Designing Schools

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]

In this thought-provoking episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores how the narratives we tell about AI are shaping our perceptions, decisions, and sense of agency. Through stories ranging from a viral Monet experiment to commencement speeches that sparked student backlash, she argues that the real challenge isn't AI itself—it's the stories institutions, leaders, and individuals tell about the future.

Drawing from personal experiences navigating economic uncertainty, research on hope, and her work with students and educators, Dr. Quidwai makes the case that agency, pathways, and purpose—not technology—are the foundations of a hopeful future.

Timestamps

00:00 – The Monet Experiment: When a Masterpiece Was Mistaken for AI

• A viral social media post reveals how AI narratives are changing our ability to recognize authenticity and shaping what we believe is real.

03:00 – Why Graduates Are Booing AI Commencement Speeches

• Examining the backlash against AI-focused graduation speakers and what student reactions reveal about fear, uncertainty, and the search for agency.

06:00 – The Power of Storytelling: Wozniak, Jensen Huang, and Hope

• Contrasting approaches to talking about AI and why stories rooted in humanity, vulnerability, and purpose resonate more deeply than technology-first narratives.

11:00 – The Perfection Problem in Education

• How decades of rewarding perfection have left schools struggling to articulate why human creativity, process, and imperfection matter in the AI era.

28:00 – Hope Is a Skill: Goals, Pathways, and Agency

• Exploring research from C.R. Snyder and Brené Brown that reframes hope as a teachable cognitive process rather than a feeling.

36:00 – Students Co-Designing the Future in Roseville

• A powerful example of students, educators, and leaders collaborating to define the skills, mindsets, and agency needed to thrive alongside AI.

41:00 – The Story You Tell Yourself Shapes Your Future

• A personal reflection on resilience, agency, and why changing your narrative can transform what becomes possible.

Resources Mentioned

• The Monet painting experiment — Fortune, Nick Lichtenberg
• Graduates booing commencement speakers — The Verge, Janus Rose
• Steve Wozniak at Grand Valley State — Futurism, Frank Landymore
• Jensen Huang CMU Commencement Speech — YouTube
• "Too Much Is Happening Too Fast" — The Atlantic, Charlie Warzel

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]

In this deeply reflective episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores the emotional question underneath today’s AI conversation: Do I still matter? Through stories of corporate layoffs, classroom innovation, leadership transformation, and emerging AI practices, she unpacks why the future of work and education depends not just on technical skills, but on preserving human agency, identity, empathy, and meaning.

Drawing on research, real-world district examples, and frameworks like SPARK and Clark & Estes’ Knowledge-Motivation-Organization model, this episode challenges listeners to rethink AI not as a replacement for people, but as a tool that amplifies the uniquely human capacities machines cannot replicate. 

Timestamps

00:00 — “No Pure Managers”: AI Restructuring the Workforce

• Dr. Quidwai examines layoffs at Coinbase, Cisco, LinkedIn, and Microsoft, and asks the deeper emotional question many professionals are silently carrying: Do I still matter?

07:00 — Why AI Training Alone Isn’t Enough

• Introduction to the Clark & Estes framework (Knowledge, Motivation, Organization) and why most AI initiatives fail when organizations focus only on tools instead of people.

10:00 — What Real AI Literacy Looks Like in Schools

• A powerful classroom example from English teacher David Norenberg shows how students critically evaluated AI outputs rather than simply using or banning the technology.

21:00 — The SPARK Framework and Prompting the Human Before the Machine

• Dr. Quidwai explains how empathy, aspirations, and human-centered thinking create stronger AI partnerships and restore motivation and agency.

29:00 — What Innovative Schools Are Doing Right with AI

• Real examples from Wichita Public Schools, Bangor Township Schools, Community High School District 117, Roseville, and Desert Sands Unified show how leaders are redesigning systems, culture, and learning around AI.

42:00 — Roald Dahl, AI Writing, and the Fight for Human Voice

• A reflection on The Great Automatic Grammatizer explores why human creativity, struggle, and meaning still matter in a world of polished AI-generated content.

Resources Mentioned

• Coinbase CEO memo — "Building a Leaner and Faster Coinbase" (the original memo)
• Cisco confirms 4,000 layoffs despite strong Q3 earnings and $15.8B revenue
• Read LinkedIn CEO's Internal Memo Announcing Layoffs
• Why the 'Middle Path' of AI Literacy May Be the Future of English Class — The 74
• Your article on Designing Schools — Innovation Gap Analysis: Using the KMO Method in Schools
• Clark & Estes (2008) — Turning Research Into Results (ResearchGate) (the original book)

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]

In this episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores the growing challenges facing today’s graduates as AI, economic instability, and outdated educational systems collide. Drawing from Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index, historical research on the digital divide, and real-world examples from business and education, she argues that the real issue is not access to AI tools, but whether young people have guides, systems, and learning environments that help them see opportunity instead of fear. Through frameworks like SPARK, backwards design, and design thinking, this episode challenges educators and leaders to redesign learning experiences, organizational systems, and community partnerships so students can build a meaningful human advantage in an AI-driven world.

Timestamps

00:00 – The “Cursed Generation” and the Broken Promise of Stability

• Dr. Sabba reflects on the difficult realities facing new graduates and introduces the tension between individual grit and systemic barriers in today’s workforce.

03:45 – Microsoft’s Work Trend Index and the 67% Problem

• A deep dive into Microsoft’s latest findings showing that organizational systems matter twice as much as individual effort when it comes to successful AI adoption.

10:15 – The Digital Divide We Never Solved

• Revisiting Paul Atwell’s research on the “digital use divide” and why schools still struggle to redesign learning tasks instead of simply adopting new technology.

17:30 – The Guidance Divide and Why Relationships Matter Most

• Examples from Mark Cuban, college students building AI-powered tools, and school leaders reveal that access to mentors and guidance may now matter more than access to technology itself.

21:45 – Four Strategies Schools Can Start Using Immediately

• Practical frameworks for redesigning learning, partnering with businesses, creating AI-safe experimentation cultures, and focusing on workflows instead of tools.

28:00 – Story, System, Strategy: Designing Schools for an AI Future

• Dr. Sabba outlines how districts and schools can move beyond isolated innovation toward sustainable organizational transformation.

Resources Mentioned

• Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index Annual Report - Agents, Human Agency, and the Opportunity for Every Organization

• Wiggins & McTighe, Understanding by Design
• The Cursed Generation -  Ryu Spaeth 
• Mark Cuban on Big Technology Podcast 
• Hey Dad! We Built an App - Axios

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]