When 98 high school students from all 50 states gathered in a replica of the U.S. Senate, they did what many adults have struggled to do: debate and pass a detailed policy for AI in schools. But their Students First Act reveals something deeper—not just what young people want from AI policy, but how deeply traditional ideas about assessment, fairness, and learning shape what students believe school should be.

Timestamps

• [00:03:00] AI Misuse or Fear Management? — Why students reaching for AI may have less to do with laziness and more to do with academic pressure, perfectionism, overloaded schedules, and fear of failure.
• [00:07:00] Students Are Using AI—But Where Are the Rules? — A look at the gap between widespread student AI use and the lack of clear, district-wide guidance on responsible use.
• [00:09:00] 98 Students Write the Students First Act — High school students from all 50 states gather in Boston to debate AI literacy, graded assessments, writing, citations, due process, and equitable access.
• [00:14:00] What Did the Students Actually Protect? — A deeper examination of how the students' policy protects traditional tests, essays, and assessments—and what that tells us about the school systems they've experienced.
• [00:17:00] What If the Oral Defense Became the Assessment? — A compelling alternative emerges: instead of using oral defenses to catch AI misuse, make students explaining and defending their thinking a normal part of demonstrating learning. 

Resources Mentioned

• Project Momentum — A 10-week cohort led by Dr. Sabba Quidwai and Dan Fitzpatrick for senior school and system leaders developing AI strategy: projectmomentum.ai

Explore More from Designing Schools

🤝 Partner with Us: Join the AI Power Circle and collaborate with forward-thinking educators building the future with AI.

📘 Get the Book: Designing Schools - a practical blueprint to transform your campus with creativity, leadership, and innovation.

🎓 Prepare Your Students for an AI Future: The Future Ready Student AI Playbook a 10-hour course experience to graduate your students AI ready.

For questions, email: [email protected]

With Claude for Teachers, ChatGPT, and Gemini all competing for classrooms, school leaders may feel pressure to pick the “right” AI platform, but that’s the wrong place to start. This episode explains why sustainable AI strategy begins with identifying broken workflows, capturing your organization’s proprietary knowledge, and building systems that can work across whatever AI model comes next. 

Explore More from Designing Schools

• 🤝 Partner with Us: Join the AI Power Circle and collaborate with forward-thinking educators building the future with AI.
• 📘 Get the Book: Designing Schools - a practical blueprint to transform your campus with creativity, leadership, and innovation.
• 🎓 Prepare Your Students for an AI Future: The Future Ready Student AI Playbook a 10-hour course experience to graduate your students AI ready.

For questions, email: [email protected]

As Nobel laureates, economists, and AI researchers warn that society may not be ready for AI-driven disruption, Dr. Sabba Quidwai asks the question educators actually need answered: What does “act now” look like in schools? This episode explores why access restrictions and predicting future jobs miss the larger challenge—and makes the case for judgment intelligence, the ability to decide, evaluate, refine, and reject, as a critical human advantage in the age of AI. 

Timestamps

[00:00] — The warning from AI and economic leaders: More than 2,000 people, including Nobel laureates and AI researchers, sign the We Must Act Now statement warning that society isn't prepared for the disruption ahead.

[03:00] — The assignment hidden behind the headlines: Rather than simply warning against AI, the statement calls for institutions that ensure AI complements humans—turning the challenge into a design and teaching problem.

[04:15] — Two places schools are targeting the wrong problem: The episode examines unequal AI access and the mismatch between how students are prepared for careers and where future workforce shortages may actually emerge.

[06:25] — Why “judgment intelligence” matters: As AI makes generating answers nearly effortless, the human advantage shifts toward knowing what to select, refine, question, and reject.

[08:20] — “Prompt the human before the machine”: A practical classroom loop—decide, observe, correct—asks students to reason independently before comparing their thinking with AI and defending their revisions. 

 Explore More from Designing Schools

🤝 Partner with Us: Join the AI Power Circle and collaborate with forward-thinking educators building the future with AI.

• 📘 Get the Book: Designing Schools - a practical blueprint to transform your campus with creativity, leadership, and innovation.
• 🎓 Prepare Your Students for an AI Future: The Future Ready Student AI Playbook a 10-hour course experience to graduate your students AI ready.

For questions, email: [email protected]

A dramatic cheating case at Brown University reveals a much deeper issue than AI misuse—it exposes an education system that rewards grades over genuine learning. Drawing on new Microsoft and Docebo research, Dr. Sabba Quidwai connects the challenges facing schools and workplaces, arguing that the future belongs to people who develop judgment, critical thinking, and the ability to partner effectively with AI rather than simply use it.

Timestamps

00:00 – The Brown University Wake-Up Call

• A take-home exam filled with perfect scores collides with an in-person final where students struggle, raising bigger questions about what assessments actually measure.

03:00 – Microsoft’s AI in Education Report

• AI adoption is widespread, but confidence, optimism, and perceptions of meaningful training are declining among educators and students.

07:30 – The Workplace Mirrors the Classroom

• New enterprise research reveals that organizations have adopted AI tools without fundamentally changing how people work, exposing the true AI readiness gap.

12:00 – Why Human Capability Matters More Than Technology

• Design thinking, judgment, communication, and collaboration emerge as the essential skills both schools and employers now value most.

19:30 – Redesigning Learning for the Imagination Age

• Practical recommendations for building assessments, classrooms, and learning experiences that cultivate human thinking alongside AI rather than competing against it.

Explore More from Designing Schools

🤝 Partner with Us: Join the AI Power Circle and collaborate with forward-thinking educators building the future with AI.

📘 Get the Book: Designing Schools - a practical blueprint to transform your campus with creativity, leadership, and innovation.

🎓 Prepare Your Students for an AI Future: The Future Ready Student AI Playbook a 10-hour course experience to graduate your students AI ready.

For questions, email: [email protected]

AI has already become a daily thinking partner for most students, yet many are navigating its use without the decision-making frameworks needed to use it responsibly. In this episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores new research, the OECD and European Union's AI Literacy Framework, and practical tools like WISE and the Confidence Check to help educators, parents, and students build judgment, not just AI skills.

Timestamps

00:00 – The 11 PM Decision

• A powerful story illustrates the real choice students face every day: letting AI do the work or using it to strengthen their own thinking.

02:39 – What the Latest Research Reveals

• New findings from Common Sense Media and Anthropic highlight how rapidly AI adoption is growing among young people—and why today's challenge is teaching judgment rather than restricting access.

07:30 – The OECD & EU AI Literacy Framework

• A deep dive into the newly released international AI Literacy Framework, explaining the difference between simply using AI and becoming AI literate.

16:04 – Turning the Framework into Classroom Practice

• Practical strategies for educators, including using NotebookLM and AI assistants to transform the framework into rubrics, lessons, and curriculum aligned to existing standards.

18:04 – The WISE Framework & Confidence Check

• Dr. Quidwai introduces two practical decision-making frameworks that help students—and adults—make thoughtful, ethical, and informed choices when using AI.

Explore More from Designing Schools

🤝 Partner with Us: Join the AI Power Circle and collaborate with forward-thinking educators building the future with AI.

📘 Get the Book: Designing Schools - a practical blueprint to transform your campus with creativity, leadership, and innovation.

🎓 Prepare Your Students for an AI Future: The Future Ready Student AI Playbook a 10-hour course experience to graduate your students AI ready.

For questions, email: [email protected]

As AI transforms both classrooms and the workplace, educators face a growing crisis of trust. In this episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores why AI detection tools are creating unintended harm, how surveillance is replacing meaningful assessment, and why portfolios, not policing offer a more human-centered way to prepare students for an AI-driven future.

Timestamps

00:00 – The Mirror Test & The Trust Crisis Begins

• A powerful story of online AI surveillance during college exams reveals the growing breakdown of trust between educators and students.

02:30 – Why AI Detection Is Failing

• Research highlights the rise of AI-related academic integrity cases and the limitations of AI detection tools, including their impact on multilingual and neurodivergent students.

09:40 – From Detection to Design

• The conversation shifts from blaming students to redesigning learning environments that prioritize authentic evidence of understanding.

11:00 – The Same Problem in the Job Market

• AI now screens resumes before humans ever see them, making portfolios and authentic demonstrations of learning increasingly valuable.

14:15 – Designing Portfolio-Based Learning for the AI Era

• Practical strategies for educators, students, and school leaders to begin implementing portfolios, reflections, and learning defenses that showcase real growth.

Explore More from Designing Schools

🤝 Partner with Us: Join the AI Power Circle and collaborate with forward-thinking educators building the future with AI.

📘 Get the Book: Designing Schools - a practical blueprint to transform your campus with creativity, leadership, and innovation.

🎓 Prepare Your Students for an AI Future: The Future Ready Student AI Playbook a 10-hour course experience to graduate your students AI ready.

For questions, email: [email protected]

While many headlines claim Gen Z is using AI as a "cheat code" to avoid hard work, 17-year-old developer Olivia is proving that the opposite is true. In this episode of The Spark Effect, we debunk the narrative that technology is eroding critical thinking by going behind the scenes with a high school senior who isn't just "adopting" AI, she’s fluent in it. 

From teaching herself Python during the 2020 lockdowns to building AI-driven platforms like Teen Civics and NOVA, Olivia shares how she uses AI agents to offload menial tasks so she can engage with more complex subjects at a deeper level. Join us to discover why "building in public" on LinkedIn gave her a four-year head start on her career and how she’s mastering the "meta-skill" of learning how to learn in an era of infinite technological change.

Connect with Olivia

Stop telling young people to wait for the future, they are already building it. In this premiere of "The Spark Effect" series, high school senior, author, and entrepreneur Eme Williams shares how "baby steps" in the real world built the confidence she never found in a classroom lecture.

As AI begins to automate traditional schoolwork, this conversation explores how to nurture the "Human Advantage" the empathy, judgment, and creativity that machines simply cannot replace. Whether you're an educator looking to move beyond traditional grading or a student ready to claim your voice, learn how to turn everyday learning into a powerful digital portfolio and why the best way to prepare for 2026 is to start doing meaningful work today.

Connect with Eme Williams

Jacob Kantor was the number one sales rep everywhere he went - McGraw Hill, LAUSD, Varsity Tutors, Revolution Prep. He could have kept doing that forever. Instead, he created JK K12 Consulting and gave himself a title nobody had ever heard of: Chief DODO, which stands for District Office Door Opener.

In this episode, we dig into what it actually took to design a career from scratch, why the best first meeting is one where you never mention the product, what the post-ESSER trust gap looks like from someone who sits between EdTech companies and district leaders every day, and how he built a weekly practice of giving people their flowers publicly on LinkedIn that changed everything.

If you're a school or district leader, this conversation shows you what trust-building looks like from the other side of the table. If you're someone thinking about designing your own path instead of following a traditional one, Jacob's story is proof that it's possible, and that the messy middle is part of it.

Dr. Sabba Quidwai is the CEO of Designing Schools and author of "Designing Schools: How Design Thinking Makes YOU Irreplaceable in the Age of AI." She works with schools and districts worldwide to help educators thrive in an AI-powered world.

• Jacob Kantor's website: https://thejacobkantor.com
• Jacob on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thejacobkantor

Drawing on Microsoft's new Preparing Students for the Future of Work report, Dr. Sabba Quidwai challenges the common narrative that AI is replacing workers. Instead, she argues that AI is eliminating traditional entry-level tasks and accelerating graduates into roles that require judgment, leadership, and decision-making from day one. Through examples from workforce research, organizational change, and personal stories about AI use, she explores why schools must redesign learning experiences to prioritize human skills, visible thinking, and frameworks like SPARK and WISE that help people partner effectively with AI. 

Timestamps

00:00 – Everyone Got a Promotion

• Introduction to Microsoft's latest workforce report and the idea that AI isn't eliminating jobs—it's removing traditional entry-level work and elevating expectations for new graduates. 

05:00 – The New Fundamentals: Context Engineering and Voice

• Exploration of the emerging workforce skills employers need most, including organizing context for AI systems and developing a distinct human voice that stands out in an AI-generated world. 

09:30 – What Laundry Teaches Us About AI

• A historical look at how technology shifts work rather than eliminating it, using the evolution of laundry and household technologies as a powerful analogy for today's AI transformation. 

11:00 – The Behavior Gap and Losing Your Voice

• Lessons from Canva's AI learning initiative and Amy Blankson's personal story reveal why AI adoption challenges are often human and organizational, not technological. 

18:30 – The SPARK Framework: Prompt the Human First

• A deep dive into the SPARK framework and how educators can redesign learning experiences by clarifying the Situation, Problem, Aspiration, and Results before involving AI. 

22:00 – Stop Policing AI, Start Designing Better Work

• Why leading organizations and universities are shifting away from AI detection and toward assignments that make reasoning, judgment, and human thinking visible. 

Resources Mentioned

• Microsoft, 2026 Work Trend Index (the 67/32 stat): Work Trend Index: Microsoft’s latest research on the ways we work.
• IU Kelley AI Playbook for Faculty (detectors, defensible work): kelley.iu.edu/Kelley_AI_Playbook.pdf
• Rob Giglio / Canva, Fortune (the behavior gap): We gave our 5,000 employees a week to do nothing but learn AI. We learned the biggest blockers are human ones
• Amy Blankson, Confessions of a Writer Who Used Too Much AI: Confessions of a Writer Who Used Too Much AI
• HBR, How to Move from AI Experimentation to AI Transformation (the 90% / INSEAD-Harvard study): How to Move from AI Experimentation to AI Transformation

Explore More from Designing Schools

🤝 Partner with Us: Join the AI Power Circle and collaborate with forward-thinking educators building the future with AI.

📘 Get the Book: Designing Schools - a practical blueprint to transform your campus with creativity, leadership, and innovation.

🎓 Prepare Your Students for an AI Future: The Future Ready Student AI Playbook a 10-hour course experience to graduate your students AI ready.

For questions, email: [email protected]