Emerson Collective and XQ Institute collaborated with Mesh Ed and Betaworks to host a two-day advisory event. The event culminated in a workshop, which we share here. The gathering aimed to highlight the transformative impact of AI in education, focusing specifically on "High School Redesign" during the second day. The XQ team presented strategic insights that guide their work, ranging from an introduction to Project-Based Learning to the benefits of a new Student Performance Framework and learner competencies. The objective of the event was to foster meaningful connections between pioneering AI innovators and seasoned educators and to disseminate these insights across the educational field.

While AI is already revolutionizing various sectors, our high school education system remains stagnant, intensifying social inequalities and hindering the full realization of students' potential. This summit aims to pivot from mere theoretical discourse to actionable solutions, emphasizing AI's capacity to redefine high school education, particularly through initiatives like Project-Based Learning and competency-based frameworks. In a landscape cluttered with well-intentioned but often overwhelming discussions on both the transformative promise and ethical dilemmas of AI, our one-day generative session stands out. Its goal is not to unearth a single, flawless solution but to identify areas of mutual agreement and shared enthusiasm among a diverse group of participants, thereby refining our collective direction.

We employed a core framework anchored in an Impact-Effort Matrix—a straightforward yet effective tool for prioritizing tasks based on their potential impact and required effort. This matrix is instrumental in facilitating consensus on which initiatives offer the highest impact for the least effort, guiding our collective decision-making process.

Moreover, we strategically assembled a cross-functional team of experts, deliberately curating a mix of individuals both from within the educational sector and beyond. This included thought leaders in broader AI and design thinking spheres, as well as actual practicing educators and administrators from high schools across America. The intent was to foster a multidisciplinary dialogue that enriches our collective understanding and propels us toward meaningful, actionable solutions."

How can AI, help make High School more relevant to both the educator and the learner?

High schools are at a crucial juncture, responsible for preparing students for an uncertain future. As XQ Institute's work reveals, high schools face an array of challenges—educational, ethical, and developmental. Artificial Intelligence (AI) introduces an additional layer of complexity to this landscape. While AI has the potential to revolutionize teaching methods and enable personalized learning experiences, it also raises ethical concerns, including data privacy and algorithmic bias.

Beyond the ethical considerations, the introduction of AI into the educational space could have far-reaching implications for the cognitive and emotional development of adolescents. The technology could alter the traditional student-teacher relationship, perhaps reducing human interaction in favor of machine-led tutoring. We need to ask hard questions: What is the role of a teacher in this AI-influenced educational landscape? How will AI affect the critical interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence that students typically develop through human interaction in the classroom?

The summit aims to create a focused discussion among career educators, design thinkers, ed tech specialists, and AI technologists. The objective is not to provide a one-size-fits-all solution but rather to identify overlapping areas of interest and concern. By doing this, we hope to narrow down the scope of our collective focus on the application of AI in education. Additionally, we will perform sentiment analysis to capture the room's collective opinions and emotional responses concerning the state of AI in education as of October 2023.

This gathering is not just about problem-solving but also about understanding where we stand at this particular historical moment. Our aim is to harness this multi-disciplinary knowledge to navigate the challenges and opportunities that AI presents in the context of high school education.

Our generative workshop was a carefully designed blend of many of our facilitator’s experiences, as well as methodologies drawn from AJ & Smart(source for AJ & Smart) and Jake Knapp's Crazy 8s exercise (source for Crazy 8s), adapted to fit the time constraints and specific strategic objectives we faced. We further refined these ideas with input from colleagues and attendees, with an emphasis on quality, engagement, and fun. The goal was to generate a meaningful array of actionable artifacts that could serve as a foundation for ourselves and others in the educational field.

XQ Institute is the nation’s leading organization dedicated to rethinking the high school experience so that every student graduates ready to succeed in life. 

Our vision is for young people everywhere to have vibrant high schools where students can grow to the fullest as civic participants, critical readers, proactive problem solvers, original thinkers, generous collaborators, and learners for life. 

XQ works in communities throughout the country, with individual schools and entire school systems, to help them dream big about what high school could be, turn their innovative ideas into action, and create more rigorous and equitable schools.

Since launching in 2015, XQ has partnered with 21 individual public high schools—both district schools and charters—across 12 states. XQ has also partnered with three urban school districts in New York City, Tulsa, and Washington, D.C., and one state school system in Rhode Island.

The five XQ Learner Outcomes provide a north star for students—propelling them to engage deeply in their own learning and to master the knowledge and skills to meet the challenges—and opportunities—that their futures hold.

Derived from the five XQ Learner Outcomes, the XQ Competencies provide an actionable framework to design and deliver relevant and interdisciplinary learning experiences, assess and certify learning, and fulfill meaningful accountability purposes.

The XQ Design Principles can guide any school community that’s ready to rethink high school so all students achieve the XQ Learner Outcomes. These research-backed principles are foundational to the XQ school design process, which has been used by teams across the country to redesign their existing schools or design new ones.

In an era marked by rapid advancements in AI, the traditional high school education system grapples with increasing obsolescence. With this urgency, our summit assembled a multidisciplinary team of 50 experts to move beyond debates and theorizations. We focused on conceivable actionable solutions, employing an Impact vs. Effort Matrix to guide collective decision-making. This was not just a problem-solving exercise but also meant as a qualitative diagnostic tool, the findings we share here in the spirit of open collaboration and “morphic resonance”.

Drawing inspiration from Rupert Sheldrake's work on morphic fields, our summit aimed to harness the collective intelligence of its participants. Sheldrake, a biologist and philosopher, posits that morphic fields can amplify the synergistic effects of collaborative efforts. According to Rupert Sheldrake, morphic resonance is a biological hypothesis positing that similar systems or species can inherit collective memories and traits from their predecessors, thereby influencing their subsequent formation and behavior. This concept suggests that natural systems are not governed by fixed laws but rather evolve through ingrained habits over time.

His concept of "morphic resonance" suggests that insights can resonate across a collective, expediting the learning process ("In a team attuned through morphic resonance, what one learns, we all learn"). This framework aligns with our objective to map solutions on an Impact-Effort axis, moving us beyond mere quantitative metrics to embrace more nuanced, qualitative measures of impact (Sheldrake, On Morphic Fields).

Traditional metrics often depend on 'hard' sciences like physics. However, as Sheldrake argues, the biology-based concept of morphic fields suggests that impact can be organic and emergent, not merely quantifiable ("The hypothesis of morphic fields... arose from biology rather than physics"). Furthermore, the self-organizing nature of these fields lends itself to capturing the synergistic impact of collaborative efforts ("The hypothesis of morphic fields: All self-organizing systems...").

In today's rapidly evolving landscape of high school redesign and emerging AI technologies, Rupert Sheldrake's concept of morphic resonance offers an invaluable framework for collective learning and innovation. This almost biologically rooted "law of nature" suggests that our communal efforts are not just additive but resonant, allowing each new iteration to inherently draw upon the collective insights and experiences of the community. This perspective shifts our perspective, even if just for one day, on how one measures "impact" from a mere physical measure of a force applied to a mass to a more nuanced, biological resonance within a community openly designing together.

The summit's focus on generative design resonates with the interdisciplinary nature of both Sheldrake's and Eisenstein's works. Morphic fields, akin to guiding biological systems, can similarly guide the collective intelligence of our summit attendees toward generating innovative solutions. Just as morphic fields guide the formation of complex natural systems, our collaborative thinking guides us toward emergent solutions. (Sheldrake (1981), "A New Science of Life.”)