Understand your students and their changing world

School leaders have always needed to understand their students: What has this new generation been exposed to? What are they thinking? This is a difficult time. Students are faced with a lot of new information, division, and fragmentation. When you factor in rapid technological changes, educators trying to understand their students are faced with something bigger than the traditional generation gap. No other technology has been able to learn from us as quickly as AI has. AI remembers things. After you use AI for three months, it knows a lot about you and your cognitive patterns. Our children interact with this life form, so knowing what’s meaningful to them – whether that’s a video game, a social media account or a problem they’re having at school – is important. 

Focus on what only you (and your teachers) can do

School leaders shouldn’t do everything. They’ve hired other people to do other jobs, and they need to motivate those people to do their jobs so that the leaders themselves can focus. Leaders need to understand that they won’t always be leading their school or district, so if they want the changes they’ve made to be carried out by people who follow them, they should focus on cultivating people who share similar ideas and about changing the culture.

In their interactions with teachers, education leaders have traditionally emphasized instruction. They have wanted teachers to become effective and efficient instructional machines. Still, with all of the technological tools at their disposal, teachers’ best value probably lies not in their instructional capabilities, but in how they do things only human beings can do: organize, facilitate, support, and coach students. This is Deeper Learning. It’s not just about going deeper into a subject matter. It’s about treating each student as unique with their interests, talents and potential. It starts by inspiring students to believe in their capacity to solve meaningful problems.

Empower students to lead their learning

Leaders need to mobilize students. They need to lead with students, so that students will take ownership of their learning. Every student needs to start by leading their education. They have AI and other technology and advisors and support, but instead of listening to lectures, they build their own learning by solving meaningful problems. When a problem is solved, they move on. Once they have experience leading their learning, they can move on to leading a community of education authentically.

When they lead a community, they’ll learn that they need other people to accomplish their goals. They’ll have the opportunity to develop social and psychological attributes such as caring, loving and wisdom. They’ll discover that being selfish does not necessarily serve their self-interest.

Create experimental spaces to fuel transformation

On a practical level, school leaders need to understand what’s changeable in their schools. Once they understand that, every school leader should build transformational changes for the future. To implement those changes, they can start small by experimenting in a small setting like a microschool or a “school within a school.” This is a place where they can allow exceptionality to exist, offer something diverse to every student, and try something different to help get disengaged students excited about school.

All of these ideas connect back to the idea of human interdependence. Unless human beings trust each other and try to build a better world (that may involve AI), many human beings really have no value. They may have self-esteem or self-respect, but their value has to be realized through creating a better place for others. In education, our value is not in competing with AI, but in using AI to make schools more interesting and to create a better place for human beings.

Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.

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