Designing Schools

When did an adult first name your thread, and how old were you? Oprah was four, standing up in a little church in Mississippi.This episode brings together my favorite conversations of the month, and every one of them kept returning to agency, ambition and alignment. Jensen Huang tells Ezra Klein the worry about AI is his to carry so everyone else gets his optimism. Noam Brown says more than ten percent of his OpenAI team now works on alignment, and Oprah uses that same word about people.Along the way there's Oprah's six trees story, Rick Rubin on Hitchcock and the prompt, and public schools like Design39 and Wichita's Creative Minds where kids already run their own projects.You'll leave with three questions, one each for identity, integrity and impact, to ask a kid this week.

______

Explore More from Designing Schools

🤖 AI Together – Sign up for the free seven-day challenge: https://designingschools.org/aitogether

🤝 Partner with Us – Join the AI Power Circle and collaborate with forward-thinking educators building the future with AI: https://designingschools.org/aiteams

📘 Get the Book – Designing Schools: A practical blueprint to transform your campus with creativity, leadership, and innovation: https://designingschools.org/book

🎓 Prepare Your Students for an AI Future – The Future Ready Student AI Playbook, a 10-hour course experience to graduate your students AI ready: https://designingschools.org/services-collegeandcareer

Questions? Email us at [email protected]

What do you say to a principal who watches a chatbot rewrite her goals and then asks, "Why'd you hire me?"

In 2024, OpenAI trained its models to refine their thinking and catch their own mistakes, while schools kept grading that same behavior out of kids. MIT's 40-page report on AI named judgment as the answer and never said how to teach it, and a Grammarly survey found 55% of students feel they have no real guidance even at schools with an AI policy.

You'll hear Dario Amodei tell Anderson Cooper that his harshest critic was mostly right, and you'll hear how students in Community High School District 117 defend their own AI policy proposals to a committee of adults.

You'll leave with a quote-sorting exercise for your next staff meeting and one question that shows where students in your building make real decisions.

________

Explore More from Designing Schools

AI Together- Sign up for the free seven-day challenge here with family and classroom versions, designed around 15–20 minute daily conversations about AI.

🤝 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]

What is a kid learning when he films his homework every night to prove he didn't use AI?

In one week in September 2026, OpenAI's chief scientist wrote that we need to "preserve human agency," and Gallup found that only 20% of Americans say schools do an excellent or good job teaching kids to think critically and solve problems.

This episode makes the case that agency is the skill the Class of AGI needs most, and that school is the one institution built to grow it.

You'll hear what Larissa May of Half the Story and two researchers told parents at a UC Irvine panel, and why a field experiment with 515 startups found that access to AI "alone is not enough."

The takeaway is the AGI Readiness Walk, a one-morning practice any leadership team can start on Monday.

__________

Explore More from Designing Schools

• AI Together - Sign up for the free seven-day challenge here with family and classroom versions, designed around 15–20 minute daily conversations about AI.
• 🤝 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]

Picture a ninth grader who graduates in 2030. Adults are deciding how she can use AI. Who’s asking what she hopes to do with it?

This week on Designing Schools, Dr. Sabba Quidwai examines AI restrictions in New York and Los Angeles, Gallup’s findings on student hope and belonging, and the question every school leader needs to answer: What are we preparing our students for?

From a teacher looking for the young creators in their classroom to a district grounding technology decisions in its Portrait of a Graduate, this episode explores what happens when students’ strengths, interests, and judgment guide the work.

A pause buys time. What we build during that time matters.

Listen for a practical starting point for your next AI policy conversation and a different way to think about the class of 2030.

Explore More from Designing Schools

• AI Together - Sign up for the free seven-day challenge here with family and classroom versions, designed around 15–20 minute daily conversations about AI. 
• 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: Free Course – AI Skills for College and Career to equip your school community with future-ready skills.

For questions, email: [email protected]

AI detection may tell educators that a model was involved, but it cannot answer the question that actually matters: Did the student think, learn, and grow? This episode explores why schools should stop auditing productive struggle and start designing for it protecting the friction that builds learner agency while using AI to remove the institutional friction that keeps educators disconnected. 

Timestamps

• 00:00 — When “augment” changes the AI conversation: Debbie Millman’s graduate students reveal the complicated space between using AI as support and handing over authorship.
• 04:00 — Why struggle matters: Carl Benedikt Frey’s work connects effort, meaning, and agency—and raises the risk of AI removing valuable friction from learning.
• 07:00 — The fundamental limitation of AI detection: Emerging watermarking technology may identify AI involvement, but it still can’t distinguish between AI writing something and simply helping edit it.
• 10:00 — Designing for struggle vs. auditing students: Why treating every student as a suspect can consume educator attention and erode trust, while better assessment design makes thinking visible.
• 14:00 — The friction AI should remove: From connecting fragmented information about students to improving teacher handoffs, AI can reduce organizational friction without replacing human judgment.

Explore More from Designing Schools

• AI Together - Sign up for the free seven-day challenge here with family and classroom versions, designed around 15–20 minute daily conversations about AI.
• 🤝 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 tools can look transformative in a demo and fall apart when they encounter the messy data, workflows, and institutional knowledge of a real organization. Drawing lessons from former Lululemon CIO Julie Averill’s warnings about “AI wishing” and “AI washing,” this episode challenges school leaders to stop chasing tools and instead identify where valuable expertise is trapped and build systems that scale it. 

Timestamps

• [00:02:00] The AI Buying Trap — Why impressive AI promises often collide with the realities of established organizations, and the importance of time, people, and budgets.
• [00:03:00] AI Wishing — How leaders can fall into believing AI will magically solve difficult problems without first doing the underlying organizational work.
• [00:07:00] AI Washing & the Human Cost — Why organizations may exaggerate AI progress and what premature AI-driven restructuring can do to employee trust.
• [00:13:00] The Painkiller vs. Vitamin Test — A practical framework for deciding whether an AI tool solves a genuine problem or simply looks good in a board presentation.
• [00:15:00] Scale Expertise, Not Tools — How “scaling statements” can help districts uncover expertise trapped in people’s heads or existing systems and turn it into repeatable organizational capability.

Explore More from Designing Schools

• AI Together - Sign up for the free seven-day challenge here with family and classroom versions, designed around 15–20 minute daily conversations about AI.
• Project Momentum - A 10-week experience for senior leaders focused on identifying and scaling expertise within their organizations: projectmomentum.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]

New research from OpenAI, Google, PwC, LinkedIn, and Coursera offers a clearer picture of how AI may reshape work and why teaching’s most human qualities may become its greatest protection. This episode explores why trust, judgment, coaching, and connection matter more than ever, while challenging school leaders to decide deliberately what AI should automate and what must remain fundamentally human. 

Timestamps

• 00:00 — “Do you think I’m going to have a job?” The question educators are quietly asking—and what new research can finally tell us about AI and employment.
• 05:50 — Why teaching remains human OpenAI’s concept of “relational necessity” and why trust, care, teaching, and human connection distinguish education from work that can be more easily automated.
• 11:00 — A profession can survive while jobs still change Why human necessity doesn’t guarantee unchanged staffing, and how AI productivity, budgets, enrollment, and demand elasticity could reshape teaching roles.
• 15:20 — AI at work is “broad but shallow” Google and PwC research reveals how people are actually using AI today—and why empathy, creativity, leadership, judgment, and other “durable skills” are increasing in value.
• 20:00 — Are schools preparing students for the AI economy? LinkedIn and Coursera data show rising demand for AI literacy, leading to a challenge for educators: protect the relational work that makes teaching valuable while preparing students to use AI responsibly. 

Explore More from Designing Schools

• AI Together - Sign up for the free seven-day challenge here with family and classroom versions, designed around 15–20 minute daily conversations about AI.
• Project Momentum — A 10-week experience for senior leaders focused on identifying and scaling expertise within their organizations: projectmomentum.ai. 
• 🤝 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]

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]