Jethro Jones: Welcome to Transformative Principal, where I help you stop
putting out fires and start leading.
I'm your host, Jethro Jones.
You can follow me on Twitter at Jethro Jones.
Okay.
Welcome to Transformative Principal and to AI for Education Real Talk.
I am Jethro Jones, and today I'm sharing a little recording that I did
from my AI Leader Office Hours, which was just a monologue of me talking
about some things that have been on my mind lately that I haven't put out
yet, and to a broad audience at least.
So I wanted to share these with you.
Would love to hear what you have to say and your thoughts.
Please reach out to me, Jethro at Transformative Principal dot com, or
on any social network at Jethro Jones.
Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
I.
I'm going to share some of my thoughts about where we're at with AI and what
we're doing, and I just kind of been thinking about things and haven't written
'em down or, or spoken about 'em anywhere.
Uh, all, all in this nice little package yet.
So I'm gonna do this today and I hope this is valuable for you.
And more importantly,
I hope that you can see this as a way to.
Make a wake up call for how we're doing things and do it better for the
people that are there in front of us and be willing to change some things.
So I wanna start with a hard truth.
In education, we could not have done a better job of preparing
our system to be overtaken by ai.
We have designed schools to be easy for adults and not focused on
designing schools to be good for kids.
The way we did that is that we made student work completely formulaic and
predictable and super easy to automate.
We did that for a, a decent reason, which was we wanted to make it easy on teachers
to know how the kids were doing and know how they're progressing and be able to
manage having 150, 200 students in a day, as I did, as a, uh, middle school
teacher, myself and a high school teacher.
So I get why we did it, but the problem is, is that we made the perfect system
for AI to step in and do a huge amount of the work of students and teachers.
And that is just what we did.
And I don't think that we were like, Hey, let's create the perfect system
where AI can come in and completely take over what we're doing, but we have.
Effectively shot ourselves in the foot with this.
Um, and by prioritizing adult convenience over student learning,
we've literally dug our own grave.
And that is why we're struggling so much right now.
Um, and to be honest, I don't think we know how to reckon with the world.
The AI is created for schools.
We don't know what to do when kids can so easily just put all their
answers into chat, GPT, and I'll get to the, well, we should just hand write
our essays, uh, thing in a moment.
But the problem is that we've forgotten what school should actually
about, should actually be about.
Schools should be about learning.
They should not be about assignments.
They should not be about tests.
They should not be about easy to manage grading systems that are
there for the ease of the adults.
They should be about learning first and foremost.
And so many of our schools are not.
Our schools should be designed around whatever it is that makes
it easier for kids to learn.
Whatever it is that helps kids focus on real learning and
their own personal capability.
That's what school should be about.
I've said this four years, but schools should be designed around the people
that are there, the students that you have, and the teachers that you have.
My book, school X. That I released five years ago is all about redesigning
your school for the people that are right there in front of you, that
are your students and teachers.
For the parents that are there, for the teachers that are there, for the
community, that is there for you, who's there, because just the way that your
previous principal did, it may not be the thing that works best for you.
So lemme talk a little bit more about how we set things up for AI to be.
The, how we set our schools up to be the perfect target for ai uh, assignments.
We gave the same assignment to every single student so the teacher can grade
it easily, and that makes it really easy for the teachers, but it also makes it
really easy for the AI to come in and know exactly how to answer it and how to do it.
We made grades based on the assignments we say to kids.
You did X.
So you get the grade for X, and the X is the assignment, the
test, the project, whatever it is.
We set it up so that they check the box and they move on.
We created in an effort to make things better.
We said we're gonna use a rubric instead of just assigning a letter grade, but the
rubric literally says, check these boxes, and that's how you get a perfect score.
And that is exactly what I have done with my own kids and my own
students saying, look, the teacher gave you the keys to the kingdom.
Here's the rubric.
Do exactly what it says.
And they have no reason to not give you a perfect grade,
literally for getting grants.
You look at the rubric first, and then you write your grant proposal in a way
that clearly shows how you can check the box for each one of those rubric
aspects to be able to get the grant or whatever it is that you're going for.
When a rubric is provided, it says, this is exactly what you
need to do to get this thing.
So you do it, you check the box and you move on.
Now, you may.
Hope as a teacher that kids are going to get some learning outta that.
And to be honest, they do.
And that's all fine and dandy.
But the problem is, is that AI is extremely good at doing
exactly those kinds of tasks.
Formulaic writing, standardized responses, and box checking work.
AI is very good at that.
You tell it to do this thing and it will do it, and it's very easy for it to do it.
It's very good about doing repetitive structured, clearly defined tasks.
What do most of our assignments in school look like?
Repetitive, structured, clearly defined.
It is also very good at providing good enough responses
to some formulaic prompts.
If you ask, for example, for it to describe what a certain theme in a
popular book is, the AI can do that.
That's really easy for the AI to do that because it has that
corpus of knowledge accessible and it knows what that looks like.
Some of the things that AI is not so easy, so simple to use for that.
It's a little bit more challenging, are highly specific, deeply contextual
and personal task unless you provide all of that context yourself.
You have to tell it exactly what to include and how to
feel about those things.
If you don't, then it will just make things up.
For example, if you're like, okay, instead of just saying, what's the
content of this book that we're reading, you ask the students to
tell how it applies to their life.
A student can still say, this applies to my life because, and
just plug that into chat, GPT and it will just make something up.
And the AI can do that pretty easily and very confidently.
That's why it's really easy for the AI to, to trick.
People into thinking that it's real is because it, it says things,
it replies to things with so much confidence that you're like, yeah,
this is definitely, definitely true.
I can totally get this.
So this idea of school being designed for the ease of the teachers has
set it up perfectly for AI to come in and, and totally disrupt us.
Most people right now are using ai.
To do things faster and easier and we're doing the same old
work just more efficiently.
I was just in Wyoming earlier this month doing a training, uh, called AI for
Innovation, and what I was really focusing on is everybody's using it for completing
these tasks and checking off the boxes.
We're doing the same old work that we've always done.
We're just doing it more efficiently now that's totally fine if the same
old work that you've been doing.
Is the work that you actually need to do.
But the problem is, is that is not, that is not often the case.
Sometimes you really don't need to be doing that work that you were doing.
I tell this joke is it's half a joke, half real, that I would not,
uh, reply to anything or do anything that the district asked me to do
until they asked me three times.
And people laugh when I say that because everybody's like,
oh yeah, that'd be funny.
But the reality is, is that I did do that.
It did work because the district would ask me to do things that they didn't
actually need done, but they're like sitting in a meeting somewhere and
they're like, oh, we should get this information from all the principals.
And so they would then ask all the principals, and the
principals would be like, well, there goes the rest of my week.
Now I gotta get all this stuff in for the district.
But.
They would send that email and then the next day they'd come back into
that same meeting with the same group of people and say, you know,
nevermind, we don't really need this.
Meanwhile, the principals are all working trying to find all
that information and get them the information they need, and they've
already decided they don't need it.
So then the.
Principles, turn it in and they're like, thank you for doing this.
That's great.
But then nothing ever happens.
I saw that happen so many times in my career.
I decided it just wasn't worth it.
I'm just not going to do this until I get asked for it multiple times.
'cause if I get asked for it multiple times, then I'll do it because I know
that they really are looking for it.
But most of the time they, they probably don't need those things.
So people are usually using AI to do the same old work just more efficiently.
They're never asking the question.
Should I even be doing this work?
Should I even be writing this email?
Should I be writing this newsletter?
Very few people are using AI to solve complex problems that
don't have a clear answer.
For example, how do I improve attendance rates at my school?
There's not a single right answer for that.
You can look at my TEDx video where I got my, uh, where I shared
how I got my school attendance up to 95% Jethro site slash TEDx.
You can go watch that video and see how I did it at my school, but that
might not work at your school and that might not work today because
things have changed so much since.
In the last 13 years since I originally gave that talk.
There are multiple strategies and multiple ways to solve a problem, and
you don't know what works until you try.
But that is a good question to ask AI because we don't know the answer
and you may get something that you don't know could work, but again,
you're gonna have to actually try it.
So using AI in that example.
May not be as beneficial as, how do I write a nice truancy letter to the
family that makes them feel good?
Well, lemme tell you what, the truancy letter does not work anyway, and if
somebody is at the point where they're getting a truancy letter, then a
little letter in the mail is not going to make them suddenly change their
mind about prioritizing education and coming to school every day.
That's just not gonna work.
How do I know?
Because I've seen it hundreds of times.
I've sent out hundreds of those letters.
And did they ever work?
No, they didn't.
All they were was us documenting that we were trying, so that if we ever did
go to court, then we could say yes.
We tried.
Then what happens now?
We're fighting with this kid and their family in court.
Yeah.
That really makes a student want to come to your school.
We are gonna force you by coercion of law to make you come.
That's a winning strategy.
If you can't sense the sarcasm in my voice, it's real.
So we need to have a shift in our schools instead of just doing the same
old thing we've always been doing.
We need to stop a few things and start a few things.
Number one, we need to stop focusing, focusing on
assignments, tests, and passing.
And we need to stop designing for ease of grading.
In fact, if I had my way, I would say you're not allowed to give assignments
or tests anymore because we need to figure out what these kids really know.
And the best way for us to figure that out is them demonstrating it.
I'll get more into that in a little bit.
We need to pay this.
One of the things, some of the things we need to start are we need to start
paying attention to actual learning.
We need to be asking, can this student really do what they need to be able to do?
And what does that look like in each different subject at
each different grade level?
What does that actually look like?
We need to be able to design learning that can't just be handed off to ai.
Now, there are some things that we definitely should hand off to AI and
technology to do, creating thousands of practice, uh, questions for something.
No teacher should ever be doing that again.
You should have an AI do that because the AI can make those so
much faster and so much better.
So if a kid needs a ton of practice, and not all kids do, but if a kid does need
a ton of practice on low level addition or multiplication or algebra problems or
calculus problems or whatever they are, we should definitely be turning to another
tool for that practice that should not be a teacher creating that, because if the
kid just needs practice and they know how to do it, but they just need practice to
do it again and again and again, then.
We should provide them an opportunity to do that.
And a computer, a piece of technology, can do a much better job of that
than a teacher can, and it's a much more efficient use of time.
But.
That's if the student actually needs the practice.
If a student comes into your class being able to do addition up to 10, for example.
I'm keeping it simple on purpose, but you can apply this to any
standard that you can easily measure.
'cause that's most of what we do in school.
If the kid can already do it, they should really be opted out of any
practice or tests that work with that.
For example, when I was a middle school teacher, I had a student
come in who was already reading some amazing Victorian literature.
She already understood it way more than my students currently did.
She understood how to write and how to communicate effectively.
Those were my real jobs as an English teacher, which I know is not
what most English teachers think, but those were my real jobs, was
make sure kids could communicate effectively this student could.
So I said, look.
You don't have to do any of the assignments that I give in class, not a
single one, because you're way ahead of all these other seventh grade students.
That was like blasphemy.
And I didn't tell anybody because I knew people would not be okay with that.
I said, you get, you passed the class already.
You have an A. So what we're gonna focus on is you doing actual
learning that's beneficial to you.
So you figure out what you want to learn this year, talk to me
about it and let's make a plan.
And that's what we did.
And this student who was amazing.
Did incredible work and turned in a binder at the end of the year that
she checked in with me on regularly and said, here's what I'm working on.
Well, how does this look?
What do you think?
And it was the best teaching experience that I've ever had in my life because
this young woman was a genius and I felt honored to be able to be in the
same orbit as her for that one year.
She was awesome.
Now.
She moved on and went on to eighth grade and then high school.
And I don't know what happened to her, but I do know that she knew how
to learn and she knew the content that I was trying to teach already.
And it was amazing.
And I, I loved that year and that inspired me for the rest of my career
to find opportunities to do that.
Now people are gonna have some pushback in an AI world.
When AI can do the work so easily, people ask, why should we do anything else?
And that's fair.
We gotta be honest about that.
If the AI can do it, why should we spend any time with it?
And the reality is we have to be honest about what AI can't do and what will
still deeply matter in human life.
What does it mean to be a human?
What does it mean to be a. A, a person who can interact with other people in
this life, we have to address that.
We have to have an idea of what that looks like.
So there are few practical things that the AI cannot yet
do, and maybe it will someday.
Uh, so it cannot, for example, fix the leaking sink under your counter, like the
ai, there's no robot right now that can come in and do that, or physically fix
anything else in your home or on your car.
Right now, that's where it's at.
And in a few years that may be very possible.
However, AI might be able to help invent something like self-healing plastics.
It might be used in conjunction with a scientist to figure
out how to create that.
It might be able to create flexible pipes that never leak with the
help of a human so that you will be able to have your sink going.
With one continuous thing that doesn't have any junctions or anything that
could cause it to leak, that may be the the possibility in the future.
Right now, physical hands-on skills are still human things
that may change in the future.
In fact, I'm sure it will to some extent.
The other thing that AI can't do is that the AI cannot.
Have human emotions, it can mimic them and it can look like it has them, but
it cannot, I, I don't remember where I heard this, and I wish that I could
because I, I've said it many times, but AI does not have empathy, and it looks
like it does have empathy, but the real difference between real human empathy
and AI empathy is that humans are limited in how much they can give of themselves.
AI is not, and AI can keep talking to you for 10 years straight and pretend like
it has empathy this whole entire time.
But humans have finite time and other resources, and so we cannot, as humans,
take care of and care for someone else 100% of the time for the next 10 years.
It's just not possible.
Even parents, part of their caring for their kids is obviously going to work
and getting a job and making money to be able to pay for all the things that their
kids need, but they cannot only do that.
We have to recharge, we have to take care of ourselves, and eventually our
bodies break down and we run out of time to do all the things that we want to.
Just this week, you and I have both not had the time to do something.
With someone that we love, that we wanted to do.
AI doesn't have those limitations.
It can, uh, praise us, work with us, support us as much as we ask it to,
and, and that's just the reality.
So as humans, we have limitations and those limitations are what make us humans.
And that's not a bad thing.
So the question becomes what should we be teaching then if, if these skills, uh, if,
if the AI can't do these skills, should we only be focusing on teaching things, uh,
that are not able to be found in a book?
The thing is, for a long time, Google and Wikipedia and other technology
tools have made knowledge retrieval.
So easy, so trivial and AI has just taken it to the next level.
So the things we need to be teaching are not just information, because
information exists out there and you can find it and access it very easily
through many different platforms.
What we should be teaching are human skills that AI cannot easily replicate.
We need to be teaching deep thinking and relational skills for each other.
The things that allow us to tackle these wicked problems, which
are ambiguous, messy, real world problems that we all run into.
Now that doesn't mean that we should abandon teaching information because
it's much more valuable when you can do mental math in your head,
when you can find a quote from somebody that you want to share.
When you can, uh, share the things that you know because you know them,
not because you looked them up.
There is value in that still.
And I'm not saying that we should go away from that.
I was talking with some friends the other day and they were.
Somebody brought up the idea of the power of memorizing things and how
valuable it is to memorize things.
Well, in a classical education, there are certain things that you,
uh, memorized or did recitations in Latin or Greek or whatever, and
those can be valuable, but it's not about the recitation of those things.
It's about number one, understanding what those things are that you're,
that you're trying to memorize.
But also how those things actually apply to you.
So recitations where everybody recites the same thing.
The reason why that's done is so that it is easy for the teacher to say, yes,
you got that thing and you recited it.
And that's, that's all well and good.
What's more valuable is having recitations of things that are truly meaningful
to you, that help you with how you understand the world and what that means.
That's the key.
And because of AI and technology, it's much easier to quote unquote grade that
and say, yes, this person memorized this thing, because we have all these ways of
tracking whether or not that that works.
So you can record that and the AI can say, yes, this matches the
thing that they were supposed to.
To memorize.
Whereas in a traditional classical classroom where everybody's memorizing
the same thing that was done to make it easy for the teacher to say, yes, all
these students can memorize this thing.
And some of those, some of those recitations do still
have value, and we can continue those, but not all of them do.
So let me share an example.
I was talking to one of the principals I coach the other day, and he mentioned that
one of his friends was doing, uh, some, some PR work for a large organization
and they were writing the newsletters, doing ads, doing doctor features,
working with the logos, getting press releases out, all that kind of stuff.
And the organization replaced him with a younger, more tech oriented person who's
using AI to do most of the content work.
Now, to be honest, I don't really have a problem with that.
I don't, I don't think that's a bad idea necessarily.
But the problem is, is when we identify and say that a person's job is this thing.
Which is writing content, putting out press releases,
newsletters, ads, doctor features.
If that's their job, then it's probably pretty easy to say yes.
That's what that, that's, that's easy to replace with somebody who costs
a lot less and knows how to use AI and can do those things much faster.
However, that's probably not what a PR person really does.
The PR person creates relationships, connects with people, and develops
these relationships in a way that the organization gets benefit
from those relationships and the network that that PR person has.
This is really valuable and something that, uh, we forget about when it
comes to hiring people for work.
The work is not just doing these discreet tasks, however, part of work is doing
some discreet tasks, and when the discreet tasks can be done better, more efficiently
and more effectively with ai, that's not a bad idea to use AI to do that.
In fact, that's a smart, fiscally responsible way to manage that.
So in this situation, the AI can generate press releases.
And draft newsletters and marketing content and create
ads and do all that stuff.
But what AI cannot do is build deep relationships with donors
and the people that work there.
It cannot have nuanced conversations that could bring in
major gifts to the organization.
I can't read a room and connect human to human with somebody within that place.
So the real value of that PR role was the relationships, the trust, and the high
stakes human connection to other people.
Those are the kinds of things that we need to be teaching kids to develop
and understand because ai, while it's great and can do a lot of cool things.
Still cannot do those things.
And to be honest, if an AI is doing those things, it feels more invasive than if a
human is doing it because it feels like it is mining you for data and seeking for
transactional outcomes from the things that you are talking with it about.
So in our schools, we have this formulaic learning.
Where students can now put a calculus problem into chat GT
and get an instant solution.
They can paste in a history assignment and say, write this like a 10th grader,
and make sure, oh yeah, make sure you include, uh, spelling mistakes.
So my teacher doesn't suspect that I used AI for this.
Everything that we've made formula in schools, essay, homework, the basic
problems that we give students, even in.
The real world, like the PR stuff that we were talking about, all of it is just
ripe and ready for AI to take it over.
But the human skills that we rarely teach, but that we desperately
need are things that are essential.
These are what I like to call organic skills.
These are connecting with people authentically, building and sustaining
relationships, being supportive in a crisis and helping someone through
a hard time, and collaborating on complex, ambiguous assignments.
And there are so many more of these organic skills.
But the problem is, is that these organic skills don't show up well on a test, are
difficult at best to explicitly teach.
And so we don't really know how to do it.
So we often just.
Ignore it, but they're also exactly what will matter the most when
AI can do almost everything else.
So the big question is how do we change?
That's tough.
And many educators feel like, Hey, we've been doing this
for 20, 30 years of my career.
What are we supposed to do now?
I am old.
I've been at this a long time, and.
Completely changing how I practice my teaching is gonna be a big change.
Also, the other question is, how do we change when we don't even
know where the destination is?
We don't even know really what we're preparing our kids for.
And so we're just gonna do the best we can, um, and just, just try to, try to
do the best we can with what we got.
And that's all there is to it.
And it can feel like.
You know what it was like to drive before GPS, for example.
You had a destination, you knew how to get there, and that was good.
Now, GPS came along and now people use it in the cities where they live and
they don't know how to get across town, and they look up everything in their
GPS, even in the place where they live.
That's where we're at right now.
We have this new tool and we really don't know how to, how to deal with it.
So if I were a principal right now, this is, this is what I would do first.
And, you know, maybe this isn't first, I should say let's, let's do this one first.
I was gonna say one thing, but I'm gonna change that.
Here's what we should do first, everything students create should
have an audience beyond the teacher.
If the only person who sees it is the teacher, then it's essentially a
pointless assignment, and they exist only to generate a grade and a check mark.
You can have many different real audiences, classmates, families,
community members, online readers, or viewers of whatever you're creating.
Students should be making things for real people, not just for a grade.
So that would be the first thing.
If you're going to give a student something to do or have them
do anything, then it's gotta be for more than just the teacher.
And it can be anybody besides the teacher, but it's gotta be
for more than just the teacher, because if the teacher is only it.
It is just there to get a grade and a check mark, and every kid
understands that and knows that.
The second thing that I would do if I were a principal today is I would
say no more traditional assignments, and I would demand that our student
information systems like PowerSchool and Canvas and all these things were
redesigned so that we have no more assignments and no more traditional tests.
Now I'm taking a hard stance on that, but there could be a
place for a test for something.
But the reality is these things are way too easy to fake with ai.
Also, they are often meaningless and everybody knows it.
The students know, and the teachers know.
Furthermore, grades are just made up.
They always have been, and they always will no matter what class you're in.
That grade is just made up so.
No more traditional assignments and no more traditional tests.
So that's a big ask, isn't it?
I mean, that's tough.
I know that I am, people get upset when I say things like that, but the reality
is we need to be assessing students in a way that is real, that one proves
that they actually know what, what we think they should know, and two, gives
them opportunities to do that as well.
It, it's really fascinating how several of my kids', teachers in middle school
and high school have said things like, well, we need to do handwriting.
Like we're gonna have our students do handwriting.
Now, the thing that is frustrating about this is, uh, is their reasoning behind it.
What they're not saying is kids can do everything in chat, GBT, so we're doing.
We're doing handwriting because, uh, that way they won't use hat.
GPTI guess some people are saying that, and that's a pretty dumb reason because
what you're doing is you're forcing kids to do something that is a longer and more
difficult process than typing things out.
We have the technology, it works better.
We should use it as an English teacher.
I know what it's like to read 200 essays over the weekend that are handwritten.
You wanna know something that is probably the fifth circle of hell.
Reading students' poorly handwritten essays because it's way more difficult
than reading typewritten text.
It's way more difficult for the teacher, number one, and it's
rejecting the technology that exists.
That should make it easier for us to read.
Now I did say before that, uh, should we even be doing things.
Just to make it easier for teachers, and I don't think we should, but
at the same time, teachers are not making their jobs easier by having
handwriting as their, their re re uh, their response to AI usage.
That's not the right approach either.
So when kids can.
The second thing I was gonna say, I lost my train of thought for a sec. The
second reason teachers are saying that kids should use handwriting is they
say, well, uh, it's been proven that, uh, it's better for the brain if kids
write things long form with their hand.
And you know what?
I totally believe that.
But that is a really stupid response when the last five years.
Even longer, but especially the last five years, we have forced
everything into this typewritten thing.
If you really believed that you would've been doing that for
the last five years and longer.
So that is just ridiculous.
What they're really saying with that is, I don't wanna say that it's
because of Chap GBT, so I'm going to say the brain science tells us this.
And while that may be true, and personally I do believe there is great
value in writing things down, uh.
That is a lame excuse when that is not how you've been
acting for the last five years.
These two responses, uh, just prove that the work itself is meaningless
and it's not worth doing, and so the kids should look for any shortcut.
That's what the kids hear.
This is meaningless, and we should try to find the fastest way to get it done.
If the assignment is pointless, then changing the medium, the pen and paper
instead of typing doesn't fit the problem.
It just makes the pointless task even more tedious.
Now again, I'm not saying that writing long hand with a
pen and paper is a bad idea.
I actually think that it's a very good idea and I love my, uh, fountain pens
that I use every single day, even though I really love using technology also.
So let's, let's make sure that that's clear.
Now with all this ranting that I'm doing, there are some things that you might
think I'm saying, but I'm actually not.
I'm not saying we don't need reading or writing anymore.
I think we actually do more so than ever.
I'm not saying we don't need critical thinking, we just need
kids to regurgitate things.
I'm not saying that.
I think we actually do need that.
I am saying we still need to learn to read, write, think, and communicate.
That is important, but we also have to add purpose to that, and there are
many different purposes that are valid.
For example, reading because it's enjoyable and meaningful
to me is a perfectly valid goal.
I can read whatever I want and that's great.
Writing because it reaches a real audience and matters to
someone is powerful as well.
Writing is essential.
Writing is how we communicate effectively.
The, the critical thinking that we must have for our students allows them to
further understand when an AI is being truthful and when it's hallucinating.
That's very difficult to see right now and that's understandable.
I know that a lot of, uh, educators will object to the things that I'm
saying and I'm, I'm okay with that.
Um, one of the main things is if Jethro, if you say that we can't
give real assignments, then one, I'm gonna lose the whole classroom and.
If you say that as a principal, your teachers are probably gonna metaphorically
flip you off like some of you are.
Were doing, and I bet a lot of people just stopped listening when I said
that and they're like, this guy doesn't know what he's talking about.
He's full of baloney.
I'm turning this off and I'm gonna go complain about it on social media.
That may be the case, and I get it.
I get where you're at.
I've been saying this for a long time though, and I've been pushing
for school to look like this.
For a very long time, ever since I had that student in my class, I've been
pushing for this kind of an education, an education that is real and means a
lot and, and gives kids the skills that they really need in life, regardless of
what their life or the future looks like.
And I understand the resistance, but.
Well, I understand the resistance and it is really hard to change.
I get that.
Here's the other thing.
We talk about rigor.
We just love to talk about rigor and PLCs and other meetings, and
we spend all this time saying, well, what does rigor really mean?
Well, the reality is relevance is more important than rigor because
relevance helps us see that what we're doing actually has meaning.
That in and of itself forces us to step up our quality.
So the key questions we need to be asking is, is there a real
reason or purpose for this work?
Why am I doing this work in this class?
Kids need to know the answer to that question.
If it is because I need to get an A, that's a pretty terrible reason.
Kids and everybody can do a lot of really hard things when they're meaningful.
People can go to great lengths when they have a real relevant meaning behind it.
That is a powerful thing.
The other idea I mentioned of having an audience beyond the teacher is
that it gives a simple, concrete way to start building relevance.
And so if instead of having an assignment of, you know, for whatever class it
is, write an essay about this thing.
Instead, explain this to your mom or dad, like just start there.
Explain this concept to your parents.
Explain this concept to a, to a younger sibling or an older
sibling, or something like that.
A lot of teachers will ask, what?
What would I do with students all day if I stopped giving assignments?
What would their res, what would they even do?
Well, we live in a world where there is infinite information and learning
opportunities, and the question of what will I do all day comes
from this mindset of filling time.
It does not come from a mindset of unleashing learning.
And so if you had, if you could get rid of all the assignments for whatever subject
you may teach or you taught, if you could just get rid of the assignments and say,
how could I really maximize kids learning information and having a real audience to
show things to, what would that look like?
What would that unlock for you?
What would you be able to do?
I started this my first year teaching, and I got in trouble for this because I
had students blogging on the internet, and these were inner city kids at a
school that should have been Title one, but we didn't do Title one for
the middle schools, only for the elementary schools, but all of the
elementary schools that were Title One fed into our middle schools.
So we really should have been a Title one school.
We started blogging and these kids that everybody said they don't know how to
write, they're not going to write, they won't ever do poetry because they hate it.
These kids were writing regularly.
I only had six computers in my classroom and I had to, uh, fight the kids to.
B to like give everybody time to do it.
And kids were just hammering to get onto these things to write their
blog with in the early two thousands with hardly anybody reading it.
But knowing that it was out there and they could access it from a different computer
somewhere else was a huge thing for them.
And they thought that was incredible and they loved that what we were
doing was actually being out there for someone else to see.
And that my job in grading it was.
Was asking them questions about what they were learning through their
writing and how they understood things.
It was incredibly powerful.
I didn't have to worry about filling my day.
In fact, I had to worry about having too much stuff for the kids to do
because I didn't have enough time for them all to be on the computers.
That was what the real challenge was.
And again, don't, don't get it twisted here.
Don't think about the wrong thing.
It wasn't about the computers and it wasn't about the technology.
It was about the audience.
The relevance that somebody else was reading their writing
and that mattered to them.
Now, did it matter to every student?
No, not every student wanted their stuff out there in front of everybody.
Guess what was really easy?
Okay.
Just turn into me and I'll be the only person that you're.
Uh, that is the audience.
That's totally fine too.
But the thing is, is when I gave them an opportunity, the kids were
clamoring because kids love when they have agency, they can do incredible
things when they are given the chance to pursue meaningful work.
And even if they start with something like playing games like Minecraft,
they eventually want more and they want more beyond what they do.
So our deeper goal for education is we need to raise good people
who can think critically.
We need to raise individuals who can hold two opposing ideas in their heads at once.
And we need to raise young people who can resist the algorithmic rabbit
holes and polarize thinking that our current society is so big on right now.
We need people who don't default to tribalism.
We need people who can disagree without dehumanizing each other,
and we need people who won't kill each other figuratively or literally
over the differences that they have.
We need to raise human beings to be good adults.
The goal should not be to get this kid from first grade to second grade, or
from 10th grade to 11th grade or from high school into college or career.
The goal should be.
To help this child become the most flourishing human being
that they possibly can be.
And sometimes that means we're gonna spend a lot of time on reading in
the early grades and make sure that they have the skill of reading.
Sometimes that means we're gonna go down these rabbit holes and kids are gonna
change their mind on the things they're interested in a hundred times, and we're
gonna be annoyed as the adults because they go down a path and then they stop.
Right before they get to something good and that's okay.
That's part of being a human.
We can let that happen because if we're not focusing on assignments
and test scores, we can focus on them developing into the kind
of human beings that flourish.
That's what we want.
Inevitably, people ask this question, well, what about state testing?
What about the state assessments that we've built?
Everything around?
Well, you know what?
That was a bad idea.
No matter when we did that, that was a bad idea because a test, a state
test especially, is a legislatively convenient way for somebody else to say
whether or not we're doing a good job.
And you know, people don't like this view either, but it doesn't really
matter if we do this other way of learning that I've been talking about.
Those test scores come.
The thing that's amazing is that when kids have relevance and they
have a real audience, the things they learn grow exponentially.
It's a really bad idea to build an entire system around one big test.
That was a dumb decision, but we did it.
Okay, what are we gonna do?
When I ran this type of project-based learning at my
school, students were working.
Students who were working on real projects learned far more than they
would have from traditional lessons.
You can go hear about it on my podcast, Transformative Principal.
Go to Transformative Principal dot org, click on episodes and
search and search for synergy.
And you can learn all about how we set that up.
This is what it looked like.
One group of students, they met an hour and a half, uh at a time, twice a week.
And over the month or so that we watched these kids and what they were doing,
they passed off over 45 standards that if we were to create a lesson plan
for each one of these standards, for them to pass, it would've taken way
more time than what they actually had.
The standards were not just their seventh grade standards.
They went all the way up to 12th grade and they covered multiple
content areas and not just one.
We have interdisciplinary, uh, learning happening with standards
from seventh to 12th grade and get this, they learned things that we
didn't have standards for, but it was obvious that the learning occurred.
Let me give an example of what that looked like.
These kids had had said, we're gonna bring on some other kids into our group.
They, they brought the other kids in for a couple weeks and they said,
Mr. Jones, this is not working.
How do we fire these kids that we brought in without them thinking
that we don't value and appreciate them, but we recognize that this
just is, this just isn't gonna work.
Do we have a standard for compassionate firing in K 12 education?
No, we don't.
Is that a valuable skill to learn?
Yes, it sure is.
It's a very valuable skill to learn.
How do you treat people with compassion even when they are completely failing
at what you expect them to do?
This kind of learning is incredibly valuable.
It is exactly what we should be striving for, and it doesn't come
from worksheets or test prep.
It doesn't come from assignments.
Tests.
It comes from real, relevant, valuable work.
But here's the other thing.
When I talk to people about this, they complain and say, well, we're
held accountable for test scores.
The reality is, is that you're not.
What happens when a school fails on state tests?
Well, in my experience, we got more money when we failed, so that's the opposite.
Of getting punished, but usually nothing happens.
Teachers and principals rarely lose their jobs over scores.
However it does happen and there is, uh, there is a mechanism for that
to happen that if you do so poorly, that the state takes over your
school and they fire half the staff.
Uh, and by fire I mean they do reduction in staffing, which means
that you don't actually lose your job, you just go to a different school.
So there really is not a lot of accountability for test scores.
And maybe, maybe someone may get moved out of a school, but that is rarely the case.
And when that does happen, you're getting moved out of a school not fired from your
job and losing your teaching license.
That's, that's not what happens.
And if somebody has evidence of that ever happening, please share it with
me because I've never heard of that.
You know who does have accountability when their kids don't learn Parents,
they have the real accountability of having that child who hasn't learned
appropriately for their whole life with them for the rest of their lives.
If you have a kid in your class who fails, they most likely go on to the
next grade or a different teacher, and you most likely never see them again.
That is the real thing.
You know, who else fails our communities when we have kids who
don't know, who turn into adults that don't know how to do things
and become a drain on the community?
That is who's accountable?
Schools are not actually held accountable.
We are held accountability in things that don't really matter that much,
like rankings and awards and labels.
But another way that we are held accountable is in the public perception.
But if that public perception is purely based on test scores, it's
really actually not that good.
That's not actually that beneficial.
We think that it is, but it really isn't.
Parents don't want kids who are good at taking tests.
They want kids who are living happy and fulfilled lives.
We've created a system that rewards the things that we decide to measure.
That's what we always do.
We decide to measure test scores, and so we create a system that rewards
that, and then we keep doing those same things because that's what's measured.
Let's think about a different measure.
Let's suppose that we just said, all right, here's, here's how
we're gonna measure our success.
If the key metric was, let's say, US News and World Report said, we're gonna
change our algorithm and how we rank schools, and we're gonna say that the
percentage of students whose writing is published somewhere in a book, a
blog, local paper, magazine, whatever.
We're gonna measure the number, uh, the percentage of students whose,
whose writing is published somewhere.
What do you think schools are gonna do the very next year they're going to start
talking about and publishing and sharing?
How many of their students published a book, a blog, a
local paper, an online magazine?
Whatever that was.
Schools would shift so fast to helping students publish.
Teachers would redesign all their assignments to produce publishable work.
If that were the thing that got us the kudos, that's what we would do if
a state had the courage to say, we're done with test scores and instead.
We're going to measure good acts by students.
Hey, there's another side thing that would be a terrible thing to build your system
around because then kids are just doing good acts because they get noticed for it.
But let's say that happened.
What would schools start doing?
They would start publicizing how many good acts their students are
doing and they'd start recording it.
The thing is, is that it's really quite simple to change the system.
Doesn't mean it's easy.
It is quite simple.
What you focus on and what you measure is the thing that gets done.
We could start changing that.
What we measure ourselves right away.
What if we created a national ranking of schools based on this percentage of
students who have published something and we just started ranking that.
What if, uh.
Even if we started with just five schools and we said, this
school is the number one place.
If you want to go, if you want to have your student publish, be
a published author in some way.
What if we change that?
However, to, uh, this, this school produces the, uh, highest
number of YouTube followers.
This school produces the highest number of Twitch followers.
People would instantly shift and they would change instruction to get that
work, whatever it is out into the world.
And and we could put guardrails on it and say, it's not just any publishing.
It has to be this certain level.
And we define that.
If we start a list, people would start changing and saying, this is the kind
of thing that we want to be known for.
Now, I've gone on a bit of a tear about all these things, and
I'm already at almost an hour.
Obviously I could talk about this for a long time if you're still here.
Bless you.
Thank you.
We should chat because if you're still listening to this, then we're
obviously of the same, same, uh, mind on some of these things, and I
don't have all the perfect answers.
Don't get me wrong.
Here's the big picture.
Our current system was built for pre AI world.
It rewards test scores, compliance and convenience.
AI has exposed how fragile and shallow a lot of our system is.
How easy it is to cheat when all of our tasks are meaningless.
Right now we have a very real opportunity to redesign schooling around
real learning, real relationships, real purpose and real audiences.
That doesn't have to be the whole world.
That can be a very small group.
It can be the person's family.
That's, it's not the point that we're trying to make, you know,
content creators and Instagram famous and YouTube celebrities.
That's not what I'm talking about.
What I'm talking about making it real so that it actually matters.
Working with an actual local business to help them redesign their marketing, those
are the kinds of things that are valuable.
The other part of our opportunity is to build a generation of students
who can, can think deeply and can connect meaningfully and can
navigate an i an AI saturated world as fully flourishing human beings.
That's what our opportunity is to create right now.
And if you are.
If you're like, yeah, that's what I want to do, then we should connect.
Let's talk about this more because I'm not in a school anymore, so I have
time to think about and support people who are trying to do these things.
When you're in the middle of it, it can be difficult.
So reach out.
Let's connect Jethro at hey.com, 8 0 1 7 Jethro.
Gimme a call.
Would love to chat with you more, but let's get started and let's start making
some of these things come to pass.
Thanks so much for listening.