AmpED to 11

Brett Roer came in ready to talk about what an AI moratorium breaks. Rebecca Bultsma wanted to talk about what the rush toward AI already broke.

He had just left a New York City middle school, two weeks into the year, trying to live inside a pause that showed up after the summer work was done. The curriculum is on screens. The approved tools are off. Students can still open an unvetted tool at home. Brett wants a way to teach this without getting students in trouble for the assignment.

Rebecca will not let that scramble settle the question. Schools have stacked vendors, screens, and spending, and she thinks a pause might be how you find out which of it was ever for students. A moratorium, she argues, is only as useful as the year a school spends inside it. Brett wants the answer. She holds the question open on purpose.

John Schembari, a school improvement consultant who advises student teachers at Brooklyn College, steps into that argument. Fire is his comparison for AI. He does not want teachers to become the AI police. He does think they have to teach the difference between AI that extends a student's thinking and AI that replaces it. Brett says that line pushed him in a way he was not hoping to be pushed.

Do not stop there. Brett still has the Briarcliff story: students who once called AI rules a rollercoaster, and who now say there isn't one. A few of them add the line a policy memo never includes. They are not sure they need the AI their teachers just allowed. Then the guest takes the host chair, and the questions belong to Brett and Rebecca.

In this episode, you'll hear:

• A pause, as it felt in one school two weeks into the year
• Where Brett and Rebecca refuse to land
• An equity question that is not about access
• Students who got clear rules and still hesitated
• The stretch where the hosts have to answer

Subscribe to AmpED to 11, and stay through the chair switch. That is the part worth the rest of the episode.

How can state education leaders create consistent standards without limiting local innovation? Brett Roer and Rebecca Bultsma welcome Dewayne McClary, Deputy State Superintendent at the Virginia Department of Education, to explore the policies, partnerships and practical decisions shaping the future of learning across the commonwealth.

Dewayne traces his path from teaching at the rural South Carolina middle school he once attended to leadership roles in Arlington Public Schools, DC Public Schools and Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools. He explains his approach of “creating floors and not ceilings”: setting a strong statewide standard while giving school divisions room to go further.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How flexible seat-time policies can support competency-based learning
• Why micro-credentials should connect directly to what students need beyond the classroom
• What Dewayne means by designing systems at the margin
• Why auditing screen time can be more useful than debating it
• What AI cannot replace in education, explained through Dewayne’s muffin, icing and cupcake analogy
• How an AI-powered transportation tool changed his thinking about student tracking
• Who belongs in Dewayne’s “Ocean’s 11” network of trusted education leaders
• What happens when Dewayne takes the host chair and questions Brett and Rebecca

Tune in for a candid conversation about innovation, AI, accountability and building education systems that give every learner a strong foundation without placing a ceiling on what is possible.

Subscribe to AmpED to 11 and share the episode with an education leader in your network.

When a superintendent told Babak Mostaghimi, “I think we’re Blockbuster Video, and Netflix is coming,” it became a warning, and an invitation, to rethink education before the future arrived.

In this episode, Babak joins Brett Roer and Rebecca Bultsma to explore why improving the existing school system is no longer enough. He breaks down LearnerStudio’s three horizons of education, from the industrial factory model to a future designed around human flourishing, agency, and lifelong learning.

They also unpack the growing tech clash in education: nostalgic humanists who want to remove technology altogether, techno-nihilists who want to automate everything, and the human-centered middle way between them. From screen time and AI literacy to creativity, collaboration, data sovereignty, and the skills students need for an uncertain future, the conversation asks a bigger question: Are we using AI to deepen humanity, or replace it?

Midway through, Babak takes over as host and puts Brett and Rebecca in the hot seat.

What you’ll learn:

• The three horizons of education, and why reform can only go so far
• Why changing the architecture matters more than adding new content or tools
• How the “swim, snorkel, scuba” framework explains different levels of AI literacy
• Why blanket screen bans and unrestricted technology use both miss the point
• How schools can design for agency, lifelong learning, and human flourishing
• Why the right questions may be more useful than one standardized AI policy

Tune in for a wide-ranging conversation about redesigning education for the world students are already entering.

What does a baby's face tell us about children and screens? More than any statistic on AI use.

Dr. Donna Housman, clinical psychologist and founder of Housman Learning, has spent over 35 years studying what children need to grow, learn, and thrive. Her answer starts long before any device enters the room. Emotional intelligence isn't downloadable. It has to be built first, or AI risks becoming a substitute for a child's own thinking.

Brett Roer and Rebecca Bultsma sit down with Dr. Housman to explore why kids are turning to AI as a companion, how to tell curiosity from big feelings, and why funding the adults around a child is prevention, not repair.

In this episode:

• Why EQ has to develop before AI enters a child's life
• What's driving children toward AI as a companion instead of a person
• How to tell curiosity and big feelings apart, and what each one needs
• What the Still Face Experiment reveals about screens and connection
• Who's responsible for protecting a three-year-old in an AI world

Subscribe for more, and share this episode with someone shaping the next generation.

What if the best way to teach students about AI is to hand them the keys and let them learn to drive?

Mike Taubman has spent two decades at North Star Academy Washington Park High School in Newark, New Jersey, where he now serves as teacher, program director, and AI innovation lead at Uncommon Schools. He joined North Star in 2005 as a founding English teacher, and a sabbatical years later spent auditing Jal Mehta's "deeper learning" class at Harvard reshaped how he thinks about mastery, creativity, and identity in the classroom. That thinking became Summit, the purpose and career exploration course he built for juniors and seniors, and this past spring it grew into an AI literacy pilot with his colleague Scott Kern that landed on the front page of The New York Times and on The Daily podcast.

In this conversation, Mike walks through the framework he built with students: AI as a car, something humans made, something we drive, something that comes with rules of the road. He shares how his students wrote their own AI Declaration of Independence, why he caps AI use at 20 percent of a class period, and why the relationship with a student always comes before the tool.

What you'll learn:

The AI as a car framework: why treating AI as something humans built and drive, not a force to simply accept, changes how students engage with it.

The AI Declaration of Independence: how Mike's students defined their own principles for what AI should and shouldn't do.

The 20/80 rule: why AI should never be more than a fifth of a class period, and what fills the rest of the time.

Relationship before rubric: why knowing a student's name by Friday matters more than any AI feedback tool.

A $20 experiment: Mike's simple suggestion for any educator wondering where to start this summer.

Brett and Rebecca sit with Mike to talk through what it looks like to stay in the driver's seat instead of becoming a passenger to this technology. Tune in, subscribe, and share if you're ready to turn up the volume on what's possible in education.

AI can help school leaders save time. But saved time is only valuable if leaders know where to spend it.

This week on AmpED to 11, Brett is joined by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, founder and dean of the Leverage Leadership Institute and author of Leverage Leadership 3.0. Paul has spent twenty-five years studying the habits, systems, and leadership moves that help schools improve, and his answer keeps returning to the same place: the moments when leaders are directly helping teachers get better.

In this episode, Paul brings a grounded perspective to one of the biggest questions in education right now. If AI can reduce the administrative burden on school leaders, how do we make sure those recovered hours go toward coaching, observation, feedback, and the kind of instructional leadership that actually changes outcomes?

The conversation explores what makes teacher development different from evaluation, why excellent practice needs to be seen before it can be replicated, and why AI tools trained on the average of everything may not be enough for schools trying to become exceptional. It is a thoughtful, practical episode for anyone thinking seriously about AI, leadership, and school improvement. Rebecca is away this week, so there is no AI Tip or News segment.

Listen to the full episode to hear how AI could help leaders refocus on the work that changes schools.

Rebecca hosts solo this week for a timely conversation with David Bowman, cybersecurity director for one of Utah’s largest K-12 districts, a member of the State of Utah Cyber Commission, and chair of the Statewide K-12 Cybersecurity Council. David brings a clear, practical view of what student data privacy really means inside schools, beginning with a classroom exercise where he showed students just how much information about them could be gathered, connected, and exposed. From there, the episode moves into the recent Canvas breach, the third-party analytics tools quietly embedded in EdTech platforms, and the difficult questions district leaders need to ask before trusting vendors with student information.

At the heart of the conversation is David’s argument that the greatest threat to student data is not always the outside hacker. Often, it is the company already inside the district’s ecosystem, collecting more information than schools or families realise. Rebecca and David discuss how districts can create stronger privacy expectations, build data protection into procurement, communicate more clearly with parents, and hold vendors accountable when their practices do not match the responsibility of serving children. David also explains why privacy cannot sit separately from teaching, leadership, or purchasing decisions, and why schools need the confidence to “vote with your data” as well as with their budgets.

Tune in for a grounded, accessible conversation about cybersecurity, student privacy, vendor accountability, and the leadership choices that shape trust in K-12 education.

What are today's superintendents actually facing, and why AI alone won't fix it.

Brett Roer sits down with Amy Dujon, VP of Education Brands at ARC Network, who sees patterns across hundreds of districts. With 27 years in education, from classroom teacher to principal to district leadership, Amy brings a rare vantage point on the unprecedented challenges school leaders are navigating right now.

Key Topics:

• The simultaneous, interconnected crises superintendents are holding (mental health, teacher retention, chronic absenteeism, AI adoption)
• Why leaders aren't lacking ideas about AI, they're lacking time, policy cover, and bandwidth
• The critical shift: using AI to reduce operational friction so humans have more space for connection
• What must stay human: relationship building, mental wellness, and the connections only educators can provide
• How district leaders can adopt AI thoughtfully without replacing the heart of education

If you lead a school, district, or education organization, this conversation reframes the AI debate and offers a clearer path forward.

Subscribe for weekly episodes exploring how education leaders solve real problems.

What does it mean to prepare students for a world where the tools keep changing? Bill Bass has been wrestling with that question for over two decades. As Innovation Coordinator for Parkway School District, serving 18,000 students across 29 communities, and former president of ISTE, he's seen every wave of edtech come and go. And he's still here, still asking the hard questions.

In this episode of AmpED to 11, Bill joins Brett and Rebecca to talk about the very real tension schools are navigating right now: parents who want AI kept out of classrooms, and students who will step into a world where it's everywhere. He pushes back on the idea that removing technology protects kids, challenges the myth that any of this is neutral, and makes the case for letting students make mistakes with AI while the stakes are still low.

He also gets honest about what edtech gets wrong about schools, how he manages innovation across 29 communities with 29 different opinions, and why digital literacy isn't a destination, it's a moving target.

This is one of the most grounded, clear-eyed conversations we've had on the show. If you work in education or care about where it's heading, this one's for you.

Subscribe to AmpED to 11 for conversations that move education forward.

A student called his school's AI policy "consistently inconsistent", different every period, different every classroom. That phrase is the reason this episode exists.

Brett Roer travels to Briarcliff Manor, NY for a live in-person crossover with Dr. James Kaishian, Superintendent of Briarcliff Manor Schools and host of Superkast. Around the table: English teacher Karen McCarthy, Computer Science teacher Chris Lo, and seniors Ava Wu and Noah Rinke. One conversation. Two shows. One very honest hour.

Brett runs the AI rollercoaster with the students, period by period, rule by rule, then the Spider-Man finger-pointing exercise with everyone in the room. Students point at teachers. Teachers point at the superintendent. The superintendent points in a circle. Nobody points at themselves. That diffusion is the gap.

Karen questions whether she's the right person to lead on this. Chris gave up on AI-generated questions because verifying them took longer than writing his own. Ava asks the question the whole policy debate keeps missing.

Brett's argument: stop downloading template policies. Get two pizzas, sit with your own community, and record the conversation. The wisdom is already in the room.

This episode airs simultaneously on AmpED to 11 and Superkast. Find Dr. Kaishian's show on Spotify and everywhere you listen.