In this episode, we explore the evolution of modern learning and the shift towards prioritizing innovation in education. We discuss strategies for integrating AI as a thought partner and examine the importance of developing critical inquiry skills from early childhood to prepare students for an uncertain future.

Resources

• Jared Colley on LinkedIn
• Mount Vernon Ventures, the Research, Development & Consulting division of The Mount Vernon School
• Imagine Then, Act Now: Futures Literacy for Learning Organizations, MV Ventures’ Spring 2024 Transformation R&D Report for education professionals and leaders
• A People-Centered Organization Living in an AI World, MV Ventures’ Summer 2023 Transformation R&D Report for education professionals and leaders
• “How might we build skills for life through eSports?”, article
• How Does Competitive eSports Shape Personal Growth and Real-World Skills?, podcast episode
• What are the trends, issues, and opportunities for implementing Al in schools?, podcast episode
• And What Do You Mean By Machine Learning?, article
• How Can Future’s Literacy Transform Organizational Success?, podcast episode
• Little Learners with Big Ideas: A Field Guide for Design Thinking
• AI, What's Your Position, Not Your Policy: A Scenarios-Based Approach to Strategic Foresight in the Age of Structural Uncertainty, article by Jared Colley on RootedEdu.com
• Creating Assessments with Complexity in the Age of AI, a guide to developing assessment complexity
• Using Future Studies To Cope with Top Challenges: School leaders need to envision multiple possible outcomes when facing risks and opportunities., article by Jared Colley, from NetAssests on NBOA.org
• Artificial Intelligence + Academic Integrity, a resource for teachers using a scenarios-based approach
• The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen
• The Innovator’s DNA: Five Skills to Develop Your Creativity, article adapted from the book, from BYU Marriott School of Business
• Designing Regenerative Cultures, by Daniel Christian Wahl
• Minds, Brains, and Programs, paper by philosopher John Searle
• Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Phil, welcome to Talking Technology with ATLIS,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host, Kristina Lewellen,

Hello, and welcome back to talking

technology with Atlas. I'm Kristina Lewellen, the President

and CEO of the Association of Technology Leaders in

Independent

Schools. And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey, and

I'm Hiram Cuevas, Director of Information Systems

and Academic Technology at St Christopher school here in

Richmond, Virginia.

Hello, gentlemen. How are you today?

Doing? Well, yes, likewise, I'm really excited. I know you guys

get to be on a campus every day. I don't, but I do try to get to

an independent school campus as often as I can. And this week, I

went to a darling k8 school in Charlotte, North Carolina,

Trinity Episcopal School. And the head of school there and

their IT director had heard me speak at an SA is event in

Charlotte. They brought me back. And so I was there with Kelsea

Watson, and we went, and we were, of course, talking to the

leadership team about, primarily about AI, but also student data

privacy and all of the cyber things. But it never gets old

for me walking down the hall and seeing all the artwork and all

the little kindergarteners and through little uniforms, it was

so cute. When would I get sick of that like, when does that go

away? Do you guys still walk down the hallway and get like

all the feels about the artwork on the wall,

particularly in the Lower School, I do,

especially when they're doing their self portraits, the full

body self portraits, those are hysterical. I

do enjoy it. We're three different campuses. My

office is located at our middle school campus. I enjoy getting

back to the Lower School as well. It's always a very special

place. There's something about middle school, though, because

our middle school spans grades four through eight, and you

have, like, full grown people in eighth grade and sub grades,

because, you know, there's boys that are, like, 6162, they're

bigger than I am. And then you've got all the little ones

that you would have had at the middle school. And just the

blending of all that in our space is particularly enjoyable

to see, not only because of the size differential, but also just

how well they take care of one another. I mean, given the range

their age, I think it's a special place, and it never gets

old.

And middle school, it's that place where you know,

you find out that God has a sense of humor.

Indeed, because those six two kids don't know

how to navigate a six two body. Yeah, yeah. Little awkward, and

that's happening so quick. I mean, it could be like six

inches over the summer,

they're on the cusp of their voice is changing

too. Uh, yep. When

I was at Trinity Episcopal, the IT

director there, Teresa. Shout out to her. She's incredible,

and she's a big Atlas fan. And if you haven't met her yet, I'll

introduce you guys at the conference. But she was telling

me, yeah, you know, yesterday there was some stress and a

couple things I was juggling, but it was also the 100th day of

kindergarten, so she just wandered down into the

kindergarten space and, like, there was little kids with

rollers in their hairs, and the little walkers with the tennis

balls, and she goes, and then I was better. And so I don't know,

like, I need, like, an emotional support kindergarten so that on

tough days I can just go hang out with the littles and, like,

my heart is happy or something, does it all the time. Or maybe I

need to find make friends with a local independent school, so

that when I'm having a day, I can just show up on campus and

get a little visitors, tag and go wander the hallway. But

anyway, so I got my experience this week, which I don't get

very often. So thank you for letting me gush about it. I

don't think it's ever gonna get old. I've been here for almost

six years, and I just love having the opportunity to walk

around to campus. It makes my heart so so happy. And I'm not

even a teacher, and I love it, so today, let's keep this

conversation going about all the fun with the littles and beyond.

But we do have Jared. Cole is with us, and Jared is the upper

campus head of learning and innovation at the Mount Vernon

school, a very innovative school that gets a lot of attention in

our space. Jared you're upper campus head, so you probably

don't get a lot of time with littles, but tell us your

journey. Have you had any experience along the way with

the lower school kids? And welcome to the podcast, by the

way. Well, thank you

for having me. I was thrilled to get this

invitation. I'm very excited to share this space with you and

get to have a great conversation. But to answer your

question, well, one, I have a seven and nine year old daughter

who go to the Lower School at our campus, so I find a lot of

excuses to get over there. Are they

embarrassed by you or not? Yet, they're too

young to have dad show up. They're still at

that sacred age where. They get excited when I'm

over there, which is great. So I'm soaking it in. Sometimes

I'll schedule a meeting with somebody over there, no purpose

to it, but it's really just so I can get over there and maybe

spot one of my kids love it, and have that moment. So I do get to

spend some space in the Lower School. I would say that the

Mount Vernon school, we believe that we're better together, and

we're super intentional about collaborative engagement. So I

do spend a lot of time in our lower school doing professional

work as well, and I have a wonderful counterpart over there

who shares a similar title, and we get to work a lot about

innovation and academic alignment and continuity of

experience and a building of capacity around certain

competencies that we value at Mount Vernon, some of those

competencies being ones that you would probably see anywhere, and

some that I think really differentiate us, like our

design thinking program that really runs through pre K all

the way to 12th grade. So we have a lot of opportunity for

the lower campus and the upper campus to come together and

really align our vision so that there is this great continuity

of experience, and we do approach it from a competency

based perspective. And so it's important that we do that. I

love this. I can't wait to get into the

scaffolding that you're talking about, how you take it through

the whole journey for your learners, but let's talk a

little bit about you. How long have you been with the school?

What was your journey like to get here? I

believe I'm in my fifth year at the Mount Vernon

school. That's a really significant number, if you think

about what was going on five years ago, I was at a school in

Texas. Before that, a lovely School in Arlington, Texas

called the Oak Ridge school. When I was at the Oak Ridge

school, I was the English department chair, and I also, in

my later time there, served as our director of professional

development and also as our kind of, our Chair of our curriculum

coordination team that worked a lot on alignment at that school.

And that's the Oak Ridge school where I was before and around

2020, I had been watching the Mount Vernon school for a long

time they were school I was paying attention to due to a lot

of the work that they were doing that I was attracted to. And I

think one of the things I was really attracted to is that I

was given a lot of freedom, where I was before to do certain

things, but I wanted to be at a place that had the capacity to

do it at scale, and so mastery based or competency based

learning would be a good example of that. But there are other

examples I could share too. And so it was around right before

the pandemic hit that a job opportunity became available at

the Mount Vernon school for head of learning and innovation, and

I very aggressively tried to get my foot in the door and talk to

the people here, and sure enough, I flew over. Did the

whole, as we all know, the one to two day intensive interview

that we Independent Schools love to do, came back home, and I

think about a week later, we all were sheltering in place for the

pandemic.

That's pretty intense. It was

talk about a VUCA moment of volatility,

uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity, and I got the job

offer, so I'm sitting there with my wife, and I'm like, Hey, how

do you feel about moving across the country in the middle of a

pandemic, when we're not even supposed to leave our house? And

we had that conversation, and to be just completely like Frank

and vulnerable, she says, Yes, but she looks at me, she goes,

don't screw this up.

You know what? Always a little levity

from the wife. That's right, but it's kind of weird. I mean, let

me just call something out here. You're an English teacher,

English chair, not necessarily the first department I would

think of when it comes to innovation in teaching. That's

kind of a leap. So you definitely clawed your way into

that, yeah, or did you have some background in demonstrating that

you had this interest in innovation?

Well, I would love to toot my horn and say, Oh, I

was an English teacher who was integrating technology and very

creative ways and kind of ahead of the curve on, you know, we

were all talking about that Samer model, and I was

redefining the classroom of what an English classroom could look

like. But I could sit here and say that and tell a story that

way. But I also would love to give a shout out to somebody who

I do think sits on your board, who, at that time was our

director of technology and modern learning at the Oak Ridge

school. And that's Jason Kern.

Oh, yeah, I love Kern. Nice. So I hope he

listens to this episode. You can know that I will make him Jason,

at that time, was leading us in terms of the

adoption of technology in classrooms. He was leading us in

terms of thinking about like, what does as we were calling at

the time, what does modern learning look like at this

moment, and as department chair of the English department, and

also as a curious lifelong learner, and also what I like to

call a mischievous collaborator, I was connected. With people,

and we were having a lot of conversations about, what could

we do differently in English classrooms that technology now

makes possible, that before, maybe it just wasn't accessible,

or we couldn't think of ways to do it. And I could give several

examples, but one that I would share is we were very early on

in my English classroom of using blogs and using digital

platforms in a way that we could connect with other English

classrooms, whether they were down the street or across the

country or across the world. And early on, I started what I call

the time a literary Colloquium. And what it was is I was trying

to model for English kids like, what do English scholars do?

What would that even look like? And one thing that people who

have a advanced degree in humanities do is they often go

to conferences and present papers, and there's usually

probably a discussant, someone who's gotten your paper ahead of

time, they've read it, they've thought of some critical

questions, and then after you present your paper, there is

this great discourse with a diversity of people in the room

from all different institutions, all exchanging ideas and

furthering each other's scholarship. And so I was really

thinking about this in a traditional way, and I was like,

Oh, I'm gonna go find all the email addresses of all the

English department chairs I can and the surrounding area, and

I'm just gonna email and be like, hey, what if we all read

the same book, like, at the same time, and had kids all write

papers and submit them, and then we, like, run a conference

that's student driven. And I sent out this email to maybe

2030 English department chairs, and I totally probably violated

norms of just going to websites and getting these emails and not

asking permission to send this out. I send it out, and it's

crickets, and then a couple people responded, and one person

that responded that I really encourage people to look up who

is, I believe, still doing work as an English teacher in a

department chair at Green Hill School, which is in North

Dallas. And his name is Joelle Garza. He also started the book

chat hashtag on Twitter, when that space used to be a space

where we had more good faith inspired exchange in terms of

discourse, and he started a group of English teachers who

were coming together to have conversations about, how do we

diversify literature and get more representation in classes?

And so I share that because he was thinking innovatively too.

And he sends me this email about my conference idea, and he's

like, I think it's a great idea. I think we should do this. But

he's like, but why should we wait for a conference? And I'm

like, email back, like, Well, what do you mean? He's like, we

got blogs. We could record podcasts. There's so many ways

that we could start exchanging ideas with our classrooms. And

so this is years ago, but we set up a blog, and we decided it was

the 100 year anniversary of the publication of James Joyce's

short stories Dubliners, and that was a strategic choice.

One, okay, anniversary, great moment for a bunch of schools to

read that book. Two, it's short stories. So this is easy to

shoehorn into your curriculum. Why don't you join us? And

before we knew it, we had this critical mass of teachers who

were all very interested in this idea that we were all going to

read the same book and our students were going to interact

on a blog together. And at first, again, there's a lot of

stages of evolution. So we were like, managing the blog. We're

like, all right, what do you want to put up there? I'll go

put it up there for you and post it. And so maybe one of my kids

had something that they wrote, All right, I'll go get that up

there for you. Another kid, maybe they recorded a podcast or

an exchange at that time. I think we're just calling them mp

three files, and they want to post that on the blog for the

other schools to react to, and we're using the comment

mechanism on the blog for doing that. But at some point we were

like, Why are we gatekeeping as teachers? Why aren't they the

editors of this blog? Why aren't they the ones who are creating

the content directly? Why aren't they making those decisions? And

so before we knew it, we had probably about 12 different

schools, and this is happening in iterations through a few

years and selecting different texts each year. But it started

with just three schools, Hockaday school, the Green Hill

School and the Oak Ridge school, we came together and had a

conference too. And I think we all would tell the story that

what we learned there, there was an interesting dialectic between

the traditional and the digital, reinforcing and supporting and

strengthening each other. And so I guess what I mean by that is

we knew there was gonna be this conference, so there was skin in

the game. And these kids were engaging on this blog in a way

that they like. Knew that there was high stakes, but healthy

high stakes, not like I'm going to fail you if you don't do

this, right? No, we're going to get together in person, and

you're going to stare at these people face to face and have a

conference experience. So there's a lot of reasons to make

these digital exchanges go well, but also the. Conference now had

this much greater meaning to it when we came together, as you

all know, because you have physical conferences too, and

you know the value add of not just interacting asynchronously,

interacting digitally, like we are right now, but also

committing to the idea that we're all going to be in the

same physical space at this time, and we're going to see

each other, and we're going to have exchanges, and we are going

to inspire each other, and we're all going to come back with new

ideas. And so over the years, we began to build that and build

that and build that. And it went from picking books like James

Joyce's Dubliners, and then one year, it was Frankenstein, 200

years later, and that was a fun year that we read Frankenstein,

because we started doing more than just having kids submit

papers. We had kids who were thinking about maker space

artifacts, having an exhibit space for that. We brought in

fine arts, and kids were making films and making paintings and

posters. And so we started to have these exchanges that became

more than just, say, literary analysis, and then it evolved

even more where we're like, why are we reading dead authors,

when we could do this with people who are living right now,

and we can invite them to come to these events and be keynote

speakers, interact with our students. And there was this

evolution that happened, and that really brought me into the

technology world, that for me to go back to an acronym that I

think we all know, but, and probably most people who listen

to this podcast know the same or acronym of, are we using

technology to substitute like, Okay, write notes with a laptop

now instead of a pencil? Are we augmenting, okay, instead of

giving a book report by getting up and just talking, you've got

a slide deck. Are we modifying all the way to I feel like we

found a way to redefine what English classrooms look like,

and that was made possible by new accessible technologies that

earlier either we didn't know about or they just weren't

around yet or accessible yet. And so that was my entry point

from going from a quote, unquote, traditional English

teacher to somebody who saw the intersection of Yes, classical

education is important, but technology can really redefine

it in ways that we can do it differently. And that brought me

into the Atlas community. I started presenting at Atlas very

early on, more as an English teacher and coming to Atlas and

being like, here's how I'm using technology. I got really

immersed in the gamification culture when that started to

become a thing, and I started redesigning my classrooms around

the idea of, like, what brings kids back to video games over

and over again, even when they fail over and over and over.

There is something about the structure of a video game, a

design of a video game, and what could we learn about that in

curricular design? And so I got really involved with that too.

And of course, technology helped Augment, modify and redefine how

we might do that. And again, I was presenting at Atlas about

topics like that as well, and sooner or later, that led me to

leading professional development my own school, being a

curriculum coordinator over alignment of our entire

curricular scope and vision. That really gave me the skill

sets to then come to the Mount Vernon school and be in the role

I am now as head of learning and innovation.

So Jared, I have a question for you. You mentioned

two different things. One, as you talked about when you were

there, you talked about this being modern learning, and now

you're into innovation in terms of how you were describing these

different pieces. And you mentioned how you define these

different things. And I want to ask you how you would

differentiate what you were doing when you were calling it

modern learning and what it's now called now you're referring

to as innovation. It's what your titles got on it. How do you

because I think everyone does it slightly differently. We're

going through it right now at MKA. How do you define

innovation, and how does that differ from what you were doing

before that you were calling modern learning? What's in a

name.

First of all, I think that the word modern is

somewhat a loaded word that we need to interrogate and unpack.

If you have not heard about the book hospicing modernity, I

highly recommend it. I will credit Will Richardson for

recommending that book to me on a zoom call one day, and

modernity carries a lot of baggage. So first, I just want

to say that modernity is a concept that carries baggage,

such as growth is always linear. Modernity carries some baggage

around colonial mindsets that are somewhat Eurocentric. And

modernity, also to me, is like a fixation on the newness of the

technology or the products, things like that. And thereby, I

wonder if it's getting us to focus on the real value add of

what we do to move education forward. And so as I think about

innovation, innovation, too can become a word. With a lot of

trappings. I think innovation can become a word that could

stagnate us instead of move us forward. So I think it's also

really important to really ask the question, what are you

innovating for? Are you innovating for people to have a

meaningful, positive identity, development, restorative

experience? Are you innovating for efficiency? Are you

innovating for marketing reasons, to have a really flashy

value proposition that once we poke through it a little bit,

it's a little bit surfacey, and so I also caution that we

interrogate the word innovation a little bit, and what we mean

by that. And so I don't know if I can define innovation without

first defining and making explicit the values that one is

anchored in that they are thereby innovating for. So

how are you doing that? At Mount Vernon, what is

the definition of innovation at Mount Vernon, I had a very

similar conversation with Steve Valentine, who I work with here

at MKA, about what the idea of entrepreneurship means at MKA,

because it's something that we talk about, right, and

understanding what that word means to us as it relates to

STEM, STEM, plus ethics, all of those things. So that's the

context and the reason, to some degree from my question. So what

does innovation mean for you and for Mount Vernon, yeah,

and entrepreneurship is another

word, but ooh, you could get me talking about that for a minute.

And again, if we don't interrogate that word, I

challenge us not to get all Latin, but like homo economicus,

this idea that our purpose is to go out and make money, and our

purpose is to train people for the job force, and to think like

that, I think if that's what we mean by entrepreneurship, we're

missing a huge opportunity. I think that entrepreneurship has

a much wider application, or opportunity for application,

where it's really about like, how do you live well and how are

you going to get there. What is a life well lived? And what

skills do you need? What competencies do you need, what

experiences do you need, what mentorship do you need to find a

path, a path that is ethical, well intentioned, and thereby, I

want to define entrepreneurial skills as being able to have the

resourcefulness to bring that together, but to have it be

layered on top of values that you know what your values are,

and you know what a life well lived might look like. And so

for me to be an entrepreneur is what is living well for me, and

how do I make that a reality? So I know you're asking for a

definition of innovation. But I first just had to unpack that

you're talking to an English teacher, if you haven't noticed.

And so I like to unpack words. So is Steve. I would say this

about innovation. I think at Mount Vernon, we would first and

foremost point you to the book innovators, DNA. I'll tell a

story we have a class in our middle school called Impact

Design Lab. And think of this as a class for middle schoolers to

really start building their design thinking muscle. And I

think already told you there's a continuity going all the way

back to pre K in terms of giving kids opportunities to build

skills around design thinking. But the impact Design Lab, which

happens in eighth grade, is really a leveling up moment. And

the designers of that class were really wrestling with the fact

that they were, like, having a hard time communicating to kids

what they meant when they say, Okay, now let's go innovate. And

here they were wrestling with, like, how do we define it? And I

pointed them back to that book, and I don't take credit for

that. The Mount Vernon school identified that book as well

before my time here as a guide for us in terms of thinking

about what do we mean by innovation? And so innovation is

a very abstract, constructivist concept that I think we all

would have to come to an agreed upon definition before we could

move forward with any kind of sense of innovation. So let me

just say it this way. What if, instead of defining innovation,

we just started to talk about behaviors that lead to

innovative outcomes? And so one of the things that I really

appreciate about the book innovators DNA is it really does

that for you. So instead of like starting with innovation, it

starts with five activities that it tells you to build your

muscle around. Observing is one of them, networking is one of

them, associating is one of them, experimenting is one of

them. And Dang, I am missing the other one right now, and that is

okay, but people can go look up the book if you were engaging in

those five behaviors. Now, I'm not sure we really have to worry

about how we're defining innovation as much as we have

developed behavioral skills that we're getting better at and

better at. Are leading to innovative outcomes. So if I

dodged your question, I'm sorry, but that's one way I would try

to answer that question.

So Jared, what's been fascinating about this

conversation is we've taken the superficial, I think, when we're

talking about some of this lingo, and really, I feel like

we've been engaging in literary analysis in our conversation

with you, and I really appreciate that when we were

talking about the evolution of your community to engage in

modern learning, there's a certain buy in that has to

happen. And I think many of our conversations end up starting at

that superficial level. And how do you get it into that in depth

thought process about what is important to this preconceived

notion in your mind of what modern learning looks like,

knowing full well that it's a loaded term, and then executing

that, such that you're looking at these new skills that these

students are now going to acquire versus some of the

skills that are going to be perhaps left behind or not

utilized as much

so I think as a good pedagogue, because I also

do a lot of coaching and around teaching and learning in my

role, and we are big on the whole backwards design approach,

in terms of how we think about building a unit, building a

Performance Task, or whatever it might be that we're engaging

students in. Let's apply that same principle here. And what an

interesting time to apply that principle, because we live, and

I think I've mentioned to you probably before the recording,

that one of the areas I am really engaged in right now is

futures thinking. And futures is intentionally used in the

plural, because none of us can predict the future. None of us

can forecast with great certainty that this is what is

going to happen next. And so the end in mind is a really, really

perplexing, baffling thing right now, because our students are

entering a world where more and more it becomes difficult to

predict in forecast. And so how are we building the skills and

capacities for a world where there are alternative futures

that are all equally plausible, that could happen? And so I

think one way that we might think about modern learning is

that we've never faced that challenge more poignantly, more

concretely, and maybe I'm historically biased to my moment

of lived experience in this moment in history. But let's

just go over what's happened in the last few years. How many of

us were talking about a pandemic before COVID hit? Not a lot of

us. How many of us were talking about racial reckoning before

the George Floyd moment. There are a lot of people who were

doing that work, but not a lot of people were how many of us

were going to be able to predict how polarized our political

landscape has gotten in recent years, and we, of course, just

gone through it again, a very difficult time for all of us,

socially, emotionally speaking, and also in terms of not being

able to predict what's going to happen next. And how many of us

now maybe the Atlas community be like, well, a lot of us, how

many of us were able to predict that large language models were

going to so quickly and so ubiquitously show up at schools

and be able to do so well what they're doing? And so we have

lived through so many interesting alternative futures

that were all plausible and maybe probable and definitely

possible, but none of us could have forecasted or predicted

they were going to happen the exact way they did. And so as I

think about the end in mind, the end in mind is so much more

nebulous right now compared to previous periods of the

educational landscape. I think that we are often still

operating on models that track kids in a way that whether

they're doing it explicitly or implicitly, probably implicitly,

a lot of times by way of how schools are structured, by way

how curriculum is structured by how instructional practices are

structured. We are still messaging a certain end in mind

that really isn't that accurate or honest about what we're

facing. And so the end in mind is one of alternative futures.

The End in Mind is one of great uncertainty. I like to call it

critical uncertainties, which is kind of a cross section of

something that's highly uncertain but also high impact.

And artificial intelligence is a great example of one. We just

went through, and we're still going through, artificial

intelligence isn't really interesting critical

uncertainty. It is very uncertain what's going to happen

and how quickly it will and we all know it's going to have a

huge impact. And so identifying critical uncertainties is

something we can do. And so what are the skills and competencies

that we need to be building in this next generation to handle

with temper? Insights, with strategy to handle, with

creativity and curiosity, a whole bunch of alternative

futures. And so I am so sick of hearing about we don't know the

jobs of the future. I think we have to go even deeper than

that. We don't know the values and the greater context of the

future. I mean, how do we talk about jobs if we're not talking

about the ecological uncertainties of our entire

planet? How do we talk about here's how you're going to

create value in the economy when a lot of resources that make our

economy valuable are under threat. And so before we even

talk about jobs of the future, I think there's other things of

the future that we have to talk about, but we can't talk about

them with certainty. And we have to think about a different

approach, and that is a different kind of backwards

design approach, because a lot of times backwards design is be

absolutely explicitly clear on the standard you're trying to

get this kid to master. But as I think about modern learning, I

think modern learning differentiates itself from

previous forms of learning on those terms,

it's really interesting. So with this

uncertainty in mind, and looping back to this scaffolding that

you provide at the Mount Vernon school, from even the pre case

you mentioned, like, how do you then weave this into the entire

life cycle of the students? As you think about some of these

uncertain outcomes,

we start with questions, and we build that

mantra into our students, and we call that a mantra. We start

with questions, not with answers. And I think that we

build that mantra, we build that mindset in preschoolers, we

build it in our lower schoolers, we build it in our middle

schoolers, and by the time we get to our upper schoolers,

hopefully the scaffolding is a little bit taken away, and they

are driving the questions that we're starting with. There's a

wonderful thinker named Christian wall. He writes a lot

about the environment, and he's written a book called Designing

regenerative cultures. And regenerative is a huge buzz word

that I think we have to interrogate as well, because I'm

not sure we all know what we mean when we say regenerative.

But one thing I'll say about that book, that he said that I

thought was so interesting, is that a lot of times we think of

questions as the vehicles to an answer, whereas in reality, what

he says is and he uses the three horizons framework, which I'm

not sure our listeners will be familiar with, the three

horizons framework, But if I were to use an example. First

horizon like, how do we as a business get people to consume

movies? Oh, we're gonna set up a brick and mortar blockbuster

where they're gonna come and they're gonna rent movies,

right? And so then second horizon might be Netflix being

like, Oh, we're gonna mail DVDs to your house and there's no

late fee. Mail it back when you're ready, and then you can

get your next one. And I'm probably dating myself, because

some people listening are being like, What are you talking

about? That's not what Netflix does, but that's that second

horizon, right? They were disrupting the blockbuster

business model. But then there's a third horizon, which is now we

have streaming services, and I don't even need you to mail me a

DVD to my house, but I want to go back to what I was saying

about Christian wall within this three horizon framework. It's

not that streaming is the answer. Now we have new

questions, because streaming is using a lot of energy, and

there's a lot of carbon emissions going on, and we're

generating a lot of heat through all this consumption of video

online for our convenience. And so if anything, the new answer

brought us to new questions. And so to go back to what I first

said, it's not that questions are the vehicle to answers.

Answers are the vehicle to new questions that we need to ask.

And so we're never going to get to a final horizon. The third

horizon just brings us to a whole new set of questions that

we need to interrogate. And so if everybody on this planet were

to stream at the same volume at the same time, I think we all

know it's unsustainable. I think there's a reason that Google and

a lot of other companies out there are buying nuclear

reactors scanning signals here as a futures thinker, they know

that when we go to scale with artificial intelligence and the

demand of energy, the demand of carbon emission, that that is

going to exact upon our planet. How are we going to do that? And

so there are new questions to be asked. There are not answers

that have now solved as much as they have brought us to a new

horizon for new questions. So not only should we start with

questions, we also end with questions, which begins in.

Start. So going back to that was a really kind of roundabout way

of answering one question you asked, but we start with

preschoolers with start with questions, right? And we want to

build that curiosity, and we want to build that lack of

complacency, that answers have been answered, there's always

new questions to be asked, and that is one way that we try to

build something in our students, a mindset, a mental model, a way

of comporting oneself to the world, that they continue to

build a capacity in, that they continue to work that muscle in

as they move all the way through till they get to grade 12. And

there's a lot of other ways to answer that question of how we

are building continuity around competencies that we think are

important in a modern learning context or in a futures thinking

context, but that's one example I would give.

One of the things you said there when you were

just really focusing on the questions. You know, one of the

things that we ask people here a lot of questions about is their

thoughts on AI. And one of the things that I think has come up

about questions in general, at least in the conversations that

I've been in, is that questions almost become the check for

understanding. When you worry that AI can give you all the

answers, it becomes less about the answer that you get or that

you write down on the paper more about your ability either to ask

the question or have a conversation and ask deeper

questions that truly represent what you were able to learn from

that. So one of the things that I'm seeing, and I'm kind of

interested in tracking, is if the concern around AI is about

it giving you the answers, then we need to focus more on exactly

what you're saying, the ability to generate those questions in

meaningful ways that point to what it is I've gathered from

the work that I've done, Hiram posted in the chat, and you can

jump in on this more if you want to. It's the idea of AI being

that thought partner in a lot of the work that we're doing. But

you've still gotta have those competencies and those

understandings to be able to question things in the right

way. Absolutely,

I'm gonna respond to that. But I also just wanna

say, and this is the educator coming out in me, is that we

have to be careful. And I'm gonna use an educator framework,

depth of knowledge framework, so those that are listening that

might be more in the technology world and not as much in the

curriculum world. Depth of Knowledge is just a framework to

think about complexity of what you're asking kids to do, right?

So Dok one is recalling facts, being able to know things. Dok

two, next level might be application and explanation in

the ability to do that. And we might say that Dok three is now

okay. Now take that and start to think really strategically about

what you're going to do with all that. And you know, dok four

might be like, how are you transferring all this to totally

new context that you couldn't even predict were going to

happen? So Extended Thinking. And so I first just want to say,

I think something we have to be cautious about is that Dok one

is just as important as Dok two, dok three, dok four. And so AI

is doing a great job as a thought partner of leap frogging

kids to Dok three and four work as a thought partner how to

think strategically, how to extend their thinking. But

students need to know things. I think about that even. You know,

I'm not getting political, but let's just say, for the sake of

our democracy, kids need to know things, and they can't just rely

on technology to give them answers. And so I had to have

that soap box moment. And everybody on my campus will tell

you, I'm the proselytizer of you got to integrate AI in your

class, so I'm not the guy here that's saying, oh my gosh, AI is

doing something dangerous. It's dialectical, isn't it? Both

truths are true, right? There are things that we have to be

worried about, and there are things that we got to be so

excited about, where AI is this thought partner? But to your

question about being a thought partner, I'll just share it an

answer through story telling, which is, although I'm out of

the classroom and Kristina, I love the beginning of our

conversation, where you said you visited a school, and it just

reminded you of the joy of being in a hallway and seeing student

work. Let me share my own version of that. I'm teaching a

course right now, even though I'm a full time administrator,

I'm also a consultant for our NV ventures, R and D company, but I

also teach a class, and the class I'm teaching right now is

called philosophy in the age of artificial intelligence, and we

are doing three things in that class, and our mission statement

at Mount Vernon is we are a school of inquiry, innovation

and impact. So every single week we are inquiring

philosophically. What I really mean by that is we're reading

academic papers by John Searle about, can a machine ever be

conscious, or is consciousness in some way necessarily tied? To

biological systems. So we're inquiring philosophically, but

we are also innovating experimentally, and we are also

examining technology's impact. And that latter way that we do

that is we also read a fun sci fi story every week, and it's

usually some sort of sci fi story that's showing the impact

of technology in some speculative future, and it gets

us talking about it, ethically, gets us talking about it,

philosophically, speculatively. Where is this going? But I want

to go back to the middle one. The other thing that we do in

our class every week is we are innovating experimentally. And

so the kids have a task board. It's like a tic tac toe board,

and each of the boxes is like something that like go try this

with AI, and I'm Trojan horsing them a little bit because the

prompts are very much getting them to use AI as a thought

partner, not as an answer giver, not as the problem solver, but

as something that they have to engage with and start to get

better at asking it the right questions, getting better at how

to evaluate the answers it gives back, or the suggestions it

might be prompting them to think about. And they go and they do

something every week. I'll just give an example. One of the

boxes says, like build a bot that is a study partner for

something that you need to drill down on and study or build it

for a friend and test it, get feedback and come back and tell

us how it went. And that's not the end of the assignment. They

also have a series of questions they have to answer, and it's

based on one of the project zero thinking routines. And so what

new ideas did it get you to consider? It also asks you, what

could have been improved? Where did it not work well, and where

did it fall flat? And so they also, as they go through this

routine every week of experimenting with AI

innovatively, they're really thinking about it evaluatively,

which is the ok for by the way, they are thinking about it

evaluatively, and where is it a good thought partner? Where is

it a good task partner? Where does it not work well? And they

reflect on that every week. We assign things through what we

call a proverbial card. They use this card, and they go through

that thinking routine. They show the evidence of a chat log, or

whatever it is. They need to show evidence of of how they

used it, but they're also doing that evaluative reflection, and

so that gets them back to asking the right questions about AI,

about the human role, about the human advantage, about the AI

advantage, and how those two things come together to create

what I call collective intelligence. And if we go back

to SAMR, right? Are we just using AI to substitute? Maybe

not that great. Are we using AI to augment something we do? Are

we using it to modify something we do, or has it redefined

something for us? Right? And so it's getting them to ask those

questions without necessarily making it the same or model, but

it's getting them to interrogate, like, Where does AI

fit in? Well, because a competency that is important for

our students to thrive in the age of intelligent machines is

to be able to work well with machines, and that is something

that these students need to practice. And I understand why

some classes are struggling with figuring out how to give kids

that opportunity. I have great empathy for a lot of teachers

who are threatened by what AI is bringing into their classroom,

and I think we have to approach this conversation with teachers

with great understanding, with active listening and with a deep

sense of empathy, because there are things, there are stories of

an assignment that I have given for years, and I have these

memories of these experiences and these relationships I built,

and AI is disrupting that in the bad way, because now my kids

aren't doing it the way we used To do it, and it's easy, I

think, for us that are thinking creatively and we have time to

think creatively about technology's application, it's

easy for us to be like, Oh, get a growth mindset. But no,

there's a lot of mourning, and I mean that M, o, u, r, N, I N, G,

there is a lot of mourning and processing that I think a lot of

great instructors are having to go through right now in terms of

what AI might be doing to their classroom. And so I understand

why some of the things I'm getting to do in my class may be

a little bit more difficult in some other contexts. And I just

want you to know on my task board, it does say, if you're

going to use this AI experimentation another class, I

have to have written permission from that teacher. I, in no way

am going to be the person who encourages you to go use AI in

another teacher's class without us, First all, being on some

sort of shared understanding level of agreement.

So Jared before we run. Out of Time, I do

want to circle back to the ventures piece of things,

because I think that that's a really interesting and creative

aspect of your school that is a little unusual. There's

incredible publications coming out of the space that I really

enjoy, but Mount Vernon Ventures is your research development and

consulting division of the school. Can you just take a

minute and tell us a little bit about where that came from and

how in the world, does that fit in the larger mission of the

school?

Yes, I'll start with where it came from, and

that predates me, and so I want to start by apologizing to those

who predate me if I don't tell the story to the utmost fidelity

and accuracy, forgive me. But it started with the Mount Vernon

Institute for Innovation, M, V, I, Fi is what it was called, and

it was a group of people who were doing great, innovative

work that was getting the attention of other schools. And

people were asking questions, and people were wanting to know

more. And a group of people on this campus, led by Bo Adams, I

know a lot of listeners who are going to probably listen to this

podcast will know exactly who Bo Adams is. He's had a great

impact upon the educational community across this country.

Bo was leading a team of MVI phi Mount Vernon Institute for

Innovation, and I think it was just born out of we were doing

interesting things with design thinking. We were doing

interesting things with just curricular innovation. We were

doing interesting things with project based learning. We were

doing interesting things with what we might call expeditionary

learning, where it doesn't have to happen in the four walls of

our classrooms, getting kids out into place based learning

scenarios. And I think a lot of schools were wondering like, how

are you doing that at scale? And it became very, very obvious to

us that there's a service that we could provide, but greater

community of schools. And I think we've always had the

philosophy that we're not just here to be a school that's

changing in a way that we know is research based and also best

for our students. But we want to also change the educational

landscape beyond our school as well, and we want to have a role

in that. I know that Atlas wants to have a role in that, that we

are all probably have a shared vocation, passion and motivation

to not keep these things to ourselves and not just be the

innovative school and everybody else is still doing it a more

traditional way. But how might we transform this so that we

design a better world? And that is a phrase that we use here at

Mount Vernon quite often. How might we design a better world?

It started there, and then we rebranded as NV ventures in

recent years. And I would say that NV Ventures is really doing

two or three things, but two things that also sometimes leads

to a third thing. The first is we're doing research and

development. And thank you, Kristina, for saying that you've

enjoyed reading some of our publications. I am the editor of

our R and D reports that comes out, and so a lot of times that

means I have the privilege of getting to read research that's

going on, read other people's synthesis of research as editor,

and other times I'm the primary writer of some of these reports.

I wrote one of our reports on it's called Imagine, then, act

now, futures literacy for learning organizations. A year

or two ago, I wrote one called a people centered organization,

living in an AI world. And so those are ones where I got to be

a primary writer, but I also serve as an editor for other

researchers and other writers that are a part of our team that

are doing great work and synthesizing great work that's

out there, and so that research and development aspect, I think

one way I would also explain why we think it adds value is that

most of us, our bandwidth is full, and most of us don't have

time to go around and synthesize a lot of research and show up at

meetings and be able to lead a team with confidence and say,

here's how we need to be thinking about this. So I think

AI is a great example writing that report about AI. What I

hope it did is it gave school leaders a document to read with

a playlist at the end of everything that got cited, so

that they could have what they need to know to be able to go

into a meeting and lead with intentionality, lead with

purpose, but also lead from a informed perspective on

something that needs to be talked about, but who has the

bandwidth to do the research. And so that is one service that

we at MV ventures are trying to provide for the greater

educational community. I think the second thing that we also do

is we work with clients, and so we work in a consulting capacity

around a lot of different issues, whether that's brand

development, whether that's working on strategy, strategic

plan, we like to talk about strategic positioning and a

futures thinking framework, whether that be going to scale

on transforming your assessment practices, because you want to

move to a competency based model. So there's a. Lot of

things that we consult with schools on. And the third thing

that that sometimes leads to is product development, developing

our own tools that we often provide for other schools.

Sometimes it's free, sometimes they cost something. But product

development is not our primary purpose. It's a bonus outcome of

that more important work that I think we're doing around

research synthesis and consulting work to help

transform schools that perhaps need a little bit of support in

doing that. Do

you have an example of a product that you've

developed? I mean, like aI chat bots or, like, what kind of

product as an example? I

could give several, but I'll stick to one.

A while back, we did a product that's called it's a design

thinking Field Guide to borrow from Harvard's Project Zero.

It's kind of like visible thinking routines that help a

team do more intentional outcomes focused design thinking

work. But I share that product as well, because now we have a

design thinking Field Guide for littles, because at first like,

oh, adults can do design thinking. But what we quickly

started using this resource for, and a lot of other schools are

using it for, is they're having students use this resource and

use these tools in their classes. It helps scaffold them

on giving better feedback and peer to peer feedback with

certain thinking routines. It helps them and their design

process and their iteration process and whatever project

they working on. And so not only are adults using that field

guide, so are students, but it became evidently clear we need

one for littles. And so a recent product that we developed is our

design thinking Field Guide for littles. And so the language and

the complexity of the tools are developmentally appropriate for

that age group. And again, it's also another example of us

having a continuity of building capacity around a skill that we

think is important at Mount Vernon, from the little ones all

the way to the adults. And to borrow a quote from our former

Director of Innovation diploma, Brad droke, age does not equal

capacity. And littles can do great work. Middle schoolers can

do amazing work. High schoolers can do amazing work, just like

we adults. That's

really cool. What a full circle kind of

conversation we've been having here today. I love it. You put a

lot more research and deep thinking around where we started

this conversation, but it's been really, really insightful. You

know, as we kind of wrap up here, I do have just a couple

questions for you. What are you reading and thinking about right

now, in your own world, what's interesting you or capturing

your attention?

I'm reading two things right now. One has to do

with some research that we're doing, which is, I'm reading a

lot about how do we put into place, from a systems thinking

point of view, programs that lead to professional growth that

is personalized, that is customizable, but is also

mission aligned, and is also ensuring equity and growth for

everyone, and providing pathways for growth that lead to greater

opportunity. So we've developed, for instance, our own system of

competencies for faculty and our system of competencies for

administrative leaders. And what does a systemic approach to

improvement for every individual in your organization? What does

that look like? And how can you do that at scale? And how can

you do that at scale again, in this context where what does it

mean to improve? And we don't know what schools look like in

10 years, and so that's one area that I'm doing a lot of reading,

and another area that I'm doing a lot of research right now is,

I think it's very important that we don't forget about the fact

that we need to build ecological literacy and competencies, and

to our students and to our staff and to our organizations. And so

I'm also reading a lot of literature around like, what do

we need to get skillful at to handle the wicked problems that

extreme weather events, that climate change, that depletion

of resources are going to be presenting, not just to us, but

really to our next generation of learners. And it's not up to

them to solve it. It's up for us to start thinking about that now

and to start building the frameworks that provide a vision

of what those competencies and skills look like. And so again,

getting back to collective intelligence, there's the human

and human centered design is really important. There's the

technology, and the technology as a thought partner and an

augmenter and a modifier is important. And there is nature.

And we also need to be thinking about the more than human world

and the more than human centered design perspectives that are

really important right now. That's my long winded answer to

say. I'm reading a lot of books about that stuff.

I love it. And will we see you at the Atlas

conference coming up in a couple of months?

You're gonna be in my hometown. I will be here, and

I think I'm doing a session with two great friends. This

organization, Vinnie rotney And Matt school, that's a good one

can't miss. Yes, please come visit with us, even if you don't

come to our session. Let's talk. Let's talk in the hallways. But

also just, I want to just say thank you. We've had a couple

students that are have been invited to be on a panel this

year at the Atlas conference here in Atlanta, and I am so

excited that all of you are going to get to see and hear

from our Mount Vernon students and how they're thinking about a

lot of these things.

I know I'm really excited. I'm glad you

brought that up last year. Dr Paul Turnbull, from the Mid

Pacific school out in Hawaii, pulled me aside on the final

morning and said, you know, Kristina, this conference is

just so cool. We've got to get students here, and we found a

few different ways to honor and recognize and elevate our

students voices. So I'm really looking forward to that. So

thank you for being a facilitator in all of that.

Yeah, well,

thank you judge. The one thing I want to say is

good luck with both Vinnie and Matt. You're gonna need to be on

your A game to keep the two of them focused and going in the

right direction. But the one thing I honestly want to do, I

was joking in the chat, you know, I said to Kristina in the

back end here that my head is about to explode after this

conversation in all of the best ways, right? And I've been

watching and I'm challenging Peter Frank, who is our

producer, who's been filling in all of the show notes with every

reference. I'm sitting here, I'm taking notes, I'm googling

stuff. I'm like, what was that? What did he just say? So I want

to thank you for what was truly a mind expanding conversation,

as you said, a lot of deep thinking, a lot of really good

stuff that I'm gonna have to go back to. I said, before you came

on, you know, I was re listening to some of our recent episodes,

and I'm gonna have to give this one another listen, because

there's a lot of great stuff here, and I think everyone's

gonna get a lot out of it. So thank you,

100% Absolutely. Thank

you, Bill, yeah,

thank you for challenging us. This was

wonderful. Jared, thank you for your time.

This has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of Technology Leaders in

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