Beyond the AI Inflection Point: Shaping the Future of Education Webinar

Beyond the AI Inflection Point Project

Toolkit

Group Discussion Guide

AI 2027

What Comes Next: Reimagining K12 Education in the Age of AI (Pre-launch webinar)

Brookings Institute Report

Utah State Board of Education AI Resources

Amanda Bickerstaff

Amanda is the Founder and CEO of AI for Education. A former high school science teacher and EdTech executive with over 20 years of experience in the education sector, she has a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities that AI can offer. She is a frequent consultant, speaker, and writer on the topic of AI in education, leading workshops and professional learning across both K12 and Higher Ed. Amanda is committed to helping schools and teachers maximize their potential through the ethical and equitable adoption of AI.

Sari Factor

Sari’s vision and strategic direction guides Imagine Learning’s work to create effective, digitally enabled curriculum solutions. A lifelong teacher advocate, she works to ensure that every student has access to meaningful, educational experiences wherever learning takes place. Before joining Imagine Learning, Sari was a mathematics teacher and held leadership positions at several successful educational publishing and learning technology companies including Kaplan, McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin, and Everyday Learning Corporation.

Mathew Winters

Matthew Winters is the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Educational Specialist for USBE, the Utah State Board of Education. He was formerly a product manager and statewide trainer for Utah Education Network, specializing in Google Workspaces for Edu. He was also the Utah Coalition for Educational Technology (UCET) President for 2022-2024, our Utah ISTE affiliate. He was awarded the Education Innovation Award for Impact at ASU+GSV, one of the International Society for Technology in Education’s 20 to Watch in 2023, and one of District Administrator’s Top 100 Innovative Educators in 2025. He is a former English Language Arts teacher at the secondary and college level.

Irina Jurenka

Irina is a Research Director working on LearnLM at Google DeepMind, where she leads a multidisciplinary team to infuse the science of learning into Gemini - and the products it powers - to create the world’s most pedagogical AI. Before this, she worked on improving reasoning in language models, while her early work at DeepMind focused on fusing together ideas from machine learning, neuroscience and physics to understand how intelligence represents information. Before joining DeepMind, Irina did a DPhil at the Oxford Center for Computational Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence, and won the British Psychological Society Undergraduate Award in Experimental Psychology.

Jason B. Allen

Jason B. Allen is the National Partnership Director for the National Parents Union. He has worked in Education for nineteen (19) years as a teacher, administrator and leader serving students, families and communities.

As a long time storyteller, Jason shares his experiences through his company, educational entities, llc , which includes The Educators Voice Blog (TEVB), Students for Equity, i Win Morning Show and Lillie’s Foundation.

He is a longtime advocate for male engagement and doing the work of elevating Black male teachers and educators voices to order to help increase the number of male educators or color in classrooms and boardrooms. His podcast, Speak Black Man, focuses on ways to recruit, retain and empower Black male educators to advocate for social justice and equity while adding our perspectives to various issues impacting us.

His life work is centered on his family’s foundation, Lillie’s Foundation, supporting grandparents and seniors raising school aged children.

‍ 00:00
Amanda Bickerstaff
Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm really excited to have you all here today. I amanda Bickerstaff. I am the CEO and co founder of AI for Education, an organization committed to AI literacy for a million educators and students. And I have never, ever been so proud of something that I have done as a colleague, a partner as than today's beyond the AI inflection point piece, it has been an enormous labor of love. It started as a conversation factor and I, who is here with us today on the floor of ASGSV, and then led to a group of 20amazing thought leaders, two of which are with us today, students, educators, and then about four months of figuring out how do we actually write this thing, which has been pretty amazing. And we're just really excited to be able to share it with you all today.

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00:53
Amanda Bickerstaff
You're the first group that is getting the full download of what we did. As always, please use the chat function. Say hello. We'll make sure that it's turned on for everybody. It wasn't. So I will turn that on. Yeah, it is. So everyone say hi. You can chat with each other, say hello. Drop resources. If you have questions for the panel, please put that in the Q and A so that we can make sure to see those. But if you have a resource or an idea, we always love that, how active our community is because, you know, we really do this work because of everyone out in the world that is doing it on the ground.

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01:28
Amanda Bickerstaff
And so I want to start, I'm going to say thank you to Jason and Matt, who are going to come up and have part of the panel in 20 minutes. So they're going to get a hangout. And while Sari and I kind of dive into the piece. So Sari, first of all, Sari is amazing. Sari is doing another convening today, which is apparently you do one every six months, something like that. These huge goals, these huge, lofty goals. But what we have is, can you talk a little bit about your background, how we met, and then also we can talk a little bit about how this project came to be.

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02:05
Sari Factor
Great. Thanks, Amanda. So I'm Sari Factor. I am the vice chair and chief strategy officer for Imagine Learning, which is one of the leading curriculum solution providers, primarily in the US I see we've got a lot of people from all over and we do sell some of our materials overseas, but most of our businesses here in the US And I've been working in and around education and curriculum and technology for more than 40 years. And I met Amanda at the ASU GSV Conference and were tracking what was happening with AI and hearing from our customers who were grappling with what do we do? Kids are cheating. How do we think about assessment differently? How can we keep learning science? Foremost our materials are based in evidence based practices and educational research. And so that's been very scientific central to what we wanted to do.

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03:04
Sari Factor
And so Amanda and I talked about how, you know, this AI 2027 report had come out just the week before we saw each other. And for those of you who have not read it, just go to ai2027.com AI-2027.com it is a fictional but research based approach to AI, you know, and not beyond generative AI know really full a full on automation and AI and what will happen in the arc between now and 2027. And so Amanda and I looked at each other and said if any part of this is true. And it was a real accelerationist point of view. It was a if any part of this is true, what should we be doing about that in K12 schools?

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03:49
Sari Factor
And so we started to try to think about how could we bring together a group of thought leaders, educational researchers, we brought students, we brought practitioners in and technologists all together into a room. There were 20 of us for two days in the middle of the summer at our headquarters in Arizona to really talk about it. And Amanda and I with an outside facilitator tried to drive with two of our own people, Jason Fournier on my team who leads our AI initiatives and then of course Amanda's person, Cory Lane Crouch were so instrumental in kind of structuring a conversation and we're going to take you through a little bit of that today. The kinds of conversations we had and with whom and what that has turned into. This new report called beyond the AI Inflection Point Shaping the Future of Education.

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04:47
Amanda Bickerstaff
And one of the things that was so interesting about this convening and if you want to learn more, we did a pre launch webinar that we can share was how important it was for us to have people that came to the room. First of all, everyone came on their own dime. They flew out, they took time off from their work, they were there with us that they believed in the moment of urgency that there are so many questions and so many approaches and we would say potentially a lack of understanding or commitment to how important this moment is of how AI is disrupting assessment.

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05:27
Amanda Bickerstaff
Students lives, even their ways in which they build relationships with each other and bots that we wanted the group to be quite unique in the sense of really big thinkers, but also those that were willing to engage and to work deeply on hard questions. That is so important for this work because that's what would happen in a district, an education organization. You're going to have big different understandings and opinions and experiences. And we wanted to model that. But also we wanted Sari and I wanted to be pushed as well to think deeper about what this could mean.

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06:05
Amanda Bickerstaff
And so what we came up with and one of the things I'm going to actually start kind of a little bit around in terms of how instead of showing you the report to start, I'd rather show you how you can think about if there's anything that resonates with you today, how you can do this in your own organization. This was incredibly important to us, is that the ultimate goal was not coming up with this piece. The ultimate goal was to spark discussion and to create spaces in which you, whether you are in the US around the world, even if you're not in K12, could do this work in your own organization. So I'm just going to show you. First of all, here's the beautiful website. Thank you Sean and everyone that's helped pull this together.

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06:46
Amanda Bickerstaff
This is where you can find not only the full report, but all of the resources, the evidence. We have a resource bank that will be like totally revolving and more resources around the key components. But we also have this beyond the Inflection point AI Inflection point toolkit. And what you're going to notice is if you look at this is that we have created essentially a version of the convening that you can do within your own organization. This is a really fascinating experience to facilitate, co facilitate with Chris who came in to help us. What we did is we took the same ideas and we put this together. So if any part of this you were thinking, man, I wish my organization could have these types of conversations.

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07:31
Amanda Bickerstaff
We have a place for you to go and even if you're not ready to quite do that yet, we've got a study group guide as well where you can go in and start to see. Can you see my screen, Sarah? Can you see the study guide?

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07:42
Sari Factor
Yes.

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07:42
Amanda Bickerstaff
Perfect. You can actually have a session or PLC where you sit down and actually talk through some of these big questions. And I think it's very important to start there then the report because that is our goal. If we got through and instead of people saying we read this report instead said we are doing this work on our own that would I think be Sari and I's shining. Like, you know that is our goal that we're moving to. But what I want to do is take you through the project. And so the way this worked and if you want to know, we have this little provocation at the top. And I will say provocation is the goal. Right Sari? I mean we actually went back and forth.

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08:19
Amanda Bickerstaff
You want to talk a little bit about how we decided like just how far we wanted to push this piece?

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08:25
Sari Factor
Yeah, I mean what you will see in the main narrative is really kind of a historical view of, you know, from the minute. ChatGPT was announced in fall of 2023. And it unrolls kind of the story of this fictional central school district. So we patterned this off of the AI 2027, which was a fictional but research informed approach. We did this narrative around how central school experienced the onslaught of AI coming in fall of 22, all the way up to 27. And at that point decisions that central makes changes the trajectory of what their district does. So there are three branches off of the main narrative. Just to give each educational group a sense of the decisions you make today will impact students long into the future.

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09:23
Sari Factor
And how do we think about equipping schools, school organizations to make the best decisions for their community? We've given them some options here and some tools so that they can create their own path what is right for their community.

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09:38
Amanda Bickerstaff
Absolutely. And so for us, if you want to think about the journey, I'm going to take you through 2023, 2027. One of the things that was incredibly us was to make it feel real. And our first readers, many of them district leaders, one of the things that they said to us was I see reflected in this, the 2023-2025 school year exactly what we're experiencing today in some way shape or form. Like I can see my district in this organ in this piece. And so we have. Is central is your kind of middle size, middle of the road, you know, district that has 10 schools. It's got. It's about 4,500 students, just under 300 teachers. So very like of most of our school districts of that size. And what we have is that the first thing we start with is it's the 2023 school year.

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10:28
Amanda Bickerstaff
And you know what's in our kids hands is AI. Like we. We have not had a chance or no guidelines in place. We've not done any pd, but kids are coming in and they are changing their behavior based whether it's through assessment practices where kids maybe are using AI in hidden ways or they're avoiding AI. Teachers are, are getting more and more un about what AI means. Like why do we keep hearing this over and over again? And what you're going to notice is we kind of pull out these pull quotes, but we tell this story about like where our faculty is that first year. And you might see this. There's been a couple of really great pieces of evidence and research out there. So this is our kind of amalgam of that. But you've got your skeptics that are like, AI is.

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11:15
Amanda Bickerstaff
It's a hype cycle. It's not going to happen. We've got our, we're just not going to do this right now. Like our deliberately distant, like, I just, it's just too much. We've got other things going on. You have your early adopters that are so already in this. They have, they're using all the models or thinking about applications in their classroom and at home. You got those that are kind of in the middle that are thinking more and more about, we need to equip ourselves and our students with AI literacy. And then you've got your group called our back to basics group, which are AI, no AI. We're talking pen and paper only. There's no out of school writing. Our entire job is to keep kids from using AI to do their work.

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11:54
Amanda Bickerstaff
And so what we see is, I don't know if you recognize, and maybe you could drop it in the chat if you do some of your own. And I will say this says a 2023 school year. But having worked with a lot of districts, we know that's what's still happening today. And there's probably more camps and maybe your district is one or more or the other, but we want us to feel as real as possible. What we did is you follow through where this district actually does go to the forefront. So they're one of the earlier districts in terms of creating AI guidelines. They create guidelines that are focused on three areas. The idea of disclosure and citation. Yolanda's like, yes, we recognize it. The second was interesting.

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12:29
Amanda Bickerstaff
And this is where I think Central is going to take a little step further into the idea of school has to change. There's already a thought around instructional redesign. It's not just about catching kids cheating or stopping them from cheat, but how are we creating conditions in which students are able to keep learning and expressing their knowledge and building those important skills. And then all the way through AI literacy being an absolute goal. You might say, why is AI literacy in the guidelines? But this is something that we see over and over again. By signaling the importance of AI literacy and guidelines. You allow the guidelines to be more actionable because people actually know what this is and isn't. And then what happens is, okay, the guidelines are great, but they're just not enough.

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13:10
Amanda Bickerstaff
Because what we start to see is in the school year, last school year, is that it becomes under pressure. We're now starting to see parents having very different experiences, students having different experiences as well, as we start to see more and more cases of accusations of student cheating and also resource constraints. How we want all these tools, but we don't know what the right ones are. And so what we have is these staff concerns that start to really come in. The first is, of course, I don't know if you've heard sari, but we've heard a couple of times AI is for cheating. I don't know if you've heard that before.

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13:42
Sari Factor
We heard that, that was like November 25th of 2020.

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13:47
Amanda Bickerstaff
I know it was like January 3rd, you know, six weeks after Chesapeake's released. You know, we've got banning actions and all over the world, including New York City and Italy, the country, but academic integrity, but also things like resource constraints, not just in terms of buying tools, but the time. We have, like the precious resource of our hearts and minds, of our teachers and of taking one more thing. They have things like equity gaps that we really leaned into equity in this, in the sense of what happens when young people have paid versions of tools at home versus those that have no access and are only limited access. And so we really lean into that. That was very important to us. Things around student mental health and well being, which the school district is starting to notice.

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14:32
Amanda Bickerstaff
Young people turning to AI instead of people for mental health and well being and companionship. And then also, I mean, Sari, this has always been so interesting. Like, what's my job as an educator? How is it going to change? Well, I still have a job. Like, is there going to be. Will kids still learn? Are the things that I'm teaching going to matter? That was something that we're seeing quite a lot. And if you feel these things in your own organizations as well, you can pull that in as well. But I think that what we want to do is that here is like the thing that starts setting central apart and one of our are places that we're starting to see more and more.

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15:11
Amanda Bickerstaff
And this is also people that are advocates for school redesign, like Corey and our team or Tom Van Der Ark or others were in the room. But the big breakthrough idea was we need a space within our organization where we can test out new practices, where we can rapidly iterate, we could take calculated risk. And the lab was created. The lab is really around five core competencies that students will be learning. And first is that the most important things that matter today. So we've got critical thinking, effective communication, creative problem solving, ethical reasoning, and then also human centered collaboration with AI tools. And what you'll notice is even though this is a lab focused on AI, do you notice how non AI this is? This is much more human centered even though it is around creating practices in which AI can come in.

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16:03
Amanda Bickerstaff
AI literacy, tool adoption, et cetera, especially at age appropriate times. It's so less about AI and much more about what is the real purpose of learning and how do we need to prepare students for the future. And it sounds great everybody, but this is the thing is that with any progress, and especially things that take time and resources and are very hard, there's going to be pushback and there's going to be pushback that is going to be pretty significant. And whether it's your board members, parents, students themselves as well, teachers. And so what we have is this is where Sarah can talk through the decision point is what we get to is that there are three kind of major challenges or two major challenges that are coming up.

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16:45
Amanda Bickerstaff
The first is can we scale the lab so it's not just like this 300 teacher or student kind of 12 teacher piece, but it's something that actually leads into like Central changing, even like with all the constraints in place. But then also that there's this big disconnect between how students are assessed outside of Central and their expectations, whether that's for SATs, ACTs, college admissions, et cetera. And that there's this big disconnect between even parents ideas of what's appropriate for their students to learn and how to express their learning. So what we have is these three paths. So Sarah, do you want to take us through what those three paths really take us down these very different features. And the only thing I will say is there are three here, there are millions.

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17:34
Amanda Bickerstaff
But we just picked, we picked three that we thought would be the most kind of evocative and provocative for conversation.

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17:41
Sari Factor
Yeah. So you know, we are already experiencing parts of this in lots of different school organizations and because the ecosystem is changing with the vector of AI. But it's not just about AI. I think that's the other thing. AI is not only impacting the schools, it's certainly impacting the employers. You know, you're reading about. And we had Molly kinder as a speaker. Molly kinder from Brookings Institution, who is tracking how is hiring changing in the face of AI coming in? Her answer to us was, it hasn't changed all that much. Which I think was reassuring to a bunch of us. But we also know that employers are beginning to look for these skills in their, you know, in graduates when they're doing hiring. So we looked at what happens if there's a return to fundamentals.

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18:28
Sari Factor
You all know the blue book sales have never been greater. You know, schools are going back to writing in the classroom, eliminating. There's their bills right now circulating to eliminate technology. I mean, this is all on the backs of the heels of social media and what it's done to kids and some of the cell phone bans. So this return to fundamentals is really about that as one potential outcome for what's happening. What would happen in schools, or at least in central school, then another path B is kind of pedal to the metal technology, and let's use it.

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19:05
Sari Factor
Go all in on AI and think about every way that we can get an efficiency in schools using AI teaching and learning, certainly scheduling, you know, counseling, all the things, the surveillance that is already happening in some schools where there are cameras to try to get a sense of, you know, what's the order like in the. In the hallways. That whole thing is a real. You know, it's really happening in some schools already. So what would happen in a. In a vision where it was just about optimization and tech adoption? And then third, really, the challenge to redesign school in the context of the age of AI that we are living in and thinking about beyond school, where are kids doing their learning, and how will they need to evolve as learners for their entire lifetimes? So these three very different pathways really can't.

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20:05
Sari Factor
We.

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20:06
Irina Jurenka
We.

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20:06
Sari Factor
We wanted them to be very decent, distinct, so that they could be prototypical of the work that I think we want all schools and school organizations to do in the coming months and years as they think about what's right for their community and their learners and teachers.

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20:23
Amanda Bickerstaff
Absolutely. And I think one of the things that was really important to us, and it's interesting, this is one of the deviations from the structure of the AI 2027, is we have three paths, not two. And one of the things that I think when we came down to it, when were talking about why three, is that I think that there are a lot of Distinct camps. Right now there is both the techno optimist as well the techno pessimist just in terms of not just AI but all tech. But then there's this like it's almost like the redesigning school is not just a messy middle but it's something that is incredibly contextual and intentional.

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20:57
Amanda Bickerstaff
Meaning it really takes into account the spaces in which we believe in as central that we believe important and actually creating the partnerships that need to be in place to make this happen. Because if resource constraints are going to be there then we need to partner with organizations that can help with funding. We need to, if we want better tech for schools we wouldn't need to partner with technologists that believe in that and work with us. If we want to have better evidence based approaches we need to have researchers that are working alongside us. And that like the. And the idea of this is that those outcomes, whether it's a lab to central the ultimate goal is it becomes something that can be shared across districts around the country in the world.

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21:38
Amanda Bickerstaff
And that idea of right now people are looking for examples and they're looking for case studies. They're looking for things that work. They're also looking for things that don't work, that didn't work, that feel safe or familiar. One of the things that we hear a lot for this going all in is we're leading with the AI platform and then realizing that there's not enough there, that the technology isn't quite what we thought it was, that we don't have enough AI literacy, that the tools are too nascent or not evidence based in a way that fully find meaningful and we have to actually retreat and try something again.

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22:14
Amanda Bickerstaff
And so what we're hoping is that through these provocations and these paths they're not predictions but they're more places in which we can have people respond to what feels most like what we're doing and what we want to take on. Because you might actually like some of this that's in here. Like you know, we don't want it to feel like they're just too negative past and a positive. But what we know is that intent and decision making and choice today is going to matter for the future. And what I want to do is I. We're gonna, we're gonna shift into our panel in a moment but I do wanna bring up who was with us in the room because I think first of all I just wanna say thank you to Sari and imagine learning we are imagine learning.

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22:54
Amanda Bickerstaff
If you don't know in K12 solutions and AI for education is 8 people full time. So we are, you know, we have partnered, I think in the most beautiful way, but it wouldn't have been possible, I don't think, without our two organizations, but also without our amazing contributors, two of which we have today with us. Unfortunately, Irina from DeepMind couldn't get onto Zoom on her corporate laptop. Thank you Google. But we appreciate her so much of having that perspective. But we've got researchers like Chris, we've got Tom Bander, Arc Mary from Distinctive Schools, who's who is a practitioner. She is on the ground doing this work and trying to lead it. We've got Peter who is, I like to say the OG of AI in Education who is now leading the NSF AI Lab and Innovation Lab in Colorado.

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23:42
Amanda Bickerstaff
We've got Nicole who unfortunately couldn't make it to the day because of travel issues but has been an amazing partner around centering this work on those with disabilities. Got Caleb Hicks who is one of the only ed tech providers in the room because we wanted that perspective. We've got Irina, others, Babak, who is also an OG in AI and education as well as JISOO and others. But I do want to point out two people and if you're really interested in hearing from a student, you should watch our webinar from last time. But we have Mayta and Rosem Rose. He actually joined us in our last webinar. So two of the 20 people in the room were high school students. And I cannot tell you. First of all, Sari did like 12 interviews. We really tried hard to make the right choices.

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24:26
Amanda Bickerstaff
But you're going to notice that two students, I will say they're both from California. So there are some questions about where we're doing this work where kids are really being inspired to think about AI literacy. But they did such a beautiful job of providing a contextualization of what was really happening with young people and also being a force for a reaction where yeah, that sounds great, but what is it really going to mean for us? And that really was something that we found to be incredibly important. You can learn about everybody more here. But now we're going to come off share and I'm going to pull up Jason and Matt, our two amazing panelists. And Matt's looking very fancy out in Utah as he always does. He's a fancy man. And then Jason is.

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25:10
Amanda Bickerstaff
If you've seen one of our webinars on Parent, the Parent Council, he's with us too. I'm sure he'll come on video in a Moment. But I just want to say thank you to Matt and Jason for being here with us. We are incredibly. And is Irina here? I see. Irina. Irina, if you're here, please come on video. If not, I see it would be amazing to have you here. Oh, Jason, you need to be allowed to have video. We're being very mean, Jason. So hold on. I'm just going to make you co host so you'll be able to go on. There you go, Jason, you should be able to do that. And then, Irina, I'm so glad it worked out. Irina, you're here with us. So we actually have an even more amazing panel with us.

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25:51
Amanda Bickerstaff
And so these are three of the participants that came this summer and we are so grateful for your continued support. And one of the things that we love about this is you come from very different perspectives and backgrounds. You've got Matt, who's at the Utah Department of Ed. We've got Jason at the National Parent Council and irina at Google DeepMind. And so you can see that even in a group of three, how diverse the perspectives will already be. And so we're going to start with. So just every now you couldn't join the prep, but we're going to go, Jason, Irina, Matt. And we have a couple of questions. If you do have anything that you'd like to ask the panel, please drop that in the Q and A. And we're going to start with Jason.

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26:28
Amanda Bickerstaff
So I'd like you to introduce yourself for those that don't know. And then I would love you to spend a couple minutes talking about why you decided to say yes to this crazy idea. And what really struck out to you stuck out to you about the actual convening.

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26:42
Jason B. Allen
Good afternoon, everyone. Jason B. Allen with the National Parents Union. We are the united independent voice of modern American families creating and implementing positive policies. I am super excited about this work because oftentimes the voices of parents and families are left out of these conversations. So we have a recent poll that we've done with over 200,000 families across the United States and territories regarding AI, what they want to see, how is it being used. And I feel as if that feedback from parents and families caretakers. This is what inspired me to really want to be a part of this impactful work and how it moves forward. I always think about in these settings, what do people really want to know their parents are thinking around AI and the advancements of technology.

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27:37
Jason B. Allen
NPU has currently released our Attack on American Childhood Report that is looking at the implications that policies are leaving as a Result of funds being removed from education, restrictions around AI and usage in classrooms and in schools. And so I want to share three areas that I think in the timeframe would fit. Parents and families are wanting to see more AI and technologies in schools because they aren't able to have access at home. People are saying, what is wi fi? There's broadband. There is. However, economically a lot of American families are struggling. So when we look at the reality of grocery prices that have gone up, et cetera, so forth, the Internet is a need. However, parents want to feed their children, so that's definitely understandable. I'll also go to this. Parents and families have said that they want to see a good balance.

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28:42
Jason B. Allen
We strike a good balance between the learning and usage of AI and also hands on learning. So lots of parents have said don't take devices and technology away, but do give our children study hall and recess because they can have a balance with how they're learning and socializing and also having fair tech free zones. Not saying that we want to take your devices or your phones from you, but maybe we have tech free zones where we can focus on hands on learning socialization and have a break screen time and phone usage. So wanted to share that data and feedback from parents and families how it connects to this work. We see a lot of ads on YouTube and a lot of things in the media that parents and families are fearful of AI and they don't want AI.

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29:33
Jason B. Allen
Well, parents want to see their children thrive in future workforces. So yes, they do want to see AI, they want to see it used reasonably and most importantly, they want to see their children being able to thrive in the workforce to come. So thank you so much for this time.

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29:50
Amanda Bickerstaff
Yeah, Jason, so I was going to ask like a very quick, like, so what do you, what struck out to you about the community? Like what if you remember back, like, what was the thing you found most surprising or most interesting about being in this room of very diverse thinkers?

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30:03
Jason B. Allen
So one thing that stood out to me is the receptiveness of everyone in regards to some of the data points that I've shared. Especially if you're, you know, creating curriculum, if you're looking at, you know, innovation in schools, it's really important to know what do parents and families actually want in regards to this area? What would they like to see? What's working for them, what's not working for them. So the convening for me was, you know, groundbreaking because it allowed me to actually present data that people could tangibly use in this work to Create shifts that we want to see in the direction of AI being expanded in our society.

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30:46
Amanda Bickerstaff
Absolutely. And it was really important for us. Well, I got to meet Jason before and I was struck by immediately just how thoughtful you were in this space and connected. But also we really wanted to have voices of those not traditionally represented in rooms like this. And I think you did a beautiful job of really advocating for the parent perspective. And also I will say that you and Mary Beck were. Who's that? Who's the practitioner, the leader of Distinctive soul Schools were ones that push us to be practical a little bit too, because were. Because we have a lot of big thinking. And then you brought us back a little bit to what does this mean for real people and like real families, real kids, real schools, which we really appreciated. So thank you, Jason. Irina, we're so glad you made it.

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31:25
Amanda Bickerstaff
So Irina is not only does she in London, but she came from bet and I'm sure it was amazing and has dealt with technology issues, but it was really important for us. Again, Sarah and I said together is that we wanted to invite at least one representative from a foundation model. And who better than someone from Google DeepMind when the attention is all you need. Paper coming from DeepMind in 2016. And Irina, you've been at DeepMind for a long time, focused on AI and education, but I'd love the same thing. Can you introduce yourself and then also what brought you to us and then what you. What kind of stuck out to you about the experience?

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32:00
Irina Jurenka
Yes, of course. First of all, really glad that I actually managed to join this and thank you for inviting me to the convening in the first place. So to quickly introduce myself, I'm a research director at the Google DeepMind. I've been with DeepMind for over 10 years and I worked on all sorts of things, from neuroscience and physics and machine learning to reasoning and language models, and for the last three and a half years on education. So the work I'm doing is on bringing the learning science into the Google's AI. So our Gemini models, because very early on, like before ChatGPT, before that moment where, you know, our report starts, we saw the nascent technology and we realized that it actually had this. It just, it was different from the other AI we've seen before.

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32:55
Irina Jurenka
And we saw that it could have this incredible impact on learning and education, but also it could go in so many different directions and we needed to do the technical work to ensure that it actually did the right thing and could amplify kind of all the potential we see in AI rather than the potential negative outcomes which could come from cognitive offloading and all of the trends that we're seeing. So we kind of did a lot of work on just trying to understand what good pedagogy means, which is much more complex than any of us, I think, had originally expected, and then figuring out how do we. Well, how do we bring it to the models, but also how do we evaluate if we're doing a good job.

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33:42
Irina Jurenka
And I think this kind of evaluation process is kind of the reason why we really want to be working with you and like the whole community, because, you know, we are experts in machine learning. We are not experts in pedagogy or learning science. We're not there teaching or being in school. So we do need to hear everyone's communities voices to kind of just sense check that we're doing the right thing and to like, understand what should we be measuring and how. So I was very pleased to be able to join this effort and to play a tiny part in it. So thank you so much.

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34:24
Amanda Bickerstaff
Absolutely. So same question again. So what was the thing that was most surprising or the thing that you remember back in the room? I think it was great to have you there because I think people. You asked really good questions. I think that was when you were the person probably furthest from the day to day. But I think that you always added this push for us to explain some things that I think we didn't think we had to explain, which I really appreciate. But is there something that stood out to you?

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34:54
Irina Jurenka
So for me, it was an amazing learning experience just to hear all the diverse perspectives and voices from the US Education system. And I think you've done such a great job bringing essentially representatives from almost like 360 degrees of the US education. So for me, kind of hearing how all the perspectives come together and how, you know, we're trying to do something that's incredibly hard. There are so many possibilities. And to kind of like see how, you know, we started, everyone had their own opinion and everyone was kind of going in their own direction. And then by the end of the two days, we kind of had a shape of something that was coherent, that was directional.

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35:37
Irina Jurenka
And I think kind of seeing how this process came together and how everyone's perspectives kind of started playing off of each other and integrating into a single story was pretty amazing.

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35:47
Amanda Bickerstaff
Yeah, I think that was okay. We'll be honest. It was hard to write this, everybody. It was much easier to do the convening. But one of the things. And sari can talk to us too, is that I was so worried about sending it to you all because we had such diversity and the feedback we got was somehow you represented all our voices. Which is why even though it's been through many drafts since then, we felt like it was. Was pretty correct. Do you agree, Sari?

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36:12
Sari Factor
Yeah, I. I agree. And. But it was like we really wanted everything to be expressed as much as we could. We wanted it baked into the stories. And I think we accomplished that. I'm sure somebody will read something and say, but I wanted to say, but we're. We. We did, I think, a pretty good job of getting all the voices in. And as we said, it's. It's not just three outcomes. It really. There are so many different possibilities and it's really up to each of you to determine what is best for your organization. We wanted to equip people and empower people with tools so that they could take the next step and replicate what we did, but probably not in a two day period. I think two days was very condensed. I mean, obviously were taking people out of their jobs.

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36:58
Sari Factor
If it is your job to be leading a school or a district or an educational organization, you'll want to take more time and you'll want to really mine the ideas of the folks in your organizations. And I will offer up our folks to be able to help you if we can.

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37:15
Amanda Bickerstaff
Yeah, absolutely. And that leads us to Matt. So Matt is pretty amazing AI Education leader in Utah. But also I will say Matt as someone that is surprisingly more pessimistic, meaning me. Like everyone thinks you name your company AI for Education. You must Muslim AI to have another counterpoint that wasn't me in the room that had the kind of the more like, let's think about this side too, was really nice. And so I appreciated Matt playing that role. But can you introduce yourself, sir, and then also talk a little bit about what brought you there and what you took away?

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37:52
Matthew Winters
Absolutely, Amanda. And thank you. Excuse me. Thank you for putting that on such kind terms. I think in the room you actually called me Dr. Doom at one point, which I really appreciated and has made me laugh for the last six months. My name is Matt Winters. I work for the Utah State Board of Education as their AI Education specialist. As far as we know, I was one of the first, if not the first in the country to really absorb this job. And I've been in the role for about a year and a half, which means I'm a grandpa at this point. I'm sure Amanda can sympathize with that. So I came to this convening because I, I always think about AI like water. It's in our systems, it's everywhere.

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38:32
Matthew Winters
We're there, we're dealing with it pretty rapidly and it's flooding into different spaces and things like that. When you are trying to go across a large body of water, you have to have a good crew. And when I saw who was included in this conversation, I went, these, some of these are already in my crew. Like I'm excited to talk to them at any point, but I was excited to hear new perspectives like Arenas and Jason's and then everyone else in the room. Because when we talk about the potentialities of what AI offers, not just in education, but outside of education, there are some amazing things that we can do with it and can really revolutionize and push education and other systems forward. But there are some incredible dangers as well.

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39:20
Matthew Winters
And being able to sit down, have a conversation with incredibly intelligent people who work industry, who work with parents, who work at higher ed institutions, and being able to actually get into the scary nitty gritty of that and actually plot out what this may look like from an educational perspective over the next three to five years is incredible, incredibly forward thinking work. The first week I was here at usb, my former super deputy superintendent handed me a copy of John Cotter's Leading Change and said, this should be what you're thinking about for the next couple of years. And she's been 100% right. I often think about AI. We're not thinking about the technology all the time. What we're thinking about is the human capital behind that system.

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40:08
Matthew Winters
And so if you're thinking about how do I take this back to my system, whether it be a higher ed institution or a K12 system or even just your classroom, really think about finding people that can help uplift and support you and build good situations. And some of those might be across the hall, they might be down the road, they might be halfway across the globe. But find those people and ask good questions, but then also spend some time really thinking about how to prepare yourself for futures thinking and to have this kind of investment in understanding how to design for what's coming. We often in education get bogged down. We talked a lot about this in the seminar. We often get bogged down in the what's happening right now, but we also have to think about what's in the future.

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40:53
Matthew Winters
And I love this document for helping us do that.

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40:56
Amanda Bickerstaff
Thank you, Matt. And I say Dr. Doom because I think we are kindred. We may be very different heights and backgrounds, but I think I see a lot in our perspectives. And one of the things I would say is that one of the places that was most beneficial to doing the work that Matt talked about, which was talking about the tensions and the Futurist piece, is we did a. Something called a creative tensions activity, where everyone. At the beginning of the first day, you guys remember this, we all stood up, and then we had two different kind of like, what holds innovation back in education? And you had things like infrastructure and technology and budgets. And then you had mindsets, culture on the other end. So they're not. They're not diametric, but they are pretty rich.

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41:40
Amanda Bickerstaff
And just to watch people go to where they were. But then the cool part about it is we asked people to talk and from where they were on the spectrum, and then you were allowed to move. And one of the things that I loved about it is that people did move, and we. We had some strong people in that room, Guys. Like, it is the most difficult facilitation I've ever done, but because of the openness to hearing and thinking about it, and if you're interested in that activity, it's part of the toolkit. And I would say that's one of the ones where you could do that right now with a group of stakeholders, and it would be a really positive information, like positive experience.

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42:17
Amanda Bickerstaff
But I do think that starting there allowed people to kind of open up that readiness to hear, to listen, to engage, and to communicate. And I think that it was really spectacular to watch. It was something that I think a lot about in our work of, like, what can happen when you give the space and you create the space for people to really think deeply and to. And to collaborate, which I don't know if we get to see that often. And this was definitely an example. Okay, so next question. So, Jason, back to you, my friend. Although I will say I miss. Jason has the best background at home. He has this. His background is all these wonderful portraits of civil rights leaders. And it's one of my favorite things, Jason. So I will look for that the next time we talk.

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43:02
Amanda Bickerstaff
But one of the things we want to think about also is when we thought about this and we thought about how to write this and how provocative to be, we really thought about the sense of urgency. So from your perspective with parents and the students and their young people, why do you think now is the moment to actually do this type of deep thinking and why we shouldn't wait?

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43:28
Jason B. Allen
So it's very important. So much is happening across our country. A lot of our states have tax allocation districts that will be opening up this year and that's vitally important to this conversation because it connects back to one of the top areas of concern for parents, caretakers and families, which is accessible. So these tax allocation districts will allow for improvements to infrastructure and access. And again, striking a good balance between how we are using AI in our classrooms, in the workforce, how we're integrating this into what we do. We also remind parents and families that this is a tool and a resource. That's what we're envisioning it to be.

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44:17
Jason B. Allen
And to help alleviate the fear of AI is going to take over the workforce tomorrow, which is not possible because we don't even have the infrastructure across the country for people to even be connected. So yes, we have seen a lot of that and that is what has really caused us to have a sense of urgency around why the time is now for us to really move forward. I like to say reimagining education through this lens.

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44:46
Amanda Bickerstaff
Absolutely. And it's interesting because when we're thinking about that third path, Jason, went back and forth like intentional and we decided to go quite strong with redesigning or reimagining because we wanted it to be something that was really like about the system. Right. That the system like zebra talk about work, like we're not gonna have to reimagine school, but workforces, workplaces. Someone mentioned about different types of roles and jobs and what that's actually going to mean and things like oil and mining, what's it going to mean in software engineering and creative work. And so I think that it was very intentional for us to have that space where it looked like it needed to be holistic and system wide. So I really appreciate that. Jason.

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45:28
Amanda Bickerstaff
Irina, you have such an interesting point of view because Google DeepMind is part of Google was kind of a little bit on the back foot right. With ChatGPT, but now really has moved into where Gemini 3 and NotebookLM and you've got all of first of all, if you're not familiar with DeepMind's alpha evolve and AlphaFold and some of the really fascinating models that are asking questions about science and some places that are really unique is that you all are at the front of this and I know you're one person in a huge organization, but why do you think now is the moment for us all to come together to have these deep conversations about what comes next?

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46:12
Irina Jurenka
I think it's a great question because as somebody who is actually working on AI. And Google is a company that's shaping, I guess, the landscape of AI out there. We definitely feel a lot like a huge sense of responsibility to do it right and to really think through about, like, all the implications of our work. And we realized that we actually do need to consider all the possible scenarios and consider what kind of future we want to be in, what kind of future we might end up in, and what do we need to do now to maximize kind of the positive futures that we all want to be in. And so these sorts of exercises, they're really important to us.

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46:56
Irina Jurenka
And again, I just want to repeat how important it is for us to engage with the communities, because we don't have all the answers. We definitely do need to listen and we really appreciate the opportunity to learn from work like yours, to shape our work.

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47:17
Amanda Bickerstaff
We really appreciate that. And we would love, I mean, we would love more and more of this. Like, we're hoping that we start to see. I know there was the AI and IT education piece you did in November. Unfortunately, I know I couldn't come, but some of the people in the community did. So we'd love to see more of this. And I think that having you all there was like a really good signal that there's more interest in collaboration in this moment in time that is going to be so necessary. So I'm actually going to go a little out of. I'm going to Sari next, because Sari, I think that this is, you know, you have a lot of competing things and this took a lot of time. But what was your driver of the why of now?

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47:53
Amanda Bickerstaff
I mean, first of all, we did not get outside funding. We did not do this a normal way. Usually you would go in a big concept note and all these things. We did this in, I would say, a very gorilla grassroots approach. And it was really pushed by the internal need and urgency that we both felt. So what is that urgency for you, Sari?

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48:13
Sari Factor
I think of it as two things. One, were hearing a lot from our customers. I mean, we're in over half the school districts in America, and a lot of our customers asked us questions like, how should we be thinking about this? And they were grappling with this and we wanted to think about how could we help to empower them with tools and with. With the narrative that we can't. We ended up coming up with, we wanted some way to say, we understand your pain and we're in it with you. We also think about this from the perspective of instruction. What is good teaching and learning look like? And what are those learning experiences we want for K12 learners as they prepare to enter the world? That is going to be very changed.

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49:02
Sari Factor
I mean, think about a kindergartner today and what they will be graduating into 13 years from now. The world's going to be very different. So how will learning design and curriculum design need to change to help teachers create those learning experiences in their classrooms, in their schools to ensure that the students are best equipped to have lifelong thriving? And we have to remember, learning does not stop at the school door and, you know, the classroom door. At the end of 12th grade, some kids will go on to college, some will go right into work, some will go into service, who knows? And they will need to be continuously learning. So this is the frame that we bring and we think about, you know, how does evidence based instruction change when AI becomes a vector? Because you always need to innovate.

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50:02
Sari Factor
You can't rely on just that research that was done 25 years ago or even five years ago. How do you think about moving the field forward in new ways? And having being part of this group really helps us think through that.

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50:19
Amanda Bickerstaff
Absolutely. And I think that a couple of things that we wanted. So there's some research in the resource hub if you're interested in some of the research being done today. But I do think that the idea of the timescale, even when were writing it, we get to 2030, that doesn't even really impact our kindergarteners. Right. Especially those that are not even in. And so you're going to see some pretty ridiculous change. That's part of it. And we even have a note. Irina was instrumental in the note saying, like, weren't interested in chasing all of the things that could happen with agents and AGI, but more about like the continuous. Even if were at a trend of today, but you're going to see a lot of change happen pretty quickly.

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51:00
Amanda Bickerstaff
And so it really, I mean, we have to think about timescales in a way that's never, I think, been possible before, but also never been as important as it is today. So Matt, my friend Dr. Doom and Mr. Calling Mr. Wonderful as well is, you know, Matt, I know that you share Utah has done some of the most interesting work on like thinking through tools, adoption, the work that you have. But also I think that you have this incredibly strong like compass that says people have to pay attention, which I really appreciate. And so you talk a little bit about why this is the moment for these choices to be Made.

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51:38
Matthew Winters
Well, yeah, that's a great question. I love what Jason brought up earlier about like including parents and there's not infrastructure and things like that. Utah has committed itself to doing a lot of things over the last 30 years to prepare for moments like this. I, I always think about a friend of mine at the Stanford Design School. She says, Laura McBain says we couldn't have predicted Covid, but we could have predicted an event like Covid. And so we have to think like that sometimes in education about what's next and get that kind of futures thinking in play and the change management in play. And so in Utah, we have a statewide network that has hardwired Internet for all but one school in the entire state. We have AI tools that are on consortium price, four of them. And we did that two years ago.

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52:28
Matthew Winters
We now I've shared this in the chat. The portrait of an AI infused learner and teacher who are helping us to guide conversations around standards and what are, what should we be teaching teach our students? And we're working one for, we have one coming out for business and then we're working one for higher ed with partners across the state. And so all of this is pointing to again, we know that this is a massive moment in human history thinking about what AI could potentially be. And it's in so many of our systems already. And we have to have the thought process around that. And that means we have to really take step forward around helping our students, our teachers, our parents, our legislators, our community members to really think this through from all facets.

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53:12
Matthew Winters
And one of the big examples of that here in the state of Utah, if you're interested in, is we have an office of AI policy that sits at the commerce intersection around AI. And that helps because our students, when they leave school and they leave our school, networks and devices, they become consumers and they need protections as well. And so all of these are coming around this idea of we have to really think about where this technology is going, what it's going to do our civilization and to prepare for it ahead of time so that we're not hit when the technology comes through.

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53:40
Amanda Bickerstaff
Absolutely. Well, I'm glad that you were already thinking about futurism. I definitely was not. I was surprised that this is where we end up going. But I do think though that the idea of COVID was something that we talked about a lot in the room too, of that moment where everyone was paying attention to the same thing at the same time and problem solving. But then how quickly I don't want to Say quickly, in the sense of it wasn't traumatic. I was locked in Melbourne, Australia, so I could promise it was, but in the sense of it wasn't a long enough timescale to see, like, change around digital access, around innovation, around what this can mean. But because we know that this is gonna.

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54:20
Amanda Bickerstaff
It's already disrupting assessment, for example, so deeply that we can see the places in which the other disruption is gonna come. And I think it's been really interesting to people in the. In the chat have been talking about all these really ethical things about preparing, and that was a big part of this. But also what happens when human skills like not just like the calculator or access to information like the Internet, but when human skills like writing and around brainstorming and creative arts and we've got coding and we've got all these things now are done not just by technology, but in some ways could be done faster, more efficiently than we'd ever expected.

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55:06
Amanda Bickerstaff
And I think one of the things that was a big part of the conversation we had is that this was not a surprise just to us as educators and students and leaders, but it was a surprise to industry, to the people making the tools themselves. When OpenAI had this major scaling breakthrough, they weren't prepared for it either. And I think that is where it is so important. And then the moment is one that can't be passed, because today we can get our hands around it. But are we going to get our hands around it in five to 10 years when the technology has moved so far beyond what we expect even today? So, on that note, we're going to end our panel with a quick roundabout. We're going to get all four people.

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55:47
Amanda Bickerstaff
And I want to say so, Jason, Irina, Matt and Sari, if there is one thing that comes out of this work, one thing only that you want people to bring back to take to your organizations, what would you want that to be? So, Jason, starting with you.

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56:05
Jason B. Allen
One thing that I would want people to take back from our organization would be the resources that we're providing to parents and families around how to utilize AI safely and also to advocate for resources connecting the AI and advanced technology in their schools. That would be one takeaway, I would say, from our organization. We would like to see.

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56:30
Amanda Bickerstaff
Awesome. Irina, what do you think? What is the one thing you hope to happen from this piece?

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56:36
Irina Jurenka
I think, yeah, I hope that people realize that AI is a tool. At the end of the day, it's a powerful tool, but it can be great or it can be not so great. Depending on how you use it. And it's really our responsibility as kind of educators and technologists to figure out the kind of the positive use cases and to kind of bring those to everyone so that they understand the responsible and kind of good uses of AI. So I hope the report makes people kind of consider how they want to see this technology used in classrooms and in education.

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57:21
Amanda Bickerstaff
Great, we're going to sari.

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57:25
Sari Factor
I think it's acting with intention. I think the time is now. You cannot wait. Our students, our teachers need our support. And you're not alone. I think that's the other message is there's a community of people out there to help you. You should involve your business leaders, your parents, your students. I mean the students were illuminating in this group because we tend to think of them in one broad brush stroke. And they actually took us through an exercise where they had different student Personas. The students who were leaning in, the students who were like nope, they're cheating. I want to get that authentic grade for myself. Involve your students. Get the student voice in. It's their lives. So I'd say you've got a community and start running.

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58:18
Amanda Bickerstaff
Matt, what do you think?

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58:20
Matthew Winters
So I say this all the time when I'm presenting around what the work here in Utah, not just in AI, but just across the board, is that it comes down to three factors that are all human based. We invested innovation early and often. We collaborate frequently and we don't gatekeep expertise. If you look at your own system and you're going we want to manage change rapidly. Look at those three pieces. If you're not investing in people and change, then you're not going to have the next layer. If you're not collaborating, it's not going to happen. And if you're not sharing expertise openly, it's not going to happen. So look at your own system and think about those. And this document is of amazing artifacts of all three of those features. So definitely check it out.

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59:06
Amanda Bickerstaff
Absolutely. Well, thank you, Matt. And I think that for me if there's one thing is that no action is too small right now when it comes to doing something. It does not matter if it is going to be bringing group together to read this. It's going to be thinking about responsible use. As Irena said, it's going to be sharing important resources with wider communities and taking parents into and students into account like Sarai said. Or Matt, thinking about the change management process, I just honestly what the reason why this exists is because we believe very strongly that if we don't make choices today, then we will not shape the future of education. The external factors will and it's just, that's just the non negotiable. We're going to have technology impact our lives more and more in ways that we cannot expect.

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59:52
Amanda Bickerstaff
And it's going to happen faster than ever before. But today is the time we can wrap our hands around it. We can start making change in action and this is going to be something that we already see happening. We just love to see it across the education system. So I just want to say thank you everybody.

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01:00:07
Sari Factor
We did it.

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01:00:08
Amanda Bickerstaff
It has been crazy. I also just want to say thank you to everyone that was on the convening body that trusted us to come hang out with us. I want to thank Jason and Sean and Casey and Tyler from Sari's team. I want to thank my team, Tanner and Corey and Dan and Casey and everyone that helped out. But I also want to just say this would not be possible without having people trust in the vision of the importance of AI literacy and support and adoption and support today. And so everyone that comes and listens and wants to be a part of this, you matter too. And we just want to say thank you. So, so read the report, give us feedback, share it. We'd love to see this make an impact.

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01:00:49
Amanda Bickerstaff
I just appreciate everyone and hope you have a beautiful rest of your day. Thanks everyone.