Tag Archives: education

Reimagining Schools

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Since November I’ve been connecting, every few weeks, with Will Richardson and a group of educational leaders from around BC, Canada in a professional development session run by the BCPVPA (BC Principals and Vice Principals Association) called ‘Reimagining Schools: Confronting Education‘. Right off the bat, Will shared some framings:

• Everything is nature
• We’re not facing “problems” to be solved. We are in a predicament.
• Our predicament stems from the fact that we are out of relationship with each other and all living things on the planet. All of our challenges flow from this disconnect.
• Education is complicit in creating these challenges.
• Collapse is not new. What’s new is that systemic privilege is no longer a buffer.
• Our personal challenge is to face reality or “sit with the shit” and not run from complex, difficult questions.

There are a few deep thoughts that have brewed from these sessions, and yet oddly enough the two most impactful things came from outside the sessions.

First a conflict within me. Will shared a post on LinkedIn where he said,

“I think it’s telling that for all of the conferences and presentations and talks and essays and “achievements” that people post and discuss here, only about 2% of them seem to make any note of the fact that they are happening while:

~ecological limits are being breached
~social trust is eroding
~ AI is reshaping cognition
~ politics are destabilizing
~ inequality is deepening
~ biodiversity is declining at alarming rates

I mean, without using those contexts as a lens for our gatherings or our teaching or writing, what is the actual relevance that we can claim, not just around education, but around living life on the planet in general?

It’s either denial or ignorance. Or maybe it’s concern that if we ground our work in those lenses, no one will show up or read or listen…”

I commented:

“I’d push back a bit and ask what is the conference about?

There’s a cognitive dissonance that is invited when the mind has to weigh these things AND also take in information that people are going to a conference to learn about.

I’m seeing your question play out on social media where people are being called out for not being political and sharing their political stance… on a channel where politics is never discussed.

There needs to be a balance, we can’t stick our head in the sand, but we also can’t pretend (and I do intentionally mean pretend) that acknowledging major issues of global concern are equivalent to somehow authentically addressing them… and topically addressing them when our topic isn’t directly affected by them is to me worse than not mentioning them. It can be a distraction without gain to the intended message.”

Will responded:

“Dave Truss So, I’ll push back a bit on the push back. 🤣

I don’t think it’s a “calling out” as much as it is a reminder. And I don’t disagree that just naming them authentically “addresses” them, but it does provide a different lens for whatever question is in front of us at that moment. Every topic is affected by them. Every one.

Modernity wants to separate everything out into pieces and ignore the interconnectedness of the whole. This is the world we live in right now. It’s all entangled.”

The comment conversation continued, and is worth reading, but doesn’t add to my conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand I completely agree with Will, if we aren’t bringing a contextual lens to what we are sharing, we are somehow missing the interconnectedness of some of the things we should most value and care about. But on the other hand, I’m sitting in a place right now where just two days ago I wrote about being ‘Intentionally disconnected‘ because paying attention to the rather disturbing world events right now feels like too much. I ended the post saying, “for now I lack the capacity to engage. It seems like a futile activity that will anger and upset me, with no gain. It is rare for me to actively choose to be uninformed, but right now is one of those times.”

Therein lies the conflict. I agree with Will, yet I don’t think I’m the only one who isn’t ready to face the harsh realities of the predicaments we are in… especially when I’m trying to learn something new. I think for our students it’s the same. The last of the framings above is, ‘Our personal challenge is to face reality or “sit with the shit” and not run from complex, difficult questions.”

I get it, I really do. But when I’m at a conference or when a student sits in a class, do we really need to ‘sit in it’? Do we need to connect everything we do to the predicaments we live in? Do we need this lens to permeate what we are learning? If I channel my inner Will Richardson I think I’d ask myself, ‘But what value is the learning if it isn’t addressing the predicaments we are in?’ … Again, I’m left conflicted.

For example, can I teach students about using AI in an ethical way and not mention the cost of the energy drain? Is mentioning this once enough or should that be the bigger lesson? Do I need to bring the dire state of the world into every lesson, predicament after predicament? Is this even healthy? Maybe I’m just too stuck in the current educational context to see the bigger picture? I really don’t think that these sessions answered this for me, and yet I feel I have a deeper understanding of the need to confront hard truths… and ensure that what we choose to teach be taught with a lens of a world in environmental, political, and social challenges. Will shared the following quote in one of our sessions:

“If we fully accept the world as it is—in all its harsh realities— then we can develop the very qualities we need to be in that world and not succumb to that harshness. We find our courage, morality, and gentle, nonaggressive actions by clear seeing and acceptance. As we accept what is, we become people who stand in contrast to what is, freed from the aggression, grasping and confusion of this time. With that clarity, we can contribute things of eternal importance no matter what’s going on around us—how to live exercising our best human qualities, and how to support others to discover these qualities in themselves.”
~ Margaret Wheatley “So Far From Home”

The second insight I’d like to share came after our first session. Will invited any of us who could stay on to do so. During that after-session conversation I mentioned that I was retiring. The topic of my school, Inquiry Hub, came up and I mentioned that I was proud of what our team has been able to do, transforming the learning outside of the traditional high school box. And yet, I was disappointed that our little school has not had a greater impact on the rest of the district. Will responded saying something like, ‘Dave, if you were able to do that, you would be a unicorn because I haven’t seen that happen yet.’

That simple statement had an unburdening effect on me. It is sad, yet it comforted me. For the past 13 years my small team of teachers and I have created a very special place for self-directed learners to have some true agency over what they are learning, while still providing an opportunity for them to meet all the requirements they need for their post high school ambitions. It has been an amazing ride, and the fact that it didn’t really spread beyond our walls isn’t something that should weigh on me as I head into retirement. The test of my leadership will show if the school thrives after I’m gone.

Overall, I really enjoyed the sessions with Will, and with the other educational leaders from across BC. I appreciated the experience of sitting in the discomfort of knowing things must change in education and sitting in the predicament rather than cherrypicking shallow solutions and discussing them like we were solving all the world’s problems. I encourage educators to follow Will on his journey to confront education and reimagine schools and join one of his cohorts of educators on similar journeys of discovery.

Is Artificial Intelligence Reducing Our Intelligence?

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Joe Truss shared a great article with me, ‘The hidden cost of letting AI make your life easier‘, by Shai Tubali on Big Think. Towards the end of the article, Shai shares this:

“[Sven Nyholm’s] deeper worry is not that AI will outperform humans, but that it will appear to do so, especially to non-expert eyes. “Current forms of AI threaten meaningful activities,” he argues, “because they look far more intelligent than they are.” This appearance invites trust. People begin to treat AI as an oracle, mistaking an impressive engineering achievement for understanding. As misplaced confidence grows, judgment weakens. Skills develop less fully. Capacities are handed over too easily, and with them, forms of meaning that depend on effort.

Nyholm links this directly to the value of processes, including confusion, detours, and lingering with complexity. He punctures the idea that everything should be fast and efficient. Speed may feel pleasant, he concedes, yet it undermines patient thinking and reconsideration. He points to an Anthropic advertisement promising a paper completed in a single day: brainstorming in the morning, drafting by noon, polishing by afternoon. What disappears in this vision is the slow work of searching, getting lost, following the wrong thread, and returning with insight. “Many ideas,” Nyholm says, “come from looking for one thing and finding something else instead.” When AI delivers tidy, unified answers, it spares us that work. In doing so, it risks weakening our capacity to break complex problems into parts, examine assumptions, and think things through with precision.”

AI reduces the productive effort and struggle that makes both learning and understanding stick. Accessing information is profoundly different than understanding information, and directs the learner towards an answer instead of a learning process. This article reinforced some ideas I’ve already shared.

In ‘Keeping the friction‘ I said, “Decreasing the challenge doesn’t foster meaningful learning. Reducing the required effort doesn’t make the learning more memorable. Encouraging deeper thinking is the goal, not doing the thinking for you.”

And in ‘What’s the real AI risk in education?‘ I said, “Real learning has a charge to it, it needs to come with some challenge, and hardship. If the learning experience is too easy, it won’t be remembered. If there isn’t enough challenge, if the answers are provided rather than constructed, the learning will soon be forgotten. Remove being stuck, struggling, and failure, and you’ve removed the greatest part of a learning experience.”

I see this in my own learning. There are times I sit and read a full article, like the one shared above, but there are other times that I don’t bother and just throw a long article into an LLM and ask for a bulleted summary of the key ideas. However, I remember articles I read far better than articles where I only read the AI summaries.

How deep would my learning and understanding be if I only went as far as to read AI summaries? How much will my confidence and my belief in understanding grow, without the depth of knowledge to support my confidence and understanding? Would I be creating a kind of false fluency in topics where I lack true depth of understanding?

The convenience of using AI might not just be changing how we learn, it might be changing what we believe learning is… Perceiving learning as having access to information rather than having a deep understanding of a topic that needed to wrestle with to be truly understood. In this way, the convenience of using AI to think for us might just be reducing our intelligence.

Keeping the friction

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I’ve been a proponent of integrating technology into schools and classrooms for a couple decades. And in many ways I’m excited about AI and what it has to offer in the field of education.

But I have one major concern above all others: Making learning easier is not the goal.

Decreasing the challenge doesn’t foster meaningful learning. Reducing the required effort doesn’t make the learning more memorable. Encouraging deeper thinking is the goal, not doing the thinking for you.

We need to make sure that AI is not taking the friction out of learning but rather maintaining or increasing the friction in the best places to promote meaningful learning. Friction is required.

Thinking Requires Effort

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I recently read a great article by Alec Couros, The Radical Act of Thinking. In it he said, “The challenge isn’t finding the tool anymore. The challenge is avoiding it. We’ve reached the point where AI is the path of least resistance for almost every task.”

And then he concluded with this:

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

Here are a few ways that I see teachers doing this at Inquiry Hub:

  1. Community video or podcast challenges. Part of the challenge might include creating the video in a specific genre, or a meta part of the presentation where students explicitly describe what they have learned.
  2. Personalized inquiry projects. This is offered through a course designed around the process of learning, not content. So it doesn’t matter if a student is learning to code, designing a website, publishing a book, learning a specific skill in art, composing a song, starting a business, or even learning to crochet… the inquiry is designed around students learning skills they want to learn.
  3. Solving problems in class. I’ve questioned the value of homework for over 15 years now. Watching our senior math teacher teach Math & Physics, I see him focusing on the why of questions. I see his students working in pairs and groups to solve problems together on white boards. I see students actively struggling and learning in class, where they have access to support, and the focus is on the struggle and understanding the problem.

Something else that we do is to be careful not to add things to students loads unnecessarily. I can’t tell you the countless times I hear well-intentioned educators say, “You know what would be a good project for your students to do?” Followed by a legitimately good idea. But we are not an alternate school, we are a regular school with an alternative approach. Our students still need to fulfill the entire regular curriculum on top of the inquiries they do for credit. As good as other ideas may be, they become make-work activities that not all students are interested in, and this just invites students to use AI or to feel like the work is just busywork.

Will Richardson asks, “Every time you’re about to implement a new program or pedagogy or technology or initiative or building project or anything else, ask and answer this simple question: “In service of what?””

When we add anything to our schedule, it’s to serve one of two purposes:

1. Integrate curriculum or make the curriculum more engaging. Our students go on to universities, colleges, and technical institutes, and they need the required courses to get there and do well. But the required curriculum doesn’t need to be taught in a linear, boring fashion. When a project is added in class, the intent is to meaningfully cover more curriculum in less time.

2. We add things in service of students. A recent example: For the last 10 years our PAC has fundraised to provide students with FoodSafe every 2nd year. So all our students learn life skills around preparing and serving food. This year our PAC is also providing our seniors with first aid training. The plan is that they will alternate years between FoodSafe and first aid so that every student who goes through Inquiry Hub will have these life skills when they leave the school. Carving out 8 hours of training time over 2 days involves our senior teachers reworking their schedule… in the service of giving our students a life skill.

I won’t pretend that everything we do is AI proof, and that there aren’t lessons and activities where students could avoid thinking using a tool that does the work for them. I also won’t pretend that every assignment and project is ‘in service’ of authentic learning for students. But I will say that we’ve worked hard to make the learning meaningful for students. We provide them with opportunities to work in our community towards common goals, and we provide them with opportunities to pursue projects meaningful to them, focusing on the process of learning… on the struggle, with a perspective that failure and struggle are a path to real learning, not a barrier.

I’ve said before,

“We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.”

This fits with what Alec said above,

“To succeed, we need to fundamentally reframe “effort.” We have to stop viewing the struggle of thinking as an inefficiency to be solved, and start protecting it as the very thing that helps us grow.”

The secret sauce is in providing the space and time for students to struggle out in the open, facing challenges or learning life skills that they will use. However, you don’t create these opportunities by continually adding things to a student’s plate. Adding more to their plates only invites them to find tools to do the work for them.

Thinking requires effort, and providing students with opportunities to demonstrate that effort in meaningful ways is, in my mind, the project of schools. Reducing busywork, and maximizing the problem-solving time, in a community of learners who find benefit from working together, is what schools should be in service of.

The upside down bell curve

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The bell curve, also known as a normal distribution, is a graph that depicts how values in a dataset are distributed. Most values cluster around the average with fewer values appearing at the extremes… those rare few that do very well or very poorly.

But there is a new curve evolving that matters more, the upside down bell curve where the ones on the extremes are where most of the data points are distributed. In an era of free and openly available information, this is the new learning curve. There is no more average majority, instead there are those that understand and those that do not. Those that participate and those that opt out. Those that engage and those that choose not to. Those that seek to learn and those that disengage.

The resources needed to do well are available. The access to information is there for all who want it. The opportunity to get that information in a format or delivery that makes sense to you is easy to find. The question is, are you willing to put the effort in?

If you learn how you best learn, then access to information is no longer a barrier and you will likely learn very well. You will be with the majority of people on the successful side of the distribution curve. If you decide it’s too hard, or choose not to engage, you will be with the other majority, ignorantly selecting the unsuccessful side of the distribution.

There will be anomalies, those that have learning challenges that are not met and struggle, and those that make no effort yet still find it easy to understand things. There will also be those few that just choose to squeak by, capable of more but neither excelling or struggling. But this is the era of extremes. This is a time when the ‘A’, the ‘Exceeding Expectations’, the ability to excel, is available to most… and yet will only be achieved by the ones who actually choose it.

The mathematical average of the curve might be the same, but the distribution will be starkly divided.

Time under tension

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One of the principles of exercising to develop muscle is time under tension. How much time are you working the muscle for?

Learning is similar. For how long are we challenging ourselves before giving up?

Resilience is similar. We cannot strengthen our resilience unless we face things that are challenging us for longer than we could previously tolerate.

I think sometimes we focus too much on making experiences easier, when what we really need is to create greater time under tension.

Fuelling my disillusionment

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A few months ago I wrote the following in response to a LinkedIn post, and then saved it in my drafts. The problem is, I didn’t copy the link to the original post properly. Furthermore, if I recall, it didn’t really answer the question that was posed. It was tangentially connected but not completely on topic.

I’ve edited my comment slightly, and I want to share it since I’m wonder if ‘it’s just me’ feeling this way?

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

It’s the doing more with less that fuels my disillusionment.

  • Greater and often unrealistic expectations of parents and universities.
  • Greater student social-emotional as well as educational needs.
  • Greater demands to prevent litigation (more documentation, more protection of data, more health & safety requirements… all ‘necessary’, but time consuming.)
  • Greater demands and expectations from the Ministry of Education, and Worksafe BC.
  • Greater costs – pay hikes, heating costs, perishable supplies. Even with no cuts to education, less money gets to the classroom.
    I could go on. I’ve watched my role shift from educational leader to middle manager of an educational machine. I feel like a shield trying to redirect and manage the above impacts away from teachers so that they, rather than we, can do great things with kids.

Still an important role but a lot less personally rewarding.

Am I the only principal feeling this?

Celebrating challenges

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I watched a few student presentations yesterday. Each one was excellent in their own way. But my favourite moment came when one student presenting on her Independent Directed Study put up a slide with the single word, ‘Challenges’ on it. She got excited and started with, “OK, I’ve been waiting to share this with you!”

I love the way our students perceive challenges and failures. They recognize that this is part of the learning journey. They celebrate the discoveries they make and the effort and perseverance it takes to overcome unexpected challenges along the way.

Here is a student that has done an amazing project, with a great outcome, and she can’t wait to share her challenges that lead to success. This happens because we embed the expectation that students will find challenges along the way. We expect them to share those challenges as part of their learning journey. As a result, the challenges become a big part of the learning, they become the focal point of where real learning begins.

An ‘A’ student that breezes through problems as if they were not problems doesn’t learn as much as another student who stumbled along the way and got to the same results. The journey is less memorable, less rewarding. It’s overcoming challenges that make a learning experience valuable, and seeing our students celebrate the challenges they met on there learning journey is extremely rewarding.

The tail wagging the dog

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I recently wrote, ‘The school experience’ where I stated, “I don’t know how traditional schools survive in an era of Artificial Intelligence?” In that post I was focused on removing the kind of things we traditionally do with opportunities to experience learning in the classroom (with and without AI).

What’s interesting about this is that the change will indeed come, but not for the right reasons. The reason we’ll see a transformation of schools happen faster than expected is because with AI being constantly used to do homework, take notes, and do textbook assignments, grades are going to be inflated and it will be hard to discern who gets into universities.

This will encourage two kinds of changes in schools. On the one hand we will see a movement backwards to more traditional testing and reduced innovation. This is the group that wants to promote integrity, but blindly produces students who are good memorizers and are good at wrote learning. However, not producing students ready to live in our innovative and ever-changing world.

The second kind of school will promote competencies around thinking, knowing, and doing things collaboratively and creatively. These are the real schools of the future.

But I wonder which of these schools will universities be more interested in? Which practices will universities use? It’s easier to invigilate an exam that is based on wrote learning than it is to mark group projects in a lecture hall of 200+ students. So what kind of students are universities going to be looking for?

I fear that this might be a case of the tail wagging the dog and that we could see a movement towards ‘traditional learning’ as a pathway to a ‘good’ university… The race to the best marks in a school that tests in traditional ways and has ‘academic rigour’ could be the path that universities push.

This is a mistake.

The worst part of schooling is marks chasing. It undermines meaningful feedback and it misses the point that this is a learning environment with learning opportunities. Instead it’s about the mark. The score that gets averaged into GPA’s and meets minimum requirements to get into programs or schools of choice after high school.

The question I ponder is if universities will continue to focus on that metric and continue to wag the dog in this way, or will they start looking more meaningfully at other metrics like portfolios and presentations? Will they take the time to do the work necessary to really assess the student as a learner, or will they just continue to collect marks chasers and focus on accepting kids who come from schools that are good at differentiating those marks in traditional ways?

This could be an exciting time for universities to lead the way towards truly innovative practices rather than being the last bastion of old ways of teaching and learning… Old ways being perpetuated by a system that values marks over thinking, traditions over progress, and old practices over institutions of truly higher learning.

University entry is the tail wagging the dog, and so the way that universities respond to AI doing work that students have had to do will determine how quickly schools innovate and progress.

The Right Focus

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When I wrote, ‘Google proof vs AI proof‘, I concluded, “We aren’t going to AI proof schoolwork.”

While we were successful in Google proofing assignments by creating questions that were not easily answerable using a Google search, we simply can’t make research based questions that will stump a Large Language Model artificial intelligence.

I’ve also previously said that ‘You can’t police it‘. In that post I stated,

“The first instinct with combating new technology is to ban and/or police it: No cell phones in class, leave them in your lockers; You can’t use Wikipedia as a source; Block Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok on the school wifi. These are all gut reactions to new technologies that frame the problem as policeable… Teachers are not teachers, they aren’t teaching, when they are being police.“

It comes down to a simple premise:

Focus on what we ‘should do’ with AI, not what we ‘shouldn’t do’.

Outside the classroom AI is getting used everywhere by almost everyone. From programming and creating scripts to reduce workload, to writing email responses, to planning vacations, to note taking in meetings, to creating recipes. So the question isn’t whether we should use AI in schools but what we should use it for?

The simple line that I see starts with the question I would ask about using an encyclopedia, a calculator, or a phone in the classroom, “How can I use this tool to foster or enhance thinking, rather than have the tool do the thinking for the student?‘

Because like I said back in 2010,

“A tool is just a tool! I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull. It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.”

Ultimately our focus needs to be on what we can and should use any tool for, and AI isn’t an exception.