No AI was used in the creation of this post. I own all the flaws and any lack of clarity, but I also hope you read something that resonates.

My earliest memory is from when I was two years old living with my parents and my twin brother in a little town in Iowa. There was a big tree in the front yard and we’d go out there and pull the leaves off the branches and when my parents asked what we were doing we said “helping it be Fall”.

I had a natural impulse to participate actively in the change I saw around me — and education is a natural extension of that since as educators we’re all change managers, we design and encourage change in our students and our colleagues and ourselves.

Schools are special communities that are by definition learning organizations, dedicated to the transformation that comes from challenge and growth, failing toward success, never fully settled. My own passion for change is rooted in the active part, understanding systems and people, and then building something new — like the cycles of nature, it’s a very human impulse, to build and rebuild and design and create.

We’re facing generational shifts in our economy, our society, and our notion of work and adding value to the world around us. The Stanford Digital Economy Lab tracked that hiring of 22-to-25-year-olds in the most AI-exposed jobs has slowed by about sixteen percent since ChatGPT arrived, but aggregate unemployment hasn’t moved much. In other words, the world our students will be going into is already experiencing shift at the bottom rung of the ladder they intend to climb. Making our students future-ready means something different now than before.

Schools are also small-c conservative — we conserve what is sacred about child development, social and emotional growth, the joy of aspiring toward personal and collective goals. And now schools are called to respond to these generational shifts. What does this look like?

To me, it looks like creating space and devoting resources to intentional reframing of the goals and workflows and systems that promote student and professional change. This is tricky and uncertain work, since there’s no established playbook for it, beyond what our own collective capacity and collaborative wisdom can provide.

There are a lot of people in the world right now hyping AI and many of them seem pretty certain about the outcome. But the truth is, no one has answers. Daron Acemoglu, who won the 2024 Nobel in economics, estimates AI will add about 0.06 percent a year to U.S. productivity over the next decade. Goldman Sachs says 1.5. McKinsey says higher. There’s a twenty-fold spread (at least) between the most credentialed forecasters in the world, looking at the same data. There is no consensus.

Also, the reality is that schools are not a monolith — they are unique, with unique communities and contexts. International schools all the more so. “Building the future” of education looks different in different places, times, and cultural frameworks. Trying to build a one-size-fits-all future is doomed.

Last year, Los Angeles Unified spent six million dollars on an AI chatbot built by an outside vendor. The vendor collapsed in three months and is now an FBI investigation. Around the same time, a Harvard physicist built his own AI tutor inside his introductory physics course — embedded the pedagogy he already knew worked, made it give one step at a time, made it refuse to hand over the answer. His students learned twice as much in less time, in a peer-reviewed randomized trial. There are other studies coming out that mimic the Harvard example: if you build intentionally and guide student practice, if you know your users deeply, then AI can be a powerful multiplier. If you apply standardized solutions, either they will cause active harm or you just waste your time. The key variable for solutions engineering in this space is who builds it, and what they build it for.

As educators, we have to actively participate in the change, design the future for our students that they need and that they are calling for. I want to create structured creative and generative space for this change — and bring technical and adaptive skills to bear on these exciting questions. We need a lab in which the emerging ideas can thrive — each school needs a lab.

Ethan Mollick at Wharton has been studying how organizations actually adapt to AI, and the pattern that works is consistent: you don’t just throw money at tools and tokens, you create labs. You find the small group of people in your particular organization who are already pushing boundaries — they’re easy to find, they’ve been asking for access for months, or else they are in the shadows and you have to draw them out — you give them institutional permission to experiment and tinker and design. We shouldn’t be buying the future from a vendor. We should build it for ourselves.

The results will be unique to your school and the individuals it serves. Those unique solutions won’t be built by Google or Microsoft or Sam Altman. They’ll be built by your community. I’ve spent my life making ideas into real things, or dreaming about that, anyway. For all the risks that AI presents to learning and work and human wisdom, it also presents an equal and maybe greater opportunity to empower students and educators to reshape their work and learning. I want to design new systems and methods with empathy, research, and collective capacity. I want to build original and powerful tools for our professional learning community and our students.

The future is more personalizable and more adaptive. It’s also, I hope, more playful and weird and all about productive struggle.

Forty years of cognitive science says the learning that feels easy evaporates and the learning that feels hard sticks. Struggle first, add tools second. A school designing its own tools can design and enforce that prioritization.

I want to partner with colleagues who bring expertise in deep learning, teaching, counseling and mentorship to build new courses, programs, workflows and platforms. This takes time and commitment, it takes an extraordinary courage and imagination, and it takes creativity and a willingness to fail. It takes, in short, all the qualities and competencies that we want our students to embody and master.

We are the learners now, and we need to “help it be Fall” in a way that makes our world more interesting, more equitable, and rich with opportunity.