Dr. Min Sun
Co-founder & CEO, Colleague AI
How should we reimagine schools’ design, their structure, and particularly, concerning how AI can transform employment, future workforce needs, opportunities? What does it mean to prepare students not just for jobs, but for a fundamentally transformed workforce?
Jonathan Briggs:
Director of Technology, Eastside Preparatory Academy
I’ll talk about some problems. I don’t have solutions to all of them, but one of the the real challenges for the first time in my career is there’s so many other pedagogical things or even technologies like bringing in a smartboard or whatever, where you could say this new thing exists, and we’re going to spend a few weeks training up faculty on how to use it, and then they can decide how to use it or not, and maybe explore different ways to do it.
This recent wave of AI transformation, the the context that you’re operating in changes every three months. It’s too fast for anyone who doesn’t get energy out of following these types of things, which I feel in this moment I’m lucky to be one of those people, but I there are a lot of people that find that exhausting, and even this space is exhausting for me, and I have a pretty high tolerance for that.
So one of the things that we’re thinking a lot about is how do we anchor our focus onto things that don’t change in time quite so fast. I mentioned before, we’re in the business of creating an environment where children grow into adults. That’s what a K 12 school is, and they need a collection of experiences, and they’re going to go through a collection of realizations and phases. They’re going to build their own identity as separate from their parents. They’re going to do all these things. I think that is still what we can be doing.
Then, if we look in this AI industry for opportunities to do that better, that shifts the equation from like how can I possibly keep up to what other things can I leverage to do this thing that we’ve always been doing. So that’s one angle that we go with in a real sort of structural sense.
I don’t know how the GPA survives. If I play out, and this is much less of an elementary school problem than a high school problem, but so long as the GPA is tied to college acceptances, and so long as it’s a compression of years worth of information into a single letter that then gets averaged out, we’re going to have students choosing between: Do I get an A with AI, or do I risk a B plus and learn something? And that’s not an environment that we as educators can create for them. That is not a fair environment for them to operate in.
We have to figure that one out. And it may be different reporting. It may be richer portfolio style stuff. We don’t really know yet, but that is sort of top of mind as a systems systems thing.
AI might also be the answer to that, which is that if you can document that richly and you can pull stuff out, we can actually write up really rich explanations of any student and how they think and what makes them unique in a way that was structurally impossible previously.
