Ready, Set …

I’ve been enjoying watching a wide range of interested and pioneering colleagues playing in the new and exciting space of artificial intelligences over the past few years. Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum, has argued in an article last month that:

“AI is rapidly reshaping the global education landscape. If deployed safely and strategically, AI can help adapt learning to the needs of each student, enabling an innovative, scalable personalized learning experience that is vital for both student engagement and the effectiveness of educators.” 

(Revolutionizing Classrooms: How AI Is Reshaping Global Education, 28 April, 2024)

As we are preparing this article for publication, I note that Game Changer guest Pip Cleaves is sharing clever ways to use AI to support effective administration. And it’s terrific to see organisations like Toddle Australia prompting conversations with educators about how to step into a space with and within AI.

I haven’t yet made comment about the potential impact of AI on education in this respect because I’ve been waiting to develop an understanding that’s less about the speculation and emotion associated with a new shiny toy and more about becoming informed by evidence of what we are learning that might have practical implications for gaining better outcomes for more learners in our schools.

But I think I’m ready to say something now.

So, what am I learning about AI?

AI is increasingly becoming omnipresent in driving both the productivity and personalisation of a virtual experience that is both with and within our world. There’s virtually no software or application that you and I use that isn’t already heavily influenced by it.

Artificial intelligence is just at the start of its journey with us.

It is evolving and moving forward quickly.

Whatever it is now won’t be what it remains.

As a consequence in education, we have a moral imperative to hold fast to the enduring meaningfulness of the values, relationships and character that define humanity at its best. Yet we also have a concurrent moral imperative to ensure that what and how we teach and the way we shape the environment of our schools to be a home for learning reflects the characteristics of the world that our students will inhabit.

Let’s Go!

AI in its current form certainly has a powerful capacity to replace human processing of given content and to assemble conventional analyses of received understandings about applications of given concepts in categorisable contexts. It may aid or even the process of creativity but in its current form it is inherently uncreative and not at all innovative. From what has been revealed to date, AI is entirely derivative and imitative.

Where AI goes from here will be a seminal case study in game changing technologies. Its long-term impact is still to be determined but, as my colleague and collaborator in a School for tomorrow. and the Game Changers podcast, Adriano Di Prato argues:

At the end of the day, AI won’t replace people’s jobs. But it’ll replace people who don’t know how to harness the power of AI.

What are the responses to artificial intelligences in our schools? How are we imagining a future for education both with and within AI?

Initial public responses of educators have tended to oscillate between a sometimes unthinking acceptance and a willingness to explore possibility in AI versus a fearful caution that sometimes verges on a mix of neo-Ludditism within an authoritarian frame informed by the immediate perceived potential for academic misconduct. There is an ethical framework that supports each of these extremes that speaks to genuine perspectives on how best to respond to change in how our world (and education more specifically) functions and how AI influences this. Thus, there is a “should” and “should not” as well as an “is” and an “is not” that informs our preferred approaches.

"We have a moral imperative to hold fast to the enduring meaningfulness of the values, relationships and character that define humanity at its best. Yet we also have a concurrent moral imperative to ensure that what and how we teach and the way we shape the environment of our schools to be a home for learning reflects the characteristics of the world that our students will inhabit."

Yet, how we think about AI reflects a longer-standing set of understandings about the proper role of information and communication technologies in education. Both responses are representative of the polar extremes of our profession’s responses to ICT over the last three decades. Some either love it to bits without thinking adequately about how to make it work well en masses. Others reject it out of hand, fighting tooth and nail to prevent it taking hold. Most sit in the middle, picking and choosing pieces of technologies and platforms that suit their own personal and professional productivity while wait it out for the solution to be developed by a handful who to wrestle with how to create this way forward in a balanced and constructive fashion, given the imperfect reality of the ecosystem, and the gap between the potential and actual capacity to do good and right with or without the direct help of ICT.

A case in point comes from the learning management systems that CIRCLE Education used to own and operate in New Zealand. Of the thousands of teachers in hundreds and hundreds of schools who used our platforms, we found 85% remained largely passive, using the technology to the minimum level required of them by their managers. Of the remaining 15%, about 15% (that’s about 2% of the total) loved to explore and test the full potentiality of the platforms, while the remainder adopted those aspects of it that seemed to suit their most immediate next needs for support.

The Pain of Change

In a similar vein, our industry has been typically very slow to respond and reluctant to commit to AI. When at last it must happen, a likely way forward for education with and within AI across the schooling sectors will be slow and painful. 

Dr Phillip Moulds OAM, Headmaster of Rockhampton Grammar School (and a client of a School for tomorrow.) believes that there are at least three areas for schools to consider the use of AI in the first instance: 

the use of AI to enhance teaching and learning practices (e.g., individualisation of support); the use of AI to assist with teacher administration duties; and (perhaps the most significant) preparing students for a world where working with AI will be ubiquitous.

Yet, sadly, given our past record in responding to emerging technologies and holding on to old and out-dated technologies for too long, I think that there is more likely to be a significant lag between us and the rest of the world when it comes to even these three potential initial applications of AI in and within education. The gap between the game of life and the game of school will grow. We will not lead comprehensively through prediction and experimentation in a quest to do what we do by serving the changing needs of our world better; we will trail far behind, yearning for a time long gone when AI didn’t exist (because, after, all we will maintain that AI isn’t really what a true education is about). When we do adopt elements of it, we are likely to embed those that confirm our existing paradigm and mindsets while looking askance at those that require us to address fundamental purpose and practice.

"What we do to make education systems appropriately focused on emerging patterns in large language models and the systems that flow from them can’t favour one group of students over another."

The adoption of AI by external assessment and examination regimes will most likely exemplify, encourage and even endorse this recalcitrant approach. These systems  will ignore it for as long as possible; after all, why fix what apparently ain’t broke? We’ve been doing recall-heavy timed written exams since Confucius was a boy, so why stop now even though pretty much everyone uses a keyboard or equivalent now to do almost all of their writing.

Accrediting bodies will eventually be funded sufficiently to establish tentative pilots and gradual, chancelessly safe adoption of these technologies. At best, then, for a long while, regimes will compel parallel systems of knowledge production and replication with and without AI until such time as we realise that no one wants to go back and forth any more. In schools, we’re much better with a fixed technology (like handwriting) than an emerging technology (like anything digital) that compels us to shed, adapt and improvise on an ongoing basis. Mastery to an adequate standard of a fixed canon of content and skills (and the construction of a self-justifying and immovable rationale for this) is what mass public education does best, after all.

Equity and Excellence With AI?

This should not be the case. It’s our responsibility to ensure that school is a place that rehearses students for the world in which they will live so that they might thrive. Game Changers guest Eleni Kyritsis points the way forward:

Technology's not going to go away, as much as we want to think that it is. The more we embrace it and incorporate it in our education system, the more it will support our students. They're using it no matter what. They're going to have it at home. They're going to have it when they're out in the big world. So it's about us showing them how to use it in the right way and also showing them the potential of what can come from technology … It’s all around us in everything we do, every day … So, we have to embrace that and go with it. To lock it out of schools is not doing justice for any students, really.

Game Changers Insight | Eleni Kyritsis

The upside for AI early adopter schools will most likely be seen in optimised and accelerated pathways and credentials for students re: higher and technical education, entrepreneurial enterprises and employment. Adaptive engagement with AI may well improve student learning experience and support greater efficiencies in staff workload with the use of tools to take on erstwhile time-consuming administrative tasks.

"AI points learning towards earlier and more frequent pedagogical processes that promote mastery of higher order thinking to enable interpretation, evaluation and augmentation of AI generated solutions. It’s about oversight – the capacity to exercise good governance of that which is generated from within the status quo."

Yet, systemically, we mustn’t allow this attainment of organisational proficiency to be solely the province of those schools that are better resourced by circumstance or history or leadership or luck. The pursuit of excellence in practice by those who are provisioned to stay ahead of the curve and are so inclined to do so should not be curtailed or held back. 

At the same time, we need to ensure that equity in process allows all children access to excellent outcomes. This is necessary both in AI-enhanced educational structures and technologies, as well as the construction of an education whose broader milieu equips students to take their place in a world whose approaches to the curation of information and communication are all powered by AI to a greater or lesser extent.

In other words, what we do to make education systems appropriately focused on emerging patterns in large language models and the systems that flow from them can’t favour one group of students over another. Dr Moulds suspects that:

what will happen is that the rich will get richer, and those that are struggling to cope now will get further and further behind.  This is not (as would be argued by some) due to a lack or physical technological resources, per se. It is to do with people and their capacity to imagine and contextualise in different environments to gain traction.

This applies as much to the purpose and practice of teaching and learning as it does to the presence of particular technologies in situ in schools. AI points learning towards earlier and more frequent pedagogical processes that promote mastery of higher order thinking to enable interpretation, evaluation and augmentation of AI generated solutions. It’s about oversight – the capacity to exercise good governance of that which is generated from within the status quo.

 In Series 1 of the Game Changers podcast, broadcaster, innovator and investor in education, Madeleine Grummet told us that:

the purpose of schooling … is to produce the next generation of innovations and solutions that will drive the engines of our future economy and future society … When we look at some of the huge issues we are facing in society … people are stepping into a completely different world and context. And so there’s an urgency about the world and the sorts of problems that they’re inheriting. And I think the role of education is to ensure that those young people, their talents and energies are harnessed as best as possible so they can step in and become the caretakers of Australia and the world in the future.

Game Changers Insight | Madeleine Grummet 

It’s this type of thinking that can help us take us further away from an immersion in the “what?” towards a contemplation of the “how?”, the “why?” and the “to what end?”

It facilitates compression of content acquisition and, I think, calls into question much of the early years primary and junior secondary years curriculum. What should and will replace this paradigm and its reliance on hand writing and teacher agency is still unclear but most likely points towards increased and earlier exercise of student voice and agency. Knowing it retains value, but becomes less critical for social utility than knowing what to do about it.

The impact of this on initial teacher training, workplace and role induction, and continuing professional learning and development in an aging profession, will be demanding. The resource implications for development of proprietary AI technology that is not reliant on third party providers whose governing ideological perspectives are unclear is concerning. The challenge for ethicists and policy makers to create an appropriate social contract under which AI might reasonably and lawfully and morally contribute to the education of children is also fraught.  

We are fortunate to have innovators operating in each of these three domains already. We have curious and willing teachers who are beginning to develop the expertise that might be passed on at scale to their weary and time-poor colleagues. We have schools, universities, companies and other institutions who are willing to take first steps into the unknown that may or may not give a clear return on investment. We have educational and community leaders in communities of practice and think tanks who are beginning to develop the legal and ethical frameworks through which positive engagement with ai might proceed without doing harm to those involved. In particular, the development and publication of the Australian Framework for Generative AI in Schools by the National AI in Schools Taskforce in 2023 is a very commendable starting point in this respect. 

 Intentionally Purposeful Adaptation to AI

But the journey can’t stop with its first steps. The paradigm of education with and within AI which we are entering demands ongoing initiatives to develop new ways of thinking about the social purpose and technical practice of educators and learners in an AI influenced world. 

Perhaps a comparative study might be gained from the world of music. Consider the influence of the rise of hip hop music, electronic music, and compositional software of the 1970s and 1980s onwards. 

The invention and promulgation of sampling as a dominant compositional technique in particular has meant a definitional shift from compose as creator to composer as producer, editor, and repackager, from composition as something original to composition as collage or even pastiche - repurposing and claiming a collection of existing information as your own so long as you play by the rules of fair use, attribution and compensation. Genius in music now is not necessarily about what you make on your own but what you make your own. The parallels with AI are patent.

These changes to notions of the identity of the composer, the mode of composition and the democratisation of expertise mean that a craft practised by a select few at a very high level is now readily practised by millions and millions in their bedrooms for greater or lesser profit. 

But at least that has always been the way in the arts. Some things don’t change. 

Add to this the impact of the streaming of music on distribution, and consequent rapid and irreversible changes to our understanding of and expectations for general accessibility of music at lower cost and significantly reduced remuneration for artists in the music industry and we can see that in my lifetime alone the assembly and promulgation of music has changed forever. 

AI looks to be doing something very similar with the assembly and promulgation of knowledge on a much wider scale.

Our schools and teachers, on the whole, know they can’t ignore this. But they need help in charting a way forward and to learn how to do this together. As Marisa Dann, Head of Education Strategy, Policy and Innovation at Brisbane Catholic Education and a client of a School for tomorrow. Believes that: 

ultimately, it will be our collective agency, discernment and efficacy that transforms learning and schooling.

As part of this, there will be a need for greater technical proficiency in the specific competencies related to the generation and maintenance of AI technologies of both our teachers and our graduates. But we should be cautious not to overstate the case for this, especially what we ask our students to spend their time doing. The advent of personal computing in the 1980s led to calls for every student to become a programmer. The rise of the internet two decades later saw a desire to increase student take-up in coding within the curriculum and co-curriculum.  Over time, there has been significantly increased education and employment in the ICT industry, but a career as an ICT professional is clearly not for every student.

"The paradigm of education with and within AI which we are entering demands ongoing initiatives to develop new ways of thinking about the social purpose and technical practice of educators and learners in an AI influenced world."

What is pertinent for every student – and every one of us who teach, lead and support them – is the capacity to thrive in a world dominated by the application of AI to all our technologies. They and we need to be able to maintain a base of wellness despite the increasing evidence that many of our new technologies are specifically designed to exploit our fears and worst instincts, and have consequent deleterious impacts on our physical and mental health. They and we need to be fluent in the evaluative judgment of how to make wise and worthwhile choices about our relationships, our communities, our sense of belonging and the most honourable applications of our vocation in this new and rapidly moving context.

We know that school communities comprise networks of connected relationships between students, teachers, parents and families. As we grapple with AI and how best to employ it, we need to ensure it is the servant of these relationships, not a substitute for them. Virtual relationships between avatars who practise arbitrary and peremptory methods of the formation, fostering and cessation of authentic connections between people already do enough damage. 

Too much is at stake to allow AI to replace our humanity, flawed and broken as it is. We can’t desire or expect a standard of perfection in a technology that does not replicate or at least acknowledge our own nature. Schools are supposed to teach us to be humane, to treat each other with a set of values that promote curiosity, compassion, courage and conviction.

We need, therefore, to develop an educational answer to the questions of the “what?”, the “how?”, the “why?” and the “to what end?” of AI as part of this continuing and true story of schooling for our yesterday, today and tomorrow.

That’s no easy task.

Yet, helping young people to become better versions of themselves by preparing them to make contributions to the lives of others that are both selfless and useful is what great teachers and great schools have always done. It’s never been a purely technical exercise of knowledge transfer for the sake of academic success in a competitive system of examinations designed to give preference for social mobility to some over others. 

 The Character of AI With and Within Education

We’ve always engaged our young people in character apprenticeships and ongoing leadership processes of development that help them to answer the powerful questions of human development: who am I? Where do I fit in? How can I best serve others? Whose am I?

The rise of AI prompts questions such as these even more urgently. If AI already knows the correct answer, then what point is there in me learning how to discern what is good and right? If AI can do so much without me, then what is my true value? How might I make a mark and show my measure when it’s all been worked out in advance? Or has it? 

Surely, school must be a place that helps our young people to know themselves, earn their place, go on that journey from me to you to us, and perhaps even find their calling. In doing so, they need a toolkit that includes AI that genuinely helps them to negotiate the complex realities of their AI-influenced world. Our schools need to anticipate this need and create a range of linear and non-linear approaches that they can teach students to make sense of something that has the potential to pretty much change how we do almost everything.

"What is pertinent for every student – and every one of us who teach, lead and support them – is the capacity to thrive in a world dominated by the application of AI to all our technologies. They and we need to be able to maintain a base of wellness despite the increasing evidence that many of our new technologies are specifically designed to exploit our fears and worst instincts, and have consequent deleterious impacts on our physical and mental health. They and we need to be fluent in the evaluative judgment of how to make wise and worthwhile choices about our relationships, our communities, our sense of belonging and the most honourable applications of our vocation in this new and rapidly moving context."

There is a clear incentive for many schools prompted by the desire for a safe and certain answer to defer their own action on an education with and within AI until an industry-wide solution becomes clear. 

On the other hand, a conscious decision to delay or perhaps an institutional inclination towards inactivity runs the risk of the loss of competitive advantage. The market will expect schools to adapt quickly to support the emerging needs of students and families to compete in local, regional and global economies whose technologies commercial practices and infrastructure will demand knowledge, skills, dispositions and habits of competencies in an AI-fuelled context. Dr Moulds believes that:

well-intentioned systems that mitigate against innovation and change may well cause unintended harm to the futures of students who are already facing volatile and uncertain times both globally and locally. 

It is highly unlikely that the march of AI globally will be reversed or slowed down significantly given the tangible commercial benefits it offers to those who embrace it both prudently and with ambition. 

If this is the case, it is hard to see why leading schools wouldn’t adapt their learning systems to become genuinely AI ready and conversant. And they will want to go beyond this. As Adriano argues:

a high level of comfort in commanding technologies such as AI and robotics will be key. People will want to build their technological literacy, data-driven decision making, AI-enhanced creativity, and ease with human-machine collaboration. Workers will also need to be comfortable moving through the metaverse and other virtual reality settings.

They will do this so long as this specific technological enrichment of learning is concurrently human centred, people and place and planet conscious, and intentionally purposeful in what it does. It needs to support their graduates and those who teach, lead and support them to develop the character, competencies and wellness to thrive with and within AI.

It’s also hard to see how they will do this successfully without parallel strengths in teaching and learning, resourcing, policy and structure. They will need to underpin this with a commitment to the culture of research and development required to bridge the gap between vision and reality in realistic but steady increments. These stages will need to carefully describe the intersection between the values and value proposition of their proposed changes and the strategy by which they will take this big step forward and up. What they do with and within AI will need to honour the new social contract of education: today’s learning for tomorrow’s world.

But, then, isn’t this co-location of AI with and within the “what?”, the “how?”, the “why?” and the “to what end?” of a future-fit community of inquiry and practice as good a definition of the character of “a school for tomorrow” as any?

Conclusions

So, what have I learned to date about building an education with and within AI? 

Let me suggest a way forward using the six evidence-based global standards that CIRCLE Education has used to frame the findings of its research since 2018. If artificial intelligences are to continue to shape how all of us assemble, process and share information in a manner that fundamentally changes the game of communication throughout our society, then:

Culture: We need to curate an ethos that is increasingly open to testing both the emerging potential of AI and the enduring relevance of what we currently do in schools to support the preparation of our students to thrive in their world.

Leadership: We need educators, innovators, policy-makers and community leaders to help us tell the story of how we move forward from the status quo with confidence into a context where AI fundamentally changes the game of what we do in schools.

Learning: We need to continue to think carefully about the purpose and practice of the approaches to teaching and learning, curriculum, assessment and reporting we co-construct for and with our students in the context of AI technologies that are changing the purpose and practice of what it means to learn, live, lead and work with success and meaning.

Performance: We need to develop, measure and evaluate individual and collective self-efficacy and adaptive expertise in what ordinary, good and great teaching and learning looks like when it embraces AI technologies to generate better outcomes for more learners.

Strategy: We need to be deliberate and intentional about moving steadily forward and making progress in how we shift the essential content of learning in and out of our classrooms to reflect what our students need to thrive with and within AI without clinging too tightly to any of the particular stages of the emerging technologies beyond their lifespan.

Systems and Operations: We need to solve the challenge of building adaptive systems of research, development and implementation to ascertain the best possible solutions for professional development, resourcing and ethical governance of education with and within AI.

Not everything in the values and value proposition of a future-fit education will change as a result of the incursion of artificial intelligences. Our profession is too wary of rapid change, especially when it’s delivered through emerging technologies. If engaged and motivated correctly, our colleagues can and should bring about meaningful incremental innovation that will allow for a chain of continuity from yesterday to today to tomorrow.

Thus, the emergence of AI is not all about stolid preservation of the status quo in the face of a rapidly changing world, nor is it about unthinking experimentation that runs the risk of losing that which matters most. Binary thinking is not helpful. We need a nuanced approach that helps us make incremental gains in ensuring that what we do in schools with and within AI (and with everything) is fit for purpose for a school for tomorrow.