Tag Archives: learning

The tail wagging the dog

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 School Experience

I don’t know how traditional schools survive in an era of Artificial Intelligence? There are some key elements of school that are completely undermined by tools that do the work faster and more effectively than students. Here are three examples:

  1. Homework. If you are sending homework such as an essay home, it’s not a question of whether or not a student uses AI, it’s a question of how much AI is being used. Math homework? That’s just practice for AI, not the student.
  2. Note taking. From recording and dictating words to photographing slides and having them automatically transcribed, if a traditional lecture is the format, AI is going to outperform any physical note taking.
  3. Textbook work? Or questions about what happened in a novel? This hunt-and-peck style assignment used to check to see if a student did the reading, but unless it’s a supervised test situation, a kid can get a perfect score without reading a single page.

So what do we want students to do at school? Ultimately it’s about creating experiences. Give them a task that doesn’t involve taking the project home. Give them a task where they need to problem solve in teams. Engage in content with them then have them debate perspectives… even provide them with opportunities to deepen their perspectives with AI before the debate.

Class time is about engaging in and with the content, with each other, and with tools that help students understand and make meaning.. Class isn’t consumption of content, it’s engaging with content, it’s engaging in collaborative challenges, it’s time to be creative problem-solvers.

Don’t mistake the classroom experience with entertaining students, it’s not about replacing the content or the learning with Bill Nye the Science Guy sound bites of content… it’s about creating experiences where students are challenged, while in the class, to solve problems that engage them. And this doesn’t mean avoiding AI, it does mean that it is used or not used with intentionality and purpose.

We need to examine what the school experience looks like in an era when technology makes traditional schooling obsolete. We didn’t keep scribing books after the printing press. Blacksmiths didn’t keep making hand-forged nails after we could mass produce them. Yet AI can efficiently and effectively produce the traditional work we ask for in schools and somehow we want students to mass produce the work the old way?

How do we transform the school experience so that it is meaningful and engaging for students… not AI?

*I used AI (Copilot) to suggest the production of nails as being a redundant item no longer created by blacksmiths. I also use AI to create most of the images on my blog, including the one with this post, with a prompt that took a couple attempts until Copilot offered, “Here comes a fresh take! A Rube Goldberg-style school, where the entire structure itself is a fantastical machine, churning out students like a whimsical knowledge factory.”

The Right Focus

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.

The trouble with troubleshooting

Being in a leadership position, I’ve come to realize that a large part of the job is about troubleshooting. Most people don’t want to ask for help, they’d rather deal with issues themselves. But when they can’t, that’s when the trouble comes your way. Sometimes it’s an easy fix, other times you don’t even know where to start. Sometimes it’s conflict resolution, other times it’s technical, and still other times it’s something you haven’t ever dealt with before.

The trouble with troubleshooting is that it’s almost always a new issue, nuanced, and not easily solved with prior knowledge. What I’ve learned along the way about troubleshooting comes down to two things:

  1. Ask more questions before seeking answers.
  2. Seek expertise and help, don’t try to troubleshoot alone.

Simple but very productive advice. It’s hard to solve the problem when you lack information, and you don’t always know what you need to know. Asking for clarification, collecting more data, and truly understanding the problem will save a lot of unnecessary back-and-forth where the problem doesn’t get solved.

Once you have significant information, then it’s easier to know who to ask for help. This is the part of the process that I’ve gotten better at with age. I used to think I had to be the one that did all the troubleshooting, that this was my job. I realize now that when I have enough information, I also often have what I need to recognize who to go to for help… not just someone to pass the problem onto, but someone who has the expertise or resources to fix the issue faster than I can alone.

It seems simple, but so often I’ve found myself knee deep in a troubleshooting scenario where a little more information would have helped speed things up. Or, realizing after the fact that what took me an hour could have taken 5 minutes if I just stopped and thought about who had the knowledge that could have helped me. The real trouble with troubleshooting is all about knowledge… how much do I need to know, and who knows more than me and can help?

Doubling Down

We learn from our mistakes… if we let ourselves.

The problem is that often when we should admit we are wrong we double down, we get defensive, we justify with bias.

Double down or learn. We can’t go both.

Although that’s not totally true. We can do both, just not simultaneously. We can double down in the heat of the moment, reflect later, recognize our error, and make amends, admit our error, and hopefully learn.

But learning is a whole lot easier, and less confrontational, when we can admit our error before putting our back up and defending it.

It’s not just better for us, it’s better for everyone around us… and we learn, and grow, and maybe spend a little less time doubling down to defend our errors in the future.

Deadlines and consequences

William Ferriter recently shared, “When it Comes to Deadlines, the “Real World” is Far More Flexible than Many Teachers.” And he gives some real world examples to consider, such as his power bill giving him 30 days to pay… and even if he misses that deadline the consequence over the next month is a whopping $1.08! That’s a lot different than giving a zero in an assignment with the excuse that this is a ‘real world’ consequence.

In a comment, I shared how a teacher at my school uses a zero as a potential consequence:

I have one teacher who uses zero’s as a ‘placeholder’ for late work. So for an easy example, in a course where there are only 100 marks given and a kid has 50/60 so far, the kid is at 83%. Now let’s say the kid doesn’t hand in an assignment worth 15% on time. The kid gets a placeholder zero, and the immediate consequence is that the 83% in the gradebook becomes 50/75 or 67%.
So the student sees the consequence of not handing in the work! BUT… if the kid hands it in later, and gets 13/15, the mark immediately changes in the gradebook to 63/75 or 84% (no marks off for late).
In a course where the gradebook is always visible, this allows the kid to see the potential consequence of a zero/no submission, but provides the opportunity to make it go away completely.

YouTube handyman

I spent part of my day repairing my hot tub. I had 3 things to do, one of which I did about 2 years ago, the other two I was doing for the first time. In all three cases I did searches on YouTube for ‘how to’ videos. I can’t say that my searches were perfect, and while 2 of the three things only required watching a video, the other took some ingenuity beyond what I watched.

Still, I have to say that this was so much easier than reading complicated manuals or trying to fix with minimal if any instructions. I could have tried AI, but to me this is a YouTube kind of thing. I can honestly say that YouTube has made me far more of a handyman than I’ve ever been capable of doing on my own.

Paradox of Resilience

I find it fascinating how resilience works and doesn’t work in different people (including myself). I have met people who have faced incredible challenges and obstacles and they push forward when others would crumble. I have also met others that make a crisis out of every minor challenge they face.

Personally, I have not endured life challenges that I’ve seen others face, from severe disabilities, to tragic abuse or family losses, or drug addiction, or PTSD. And when I see people deal with these challenges with poise, grace, and a positive attitude, I find it inspiring.

But resilience is a tricky thing. It can shine through in one aspect of someone’s life and be absolutely lacking in another. One issue that I might consider small can feel especially large to someone else and vice-versa. A perfect, personal example is that I can get on a stage to deliver a presentation to 1,000 plus people and I’d have no problem. But put me on a stage with only a dozen people watching, and give me ten lines to memorize and act in a scene or a play and I’m a nervous wreck.

The challenge with resilience is in improving it. Some things might seem easy, like for instance, give me only 2 lines to say, and an audience of 4 friends and I could probably build up my resilience to stage freight over time… but I’d hate every minute of it, avoid practicing, and not want to keep trying. Essentially, my lack of resilience will keep me from doing the work I need to do. While this is a simple example, it outlines the challenge, the paradox, of resilience… lack of resilience leads to not working on being resilient, while having resilience fosters more resilience.

We can work to build resilience only as long as there is a willingness to do the work… a willingness to show resilience. That said, it does happen. I see it in the students we teach. Students who feel they can’t, who feel they are ‘too dumb’, who achieve more success than they expect. We can help people be more resilient, but there is a metaphorical line that can sometimes be drawn in the sand, where lack of resilience prevents resilience. And when someone hits that line, they just aren’t ready to grow.

It could be fear of failure. It could be a lack of faith in ability, it could simply be that the small step seems insurmountably large. And yet from the outside looking in it looks fully attainable. Sometimes a cheerleader is all the is needed. Sometimes there is a way to break the challenge down to an even smaller and easier task… and sometimes the lack of resilience is such that the person simply isn’t ready.

To Prove or Improve?

It was a simple question asked in a meeting of BC online schools.

“Are we using data to prove or to improve?”

Is it about accountability or improvement? What does the data teach us about our practice? How does it affect our future outcomes and where we focus our support and funding?

What is the real value of collecting data, and how is it best used to inform our practice?

Passion for learning

I met two young, gifted students yesterday, interested in attending our school next year. It’s fascinating to meet 13 year old kids who aren’t just good students but passionate learners. Kids who see school as places to connect with friends and get exposed to ideas that they wouldn’t get exposed to if they stayed home. Kids who want to go to school because it’s more interesting than staying home.

It excites me to think that these kids will come to our school and part of their day will be dedicated to them perusing passion projects that they design. They aren’t just going to be taking notes, do practice questions from a textbook, or comple ‘cookie cutter’ styles projects where most of the final products look the same.

I think some kids learn despite the system they are in. These kids I met yesterday would be successful no matter what school they attend. But they deserve an opportunity to attend a school where they get to shine… Where they get to try something that can fully engage their passion for learning. Even where they can try something too big and fail, but learn that this too is a learning experience.

When I see kids with a passion for learning, I see kids that should have some autonomy over their day at school. They want to learn, let them discover, explore, and innovate. Let them follow their passions and interests. Let them own some of their own learning.

Keep the passion for learning alive.