Tag Archives: learning

Ripple in time

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I was at a dinner with some online school principals from other districts last night and one of them mentioned the influence that I had back in the early days of Twitter. It was interesting to hear his thoughts, and to recall what those days were like. The sharing and learning had a depth to it that I haven’t felt since. It was a time when educators were trying new things, playing with new technologies, and experimenting with their own practice on an almost daily basis. And then openly sharing their successes and failures, asking questions, and seeking solutions to new and thoughtful problems.

I’ve thought fondly of those times, but I never really took the perspective that I had influence, or that what I was doing was having a ripple effect on others. I felt more like I was riding the ripples of others than I felt like I was making the ripples myself.

It was quite an honour to hear him speak of the influence I had, and to look back at that time a little differently.

Pruning – Strategic Subtraction

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One of my favourite quotes comes from Derek Sivers:

“If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”

When looking at Dr Simon Breakspear’s ‘The Pruning Principle – Unlocking educational progress by mastering the art of strategic subtraction,’ I feel as though there is a chasm between the insightful information he shares, and the ability to use that information meaningfully and effectively in schools. Simon summed this up at the BC Principals and Vice Principals Association conference in Whistler yesterday when he said, “Subtraction is harder than it looks!”

So, let’s examine this Pruning Principle a little closer and leap over the chasm between this insightful concept and it’s usefulness.

The premise:

In gardening pruning, cutting back, is essential to cultivating long-term vitality. That said, it’s important to recognize that pruning almost never involves removing something completely.

The challenge:

The ideas of ‘doing less’ or ‘de-implementation’ have negative connotations. ‘Pruning’ is a better, more positive frame. The challenge is to recognize that sometimes we have to stop doing many good things to spend time doing fewer better things.

“There is nothing so useless as doing effectively that which should not be done at all.” ~ Peter Drucker

The plan:

  1. Examine (Review the landscape.)
  2. Remove (Subtract with care.)
  3. Nurture (Cultivate what matters.)

With a focus on ‘impact’, intentionally remove things we do that are not as impactful or effective as we think, in order to nurture and give more time to the truly impactful things.

This is an iterative process. The pruning need not, and probably should not, be big/irreversible/long-term/complex-structure. Instead start small/reversible/short-cycle/short-term.

The targets:

Areas to target for pruning:

  • Time
  • Priorities
  • Physical and visual space
  • People/participants involved
  • Commitments and responsibilities
  • Processes or steps in a process
  • Platforms and schools
  • Rules and policies
  • Standards and frameworks

The goals:

  1. Redirect finite energy and resources
  2. Stimulate desired new growth
  3. Reshape for health and longevity

The questions:

What is on my ‘Stop Doing’ list?

What can I Delay, Delegate, or Dump?

How do I shift my internal dialogue from pruning being a negative, a subtraction, to being one where pruning is about caring and greater competence?

The example:

Pruning is a great metaphor, it takes the subtraction of things to help nurture them and have them blossom or bloom. But my favourite example from Simon Breakspear was about learning to ride a bicycle. One of the biggest challenges in learning to ride is balance. A kid’s bike comes with training wheels. While the wheels prevent falling over, they are a crutch that doesn’t actually help with balance. Now, we see little bikes with no pedals, and no training wheels. Kids are learning to balance before learning to pedal… and they are learning to ride both younger and faster! Instead of adding training wheels, we subtracted the pedals and made the learning journey better.

The first steps:

Choose a target area and start small. Do small experiments. Focus on the improvements you want while remembering that you are already at capacity. You aren’t going to effectively add more, or do better, unless you prune somewhere else.

We can flourish (blossom) when we focus time and resources on things that have impact. By pruning distractions and low-impact efforts, we and our teams can redirect energy towards what truly matters… enhancing both performance and wellbeing.

The infinite classroom

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I recently heard someone describe AI as the infinite classroom… You can get anytime learning, catered just to you. And for a moment I thought, ‘I remember Google being described like that, and YouTube too.’ Now, I know that the ‘catered to you’ part of Artificial Intelligence is a richer experience than Google or YouTube, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t kind of been here before. The guy went on to say that schools today are irrelevant. He was American and his focus wasn’t K-12 education but rather ‘investing’ $200k+ for a college degree that could be irrelevant by the time you get it.

Still, this made me think of all the digital distractions that make school less appealing and engaging compared to out-of-school offerings and opportunities… From AI providing meaningful, just-in-time learning, to social media, to gaming. Be it for learning or entertainment the competition for attention is significant outside of school.

So how do we engage students in schools when an infinite classroom as well as unlimited distractions are happening outside of schools?

What we shouldn’t do is bring back more traditional testing to ensure students don’t cheat using AI. What we also shouldn’t do is try to compete with the outside world and attempt to make schools more entertaining.

What we should do is create rich experiences where students are exposed to concepts and ideas that they would not have found on their own. We should provide social opportunities to learn together. We should provide opportunities for student voice and choice.

It’s not about competing with the infinite. It’s about cultivating learning experiences where students feel invested in the experience. It’s about fostering curiosity and providing shared learning opportunities that challenge students meaningfully.

In a world of infinite distractions, engagement in schools needs to be community and relationship focused. If it’s just about accumulating information and content, then classrooms as we know them will be no match for the infinite classroom (and unlimited distractions) that out of school opportunities will provide.

Cross pollination

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Do you know what’s really hard to do? First, choose an area of your life where you really have your ‘stuff’ together. Then take those same skills, habits, and discipline and apply it to another part of your life. It should be easy, or at least easier than it is. We should be able to recognize what makes us extremely effective in one aspect of our lives and simply apply the same strategies elsewhere.

What prevents this? Is it motivation? Is it the fear of starting? Is it that we recognize the effort is more than we are willing to put out?

Whatever the reason, it’s sometimes important to remember that it is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than it is to think your way into a new way of acting. Start with the action. Do the things you already do elsewhere in a new area of your life. Start with small actions, but the action itself is the start. Not the thinking, not the planning, not the talking about it… the doing.

Apply action, and the good work and skills you’ve developed will indeed cross over.

Experience is something you get right after you need it.

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Ever notice how many jobs say, “Experience required”? Who are all these experienced workers looking for new jobs?

How many jobs want you to have a degree first? I understand a doctor, nurse, lawyer, architect, or engineer needing a degree, but how many corporate jobs really need a prospective employee to have a degree?

I love the quote, “Experience is something you get right after you need it.”

At some point in your life you are going to learn something on the job. You are going to figure it out either just when you need to… or just after you’ve messed up the first attempt.

Hiring is going to change. You aren’t going to see companies focusing on degrees and academic accolades. Instead, you’ll see people with micro credentials or niche skills being hired because they have learned skills that directly relate to the job expectations. Or you’ll see jobs being offered on a trial basis and companies willing to hire based on characteristics like flexibility, ingenuity, and creativity. ‘Come try this out for a 3 month contract, and we’ll see if you’ve a) Got a good head on your shoulders, and b) Fit with our community and values.’

Don’t worry about experience, you’ll get on the job. Just come with the right attitude and an affinity for the job. The first time you try something, that’s when you’ll get the experience. Before that, it’s not schooling or past experience, it’s evidence that you are a learner and you are willing to put in an honest effort. That’s what will get you hired.

Instant feedback

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Yesterday, at our welcome back session for principals, one of the assistant superintendents asks us a couple questions to get feedback on what we thought was important for our district visioning. This is a typical kind of exercise to start the year. Usually this data is collected then in a later session we look at the data and trends.

But instead, he had us do the activity individually, then connect as a table group to prioritize our results. Then one person per table put the top 5 answers into a Microsoft form.

The assistant superintendent then used Copilot, Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence LLM, to not only collate the data, but also to look for trends. He did this during a break so that we were not waiting on him. Then we came back and discussed not only the results but also his line of questioning.

Probably my favourite part of this is when he told Copilot, ‘here is the data’, but forgot to paste it in. Why? Because it’s important to model that you can make mistakes when trying something new.

I was discussing with a colleague before the meeting that I was hoping to see this happen. I’m tired of people collecting large amounts of data that will then take hours to assess, when we have new technology that can find trends invisible to us in mere seconds.

In the meeting we still did a lot of activities to connect us to our peers, we still had great table talks and meaningful conversations, but when it came time to collect and assess data we didn’t go old school, instead we took advantage of the technology available to us in a meaningful way. And yes, more analysis of the data may come later, and not all of it using AI, but to have this powerful tool use available and to not both use it and model it, would be a real shame.

It was really great to see this happen in yesterday’s first meeting of the year.

“Oh no, AI is making us dumber!”

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Except it’s not.

People forget that we were worried about the internet and Google. And before that writing utensils:

“Students today depend too much upon ink. They don’t know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil.”
~ National Association of Teachers Journal, 1907


“Students today depend on these expensive fountain pens. They can no longer write with a straight pen and nib. We parents must not allow them to wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in the real business world which is not so extravagant.”
~ From PTA Gazette, 1941

I pulled those quotes from a presentation I did 16 years ago. I did another presentation at that time where I shared a quote from 1842 discussing how books would become useless “when the pupils are furnished with slates”.

We are used to pronouncing ‘the sky is falling‘ when the next advancement comes along. Google was going to make us dumber. It didn’t. Smart phones were going to make us dumber, but they didn’t. They did however change the things we thought and still think about, and remember. For example, I used to carry around a few dozen phone numbers, memorized in my head, now I don’t even know my own daughter’s numbers. They are neatly stored in my phone.

AI will do the same. It will adjust what we remember, fine tune what we think about about and ask, and help direct our thinking… but it won’t make us dumber.

When I was a kid, I thought my dad was the smartest guy in the world. I can’t think of a question I asked him that he didn’t know the answer to. Sometimes he’d even bring me a file on the topic I asked about.

I remember absolutely blowing away a teacher and my fellow students on a project I did on harnessing the ocean for power. I had newspaper clippings, magazine articles, even textbook sources that I shared on the classroom overhead projector. It looked like I spent hours upon hours doing research. I didn’t. I asked my dad what he knew and he gave me a thick file with all the resources I needed. He was my Google long before Google was a thing.

It made me look good. It made my work a lot easier. It didn’t make me dumber.

I’ll admit that there is something fundamentally different with AI compared to advances like the slate, the pen, the internet, Google and other ‘technological advances’. As Artificial Intelligence becomes smarter than us, we can rely on it in ways that we couldn’t with other advances. And it will take a while for us to figure out how to create tasks in schools that utilize AI effectively, rather than having AI do all the work. It was hard but not impossible to ‘Google proof’ an assignment, and that challenge is significantly magnified by AI. But the opportunities are also magnified.

What happens when AI can individualize student learning and what we consider the ‘core curriculum’ can be taught in less than half of a school day? How exciting can school be for the other half of the day? What curiosities can we foster? How student directed (and thus more engaging) can that other half of the day be?

We are only dumber using AI if we decide that we will passively let it do the work for us, but let’s not pretend students were not already using ‘cut-and-paste’ to get assignments done. Let’s not pretend work avoidance wasn’t already a thing. Let’s not pretend that we don’t already spend a lot of time in schools teaching students to be compliant rather than to think for themselves.

AI will only make us dumber if we try to continue doing what we have done before, but allow AI to do the work for us. If we truly use AI in collaborative and inspirational ways, we are opening an exciting new door to what human potential really can be.

Promptism – A flat earth metaphor

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I read an interesting article by Sune Selsbæk-Reitz, on a word he sort of invented for asking and believing what AI shares, Promptism. The article, The Earth Is Flat, defines this new word: “Promptism is the quiet belief that if I just ask my question clearly enough, I’ll get something true in return. Maybe even something wise.”

And the article describes how promptism is killing curiosity, and providing ‘truths’ that may not be truthful, and yet are being taken as so at face value without questioning.

From the article:

“The ritual is the same every time:

Ask the machine. Get the word.

Move on.

We don’t think of it as belief, because there’s no incense, no robes, no temple. But there’s authority. And there’s trust. And there’s something deeply seductive about being given something that feels final. Even when it isn’t. Even when the certainty is a performance.

Because the thing is: the more fluent the answer, the more invisible the framing becomes. And if we don’t pause to notice that… we’ll mistake fluency for truth, and coherence for proof.”

The article continues:

“But with ChatGPT or Gemini, the answer arrives fully dressed.

Paragraphs. Polished tone. No seams. No links. Just a voice that sounds sure of itself.

That’s not just convenience. It’s a design choice. And it’s flattening how we think. Because friction – the pause, the doubt, the need to look something up – isn’t a flaw in the process of knowing. It is the process. That little jolt of uncertainty that sends you looking deeper?

That’s what makes knowledge stick.

That’s how you learn.”

…“And the more we do this, the more we forget that knowledge was never meant to arrive fully formed.”

I’ve noticed how this has affected me. I don’t go two or three pages into Google anymore. I don’t find tangent, related, and interesting ideas and connections. I ask an LLM, I get an answer, or I refine my question and ask again. I seek an immediate answer, and I accept that answer.

No more new tabs, no clicking links, just a single conversation, and a sort of final answer. The internet is getting flatter. The depth of search shallower. Promptism is the new search… and I wonder what the consequences are, what the price is, in finding convenient ‘truths’ that we just accept, and don’t bother researching or questioning?

Iterate, iterate, iterate

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We’ve all heard the phrase, “If at first you don’t succeed… try, try again.”

That’s the right idea but the wrong language. It should be, “If at first you don’t succeed… iterate, iterate again.”

Because we all know another saying too, “Do you know what the definition of insanity is? Doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result.”

We don’t need to try again, we need to iterate, again and again… Tweak, adapt, adjust, fine-tune, modify, tailor, refine, reshape, alter, and/or calibrate. And to do all this we need to embrace failure as learning.

Trying the same thing again just won’t do.

Guiding students forward

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Watch this leadership lesson I just found on Instagram:

I can’t help but think about how important this is not just in business/leadership roles, but also in teaching. The best teachers guide students. Teachers are the compass: “A compass doesn’t point the way, it points north and guides the student on their own journey.”

We lose sight of learning when we focus on teaching courses and not students. We lose our bearings when the curriculum is more important than the learner. We are completely lost when we teach to the test.

Watch the video again, and think of the times you led a challenging student rather than faced off with them. Like the time you put the ‘trouble-maker’ in charge because you had to leave the room for a couple minutes… knowing he would keep things in line for you but would cause problems if a peer was left in charge of him. Or the time you metaphorically threw a lesson out the window because students felt lost and you were not getting the learning across. Or when you sat with a kid to do 5 homework questions, letting them know that if they did that with you, they wouldn’t have to do any of the remaining homework.

Are you the guiding compass or the bossy captain? Are you facilitating learning or trying to push learning down their throats? Are you building resistance and conflict or resilience and trust?