Here is an excerpt from my book review series at the start of the year:

This primary source collection allows Steve to speak directly to the reader through speeches, letters, photos and other gathered materials. I felt more connected to him as a creative person and got a sense of his humanity in a different way than when an author writes about a public figure secondhand. I'm glad I got to know him a little better through his own words. It reminded me of the power of primary sources. We don't consume very many of them!

I personally downloaded and read the ePub, but there are a variety of ways to access it for free, which are explained in this helpful link:

https://www.idownloadblog.com/2023/04/11/download-make-something-wonderful-ebook-tutorial/

Saturdays are for recommendations! They won’t all be books, but I hope you like this one.

The one in which a PhD advisor considers the career trajectories of two new students and what might happen depending on their choices with AI:

https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/

A tool for districts and states to help develop comprehensive policies in a “stack”:

https://www.aipolicylab.org/post/policy-stack-resource

Learning to Flourish in the Age of AI: A TL;DR of LearnerStudio’s original publication (November 2025):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O_YM-n1dNVTRFNTGWroVoehZqD7Hu1fc/view

I would appreciate feedback on these links. Are they the types of content you want to read? What’s missing? I tried to keep it manageable at three links. More or less?

I’m sure you can picture this right now - the children lined up in rows, facing forward towards a teacher standing in front of a chalkboard - maybe now upgraded to a whiteboard in your modern version.

But the archetype - the thing that comes to mind as a concept - is simply not the reality across the country. The leaders who are picturing that as the daily norm haven’t been in schools in decades! Perhaps not even since their own time in schools, where they have conveniently edited out their own extracurriculars, chemistry labs, music lessons, and the computers that would inevitably be accessible to every student if they were to visit a school today.

I see a push toward swapping out the human being archetype at the front of the room for a personalized robot teacher. We saw this literally with Melania Trump and a humanoid robot, where the presumption is that this robot will be the future in education.

One problem though. Those classrooms are filled with actual children. Not robotic learners.

Classroom Design

As we re-think what schools looks like in reality, beyond the archetype, let’s start with desk configuration. Some rooms are necessarily facing forward in rows, such as chemistry labs where symmetry is safety. Teachers are supervising students as they create chemical changes and occasionally use fire. Rows allow clear lines of sight for demonstrations and supervision while experiments are taking place.

The students in chemistry labs are not working alone though. They have partners that support one another in all aspects of the work, including data collection and reporting. This is similar to other classroom designs, which have triangular or trapezoidal tables for group work. These modular tables, designed for groups of learners to work in collaboration, are found from preschool through grad school across the country.

Instructional Design

Instructional design practices that rely on these table groupings include partner activities such as “turn and talk” or “think, pair, share” while a whole table group discussion experience includes debates, role taking where each learner does a portion of a project, or study groups. Then students may “gallery walk” between tables to collaborate further throughout the classroom.

Even when seating is individually designed, this is often for storage or transient reasons. Some elementary schools may have students store items in their individual desks to avoid clogging the cubby area, while high school classrooms are designed for students to move classrooms each period. Even with individual seating, desks are designed to be moved easily and often re-arranged to meet the needs of the day, whether that’s a giant horseshoe for a socratic seminar discussion or clustering desks into different level groups for language arts.

We can see in the items that we purchase for schools and in the methods used for instruction that the archetype is misguided. We will continue next time with digital tools and the social aspects of education - further separating ourselves from Little House on the Prairie. That model of schooling is as much of a myth as the robot and the First Lady, though I fear that there are groups of people who want us to have both a time machine whipping us into the past and a robot overlord to supervise our children.

Let’s get our bearings about where we are now, and then craft an alternative vision for a school of the future. See you next time.

I’ve started this Substack to explore the changes in technology, values, implementation and impacts for regular people, and perhaps to prompt discussion and exploration of ways that we can build a future that centers human flourishing as the most valuable measure of a technology’s success.

I work at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Education, where I create active learning opportunities for students and teachers that give them tools and agency to make decisions about where, when, and how to use emerging technologies.

There is a tension inherent in this work. AI can be cool and fun and useful. It’s “the future” even as it’s put into our daily lives through the items we already own and use every day. But I worry that we are trying to go faster without asking, “for what?”

Are the children I teach expecting a brighter world where this technology reduces their burdens while enhancing their lives? It is one possible future - but most of them don’t believe it. A few people are getting rich while many others are losing their jobs. Everything feels precarious. And it’s hard to be excited about technology when we have reasons to distrust some of the creators and can’t opt out.

We need to teach about emerging technologies, but in a specific way that includes technical understanding and ethical framing while supporting the autonomy of the learner. We need to create governance and regulation that ensures these technologies actually help people, and to invest in research to understand the societal impacts of their implementation. And all workers need to earn a living with dignity for their labor, using technology to automate the dangerous, dirty and repetitive tasks while leaving the creative and exciting work for people. In this Substack, we will explore these disconnects and perhaps find ways to begin to create the world we wish to live in. For all of us.