Some thoughts and reflections from a year of learning, sharing, and leading workshops, keynotes, and coaching for school leaders and educators, and, more importantly, teaching children ages 3 to 11. This year that thinking became a letter, written to September. 

Painting by KiloBlimp

Dear September,

I was thinking of you as an opportunity to begin, even though it’s the fall and it seems like the end of a season. But I think for many educators in the Northern Hemisphere, and I’m sure educators in the Southern Hemisphere feel the same, September is the new start. After a summer pause, after hopefully being able to disconnect and relax, coming into September feels full of hope, excitement, anticipation of all the possibilities ahead of us.

As I write to you in June, after a full year, I have some thoughts, and maybe some anxieties, about what you’re going to bring to me, to my world, to the work I do supporting educators in schools. How this accelerated change surrounds us, mainly shaped by geopolitics and technology. What can we expect? I’m both excited and apprehensive.

Two things really stuck out this past year. One, doing my podcast, the International Schools Podcast, a guest, Warren Apel, Director of Technology, mentioned this idea, “the AI tool you are using today will be the worst tool you will ever use.” That resonated, because it connects to how fast things have changed. I think there have been three or four moments this year where suddenly I felt a jump, in capacity, in intelligence, in just how powerful AI systems are becoming.

And then, doing a lot of workshops, I noticed people are often are bold in the breakout rooms, really willing to reframe school, to challenge what the value-added benefit of a human even is in a world increasingly run by AI. Another guest on the International Schools Podcast, Adam Morris, Product Director: Integrations, Faria Education Group, shared the idea not engaging with AI is pedagogic malpractice. That got me thinking, part of what we’re doing wrong thinking of AI as a tool, when actually it’s much more, it’s an ecosystem woven into everyday life.

And that pattern, bold ideas in the room, then far more caution once people return to their own context, I think it’s partly because we’re not aligned in our boldness, not all willing to start over, to think of the moment and the future rather than letting the past dictate. The hesitancy to be bold in a school setting has a lot to do with timetables, exams, the busyness, the organisational trappings, getting caught up in being human, in the feelings and emotions and seasons of how much capacity you actually have. What does it mean to change, not just enhancing what we already do, but really thinking from a blank slate. Whatever we did before, we’re not doing again, we’re thinking of something completely new.

I do this myself, in my own workshops and keynotes. I’m very aware that if you provoke people, push them outside their comfort zone, there’s uncertainty, and uncertainty brings an emotion that can be defensive, a discomfort. One way is to push back, another is to ignore it, run from it. So I’m mindful of how important it is to stay intentional, purposeful, relevant, and true to what people are actually dealing with, even though accelerated change often feels distant until it hits us personally or professionally. 

But maybe we should be more uncomfortable, more often. Maybe if we got used to discomfort, we’d build greater resilience, greater capacity to adapt with agility. Not that people aren’t already adaptable, but the kind of adaptation this moment asks for, with AI ecosystems accelerating the way they are, is different. You take the hype with a pinch of salt, but there’s a sense that something is taking place, and it’s bigger than us at times.

There’s no doubt the seamlessness of these tools is addictive. What’s easier than being able to quickly subcontract out our thinking and get something else to do it, maybe more efficiently, with greater depth than we are? This idea of cognitive offloading is something Tim Cook, who writes on cognitive privacy and AI in education, a guest on the International Schools Podcast  describes well and shares in his writing, the difference between adults, who can lose a skill and still get it back, and children, who never built it and have nothing to get back to.

Think of what children have growing up around Alexa at home, watching parents talk to a chatbot, the sense that the answer is just there, that the process, the heavy lifting, doesn’t need to happen. Just the transaction, and the dependence on it. That might be fine for us adults, who’ve had practice with the grit of learning. But if we don’t protect that for children, if we don’t make sure they still engage with the struggle, they’re going to lose something they never had the chance to build. And for ourselves, we have to keep reminding ourselves, critical thinking, the heavy lifting, the resistance, the adaptability, these are essential. We have to be the guardians of that, however exhausting, however efficient the shortcuts on offer.

One thing I plan to do this summer is get bored. You know those rainy days as a child, nothing to do, sitting in your room a little annoyed, your parents telling you to keep busy, and then suddenly you start making something out of nothing. A toy off the shelf, a piece of paper, moving the furniture around to build a house, something imaginary. Just that capacity to sit there with nothing in your head and create anyway.

On the long distance cycling trips my wife and I do, the landscape can feel the same after a while, after endless kilometres. That creates a time to be present in the moment, and lets thoughts run by you and then nothing, and then new ideas come. That’s something I see constantly with the students I work with, they want the immediate answer, avoid having to problem solve, an innate need for an instant return. And that instantness comes at the cost of creativity, because if we can’t sit with something on our own, push through the difficulty, the sweat of getting to a new idea, what are we losing? What are we taking from ourselves, and from the children we teach?

There’s a growing gap, September, between what we’re comfortable engaging with as educators and how much we’ve valued, and value ourselves, for our past knowledge and skills. Maybe that knowledge still matters. But maybe it also traps us into wanting to be safe, wanting certainty. How do we get comfortable with discomfort? How do we build the capacity to model agility when there’s so much unknown, and find the strategies in our back pocket we can pull out quickly, whether we’re leading, teaching, or just trying to share an idea? How do we break away from the past enough to try something honestly new?

And in the many conversations with school leaders, I notice we really want a system, a policy we can carve in stone and live by. We want artificial intelligence to be a set of tools we control, this one’s appropriate, this one isn’t. I understand why systems, consistency, rules matter. But if we’re not willing to be agile, where the policy might need to shift every three or four months, or even in weeks, where it’s really guidelines rather than policy, understanding tomorrow it could change again, and modelling that with children too, because whatever tool we tie ourselves to today, there are ten more powerful ones coming that we don’t even know about yet.

This is a systemic change. It’s about a system, not a tool. Our usual ways of working aren’t built for being in a constant flow of accelerated capability, systems that show up at home, in the car, online, everywhere around us. What can we do as leaders to keep remembering, the tool is not the focus. It’s the value-added proposition of us, of being human. How do we adapt, how do we stay agile, so that the proposition of being human stays timeless rather than chasing the latest AI tool release? Humans need to stay at the centre of this story, and we have to keep checking that what we think is right today might not hold tomorrow.

One small example of what that agility can look like. I have a framework I use called CRITIC, built out of a lot of reading, a lot of other people’s work, nothing original really, just my own adaptation of what I’d learned. In one workshop, I gave it to a group of teachers as something to take and try between sessions. When we came back together, two of them shared what they’d done.

They’d used it with their own students, treating whatever the AI gave them not as the answer, but as something to question. What is it actually saying? What reasons does it give? What’s missing, a number, a source, an example. What other view could there be. What happens if we believed this and it was wrong. What would we actually go and check? And the teachers said their students started noticing the AI’s answer had a kind of curated voice to it, a perspective, even something like empathy that wasn’t quite real, and the only way to catch that was to slow down and really interrogate it, almost like being a detective.

That, I think, is the deviation worth having. Not using AI less, not using it more, being intentional, willing to plan and think deeply about how we put it in front of students, as a critical friend, a challenger, something cross-examined rather than copied. Because if we do that, it can only grow a student’s capacity to think independently, instead of repeating back whatever was generated for them.

But I want to be honest about something that unsettled me more than I expected. I was working with Fable 5 for a week in June, a large language model from Anthropic, extraordinarily powerful. At that level, you could handle real complexity and in a short time it could generate artifacts, feedback, analysis, engagement, as a critical friend or even as a challenger, and the quality and power of what it delivered was, for me, quite mind-boggling. I was like, wow, this is a new level. And of course I worked with it, really said, okay, how far can I push this within the context of my own skill set, and I really got to push it, I think, in ways I hadn’t been able to before. Not only using it as a teaching assistant, but as a critical thinker, a challenger, where it really got to be a critical thinker with me, we exchanged ideas, it challenged my ideas, I challenged it, and then also it challenged me. But then suddenly it got shut down. I won’t go into the details, by the time anyone reads this, something will likely have changed again. But what I suddenly realised was that these systems we become reliant on, it’s a bit like nectar, you taste it and realise how good it is, and you want to be engaged with it, put it through its work, and then you suddenly realise what happens when it turns off. A government, or a company, can create something this powerful and decide overnight to shut it down for millions, hundreds of millions of users. And it becomes a bargaining chip. Maybe only a certain profile of people get to use it. Only certain companies. Only certain countries.

And suddenly the geopolitics of it, how technology companies and the power they’re generating through these AI systems, the infrastructure required, the impact on the environment, and then when these things become powerful enough, how a government, or even an organisation, if they have the power and the capacity, can shut everything down, and suddenly you’re left with nothing. It’s a bit like being an addict, and suddenly you don’t get to have it, and you go through the withdrawal. This was really pointed out to me, suddenly realising how powerful these, not tools, ecosystems, are. And how governments and organisations can really control our access to them, on a whim.

So maybe, September, what I’m really asking of you is for that renewal, the idea that yes, it’s the fall, it’s the end of a season, but I want to take that as a chance to think of it completely differently. Maybe September is the new spring. However cautious or uncertain things are, however much these systems reshape the world around us, I’m still excited by the fact that I’m human, that I have this capacity, if I give myself permission, if I plan for it, stay disciplined, and don’t reach for the shortcut, to go and get bored. Really bored. And then see what comes. 

John