SPEAKER_01 0:00

You're listening to the Support Ed Learning Podcast, where we challenge the status quo of education and reimagine what learning should be. I'm Dr. Joe Sebastian, and in every episode we dive into critical thinking, Bloom's Taxonomy, educational innovation, and how AI is shaping the future of learning. Whether you're a teacher, parent, policymaker, or lifelong learner, you're in the right place to rethink, reshape, and revive education. Jeff UTEC has been in education for almost 30 years. He's worked in schools across 20 countries, advised state education systems on AI, and just wrote a book called Humans Still Humans Still Required. His message to parents, the education system your kid is in was built for a world that no longer exists. Here's what to do about it. Welcome back to the Supported Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Joe Sebastian. Families often ask me how to navigate the maze of college emissions without wasting thousands of dollars and years of time. And the answer usually involves finding the people who have figured out the rules of the game and cracked the code of what schools aren't telling you. And that's why I'm really thrilled to have Jeff Utech here today. Jeff is an educator, author, and consultant with nearly 30 years in the field. He is a Bill and Melinda Gates grant recipient, a TEDx speaker, co-host of the Shifting Schools podcast. And again, he just published Humans Still Required, Leading Schools, The Work Machines Can't Do. He's helped co-create AI guidance for the state of Washington and has worked with schools for over 20 countries, from over 20 countries. Jeff, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Hey, thanks for having me, Joe. Really appreciate it.

SPEAKER_01 1:42

Absolutely. So I've kind of given them the I've given you the intro, but like what who are you? What's the specific problem you are trying to solve in education? If you want to give us the run, the 60-second rundown of it.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

The 60-second rundown. Well, it's uh I I have one, I have one, I guess, uh beaming light that I focus on. And that is the idea that our job in in education is to prepare students for their future, not our past. And everything I do looks at looks at what I how I support schools through that lens. How are we preparing students for their future, not our past? That's the work I do around right now, AI. It's around the work I do around generational leadership and generational understanding. Because one of the things that I find very fascinating is education itself is the only thing that everybody's gone through here in the United States, anyways. Everybody goes through the educational system, whether it worked for you or not, or how well it worked for you for not, everybody's gone through it. And one of the biggest issues we have in education is when you didn't have children that are going through the system, you're looking at the system as when you were going through school. Right. You remember your best teachers, you remember your worst teachers. You want you want school to look like it looked when you were in school because of how you believe things should be. And that's where we start getting in trouble because school, of course, as you hear over and over again, still looks very similar. And a big part of that is it's a big system to try and move when you have generations of people that have been going through the system. And so anything that looks different a lot of times is really stressful to parents and grandparents and and the community at large.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Well, you're from Seattle, so are you a calling cow cowherd fan? Yeah. Are you or not? I don't know if you you do know I have no clue who he is. Oh, he's like um he's on Fox Fox. He's a he's a sports commentary. Um but he talks about the difference between baseball and football. I've got don't worry, I'm a history teacher, so I'm going somewhere with it. Okay. So he talks about, I mean, this is before like the pitch clock and baseball and everything, but he's talking about baseball is stuck in the past, it's all about legacy and yeah, hall of fame and all this stuff, and football's always focused on the future. Yeah. And I look at education, I've um I'm almost 20 years in now, yeah, and I look at it as it definitely has been more of a baseball experience than a football experience. We're very slow to change, yeah, and we're stuck like what you said, what school used to be, what what it what when I was in school was like this, and um just initiatives that come around, stay in for a little bit and go again. But you know, with your 30 years of experience, what is the thing that schools are consistently getting wrong right now?

SPEAKER_00 4:28

Well, I think there's I I think the big thing is is this idea that the work, the world of work is changing very rapidly. When I'm not working in education, I'm also working with business leaders, uh Fortune 500 companies, business leaders of small and medium businesses across the United States and across the world. And I think the thing that right now we are not focused on enough in K-12 ed is the idea of work itself is rapidly changing for a generation. Here in the United States, we know that unemployment for those between the ages of 18 and 24 is at an all-time high of over 8%. We also know that for this generation, if you have a four-year degree, a bachelor's degree coming out of university, your unemployment rate is almost the same as those with a high school diploma, which tells us that there's something happening in the system itself. And we're going to have to figure it out in K-12. How do we prepare students for that future that looks a lot different than it did for other generations? And I think that's where this idea of generational understanding comes into play. And a lot of the work I'm doing right now is supporting teachers and parents and understanding that, yeah, we did things to your generation when you were in school based on what that future of work looked like. And the future of work right now is changing so quickly that we have to make sure the kids have the skills needed for that workplace. And I think that right now is the big lift that we're going through, uh, specifically around some of the stuff that we see with AI, but just in the workforce in general.

SPEAKER_01 6:02

Yeah. So publishing an AI book is is risky as well, because right, because it could, it's AI is changing so fast. But your but in terms of your book, it's on the concept of being of humans still require. What is the core message of that book? And why does it matter for parents who might be worried? Because literally, in this 10-year political turmoil that we have been in, we went from a politician saying, Hey, coal workers, leave the coal mines and just learn the code. Now it's like I have this, yeah. I I always lean towards the comedic aspect of it. So it's like, now if Claude Code comes out, it's like I just learned the code.

SPEAKER_00 6:42

Yeah, it's so true.

SPEAKER_01 6:43

It's so cheap. And then it was like, hey, you gotta be a prompt engineer. Well, you don't need a prompt, you don't need Chat GPT can prompt engineer for you. So, like, what families out there that are worried about like how the heck is my kid gonna adapt to this? What would you think?

SPEAKER_00 6:57

Well, I think the first thing to understand about the book is is where it comes from. It's not an AI book, it is a leadership book made for this moment. And, you know, my work through education for the last 30 years, I've been a full-time consultant since 2012. I uh helped to write the guidance for here in the state of Washington around AI in public schools. We were the fifth state to come out with guidance at that time. Since then, I've helped 13 other states and four other countries write that guidance. I've worked with superintendent organizations, principal organizations from across the United States over the last three years with AI. And it's through all of that work that the book came. And the book is about leadership. It's about looking at how do you lead in these moments when we're going through great transitions. Every generation goes through about four great transitions in their lifetime. And right now, we are going through another great transition. So this isn't new. We have historical, we have his historical data that shows how you lead through these transitions. That's number one. Number two is looking at what is AI forcing us to do? And in the book, what I really what I loved, I leaned into a lot in the book is this idea that AI is forcing us to be more human. And what happens in education, as it does in a lot of other areas of work, is we find all these ways to stay busy and we offload all other kinds of tasks. And these other tasks get in the way of what are the actual human things that we need to be able to do. So, for example, judgment is a human thing. AI can do all kinds of stuff for you, it cannot make judgment for you. You, we humans still hold judgment in our final decisions, and that is a human skill that we're going to have to get back to. If we're just asking kids to write an essay, AI is going to do that, AI already can do that. But if we're asking kids to put judgment on that essay, to apply what that essay says about my community, about my lived experience, then we get outside the machine. And in the book, we really talk about what are those things that get us back to being human, the things that we've always said we wanted. And in the world of AI, we're gonna be able to double down on those and actually, I think, go a lot further in getting to a place of this idea of critical thinking, which is something that we've been trying to get to now for over 40 years in education.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

So, yeah, and that's that word has been used a lot, and we obviously need it because our kids don't think critically. What opportunity does AI present for us to actually finally figure this out and crack the code? Because I think we want kids to be critical thinkers. It's in our mission statements and our portraits of graduates, but what is a teacher's role in that?

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Yeah. Well, first of all, I disagree with you. I think kids think critically all the time. Uh, I'm talking to kids right now that are critically thinking, do I use AI on this assignment or not on this assignment? Correct. Based on their making the judgment, is this assignment worth my time and effort? The kids that I'm talking to across the United States make that critical decision for themselves day in and day out. Number one. Number two, if you go back and look in history, you can go back to the late 1970s and find where we started having all kinds of papers. We had books written here in the United States and across the Western world around this idea of why don't kids critically think? This isn't a new problem. You can go back and look at the data. We have been struggling to get kids to quote unquote critically think for decades, which should tell us something. It's not about the tools that come and go, it's trying to get people to think deeply has always been an issue. You then pretend that it's a teenager whose frontal lobe isn't fully developed, and of course it's going to be a hard skill to do. The issue is, are we setting up systems to allow that to happen? And if we're not setting up systems to allow that to happen, we can't expect kids to critically think on their own.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Do you that's the shift in schools? Do you think the American education system, because obviously it's designed by an antiquated model, was that the is it it doesn't implement critical thinking because it wasn't designed to make critical thinkers?

SPEAKER_00 11:07

I think it was. I think if you go back to if you go back and read the books from John Dewey back in 1920 and 1910, you can see critical thinking throughout that. He doesn't call it critical thinking, he talks at experimental learning, which is the exact same thing, right? But if you look at the foundational documents of what this educational system was set on before the SAT, before the College Board, before we got it, we pushed every kid to have to go to a four-year degree. It was very much that way. We got away from that. And I think what AI is going to do is it's going to make us refocus on what were those foundational skills that this entire public education system mom was built on in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

So you've worked with schools across 20 countries. What does American education get wrong that other countries have figured out?

SPEAKER_00 11:51

Well, I don't know if anybody's figured it out. I think that's the first thing. I think number two, no matter what you read in the news, everybody has adopted the American system. There are very few places that have not adopted a very American system way of teaching. Even, you know, we see all the time that Finland does it differently. Well, there's a lot of things in that re in those reports that you have to look at. First of all, Finland is not a diverse country. Let's just start with that. There's no diversity in Finland, there's no poverty in Finland. Let's put it this way: there's only enough kids in Finland, as is my public school here in this in Seattle. That's the entire nation of Finland. If I only had to educate 60,000 kids, yeah, you would do things completely different. There are other things that I know that other countries do that are that are different. Other countries, much like Finland, but a lot of the European Union, the way they the time they have kids go to school is different than the time we have here in the United States. You know, the the way that our expectations of before school and after school programs are different here than they are in other parts of the world. Have you gone to any of the Asian countries? I lived in Bangkok for four years. I lived in Shanghai, China for three and taught in both.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

And what because I we had a um here's how here's how messed up the system is in education in America. So I had a teacher with her master's and a principal experience. She taught in Singapore and I think Hong Kong. With her and her husband, they moved back to where I was a system principal at. She was like a building something. Couldn't get like like it's just limited jobs, um, way overrequalified. So do would you say the same thing? So the you're you're talking about the European model, is the same thing true in the in the Asian model in those schools?

SPEAKER_00 13:40

As far as kids being ahead, yeah, or the system itself.

SPEAKER_01 13:44

In terms of what you said about Finland, you said it's kind of more a myriad.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

I think there's I think there's a cultural, I think there's a cultural difference to education in Asia. In Asian countries, most, not all, education is seen as something that is not a given, it is something that you are honored to have. And that comes from the community, that comes from the culture of that country, and that comes right down to the parents. There is a different, there's just a different way they view education. Teachers are held in high regard. I think we've gotten away from that here in the United States, but in Asia, I would still say that yes, teachers are held in high regard. People have a lot of respect for teachers and educators, uh, and those communities show it. You know, when I was teaching, or even when I was teaching in Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia, I came out of the United States and where I would taught for three years. I was a fourth and fifth grade teacher, and I moved to Saudi Arabia, and in our first month of the first month of teaching, we covered almost four months of what it took me to cover back here in the United States. Wow. But every kid does their homework. Poverty is very little. I didn't have to take kids as clothes homes and wash them over the weekend. I didn't have to go buy fresh fruit for my students. There's a different way that we treat education in different parts of the world. And I think that has more to do with it than the system itself.

SPEAKER_01 15:17

So you're now co-facilitating the AI guidance or have done that for Washington State. Yeah. Based on what you saw, how prepared are schools for AI right now?

SPEAKER_00 15:28

I think we're getting there. Um, I don't think I don't think anybody was prepared for how fast it was going to come. I don't think anybody was prepared for um the speed of which it's transitioning education and the workplace. Uh, you know, living here in Seattle, we get updates almost daily of some tech company laying off more workers. Right. We've been hit very hard with that here in the in the city of Seattle and the state of Washington. Um, but I think I think states are doing well. You know, I think the states that have gotten out in front of this, I mean, still today, we've only had 35 states that have even come out with guidance for for public ed. Um, and so there are some states who are not even, you know, from this Department of Education, still not putting out guidance to support those teachers. And some places, like for example, Montana, that has been picked up by nonprofits or other organizations have picked up and brought out guidance in those states. Um, so I think we're we're doing okay. I think it it has to, it has a lot to do with the state, who's leading the state and how fast that state is going. For example, here in the state of Washington, we got on it very quickly. Our Department of Ed got on it. We had we were the fifth state to come out with guidance. And I had over 10 hours with every superintendent in the first two years in 2023 and 2024. And that just puts you on a sif different trajectory when you have a state push coming out and you have support from leadership all the way down uh to teachers in the classroom.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

This episode is brought to you by Supported Tutoring, where we don't just help students get better grades, we help them become critical thinkers. Whether it's mastering AP exams, maximizing college applications, or building lifelong learning habits, our expert tutors focus on critical thinking, confidence, and real growth. Head to supportedtutoring.com to find the support your student deserves. So you've lived through multiple tech cycles in education, right? You've had the smart boards, iPads, one-on-one devices. Um, is the AI shift fundamentally different or is it just another wave?

SPEAKER_00 17:35

I think it's another wave. Um, you know, when I started teaching, uh, it was putting internet in schools. I sat on the committee that debated whether or not teachers should get email back in the day. Um, you know, when I got the Bill and Melinda Gates grant, I was the first teacher in my classroom with an L C D projector. Um, we've seen these waves come and go before. We saw the wave of one-to-one. That was, you know, something that I was supporting uh before the pandemic. And then we saw the pandemic. Uh, and that was a that was a transition that we had to go through. So these transitions come and go. And I think all transitions have a very similar trajectory. The issue is, I think, is again the speed of which this one hit us. Right. And not only did it hit us hard as educators, but as young generations always do, they adapt to the technology very, very quickly. And the one fascinating thing that I'm finding right now, and I was just talking to some teachers again the other day that continues, and I have no scientific evidence around this other than conversations I'm having with teachers across the United States. We see a divide with students who are about 13, 14 years old, which is the end of Gen Z, by the way. That's the end of that generation. With that generation who are still in our schools, I'm hearing more and more that there's about a 50-50 split between kids who are all in on AI and 50% of kids who don't want to touch it because of the environmental factors. And then when you talk to kids that are under the age of 12 or 13, they're all in on AI. They don't, there's not the environmental factor. They're trying to use it any way they can to do all kinds of incredible stuff. But it's really interesting that we've got almost half our kids in middle school, high school who are the kids we're worried about the most. And across the United States, there's 50% of them that are saying, I don't know if I trust this thing, I don't know if I'm going to use it, I don't want to have an account. And another 50% who are saying, I need to know how to use it, I need to know what this thing does, and I'm willing to use it on my schoolwork, prepare me for my for my future. Whether it is helping me write college applications, whether it's helping me get scholarships. I mean, if a kid right now, I keep telling students, if you're not using AI to help you find and write scholarships, you're missing your moment in time. I mean, why not? Those scholarships are made for made for AI, you know, in 500 words. Tell me your leadership skills. I mean, come on. It's just uh until they're willing to change what they're asking kids, of course, go use it. You should. Technology of your time.

SPEAKER_01 20:00

What um for students who are already using AI, like ChatGPT, Copilot, what whatever, most parents have no idea, right? Or and um what should families be doing at home around AI and having those conversations with their kids?

SPEAKER_00 20:15

Yeah, that's a really good question. And that's some of the parent pro some of the parent presentations that I'm doing now are on this. And I think number one is to have open conversations about it. I think number two is most parents, I'm going to guess nowadays are either using it inside their work or they've heard about it on the news. And a big part of it is to be open about how we are using it and what are the different ways we're using it. But at the end of the day, we want to make sure we're coming back to those ideas of judgment, judgment, analysis. We want to be reflective in it and being able to talk through this idea of how do you use AI? Why are you using AI? Understand, and I one of the things I I love to make sure everyone knows is how it works. Uh, we are seeing more and more people, the latest reports coming out, are you are using AI for their own therapy or for their own social emotional support, which is, I think, a great use of AI if you understand what AI is doing, if you understand that AI is always going to assume that you are right, you're not wrong. You know, there are ways that you can set up the structures that it can really be supportive for you, but you have to understand how the system works. You have to understand what is happening inside the black box. And once you do, you can be critically, you can critically analyze those outputs and be a better informed human when it comes to using this tool.

SPEAKER_01 21:40

So the the the let's talk about how like um we could challenge some of the school leaders listening. Because I think, like you said, not it's not universally adopted. We states are being pushed to have like there's a requirement that they have some language around AI, but it's not nothing universal. So you talked about shifting schools. What does that actually mean? What does a shift in school look like versus a traditional one?

SPEAKER_00 22:08

Well, I think right now around AI, it's going to be again this idea of being open and honest. The schools I'm working with, we are opening up AI for all teachers and students down to 13. We can talk about why you want to leverage different platforms right now inside schools. But the big thing is as we go through these different transitions, whenever there's a new technology like this, and we end up in a battle between, you know, the adults and the kids, and we try to shut something down where we say no using AI, it never works. Young generations forever, I was a generation that they tried to ban calculators and they never were able to ban calculators, right? It doesn't matter. It's not, it doesn't matter, right? It doesn't matter what the technology is. You set up this structure where it's us versus them and the adults lose every time inside schools, which is why we have to create a structure of openness. A lot of my trainings are focused on how do you set up classroom structures? How do we adopt an AI matrix? How do we make sure every assignment has an AI scale on it so that students know on this assignment you can use AI at a level two, or on this assignment, you can use AI at a level four? What do those different levels mean? That's the type of stuff that is in the guidance that changes the structure of the classroom. But until we're willing to set up new structures for the classroom, we are going to continue to be in this. Did they use AI? Did they not use AI? Why are kids quote unquote cheating when all they're doing is trying to finish their work that they feel isn't very important? And we end up in a whole mess of things because we haven't put the structures in place for a new type of learning environment.

SPEAKER_01 23:42

And you talked about personal learning networks, PLNs. Why should parents care about whether their kids are connected to a global network?

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Well, I mean, I think first and foremost, you know, again, this goes back to my work I'm doing in businesses and my work around generational understanding. I don't think most people understand just how powerful LinkedIn is. I know most people in education don't. LinkedIn is a social network, and 94% of all hires across the United States can be tracked back to a LinkedIn connection. That's how powerful that social network is. The age you can be to be on LinkedIn is 16. So one of my goals is every high school senior should graduate with a LinkedIn profile, especially as the world of work is starting to change around us, where less and less people are going to need four-year degrees. We are seeing a transition back to the skills, and you can go out and get a certificate. Just today, Google launched another four different certificates you can get that are free. Those certificates come where you can put your certificate up on LinkedIn, and that means something. You don't need to have a four-year degree always to do the work. So we need to teach kids how to use social networking for good. That's what my TED talk was on back in 2010, by the way. And uh nobody listened to it or watched it then, and I don't think anybody's watching it now. But that's it. I mean, understand the power of LinkedIn and LinkedIn alone. 94% of all hires go through LinkedIn. If that's not a reason to get kids on LinkedIn before they graduate, I don't know what isn't.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

And um, in terms of digital citizenship, you said it shouldn't be a 30-minute lesson. What should it be instead?

SPEAKER_00 25:23

Well, digital citizenship is something that just needs to be embedded in everything we do. There's not a time, especially now, we find ourselves in one-to-one classrooms. We find ourselves, you know, where students have cell phones. And one of the things I love about the era that we're in right now is more and more states are banning cell phones from the classroom or from schools. More and more schools are banning classrooms. And there has been no research to show that banning phones in schools has led to less time of students on the phone or less time students on computers. I have not seen any research that says, oh, this school banned phones and kids reduce their on-screen time by three hours. It just isn't happening. But what is happening is we're not having the conversations any longer. That when we don't have devices in the schools, we don't allow teachers to have the critical conversations around digital citizenship. What does it mean to live in a life where you are always connected with a phone or a watch or both or whatever it might be? Those are the conversations that we need to be having day in and day out. And we didn't have them. We didn't have them back in 2012 and 2013. We didn't have them back in 2010 when I did the TED Talk and warned people about this moment in time. We pretended that social media didn't exist. We pretended that it wasn't going to be an issue. And now we find ourselves in 2026. And the best option we have is ban phones in schools. And it's not solving a problem. It's not changing the conversation, it's not supporting a uh a uh generation and understanding what their structures are to be healthy with their devices. We're just trying to ban them so we can once again pretend it doesn't exist, and that's not going to change the mental health crisis with our young people.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

Do you think that's part of the reason why? I mean, are we trying to get out of ahead of AI because this can be the next social media in terms of not knowing how to use it? We're not going to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 27:11

I think that's I think you're right. I think part of what this is is I feel like we learned our lesson. You know, I mean, I've been very proud of K-12 education that we are only four years into this, and there's already a lot of momentum of how do we support kids with this technology because we didn't through the last transition and we're paying the price now.

SPEAKER_01 27:31

Yeah, it's uh it's interesting because um, yeah, I mean, we could have just taught kids like how to properly use social media or not not been on it for until they're teenagers or ready, or just we'll just ban we'll just ban phones.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

So it's probably the well, and I think there were ways to set it up. I mean, I when I was teaching in Bangkok, back to my overseas teaching time, when I was teaching in Bangkok, we had eighth graders create it, and this is back in the day when only Facebook was one of the Facebook was the largest at the time. Um, so we're talking 2010, 2011. Uh we had seventh and eighth graders set up a Facebook page where they had 3,000 followers to ban plastic bags at the supermarket in Bangkok, and we're able to ban the use of plastic bags, bring your own bag to the supermarket at three different uh supermarkets in Thailand. That's the power of social media when you're taught to use it correctly. You can create movements with it, hence the whole Arab Spring, hence of what we saw in Iran, you know, a few months ago. You can use this and leverage it in very powerful ways for yourself and for your community. But if you're not taught how to do that, it doesn't just happen.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

So for the high-achieving family out there and the kids taking multiple AP courses, um, aiming for top colleges, how does this digital transformation piece fit into their strategy?

SPEAKER_00 28:57

Well, I think the big thing is, is I think you need to take a step back and see what are those jobs where they're actually going to be out there. And I'm not so worried about the jobs. We talk about this all the time. We don't know what the jobs of the future are going to be. That's right. We've never known actually. If you go back in time, we never knew. In the 1980s, they couldn't have they didn't know that you'd be an online influencer that just wasn't a job in the 1980s when I was in school. So, what you have to do is you have to look at what are the skills? What are the skills that are going to be needed? And then what education do you need for those skills? And I think you can find the lists of skills everywhere. UNESCO is one that I follow that talks about what are some of those skills. Uh, analytical thinking is big right now. Uh, leadership skills are big right now. Problem-based, uh, problem-based analysis is huge right now. Those are skills that the jobs will be there. I'm not worried about what the jobs are. I'm worried about what the skills are, right? Empathy and understanding is a skill that is going to have jobs in the future. When I worked at high-powered international schools and I still do a lot of work in high-powered international schools, you know, I know there's a lot of there's a lot of um prestige in going to high-power universities. And I would just be very cautious today to make sure that you do your due diligence to make sure you understand what that degree is going to get you. Because we know all too well what happens if you end up dropping $100,000 or $200,000 on a four-year degree, and all of a sudden nobody's hiring that anymore. All you have to do is look here in my backyard at the University of Washington. We just graduated one of the top computer science uh programs in the nation. And these kids can't find jobs all of a sudden coming out of university. And they're caught, they got caught in the transition. But if you're a high school student right now or a parent of high school kids, you're not caught in the transition. We know what's coming, we understand what the future looks like. And how do we help guide our young people into what are the going to be the jobs and set them up for success as this work as the idea of work continues to change?

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Well, let's move into uh lightning round, if you don't mind, where uh we'll have some rapid questions and you can answer with single way a responses, no explanation leaded. Okay. All right. Before I do that, what is coming in education, or what do you see education next five years? And what's coming that most families don't see?

SPEAKER_00 31:30

Um, I think the thing that most families don't see coming is we are very quick to every kid having an own individual tutor uh that is AI driven.

SPEAKER_01 31:41

I think that's the that'll be the big thing. Something we're working on. Non-AI driven or AI driven? AI driven. Yeah, something we're working on right now. Yep. So personalized learning, right? Yep. All right, lightning round. One book that changed how you think about education.

SPEAKER_00 31:56

Um, again, I would go back to any book written by John Dewey in the 1920s. Um, Education in the Theory, the theory of learning. Um, all of those books. I just reread, I just reread two of them uh about two weeks ago. And again, I think that is what the foundation of this system was built on. And I'd encourage anybody, parent or student, to go back and read the foundational books. Um, my favorite line and my favorite quote from John Dewey is education, uh, education isn't the preparation for life, education is life itself. And if we all kind of looked at education that way, I think the world would be a very different place.

SPEAKER_01 32:34

If you could go back and tell yourself one thing when you started in 1999, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 32:41

Stay curious. I think that's the thing that I tell students as well. Uh, keep looking forward, uh, don't be afraid of change.

SPEAKER_01 32:51

Worst advice you hear school leaders giving right now.

SPEAKER_00 32:57

Uh worst advice. Uh let's see, that's a good one. Um, the worst advice. Uh don't use AI.

SPEAKER_01 33:08

One thing parents overthink about technology with their kids. That it's all bad and it's going to ruin them. And if someone could only do one thing after listening to this, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 33:19

Or what should it would be to be curious and go do some research on what are the changing changes happening in the workforce in whatever country you happen to be listening in.

SPEAKER_01 33:33

All right. Well, Jeff, this has been amazing, credible. Um, I really, really appreciate your time. Thank you for everything you're doing to kind of lead the charge in education and uh innovation on the uh cutting edge there and uh serving for for over 30 years for 30 years, huh? Almost 30 years. 30 years?

SPEAKER_00 33:52

Almost 30 years, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 33:53

Almost 30 years. Yeah. Um, for people who want to go deeper with you and and where can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 33:59

Yeah, so a couple different places. You can find me at jefutech.com. Um, we'll put those in the show notes, I'm sure. And then shifting schools and the shifting schools podcast. You can find shifting schools podcast uh anywhere that you can find podcasts. I've been podcasting since 2006. We have a lot of thought leaders on and authors and uh others are a lot of focus on AI right now because that is the focus, but a lot of other educational uh educational well-being stuff over there as well.

SPEAKER_01 34:25

Awesome, cool. So thank you, appreciate it. Uh, hope you'll come back in the future with talk. We'll see where we're at with AI in a little bit. Sure. Sure, we'll have updates and education.

SPEAKER_00 34:35

So for sure, for sure.

SPEAKER_01 34:36

Uh thank you for appreciate having you on. Absolutely. Thank you all for listening to the Supported Learning Podcast. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us on the Supported Learning Podcast. If today's conversation inspired you, challenged you, or sparked a new perspective, be sure to subscribe and share with a fellow change maker. We'll be back soon with more voices, more insight, and more ways to elevate the future of learning together. Until then, keep learning and keep pushing the conversation forward.