Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
“It used to be about ability. And now, in a changing world, I think what we should be looking for is agility. I want to know how quickly do you change your mind? How fast are you to admit you’re wrong? Because what that means is you’re not just going to be reacting to a pandemic or to AI, you’re actually going to be anticipating those problems and seeing around corners, and then leading change as opposed to being a victim of it.” ~Adam Grant
It’s more than just anticipating problems, it’s about being agile, understanding challenges, and addressing them while they are small. It’s about understanding your strengths, and the strengths of your team… as well as weaknesses.
It’s about Agile Ability, which is why I titled this ‘Ability AND Agility’, rather than ‘Ability VERSUS Agility’. We need to embrace our failures and learn from them, recognize problems early, even predict them and be preemptive. This is so different than a culture of accountability and blame.
The desired student, employee, partner, colleague of the future will learn what they need to on the job. They’ll be exceptional because of their agility and willingness to learn, not just because of what they came to the table already knowing.
We are in for a unique change in the workforce. We are approaching a wave of Generation X retirements and that’s leading to shortages in the workforce. Teachers, nurses, doctors, plumbers, and many more positions that AI won’t easily replace, are seeing retirements happen faster than they can be replaced.
So part one of the change is simple to see, and that’s workforce shortages. The other part of this wave is these same Gen X’ers taking on different jobs. People retiring in their late 50’s and early 60’s are not all going to leave the workforce completely. This will happen for a couple reasons.
They won’t leave because their pensions need to be subsidized to live the life they want to live, and they won’t leave because work gives meaning to a lot of them… being productive is important in feeling young and staying healthy. Some of these people will continue working in their old fields after receiving there pension, ‘double-dipping’ and earning both a pension and also doing their old job part time. But others will go into whole new fields.
This is a part of the wave that is undefined and even exciting. I think you are going to see an increase in ‘creatives’ who are going to be 55+ in age. Older social media influencers, and artists, and producers of creative content. You’ll see novelists whose first best seller was written after the author turned 60. You’ll see short, clever, high quality filmmaking and storytelling. You’ll see new companies going viral with first-time CEO’s and entrepreneurs who are also senior citizens.
When Gen X retires they are going to ‘hit different’. Then again they are a generation that seemed to define themselves as different all along. I’m excited to see how they hit retirement are redefine it in the coming years.
It has become abundantly clear that the old adage that, “Knowing is half the battle,” is a pile of BS that should never have become a knowable quote. People know that smoking is bad for them; they know that second serving of desert is not a good idea; they know that they should work out. The only time knowing matters is after a life-threatening experience, a kick in gut that says ‘get your shit together or else.’
Prior to that, knowing is maybe 5% of the battle. Doing is the real threshold to get more than 1/2 way to the goal you are hoping for.
Doing something to change, no matter how small, is how you get to the goals you want to achieve… to accomplish positive change.
What you do could be less than 1% of what you hope to accomplish. It could be a small step in the right direction. It could even be an initial step in the wrong direction (but with the right intention). What matters is action.
Doing is more than half the battle.
Change doesn’t happen because you know it should, it happens because you took action.
“The impediment to action advances action.
What stands in the way becomes the way.”
On a positive note, the obstacles to learning can become the impetus to new learning, like this example from a student at Inquiry Hub… where a roadblock to continuing a project led to new, creative approaches and learning.
But often the impediment or obstacle becomes the block to new learning, or new approaches, or different, better ways of doing things. The impediment becomes the way, it becomes what you do, or rather what you do to avoid change, or worse yet what you use to define yourself. “I can’t” becomes the mantra, the limiting thought that makes not changing, not improving easier than doing what’s best. “I’m too tired, too lazy, too fat, too stubborn, too ‘insert-excuse-here’ to change. You continue to do what you did before, or you try something new, but decide that what you are already doing is either easier or more comfortable than the thing you had hoped to do. What stands in the way becomes the way. Inaction becomes the action.
“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than think your way into a new way of acting.”
We often convince ourselves of things we should not do, we talk ourselves out of trying new things, and we limit ourselves by thinking something is too hard… we think our way out of acting differently. The reality is that we are quite good at that. Our thoughts themselves become the impediment. The trick to overcoming this is to act… to actually start doing regardless of the thinking. Start small. Start really, really small but start to ‘do’ the thing we want to do. We are far more likely to achieve our goals if we act our way into doing them rather than trying to convince ourselves that we can do them.
Our thoughts can impede us, or our actions can push our thoughts forwards so that the thoughts (eventually) follow our actions.
“It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than think your way into a new way of acting.”
Otherwise, the impediment to action advances (non) action. Start small… but start now.
We walked about 1/3 the way up then we put on our grip-on cleats, and the cold air was a lot more difficult for me to tackle compared to the actual walking conditions. Still, we usually do the walk in 55 to 56 minutes and it took us 1 hour. A four minute difference.
Today was another story. It started the same with just us in the parking lot, but the lot was very slushy and slippery and so Dave and I put our over-shoe cleats on right away.
Walking conditions this time were much harder to tackle. One thing that added to the challenge was that we had to stop at least 10 times for Dave to adjust his cleats, which kept slipping off of his shoes. I don’t think Strava counted all the adjustment stops because when I stopped my timer it said 1 hour and 14 minutes, but it saved the time as 1 hour and 11 minutes.
That’s a significantly slower time due to the slippery, slushy conditions. We don’t mind, it wasn’t a race, and we love the opportunity to be together, get some exercise, and also feel the accomplishment of ‘just doing it’ even when conditions are less than favourable. But one thing that was quite clear was that my cleats provided a much better experience than Dave’s. In essence, my cleats were a tool that I used, but didn’t have to think about, didn’t have to manage. I put them on at the start, they did their job, and I took them off at the end. Dave’s cleats needed his attention. They took away from the flow of the experience… they interrupted our walk.
Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a big deal, it didn’t ruin or walk or anything like that, they simply required our attention. On the way down Dave suggested that we think about a metaphor for the experience and the best one we came up with was, “Sometimes it’s worth getting a great tool instead of accepting and tolerating the use of a good tool.”
The cleats I own were just $21 on Amazon, and a few dollars more than the ones Dave has. The cost difference isn’t much, but the experience is so much better. Unfortunately after our walk last week, I forgot to share the link with Dave until yesterday, so he’ll get his by Monday and be ready for next week, but they didn’t come in time for today’s walk.
It’s a good lesson to think about though. Sometimes we just use a tool because it’s the one we have, the one we’ve always used, or the one that is easy to access, rather than seeking the best tool for the job. Sometimes it’s worth the time and research, and/or the extra cost, to get a tool that does the job extremely well… and reduce the challenges of using a less than ideal tool.
In the grand scheme of things, we’ll probably only need these cleats 1-3 more times this entire year, and if Dave stuck with his, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But there are things in our lives that we readily tolerate that could become ‘invisible’ and require less of our time, energy, focus, and attention… working seamlessly because we have found the right tool for the job.
“Someone asked these questions in response to a blog entry, and I was wondering, what would YOUR response be?
1. What role/how much should students be using AI, and does this vary based on grade level?
2. What do you think the next five years in education will look like in regards to AI? Complete integration or total ban of AI?”
I commented:
1. Like a pencil or a laptop, AI is a tool to use sometimes and not use other times. The question is about expectations and management.
2. Anywhere that enforces a total ban on AI is going to be playing a never-ending and losing game of catch-up. That said, I have no idea what total integration will look like? Smart teachers are already using AI to develop and improve their lessons, those teachers will know that students can, and both will and should, use these tools as well. But like in question 1… when it’s appropriate. Just because a laptop might be ‘completely integrated’ into a classroom as a tool students use doesn’t mean everything they do in a classroom is with and on a laptop.
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I’ve already dealt with some sticky issues around the use of AI in a classroom and online. One situation last school year was particularly messy, with a teacher using Chat GPT as an AI detector, rather than other AI detection tools. It turns out that Chat GPT is not a good AI detector. It might be better now, but I can confirm that in early 2023 it was very bad at this. I even put some of my own work into it and I had Chat GPT tell me that a couple paragraphs were written by it, even though I wrote the piece about 12 years earlier.
But what do we do in the meantime? Especially in my online school where very little, if any, work is supervised? Do we give up on policing altogether and just let AI do the assignments as we try to AI proof them? Do we give students grades for work that isn’t all theirs? How is that fair?
This is something we will figure out. AI, like laptops, will be integrated into education. Back in 2009 I presented on the topic, “The POD’s are Coming!”
(Slideshow here) About Personally Owned Devices… laptop etc… coming into our classrooms, and the fear of these devices. We are at that same point with AI now. We’ll get through this and our classrooms will adapt (again).
And in a wonderful full-circle coincidence, one of the images I used in the POD’s post above was a posterized quote by Miguel Guilin.
It’s time to take the leap. AI might be new… but we’ve been here before.
“Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it” ~ Max Frisch
One of my favourite presentations I’ve ever created was back in 2008 for Alan November’s BLC – ‘Building Leadership Capacity’ conference. It was called: The Rant, I Can’t, The Elephant and the Ant, and it was about embracing new technology, specifically smartphones in schools.
The rant was about how every new technology is going to undermine education in a negative way, starting with the ball point pen.
I can’t was about the frustrations educators have with learning to use new tools.
The elephant was the smartphone, it was this incredibly powerful new tool that was in the room. You can’t ignore an elephant in the room.
The Ant was a metaphor for networking and learning from others… using a learning community to help you with the transformation of your classroom.
I ended this with a music slideshow that I later converted to video called, Brave New World Wide Web. This went a bit viral on BlipTV, a now defunct rival of YouTube.
The next year I presented at the conference again and my favourite of my two presentations was, The POD’s are Coming, about Personally Owned Devices… essentially laptops and tablets being brought into schools by students. These may be ubiquitous now, but it was still pretty novel in 2009.
These two presentations and video give a pretty strong message around embracing new technology in schools. So my next message about embracing AI tools like Chat GPT in schools is going to come across fairly negatively:
It’s going to be a bumpy and messy ride.
There is not going to be any easy transition. It’s not just about embracing a new technology, it’s about managing the disruption… And it’s not going to be managed well. I already had an issue in my school where a teacher used Chat GPT to verify if AI wrote an assignment for students. However Chat GPT is not a good AI checker and it turned out to be wrong for a few students who insisted they wrote the work themselves, and several AI detectors agreed. But this was only checked after the students were accused of cheating. Messy.
Some teachers are now expecting students to write in-class essays with paper and pen to avoid students using AI tools. These are kids that have been using a laptop since elementary school. Messy.
Students are using prompts in Chat GPT that instruct the AI to write with language complexity based on their age. Or, they are putting AI written work into free paraphrasing tools that fool the AI detectors. Messy.
Teacher’s favourite assignments that usually get students to really stretch their skills are now done much faster and almost as good with AI tools. And even very bright students are using these tools frequently. While prompt generation is a good skill to have, AI takes the effort and the depth of understanding away from the learners. Messy.
That final point is the messiest. For many thoughtful and thought provoking assignments, AI can now decrease the effort to asking AI the right prompt. And while the answer may be far from perfect, AI will provide an answer that simplifies the response for the the learner. It will dumb down the question, or produce a response that makes the question easier.
Ai is not necessarily a problem solver, it’s a problem simplifier. But that reduces the critical thinking needed. It waters down the complexity of work required. It transforms the learning process into something easier, and less directly thoughtful. Everything is messier except the problem the teacher has created, which is just much simpler to complete.
Learning should be messy, but instead what’s getting messy is the ability to pose problems that inspire learning. Students need to experience the struggle of messy questions instead of seeking an intelligent agent to mess up the learning opportunities.
Just like any other tool, there are places to use AI in education and places to avoid using the tool. The challenge ahead is creating learning opportunities where it is obvious when the tool is and isn’t used. It’s having the tool in your tool box, but not using it for every job… and getting students to do the same.
And so no matter how I look at this, the path ahead is very messy.
Change is good. We learn, we grow, we adapt, we change. Change is essential, and I like to think of myself as a change agent.
But change isn’t always easy. And the adoption of change is never distributed evenly nor does it affect people equitably. In many cases, when change happens it upsets people who are not ready for change… and that invites complaints.
Squeaky wheels start to squeak.
Something we need to be careful about is that change is happening for the right reasons. This can be hard because no matter what you do, the people most resistant to change are often the loudest. So you are doing things one way and it isn’t efficient or effective, and people complain. You change to a new way that works better. Now, there are happy people (quietly) enjoying the new approach, but a new group are unhappy. That new unhappy group might not be big, and they might not like the new system only because they liked the old way… but they are the loudest group.
This group might be the most vocal, they might make the most complaints, but they shouldn’t be the reason not to move forward, or to quickly change again, before seeing the positive aspects that the new changes have created.
There will always be squeaky wheels. There will always be naysayers and complainers. It’s important to empathize and support these people. It’s also important to learn from these people, but they should not be the drivers of change. A small but loud group should not be allowed to slow down or alter change just because they are the loudest.
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Afterthought: I wish news media thought about this… news today is about attracting eyes and clicks, and the small squeaky groups get far too much attention.
Nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. It’s easy to look back and think about ‘the good old days’, and all the positive things of yesteryear. But trying to rebuild a culture of the past, trying to ‘go back to the way things used to be’ is all but inevitable to fail. You can’t rebuild a culture, you need to build a new and desired culture.
When schools went remote in March of 2019, Inquiry Hub was unintentionally ready for the transition. My teachers barely missed a beat. Students already had a fair bit of independent time, so teachers didn’t need to adapt their teaching to give students time to work independently. Every class was already in Microsoft Teams. And we even joined each other online and had virtual lunches together. I actually saw my staff at lunch more than I normally did. And more importantly, students almost all made positive transitions to working from home.
It was when we got back to face-to-face that things really changed. We used to have students mixing across grades and working collaboratively in hallways, and in any open space or classroom available. Then suddenly they were locked down in single rooms, at single desks, not facing each other in table groups. Two and a half years later, only our Grade 12’s knew what Inquiry Hub used to be, back in the first 2/3’s of their first year. Our Grades 9, 10, and 11 students never experienced our school pre-covid.
I started this year thinking that we need to rebuild the culture of the past, but I realize now that this won’t happen. We have more students who are more used to their classroom being their primary community. We’ve grown by almost 1/3, and classes are now more of a community in size. We aren’t what we used to be. We don’t have the shared history, and efforts to be what we used to be will detract from what we could be.
So how do you build culture? How do you design activities so that they foster the community you want to build… but not force something that isn’t organic and natural? I think you create opportunities for students to connect, but you don’t force it. You show what you value by showing appreciation for positive behaviour and attitudes. You invite people to participate, but don’t force them. You explicitly share your vision and give others a chance to build that vision with you.
You don’t rebuild culture, you build it anew. It won’t be the same, but if you explicitly and cooperatively share a common vision, and take action towards it, the culture you build can look a bit like what it used to be, but it won’t ever be what it was. Nostalgia will keep you from being what you could be while you focus on what was, but never could be again.
It doesn’t matter if it’s physical pain, or simply the pain of doing something uncomfortable or inefficient, I’ve noticed that people prefer old pain to new pain.
Knee hurts, but so do the physiotherapy exercises? Well then the knee pain isn’t so bad.
Doing something that takes a long time to do, but learning the better way to do it is hard work? The long way is ok.
Being told that the system you are currently doing needs to change? Complain about all the ways the new system will be a potential problem, rather than focussing on how it could be better.
People prefer to stay in the pain they know than to be introduced to new pain… even if that pain is lesser than the current pain. The pain of change hurts more than the pain you are in. Except it really doesn’t. That’s the paradox of pain… new pain is always perceived as more painful than the current pain you are in. And so change is resisted, and the old pain persists.
We walked about 1/3 the way up then we put on our grip-on cleats, and the cold air was a lot more difficult for me to tackle compared to the actual walking conditions. Still, we usually do the walk in 55 to 56 minutes and it took us 1 hour. A four minute difference.
