Future Fluent

Jeremy and Betsy discuss the recent podcast interview of Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, by New York Times columnist and podcaster, Ezra Klein. Schools want to build "agency" in students. How will that happen? And what about the CEOs of the AI giants? How much agency do they really have?

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In this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy and Betsy talk about a recent interview that New York Times columnist and podcaster, Erza Klein, did with Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, which makes many of the chips used to power AI. Check out the full interview here.

Huang was responding to comments by AI CEOs Sam Altman of Open AI, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic. Nerves were set on edge following reports that AI models had hacked into sites including one involved with Australia’s universal healthcare system.

In this long essay on his blog, Amodei discussed the need to slow down AI. “I have worked on AI for the last twelve years because I believe it could dramatically raise the quality of human life,” he began. And then he added: “But over the last few months, I have become convinced that fully addressing the risks requires even more prudence — not just investing in risk prevention, but pacing the rate of capabilities advancement so that risk prevention has time to keep up.”

Sam Altman went a step further in a post on X: “We welcome a federal framework that sets consistent safety requirements for frontier AI,” Altman wrote. “Pacing will be well worth this cost; no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness, or let capabilities get ahead of alignment and monitoring.”

You can hear more on Altman’s comments in this article on CNBC.

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Can AI for teachers and students be built on a foundation of what we know about how students learn, namely on the learning sciences? And, if so, how can learning sciences infuse not just one AI product, but potentially all of them? Jeremy Roschelle and Betsy Corcoran kick off this third season of Future Fluent by talking with two people who are trying to change the “building blocks” of the AI programs used in schools. In this exclusive conversation with Priscilla Chan, cofounder and coCEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and her colleague, Sandra Liu Huang, president of CZI’s Learning Commons division, Jeremy and Betsy explore what they are doing to retool the AI that is permeating edtech.

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September marks the first anniversary of CZI’s Learning Commons, an AI “infrastructure” that any developer can use to build edtech tools. Companies (and yes, individuals, too), can sign up to explore the platform here: platform.learningcommons.org/login.

The platform aims to have three components:

* The Knowledge Graph, which aims to integrate materials such as rubrics, standards and even “misconceptions,” typical mistakes that learners make;

* Evaluators, or ways to assess if AI material is aligned to learning science;

* Agent Skills, or ways to help AI tools build learning science and strong pedagogy into whatever they’re building (say, lesson plans).

Here’s a piece in EdSurge that describes the work. In it, Helen Crompton, executive director of the Research Institute of Digital Innovation in Learning at Old Dominion University, makes an important point: “Once a platform becomes part of the underlying infrastructure upon which many other products are built, it can begin to shape what information is available, what is considered authoritative, what gets measured and ultimately what kinds of educational experiences are created.”

Here’s what Sandra and Priscilla are reading:

* “Build: Investing in America’s Infrastructure“, by Sadek Wahba, managing partner at private equity firm, I Squared Capital.

* School Rethink 2.0, edited by Frederick M. Hess, Michael B. Horn, and Juliet Squire

* The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, which, as Priscilla says, brings home the idea that parenting takes an entire community.

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What do wizards have to do with Doritos or trout? In this wrap up episode to Season 2, Jeremy & Betsy talk about the metaphors and insights their guests shared this year to make sense of AI. Guests included researchers, writers, educators, builders & influencers:  Ethan Mollick, Pat Yongpradit, Inge Molenaar, Erin Mote, Justin Reich, Melina Uncapher, Elvira Salazar, Margaret Honey, Mike Taubman and Babak Mostaghimi. And the theme running through it all: Sure, the technology is changing rapidly. But even more important: Our sense of when to use AI– and when not to use it–is morphing, too. Finally, Betsy & Jeremy hint at what they will explore when they kick off Season 3 this autumn. Got thoughts? Suggestions? Questions? Drop a note on LinkedIn.

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The backlash against screens (and technology in school broadly) is growing, and with good reason. In this episode of Future Fluent, Betsy and Jeremy explore with Dr. Babak Mostaghimi of Learner Studio what it takes to build technology, including AI-based tutors, that bring people together rather than isolating them. The bottom-line question: Learning should help people thrive: How could AI be designed to do that?

Oh, it’s hard to be human these days! Start with reading all about it. 

• Babak Mostaghimi is part of the Learner Studio team. The team published a collection of pieces (including one by Betsy!) called “Bringing the Future Into Focus.” And check out Mostaghimi’s piece, “How can AI be used as tool for learning, beyond more efficiency toward current outcomes?”  

• Michelle Culver created The Rithm Project, a nonprofit, to “think out loud about what it means to be human–together–in an AI age.” Her substack is here. 

• Julia Freeland Fisher, director of education research at the Christensen Institute, has written extensively on the value of networks. Check out this report: Students’ hidden networks: Relationship mapping as a strategy to build asset-based pathways.

• We talked about the work going on at OKO Labs in teaching math. And the work reimagining robots that’s going on at IDEO. 

• McKinsey Global has been reporting on the future of work here:“Jobs lost, jobs gained: What the future of work will mean for jobs, skills, and wages.” The World Economic Forum has this set of stories about the role Artificial Intelligence may play in the world here. 

• Dan Meyer, who never pulls his punches, put up this challenge in his Substack: “I’d like to see from everyone engaged in this discourse: one (1) stationary video of a full classroom session.” The challenge is on! 

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Do we – or don’t we? Teachers are both under pressure to press 'pause' on AI in the classroom and to prepare students for the future with AI. On this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy and Betsy connect with Mike Taubman, a veteran teacher at Uncommon School in New Jersey to explore how he's bringing decades of hard-earned pedagogical insights to bear in guiding his students into AI usage. As a long-time English teacher and career advisor, nothing is more precious to Taubman than face time with students. But he also wants them to be able to go under the hood and understand the assumptions and mechanics of AI. His solution: To start building an “AI Driver’s License” for high school students. Taubman shares what's working--and what's under construction--along with why Newark's Mayor Ras J. Baraka recently stopped by Taubman's class. Spoiler alert: Taubman wasn't the one who invited him.  

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Mike Taubman got his start as an English teacher–so, no surprise, you can follow his work by reading both what he writes and what he likes to read. 

Taubman writes frequent updates about his classes and other experiences on his Substack, AI Waypoints. (Browse here for details about the “AI Driver’s License” curriculum Mike and fellow teacher, Scott Kern are developing as well as Mike’s exchange with protesters at the 2026 ASU-GSV meeting.) The NYTimes wrote about the AI Driver’s License here.  

Check out this fabulous story about how two of Mike’s students convinced the Mayor of Newark, NJ, Ras J. Baraka, to visit their school and managed the whole visit. Here’s Mike’s description of the visit, too. 

Books recommended by Taubman include: 

• The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang, a Hugo Award winning science fiction novella from 2010 that describes the “raising” of digital entities. It’s included in a compendium of Chiang’s work, Exhalation (2019). 
• Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 2021, is a fav of both the NYT’s Ezra Klein and Barack Obama.  
• In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School, by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine from 2019, is an overview of the state of US high schools. 

And of course, the 2013 movie, “Her,” by Spike Jonze. 

We also talked about this (meta) study from Stanford University on 800 academic papers on the relevance of AI for K-12 education. 

Finally, you can also watch this segment on NBC’s Future Education about Taubman’s colleague, teacher Scott Kern, who built chatbots to support his students. 

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What’s been the most powerful learning experience that you've had? Dr. Margaret Honey has helped build remarkable learning experiences–starting with the television show, The Voyage of the Mimi, through her work at the New York Hall of Sciences and most recently with the Scratch Foundation. Through it all, she’s held fast to several principles, starting with: Never fake it. And center activity around children’s curiosity not around rubrics or assessments. In this episode, Margaret shares with Jeremy and Betsy the triumphs, challenges and hard-won lessons learned of building memorable experiential learning environments–along with what changes in an AI-saturated world. (And, we also learn why actor Ben Affleck knows so much about humpback whales!) 

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• The Voyage of the Mimi (with Ben Affleck) was a 13-episode television program created in the mid 1980s. (Here’s episode 1.) A crew of the ship, Mimi, explored the ocean, to carry out a census of humpback whales. In The Second Voyage of the Mimi, archaeologists searched for a lost Mayan city. 

• Here’s a video short on the Connected Worlds exhibit at the New York Hall of Science. (Better: Check out the exhibit at the museum!) 

• Scratch, a free, nonprofit coding community and environment for children, is supported by the Scratch Foundation. (Start here if you’re considering a family membership; here if you’re an educator.) 

• Xperiential, a collaboration between Pixar and Khan Academy, is a project-based learning approach aimed at inspiring students to explore careers through storytelling and design. 

• Jeanne Bamberger’s 1995 book, The Mind behind the Musical Ear, explores how children develop “musical intelligence.” 

• Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create, and Lead in Unconventional Ways, by Sarah Stein Greenberg (2021) includes both stories and innovative exercises to build creative leadership.

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History is chock full of new technologies developed with good intentions. But if we’ve learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that doing research and designing products has layers of complexity. It isn’t enough to just build tech for others – we have to build it in close partnership and community with those who will use it. In this episode of Future Fluent, Betsy and Jeremy talk with Dr. Elvira Salazar, a life-long educator, passionate devotee of STEM education and NASA, and now the Director of Online Learning & Technology for Latinos for Education. They’ll talk about what the AI community gets right – and gets wrong – in the rush to build the next great thing. 

Learn more!

• To explore more of Dr. Salazar’s work, a great place to start is the Latinos for Education website. 

• She also contributed this piece, “Learnings from the Front Lines on Redefining Leadership for the Age of AI,” to EdSurge. 

• Dr. Salazar described the work of CLEAR, or the Center for Leadership Equity and Research. You can explore the groups work as well as its AI initiative at Clearvoz.com 

• This story, “AI Leaves Some Students Lost in Translation,” explores in more detail some of the promise and challenges of AI development for the Latino community. (You can also try out the Playlab app developed by the group, “Elevating your Speaking,” a tool that parents can use to support their students’ language development skills, here.) 

• Stanford University professor, Dr. Sanmi Koyejo, discusses his white paper about how AI is leaving non-English speakers behind here. The full report from Dr. Koyejo and his team is here: “Mind the (Language) Gap: Mapping the Challenges of LLM Development in Low-Resource Language Contexts.” 

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Why are the “myths” about how we learn sometimes more powerful than what research has delivered? In this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy and Betsy interview Dr. Melina Uncapher, a neuroscience researcher and learning science practitioner who has spent her professional life trying to help educators and researchers work together. They plunge into one of the great myths of learning–that we have different “styles” of learning–and then ask the question: Can AI make it possible to weave learning science into the classroom? Betsy puts a challenge to Melina.

Learn more! Here’s where you can explore some of the ideas around learning science and AI that we discussed with Dr. Melina Uncapher. 

• “Strategic Surprise and the Future of Educational R&D” is an openly available white paper coauthored by Drs. Melina Uncapher and Jeremy Roschelle. The core point: Generative AI is catalyzing rapid shifts in learning practices that far outpace how we have traditionally responded to changes. This paper proposes to re-architect education R&D to be more agile, responsive, and, hopefully to create breakthrough potential. 
• Designed for Brilliance is a workbook resource for teachers on how to apply learning science by Dr. Uncapher. At the moment, it’s available as a downloadable PDF. Check out Chapter 2: The top 7 Neuromyths, Busted.  
• On the broad topic of using evidence-based practices in the classroom, take a look at the Accelerate, Transform Scale Hub launched recently by Digital Promise and SRI. Background details here. 
• Why good ideas stall in education – an opinion piece by Dr. Uncapher and Nat Kendall-Taylor in the 74Million. 
• AI Snake Oil: What Artificial Intelligence Can Do, What It Can’t and How to Tell the Difference, by computer scientists Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, from Princeton University Press, is well-worth a read. 
• And if it all seems like a bit too much, check out the Pixar movie, Inside Out, which, as Melina says, puts the principles of learning science into animation! 

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AI arrived in classrooms at the same time it arrived in businesses and homes. And while it may speed up tasks at work, teachers, students and parents are still in the early and often painful stages of figuring out how or even if it will make learning “more efficient.” In this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy and Betsy talk with Dr. Justin Reich, an MIT professor and researcher, and cohost of The Homework Machine podcast. Reich’s been studying Chat GPT's role in school since November 2020. Reich and his team listen closely to teachers through their research. He worries that AI is already slowing down learning. “I think we’re going to find that there are millions and millions fewer minutes of homework being done at all secondary grade levels this year,” he warns. Join us for the full conversation.

Learn more!

• Get started by jumping into the podcast that Justin cohosts called The Homework Machine. It explores the art and craft of teaching through interviews with more than 120 teachers and students from across a wide variety of subjects. 

• Prefer to read about AI? Browse this downloadable (and free) PDF from Reich and his colleagues called: A Guide to AI in Schools: Perspectives for the Perplexed. 

• Justin’s past books are well worth exploring, too. He wrote Iterate: The Secret To Innovation In Schools (published in 2023) and Failure To Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education (published in 2020). 

• Want to understand more about how we teach and learn? Check out the National Tutoring Observatory, a research program aimed at improving teaching and learning at scale by studying great tutors. 

• Also seminal: the work of cognitive and learning scientist, Michelene (“Micky”) T.H. Chi. She has built a rich collection of research around how students learn, study and solve problems. 

• Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg (2023) explores what we should trust online.   

• And when it’s all too much, try a little fiction: Babel - An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang (2022), is a historical fantasy, a sort of Harry Potter meets linguists in a complex world.

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Do you trust AI? And if you don’t, what should you do? That’s the heart of this wide-ranging conversation between leading education policy advocate, Erin Mote, and Future Fluent’s Jeremy Roschelle and Betsy Corcoran. Interacting with AI, Erin says, is "like conversing with a brilliant person you cannot trust." But Erin doesn’t stop there. She’s got a treasure trove of ideas of how to build bridges over this gap, from more robust government policy, to checklists for school leaders before they adopt AI and, crucially, for parents who want to prepare their kids to live in this complex new world. Advocate, educator, Mom: Erin brings a rich perspective to the question of how are we going to learn to live with AI. Join us. 

More to check out! 

Erin Mote shares loads of resources on LinkedIn. In addition, here are some of the resources that we talked about during this episode of Future Fluent. 

Author and commentator April Rinne writes about how to navigate change. Check out her book, Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change (as well as some astonishing pictures of the scores of places she has done handstands!) 

 The Last Invention podcast goes through the 70-year history of artificial intelligence, including competing visions of utopia and apocalypse. 

Get all the details about EdSafe AI, including its latest white paper, S.A.F.E. by Design: Policy, Research, and Practice Recommendations for AI Companions in Education

Super handy for school leaders: This checklist (created by EdSafe) of considerations around data governance and the ethical implementation of AI. It’s called: AI in Education: Negotiating for our Future - A Checklist for K12 Districts, Dec. 2025.

The AI Civil Rights Act of 2025 was introduced in the US Congress in December 2025 and is still in committee. A bill in the Florida state Senate mirrors the approach of the congressional bill and is moving faster. It aims to create strict, state-level guardrails for AI, directly challenging federal efforts to standardize regulations and positioning Florida as a leading, skeptical regulator of the technology. 

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