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🔴 Introduction
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.
Strategic Framing
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."
Problem Statement
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 in 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.
Objectives
- Our primary objective is to foster a focused approach towards integrating AI in education, with an emphasis on Project-Based Learning and the New Competencies Framework for high school stakeholders. Unlike previous discussions that have often been broad and theoretical, this initiative aims to differentiate by honing in on actionable, impactful strategies. Through our engagements with tech leaders and academic peers, we've identified a pressing need for tangible pathways in AI's educational application.
- The event's uniqueness lies in its commitment to deriving practical insights, especially in areas like PBL. On Day 2, our goal is to discern where collective enthusiasm and consensus lie, particularly in solutions that participants rank from "Low Effort / High Impact," to "High Effort/ Low Impact". Instead of chasing a singular solution, we aim to pinpoint where opportunities align with genuine, collective ENERGY and a freshly cultivated group of collaborators who may NOT otherwise have come into orbit on this topic.
Advisors Attendees
Why this workshop structure?
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.
Summary of Red Team’s Journey
🔴 The Red Team's Workshop Journey focused on addressing key problems and opportunities in the high school education system. They identified three top problems:
🔲 Through reframing these problems into opportunity statements, the team aimed to:
- Streamline the adoption of innovative practices
- Enhance student engagement
- Align the curriculum with real-world applicability.
☁️ Their "blue sky" solutions involved leveraging generative AI to create
- personalized learning experiences, implementing peer-to-peer teaching models for enhanced understanding and engagement, and re-evaluating educational standards for relevance. The team recognized the potential of generative AI in disrupting the relationship between school funding and educational quality, allowing schools with fewer resources to provide high-quality experiences.
To address these challenges, the Red Team proposed a digital platform that utilizes generative AI to analyze student engagement and performance data. The platform offers personalized learning paths, real-time feedback for educators, and a comprehensive view of student progress. It aims to transition from a time-based to a competency-based education model, focusing on mastery of skills and content.
By empowering educators with actionable insights and facilitating student-centered learning experiences, the Red Team's proposed product seeks to maximize student engagement and promote lifelong learning. The team's journey reflects a commitment to innovation, equity, and the transformation of high school education.
Procedures
- Review materials
- Announce roles:
- 1 Facilitator: guides the exercise
- 1 Note-taker: captures real-time notes and takes photos of the output
- 6-7 Advisors: Provide domain expertise
- Encourage Advisors to log into the Team’s Notion to contribute, especially to add links/resources in the “Notepad” sections
- Conduct icebreaker
- Establish norms for the rest of this day
- Focus, to the fullest extent possible.
- We each have a voice at this table.
- This is our opportunity to take risks. Embrace wild ideas.
Timer [seated]
Materials
- AV for Note-taker to share Notion on screen
- Post-its (plain white rectangular)
- Sharpies (writing material)
- Rolling easel
- Personal mat to place Post-its
- Sticker dots for voting
- Virtual and physical timer
Outcomes
- Teams are familiar with each other
- Teams understand the exercise and materials they will be using
FACILITATOR AND NOTE-TAKER GUIDELINES Total time available: 10 min - Overview: 5 min - Ice breaker: 5 min Icebreaker format: - State your name - What do you do for work / where do you work?
Procedures
- Within 10 minutes, each Advisor writes down as many problems or challenges they perceive:
- INSIDE OF THE HIGH SCHOOL CLASSROOM or IN HIGH SCHOOL EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM
- Example: “High schools are failing our students in math, they can’t relate and it is boring for them.”
Notes:
- Use one Post-it for each problem/challenge
- You will select up to 5 problems/challenges to share with the Team
Timer [seated]
Materials
- AV for Note-taker to share Notion on screen
- Post-its (plain rectangular)
- Sharpies (writing material)
- Rolling easel
- Personal mat to place Post-its
- Virtual and physical timer
Outcomes
- Each Advisor has at least five problems/challenges written down on Post-its
FACILITATOR AND NOTE-TAKER GUIDELINES Total time available: 5 min Note-taker will take a photo of each advisor’s board of post-its 📷 and upload all of them to this section of the Notion section.
Notes
Every state does something different—trying to quantify is a mess; the galaxy plot—identifying this graph (how many grade levels is your school trying to do in comparison to the nation); SES—access to capital, what is happening in the minds of the child is correlated with the income level of their parents, year after year, the stability of this failure that it’s impossible to confirm without identifying it simply as institutionalized inequality.
We don’t really teach complex thinking; not sure how to teach students about a flow state, a sync in thinking and engaging.
Week-by-week understanding of dynamic learning flow, like a learning spring with students; could almost predict that something will come through and emerge at the dynamic rotations.
Most aspects of human inquiry is boring; but what about the subjective experience of learning; when ever there is a pattern of observables between two raters, and that can be fed to AI, it becomes more objective; how do you give a model that example, when privacy and data are paramount, can we even feed that to model without complication?
High school students having agency over changing the schools; democracy is the big theme here—closely aligned with students not have a voice in their learning; in general the theme is inflexible structures. They are designed for students of the average knowing there isn’t really an average.
Innovations not developed to be easily implemented into high schools. Centering design around inflexible institutions; knowledge silos not allowing for interdisciplinary curriculum instructions; squeezing interesting things into schools; structures of schools messed up the curiosity of information;
Define intersubjectivity: if you asked everyone what the mood of the room, a through line would emerge, and that’s an objective experience. Centroid or distribution of—that becomes and objective fact
Understanding it as how different people assign meaning to it; how to reflect on that quantitative data; people in a public school setting, in institutions that represent and build from them, many organizations where you gain certifications
Disconnect in the dialogue of why we have high schools; general problem of scale; how much is too much, but was is the comfortable size for managing relationships, not just people; viral learning—getting students working with each other, the students work and build with each other.
One of the winners of the tool competition was peer teaching, use AI to pair students up into groups.
Procedures
- Each Advisor selects up to 2-3 problems/challenges to share with the Team, spending ~30 seconds on each problem/challenge (3 mins max per Advisor)
- After each Advisor shares, Facilitator takes the Post-its and attaches them to the rolling easel, grouping common problems/challenges together
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Timer [seated]
Materials
- AV for Note-taker to share Notion on screen
- Post-its (plain rectangular)
- Sharpies (writing material)
- Rolling easel
- Personal mat to place Post-its
- Virtual and physical timer
Outcomes
- The team has an idea of all problems/challenges inside high school classrooms or the high school educational system
- Problems/challenges are grouped by commonality
FACILITATOR AND NOTE-TAKER GUIDELINES Total time available: 30 min - Each Advisor: 3 min max Reminders Facilitator should: - Remind others to respect the time constraint and to listen to the shared problems/challenges - Track the time for each Advisor - Collect the Post-its from each Advisor - Group common post-its together Note-taker should: Summarize each Advisor’s conversation on the shared problems/challenges
Student Engagment/Student experience:
- Student disengagement connecting to the flow state concept
- Subjective state of the student, not engaged and bored
- Why school? Why students? Which of these are about the subjective experience and which are about the leaning itself. What we’re learning dictated by standards, standards are wrong, do we change that?
Teachers
- Teacher workload and capacity; retention and burnout; shortages
Inequality
Looking to identify the key framing: Inequity, Engagement, Agency (Student)—connected to engagement, Teachers, Change Management
Is there a connection that can be measured between Inequality and Engagement, powerful understanding of the gap between, able to predict and connect to cognitive development.
Engagement as a fundamental right—are students earning it? Forced to attend, even you’re ahead
How flexible is a system to adopt change? The mechanism of change resistance
You have a group of kids, they all have different relationships to those different competencies (Like XQ’s Comps); imagine the affinity mapping practice—I have all these skills that I’m good and gravitating towards; a giant map of 30 students all achieving this; that is super hard for an educator to organize; a quick turnaround of how to get all that into an engaging project to drive student engagement and inequity.
Plasticity doesn’t have it’s own rules, if you can understand what those mechanisms are, you can change those mechanisms and change those, we can disrupt those with genAI
- The competencies could be the way in for students, the content flows into them easily,
- Ai is good at clustering, it is also really good at first drafting things
- It’s really good at learning relevance to me, I can start to accumulate temperature on them to identify the weight of a solution
- The AI can also develop agency, or at least ideas,
Procedures
- Each Advisor receives two red dots to vote on the most pressing problems, doing so silently
- Facilitator moves the top 3 problems/challenges based on the number of votes to the middle of the easel
Notes:
- If there is a tie-breaker, Advisors will vote for the top problem/challenge by using their hand
Timer [standing]
Materials
- AV for Note-taker to share Notion on screen
- Post-its (plain rectangular)
- Rolling easel
- Virtual and physical timer
- ¼ inch dot stickers (round and red color)
Outcomes
- Advisors vote
- Top 3 problems/challenges are identified
FACILITATOR AND NOTE-TAKER GUIDELINES Total time available: 5 min Facilitator reminds Advisors to vote silently
Procedure
- The top 3 problems/challenges are rephrased by the original author outloud to the Team. The team works to reframe the problem into a "How might we...?" statement.
Example:
Problem: “We have no means of measuring the efficacy of these AI tools my students are using."
Reframed: "How might we create means of measurement and efficacy of AI products?"
Timer [standing]
Materials
- AV for Note-taker to share Notion on screen
- Post-its (plain rectangular)
- Rolling easel
- Virtual and physical timer
Outcomes
- There are 3 “How might we…” statements and they are captured in the Team Notes section
FACILITATOR AND NOTE-TAKER GUIDELINES Total time available: 5 min Note-taker captures the “How might we...” statements
Notes
Orchestrating work - how do we organize and demonstrate the organization of the work;
How can AI help schools learn about what is engaging students, chronic disengagement is lost it?
KPIs for the teachers provided by the AI
Surface the change management, but then what about the implementation? Is there a forum?
Empowering teachers as the change makers, the solutioneers, but change can be a threat to their credibility, stability, etc.
What are the functions of the stakeholders outside of the system—what is the school for them? It’s contribution/their contribution to the school?
Models of access and equality; funding amount to be considered of what the capacity is, service has to be provided by some level of expertise; and competition for talent; open verses the closed competition, huge amount of inequity to that.
The law of accelerated returns, need support for that infrastructure
- Communities
Procedure
- Brainstorm. Allowing 5 mins for each of the top problems/challenges, each Advisor writes down as many solutions they have for the specific problem/challenge
- The format for Solutions on a Post-it should be no more than 3 sentences, which sounds similar to an “elevator pitch”
- Given the current landscape of companies and AI products, hold space for how technology may play a role in each solution Post-it
- Example solution: “Build the most dynamic curriculum on becoming an Entrepreneur; using AI co-pilot trained on insights from world-famous business leaders.”
- This process will be repeated for the problem/challenge, totaling 15 mins
- Shareout. Each Advisor selects up to 3 solutions to share with the Team, spending 1:30 min max per advisor on sharing solutions (~30 secs on each solution). Limit to three sentences “elevator pitch.”
- Sorting. After each Advisor shares, Facilitator takes all solution Post-its from the Advisor and attaches them to the rolling easel. Team reads all solutions and [if applicable] Team supports in sorting common solutions under each problem/challenge
Timer [seated]
Materials
- AV for Note-taker to share Notion on screen
- Post-its (plain blue rectangular)
- Sharpies (writing material)
- Rolling easel
- Personal mat to place Post-its
- Virtual and physical timer
Outcomes
- All solutions are sorted and presented under each of the top 3 problems/challenges
FACILITATOR AND NOTE-TAKER GUIDELINES Total time available: 40 min - Solutions for each problem/challenge (total 3): 5 mins - Solutions discussion (1:30 min each): ~15 mins Reminders Facilitator should: - Encourage as many solutions to be written. No pressure on “over” designing - Reminder others to respect the time constraint and to listen to the shared problems/challenges - Track the time for each Advisor - Collect the Post-its from each Advisor Note-taker should: Summarize each Advisor’s conversation on the solutions
Notes
There are dedicated individuals ammased to facilitate the redesign and implementation — how does this connect with the change management aspect?
Avoid issues of fragmentation; the regulation is a barrier as well; data and rules about student safety; there is a pathway through academic research;
Procedure
- Each Advisor receives 5 red dots to vote on the most appealing solutions, doing so silently
Notes:
- If there is a tie-breaker, Advisors will vote for the top problem/challenge by using their hand
- Only 1 vote per solution
Timer [standing]
Materials
- AV for Note-taker to share Notion on screen
- Post-its (plain rectangular)
- Rolling easel
- Virtual and physical timer
- ¼ inch dot stickers (round and red color)
Outcomes
- At least 3 solutions are identified via votes
FACILITATOR AND NOTE-TAKER GUIDELINES Total time available: 5 min
Procedures
- Facilitator selects at least 3 and at most 5 of the most voted-on solutions and moves them to the top of the matrix side of the easel
- Advisors discuss each of the solutions to determine the feasibility and place the solution on the “Effort vs. Impact” matrix
- Vertical axis: level of impact of the solution
- Horizontal axis: level of effort required to create the solution
- Each Advisor receives 1 green dot to vote on the most appealing solution from the matrix, doing so silently
- By the end of this session, the team has landed on one idea to build a roadmap for.
Notes:
- The objective of this exercise is to gather consensus, if not a majority, on where to place each solution on the matrix
Timer [standing]
Materials
- AV for Note-taker to share Notion on screen
- Rolling easel
- Virtual and physical timer
- ¼ inch dot stickers (round and green color)
Outcomes
- Top solutions are on the effort vs. impact matrix with their votes
FACILITATOR AND NOTE-TAKER GUIDELINES Total time available: 20 min - Placing solutions on matrix: 15 mins - Vote on matrix: 5 mins
Notes
Whatever solution is identified, all stakeholders need to be identified to be able to interact and engage in support with one another.
Orchestrating
Photos:
Procedures
- The facilitator rolls the Team’s easel to the general area for viewing.
Side 1: Problems/challenges & solutions
- Grouped problems/challenges
- Voted on top 3 problems/challenges
- All possible solutions under each of the Top 3 problems/challenges
Side 2: Mapped matrix
- Quadrant with at least the top 3 solutions plotted based on effort vs. impact
Timer [walk]
Materials
- Rolling easel
- General area for a break
- Coffee, tea, biscuits break
Outcomes
- Advisors have scanned the problems/challenges, solutions, and mapped matrices from the other Teams
FACILITATOR AND NOTE-TAKER GUIDELINES Total time available: 15 min Facilitator should guide the Team back to workspaces Note-takers should take a photo of all easels
Red team! Now go Build your Final Team Reports!
