Not Mincing Words: The Need for Future-Facing Conversations

Sometimes, I want to roll my eyes when I hear something. Since I am an animated person, it’s hard to disguise my feelings. When I forget to tell my face to stay in a neutral position, my expression gives it away. This week, I had a moment when I slipped.

“We should call it evidence-based practices vs. data-informed decision-making.” 

Yup, this was a headliner topic at a recent leadership conference. It’s not abnormal that we split hairs on terminology in education, but c’mon, is this REALLY a hot-button topic in leadership these days? Why is no one talking about innovating our schools in meaningful ways? It seems like we are pulling out our “greatest hits cassette tapes” of redefining what we already do instead of having future-facing conversations. Has no one been paying attention to what AI is up to these days? Oh my goodness, let’s get our heads out of the sand and start actually grappling with how structures and systems need to change. 

It seems like since Covid everyone has “change fatigue” and we are still reeling from this disruption. But how much has really changed since Covid? Really? 

Our grading policies? Nope

Our content standards? Nope

Our school schedules? Nope

Our teacher evaluation process? Nope

Our school calendars? Nope

These are just a few  “bread and butter” aspects of our schools. We haven’t even touched on deeper issues such as what is the purpose of an education? Surely we can’t still claim that a university degree is the end-all-be-all for our students currently sitting in Kindergarten?

Long before generative AI came into the zeitgeist, the impact of technology has been spoken about. Most of us might be familiar with the work of the futurist Alvin Toffler who famously quoted that “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”   Or maybe some of us are aware of Toffler’s more obscure predecessor Norbert Wiener, who wrote in his book, The Human Use of Human Beings, who, back in the 1950’s shocking wrote,  “The ‘mechanical brain’ and similar machines can destroy human values or enable us to realize them as never before.” – which is something, 70 years later, that we are currently grappling with the possible trajectories of the use of AI. 

So, it’s hard to believe that we don’t have enough “evidence” to support a change in practices. Plenty of intelligent conjectures exist that can “inform” the need to continue to innovate and challenge our educational paradigms. Here are just a few reads that seem to highlight the potential uses of AI.

• Why we need to rethink education in the artificial intelligence age
• Education in the AI era: a long-term classroom technology based on intelligent robotics
• An AI-based Learning Companion Promoting Lifelong Learning Opportunities for All

But here’s the thing: if we stopped for a minute and just took a moment to consider the possibilities, then we wouldn’t need to rely on predictions. Instead, we could actually take over the wheel and start driving our learning community toward improving humanity and our relationships with the planet with a true intentional shift to ensure that we use AI for Good. We must think backward from there and re-design what education could look like. 

Let’s stop repackaging our terminology and, as leaders, rally around some more interesting questions:

• If you knew that 70% of the jobs that people have today will disappear in 10 years, what would you stop doing immediately at school?

• How might your role in education change if we truly embraced AI as a learning companion rather than just a tool? 

• What would education look like if we designed it primarily around ‘learning, unlearning, and relearning’ rather than content mastery?

• What would happen if we replaced homework with ‘future-work’ – tasks that prepare students for emerging challenges?

• How might we restructure education if we assumed every student would need to be both a creator and collaborator with AI?

If we were to coalesce on drafting some potential answers to these questions, we might be able to come up with a blueprint for education that actually serves our students’ futures rather than our past. We might discover that the most radical thing we can do is to stop pretending that minor tweaks to an industrial-age system will prepare students for an AI-augmented world.

The real “evidence” we should be examining isn’t whether our current practices work—it’s whether they’ll matter in the world our students will inherit. The real “data” that should inform our decisions isn’t last year’s test scores—it’s the rapidly evolving landscape of human potential and purpose in an AI-enhanced society.

So perhaps the next time you’re in a conference or a workshop discussing semantics or small-scale adjustments, ask yourself: Is THIS the conversation that truly needs to happen? Are we brave enough to face the future head-on and reimagine education from the ground up?

Because if we’re not, we risk becoming as obsolete as those cassette tapes we’re still playing.

What conversation will you start tomorrow?