When Tom Driscoll says, “I help teachers,” he means it, not in a vague, inspirational way and not as a slogan.
In just three words, he sums up his life’s work: “I help teachers.”
That clarity matters because right now teachers are standing at the intersection of rising expectations, shrinking time, and accelerating technology, and AI has only intensified the pressure.
On a recent episode of The Learning Experience Ops Show, Tom Driscoll, CEO of EdTechTeacher, unpacked what it actually takes to support educators in a moment of rapid change, and the conversation was less about tools and more about fundamentals, less about hype and more about capacity.
Listen to the podcast on your favorite directory:
The Real Problem Isn’t AI. It’s Time.
When districts talk about innovation, the conversation often centers on platforms, licenses, and strategy decks, but Tom sees something simpler, and harder.
“It’s not money. It’s not funding. It’s not do we know what to do. It’s time. Teachers don’t have enough time.”
That’s the scaling problem in education, because districts pilot something new, a small group of educators experiments, it works, and then the initiative rolls out to everyone else without the one ingredient that made it successful in the first place: protected time to learn and practice.
You can’t just announce change and expect adoption, and if you want AI literacy across a district, you have to carve out time to explore it, create space to collaborate, and treat teachers like professionals who deserve room to learn, otherwise innovation becomes another task dumped onto an already full plate.
And in an era of AI anxiety, that approach backfires fast.
Don’t Double Down on Boring
Long before generative AI, Tom learned something fundamental in his classroom: engagement starts in the first few minutes, because if you lose students early, you rarely get them back, and drilling harder rarely solves the problem.
“If the kid didn’t get it the first time, how does just going slower and more boring make it helpful?”
It doesn’t, and this philosophy shapes how Tom thinks about both instruction and technology, because instead of doubling down on remediation, he pushes for authenticity, real projects, real audiences, and real stakes.
Make school less boring, a mantra that may sound simple but is deeply strategic, because in a world where students have constant access to intelligent tools, the value of classroom time shifts, and it’s no longer about delivering information but about designing experiences worth showing up for.
AI can assist and personalize support in the messy middle of learning, but it shouldn’t replace the shared journey.
“Learning is so inherently social.”
That belief anchors everything.
AI Is an “Arrival Technology.”
One of the most powerful ideas Tom shared came from Justin Reich at MIT who described AI as an “arrival technology,” meaning most innovations in education are rolled out, planned, piloted, and phased in, but AI just showed up.
There was no three-year roadmap and no gradual integration, and teachers were suddenly navigating student cheating concerns, unclear policies, and daily headlines about disruption, while district leaders were hearing promises about productivity gains and burnout reduction.
The mismatch is real, and in classrooms it often feels chaotic, with teachers “plugging the holes in the boat,” trying to keep learning afloat while the policy catches up.
So what’s the move, step back from the noise, because Tom advises educators to focus less on every new app and more on the fundamentals of what AI actually is, to start with shared understanding and build literacy before chasing tools.
Then design intentionally with a rhythm of human, AI, human, where a teacher frames the learning, AI supports where appropriate, and human judgment closes the loop.
That rhythm keeps control where it belongs.
Hold the Line on What Matters
There’s a temptation, especially in moments of technological excitement, to pivot everything toward new pathways, new courses, and new credentials, but Tom has seen this cycle before.
He lived through the “teach every kid to code” wave and watched subjects like civics lose ground in the rush to prioritize what seems economically urgent, and his warning is calm but firm: don’t abandon your core.
AI literacy matters, but so do history, civil discourse, and democratic understanding, because schools play a social role that technology cannot replace, and personalization, even when powered by AI, should not fracture shared experience.
“I don’t want the AI designing the whole experience for the kid.”
Teachers still set the map, students still learn together, and AI can adapt the journey along the way, and that distinction is everything.
The Future Isn’t Fully Written. That’s the Opportunity.
When asked about 2028, Tom didn’t predict the collapse of schooling or a two-hour AI-driven education model, he predicted evolution: less lecture and more projects, less passive consumption and more authentic creation, less staring at glass screens and more natural interaction with technology.
Public education will still exist and the structure may not dramatically change, but what happens inside classrooms should, and that shift will not be driven by hype.
It will be driven by educators who understand the fundamentals, protect what’s human, experiment responsibly, and build capacity over time.
Tom’s work at EdTechTeacher reflects that philosophy, because they don’t just introduce tools, they help teachers design with intention, they meet educators where they are and help them move forward with confidence, with no guesswork, just proven strategies grounded in pedagogy.
The Throughline: Help the Teachers
In a moment obsessed with disruption, Tom’s message is refreshingly grounded, support the profession, give teachers time, keep learning social, and let AI assist, not dictate.
If we do that, the future of education won’t be something that happens to schools, it will be something educators shape deliberately, and that starts with a simple commitment: help the teachers.
Listen to the full conversation with Tom Driscoll on The LX Ops Show or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast Transcript– Jason Gorman with Tom Driscoll
Jason Gorman (00:00)
When I was in middle school, my mom, who was a teacher, was honored on a national talk show. Years earlier, she had helped a young student through an existential crisis. That student nominated her, and for one shining moment, in a decades-long career, she got some public recognition. It is not an exaggeration to say that teachers save lives. They do.
They’re the most important adults in our kids’ lives after the parents and after 20 years of seeing what social media has done to young people, we’re now facing even more powerful technologies. Teachers are on the front lines now again, and they’re trying to figure out how to use these tools responsibly and safely while their jobs are only getting more and more complicated. I think about this all the time. I’ve got…
kids myself. And that is why I’m so excited about today’s guest. He spends his time helping teachers make sense of technology, especially AI, in ways that are practical, ethical, and sustainable. Tom Driscoll is the CEO of EdTech Teacher and a longtime leader in technology-enabled professional learning for K-12 educators. He’s formerly a district director of digital learning and has led large-scale professional development
rapid cycle ed tech pilots and coaching programs. Tom’s also published widely on educational technology. Welcome to the Learning Experience Ops Show, Tom Driscoll.
Tom Driscoll (01:38)
Thanks so much, Jason. Truly happy to be here today.
Jason Gorman (01:42)
So glad we’re doing this. So let’s jump in first with a couple of quick lightning round questions to kind of get us to the ball. I know you’re sports guy. All right, so if you have to give a short elevator pitch to somebody about what you do and you’ve got 30 seconds or less, what is that pitch?
Tom Driscoll (01:57)
Let’s do it.
I’ll do it in five seconds. I help teachers.
Jason Gorman (02:13)
Lovely.
Tom Driscoll (02:13)
You
go, I help teachers, I help them do their job because they need support and what they do is so valuable. And that’s what we do. Our mission is about helping teachers in the classroom. And that’s our core vision.
Jason Gorman (02:24)
Beautiful. All right, well, maybe this next one is easy. Next lightning round question. What do you love the most about your work?
Tom Driscoll (02:31)
So I love the fact that I can not only help teachers, but help them experiment and be creative. And that’s what I love more than anything is that educational technology has unlocked a lot of educators creativity and not just with projects, but their own instructional design. So I just love the fact that we can design with them as creators.
Jason Gorman (02:53)
When you are absolutely dialed in at work, what are you most likely to be doing?
Tom Driscoll (02:58)
typically I love to create myself. ⁓ So I love to design and create ⁓ resources for teachers, but also I love collaborating with others to create. So creating with other teachers, with other professionals, that is what I truly dive into and love.
Jason Gorman (03:18)
and what event or moment inspired you to do what you do.
Tom Driscoll (03:21)
was actually my second year teaching. I was ⁓ first getting into educational technology. At the time, it was a projection screen with slides and everyone was like, ooh, wow. But I was like, all right, just something as simple as not turning my back to the class and writing on the board. was like, wow, just that tiny little shift can change how I teach a class. And that kind of got me hooked. And then I just took off.
Jason Gorman (03:34)
I’m
These have all been pretty positive. This one is maybe a little less positive. What are you most anxious about for the future?
Tom Driscoll (03:53)
I am anxious about, frankly, the profession. I think the teaching profession, as you alluded to in the beginning, is in some ways ⁓ not supported as it should. Teachers are not necessarily supported as much as they can. And what I’m worried about is that as challenges come up, teachers again are going to become that proverbial punching bag, which they shouldn’t be. I feel like they should be revered in our society. ⁓ So what I’m worried about is that we’re not
going to put enough emphasis on the value of teachers and how complex this profession actually is. And it deserves the attention of other professionals.
Jason Gorman (04:30)
What is something teachers will have to change because of AI, but you don’t want to change?
Tom Driscoll (04:37)
So one thing that almost every educator is going to have to have some type of basic ⁓ AI literacy, particularly with generative AI. I think that’s good for most scenarios, but I think it really does put some teachers in a pretty difficult spot because there’s really no off ramp to this one. Like you kind of have to get some basic core skills and some teachers are really not in a position to jump in right now.
Jason Gorman (04:50)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Driscoll (05:04)
I think they can get there, but what I don’t like is that, you know, it seems like it’s putting a lot of pressure on teachers that are already stressed. So, you know, that’s, that’s kind of tough for me to swallow. And that’s where I think particular teachers that are going to have a longer learning curve with AI, they’re going to need more support, not just people telling them they need to learn it now. They need, they need help, you know? So I really think that we should focus on that.
Jason Gorman (05:28)
Mm-hmm.
Last lightning round question. What’s a book, movie, or podcast that has nothing at all to do with work, but shapes how you think?
Tom Driscoll (05:40)
You know, one podcast I listened to that probably no one ever remembers one of the first was called the Google Educast. It was the dorkiest thing ever, but it was a bunch of about 10 years ago. It was a bunch of maybe more these Google certified educators when Google for education first started. And I was kind of a new myself and I just loved listening to other teachers share their stories. And it really did kind of, I want to be part of that community. So that was, that was a big one. Nobody’s probably ever heard of it, but that got me into this or helped get me into
Jason Gorman (05:46)
Mmm.
Definitely,
definitely have not heard of that one. That’s a good throwback. That’s a good throwback. All right, that’s it for the lightning round. We can get into some of the other questions and I’m just gonna kind of start with big picture. Can you describe your job at EdTechTeacher and what EdTechTeacher does?
Tom Driscoll (06:09)
Yeah.
Right. So, ⁓ as I mentioned at the beginning, we help teachers and in the way that we do that is, ⁓ through professional learning experiences, we provide a wide variety of them in different formats, but the, the main goal is to help support them where they’re at, but then make it firmly grounded in sound pedagogical practice. Right. So our whole, companies has expert educators, instructional designers, and what we try to focus on is how can we leverage technology in the service of learning?
Right. So you’re an expert educator. Say you want to focus on say inquiry-based learning or mastering or whatever it might be. We take those pedagogical practices. We provide support on those practices, but then also weave in how can you leverage technology to ⁓ enhance those practices? And a lot of it is through discovery. Like a lot of teachers, maybe just find new ways to do things that they’ve never heard of through our sessions or just different ways to think, which is, which is great because I know like teaching can be a lonely profession.
Right, my first four years teaching, I don’t think I had one person ever really come in and talk to me about teaching ever, or give me feedback. It’s like, it’s very isolating. ⁓ So what we can provide is that community, ⁓ whether it’s individual folks that, you we had about 17,000 people on our newsletter, because they want to see, you know, what are some resources that we’re sharing out? We do a lot of free live webinars, we do online courses. We’ll talk a little bit later about a new.
Jason Gorman (07:33)
Huh? Wow.
Tom Driscoll (07:54)
program and launching with IBM to provide free training across the country. But yeah, really just helping support teachers, whether they’re a sole teacher in a classroom or maybe a whole district wants to make a move. So we also work with school leadership teams to decide, how do we want to scale things? What do we want to practice? Do we want to do a quick pilot? So that’s the core way that we help. The other way that we help is also through our partnerships with some of the ed tech companies. So for instance, ⁓
Adobe for education or a partner with them and say a school district has an Adobe Creative Cloud license. Our team can go in and show teachers like, Hey, you might be a second grade teacher. You’re not teaching, you know, Adobe premiere, but you could use Adobe express to create these awesome projects with your kids in second grade. So it’s kind of taking a technology that maybe school already has, but helping them discover different ways that they could use it across the curriculum and really creative ways. Um, this is just really fun work. I, as you can, I enjoy what I do.
⁓ And it’s constantly changing. So, as the world changes, we change with it and we help teachers get there.
Jason Gorman (09:00)
It’s definitely not a boring ⁓ area of the world that moves at a snail’s pace. ⁓ You are definitely, I would imagine you’re learning nonstop.
Tom Driscoll (09:04)
No. No.
Right. But I will point here though that like there is that that clash between the field and the institutions of education. Right. I mean, they move at a glacial pace, right. As far as change. So that’s the other thing that we try to help with is how can we get things moving in a responsible way? Because a lot of school districts, they for whatever reason, things go very, very slow. So what we can do is help come in and say, hey,
Jason Gorman (09:20)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Tom Driscoll (09:42)
we’re gonna ramp these people up. We’re gonna help them get confident, comfortable and confident in doing this. And then we’ll also help you make this a common practice because what I worry about is equity, right? And you think about it like in a school, your students future shouldn’t just depend on what individual class they’re in. Like all the teachers should have that same skill set, right? Or at least that same competency. So what I worry about is some districts like say right now, like the AI piece.
Maybe they do a one year AI cohort and then they’re like, okay, we’re good. No, you’re not. Like all you did was have that one cohort ramp up and you didn’t help anybody else. ⁓ we also help districts take the things that do work and just help them scale it. So then every educator can have access to those practices.
Jason Gorman (10:18)
Mm.
What are the, I mean that scale piece.
I hear you. mean, Sometimes the hardest part is figuring out how to get a foothold to do a new thing. And you can do that hard work of figuring that out, but if you don’t go that last kind of mile of figuring out how to replicate that, it’s almost like, I don’t want to say a waste of time because some people have really been helped.
they’re better off. But how do you think about that scale piece? How do you do that effectively? How does a district or a school do that effectively?
Tom Driscoll (11:11)
Yeah, schools do it a lot of different ways. You know, when I did work in a school district, ⁓ we did do a lot of collaborative work with others in the region. So I think working with different networks to get support helps. But within your district, typically what you need is some type of ⁓ time commitment. That’s the biggest thing. It’s time. You have to reserve time for this. And that is by far the biggest barrier. It’s not money. It’s not funding. It’s not do we know what to do? It’s time. Teachers don’t have enough time.
Jason Gorman (11:40)
Hmm.
Tom Driscoll (11:41)
So if you truly want to scale something, you need to provide them with the time, right? Give them some time to dig in, to try to work with their peers. If you just keep dumping all these tasks on teachers and then say, ⁓ learn this new initiative that these other teachers piloted and start doing it next year, that is unfair to the teachers that weren’t in that pilot. You need to give them the time and space to dig in and learn with the folks that were in it. You know, and it’s hard. I get it. Like it is tough to figure out what time to devote to this.
Jason Gorman (11:59)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Driscoll (12:09)
And I’ll take a step back. Time does cost money, right? Because that is part of this. But that is the single thing that I think if districts really want to scale these things, you have to find time for educators and treat them like professionals and give them time to learn this stuff. I think that’s how you actually scale these practices.
Jason Gorman (12:26)
You talked earlier, you yourself, you were a teacher for four years, it sounds like, and ten years.
Tom Driscoll (12:33)
Actually, ⁓ tenure.
Yeah, yep, I in two different schools in Connecticut.
Jason Gorman (12:39)
What are some kind of core processes or ideas or techniques that you learned as a teacher that you feel are just evergreen? They’re just always going to be important. They’re always going to be critical. I know most of your job, you are really at this kind of forefront of change. What are the things that never have to change, that shouldn’t change?
Tom Driscoll (13:08)
I think the first is… ⁓
when you’re starting any lesson, no matter what it is, anywhere, anything that you’re teaching, ⁓ it’s that first two to three minutes. That first, like that inquiry hook, that engagement, that relevance, that connection with them, you gotta get them in the first few minutes, right? And then they’re in, right? So I think if you can really hone that and get kids to lock in and to care about what you’re teaching that day, ⁓ that’s gonna go a long way. So I think just focusing on that first few minutes.
Even think of like, think about how kids watch YouTube right now. If they don’t finish the first, what is it? Seven seconds or something, they’re never going to watch it. So you got to get in past seven seconds. So I’m not saying you got to get past your first seven seconds of your lesson, but you have to think in that mindset. If you just drone on about your objectives for the day and checking the homework and all that crap, and then 10 minutes in, everyone’s just sitting there and you wonder why they’re bored and don’t care. It’s because you just blew the first 10 minutes on operational crap. So, and again, it’s just part of the nature of schooling. I get it. You have to do that.
Jason Gorman (13:46)
Yeah.
Tom Driscoll (14:08)
But one thing that I always really tried to do is preserve that first few minutes to really bring everyone together and to get them to care about what we’re teaching that day. I don’t think that’s ever going to go away. The other thing too is I think ⁓ I was never a fan of, hey, a student didn’t learn something. Let’s just make it really low level and drill them with it for hours on end. I think that’s stupid. If the kid didn’t get it the first time, how does just going slower and more boring going to make it helpful?
Right? It’s not, they’re not going to want to do that. You know? Um, and I saw it happen in high schools all the time. They’d fail algebra. So they put them in remedial algebra, which was like even more boring. And it’s just like, how about instead of that, we do like a PBL where like they actually care about the math they might learn. A crazy idea, you know, but I think we spend too much time on the remediation with really basic drill and kill stuff. We’re really the kids that are disconnected, the kids that aren’t engaging.
Jason Gorman (14:37)
That’s a fair question.
Tom Driscoll (15:04)
It may not be because they can’t do the thing. They just don’t care. Right. So I think that it’s the wrong medicine. You know, just don’t double down on boring stuff. Give them something more authentic. One educator that I follow all the time, Scott McLeod. He’s a university professor out in, think it’s University of Colorado. And his whole thing is about, you know, his mantra is make school less boring. But the whole point is like, have that, that authenticity to it. Have, have something there, especially with
When you’re doing projects, like don’t make yourself the audience. Like if you’re the teacher and you’re the only audience, it’s not a great project. Audience should be someone other than just the teacher. So they care. Cause honestly, I hate to say it, but they don’t really care about just pleasing you all the time as a teacher, but they might care about an outside audience that they’re designing for. I know I’m rambling a little bit, but I would say those would be the big things for me is inquiry hooks at the beginning, get kids engaged. Don’t just double down on remedial stuff.
Jason Gorman (15:38)
Hmm.
course.
Tom Driscoll (15:59)
of in focus more on authenticity, engaging kids and making school interesting for them so they they care. ⁓ Those are things that are universal that is not going to change with technology.
Jason Gorman (16:09)
And those things are so fundamentally human. They are about connection and empathy, if I’m understanding, really understanding where the student is and what to do next that’s right for that student and keeping them involved in a way that feels good to them. And that isn’t something technology is great at.
Tom Driscoll (16:16)
Mm-hmm.
Jason Gorman (16:33)
I know that you need to stay, of course, for your job. You’ve got to stay ahead of what is happening in the world of technology. I know you’ve been running a tech teacher longer than we have had LLMs at the center of all of our technology conversations. And I can imagine that it’s always been a fast-paced job. But now, I mean, we’re just at a totally different level.
Tom Driscoll (16:48)
Yeah. Yep.
Jason Gorman (17:02)
of pace of change. So how is it that you are able to stay on top of your own learning, stay ahead of where teachers need to be as the world just accelerates so fast? And do you have any tips for the rest of us?
Tom Driscoll (17:22)
Yeah, I mean, it’s something that everyone in every field is in this boat. This is not unique to education. ⁓ I think what we need to do, particularly in the education field, is not worry too, too much about the tech itself. Focus more on what the tech does in general.
And what we need to do is start to design. Like we need to all put our instructional design hats on because school is going to be different. It is. And it might take till 2028 to get there, you know. ⁓ But it will be fundamentally in 2028 seems far away, but it’s really not. I mean, we’re almost at 2026. So like, you know, these kids are going to be living in a much different world very, very soon.
Jason Gorman (18:07)
you
Tom Driscoll (18:13)
So I think if we can just kind of unpack this a bit and say like, what does this mean for our profession? Just take a second, step back. Like how do we want to teach? How does it align with our values? And then think about how we might want to engage with these tools. That’s the big thing. Cause then you can cut out a lot of the noise. I get probably 50 emails a day with the newest EdTech AI tool. I don’t open any of them. Right? So EdTech people stop sending me that stuff, I don’t open them.
Jason Gorman (18:34)
you
Tom Driscoll (18:37)
What is important is to know the fundamental technology, So I think schools should step back and say, all right, what we shouldn’t be talking about is these eight apps. We should be talking about what is generative AI actually, and what does that mean? And I think if we can all kind of start with that fundamental understanding, we start a lot of our beginner workshops with that. We don’t talk about ed tech at all for the first hour. It’s all just kind of getting a better understanding of, as a former history teacher, I actually go back.
Jason Gorman (18:41)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Driscoll (19:04)
And I say, hey, when did AI get invented? And lot of people are like, 2022. And I’m like, well, it was actually the 50s. We’ve been working on this stuff for 75 years. So I think also providing some historical context to this helps people lower some of the anxiety. ⁓ And then I think also letting teachers take some control over this. Because a lot of the anxiety around AI is the loss of control, the fact that we’re losing some of our, our hands aren’t always on the wheel now.
Jason Gorman (19:09)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tom Driscoll (19:33)
So with that, I think it’s like, all right, we need you to shape how AI looks for you as an educator. Right? So we want you to be confident and comfortable in doing that. And for me to, this comes back to that learning piece. When I find articles in research that shows best practices, I try to kind of filter it down and make it very, very practical as far as what steps can I take as an educator.
Jason Gorman (19:39)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Driscoll (19:58)
And that helps me as well, because if I can’t really articulate it and explain it, I really don’t know it well enough either. Right. And someone once told me, like, if you can’t explain something briefly to somebody, you really don’t know it that well. Like you should be able to consolidate. So I do that. And then as far as the research itself, I just find the smartest people in whatever field I’m studying and I follow their podcasts. I go to their newsletter. I’ll read their books. like, why not? Like if this person is one of the best in the world at whatever.
Jason Gorman (20:04)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Tom Driscoll (20:26)
Why don’t, so one example is, ⁓ I follow Ethan Molek’s work. You’re familiar with his. He was really one of the first educators, I think, that really just jumped out on this and shared how he was doing it. And he even admits, he’s like, I don’t really know what I was doing at the beginning, but I shared it publicly. So I think getting involved in some of those public conversations around this with the experts and then bringing it to your field helps. I didn’t just go out and say, I need to find AI experts in education. I mean, I want AI experts.
Jason Gorman (20:31)
I am.
Yeah.
Tom Driscoll (20:56)
And then I went, all right, how might this apply in education? Then I went out, how could AI help with education? And then I filtered down more, but I always start with like the smartest people in the field that could possibly find and learn from them, whatever I freely can online. And then I kind of work my way back into like my specific niche.
Jason Gorman (21:12)
That is some very good, very applicable advice. I want to go back to something you said about fundamentals. This is a theme that has come up over and over again in my conversations on this show. In different, people who have totally different jobs, completely different areas of focus, but this idea, when we start talking about technology in the future,
There has been this common notion that the best way to handle it is to make sure we’re not abandoning our fundamentals, that we understand them, that we’re doubling down on them, that the fundamentals are the things that allow us to be effective with technology, that allow us to stay centered and have a goal and know how to get to it.
Because if we don’t have our fundamentals, we literally can’t use the tools because then it’s just random. We have to have the fundamentals. So I appreciate you bringing that up and I wanted to highlight that. ⁓ We talked a little bit already about the dynamics in a district. ⁓ I’m curious to hear, is there a common mismatch that you see between a district’s AI ambitions?
and the teachers’ day-to-day constraints like prep time or grading load. What is that mismatch? Is there a mismatch?
Tom Driscoll (22:40)
So the biggest disconnect I see right now is really more of a timing thing, but I’ll hear a lot of school leaders and administrators, even people outside of education say, hey, AI is going to help make teachers’ lives easier. It’s going to make it better. It might reduce burnout. It might help get more people into the field. Then you go into a classroom, right? And the teachers…
Jason Gorman (22:45)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Driscoll (23:03)
you know, spinning around, trying to keep kids engaged. The kids are cheating with AI. They’re trying to catch them. There’s no policy. They’re trying to figure all this stuff out. It’s kind of chaos right now as far as AI in the classrooms. And part of this is because this was ⁓ our former, ⁓ one of our founders, Justin Reich, ⁓ up at MIT. He actually coins this as an arrival technology, right? So he said, most districts have rollout technologies where a district will plan things and roll it out over years.
AI just arrived. 2022, 2023, it’s here now. we had districts had no time to really plan a rollout. All they could try to do is randomly block stuff and get AI detectors, which I think should be illegal. But I think they were really scrambling and they’ve been behind. So I think that’s one of the problems that teachers are kind of caught in the middle here where districts and understandably didn’t have a plan for this because it just happened. So districts are now trying to come up with a plan. in the meantime,
You know, the teachers are in the classroom trying to plug the holes in the boat, you know, ⁓ because there isn’t really a clear use, a widely understood use case for AI at scale yet. It’s still in that tinker phase and it’s not a lot of tools for kids yet either. It’s very limited. It’s not like kids should just open up chat GPT and use the tools anyway, even if it did make sense because it’s not safe. ⁓ So I think there’s also the disconnect with what can teachers and students even use right now? It’s not as much as you’d think, especially for free stuff.
Almost everything’s trying to charge you or has some type of freemium built in. The only one I even know of is Google Gemini. That’s the only one that’s included for free for school districts. Everything else is a paid tool. So I think teachers feel a little bit hamstrung on that end. And I actually hear some say that AI is not helping them. It’s actually making them more anxious, partly because of cheating, but also because how much they’re now going to have to learn on top of everything. So
Jason Gorman (24:53)
Mmm.
Tom Driscoll (24:59)
It’s just a lot at once. So I feel like at the district level, there’s a lot of promise and potential and I get it, but I still feel like teachers are struggling in the class right now to kind of manage through this rocky rollout, if you even want to call that of AI in education.
Jason Gorman (25:19)
I’ve heard.
industries a really similar kind of example or about the conflicting ideas that leaders have and ⁓ any actual realities on the ground. Actually here’s another question for you. Do you in your experience how familiar are leaders who are responsible for
know, faculty and students, how much personal experience do they have with AI in your experience and how much should they have?
Tom Driscoll (26:04)
I’ve, I’ve been surprised at how much they have, frankly, you know, cause this is kind of my second go around with this. Like my first big thing with districts was like one-to-one computing in the classroom. And that was a big rollout. And back then, like maybe 10, 12 years ago, maybe long for some districts, a lot of the Principals had no idea. They didn’t even know what a Chromebook was and they were leading a Chromebook rollout. Right. So there was very big disconnect, but I almost feel like maybe just because of like COVID and everything that happened during distance learning, I feel like a lot of administrators are.
Jason Gorman (26:07)
Mm. Mm.
Tom Driscoll (26:34)
are more skilled now than they were even five, 10 years ago. It also might be a demographic shift. Maybe they’re just more younger folks that maybe they were a principal during a one-to-one rollout 10 years ago now that the superintendent. So I feel like we’re getting more leaders in that have experience with technology. So that’s a good thing. The one area that no one has experience with though is implementing generative AI in the classroom because it is literally brand new. So that’s the thing that
Jason Gorman (26:38)
Great.
Mm-hmm.
Tom Driscoll (27:00)
even if they are really good at tech, it’s new for everyone, matter who they are. So we actually do a lot of training with ⁓ just leadership teams, you know, and frankly, it’s almost the same training we do with educators. It’s not a whole lot different. It’s like, what is AI? How does it impact education? But the only spin on that is we also show them how AI can help them perform better as school leaders. And we found that if we can get them using the tools to help them just perform their job tasks better and to learn.
then they can translate it better into district policy. So that’s been one of our angles is like, we’ll do some workshops with leadership teams, but also show them very concrete examples of how they could use this as part of their leadership skillset.
Jason Gorman (27:42)
That’s great. mean, for me, this does feel like a technology that is really hard to understand unless you use it a lot. You have to. And unlike other things where if you kind of get it, you get the concept, and if you’re responsible for somebody else’s work using that technology, you can more or less understand what to ask them, how to direct them, how to view their work. And AI just doesn’t work that way.
Tom Driscoll (27:49)
You have to try it. You have to use it.
Mm.
Jason Gorman (28:11)
And one of the things that I hear a lot for people in corporate environments or other environments is that the leader gets very, very excited about AI. They get all hyped up, but they never use it or they use it very little. And then they have these crazy expectations about what is possible in their organization. And they’re making people, they’re expecting that like…
The AI fairy dust is just going to get spread across their employee workforce and everything’s going to get faster and better and higher quality and more efficient. And that is not the way it works. I am glad to hear that your experience is not quite that with school leaders. That’s quite heartening.
Tom Driscoll (28:53)
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think when I said 2028 earlier, I didn’t just make that up. Like a lot of folks are saying like, you know, in the workforce, it might take till 2028 until AI adoption really is pervasive across industries. ⁓ So I think that like there’s still time to get there. But yeah, I mean, I’ve been pretty impressed by but at least the school leadership teams I worked with recently because they’re not setting super high expectations yet for.
how it’s being used, think right now most districts just want it to be used safely and ethically, right? They’re not using it to, you know, let’s raise our test scores 800%. Nobody’s saying that. It’s really more like how can we create safe, effective, ethical AI environments where students are preparing for the future? The big thing that they’re more worried, not worried, but concerned with is how is this shaping the future job market for our graduates, especially if you’re a high school.
Jason Gorman (29:27)
Mm-hmm.
you
Tom Driscoll (29:50)
principal or working with those students. Cause that is actually changing the content of our courses or even what we teach. Like right now in Rhode Island, we’re going to have a new AI CTE pathway that never existed. Right. So I think that’s going to be a normal thing. So I think as that happens, we’re going to have to shift staffing. We’re going to have to shift curriculum. We’re going to have, so a lot’s going to have to shift, but we’re, we’re ways off. Like we’re probably a year or two from that big shift, but that’s something that district leaders are going to have to start planning for too is like.
Even our staff is probably going to change. Like what teachers we have and what positions is going to be different. I remember that happened with, uh, this isn’t a new thing either. There was a, a woodshop teacher where I was a district digital learning director, the woodshop teacher retired. It became the STEM lab. Right. So this stuff happened like, like a lot of districts will just take an old program and usually they won’t make the teacher leave. But once they retire or whatever, they’ll take it’s like, okay, that program was great in 1975. Let’s make like a STEM lab or AI or whatever. Um,
And unfortunately, that’s the way districts work, right? It is what it is. But I think the opportunity there though, is that as those opportunities come up, that’s when we can start to rethink and reshape what it is that we’re teaching, how we’re teaching it, how we staff it. But yeah, I don’t think that’s changing too, too fast. Cause like, if we’re going to go off the 2028 thing, like it’s going to take a while for like all these industries to really, really fundamentally change. But it’s conversations that they should be having now, right? Cause if you’re in high school now, that is the world you’re going to be going into. So they need to start getting ahead of that.
Jason Gorman (31:20)
It’s just an impossibly moving target. And we’ve been having this conversation for decades. mean, well before AI, we’ve been saying, how are we supposed to, what are we supposed to be teaching kids about the world? Because the world is not going to look like it does now in five years. It’s going to look totally different. We always used to hear like half the jobs will be totally different or whatever. We always hear these. And I feel like half is not even close. It’s going to be.
Tom Driscoll (31:21)
That’s hard.
Well, yeah.
Let’s go see it.
Jason Gorman (31:46)
90 % of the I mean, I don’t know what the number is now, but it is more than half in five years. The jobs will be different. And that’s it. That’s it. ⁓
Tom Driscoll (31:52)
Yeah, I even think like, what am I going to be doing in five years? Like, mean, like everybody’s
position is going to be different, you know? So it’s interesting. and, but I also see how that causes anxiety with a lot of people. Um, but I think that the opportunities that, here’s one example that you’d appreciate about the mismatch, right?
Jason Gorman (31:58)
Yes.
Tom Driscoll (32:10)
I was still teaching in the class and all of a sudden we got all these posters and they’re like, show these videos. What the hell is it? It was called Hour of Code. And that was a huge thing across the country and maybe like 2010, 11ish maybe. And the goal was like, we need to teach every kid in the country to learn how to code because that’s the future. And we’d have these videos of like Silicon Valley and people on scooters and playing ping pong. And all my kids are like, yeah, I’m to be a coder.
Jason Gorman (32:22)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Tom Driscoll (32:39)
Now look at it. mean, low level coders are getting laid off in mass right now. I honestly, parents are pissed because like say you were a parent back then you had your kid get into all this stuff and now they’re like, what the heck? So I do get it. It’s a problem. It’s a challenge. But I think that it’s it’s one that we can’t ignore either. I mean, we got to keep shifting. ⁓ I said earlier, like if you’re not if you’re not moving, you’re you know, you’re falling behind right now.
Jason Gorman (32:41)
you
Yeah.
Yes, you’ve just named, this ⁓ is a ⁓ triggering subject for me that you just brought up around this.
Tom Driscoll (33:12)
Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Jason Gorman (33:20)
incredible push by the tech industry, by tech giants in particular, to teach every kid how to code. And that the message over and over again was, these are what jobs are going to be. And now as soon as it was possible for them to replace those jobs with technology to do those jobs, they have done that. I
I am deeply skeptical. I I use these tools. I love technology in general. I’m also very wary and skeptical about the technologies and about the motivations of these companies behind the technologies, especially when it comes to kids.
And this one example, just once I saw this, sort what was happening in the last couple of years, I just thought, we just spent 20 years trying to teach every kid how to code. And now those jobs are going away and it’s just infuriating. I will say this though, there’s still valuable skills. I think if you’ve learned how to code, it’s a creative skill, it’s a problem solving skill, it’s a skill that requires, you know,
Tom Driscoll (34:25)
Alright.
Jason Gorman (34:44)
collaboration, cooperation with other people. I mean, it’s just, it is still valid. There’s still plenty of things, even if you never code, that are probably quite useful about it. However, I personally, and also just as an educator, find the kind of arc of that quite frustrating. ⁓ Because I think it also came at the expense of other things. I think we were teaching those skills when we weren’t.
teaching about other stuff. My kids say to me all the time, why is it that I still don’t understand how banking works or like how to work my personal finances or what my fundamental human rights are, right? how to, know, basics of human psychology. Why did we get none of those things? And we had all of these other things. These are legitimate questions.
far too big to get into in this conversation, but anyway. Man, I just got all upset with your answer there. It really got me going.
Tom Driscoll (35:47)
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s
in this so many personal connections there I have one quick anecdote for those who are watching I’m gonna point So that book I wrote with ⁓ about civics education and how it got squeezed out of public schools starting in year 2000 and One of the and honestly, I think one of the reasons we’re in the absolute mess of democracy We are is because we spent two decades not teaching civics. It’s not the only reason
Jason Gorman (35:58)
Yeah.
⁓
Tom Driscoll (36:15)
But it definitely did not help that we have a whole generation of people that don’t even understand the fundamentals of our government. And I think part of that is because the public schools let us down on that front. We got rid of a lot of social studies courses. We got rid of civics classes entirely. Part of it was to make room for all the things you were just mentioning. So there’s always that give and take. So the point here is that, yes, AI is a big thing. We’re moving maybe AI literacy. But
Do not take out the course that teaches like civil discourse and like how to engage in democracy for the love of God, like keep those important things and maybe think about how we can integrate. My thing would be, why don’t you just integrate learning about AI into a civics class? Why do you have to have a separate class for it? You know, so I don’t know. It gets me going a little bit too, because I felt like even just my passion as a subject is history and social studies. There’s a history major and I see it getting pushed aside and I see what an important
Jason Gorman (36:58)
Yes. Right.
Tom Driscoll (37:13)
important subject it is. But I just think as school leaders, the takeaway here is that, you know, you’re going to get a lot of people saying to do AI everything over the next three years. So I think it’s going to be very important to hold the line on those things that you do find like core to your school, core to what you believe in, ⁓ and not just chase this. I mean, you have to address it, but
Jason Gorman (37:23)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Tom Driscoll (37:36)
I would not totally pivot and abandon everything to believe just because AI is changing society. You have to have that fundamental belief system and stick to it.
Jason Gorman (37:45)
You have mentioned a couple times that you kind of circled 2028 as a year that we should be thinking about. What are your predictions for 2028?
Tom Driscoll (37:53)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, so first of all, I think the way that we interact with the web and with the internet is going to be fundamentally different. I was actually talking to buddy this morning. We work out together before school. I was like, we’re going to look back. Remember we used to browse on the internet to find information? Do remember those days? We might be saying that in 2028. So I think things are moving real fast. I also think.
Jason Gorman (38:08)
Hmm.
Tom Driscoll (38:29)
interacting with these technologies are going to get untethered from what we’re staring at right now. You know, we’re staring at pieces of glass, you know, and I think that maybe by 2028, we move beyond staring at glass all day. I don’t know exactly how that looks. I would be all for that. I spend way too much of my day staring at some type of glass. But I think having some more natural ⁓ ways to interact with people. And I’m not saying like Ray Ban, Facebook glasses are the future, but I mean,
I’m not opposed if I can not be sitting at a computer all the time. You know, so I think that that might be also good for the education field where maybe we can leverage these technologies and not have to worry about Chromebooks all the time and not have to worry about this. Like it might just be more of a natural extension of our thinking or what we’re doing. And I think that that’s probably where it’s going to go. And then as far as teaching, I think it’s, it’s not going to change fundamentally from a structure standpoint. I don’t see that. think there’s too much of a social role for education.
Right. So this whole two hour school thing that’s going on, I think that’s a bunch of garbage. That’s not going to scale for public education. ⁓ But maybe we could replicate how that looks, but I don’t see a big shift in the way public school is structured. I think the bigger shift would be how, what is the school they look like in 2028? That’s what I think is going to be different. And I think that’s where we’re going to be moving towards, I would think, ⁓ less of the chalk and talk, because it’s going to be increasingly useless. And it’s going to be more about
Jason Gorman (39:34)
Mm-hmm.
Tom Driscoll (39:58)
projects, authenticity, designing things. I mean, I would love that future if that’s what we were going towards. But I see that as a good thing if we can move in that direction. But we’ll see.
Jason Gorman (40:11)
Well, this is so apropos. I have one more question for you. And my last question always comes from a previous guest. this person, her name is Andrea Flores. Andrea is a great thinker. She’s currently working at MIT Sloan. She’s designer. She does a lot of work on lifelong learning. And she said something in our conversation that she talked a lot about shifting from
teaching in silos to ⁓ solving problems, coming into school and solving problems. And this just allows for a cross-disciplinary ⁓ approach. So it’s kind of apropos that this is her question. So let me ask you her question. It is, when AI can personalize every learner’s path, who or what ensures that all learners still share a common map of the territory? And what role might teachers play in shaping
that shared understanding.
Tom Driscoll (41:12)
Yeah, so the first part is I don’t think I’d want that reality. The first part where you said, can you just repeat the AI personalized for every…
Jason Gorman (41:17)
Hmm.
Yeah.
When AI can personalize every learner’s path, who or what ensures that? Yeah, yeah.
Tom Driscoll (41:26)
Okay, let’s stop right there. When it can, that perfect, that part. When AI
can personalize every learner’s path. I don’t like the sound of that. I don’t want just some machine spitting out how a path should be pressed for my kid. If I’m in, if I’m in a school classroom with students, if it’s a, if some, if it’s some self-paced online course thing, that’s different, right? Personalizing an individual experience where it’s just individually, that’s fine. But I think learning is so inherently social.
Jason Gorman (41:43)
Hmm.
Tom Driscoll (41:55)
that really it should be the teacher, the educator is setting the context. We’re learning this thing together. Then as we dive in, I see AI as a tool that could personalize the experience for the student as they go through that shared experience. But I don’t want the AI designing the whole experience for the kid. I do not want that, right? I would rather the expert educator, we still have curriculum, we still have projects, we have things that we focus on. You’re still
Jason Gorman (41:57)
Hmm.
Tom Driscoll (42:26)
You’re still driving this. Like there’s that element there. I think the AI should come in after and say, all right, maybe this student needs a little bit more support with X and the AI can help them with X. And this student maybe wants to explore this field. So they use AI to research this field. Great. But then we all come back together. And I think that that’s a fundamental philosophy that I believe in with AI is it’s that human AI human, right? That human intuition, that human question.
You jump in, AI helps in the messy middle, and then you end with some type of human judgment in reflection. Right? So it’s still human human. Teacher can drive it. So that’s that. The AI would be in the middle to help support that. So I would very rarely support a program that was completely designed and driven for students by an AI tool. I do not support that.
Jason Gorman (43:15)
Thank you so much for your time. This has been amazing. could keep going, but we probably both have other things to do in our days, but I could literally keep talking. We should do this again. I think it would be interesting to have a conversation with maybe you and Andrea, too, maybe some point in the future. I think you guys would have a lot of interesting things to talk about.
Tom Driscoll (43:26)
Yeah, it’s a lot of fun.
Excellent. we’ll do it. Jason, thanks so much for having me on and we’ll have you on the EdTech Teacher Podcast soon.
Jason Gorman (43:41)
I would love that. Yes, please. That would be great. All right. Thank you, Tom Driscoll, coming on the, I was going to say the EdTech TeacherPod, the Learning Experience Operations Show.
Tom Driscoll (43:43)
Let’s do it.
Not yet.
Excellent. Thanks, Jason.