Connections

In my last post, Does Education Really Need an Upgrade?, I confessed that I had been down a rabbit hole. I wasn't sure it made sense, so I spent a chunk of time crafting a single paragraph to apologise to readers if the post seemed an incoherent record of my "out loud thinking" with ChatGPT-4o.

Why did I write the post in the first place? My gut told me the transcript of my "thinking", aided by AI, was important and I should document it, but I wasn't sure why. Clearly, it was a hot mess of wondering, wandering, and pulling on different threads between where I've been, where I am now.

The next morning, I woke up with a bit more clarity. It's about making connections to help me figure out my next steps forward. Māori have a beautiful proverb, "Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua", which translates, "I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on the past".

AI is unlike any other digital technology humans have encountered. Here’s what makes this technology different: I’m not just using it, I’m building with it. For the first time, I can co-create curriculum for a digital tool, with the tool itself. I bring my lived experience and context. It brings patterns drawn from vast amounts of human knowledge. Its design allows it to generate new, responsive ideas — shaped by how I ask, how I challenge, and how I guide the process. Together, we’re not just delivering lessons, we’re inventing new ways to learn. That’s not automation. That’s a whole new kind of collaboration, and it changes what it means to teach and learn.

A great example of this kind of collaboration is how the preceding paragraph was created. The explanation in orange was co-constructed with ChatGPT-4o. Here is the PDF transcript of how it was created.

AI Chat with ChatGPT-4o_ Why AI is Different.pdf

Download PDF • 216KB

"Following the Learning" is how I have been successful creating curriculum for emerging technologies for over a quarter of a century. It's a field that allowed me to break through established educational norms because there were no existing maps to follow! I was totally on my own to figure it out. While the responsibility was daunting, having the freedom to create something new and unbound by school convention was absolutely exhilarating.

I hated school. It was never designed for me, a neurodivergent learner because neurodiversity didn't exist back then. School was a one-size-fits-all model. I reckon teachers just perceived struggling kids, like me, as dumb. Me? I perceived school as something that sucked and had to be endured!

I started tuning out teachers who could not hold my interest. I recall math teachers going on and on and on... about do this and then this. I didn't hate math, I just couldn't make sense of their tedious explanations. When I was curious, I asked my brother, Mel, who could break down the concept so it made sense to me in about five minutes! To this day, one of my best teaching tools is understanding that kids are often better at explaining to each other what the teacher is trying to teach.

So, why did I become a teacher if I hated school? Great question! You can read, Why I teach, if you are curious about the details. Otherwise, suffice it to say it was a decision shaped by the cultural constraints of Mormonism, being female, and having a neurodiverse brain not understood or suited to school. An "aptitude test" in high school suggested that "cleaning" would be a good fit for my career. If they had only seen the condition of my bedroom, they would have understood their test was inaccurate. I left high school feeling like an outlier with no skills of value. Ironically, teaching was the lesser evil of the handful of choices I felt I had in front of me.

I got on with just living my life, the best I could, and trying to figure out who I was outside of two stifling cultures that tried to shape me into conforming to something I wasn't... a religious culture and a school culture; neither of which could see me, nor value me.

There were rare exceptions when I came across a church member or a teacher who broke through ritual sameness and let me know they actually did see me. They were just glimpses, but they mattered!

Roma Richards, is a name I will never forget. She was the only one in my church congregation, the only adult, who knew my home life was difficult. She never talked to me about it or asked awkward questions, she just quietly had my back by being present and looking out for me when I showed up on my own... which was all of the time. What a gift!

Mrs. Ballard, my third grade teacher, created a bespoke project just for me... a project where I could shine. I can look back now with my teacher's lens and intellectually explain what made her such a skilled and intuitive teacher, but back then, through the eyes of a third grader... I just adored her!

Mrs. Edwards was my 7th grade humanities teacher. The one simple thing she did that had an enormous impact on me was simply acknowledging me through recognising a comment I made in one of her lessons. She had asked the class if we had to choose between living in a mansion with everything we desired, but never being able to leave the grounds - or - being free to wander wherever we wanted to go, but have absolutely nothing; what would we choose? I never would have remembered my answer had she not responded in the matter-of-fact tone of someone acknowledging the obvious. Mrs. Edwards said, "Of course you would choose that, Marianne." I was so disconnected from knowing who I was as a unique human being, I would never have remembered my answer had she not given it weight by signaling that she saw me. I've never forgotten the answer, nor the feeling of being seen... nor Mrs. Edwards. I will never know if her response was a technique of outstanding pedagogy, or whether she actually saw something in me I could not see myself. Either way, it doesn't matter. For a 12-year-old, it was a profound experience.

I cannot recall the name of my high school art teacher. By that time in my school career, I was a pretty dodgy student focused on how to ditch classes and get away with doing the bare minimum of work. The art teacher tried his hardest to encourage me to keep coming to art class and do more work. He saw in me what I couldn't see myself back then, the raw talent of an artist.

At university, I met a very enthusiastic (and annoying) writing teacher who helped me complete the minimal writing requirements for my degree. He worked really hard on trying to convince me to continue his writing course. He could see through the multiple spelling mistakes and my crooked grammar that I had a way of expressing myself through writing that was interesting and authentic. I thought he was nuts, but the trouble he took to convince me to stick with writing actually stayed with me. Even though I never followed through at the time, his encouragement helped me take risks later in life, like writing this blog. Being seen always matters.

Sixteen years of school and only four teachers had connected with me. By the time the last two of those teachers tried to connect, I was so jaded by school that I rejected their efforts to support me as student with real potential. Still, their efforts mattered.

Four teachers! Is that the best education can do for students who don't fit neatly, and perform acceptably, in the cookiecutter mold we call school? Four!!

I can't help but keep ruminating on what I learned when writing about the human need to be seen and valued in my post Exploring AI: Perception vs. Reality. If I was a kid exploring AI right now, without the lived wisdom of years of working to understanding emerging technologies, how vulnerable would I be? There are heaps of kids today that are just as invisible in school as I was.

All of my lived experiences drove me to improve learning for the students I taught. The frustrations I personally experienced morphed into a strong irreverence for a broken system that had failed me. It sparked my creativity in building spaces and making connections to keep learning relevant as the world evolved.

The reality is that our world has changed in profound ways, and yet school continues to prepare students for the industrial age. We are about to discover if schools can withstand the increasing pressure of staying relevant if they cannot adapt.

It turns out my wandering post was all about pulling on all of the connecting threads, trying to weave them together to understand how we will prepare ourselves to adapt to the next wave of change that is already upon us. AI is evolving faster than humans can adapt. It is powerful, and cool, and scary as! Whatever our feelings or opinions about AI may be, if we do not figure out how to adapt, we are being negligent in preparing students for the world in which they live.

My job, as a curriculum developer, is to figure it out this stuff and create learning opportunities for students to understand it so they can use it productively, safely and ethically. Unlike all the previous technologies, it will also require them (and us) to deeply understand what it means to be a human in a digitally shaped world.

This is no small ask. We will need to walk backwards into the future with our eyes fixed on the past... if we are going to draw on the wisdom of our lived experience to anchor how we innovate for an evolving unknown.

TL;DR:

As a student I was invisible at school. I've spent my career, as a teacher, trying to do better for my students, and the last quarter century trying to keep learning relevant.

We are currently facing an enormous world shift with AI. It is evolving faster than humans can adapt, and yet schools are still preparing kids for the industrial age.

I feel an enormous responsibility, as a teacher, to help students figure out AI. They will need to know how to use it productively, safely, and ethically while understanding what it means to be human in this digitally shaped world.

As the Māori proverb teaches, "We need to walk backwards into the future with our eyes on the past. We need our lived wisdom to figure out and navigate this unknown territory. And, we need to figure this out WITH our students, not just FOR them if we are going to adapt and evolve in keeping learning relevant in school.