Building Superhumans: Reinventing Schools for the AI Age

0:12 Welcome to the AI and Education Podcast. Where are you today, Ray? I am at home in Sydney, Dan, it is the winter, and so I am all hood-ified and I notice you are as well. I have as well, I've moved into a new house and I'm notified, and all the windows are open and there's no heat in and it's cold. Ah, When you say cold, hemisphere.

0:32 Dan, just to be clear with everybody, it was nine degrees this morning. That's like shorts and tshirt weather if you're in London. Yeah. Coldish then. Yeah. Fair enough. So today, Ray, very, very, very excited. We've been trying to get our next guest on the podcast for quite some time, and he's luckily in Australia at the minute.

0:51 , today I'm really pleased to announce that we've got Will Campbell, on the podcast today, founding head of Franklin School in New Jersey in, in the us and, and an ex Australian boy from Trinity Grammar School and various other Australian schools,, and across in, in the us. So, and doing some amazing stuff with AI technology and one of the most innovative schools in the world recently.

1:12 So, welcome to the podcast Will. Where we find you today. Thanks so much for having me. I'm actually in the cold suburb of Cogee, in Sydney as well, so i'm complaining about 10 and 12 degree weather when we had one of the coldest winters for a while in New York City. So, can you tell us a little bit about your journey and, how you ended up at Franklin?

1:31 It's, yeah, it's a wild one. Looking back it's about taking opportunities about, leaning on mentors, having, people that can help you with certain decisions, but then also being comfortable in risk taking. I was a little bit of an athlete. I played a bit of rugby. , And at the end of that career, after an injury, managed to study, got really good results and before I graduated, was off, offered an opportunity, , to work at the Australian College of , physical Education.

1:56 Had some incredible mentors there, within a two year period I was nominated to be the Dean of faculty. I've always been a people person. I've always been an avid learner, but also someone who likes to really build teams and cultures. Went on to be nominated for the New South Wales Council of Deans, and that's probably where I made my greatest transition personally in leadership.

2:15 Seeing where my gaps were, seeing what I needed to develop. Went to a mentor and I said, I really feel like we're moving the needle here. I think we're doing fantastic things, but, I don't know if I want to end up being in that space of chasing, being a professor, et cetera. I, I wanna get my hands a little bit more dirty.

2:31 So it was almost another sliding doors moment. Just had this opportunity where Trinity had a space in the middle of the year. , Ended up gonna. Trinity really loved my experience at Trinity. I was the associate director. I was Director of Rugby. I was the first 15 coach. was sitting in the curriculum office, but I was wearing a PE college shirt., quite a unique role.

2:52 I used to present on behalf of Trinity with the World Academy of Sport in the IB. And it was, I was in Hong Kong we were just round tabling things and problem solving. And I hit a couple of really key solutions for a member at the Dwight School in New York. Before I left Hong Kong, there was a conversation would I be willing to just do a meet and greet.

3:13 The vice chancellor and chancellor in particular really had an affinity with the way they were talking about their school. And three months later moved the kids and the family over to the Dwight School network. And just so happened that COVID hit six months after turning up to New York. I think we were online 48 hours after shutdown.

3:31 And then just got a tap on the shoulder. "We're gonna be starting the Franklin School, which is a part of the Dwight Network, and we want it to be different. We want it to be a school that's a little bit more, future thinking from an infrastructure standpoint". Let's really see what I could potentially do with a great team, with a blank slate , and a platform to listen to everyone that's been saying things for the last 10 years, and what the next five years should be.

3:55 Look at, look that. Just looking at , what you've done with Franklin School there. You've founded it in 2022 and, and then, was top 10 finalists in innovation, , for T4 Education, and then you won it this year for the most innovative world, best school for innovation. That's, that's unreal. , That journey itself must have been, , super quick as well, you know, Yeah, it's a look.

4:18 it's a, you, it's a rush, right? You just, what you just said. I get goosebumps every time that I hear it. I think the proudest moment was the fact that we were going up against, you know, I would call them ed tech schools. Like, they're just very, very forward thinking and specialised and so good at maybe one area.

4:35 We got recognised for so many elements of our school being innovative in its thought process application, but also about making sure that it's almost like a playbook. We really got it to a point where everyone understood , the language of the school and how it should be, , implemented. So that was really great because , our AI integration, we were doing it well and truly we had like our, you know, third iteration when people were talking about whether or not they were gonna ban it, so were a, a very much ahead of the game in that space.

5:07 but yeah, very, very amazing opportunity , to win an award like that in such a, an early stage of our, our school's history. it, it must have been a fascinating journey as well around that AI piece. I mean, you mentioned ai, , 2022 was a different world for ai. That was , the world we were in when we started this podcast.

5:28 It's curious that Dan and I are both in hoodies today. 'cause I always describe it as the age of AI when it was people in hoodies that, like it was the data science type of stuff where, , we could talk about it, but the doing was left it to people wearing hoodies. whereas we then got very quickly into the age, I think it was caused by the release of Chat GPT where it suddenly became mainstream.

5:52 But also the conversation about what you might be able to do with it changed, because it was no longer a big data type conversation. It was a much more,, integrated into learning conversation potentially. , How did you manage that transition? Because we've talked a lot about the current day, not about that period , of journeying into that world , and you were trying to create a new school as this new technology was dropping.

6:20 Yeah. I think best practise applies to so many things that are new is that you try and get a team together that has an insatiable passion about learning about it. You have a couple of people that are against the grain and cause the rub, and you create a room that kind of is a little bit push and pull , and you kind of wanna find out where the rub areas are before you start.

6:41 Then expanding it out into the wider community. So when everyone was talking about, , AI and is it gonna get into schools, we had already sandboxed it, three or four times through to see what we think would potentially happen if this became a part of our bedrock infrastructure. A big part of my role is always about risk mitigation as a head of school.

7:01 And so for me it was, I was so pro in this area of learning about it. I had a great director of innovation that was an associate professor at NYU and also in all of these tech spaces that are traditionally more suited to people that aren't in education. So I also had a great person to and be a thinking partner while I was working through the weeds of , how do I think this is the safest, best way, but also not wait.

7:32 we've got a platform here, Wes, that it's the sticker on the front of our school. It says high school reimagined. And so the idea is that we've got an insatiable appetite for people that are connected to our school to go along for that journey. And as long as we articulate that there might be pitfalls, , we were pretty open to sharing that we are going to be drip feeding this out with a real kind of point of, once we know that this is what we should be doing, we're going to be so far ahead of this space.

8:02 So let's prep for it. Let's get everyone along for the ride. So internally sandboxing, then also starting to drip feed out into the different spaces. So a couple of student groups, we created a micro course that was on AI and machine learning. We also then started becoming a, a PD hub in the first year that we, we actually there we became, the leading fab node for, the whole of North America.

8:26 And we just had a great fab lab. And so we in invited people in. Just, just the whole of North America. I know. And so that kind of led was while everyone was putting up the fences and thinking about the risk without analysing its potential reward, were starting to put infrastructure in place to really mitigate all of those risk points.

8:49 then we just heavily invested in understanding the tools. We've had the licences for our faculty and staff for quite a long period of time. We have professional development that's actually a part of our teaching load at our school. two periods per week. Our teachers, it's professional development and it, it counts as a part of their load, which is a huge investment.

9:12 but what it does is also just means that you start to find the challenge areas of, and also the fact that I was talking, , before we got on about judgement and just having people seeing , the frustrations of it, like it was just another platform. And that was one of the best things that we did, is we just managed to get this idea of this is not a platform.

9:36 We're actually going to create the one thing that you've all complained about since you became teachers. And that's time. So we flipped the script on it a little bit and we took away the fear of , this isn't gonna replace you. This isn't gonna take away your thinking. It might be a thinking partner for you, but hey, guess what?

9:51 We're gonna give you eight hours to nine hours of your time back per week. That's where we started the conversation. , And then I think the big part of it is having students also play a role in working out how it was best to implement before we implemented. having those micro courses, we then bumped it into an elective.

10:11 We also have a thing that's similar to Shark Tank at our school. There's Franklin Student Ventures and it's an entire incubator programme. So we also had students that had parents that were working in the space. So we were almost creating this incubator that was being fed in by people that probably knew better than we did.

10:28 And so we actually started to be able to create great centralised knowledge area to just make better decisions on when the tools were at their peak, what they should be used for, what kind of access, what kind of assessment design are we going to utilise, how do we create roadblocks when we need to. And I think because everyone else was worrying about the policies and how to potentially stop it, any of our pitfalls, that was just really, there were micro in the road we'd articulated that we don't know that, we don't know this perfectly.

11:03 We dunno exactly everything, but this is where we're at and this is how we're gonna do it. You mentioned there about the fear of, "oh, is it you gonna take my job away, or part of my job away", or whatever. There's both a positive and a negative, which is like, get rid of the things I don't want to do.

11:17 But please, please don't, don't use AI to do the things that I do want to do as a teacher. So is that fear of, AI rocking up and taking away a teacher's job, something that , is a, palpable thing , in your world? Yeah, I would say not in our building anymore. So we have really incredible retention from our newest teachers to our most experienced teachers.

11:39 But it's definitely, uh, it's a conversation around the globe for sure. , I've been working with Hewlett Packard on two AI reports over the last kind of three or four years, it's interesting, the first talking point in all of them ends up being the same conversation and you're just like, you get to a point where it's like, "okay, we've gotta just park this and we've gotta start to see what we can do with it" rather than kind of a fear element and stamp on it.

12:02 , I think one of the most important things with any platform, any tool in education is you've gotta try and work out how it works for your own school system, before you start talking about it in this wider sphere of education. so what we did is we got to know warts and all, of all of our faculty as we were designing our professional development programme using AI tools.

12:28 SO we were essentially teaching and building our tools to understand our pedagogy and understand our educational philosophy. Which meant that when it was talking to these people that hadn't experienced before, the meta language that was being discussed was actually comfortable for them. But I think it's that other thing of.

12:47 Especially after COVID, I felt like the profession was really beaten up. you know, burnout's still a conversation. Everyone keeps talking about burnout. But parents, because they were educating their kids at home and the teacher that might have been in front of them had never been an online teacher before, which is a , different type of pedagogical experience in itself.

13:08 They were like, "oh, teachers have it easy. They're just giving out these worksheets. I, I know how to teach , my son or my daughter now", or the opposite. And they're like, oh, teaching, you know, I wouldn't want to touch it. But there was this real beaten up version of the profession and people saying, we have too many holidays after this.

13:23 Like, there was so much kind of focus on the negative, that we really wanted to generate this, love for your craft again. so we actually created a system where our, we have our strategic Saturday at our school, it's an invite , every single person can come. And the idea was like we wanted them to invest in the designing of what they were going to experience with how the tool was actually gonna be used at the school.

13:49 So it was heavily on inclusion. , But a big part of it was that sandbox. So we already knew what they were all gonna say. We knew what kind of teachers were gonna hate certain parts of it, what ones were gonna fear for their jobs. but it's definitely something we've been able to reduce significantly.

14:05 But it's definitely a talking point. Especially for those that are just, they're adver, they're reverse to interacting with AI tools. So you've got some incredible educators, that because of the way it's been presented to them, and maybe the way that they've actually had the platform introduced to them, they're anti it straight away, when they're, the people that I think are most integral for its build out- is like those that have had 20 years of pedagogical judgement that have gone through the weeds of four and five iterations of different learning frameworks.

14:37 It's definitely all about, a lot about design, but I also think it's really important for the leaders of the school to be, talking about what the transformation will look like, but from a positive lens rather than one that here's a platform, learn how to use it, or you're gonna burn out and. Uh. What'd you think then, based on what you've learned here, and the PD you've done for everybody else, what's gonna be the dominant model of education going forward?

15:02 Do you think? What are you hoping might be good in that area , Yeah, I've been obsessed with curriculum design like, I can't even remember how long, and I dunno why. Um, but a, a big part, yeah, don't hold it against me, but it, it's one Look, I can tell you that everyone that's at the school , we've got an ED leadership Slack, they get so sick of the amount of articles and documents and stuff I've put on there about curriculum design that's like, give us a different thing.

15:27 , I think what we're losing sight of is the developmental journey of a student, right? We're, if you think about the way the conversations are going, we keep talking about education as this entire, like, it's, it's a continuum that all of a sudden everyone fits into the same part of the continuum. And I just think that's really , a bad model to talk through.

15:49 Bedrock is about knowledge, exposure, understanding, so that you can make judgments. The early stages of educational development should still absolutely embed that experience for students that has the teacher at the front of the classroom around the classroom, mentoring also Vygotskys' zone of proximal development, putting the kids that are doing really well, challenging kids, et cetera.

16:14 I think to answer your question, it's gonna be different for each of the stages of educational development for the students. And this is where I think I'd probably go a little forward thinking in the area of where I think that we need to move assessment for students. We've got students that go into accelerated Pathways, but they still sit in the same grade.

16:35 They just never get to sit with their peers because they've broken a schedule up and all of a sudden it doesn't work. Like capabilities, competencies, and knowledge assessments can expose students at different grades to different things. And I think that's where AI tools really come in to be able to personalise that for the student.

16:52 But it shouldn't be a blanket exposure if a student's in eighth grade , year eight. And I'll also, if I say maths versus math, be really proud of me because the math thing took me a long time to hold the s I think so much of it is gonna be influenced by the developmental pathway of students. And then what I think is gonna probably transition a lot more is that kind of mentored or autonomy model.

17:16 And that's where the real educators , that are really nuanced in all of the different practises that happen and differentiated practise happen in a classroom, they're going to be able to facilitate a student that really needs to focus on good questioning and critical analysis of what's in front of them, rather than developing more sponge absorbing knowledge.

17:39 that's where I think it's gonna be really challenging for the schools that are 150 to 250 years old because the infrastructure of learning has always been this kind of like conveyor belt of once you've ticked these series of outcomes, you're just gonna move into the next series of outcomes regardless of what level you tick them off.

17:57 And so I think there's a real opportunity for that to be a model. I also think that we're gonna get to a point where. And again, I dunno if this is the right, approach because knowledge development and skill development can accelerate at such a rate that maturity doesn't match, you've seen these outlier students around the world.

18:21 There's one at NYU at the moment that's teaching. I think he's an associate professor at like 14. , And then all of a sudden you lose all of these other aspects of age development. So there's educational development and there's age development. So I think that's something that's gonna be a real rub area, is that I think AI is going to create these really exceptional, talented students that are the most, deepest critical thinkers.

18:45 'cause everyone thinks it's gonna be the opposite. You need to design your assessments that need to be better. an AI tool can do your assessment really quickly, it means that you haven't created a hard enough assessment. , And again, don't get me wrong, for those out there, I'm not saying that all of a sudden I'm this assessment expert by any means.

19:02 I think there's a real opportunity to get, and this is being really, honestly, I think that we need glo like a global foundation of leaders and it's just a think tank where we're just getting rid of all of the red tape and we're just really thinking about, "okay, how could we potentially create an infrastructure that'll work?".

19:24 Sometimes that won't be able to be implemented, right? There'll be a reason why it can't. But I think we need to think deeper on removing the conversation and the discourse around the negative in all of these spaces. And try and find as much positive as possible, so that we can get more people that will then be better at critically evaluating where it's going to fail or where it's going to be wrong.

19:47 'cause at the moment, you've got all those that love and are insatiable learners about this area. And then you've got the other side and you need the other side in order for the others to be held accountable and to think differently and have different perspectives. So, I think, the, the autonomy approach to learning, I think is going to be to one that's definitely built out.

20:08 But I also think that there's going to be an element of self-teaching that is going to accelerate a lot in a very short period of time, which also needs, , its guardrails, right? It also needs, , e every element of that learning journey needs some form of mentorship. , In my mind , is a student can work towards an outcome, but they don't necessarily know the purpose of why they're working towards it.

20:31 And without the experience and without the judgement skills, they could just be learning a huge amount of stuff that could actually be synthesised and compressed into a transdisciplinary way of learning. I, I don't think there's a definitive answer, but I definitely have some deep thoughts on, on what I think it might shift to.

20:48 I think that whole picture that you're painting there , is really important because I find , in the work that I do outside of the world of education, we have a lot of conversation going on about, , what are the essential skills that employees need? You know, which parts of the jobs are gonna end up being automated or syphoned off to AI in order to release time to do the really valuable stuff.

21:11 And there's, a bit of a downside thing, which is, "oh, I'm, all I'm going to be doing is it just gonna be checking the AI is not making mistakes?". And there is an element of that. , Fortunately that's fun because many of the mistakes that AI makes are hilarious. Yep. but there is the other much, much more important thing.

21:28 And what will become, , absolutely central is , the role of the human in terms of the human skills and attributes that,, you might automate some things with technology, but , essentially the human skills are not gonna end up being replaced by AI and be gonna gonna become so much more important. And there's a whole load of career planning and, , employer and employee discussion about that.

21:51 My reflection as well listening to both of you there, is that also it's about lighting that fire and not just filling the vessel kind of thing. I know that's an old adage, but you know, that slowing things down and age related learning and why you're doing it is actually quite an important part of education.

22:10 You know, when you do masters degrees or, or vocational stuff, , you often spend, you spend time, you know, if you want to be a lawyer, you might spend, years and years and years doing that thing. And there's a reason for that because you need to experience the human element of being in a courtroom and understanding the nuances , of the legal system, not just reading it in a book.

22:29 You've gotta, you've gotta stare defendant down and, learning should be hard, should be challenging, but should also, should be slow in age appropriate , and give you time to mature what you're thinking. So it's definitely changed my thinking today, listening to you both there. , I think that both of you said about like the importance and harder, right?

22:47 , And I think that's something that we're also kind of losing sight on, is that they think that AI is going to all of a sudden make everything easier. We were talking about the innovation award at the start. One of the things that I became obsessed with, and I I can't remember, I I always say it's either 2016 or 2017 was, , the release from the World Economic Forum on the taxonomy to skills chart.

23:11 Did you see how it's , the interactive dynamic? for me it was that real capabilities, competencies that you just saw, synergies between, that didn't really matter what the jobs were that were on the right hand side. Those jobs kept pivoting, but you could see where there's clusters of skills, capabilities, competencies.

23:30 a big idea for me, which is one of the reasons I said yes to the job as well, is 'cause I knew how to clean slate, was creating a thing called a skills curriculum. So it was on that idea of what you were saying before Ray. Is the human element. If you can, if you can harness all of those aspects, so many of those characteristics, capability, skills, judgement , they fit into so many different professions.

23:53 then if you think about it, AI is going to speed up the knowledge area that's gonna separate the people. Like those, they've got eight of the nine areas that you need. But the one that they need the most is understanding of ethics. And ethics is a judgement thing. And it's a personal thing as well that you develop, but it's also something that has frameworks within it.

24:11 So that skills curriculum really helps students sit in the unknown, work on the skills that are outside of traditional assessment. But I also think that one of the things AI is going to do is it's going to make the school experience harder where it counts. And you were talking about AI making mistakes.

24:33 If you think about how many papers get retracted. How many researchers get changed? Like are you having a glass of milk every day? Is an apple really keeping the doctor away? , Is breakfast really the optimal way to start your day? There's good practise has always been to question everything anyway. And so just because we are getting this at a fast net speed, why all of a sudden do we feel like everyone's gonna just not question everything?

25:01 And I think that's where we need to go back to that point of: Saving time going, it's going to occur by using these tools, but it doesn't need to be, "I've now got the answer, press send" or I accept this. It's, instead of reading a meta-analysis with 30,000 different perspectives, it gives me a snapshot of it.

25:26 I'm going to then evaluate the snapshot. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go read those specific papers, which has reduced my time significantly, but it's made me spar. like it made me battle with ai, it made it, it came a thinking and sparring partner rather than a personal executive assistant that's synthesising the work that you should be doing.

25:46 And so that's what excites me the most about it, is deeper questions. Students are going to have to question more, I think educators are going to have to think harder on how we move the needle for students to really understand that knowing is okay. And just because you get the information means that you've got it now critically evaluate it.

26:09 And if you don't understand it, you are missing the bedrock of knowledge anyway, and you should be going back and doing a little bit of preparation. feel like we started this conversation with some questions. I now have even bigger questions, but I love that. I think what I'm hearing is there are some amazing opportunities.

26:30 There are also some things we need to be, , careful about. The thing that we need to do is have an open mind about what might happen in the future. And that there's a role that technology can play. There's the role that humans can play . And perhaps there's gonna be a different model of learning as we think about it.

26:51 Not stripping out that, "oh, everything's gonna be taught about ai" 'cause that will be awful and terrible and have massive consequences, but that perhaps we're gonna have a model of learning that develops both skills , and the superhuman skills and attributes that are gonna be important in the future as well.

27:11 Yeah, a really good summarise. And I think one, one added part to it, which, you know, one school in particular has short, really shortened the day of learning for students by using, technology tools. I don't think it needs to go that way, but I do think if we're really wanting students to develop those skills, we need to be able to give them time to immerse themselves in it.

27:34 And so teaching a skill versus applying a skill are two very, very different things. And that's something that we purposely designed at our school is an opportunity to apply your learning. We're so research heavy in certain areas and then we pretend it doesn't exist, right? Because it makes it too hard for the infrastructure that we're trying to build.

27:53 Students really shouldn't be starting school before nine o'clock. And, we're putting in so much stuff into what we call learning for our students is that we can't get through everything in the time that we're saying is appropriate for a kid to be at school. So let's start school earlier. Let's reduce the amount of playtime that they have, which is socialising, which is developing conversations, which is collaborating, which is problem solving, which is building resilience.

28:20 We're reducing all of those timeframes to essentially behind a screen, which we're also banning now as well. I think there has to be a real deep thinking on what a school day should look like for a student outside of just learning. And that's where I think there's an opportunity to start the day later and finish the day earlier.

28:40 But we need society to help us do that because everyone talks about preparing the students of the world of work that's about to happen. But no one in the workspace wants a student inside their workspace during the day. You, you do a bogus internship and most of the time it's with a family member that's got a great building organisation so you can dig a trench for them and they'll buy you hot chips and some chicken.

29:02 , But it would be great if there was a real commitment where I, and I'm seeing it around the world. Yeah. I have a real, always had this burning desire to lead a really big school in Australia to be able to , change it enough so that it becomes this real historical, everyone understands where its tradition has come from, but it was able to see where the future is going.

29:24 And one of the interesting parts is you need external partners in order for that to work. And , that's become really hard. and so I think that's an important thing is realising that we need external people to be helping outside of education and get students to be immersed in experiences even if it's cyclical.

29:46 And it's, ninth grade, which is tends to be a year where we ship them off to a beautiful campus down somewhere and they get to learn about, , bush and life in general and they stay away from school. That's what we've done is invest so heavily in ninth grade as year nine as being the area where we just really challenge human growth.

30:04 'cause that's when they become quite challenging. Right? Everyone says ninth grade's the hardest Yeah. Take advantage of it. Yeah. Get, get 'em to rub, rub in a million different areas so that you can learn as much as you can about them, but we need external partners to make it work. Wow. Well this has been an amazing conversation.

30:22 Will, thank you so much for joining. We really appreciate it. we're gonna have to get you back in a year's time to give us an update because it sounds like you're building the school to produce super humans , for an AI age. And I want to know how that's working out for you and, , the bumps along the way that I think everybody listening to this would find really, , useful as we all go on a similar journey.

30:45 Thanks very much. love to and than happy to host you if you guys ever make it over to New York. Yeah. Thank you, man. Cheers.