Unscripted Intelligence

Power Players: Student Safety, Teacher Freedom, District Control | Episode 36

🎙️ Episode Description

Somewhere in your district, a teacher has an idea for tomorrow’s lesson and a tool request that won’t clear until next month.

Every system builds approval layers to keep kids safe. Student data, cyber threats, screen time, apps that pull kids away from each other. Those protections matter. They can also slow down the creative, curious learning teachers want to design.

In this episode of our series with FETC, we sit down with Stacy Hawthorne and Amanda Lanicek, former teachers turned power players in district technology decisions.

Together, we ask how leaders can protect kids while still giving teachers room to build learning around investigation, real problems, and human connection.

🔍 About the Hosts

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines, but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging, in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament: Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement and Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve.

Arvin Ross: Co-Founder of ProSolve, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast.

Jena Crossland: Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations and Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗 Join the Movement

Website: humanintelligencemovement.org 

Email: [email protected] 

Follow the Human Intelligence Movement on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates.

🎙Portrait of a Learner | A Portrait Is a Promise, Not a Poster

Guest: Rich Harrison

Host: Arvin Ross + Dr. Michelle Ament

Presented by: The Human Intelligence Movement

🔍Episode Summary:

Recorded live at the Scaling Student Success Ignite Summit. Rich Harrison, CEO superintendent of Lighthouse Community Public Schools, leads 1,700 students across TK through 12 in deep East Oakland. His network is building a portrait of a learner that’s meant to shape what happens in classrooms, not what hangs in the lobby.

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross talk with Rich about how a district decides which human skills matter most, what changes when leaders commit to them out loud, and where the work gets hard once the poster is printed.

🎙️About the Hosts:

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines—but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging—in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement & Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve.

Arvin Ross Co-Founder of ProSovle, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast.

Jena Crossland ⁠ Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations + Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗Join the Movement:

Website: ⁠Humanintelligencemovement.org

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠

Follow ⁠@HumanIntelligenceMovement⁠ on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates

🎙 Portrait of a Learner | Scholars Own Their Learning

Guest: Liz Brunner

Host: Arvin Ross + Dr. Michelle Ament

Presented by: The Human Intelligence Movement

🔍Episode Summary:

Recorded live at the IGNITE Summit in San Jose. Liz Brunner is the superintendent of Compass Charter Schools, a fully virtual public charter serving about 2,300 scholars TK through 12. Most of them spend less time on a screen than kids in a traditional classroom, and that’s by design.

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross talk with Liz about why her school calls kids scholars instead of learners, what personalized learning looks like when every family needs something different, and how a virtual school builds human connection. Then the harder part: Compass has had a scholar profile for five or six years, and Liz is now asking whether the competencies are the right ones, whether the community sees itself in them, and how you measure something like confidence.

Her advice for leaders starting this work: when people see themselves reflected in the portrait, keeping it alive stops feeling like effort.

🎙️About the Hosts:

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines—but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging—in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement & Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve.

Arvin Ross Co-Founder of ProSovle, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast.

Jena Crossland ⁠ Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations + Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗Join the Movement:

Website: ⁠Humanintelligencemovement.org

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠

Follow ⁠@HumanIntelligenceMovement⁠ on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates

🎙 Portrait of a Learner | Compliance Is Not Leadership

Guest: Dr. Joan Perez

Host: Arvin Ross + Dr. Michelle Ament

Presented by: The Human Intelligence Movement

🔍Episode Summary:

A system is designed to get the results it gets. If yours is built for compliance, that's what it produces.

Recorded live at the Scaling Student Success IGNITE Summit in San Jose, this conversation is about what actually sits at the center of your leadership. For a lot of schools, it's a checklist: the initiative that has to roll out by May, the dashboard indicators, the bus you already know how to drive. Human-centered leadership asks what changes when you put a person in that spot instead.

Dr. Joan Perez is an assistant superintendent who looked at her district's leadership program three years ago, saw a military-style model that wasn't preparing anyone for the future of work, and blew it up. What came out of it is a cohort she now runs with Michelle: teams of leaders spending six months on a real problem of practice, with visits to Google, Amazon, and Extron to ask what those companies are actually hiring for.

Tune in to hear Dr. Perez's advice for leaders who aren't seeing coherence.

🎙️About the Hosts:

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines—but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging—in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement & Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve.

Arvin Ross Co-Founder of ProSovle, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast.

Jena Crossland ⁠ Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations + Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗Join the Movement:

Website: ⁠Humanintelligencemovement.org

Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠

Follow ⁠@HumanIntelligenceMovement⁠ on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates

Power Players: It Starts With Us | Episode 35

🎙️ Episode Description

Somewhere in your district, a decision about AI is waiting to be made. It starts with whoever's willing to make it.

In the first episode of Power Players, our new series as FETC's official media partner for their 2027 theme, Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross sit down with two superintendents who are done waiting for someone else to decide.

Dr. Jeff Horton, the 2026 National Superintendent of the Year, has built his career on turning districts around when the room said it couldn't be done. Dr. Matthew Friedman has led four districts and one hard-won belief: the adults have to change first, or nothing does.

They agree the system is failing kids right now. This is a conversation where we'll uncover the unavoidable truths about how far leaders are willing to go, and whether they can get there alone.

🔍 About the Hosts

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines, but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging, in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament: Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement and Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve. Arvin Ross: Co-Founder of ProSolve, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast. Jena Crossland: Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations and Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗 Join the Movement

Website: humanintelligencemovement.org 

Email: [email protected] 

Follow the Human Intelligence Movement on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates.

The Unavoidables: The Upgrade No One Installed | Episode 34

🎙️ Episode Description

AI is evolving faster than the people leading through it. Everyone can feel it. Almost nobody says it.

The conditions moved fast. The pace, the ambiguity, what judgment is worth when a machine answers first and sounds certain. Most of us responded by buying something. New tools, new language, new departments with innovation in the title.

Adopting is visible and fast. It also lets us skip the part that decides everything: whether anything about how we grow the person in front of us has changed at all.

Arvin and Michelle discuss what it means to lead differently in an AI world. Where the line falls between using a new tool and becoming a different kind of leader, and the times they have each been on the wrong side of it.

🔍 About the Hosts

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines, but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging, in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament: Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement and Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve. Arvin Ross: Co-Founder of ProSolve, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast. Jena Crossland: Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations and Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗 Join the Movement

Website: humanintelligencemovement.org

Email: [email protected]

Follow the Human Intelligence Movement on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates.

The Unavoidables: The Cost of Knowing | Episode 33

🎙️ Episode Description

On this episode of Unscripted Intelligence, the podcast by the Human Intelligence Movement, hosts Dr. Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross explore what it costs us to have instant answers.

Getting the answer feels like winning. It's quick to end the discomfort of not knowing. And most of us have never stopped to ask what we trade for it.

That stretch of not knowing the answer, the part that feels like failure while you're sitting in it, was where the thinking happened. We treat it like an obstacle when it is work.

This is Episode 2 of The Unavoidables, the series where Michelle and Arvin go back to the conversations that refused to resolve. Tonight they sit in the one they can't put down. If knowing has become instant, and the not-knowing was doing something, what did we lose when we made the answer free?

Join us LIVE for a chance to notice where you've been reaching for the fast answer, and to ask what it's been quietly costing you..

🔍 About the Hosts

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines, but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging, in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament: Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement and Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve. Arvin Ross: Co-Founder of ProSolve, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast. Jena Crossland: Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations and Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗 Join the Movement

Website: humanintelligencemovement.org Email: [email protected] Follow the Human Intelligence Movement on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates.

🎙️ The Unavoidables | Episode 32

Host: Arvin Ross + Dr. Michelle Ament

Presented by: The Human Intelligence Movement

🔍 Episode Summary:

Hosts Dr. Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross return to the conversations they couldn't stop thinking about.
The threads guests started but didn't finish.
The unavoidable truths that surfaced once and kept resurfacing.
The ideas that needed more than one episode to land.
Live. Real. Sometimes messy. Always human.
Across episodes, Michelle and Arvin sit with the paradoxes, push back on each other, and work out loud what it means to hold AI and human intelligence in tension. YOUR voice is needed for this community conversation!

🎤️ About the Hosts:

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines, but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging, in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament: Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement & Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve.

Arvin Ross:  Co-Founder of ProSolve, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast.

Jena Crossland:  Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations + Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗 Join the Movement:

Website: Humanintelligencemovement.org

Email: [email protected]

Follow @HumanIntelligenceMovement on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates

🎙️ Uniquely Human | Episode 31

Guest: Brian Arnold + Meghan Freeman

Host: Arvin Ross + Dr. Michelle Ament

Presented by: The Human Intelligence Movement

🔍 Episode Summary:

We design learning to feel hard. We build in the friction, set how long it lasts, and map the way out before the learner ever starts.

Then they push through the thing we engineered, and we call it growth.

But we built the path. We already knew they'd make it. So was that struggle, or a performance of it?

The best learning of your life probably wasn't designed at all. It was the thing that almost broke you, the moment no one was there to smooth the way. That's the part we can't seem to manufacture, no matter how good the tools get.

This week, Brian Arnold and Meghan Freeman join Michelle and Arvin. Not a conversation about ed tech. A live conversation about whether the struggle you can design is struggle at all, and what we lose when we take the not-knowing out.

🎤️ About the Hosts:

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines, but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging, in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament: Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement & Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve.

Arvin Ross:  Co-Founder of ProSolve, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast.

Jena Crossland:  Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations + Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗 Join the Movement:

Website: Humanintelligencemovement.org

Email: [email protected]

Follow @HumanIntelligenceMovement on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates

🎙️ Uniquely Human | Episode 30

Guest: Laurie Guyon + Dan Thomas

Host: Arvin Ross + Dr. Michelle Ament

Presented by: The Human Intelligence Movement

🔍 Episode Summary:

New York adopted a Portrait of a Graduate built on creativity, critical thinking, communication, and reflection. Educators have been insisting these were the skills that mattered most; now, New York State has named what a diploma should stand for. 

But naming human skills is not the same as building the skills in a student.

That gap is the whole conversation. We know how to teach a fact and test for it. Do we know how to teach a kid to think critically, or to know it when we see it? How do you assess reflection? What does communication look like on a rubric? 

This is where it gets real. The decisions districts make over the next two years will determine whether this becomes lived practice or another beautiful framework that quietly collects dust. Closing that gap is a daily practice problem, and it lands on the educators standing in front of students right now.

Michelle and Arvin sit down with Dan Thomas and Laurie Guyon to ask the question the policy can't answer on its own. What actually moves a human skill from a document into lived experiences?

🎤️ About the Hosts:

Michelle Ament and Arvin Ross come from different generations, experiences, and disciplines, but their unlikely partnership is built on mutual curiosity, deep listening, and a shared belief in the power of human connection. Their conversations are real, unscripted, and often challenging, in all the right ways.

Dr. Michelle Ament: Co-President of the Human Intelligence Movement & Chief Academic Officer at ProSolve.

Arvin Ross:  Co-Founder of ProSolve, educator, speaker, and adaptability enthusiast.

Jena Crossland:  Production Manager for Unscripted Intelligence and Director of Operations + Marketing for the Human Intelligence Movement.

🔗 Join the Movement:

Website: Humanintelligencemovement.org

Email: [email protected]

Follow @HumanIntelligenceMovement on LinkedIn for live shows and episode updates