Rebecca Winthrop
speaker
127 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 17 Jan
Rebecca Winthrop’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Kids will find a way, no matter what. Kids will find a way. We cannot outmaneuver them with technology. So the first response when Gen AI came in was ban it, block it, get anti-plagiarism checkers in, which are bad, by the way. Like I talked to one kid who showed me he had this essay and the plagiarism checker flagged 40% of it and he changed two words and then it went away.
So we cannot out-technologize ourselves. So what we need to do is shift what we're doing in our teaching and learning experiences.
I am not sure I agree. I agree with several things. One, you are not alone. There are many, many kids who currently today are going through the system and feel like you. Two, I agree with you that as sort of a bureaucratic system that is actually quite miraculous if you think about it, like in every community across our country,
Kids as young as 3 to 18 at the same time of day are getting themselves to a place Monday through Friday for a certain amount of days in the year. I mean, that is an organizational feat. And the thing I don't agree with is that once you're there... you just have to design for the mean and the average.
I think there's lots of examples that are relatively big scale, or at least not just one little school in a corner by one fabulous homespun teacher that do things differently. And I think it actually just gets down to how we orchestrate teaching and learning experiences.
I'll give you a couple. So there's an example of schools in North Dakota that have created studios for their adolescents. And what are studios? They are self-created classes that a student can design and And they have to tell you, or tell the teacher, what standards they're meeting. I'll give you an example.
We have a great character in the book I've done with Jenny Anderson, the disengaged teen, named Kia. And she was totally disengaged, doom scrolling in middle school, and then these studios showed up. She got super into it because she was learning history and science, and she decided to design an escape room.
And she had to list out for herself, these are the standards I'm meeting for whatever grade she was in, 10th grade, I think, history and science. And she did an escape room around the assassination. of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. But she had to design this escape room. That turned her on like nobody else. And she got super excited. And she did several of those.
And then she actually said she was so motivated, she went back to sort of normal classes. They're doing that across the district. That's one small example. There's other examples of schools that, we're talking about AI, do sort of tech-based education on core subjects for a couple hours a day. math, science, reading, social studies.
And then for the rest of the day, they are doing projects together on whatever it may be that they so decide. And there's a curriculum, there's things, you know, the teachers want them to learn. It's not a every kid do whatever you want, but that's super motivating. There's no reason that we couldn't do that with the existing staff and people and school buildings and infrastructure.
We just have to have the willpower to decide to do things differently.
I love that. What's an example? So you started political blogging and then what happened?
Right.
And this is something we talk about around finding your spark. Kids need to find their spark. And they may have many sparks and their sparks may change. But when kids find their spark, for Kia, it was this idea of doing an escape room around historical residential assassinations. For other students, they find sparks in other places.
One of the characters in our book, Samir, absolutely loved local politics and dove in, getting himself on the school board, ultimately, in high school. Another student, Mateo, was super excited and turned on by robotics, and that's what really turned him around. And when you're motivated, this internal drive, it makes you engage more. You lean in more. You enjoy it more.
There's a virtuous upward cycle. And there's lots of evidence to show that it often spills over. So Kia talks about doing these studios for a couple years, which really helped her re-engage and care about school. And then she went back and did some high school college credit courses, which were very traditional structure.
And she said she didn't love the structure, but she had enough motivation to figure out how to bend the class to her interests. So, that's the best case scenario. It doesn't always spill over automatically. What you talked about when you said you enjoyed it, you loved it, you loved English, but you didn't give the teachers what they want, it's probably because you're a total explorer.
And we do not reward engaging in school in a way that supports explorers in general. Some schools do. And that is what we have to change.
I think we're on the same page. Schools exist. They're important. They're important for many reasons. We need to change what we do inside of them, particularly because of Gen AI, and we need to do it quickly. In addition to, I would say, regulating Gen AI so it isn't so massively in students' and young people's hands without being designed for that purpose.
I would say those are the two big things we need to do. But I don't think our goal inside schools when we're educating young people is to have a 100% personalized learning journey for every kid. What I think you're talking about is actually the ability for Gen AI to help teachers, which I think is very real.
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