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Design Thinking Isn't a Framework. It's a Toolkit That Outlives Classrooms.

kmontgomery@dtechhs.org (Ken Montgomery) — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 00:38:12 GMT

What d.tech's Design Thinking Program Prepares Students For

I keep coming back to the same lens when I talk with d.tech graduates: they are anchored in purpose, adaptable, strategically effective, relationally intelligent. I call this human agency, and it's what I watch for when I ask alumni what stuck with them.

I recently got to chat with d.tech alum Miriam Brody, a 2022 graduate, now a PhD student in human-computer interaction at the University of Washington. Her focus is accessibility and creativity, an important though not flashy corner of tech research right now.

When I asked her where that passion came from, she didn't point to a research methods class or a mentor's advice, though I half expected one of those answers. She described a toolkit of design thinking instead, picked up mostly outside the classroom, through clubs, sports, and community work at d.tech long before any formal computer science course caught up with her.

That's design thinking doing what I think it's supposed to do: building less of a six-step process and more a habit of noticing who a problem belongs to before deciding what to build. Talking with Miriam, I kept hearing human agency underneath every answer.

How Design Thinking Builds a Community-Centered Toolkit

She traces her interest in computer science to clubs, sports, school leadership, and a project with the San Mateo County Board of Education on STEM outreach. "I got this real passion for community," she told me, and that passion became the training ground for the researcher she'd become.

Miriam’s research on accessibility focuses on treating the people she studies as designers of their own solutions, not subjects waiting on her expertise. One of her recent papers looked at how disabled artists adapt their creative tools. "The whole research was not about me creating a new tool," she said, "but just understanding what people are already doing. They are the engineers."

That instinct shows up again in her work making retro video games accessible to low-vision players, where she's found that “accessible” isn't the same as “desirable.” Strip a game down to only what's functional, and you can lose the thing that made it worth playing in the first place. "It's not just about how we can make this functional," she said, "but how do we actually spark joy? How do we create play?"

Design Thinking and Empathy: Understanding Who a Problem Really Belongs To

Ask Miriam what her research argues for, and she doesn't start with disability. She starts with everyone.

"I truly view accessibility as intersectional," she told me. Her work is rooted in disability research, but the frame is bigger: age, economic background, educational background, any place where someone needs something specific to function in a world built around an assumed default user.

The insight Miriam keeps returning to is that accessibility built for one group tends to end up serving everyone eventually. She cited examples that span everyday use: curb cuts – designed for wheelchairs – turned out to be just as useful for strollers and grocery carts. Google Docs zoom – built for people with low vision – is a feature nearly everyone uses now. Siri's voice-to-text started as an accessibility tool before it became a convenience for anyone with their hands full. "All these pieces were created for a particular group, but then are able to impact a much larger environment," she said.

It's easy to treat empathy as a box to check early in a project, something you do once before moving on to the real work of building. Miriam's research treats it as the whole point: understand who actually needs what before deciding what accessible even means.

Building Comfort with Iteration

Most people treat a step backward as a sign something went wrong. Miriam treats it as data.

"Being a researcher is a lot about iteration and willingness to come back to ideas," she told me, "understanding that where you're in the beginning is not necessarily where you're gonna end up." That's not a hedge. It's a skill, and she credits d.tech’s design thinking approach with teaching it to her early enough that it stopped feeling like failure.

"Those steps back are actually a step forward," she said, describing the instinct not to get frustrated when a project sends you back to a question you thought you'd already answered. The design thinking model has that iteration built in on purpose: you come back to ideas, you test them again, you let the process pull you backward when the work calls for it.

It's a hard habit to teach directly. You can tell a student to expect setbacks, but expecting one and actually treating it as progress are different muscles. Miriam picked up these habits at d.tech, and they followed her straight into a CS PhD program at the University of Washington Paul G. Allen School for Computer Science & Engineering that encourages the same iterative process: you rarely land where you started, and that's the whole point.

How Design Thinking Prepares Students for Life After d.tech

I asked Miriam what she'd tell an incoming high school student. She didn't mention grades, or a five-year plan, or picking the right track early. She talked about not needing to have it figured out.

"I thought I needed to know exactly what I was gonna do," she told me about leaving d.tech. If someone had told her back then she'd end up doing a PhD in human-computer interaction, researching accessibility for people whose needs get overlooked by default, she wouldn't have believed them. She didn't know that world existed yet. Instead, she had the toolkit of design thinking, a habit of empathy, and enough comfort with iteration to let the path find her instead of forcing it.

"You need not just motivation, but the ability to keep going without it. Be the person who's telling yourself what to do.”

Miriam’s journey is an example of design thinking taught well. Her way of moving through problems and through a career keeps working, even when you have no idea where it leads.

Key takeaways from this post

Design thinking's real value isn't the six-step process on a poster. It's the instinct it builds: notice who a problem actually belongs to before deciding what to build.
d.tech's most transferable lessons often come from community, not curriculum. Clubs, sports, and cross-disciplinary exposure shaped this research path as much as any class did.
Accessible design built for one group tends to end up serving everyone. Curb cuts, screen zoom, and voice-to-text all started as accessibility features before becoming defaults.
Treating a step backward as progress rather than failure is a skill, not a personality trait, and it's one design thinking teaches early enough to outlast any single project.

High School Design Thinking: The Problem-Solving Skills That Hold Up in Any Career

kmontgomery@dtechhs.org (Ken Montgomery) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 20:00:00 GMT

Sam Cheng graduated from d.tech / Design Tech High School last spring. Now, he’s a UX design fellow with Kleiner Perkins, a premier Silicon Valley venture capital firm. There he’s working on the product design for a fintech startup called Multiply, where the work involves redesigning how people navigate mortgage applications and other major financial decisions. Incredibly, this is one year out of high school.

So I asked him – as I do with other graduates – how he defines design thinking, and he gave me this: "It's a toolkit for solving problems through empathy."

Nine words: simple enough to say on an elevator, precise enough to describe what he does every day.

This is very similar to what I've seen across many d.tech graduates: the framework transfers. The problems change, the industries change, the tools change, and what stays is the underlying ability to understand a problem before reaching for a solution.

What High School Design Thinking Prepares You For

At most high schools, the path is clear: take the right classes, hit the right scores, build the activity list that signals readiness to an admissions office. Sam went through a different experience at d.tech.

Through the Innovation Diploma — developed in partnership with our Innovations Programs — Sam connected with things that don’t often show up on a syllabus. "I discovered I really enjoy UX design specifically," he told me, "and that process of designing interfaces and designing experiences that people really enjoy." He also graduated considerably better at public speaking, a skill that developed through repeated presentations and design reviews.

When students have the time and structure to build products, interview real users, and present their work to real panels, they discover what they're genuinely capable of and genuinely drawn to. Sam came out of that process with a specific identity as a UX designer and with confidence rooted in work he'd done.

He arrived at college with experience building real things. "I already had built products and [completed] real-world activities," so "I felt much prepared in the social aspect and the area outside of solely academics," he said. Sam’s entrepreneurship program turned out to value exactly what d.tech had developed in him.

How Design Thinking Teaches Students to Solve the Right Problem

One of the most consistent patterns I see in students who are learning the design thinking approach for the first time is that they tend to pull toward solutions. Someone names a problem, and the instinct is to start building immediately.

Sam had a version of this early on. During one of his first projects at d.tech, his group identified a real problem (trash and pollution in water environments) and quickly converged on something they wanted to build: a remote-controlled boat with a net to collect debris. "We really wanted to make a remote control boat," he told me, but the boat didn't solve the problem. The team had found a solution first and tried to fit the problem around it. "Making a remote control boat is way harder than we thought," Sam said. And then, the motivation faded because the purpose wasn't there.

Design thinking builds a different instinct: explore the problem space thoroughly before reaching for an answer. Sam described it as "swimming in the maze." Rather than taking the first route out, you map the whole thing until you can identify the fastest path through. "You're not just going on a ‘flat plane’ of these are all the solutions. You're really going on a three-dimensional space of all the different things around the problem and the solution."

That kind of exploration takes longer, and Sam was honest that it can feel like unnecessary work while you're in it. "A lot of us felt like it was busy work," he said of the research and interview assignments in his design thinking courses. But it's exactly what changes the quality of what gets built.

Design Thinking and Empathy: Understanding People Before Assuming You Know What They Need

Before graduating, Sam was working at the Oracle Education Foundation through a d.tech internship; there, he was helping to write technical curriculum to teach design thinking and data skills to students across the world: Brazil, Argentina, Peru, the United States. His first instinct was to design for someone like himself.

For an early data visualization exercise, his team used a chart featuring Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, and other recognizable artists. But when the team met with the Oracle volunteers teaching these courses in Brazil, they found that students weren't connecting to these US-based artists. The musicians were American, and the cultural references didn't travel.

"We had to rethink it," Sam told me. "How might we explore it from the perspective of something that everyone might understand?" The team went back through the materials and replaced the examples with globally understood references: soccer, weather patterns, and data sets that meant something regardless of where you grew up.

This experience captures what empathy means within design thinking practice: the specific work of going to talk to the people you're designing for before assuming you already know what they need. "Once you take a step back and really go through the whole thing," Sam said, "you start to uncover new insights that you might have missed previously."

So whether you're building a financial platform, writing curriculum, or designing anything meant to be used by real people, the same practice applies: understand the person you're designing for before you decide you know what they need.

What Design Thinking Builds That AI Can't Replicate

Currently, Sam works at the intersection of product design and AI. When I asked him how he thinks about the relationship between the two, he was specific.

"AI can really get you from zero to ninety percent," he told me. "But there's that last ten percent that makes something really special. That builds that moat. That comes from each individual person."

A moat, in startup terms, is what makes your work genuinely hard for anyone else to replicate. Sam's point is that AI closes the gap on the ninety percent that almost anyone could produce. What it can't average its way to is the insight that comes from deeply understanding a problem first.

AI is good at producing the expected answer: something that looks right, sounds right, and fits the pattern of what came before. Sam described it as averaging; feed a model enough input, and it produces something that resembles the center of it all. Creating something new requires a different kind of thinking.

The Stanford d.school has a class built on this premise. Students developing biomedical startups spend six weeks in a hospital doing nothing but observing. They shadow surgeons and anesthesiologists. They watch and listen. Only after those six weeks do they start thinking about what to build. "After that, they usually have burning things in their head," Sam said. "Why are these doctors using pagers from 40 years ago? Their electronic medical records are really hard to use." Those insights don't come from a search engine. They come from deep observation and a genuine understanding of the problem itself.

"If you just come up with an idea off the top of your head," Sam told me, "it's really gonna be something that anyone else could come up with. What gives you the moat is that unique insight."

In a world shaped by AI, the tools exist to execute, but design thinking builds the understanding of the problem that makes execution worthwhile.

How Design Thinking Prepares Students for Whatever Comes Next

About a year after graduation, Sam is doing exactly what d.tech is designed to produce: someone who finds the real problem before building a solution, who understands the people they're designing for, and who brings genuine insight to work that could otherwise look like anyone else's.

When I asked him what advice he'd give to an incoming student, he didn't talk about grades or classes. "Try out all of the different things," he said. "You might find things that you like and things that you don't like, but you will find that purpose and mission and the things that really excite you."

What we're building toward allows the students who come through design thinking education to learn a framework for solving real problems. More than that, they're developing the instinct to question what's in front of them, to go looking for the real problem, and to bring other people into the process. That combination of empathy, exploration, and genuine understanding is what holds up across industries, roles, and whatever landscape comes next.

How Design Thinking Builds Skills That Last

kmontgomery@dtechhs.org (Ken Montgomery) — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:00:00 GMT

What High School Needs to Become in an Age of AI

When ChatGPT launched, one of our veteran teachers with over 20 years in the classroom came to me and said he was having an existential crisis. He'd always been able to anchor on one thing: teaching kids to write, but now, if a machine could produce an essay in less than a minute, he had to question the value of teaching a skill students could have a machine to do in seconds.

That story stuck with me because it gets at something bigger than one teacher's classroom. If writing, one of the most fundamental things we teach, could be called into question overnight, what else could be? And more importantly: what are we actually preparing students for?

Schools have always had an answer to that question. The argument was usually about emphasis, college prep versus career readiness versus civic life, but there was always a destination. The disruption of AI feels different. Past disruptions like the widespread adoption of 1:1 mobile computing came with a rough map. This one arrived without one, and even the people building it will tell you they aren’t sure where it leads.

And that uncertainty changes the core questions we ask as educators:
What's the point of a grade if it measures the wrong things?
What do we tell students to aim for when the target keeps moving?
What does a curriculum even prepare someone for when the landscape shifts this fast?
At d.tech, we've been sitting with those questions, and here's where we've landed.

AI Is Changing What High School Needs to Deliver

Think about what a high schooler has moved through in the past few years: a global pandemic, profound social upheaval, political instability, and the arrival of AI. I can’t think of a comparable four-year stretch in my own high school experience. These students are navigating genuinely new territory.

The adults in the room are navigating it, too. AI arrived into a world where the social fabric around schools was already under strain. Polarization, social isolation, and the lingering effects of the pandemic have made it harder for teachers, families, and students to talk to one another. As Ash Vasudeva, Director of Education Programs at the Hewlett Foundation and a d.tech board member, observed in a recent conversation: "If we're not helping kids dialogue across differences, and adults aren't modeling how to dialogue across differences, I don't think we're doing the next generation any favors."

Students are arriving at the same question their teachers are: What is the purpose of school right now? They're watching a machine handle tasks they've spent years learning, and wondering what jobs will even exist by the time they graduate.

As we start to answer that question, we realize the answer isn't a comprehensive redesign; it's a repurpose of what we're trying to produce in a student. That's why we've been moving with urgency. The pace of AI and creative problem-solving in the real world is setting the tempo now.

At d.tech, that urgency led us to one central question: if the future is this uncertain, what's the one thing we can give students that will serve them regardless of where things land? Our answer is human agency, and it's reshaping how we think about school.

How d.tech's Design Thinking Curriculum Builds Human Agency

If the future is this uncertain, what's the one thing we can give students that will serve them regardless of where things land? Our answer is human agency, and it's what our design thinking curriculum is built to address. All d.tech students take four years of design thinking, progressing from learning the framework to applying it in the workplace to solving problems in their community to using it to design their own futures. Underneath that, we want students to graduate with human agency and this means that we have to give them experiences to develop the drivers of human agency, which are:

Purposeful identity: graduating anchored in your values, knowing what matters to you
Adaptability: being anchored and flexible at the same time, able to manage uncertainty without losing yourself in it
Strategic efficacy: the ability to set a goal, build a plan, and develop the actual competence to see it through
Relational intelligence: knowing how to build trusting, respectful relationships with other people

Betsy Corcoran, president of the d.tech board, named a tension that anyone who has watched a young person enter the workforce will recognize: "There is a conflict between having all of the great personal skills on the planet and having a skill that you can use to get in the door of a job."

That tension lives inside all four drivers. Real capability and human skills have to develop together.

About 26 states and hundreds of districts have begun creating “portraits of a graduate,” broad descriptions of what young people should know and be able to do by the time they finish high school, going well beyond course credits and seat time to include collaboration, civic identity, and communication. Ash noted something striking about where those portraits are landing:

"If you look at the Kentucky portrait of a graduate, and you look at Wyoming and Virginia and Washington State, they're more alike than different. They cut across red and blue lines."

These portraits point back to the same destination we’ve been building toward: students who are grounded, adaptable, and capable of contributing to the world around them, the same skills at the heart of what d.tech has been building toward for over a decade. Human agency, it turns out, is what endures.

The Innovation Certificate: Making These Skills Count Beyond High School

For years, schools have asked students to develop skills that the traditional credentialing system has no way to recognize. Colleges can read an AP score. Employers can read a GPA. But purposeful identity, adaptability, relational intelligence (the skills that actually prepare a student for an uncertain future) have had no legible signal. Until now.

Just as an AP score gives colleges a clear signal of subject-matter expertise, the Innovation Certificate gives students a way to demonstrate the human-agency skills that will serve them in college, in work, and beyond. Colleges are already looking for students who can show something substantial beyond a test score. Employers are looking for people who can communicate clearly, collaborate across differences, navigate ambiguity, take initiative, and build trust with the people around them.

The Innovation Certificate is earned by completing d.tech's design thinking curriculum — roughly 40 hours of class time over three to four months — built around a real project taken from exploration to prototype to reflection. Students finish with a credential they can add to a resume, reference in a college application, or bring to a job interview. The Innovation Diploma extends that work across a full year, with longer projects, real end users, panel presentations, and a defense of demonstrated proficiency across six learning outcomes.

We've been pushing for this kind of credential to land inside the college admissions process itself: an artifact that reflects human agency, recognized the same way colleges recognize an AP score. The credential exists, students are earning it, and the conversation about what it should count for is already happening.

What Design Thinking Prepares Students For

We are in a genuine transition. The students moving through high school right now are navigating things that have no precedent, and the schools serving them are being asked to do the same. That's uncomfortable, but it's also an opening.

At d.tech, what we have is twelve years of trying, a framework we believe in, and a deep conviction that human agency is what prepares a student for a future nobody can fully see yet. The world is moving fast. The students who know who they are, can adapt to what's in front of them, and can show what they're capable of, those are the students who will shape what comes next.

If you're curious about how the Innovation Certificate works and what it could mean for your student or your school, explore what we're building.

Key takeaways from this post

AI is changing what high school needs to deliver, and the schools moving with urgency are already building something better.
Human agency (purposeful identity, adaptability, strategic efficacy, and relational intelligence) is the skill set that prepares students for a future nobody can fully predict.
Design thinking is more than a curriculum. It's a framework for solving real problems, building real skills, and showing real capability.
The d.tech Innovation Certificate gives students a legitimate credential for the skills colleges and employers are already looking for.

Derisking College: Is it Berkeley or the Bellagio?

kmontgomery@dtechhs.org (Ken Montgomery) — Fri, 23 Feb 2024 21:00:00 GMT

Let me begin by saying that this has nothing to actually do with UC Berkeley; they are one of the top schools in the world. It also has nothing to do with the Bellagio; they are the world-wide leader in outdoor water shows occurring in the desert.

The reason these industry leaders are in the title of this article is simply because I’ve always liked alliterations.

The reason that they are being compared to one another is because Paul Tough recently said that attending college is like going to a casino, and it’s not because of the “all you can eat” buffets/cafeterias.

Instead going to college is like going to a casino because some people win big and some people lose big. He goes on to say that college used to be a safe investment like a T-bill. You were basically guaranteed a return on your investment, but that’s not the case anymore.

On going to college

This comment could easily seem like another voice indicating that high school graduates should consider alternatives to college. At some point in the future that might be true but it’s not true yet. If you don’t go to college, what else would you do? It’s not like the U.S. has a robust apprenticeship system or some other great alternative for a path to a promising career. Granted there are some options out there, but for the most part, people who pursue something other than a college degree do not end up with a credential that unlocks as many doors to employment as a college diploma does.

Of course going to college is not the perfect option, but despite what many people would have you believe there aren’t many other credible options. CEO’s may talk a lot about alternative credentials, but heads of HR hire on college degrees+. The + is usually something like an additional credential or an internship with a great letter of recommendation. In other words the college degree is the minimum requirement needed to be considered for an interview, but the + is what will actually get you the interview.

Making college a great bet

So it is within that context that I’ve been thinking about what we might be able to do to help our students come out of college as “big winners”. At the risk of going too deep on the analogy, here are a few things that can be the equivalent of helping kids learn to count cards before they sit at the table.

Let them explore. It is extremely important that students have an opportunity to explore many different fields. Many universities now ask students to choose their major when they apply, and every adult I tell that to responds with some version of “I had no idea what I wanted to do when I was 18.” I don’t think this is one of those ‘back in my day’ responses. I think it is still a lot to ask a student to choose a major when they apply to college unless of course their high school experience has afforded them a wide range of things to study. We do this through our intersession and our design thinking programs. The intersession program gives students a break from their core classes and allows them to learn from professionals through programs such as those offered by the Oracle Education Foundation. In our design lab classes, students are taught the design thinking process, but are then allowed to apply their problem solving skills to areas of interest. These programs give students the opportunity to test out a field. I remember one student was very into “saving the oceans” and wanted to build something to keep debris out of storm drains. She tried building something and soon realized that she didn’t love actually building things, but much more preferred organizing people to take action. It’s great to go to college with this type of self-knowledge.
Instill in students curiosity and self-direction. The world is filled with uncertainty right now. I spoke to a Design Tech alum who recently graduated from a prestigious university and immediately begin a quest to learn what she still needed to learn. She noted that in college she was much more willing to take risks and explore different fields than her classmates because of the way we emphasized curiosity and self-directed learning in high school. She has since landed a job at a tech company during a time when the tech sector has been hit by layoffs.
Teach them the basics of networking. The K-12 experience is unique in that it’s pretty much the only time of your life when you are surrounded by people primarily your own age. In this situation “networking” is about making friends and does not require a lot of effort because everyone else is trying to make friends too. Professional networking is different. Professional networking means that you are connecting with people across a range of ages to learn something. In our design thinking classes we ask students to talk adults all the time to learn about their experiences and gather insights. We are entering a time when entry-level jobs are going to start disappearing, and it’s going to be essential for students to start building out their networks while they are in college, so they must head off to college with the skill already developed.

The things that I’ve outlined here are not the traditional educational outcomes. These are not the things that students are usually tested on, and they are not the things that schools get held accountable for doing. Of course students must have the basic skills needed to pass their college courses, but if they are to truly “hit the jackpot” while at college, they must do things that can add the + to their experience. If not, they could leave college with the same experience people have when leaving a casino. It’s that somber acknowledgement that the house always wins.

ChatGPT: transforming us from creators to revisers just as the microwave transformed us from cooks to reheaters.

kmontgomery@dtechhs.org (Ken Montgomery) — Fri, 09 Feb 2024 21:00:00 GMT

That email that I just had the robot write is probably good enough to send without editing? At least that is the thought that went through my brain after I last used ChatGPT (the robot) to write an email. I’m not sure if that’s because the robot is getting better or if it’s because something is changing in my brain. Actually, I’m pretty sure that both of these things are true. The robot is getting better, and something is changing in the way I think about writing.

My new writing process

In fact I noticed that I recently went about writing in way that is similar to how I might “cook” a frozen dinner. When I cook a frozen dinner, I peel off the plastic, pop it in the microwave and find a task I can do for about three minutes. This usually involves doing something on my phone or emptying part of the dishwasher. Either way I disengage while I let the machine do its work. Of course I don’t love the frozen dinners, and I could have had something better to eat if I wanted to put more effort into the task, but the meal was good enough.

Recently when I was attempting to write something, I used a process that was strikingly similar. I logged into the robot, spent a minute crafting a prompt and then found something to do for the next 60 seconds. Similar to reheating, I mentally disengaged from the task, consumed the results and decided that the product was good enough. I think that this might be a problem over the long term.

Is ChatGPT making us dumber?

It has been documented that Google does make us “dumber”. The Google effect was first explored in 2011 and has been refined and clarified through additional studies, and the conclusions are not great for the human brain. In 2021, Fisher, Smiley, and Grillo argued that “When people see how to reliably access new information using Google, they become less likely to store that information in their own memory”. This is an important conclusion because it argues that having access to Google will likely change the way we use our brains. This is particularly troubling when it comes to creating and the robot.

It is very easy to overstate the quality of the work created by the robot. Most of the things that I have it create look pretty good. They look pretty good because I haven’t gone through the intellectual struggle that is the writing process. I usually don’t know what I think until I write something, and I think that “writing to learn” is a pretty common strategy.

Virtues of slow thinking

One of Sam Altman’s recommend books is Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman writes that when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one without noticing the substitution. I think that using the robot will make this type of substitution happen more often. We are not going to notice that we don’t really understand problems on a deep level when all we are doing is revising the robot’s work. We will very much feel that the robot’s answers are sound and in some ways the answers may even seem surprisingly creative. This is because we haven’t thought deeply about the content.

Don’t get me wrong, microwaves can be great, but it would be difficult to argue that they have made us healthier overall. Unless we think deeply about what the robot is doing to the way we create we might be headed down a similar path where quick, easy and good enough becomes the norm.We need to most quickly

Education and the Robot: How fast can we get students to the wrong finish line?

kmontgomery@dtechhs.org (Ken Montgomery) — Sun, 10 Dec 2023 21:00:00 GMT

After a fall season of learning about A.I. (the robot) in education, there is still a lot that I don’t know, but there are a few things that I’m becoming more and more sure about.

We are running very quickly to the wrong finish line. When it comes to A.I. in education, there are lots of people spending a lot of time and energy to try to do one of two things:

Develop the best A.I. powered tutoring system. While this might seem to be a logical path to follow, we have to remember that the purpose of school is not to get better at school. Schools don’t exist to develop better students. so yes, Khanmigo may very well help you do your homework and study for your tests, but that shouldn’t be our primary focus. Teaching to the test is only useful if we have designed a really good test, and the tests that the robot might help you do well on probably aren’t the greatest tests.
Relieve educators of their administrative burdens. This is a more worthwhile goal, but I hope that this does not actually translate into an increase in the expectations around educator capacity. For example, if the robot can write I.E.P.’s it would be a mistake to immediately assume that teachers could then have more students with I.E.P.’s on their caseloads. Yes, there could be some increase in caseloads, but we all need to think carefully before we go about replacing one thing with another. The robot needs to be used to make working in education more sustainable, not just increasing productivity. It is also worth asking if many of the administrative things teachers are being asked to do right now just be eliminated.

The questions that AI raises for schooling

Again, both of these objectives seem like very worthwhile and obvious goals to work toward, but the problem is that they are dominating the conversation while we really need to talk about something else. We already know that the robot is really good at A.P. tests, but it does not seem that this fact has inspired sustained conversations in schools about the value of preparing students to do well on A.P. tests. Instead we’re hearing a lot about how we can help students do better on A.P. tests with the robot’s help. We are not sufficiently grappling with the reality that the robot may have made all of the traditional aims of education obsolete. The problem is that this is a much more difficult conversation to have and potentially not as lucrative, but we have to address this with the same energy and vigor that we have for using the robot to help students do their homework.

As it is right now, we are moving too slowly. We are starting to have conversations about this within our organization and with others, but we still feel that we are not moving fast enough. It is very clear that Open AI and others are not going to slow down so that we can all pivot to new way of thinking about our work, let alone wait for senior English teachers across the nation to think about their students’ needs and then rewrite their units so that students have confidence in the importance of what they are learning given the advances in. A.I. So we are moving too slowly and I’m not sure how to move with appropriate urgency on this topic, but our students do notice.

We need to most quickly

Students have always wondered “why do I need to learn this?”, sometimes it’s a very real question, and some time it’s a procrastination strategy, but now the question carries with it a bit more anxiety on the student’s part. It’s not just wondering why they would ever have to understand symbolism in Lord of the Flies when they want to be a physical therapist, but now it is more about wondering what they can possibly do out in the real-world that the robot won’t be able to do. It’s a different question that brings different emotions to the forefront.

And don’t even get me started about what the robot might be doing to us and our creative drive. These are all really big topics that we need to talk about every time we talk about A.I. and education. If not, we are going to get to wrong place much more quickly than we might think.

ChatGPT and Creativity: Is it peanut butter and chocolate or ketchup and red licorice?

kmontgomery@dtechhs.org (Ken Montgomery) — Sat, 30 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

When I was little I decided that I was going to run away. Undoubtedly my parent’s had put some reasonable restriction on me, which I deemed too much to bear and I decided to hit the road. I packed a lunch, put it in a cloth, tied it on a stick and started walking. (I’m also pretty sure I was inspired by some TV show I had recently watched. And, my mom helped me get my lunchbox tied to the stick and off I went.)

In packing my lunch I decide to make a sandwich combining two things that I loved. It was a ketchup and red licorice sandwich.

Somethings just go together; some do not

After about five minutes of walking I decided it was lunch time. I ate my sandwich, got a stomach ache and headed back home. There were a lot of lessons to be learned that day, but one that really stuck is that sometimes things that are really good by themselves become really bad when they are combined, and in fact they can do weird things to us. Wonder bread, ketchup, and red licorice definitely fall into that category. Of course sometimes certain combinations are magical and launch candy empires, such as peanut butter and chocolate.

In leading an organization focused on teaching people how to develop creative purpose during a time when it seems as if ChatGPT is going to take over the world, I’m wondering if ChatGTP and creativity is a magical combination like peanut butter and chocolate or if it’s going to more like ketchup and red licorice.

ChatGPT and creativity

Right now I’m in a bit of the ketchup and red licorice mindset and here is why.

First I think we should all acknowledge that there are no experts yet on how AI is going to change the world. There are a lot of ideas, but AI is too new to have the body of knowledge built up that is needed to support true expertise. Some people definitely understand how it works and its capabilities better than others, but we are all learning the implications together.

When it comes to ChatGPT and creativity, what I’m thinking about at this moment is how ChatGPT will impact the motivation needed for developing creative purpose. Creativity is not magic, anyone can be creative, but it does require learning a process and putting in a lot of hard work. It’s like pretty much anything else worth doing. The part I worry about is that as people start growing up using ChatGPT, and ChatGPT gets better, people may lose the drive needed to be creative because they feel that they can’t compete.

Research on creativity

Daniel Gross’s study about competition and creativity in the graphic design field found that some competition can increase incentives for artists to create original designs but heavy competition depresses incentives. I worry that students who grow up with ChatGPT will view the “creative competition” created by ChatGPT as too heavy, and they will lose their desire to even try, much the same way that I don’t even try to understand the best way to go somewhere; I just type in an address on my phone and go. Losing the motivation to navigate is not that big of a loss, but losing the motivation to create is. And this nervousnesses is just in the context of ChatGPT 4, which makes me feel like I’m writing about why we should think carefully about the impact of Friendster, not even comprehending where Instagram and Tik Tok might take us.

I had learned how to make a ketchup and red licorice sandwich, but I did not think carefully about what it would do to me. I feel that we are in a similar situation with ChatGPT and creativity. We are very interested in learning how to use ChatGPT and understanding what it does for us but we need to understand not just what it does for us, but also what it does to us? We need to talk about this more than we are because unlike my five minute walk home, we could move too far and too fast to go back.

Redefining Education: Personal Credentials to Collective Betterment

kmontgomery@dtechhs.org (Ken Montgomery) — Fri, 08 Sep 2023 20:00:00 GMT

The 2024 presidential election season, which never seems to stop, officially began with the first debate a few weeks ago, and one of the hot topics will be education. Our country is once again arguing about the roles and goals of education in our society. It’s a worthwhile discussion to have, as obtaining degrees and diplomas play an important part of moving through modern society.

Not only do the degrees and diplomas help, but virtually all states have mandates for when children must begin school and when they can drop out. The laws might vary around the process of schooling whether, it’s a public school, a private school a home school, or something in-between, at a policy level we’ve all pretty much agreed that education is essential in a young person’s development.

One key piece of the debate about education that rarely gets discussed though is whether we should look at education as a public good or private good. David Labaree identified three alternative goals for education in the U.S. in his paper published over 25 years ago: Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle Over Educational Goals. Labaree highlights the tradeoffs and tensions in these goals and how the goal of social mobility has reshaped education into a commodity motivating individuals to prioritize credentials over learning. Having worked in education for almost 30 years I don’t view this as a positive development. My question is how can we move the system back toward viewing education as public good?

What if we viewed education as important as clean air?

Imagine if we lived in a society where education was viewed the same way that we view clean air or clean water. Something where we truly believed that the more education that there is in our society, the better off we all are. Instead we are stuck in this system where we collectively agree that schools should help students “make the world a better place”, but individual families mainly want schools to provide students the credentials that they need to get ahead or maintain their socioeconomic position. We see this in the relentless pursuit for admission to highly selective colleges and in high schools that focus on college for all. No one makes the case that what students will learn in college is essential to their socioeconomic position, but everyone acknowledges that a college degree is important to a person’s socioeconomic position.

The pursuit of the credential permeates the high school classroom, as we see students worry more about their grades than what they’ve learned, or how long the teacher wants the essay to be instead of using what they’ve learned to make a positive difference in the community. Now go back and imagine if education were viewed like clean air; it would be something that should be accessible and beneficial to all. This shift would have dramatic implications for not only how we allocate our resources, but also what is taught in schools and how it is taught. Imagine how it might play out in something as visible as the college ranking and admission process.

How this might play out in college admissions/ranking

Instead of gaining notoriety for rejecting large numbers of qualified students, colleges would be celebrated for admitting large numbers of qualified students
Instead of publishing the average G.P.A’s and test scores of incoming freshmen, we would have to create a way to communicate a students’ contribution to the public good and sort and select on contribution instead of test scores
Instead of students relentlessly pursuing A.P. classes, students would relentlessly pursue making a positive impact in their communities
Instead of well-resourced students hiring college counselors, well resourced students would hire community liaisons to help them find out how they could make a difference in their community

Right now it is difficult to imagine this type of change occurring in our system, but unless we start to consciously and deliberately take steps toward viewing education as something other than a commodity to buy, sell, or trade for social position, then we face a very difficult path in building an educational system aligned with what we all collectively want, which is a society where each individual’s education benefits as many people as possible, just like clean air.