wouldn't have been able to develop a cool solution to it.
SPEAKER_01:It's interesting that this little... example is what's illuminating how we're not quite ready for where we're going you know like the like the kids are going to revert to the routines that they've that have become normal normalized for them in terms of how they're going to and whether or not it was copying from the internet straight up or copying from a book back in like i mean we copied from books when we were sort of like still figuring out what we were supposed to really do i
SPEAKER_00:remember i mean it's so funny because people said you know complaining about students copy i remember turning in an essay And it was word for word verbatim from the Encyclopedia Britannica. We had this giant set. And that was like the elite encyclopedias. That was considered the good stuff, right? But, I mean, that's not new, right? Kids have been doing that for a long time. And honestly, I didn't even know better. I was in fourth grade. I thought this is what it meant to do research and write an essay. When I think about AI, I think there's going to be these deeply human things that are done. There's going to be these aspects where we use AI to do the repetitive work we hate, jump cuts and editing. There's going to be an emphasis on the human side. There's going to also be times where we use it to do things that are deeply human and we're using it as a tool, but as a thought partner. That's really exciting. I think about Ethan Mollick's notion of the cyborg and the centaur. We're going to use it in a very cyborg type way. And then we're also gonna just abandon it completely for a while and do something just solely solo in the same way that someone who handcrafts furniture is now more valuable than ever, right? And then we're gonna use it in bizarre ways where we transform the learning altogether. So I think about it in this continuum of, we're gonna resist it at times, we're gonna integrate it at times, we're gonna have times where it is offsetting what we do, and separate, and then we're going to have times where we use it to really transform the learning. And that, to me, is exciting. It's at times terrifying. There's moments where I definitely have ethical concerns with AI. But I think we're going to enter into a really interesting space where it's not either or, right? We're going to have to be all of the above. So what happens is it's the same thing. New art forms come out. because of the technology that are unexpected. Hyper-realism is the way people paint because of mirrors. The Dutch masters, people don't think about the technology made them better at their art form. But when photography comes out, we end up with impressionism. We end up with surrealism, with the Dada art movement, with cubism and all these modern art. All these art forms emerge that are, to me, really exciting. So the technology is going to push us to do these things that humans do very well differently and that's exciting and then the other thing that happened with the drum machine is it then also created new genres that use the drum machine right so the assumption was it's used to replace a drummer but the reality is it leads to the explosion of hip-hop electronic music i mean that's that's ultimately it i mean that's ultimately the bottom line like you know when when i mentioned earlier the the goal of PBL, you know, it's not, it's not the finished project. It's not the finished product. You know, those are all going to fade that they're, you know, very few products last. Like the reality is it's, it's who you become. And, you know, I think about me teaching in this, you know, it was a low income school and it was a mixed group of, I had the gifted group that we talked about this before, but you know, the gifted group and the, the ELL group and the special ed group, And to me, the long-term value in what I see is, where are they now? What are they doing now? How are they using those core skills that they learned? And that, to me, is what's exciting. In the moment, there were moments where I remember being frustrated or being sad for a kid that they tried something and it didn't work. And now I can look back on that and say, okay, well, let's look at who they've become as adults. And that's pretty exciting.
SPEAKER_01:You've been listening to the Education by Design podcast. I've been your host, Phil Evans. If you like this episode, please hit subscribe or follow and join me for my next episode. Keep on learning.
