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Posts Tagged ‘learning forward’

The Human Half: AI, the OECD, and the Future of Educational Leadership

Posted in Change, Personalized Learning, Technology, tagged , , , , on November 12, 2025| 2 Comments »


Inspired by the recent Learning Forward BC conversation on human flourishing and AI.

Last week, I spent three hours tweaking a PowerPoint presentation I already had help with. At the same time, I had to decline a visit to an elementary class exploring AI tools. The irony? While I was perfecting slides, they were shaping the very future I was supposed to be leading them toward.

If we are honest, most of us superintendents spend far too much of our energy doing work that does not require the full force of our humanity. We draft versions of the same report again and again for different audiences. We shuffle through data systems, chase signatures, and repackage findings. It is necessary work, but is it what we were called to?

At a recent Learning Forward BC event on The Intersection of Human Flourishing and AI, that question hit home. We were exploring how technology might liberate, not limit, our humanity in education. It made me wonder: What if AI could take over significant portions of our work as leaders? What would we hand over, and what would we fight to keep?

Why This Matters for Leaders

I have written a lot on this blog about how AI is reshaping the work of teachers and students. But we need to look just as critically at our own work as superintendents and senior leaders. If we expect educators to rethink assessment, planning and feedback in an AI-rich world, then we must also examine the way we lead, communicate and make decisions.

The truth is that the same technology that can help a teacher personalize learning or a student write an essay can also help a superintendent analyze data, summarize reports or draft correspondence. AI is not only changing classrooms. It is changing the nature of leadership itself.

And yes, I am sure some superintendents might already be wondering if a chatbot could replace them at board meetings. But since I know my trustees often read this blog, I will not take the chance of testing that particular joke here.

The Question That Changes Everything

The OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)  Education for Human Flourishing framework reminds us that our purpose in education is to equip people to lead meaningful and worthwhile lives, oriented toward the future. If that applies to students, it applies to our leadership too.

So whether it is 30 percent, 50 percent, or even 70 percent of what we currently do, the question becomes: What would we hand over to AI, and which tasks would we hold on to because they matter most?

What We Could Let Go Of

AI is already remarkably good at tasks that drain our time but not our meaning:

  • Drafting first versions of reports, memos and letters
  • Crunching and summarizing enrolment or survey data
  • Managing meeting notes, calendars, reminders and task lists
  • Building templates, presentations and standard job postings
  • Drafting policy or procedural documents for refinement

These are automation, not animation. They do not require empathy, judgment, or nuance, only accuracy and speed. That is AI’s strength.

What We Must Protect

What we must protect, deliberately, are the moments of human connection, purpose and complexity:

  • Sitting with a parent whose trust in the system has eroded
  • Listening deeply to a principal wrestling with burnout or vision
  • Reading the room in a board meeting and knowing what not to say
  • Inspiring staff to believe in something greater than their daily tasks
  • Recognizing a student’s spark when they realize someone believes in them

These are leadership moments: irreducible, unautomatable and profoundly essential.

Leading for Human Flourishing

The OECD highlights three human competencies that AI cannot fully replicate: adaptive problem-solving, ethical decision-making and aesthetic perception.

Adaptive problem-solving: When a community crisis hits and there is no playbook, whether a sudden school closure, a traumatic event, or a divided community, we respond with creativity born from experience and intuition.

Ethical decision-making: When budget cuts force impossible choices between programs, when we must balance individual needs against the collective good, when integrity demands the harder path, these moments require moral courage that no algorithm can calculate.

Aesthetic perception: Recognizing when a school’s culture shifts from compliance to inspiration, sensing the exact moment a resistant team begins to trust, and seeing beauty in a struggling student’s small victory. This is what makes leadership an art, not just a science.

AI can mimic these competencies, but it does not feel them. It may calculate empathy, but it cannot experience it or show it. As more of our routine tasks shift to AI, the invitation is clear: we reclaim the human half.

Creating a Culture of Yes

This is where AI becomes an enabler of possibility rather than a threat to purpose. When AI handles the bureaucratic “no” work, the forms, compliance checks and procedural barriers, we create space for the human “yes.”

Yes, I have time to visit your classroom.
Yes, let’s explore that innovative idea.
Yes, I can truly listen.

In a Culture of Yes, AI does not replace us. It liberates us to be more fully present for what matters. Every report AI drafts is a conversation we can have. Every dataset it analyzes is a relationship we can build. Every schedule it optimizes is a moment we can use to connect.

Getting Started

This is not about wholesale transformation tomorrow. It is about small experiments.

What one repetitive task could you delegate to AI this week? What human conversation would that free you to have?

Start simple:

Use AI to draft that routine memo, then spend the saved time walking the halls.

Let AI summarize survey data, then use your energy to discuss what it means with your team.

Have AI create the meeting agenda, then focus fully on reading the human dynamics in the room.

The goal is not efficiency for its own sake, but reclaiming time for what only we can do.

The Real Promise

The promise of AI in leadership is not efficiency, but rediscovery.

It is the chance to release ourselves from the burden of mechanical work and return to the heart of leadership: human connection, meaning and moral purpose.

Imagine walking into your office tomorrow knowing that the reports are drafted, the data analyzed and the calendar managed, all before your first coffee. Now you can spend your morning where it matters most: in classrooms, with people, making meaning.

Because in the end, the future of education will not belong to the most efficient systems. It will belong to the most human leaders, those who use every tool available to protect and amplify what makes us irreplaceably human.

A Question to End With

I wonder if my list looks like yours. What would you hand over to AI, and what would you hold tightly because it feels essentially human? I would be interested to hear how others are thinking about their human half.

 

 

The image at the top of this post was generated through AI.  Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers (for our students this post would be a Yellow assignment – see link to explanation chart) as I edited and refined my thinking

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Has COVID Changed How Adults Learn in School?

Posted in Personalized Learning, Professional Development, tagged , , , on May 18, 2023| 5 Comments »

I have written numerous times about the impact of COVID on student learning. In 7 COVID Edu Trends That Will Stick I wrote about shifts from an increased focus on equity, to greater digitization of resources to permanent changes to how we think about time in secondary schools.

I have recently been thinking about the shifts we have seen (or not seen) with professional learning for the adults in our schools.  In preparing to be part of a panel for A Cross Canada Professional Learning Conversation, I reflected on The State of Professional Learning in Canada that was published in 2016.  One of the great challenges in education in often being precise when describing why jurisdictions are having excellent student learning outcomes.  British Columbia, and Canada more generally, is widely seen as a world leader in education.  Again, this is ground I have covered before, and don’t want to open debate on PISA or other measures, but it is safe to say, Canada is viewed well across the world for K-12 education.

Three areas of that 2016 report that I still think are crucial today to our collective success include:  our focus on diverse learners, the balance between individual and system professional learning, and the need for leaders to be fully engaged in the professional learning in a community.  I think if anything these three in particular (the report has a longer list) are more important.  The pandemic emphasized the learning differences within classes, schools and across systems.  The need to focus on the diversity of our classrooms is more urgent than ever.  And when it comes to who drives the professional learning, I think of it as a healthy tension between the individual, their school and the system – one needs a balance – to ensure teachers are more than independent contractors who share a parking lot, but also allow for personalization in their own learning.  And if it ever was acceptable to be a school or district leader and not be a learning leader – that time is now over.

So, what have I seen as COVID impacts on the specifics of adult learning?

Content – COVID and other social issues that took place simultaneously have accelerated shifts we saw pre-Pandemic.  We are seeing increased interest in Indigenous learning – particularly related to our local Squamish Nation. In addition, mental wellness and wellbeing, equity, diversity and inclusivity as well as early learning are all areas of greater emphasis.  

Format – I am not sure where the preferred format question will land.  We are seeing a lot of uptake of in-person learning opportunities.  It is hard to know if this is just still the novelty of not being able to do this for several years, or if it is a return to these events which were the cornerstone of professional learning pre-pandemic.  During COVID we saw a huge growth in digital skills for adults, and many are continuing to find professional learning online now.  There is a new balance that is not yet finalized between these formats.

Drivers – Just like with students, staff are looking for deeper personalization and more control over their own learning.  One of the larger societal shifts in COVID was the move to increased remote work.  Of course, teaching does not lend itself well to this.  It is largely an in-person profession with fairly standard hours.  That said, there are more options for remote or flexible professional learning.  And the use of technology (and the dabbling in AI recently) have staff wanting even more precise experiences.  Why go to a literacy workshop with 100 K-12 teachers when you can be connected digitally to a group of educators from across the province working at your grade with similar resources?

There is a digital expectation – just like there is with our students and it is one that we are still working on to support the adult learning.

When it comes to adult learning it is not a surprise their needs are similar to the student learning needs – they want a system that gives them some universal experiences, but also some deep personalization – that provides options for in-person and digital experiences.  It will be interesting to see where we are in 3 years – and if there is a snapback – will 2026 look like the National report of 2016, or will adult learning in schools have been permanently altered by the pandemic.

 

 

 

 

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Leaving Politics at the Door

Posted in Professional Development, tagged , , on September 11, 2010| Leave a Comment »

I have just finished participating in the two-day fall retreat for Learning Forward BC.  And just what is Learning Forward BC?

Learning Forward

It is the rebranding of an organization that is well-known to many educators.

Learning Forward is the new name of the National Staff Development Council.  We are an international association of learning educators committed to one purpose in K-12 education:  Every educator engages in professional learning every day so every student achieves.

What struck me as different from this group from the many different formal and informal networks I often meet with around professional development is that at its core was the group’s commitment to being apolitical.  In the  room were educators who spend their days as classroom teachers, school administrators, district staff, university staff and ministry officials.

A lot of the discussion focussed on what place Learning Forward BC has in the current provincial landscape.  What attracted me to the group, and the place I think it has is as an organization where people “leave politics at the door.”

I don’t have experience outside the province, but  many people who have had experiences in other places in Canada, and around the world, often note that politics and education are intertwined in ways in B.C. unique from many other jurisdictions.  Too often we spend so much time focussed on our roles in the system, that we don’t get down to the work of moving learning forward.

This was my first true taste as a board member for Learning Forward BC – but if it can play a role in providing venues for conversations free of our titles and roles, it could be time well spent.

Look for more information about Learning Forward BC coming this fall.

To connect with the Learning Forward parent body, you can do so on Facebook or Twitter.

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