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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, December 12th.

I'm Jeremy Shorr senior director of emerging technologies and digital innovation at the Teaching Institute for excellence in Stem ties and moderator for today's conversation, which is the City Club's Berniece Kerrigan Smith Forum on Education and also part of the City Club's Education Innovation Series.

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is now widely embedded in industries, from workforce recruitment and health care to business operations and design.

AI is transforming how people work and solve problems in education.

The conversation often centers on AI is a subject to be taught, a skill to be practiced, or risk to be managed.

Concerns around cheating and plagiarism have dominated early classroom discourse.

However, our conversation today might not be what you're expecting it to be, because what we're seeing emerging now is a more productive shift.

The opportunity to reframe AI not as the goal itself, but as an enabler that unlocks new possibilities for teaching, learning, creativity in school, design, design.

Joining me on stage today are representatives from leading organizations that are moving beyond AI literacy alone and toward AI fluency.

They're proving that AI is most powerful when it strengthens human capacity rather than replacing it.

And they see AI as an enabler that expands what schools and educators can achieve, not the subject itself.

Chrissybil Boulin leads Viral Learning, the first decision intelligence platform that measures how people think, adapt and decide under pressure.

Chief Innovation Officer Joseph South and focuses on AI enabled learning environments that amplify teaching and accelerate responsible innovation.

And Mike Yates, the senior designer at teach for America's Reinvention Lab, leads Future of Learning prototyping and helps students and educators invent educational solutions faster.

And in my organization, Tys, we work with organizations, schools, and policymakers to scale innovation and deepen learning by using AI and other tools to expand educator capacity, transform systems, and change outcomes.

This is the next leap forward for classrooms and schools, and today we'll hear more about how we can use AI as a force multiplier in education and empower educators to design the future of school.

But before we begin, a quick reminder for our live stream and radio audience.

If you have a question for our panelists during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to (330)541-5794 and City Club staff will work it into the program.

Now, members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Sibyl, Joseph and Michael.

All right.

Now we can get a little bit less formal.

Sybil is a development economic economist and founder of Zero Learning.

She helps fortune 500 companies hire for decision quality and foresight, not resumes, by turning the lived experience into a measurable edge in performance and retention.

She also makes me feel exceedingly underdressed here at the City Club.

In my sweater.

Sybil, my wife and I talk a lot about how we think that, experiential learning does as much to shape our children as their education.

And I really kind of wonder what experiences shaped you.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for that.

And I'm really grateful for the opportunity to be here with everyone.

I think that my story really starts from my origin.

I'm from two different worlds.

I was born in New York, and I was raised by a single mom who would organize issues which are community lending circles, so that she could help pay for me to go to Catholic school, and so that I could have the opportunities afforded to me that kids with two parent households did at the same time.

I'd go to Haiti every summer to visit my dad, and my friends in Haiti were just the coolest kids I knew.

We'd have electronics, like laptops or cell phones that we'd take to numerous Apple stores in New York, and no one could fix them.

And you just wouldn't believe it in like 30 minutes.

These kids on the street would fix these phones, and they had no formal education, no formal training.

And so I think that really shaped me early on.

And it made me realize that the ability to learn is everywhere.

But access to credentials is not.

And so I think that was the first time that I started to question, how do we measure intelligence, and in particular, how education measures intelligence.

And so, you know, went on to the University of Cambridge, where I studied development economics and eventually founded Farrow Learning, where we help companies hire folks not for what they know, but for how they think, their lived experiences and their decision quality.

And I think now that we're in this age, it's reshaping the value of education and even what it means, like what our potential and value is as human beings.

So excited to talk more outstanding.

And right next to Sybil is my friend Joseph South.

We met, I think, the first time here in Cleveland, like a decade ago.

Joseph is the chief innovation officer for Estee, a nonprofit organization focused on transformative, research backed learning experiences for students around the world.

He previously led educational technology strategy for the United States at the US Department of Education.

Joseph, I think we all have, up here and a lot of people in this room, countless stories of, of students have been, underestimated.

But some teacher or some tool unlocks something in them, and they change the world.

But I've known you a long time, and I feel like you've probably never really been underestimated.

Well, I hope that's not a comment on my capacity.

I well, actually, that's a funny story.

I so when when I was being vetted for this position, it's a presidential appointee, so it's kind of a big deal.

And you're really allowed to tell anybody about it.

And so for almost six months I had to keep it to myself.

That has been vetted by the white House for this position.

And I was dying to tell my family because this was going to be such a big deal.

So finally, finally, the day came when I was able to, like, revealed to my family that had this incredible opportunity.

And, I was in person.

Both of my sisters were in the room and I said, I've been appointed by the president to lead educational technology for the United States government.

And my older sister had this look of incredulity on her face and said, really?

And my younger sister looked at me and said, you, And I don't know that they were underestimating me at the time.

But what I will say is, even though the learning curve of that position was straight up, and I've never, ever been in a position with a steeper learning curve than that, I did get there.

And so I think I think the lesson is not that, that we should be we probably shouldn't be measuring people where they are, but what their, their, their potential to grow into something.

Absolutely.

You know, in my work around the country, I've had the opportunity to meet all sorts of really interesting and brilliant people and sort of add them to my network.

And I'm so excited to bring all three of these folks to you today, because, Sybil and Joseph are two of the people that I call all the time when I want to think about things differently.

And, the third person that I call all the time when I want to think about things differently is my friend Mike.

Mike Yates is a senior designer teach for America's Reinvention Lab, where he leads I innovation and future of school experiments from Sneaker Design studios to AI hackathons and workshops, he helps students and educators prototype what's radically different.

What a radically different, more human learning experience could look like.

Mike.

Probably all of us get asked some variation of the question.

You know, what's the the best school model?

And my answer is usually, well, all of them, all of them are the best because it depends on the situation and the student.

But I wonder if you have, any experiences where a different school model has really been able to, to change things?

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I a as a young educator, I found myself trying to create different school models, working in different school models, because I grew up with a visceral hatred for school.

Like school made me physically sick because I was so, my mind was just in so much of a different place than where I felt like my teachers were.

I had a teacher in the fifth grade that told me the internet might go away, and I was like, yep, giving up on that place.

Like like I was able to play Oregon Trail and, like, chat with a kid from Oregon.

So in the fifth grade, I was like, you don't understand how significant this is.

But I think, like to the question, I found myself working in this very strange school model at the time.

It was like the summer of 2016, and we were trying to replace direct instruction with what we were calling adaptive learning software at the time.

And what was so unique about it is that the only way that this is going to work is if we had radical feedback from young people.

And so I remember sitting around with like six middle school students and I was like, prepared with all of the things that I knew about learning and professional things.

And the first question that was asked, they were like, so, what do you think happens to Thanos?

And I was like, what?

They're like, you haven't seen every movie in the MCU.

And right there I knew, like, oh, like, this is this is different.

And I embarked on a journey where, like, the the school model that was right for them was the one that they got to help shape.

And so I think the best school model is the one where young people and adults come and sit at the same table and they forge that model together.

All right.

So, so, the thing that we promised when we were sort of talking about this, this panel, is that we weren't going to talk about the things that that those of you have been thinking about education and AI for a while, probably have been thinking about if you want to ask those questions later, you certainly can.

Well, we want to talk about instead is really what's possible.

So if if we really treated this as kind of a blank slate moment with AI as a core design material, core support, but not necessarily what's in the forefront, it can be boats in the forefront.

What's one way that school might fundamentally change?

Joseph.

Yeah.

So I, I feel like our current approach to school is sort of antiseptic.

We, we take the, the children out of their homes and out of their communities and put them in a specific place.

And then we take a subset of everything that you might want to know about or learn about, and we standardize that for everyone.

And they're all going to learn that stuff, and they're all going to learn it here, to learn it.

Now they're learning at the same pace.

And that's not really how any of us actually function, right?

We have so many different very interests and, aptitudes.

And so what I would do and honestly, I would do this without I just for the record, but I helps enable it is I would change school so that it's connected to the community, that the problems that you're trying to solve are the same problems that your community is grappling with, and you're injecting those students into those environments.

And I would open up the curriculum from being a few sort of widely agreed upon, but very narrow topics to be many, many topics of interest.

And of course, no teacher can be an expert in everything a kid wants to learn about, right?

I mean, you know, no teacher knows what's going to happen without those, but but with I mean, maybe you do, I don't.

Okay, I'm waiting like the rest of us.

Okay.

But with AI, you can open up the support system to be much more differentiated for students.

And so I'm not just talking about helping a student learn where they are, but helping them learn about the things they want to learn about and do it in a way that's relevant to their community.

You know, the sort of makes me wonder, you know, Mike, in your your bio, you talk about how, you know, you're looking to design more human centered learning, but then your example is, you know, kind of more digital learning.

So what, don't those counteract each other?

What what's the balance between these things so that we're highlighting human skills, human needs, human, challenges, using the tools without letting you know one overtake the other?

Yeah, it's I mean, it's almost if you use tools appropriately, it's almost the opposite.

Right?

So I've said this for a long time, but the only good technology in school is technology that makes room for more meaningful human moments.

And if it doesn't do that, like hold, hold it to that bar and get rid of it if it doesn't do that.

So, you know, the school that I was mentioning, a lot of people assumed when they heard about the model, like, oh, kids was going to be on laptops all day because all of our paradigms for school is the one that you see in the movies.

Boring.

Teacher in front of the room, chalkboard lockers in the hallway.

There's some bully kid who's got like a runny nose right now.

Like that's what we think of a school.

So when you think technology in school, most people go, computer labs.

I've seen that before.

But instead you could think about we work where there's 100 people in the building.

All of them are working on something different, but they're at tables, collaboratively working together.

They're at the kombucha station.

They're laughing.

They're seeing each other in the hallway.

You have a communal experience.

There's a gravity of work that is sort of pulling people in and out of work.

That is what that school looks like and not like the computer lab example.

So by way of example, like if you find the right pieces of technology in the room and you bring them into your building in a responsible way, actually you free up students to be more of themselves.

You free up more time in the day to have the conversation about what's going to happen to Thanos or like on Christmas Day, like, what are we going to find out about Vecna?

Like, that's really important, right?

Those things sort of bond your school together in ways that I just haven't seen without leaning on technology and creative ways.

Because I haven't seen enough margin be able to create.

I haven't seen any school be able to create enough margin in the day to be able to do those things.

Several I think one of the things that that a lot of folks in this room, something that I think about and worry about is, is I agree with all of this.

But I do also worry, you know, if if I radically change what it looks like in a school, are those students going to get jobs or are they going to get hired later because the employers are looking, you know, they went through a traditional model.

They're looking at traditional model.

So in in your experience working with, you know, under the umbrella of, of economics, but with employers who are looking for, for evolving skills, what does that look like in a are they are they concerned that, you know, we're going to stop manufacturing these same sort of cogs that we've been that we've been manufacturing for a long time?

Yeah, I think that the truth is we have to realize that we are living in a new economic era.

So the old economic era was knowledge based.

So you learn things and you perform task.

And so our education system is very much set up for that.

But what's happening now is that AI is automating tasks, and it can do it quite frankly, faster than we can reskill folks.

And so what's really important is to realize that humans are not going to be replaced by AI, but perhaps the value of what we provide to the workforce is shifting.

And so I think what's really going to be important is not teaching people like what to think, but essentially helping them make better decisions.

So we're moving into a perspective based economy where if I can do all the tasks and human beings are going to be in charge of the why and the when and the what's next?

And so a lot of that really is decision intelligence.

How do you solve problems?

How do you make decisions under stressful situations?

How do you prioritize when everything's on fire?

We're constantly living in a world where change is inevitable, and we need to foster an education system that teaches people to be adaptive, that teaches people situational judgment.

And I think that that's what we're seeing.

The World Economic Forum is actually stated that 70% of emerging jobs actually require adaptability over credentials.

And I think that's huge.

And that's something that we really need to, you know, pay attention to.

And 85% of executives today say that adaptive judgment is more important than technical skills.

And so I think AI is shaping what education even means when we're living in an automation economy.

It's really striking that just the thought that someone might be less prepared, for a job if AI is in their school.

And I know there's this issue of cognitive laziness and and people are concerned that because they're going to outsource their thinking to the AI and then they won't learn how to think, right?

But it's interesting when you talk to actual students and some are in the room today.

A lot of them are using it to augment their education.

And so if you think about the difference between, automation and augmentation, I think that's the key.

And there was a there's a recent study of radiologists, and what they found is that and this is fascinating, that radiologists by themselves not as good as AI, looking at the scans eye better than the radiologists, but the AI augment it.

Sorry.

The radiologists augmented with AI better than either one.

Right.

And that's the world that we're headed to.

And it's really interesting.

I there was a I was at a school where there was a they had a panel and they had a student on the panel, which was awesome because we really need the students voices.

And, and they were talking about all their things and how they might ban it, and they weren't sure.

And then the student said, can I say something?

And I, I'm sure you're like, you guys are going to make your policies and do what you do.

I know that, but I think that's for my job.

And so I'm going to be using AI no matter what you people decide.

And it's kind of like a mic drop moment, right?

I mean, if students don't have those skills, they're not going to be able to get the jobs.

And what's I think interesting too, is that when we start having conversations with university professors and with employers, we're already starting to see an economic divide between access to these tools.

And students who were able to use them in high school were able to use the pay versions and the higher powered models and those that weren't.

So this is kind of this weird inflection point where if we do this right, and we probably probably won't, but if we do this right, so confidence generally, well, so much of what funds out.

If we do this right, it's a it's really a massive equalizer.

But if we do it wrong, it's going to or it has the potential to create an economic divide like we've never seen before.

Mike, I know that, you know, one of the things that that you and I and frankly, a lot of folks in this room who are our friends, we've been talking for 25 years about the ways that schools need to shift and change.

And it never really happens because it's this established, entrenched system.

Maybe this is the opportunity where our hands are going to be forced, and that's terrifying, but also good.

Well, you know, what does that start to unfold as, do you think for, you know, for a public school, I see a table of, friends over there.

Public school superintendents.

You know, they they still have state tests.

They have to think about.

They still have levies they have to pass to keep these schools open and functioning.

So how do they balance this, this shift with these entrenched systems that that I think are going to start to fall away but haven't.

I think this is where this is where you experiment.

This is where you create margin in your life as a school leader, administrator, teacher to start experimenting.

One thing, obviously, we hear it all the time.

People are like, what are we going to do about the essays?

But we're not asking the right questions.

So I think there's like a set of questions to be asked that will hover underneath and above all of the basic academic questions.

Like the real question is whether or not writing five paragraph essays was ever a really great way to show what you know.

Right?

Like, is there another way other than the five paragraph essay?

The truth is that we've become really comfortable, because so much of the way that education works is about making adults in the building comfortable.

Like, if you follow my policies, we're good.

If you follow my classroom procedures, we're good.

You call me what I want you to call me, and then we're good.

But for the first time, students now have something in their pockets that is more powerful, faster, and smarter than you.

And so, naturally, we feel threatened as an industry.

But when you feel the threat, my advice is to lean into whatever that is.

Ask yourself, maybe for the first time in your career, what if I'm wrong?

What if there is another way?

And I guarantee you, like, the other way that you find will be much more exciting and much more valuable to your classroom.

Your students will like you more, or they might hate you more, but they're going to learn so much more from your classroom.

They're going to benefit so much more.

Like, I actually think at the end of the day, there's all these heady things that we can say about, like how you can get students jobs, how you can use technology responsibly in schools.

I think there's really one thing that you need to be optimizing for in the school system and is going to force everyone to do it.

You optimize for time.

How much more time on task can I get with X?

If you are LeBron James, if you're a student here and you happen to be that good at basketball, the whole city of Cleveland probably knows it.

And and to be where LeBron James is, you need more time in the gym.

So the question is, as a school, how can I optimize for that student to spend more time in the gym without sacrificing the other things that we know are very important?

Because LeBron James is who LeBron James is, because he's got the athletic talent and he's got the financial prowess, right.

So he had somebody doing that for him.

You think about anybody who's who's the top of any industry.

They are as like well-rounded of a person as they can be because they had people who stepped into their lives.

Now we can do that at breakneck speed.

So it doesn't matter if you want to be a rocket scientist dancer, basketball player.

If you can optimize for doing more of that, then then that's where you going to find success.

And so whatever is the barrier between you educator and helping students do more of the things that they love to do, the uniquely gifted and talented that especially if it's your ego, is going to force us to put it down.

So like get a head, start putting it down today.

Start finding new ways today.

There's organizations and like places where you can go call Joseph.

He's got ideas.

He's really big conference that he runs.

Lots of ideas there.

So I would highly recommend like seeking out any organization that has innovation in the title.

I know there's there's one local around here.

You.

Oh, yeah.

We call that guy, right?

It's like, call your local.

Like the local people in your community that can help you sort of think through these things.

Because most of the time you don't see the like, you really don't see the forest for the trees.

Like, sometimes I get it like you're in it.

You're executing your focus on the next 10 to 24 months at best, and you need somebody who's going to partner with you to help you see around the corner to say, hey, in five years, this is what the world is going to look like and help you design that.

And so while I'm joking, I really do mean it.

Like if you're inspired to do something different, actually call Jeremy.

You can call me too.

I just don't live in Cleveland.

But you, so I. And with your work as an economist, you know, we talked about the World Economic Forum and, you know, they had this, this recent report.

I January of last year, I think the, the future of jobs report and it's, something Joseph and I are both kind of obsessed with because, what you notice when you look at the predicted skills for 20, 30, like, not 2045, we're talking, you know, three and a half years from now.

You don't see academic discipline skills on that list.

You see AI and technological skills, and you see leadership and problem solving those types of skills.

I know you're working with employers in this space.

You know what?

How are we to know, though, that that's not kind of this short term blip, that this AI bubbles is not going to pop and that we're going to totally rethink what we're doing in schools.

And then all of our students are going to be in a bad place because what they really needed was, you know, chemistry one on one or whatever.

Yeah.

Think about it like this.

In the industrial age, you know, reading and writing was essential.

There's absolutely no way that you could get a good job if you were not literate.

Right?

But now you have a tool in your pocket that is incredibly smart and knows everything.

And so the value of rote memorization just it's not there anymore.

You know, so human beings having to memorize things and, and regurgitate it, there really is no value in that.

So there really is no going back.

And so what we're seeing is that we're moving towards an economy where your behaviors actually matter, are going to matter more than the credentials you have.

And so if you think about it, skills are really a snapshot of what you can do in one instant.

And as we mentioned AI is is gaining skills faster than we can reskill folks.

In addition to that, your resume really is just, a snapshot of your history.

So the only thing that really compounds in an economy like this really is your lived experience and your lived experience, defining that as how you make decisions under pressure, how do you adapt as situations change?

And so that is only going to become more and more valuable as time goes on.

And so I think it's really important that we redefine the value of a test.

Right.

We talk a lot about kids are using AI to cheat on tax.

Well, if that's the case and we're we're testing them on the wrong things.

Right.

Because that means that is no longer valuable in our economy.

I know it's really hard.

It's a huge shift.

But I think it's exciting as well, because degrees have a lot to do with the access that you have.

There are a lot of different intelligences that we haven't been able to really address.

And so I think I gives us the opportunity to understand why a top employer is a top employer, and not just the school they went to or the skills they had, but how do they think?

How do they make decisions when the script falls apart?

How do they adapt as situations change?

And I think we can use this technology to identify students and to help them understand what sectors they're a good fit for, to help them understand where their natural aptitudes are going to be appreciated, where they're going to be successful in the workforce and create these roadmaps.

And so I think we can take the guesswork out of education.

And I think that we're living in a time where economic development and education have to go hand in hand.

There's no way to separate them anymore.

Just so I agree with that, and I want to be careful that we aren't giving the impression that content knowledge doesn't matter, right?

Because because you can't be a physicist and not know physics, you can't be a chemist and not know chemistry, right?

But I think, I think there's two things to keep in mind.

One is that the way we've been going about that needs to change, right?

So we've been using I'll take the five paragraph essay because we're like, okay, this features a student like how to think and organize their thoughts.

And if we don't do that, there will be no way for a student to think to organize their thoughts.

You're like, well, that's not true, right?

These are two different things.

There's an artifact and there's the process.

And so we can change out the artifact for something more meaningful.

But we need to preserve the process of helping to develop that critical thinking.

And similarly with chemistry.

Right.

We don't want them to not learn chemistry.

But learning it by filling bubbles on a sheet is probably not the best way to learn chemistry, right?

And so if we can change that out to be something that's more applied, that's more hands on, that's more authentic, then they will learn chemistry.

In fact, they'll learn it better.

And not only will they learn chemistry, they'll learn chemistry the way a chemist does chemistry.

Right.

And that gets to that lived experience that I think you're talking about.

And then that moves us forward.

So so I don't want to I want to just honor the people who are concerned that I could just sort of come in and hollow out everything, and we're just like, I don't know, ask.

I, that that is, that is a that is a real risk.

But I think there's ways to manage it.

And anyone who's, who's who's, embarrassed that they're afraid of these tools should not be.

This is terrifying.

Yeah, this is true.

It keeps me up at night.

These are terrifying things that could go great and could go definitely.

Definitely not great.

It is about time, to to jump to questions.

But before we do, I'd like to do just the fastest lightning round.

So pithy.

Pithy, of of this question.

So, let's imagine just for a second it's it's, I was gonna say ten years, but that's too long a time horizon with these tools.

It's five years.

Three years from now.

What's something in sort of traditional education that we hold sacred, that we think is important, that you think that I might show us was never actually all that important?

Who wants to go first?

Does great grade levels.

Yep.

Oh, Joseph, my.

I'm thinking of a backup.

Yeah.

It'll give you ten.

Mike, you had a backup?

Yeah, I do.

I mean, I have so many.

I have a long list of things that I, my standardized testing.

Yeah.

Ten years ago.

Hopefully.

Yeah.

Right.

So.

Well, yeah.

Just rote memorization.

Absolutely.

All right, so we're about to begin the audience Q&A for those just joining via our live stream and radio audience.

I'm Jeremy Shaw, senior director of emerging technologies and digital innovation at the Teaching Institute for excellence in Stem.

And moderator for today's conversation.

Today, we're talking about how to harness, how to harness, how to harness the power of artificial intelligence in education.

Joining me on stage is, Sybille Berlin, president of Varo Learning.

Joseph South, chief innovation officer at ACD, and Mike Yates, senior designer of the Reinvention Lab at Teach for America.

We welcome questions from everyone City Club members, guests, students and those joining via live stream at City club.org or live radio broadcast at 89.7 Wksu.

Ideo stream public media.

If you'd like to text a question, please text it to (330)541-5794.

That's (330)541-5794, and city club staff will try to work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

My question is not meant to offend anybody in the audience.

Got to say that.

Okay, so don't take it personally.

If there are millions of people who put the guy who was in the white House, who put him there, and Sybil, you mentioned a term that's decision intelligence.

So there's a rumor that a lot of the people who put him there were not really educated.

So if they had had access to a I could that have helped them make a better decision.

And so glad drink to that.

When you just start off with something like I mean I did non-controversial say I'd love to start.

Thank you.

Thank you for your question.

Appreciate that.

Where I can't really talk on the politics of things, but but I definitely think that the idea of, like, decision intelligence and that, making better decisions is something that is important.

We're living in a time now where AI allows us to look at micro decisions, to look at like behaviors that folks make and to understand, like, how does that equate to success, whether we're talking about retention or performance, if you're an employer or whether it's critical thinking and reasoning if you're an educator.

And so I think that it's really important that we start to think differently about what learning is and start to shift from the idea that learning is simply knowledge based and start to think more about, how we can teach students about, like risk mitigation when it comes to decision making or how we can think about prioritization as things are shifting.

And so, I think that we can all make better decisions.

And I think that we can use AI to understand how micro decisions have effects in ways that we couldn't before.

And that definitely expands beyond the classroom.

And Mike, you want to jump in.

Yeah, I just I just will give a direct answer to the question.

I think mathematically, there's no way that that can actually that the the premise of the question can be 100% true.

But what is interesting is the the type of education that the question begs, right?

Like the type of education that you could like, the experience that you could build from that place of what sounds like a place of pain is you could build experiences using AI, help connect students or even adults to the idea of like like public discourse or civic education, right?

There are organizations like Local Civics, which is one, which used to be Cleveland based, that actually is doing that.

They're exploring like, how do you use AI to help expose students to multiple viewpoints?

There's a website called Answer the Public.

You can type in any question in the world, and you can figure out what people are saying about this online.

That's an example of how technology is bring you closer to the conversation.

So like do we need a more educated populace?

Sure.

Like of course.

And AI is a tool that can help you help you do that.

So for me, it's not about like whether or not the people that voted for X candidate are educated or not.

Like it's the fact that like in every election, somebody is going in button mashing at the polls and we need to stop that in general, like period.

And I think I as a way, like as I can help us do that for students at younger and younger ages.

I have experience teaching kindergarten many years.

Head Start state pre-K.

Currently, I work for the Literacy Cooperative as director of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library for Cuyahoga County.

And my question is, the research is really clear that young children don't learn effectively by looking at screens on screen screens just do not build the neuronal connections that we need to have happening in their brain to wire that brain for successful reading and writing, or anything for that matter.

They really need real interactions with real objects, people, books and we want to promote curiosity in them as well.

So what are how do you manage this new technology to ensure to protect young children?

And early childhood goes to the age of eight to protect them and to ensure that we have well developed brains, in this society.

Yeah.

So I really appreciate the question.

And, and, I when I was at the, department, I had the opportunity to work on a brief about, attacking and early learning that we released with the American associate of pediatrics and, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

And so this is what I would say.

It goes back to what Mike said earlier.

We know that the human connections are essential, right?

When, for, for all of us, but especially for, for young people.

And so when the technology is in the forefront, right then it interferes with the human connections, but it can also be in the background and has the potential to enhance those connections.

And I'll give you a couple of examples.

So one, you know, I was out with my with my child, in a park and, you know, we heard a bird chirping and there's an app that you can you can go on and it will listen to the bird and it'll tell you what kind of bird it is.

Right?

It's using AI to or machine learning, or at least to to to to know what that bird call is.

So then I could have a conversation with the child about the bird.

Right?

Another one is, you know, some, some there's apps that have that support a parent and a child doing yoga together.

Right.

Which is the parent on their own may not know how to do that.

And the app, you know, can adapt it to, children's bodies.

They can do that too.

And so I think I think we have to remember it's called, I think it's called co viewing.

I don't like the word viewing though.

I think it should be called co learning.

But but if you co view the technology with a with an adult then it can actually enhance that relationship.

And I've I've a 16 year old a 14 year old a four year old and the four year old uses al all the time.

But she's, she's never on the screen to use the I. It's these types of interactions.

It's, it's knowing that there's no question, no curiosity.

She can have the.

We can't dig deeper into that.

We can't, establish new learning paradigms, a new ideas from.

There's never an opportunity for never a time when I say I have no idea.

I mean, maybe next week we can go to the library and figure this out.

It's right now we can dive right?

Right in.

I'm a computer science professor by training, so?

So I, I had a flashback moment to maybe 15 years ago.

I was standing at the National Computer Science Education conference talking about, you know, what we were thinking of at that time, right.

And I drew this parallel to math education.

I mean, if you think about what happens in K-12 math classrooms all the way from kindergarten through 12th grade, everything is really built up to getting a student ready for that first calculus class in college.

And if we apply the same kind of logic to any other discipline, right.

In other fields, the the conversations that we're having today about AI, especially AI, augmented learning, upends everything that we know about education policy, right?

I mean, I'm sitting I'm looking around the room, there's administrators, there's policy makers.

You know, that work in, in K-12 education?

We could do that.

But there's millions of kids in school today.

So what is the right and really, you know, Joseph, maybe your federal policy lens brings this to that, to this thing.

Like, how do we do that?

In terms of adjusting future looking policy without sacrificing an entire generation of kids that are going through what we'll consider traditional learning that's being upended.

So I think all of us could address this, by the way.

I'll start in and open it up.

But, you know.

Part of the question is, are we already sacrificing a current generation of students to the old ways of doing things, right?

So, I mean, I would I would turn that question around and say, what, what what are we gaining with the current system?

What are we losing with the current system?

And, you know, right now, I think and I realize this listen, folks, everybody, I'm just thinking about your work as well.

What we're gaining is we're gaining, a certain set of requirements that lead to a gate to open, like, college, acceptance that then leads to further experiences that lead to another gate to open, which is a job.

But a lot of those are just tags.

They're, they're they're not experiences.

They're they're schools built on a knowledge transmission, model, not, expertise development model.

Right.

But in the in the actual workforce, people want expertise.

And so I think that we're currently sacrificing time where students can gain expertise and things that matter deeply to them and that matter to the world for knowledge transmission.

But from a policy point of view, to actually address the question, what we and I'll be brief here, what we need is guidelines, not rules, because this is changing too fast for us to set hard and fast rules.

They're going to last for a year or 2 or 10 years.

And we know that in policy you set a policy and those things have staying power.

They're crazy.

Like the Carnegie unit.

I we don't have time for the Carnegie unit, but but it's it's stay forever, right.

And so if we can focus on guidelines and allow for the experimentation that Mike was talking about earlier, then we can have the right direction.

We do need to learn from what's out there.

So I guess the last thing I would say is you need federal and state mechanisms, ideally, that bring back the learnings into something that can then be reviewed and shared out.

And that's the most effective approach.

And this conversation is kind of why I have faith that we will figure it out.

Because I think the ecosystem is strong enough.

I personally think about policies zero minutes out of every day, because Joseph is alive, like because Joseph exists.

And I can, like, trust.

I legitimately can trust that.

Like, there are people that I know in the ecosystem who are obsessed with this, right?

And like, who have the experience and and when I say obsessed with it, I mean, like, they enjoy doing that.

I would not survive if I was like having to do policy.

But I think if there is a way, I love what you said, Joseph, about, like there's something that needs to be informal here, like a set of recommendations as opposed to hard and fast policy, because the the Silicon Valley is more powerful today than it ever has been.

And Silicon Valley is young and it is brash, and it actually does not care about governmental policy.

The story I'll tell you in my state, where I live in Texas, there was one time where I was, we were doing the school project, and we had school in a hotel.

And in the next ballroom over there were all of these billionaires that were walking in.

And it was a very strange scene, and it was like, what is happening?

Well, they were meeting because they were trying to devise a plan to build a Hyperloop train from Austin, Houston to Dallas.

The reason is obvious they just want to be able to access talent from anywhere in the state.

And they were trying to devise a plan to get the state of Texas to pay for it.

Well, our governor was like, absolutely not.

They were like, fine, we'll do it ourselves.

Right?

Like that was one of those examples where I'm like, you know, like they're not waiting on the state of Texas to write the law.

Like as soon as the state was like, no, they're like, but we got it.

Like they're hiring people.

Like a friend of mine is now over the Austin the Houston Loop.

Like it's insane.

That's where the way that this is going, like OpenAI is not waiting on policy to be written.

What I think is interesting is that there's some part of the solution, though, that like, it does actually exist in like good pedagogy in the past.

Right.

So a part of like when you start, when you actually stop talking about like the rules of school and you start talking about human development, this is why mind meld, when we're talking about getting rid of grade levels, when we talk about grade levels, is when you take students and you fix them to a set of content and experiences based on what they should know, because they're six.

Well, all six year olds are different.

I have four kids.

I have a six year old, I have an eight year old.

I have a ten and 11 year old.

My ten year old academically is an eighth grade, and she should be allowed to to go as far as she wants to academically.

If anybody's familiar with the classical model of education, this is the thing that I'm recommending that people actually reach back for, because it provides the proper guidelines and guardrails to where you use AI and where you say, no.

Classical education is broken down into three phases.

Grammar phase is what we know of as elementary and in the grammar phase covers many age levels.

And it basically says this is where you're getting the building blocks to life.

This is where you learn that like red and blue are different and like two plus two most times equals four.

That's where you learn that the logic phase is your next phase.

This is what we know of as middle school.

And if you teach middle school, you'll you'll hear familiar things.

This is where young people start to ask questions about the world around them.

They're now taking those building blocks that they got in the grammar phase and they're like, yeah, but what if two plus two doesn't always equal four?

So they learn about base number systems.

Then you get to rhetoric.

And this is where students are using everything that they've learned in grammar and logic.

And they are now creating new things.

So if you use that as a way to organize the way that we think about human development, access to AI, like in my house, I homeschool my children.

They don't get access to AI until they're in rhetoric phase learning, because now I know that you have enough building blocks to where when you see that image, you're like, that's not a human.

When the AI hallucinates, you're like, I'm going to go look that up elsewhere, because I don't think that sounds right, like that's the protection.

So I think if we can figure out how to like, find the right pedagogical backbone and then make a national set of recommendations that AI that can change, that will change in the six months, I think, I think we'll probably get to a set of policies in like, I don't know, 15 years to jump in really quick to.

I think that AI gives us incredible opportunity now to actually look at someone's career trajectory so we can understand why someone who doesn't necessarily have the right credentials on paper was successful.

And we can, you know, in the background, assess students and understand at a young age, like where their aptitudes are.

And we can actually individualize the learning that they receive to actually help them when they go out there in the real world and enable them to be able to get a good job.

And so I think using AI in the background and not just studying what people know, but how they decide and how they move through the world, and basically matching that to other folks that are out there in different industries is something we've never had access to before.

We've never understood why two people with the same path might take a different trajectory.

And so I think it's really important to look at all the new data that AI allows us and to create personalized pathways where education and career are synonymous, and upward mobility and career and not are synonymous.

Because we know a lot more about how people think and decide.

And so we can instill this in students a lot younger.

Hello.

Our next question is the text question.

It says one of the big AI stories of the last year was about young people who mostly bonded with chatbots and end up taking their own lives.

This points to the real dangers of these relative untested technologies.

How can school address this specific challenge and prepare students to to forge appropriate relationship with tech?

Yeah.

This is I mean, this is the the heavy question that we think about a lot.

And I know Mike and I have a, a good friend of Mike's, but, an acquaintance, who's kind of you want to talk about Michelle's work?

Maybe.

That's exactly.

Yeah.

Michelle Culver, who founded the Reinvention Lab and teach for America, which I will take just a second to say that was a much larger feat than just saying the word.

She just stood up.

A new team like cast in 20 years of of hard work, sweat equity and created a team of people that would openly disagree with her, including me all the time.

Which is a very brave effort.

She moved on from the lab and created something called the Rhythm Project, where, I got to see this happen for her in live time.

And it was really exciting where she started when when she started giving access to language models, she started asking the language models awkward questions to see how it would respond.

And she was like, hey, like, do you do you love me?

And the language model was like, of course I do.

And she was like, oh, this is weird.

So now she has an an organization called Project Rhythm that does explore AI at the intersection of relationships.

It's asking the really hard question, what does it mean for human connection when these machines are more and more human over time?

I built this AI course where that all of our incoming corps members at teach for America take, and there's a movie clip at the beginning of it.

There's a clip of the movie.

Her if anybody heard of this movie, the movie her it's if you haven't, it's like nobody watched it when it came out because it was very scary.

It came out in 2013.

This is a Joaquin Phoenix movie, which is why a lot of people were probably like, yeah, that guy's a weirdo.

And they didn't watch it.

But it's about a man who falls in love with his operating system.

And the operating system is voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Which, by the way, she.

She sued an AI company for trying to use her voice from that movie.

And, you know, so when you see Scarlett a movie, she's doing it for the love of the game, like she don't have to be there.

But, that movie is so interesting because in 2013, somebody saw a world where that would happen, and it's happening now.

And so I think what to do in schools.

I will go back to sort of my previous answer, which is I really do think there's something into or there's something to figuring out what the gates are for access.

And a part of the gates for access have to be this understand that AI is not human.

And I actually I found it really interesting.

There's a there's an interesting interview with, Sam Altman, and I can't remember who it was, but it was a hosted.

I disagree with a lot.

So maybe it's like Tucker Carlson or somebody, I don't know, but the interviewer is trying to trap him.

The interviewer is trying to say, don't you think it's okay that your your AI allows suicide?

And Sam Altman says, you know, I'm going to pause and think about that.

He goes, yeah.

Upon further thought, no, I don't think it's okay.

I don't think we're going to allow that.

And I found that interaction so interesting because you like a lot of people like what this interviewer wanted.

Sam Altman to say is, well, you know, you know, people are different.

And, you know, we we let people do what they want.

We empower people.

But actually, he was like, no, we're we're working on it.

We're going to fix it.

So I, I say that's to say not that you should trust Sam Altman or OpenAI.

But but to actually say that, like, there is a thoughtful conversation that needs to be had among students.

Like, it's not true that like all students blindly trust.

I think if you talk to the students in the room, you will find more skepticism than you, maybe even that you have.

So I but I do think there's something to gaining your human development and learning journey and making sure that people understand that these are not human, they're not trying to be human.

On some level, the people who are who are pulling the strings behind the scenes, you know, Wizard of Oz, so to speak, like they understand that these machines should not try to be human as well.

But that understanding, I think, is fundamentally very important.

And so I think important also to, to, to remember that, that these are tools that have positive and negative uses because work also shows, that there are instances and tools with reductions in suicidal ideation where students can actually access help and, in a more rapid and deep manner than they can in many other circumstances.

That's not to say they should have unfettered access.

That's not to say there's not a lot of risk involved, but it is to say that that there are positives and negatives.

Just want to quickly, just just briefly, I think the because I want to get to this question, the the for a school, there's this notion of digital citizenship and, and we teach students responsible use of technology.

And this is something that has to be taught.

They're not just going to figure this out by osmosis.

And since this is one of one of the ways that we can proactively have those conversations with the students so that they can start discerning between what's real and what's artificial, During this panel, I've noticed that a lot of the connections to education is just about like careers.

That's not all education is to me.

So.

Education to me is the ability to learn, like those five paragraph essays, as in just about the five paragraph essays, writing it and having to have a grade on it.

That's something that we can call a sacrifice for being able to put stuff together, to analyze, to understand and to connect.

These are things that I see as like essential human qualities, other things that we must sacrifice for.

I, like the other question mentioned, is like, I'm so nervous, you're doing great.

This is awesome.

Keep going.

Is like the rates with underage people in the eye, what they're telling them.

We see this with the first like internet.

When the internet first came out, my mom told me that nothing was restricted.

You could do anything that you wanted to do on there.

And in a way, especially in this now day and age, that it's dangerous.

So my question for you, considering all of the sacrifices that we have to make, is it worth it?

And I can't think of a. Do you just want to change seats with her?

Jeremy?

I can't think of a better, I assume at this point.

Final question.

So, so, so, you know, what do we think about this?

It's it's, I don't know, maybe it's too late to undo it.

But whether it is or not, how do we retain that humanity, how to retain the focus on humanity and make sure, that the that these tools, you know, support learning and personal growth and all of the things that that she spoke about, I think that the future of learning has to be like lived experience has to become the curriculum.

Your lived experience has to be what we teach.

So helping people hone their self-confidence, helping people understand that they're community knowledge, that the resilience that they've built in their life actually has a value.

To be important and I gives us the opportunity now where we don't have to say this is too difficult.

We can actually individualize how we teach.

We can actually focus on things that before we thought were softer skills.

And we can really make the classroom about what kids really care about and what's really going to be important for them.

And so I think I is only worth it if we make a lived experience at the center of it, if we keep the humanity of it all, and we use this as an opportunity to make education about a lot more than what we know, but about what's possible and how we think.

And so thank you so much for that question.

I think that that's amazing.

I, I was on a I was a moderator for a panel of students last night, and one of them was a writer, and he said, I stopped using AI to help me write because I wasn't learning the discipline of writing, and I'll bring it in later to revise.

And so I think, I think we need to be really intentional about when and how we bring it in.

And if we do that, we can preserve the productive struggle.

That's always been a part of learning.

And I think that the the important thing for us all to think about it, a lot of educators in this room is that the reality is the only people, in my opinion, that can guide us towards the future that this young woman was talking about, our educators, our schools, we are the place where the only place that can ensure that students have the skills to navigate the future, to use this as a tool and not let it take over, of their lives in really negative ways.

We are a tiny bit over, so I'm going to go through this fast.

Thank you.

Chrissybil Boulin, Joseph South, and Michael Yates for joining us at the City Club today.

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Today's forum is a part of the City Club's Education Innovation Series in partnership with Nordstrom, Nordson and the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation is also the Berniece Kerrigan Smith Forum on Education, made possible thanks to the members of her family in honor of her distinguished teaching career, which started in Licking County and eventually led her to teach at Cleveland Public Schools during and after World War Two.

We'd like to thank the family for their continued support.

City club would also like to welcome students joining us from Chardon High School, as well as the guests at tables hosted by the SCC of Northeast Ohio Dream Team.

Friends of Bernice Kerrigan Smith, Magnificat High School, Nordson, teach for America, Ohio, and ties.

The City Club will be off for the holiday break, but will return in the New Year on Friday, January 9th.

They will be joined by Nick Barlett, CEO of Rock entertainment Group, which oversees some names you've probably heard of here in Cleveland.

The Cavs, the monsters, the charge, and more.

He'll discuss the goals and plans for the organization itself and the city of Cleveland.

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I'm Jeremy Shorr This forum is now adjourned.

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