I love this quote from President Roosevelt for so many reasons. But, mostly because it continues to be a guiding frame for me both professionally and personally.

The last few decades in education have been a whirlwind. I typically share this story when speaking with groups, but as I’m headed back into the classroom a bit this fall, I wanted to share it here with all of you as well!

Next year, I’ll be back in that arena, working part-time as a teacher at a local high school. I’ll be sharing my journey along the way as I’ve done for the last twenty years, and hoping to learn something new. This isn’t merely to get a fresh perspective, but to see what the work looks like week in and week out, working with students.

As I continue writing about Learning 3.0, and what the future holds, it is going to be exciting to get an inside look, and be in the arena with all the ups and downs that come with it!

There's an uncomfortable finding that keeps surfacing in education research, and it's one we need to talk about honestly. Student engagement is not always a strong direct predictor of academic achievement.

So what does all this mean?

Well, a kid can be deeply engaged in your class and not score higher on a standardized test. And a kid who is bored out of their mind might still pull a 95.

If you've been teaching for more than a few years, I’m sure this doesn't surprise you. But it does create a real tension. Because if engagement doesn't reliably move the achievement needle, why should we care about it?

I beleive we should care about it more, not less. Here's why.

My favorite day of the marking period when teaching is always the same: Appeals Day.

As a high school teacher I had to constantly deal with the expectations and assumptions of our current grading system. Students want, and feel they deserve, the highest grade possible. Most of the time they understand why they received a particular grade, but in English (a very subjective subject) there can be times when students feel they deserve better.

When my students complain, I always come back with the same retort: “Complaining is like a rocking chair, you can do it as much as you want but it won’t get you anywhere”.

Unfortunately, as many years as I’ve said that line, it has increasingly become true that complaining does get you somewhere in our current system. In fact, this has become an issue for teachers all around the world (not just the US), and I think I have one solution that may work for some of you.

It’s called Appeals Day.

We've been told for years that engagement is the holy grail of teaching. And the advice usually sounds the same. We should make it fun, make it rigorous, make it relevant.

But what if one of those strategies was seven times more powerful than the others?

That's the finding from Kristy Cooper's study at Michigan State University, published in the American Educational Research Journal. Cooper analyzed how and why engagement differed across 581 classes in a single diverse high school, surveying over 1,100 students and conducting embedded case studies of five classrooms. Her mixed-methods approach (factor analyses, multilevel regression, interviews, and observations) revealed something that should change how every teacher thinks about their practice.

I've been doing something this year that a lot of teachers are picking up, and it's so simple it almost feels too obvious. Shout out to Mrs. G, a teacher in New York who's been running a version of this too.

Here's what you can do. When students turn in a writing assignment, I take their paper (long, short, doesn't matter) and I send it to Claude or ChatGPT with a simple prompt: Take this paper and create a five-question knowledge comprehension quiz based on the information in it.

Next day, every student gets a quiz. On their own paper. The one they supposedly wrote.

Whatever process you use, the output should be a document your teachers will actually open and a framework your students will actually understand. If it's sitting unread in a shared drive, it's not a policy. It's a formality.

I built a free tool to help you just like the 20 other schools and institutions I’ve helped in crafting and revising these policies. It’s called Policy Compass.

Policy Compass helps schools build and maintain AI policies through guided questions, AI-generated drafts tailored to your school's context, and audience-segmented documents your whole community can actually use.

Something is happening in education right now that should make every serious person uncomfortable.

It’s making me uncomfortable that’s for sure.

I wonder if you can see the same pattern happening.

Every decade or so, we identify a villain, wage war on it, declare victory or defeat, and move on. All this without ever addressing the underlying conditions that made us have an issue in the first place.

One of the things I keep reminding myself as I write LEARNING 3.0 is that the future isn't coming. It's already here. It's just unevenly distributed.

Most schools are still running a model built for the industrial age with learners in the same seat, same pace, same content, same teacher for 30 kids. But, there is a growing wave of programs and tools are quietly rewriting the rules of how learning works. What's fascinating is that they're coming at it from completely different angles. You’ll see a private school network, a homeschool community platform, a curriculum giant, an early literacy app, and a classroom AI tutor. But they're all, whether they'd say it this way or not, moving in the same direction.

They're all heading toward Learning 3.0.

I have been thinking about learning for most of my adult life.

I have spent thousands of days teaching in various classrooms. I have sat in hundreds of classrooms watching teachers work. I have read the research, argued about it with colleagues, tried to translate it into something useful for the people actually doing the work. I have spent years thinking about the gap between what the science of learning shows and what schools actually do (and feeling a particular kind of frustration at how stubborn that gap is). Wondering why we as a system can be so resistant to good evidence, how much the institution can absorb and neutralize before returning to its default settings.

And then AI arrived in schools. And for the first time in a long time, I felt something that I do not feel very often when thinking about educational systems.

Hope.

Somewhere in the last few weeks, you probably did one of these things.

You reread your notes before a test or an important meeting. You highlighted passages in a book and felt the satisfying sense of the information going in. You crammed the night before like I frequently do. It’s usually a mix of staying up late, running through the material repeatedly until it felt familiar, and walked in the next morning feeling reasonably prepared.

All of these strategies feel productive. They produce a belief that psychologists have a specific name for: the feeling of knowing. It is basically the comfortable sense that the material is in there somewhere and accessible.

The research says that this feeling is often wrong.

Imagine a teacher who never looks away.

Not in a surveillance sense or a camera watching whether you are sitting up straight or staring at your phone. Something more specific and more interesting than that. Imagine a teacher who is paying close attention to the particular texture of how you engage with a problem. Who notices not just whether you got it right, but how long you paused before attempting it, whether you changed your answer and why, what kind of wrong you were when you were wrong, and whether your confidence going into a question matched your accuracy coming out of it.

Personally I could experience a bit of this sometimes as a coach. I couldn’t help myself but pay a bit closer attention to the athletes I was teaching in my classroom. Especially those that were struggling a bit.

Every few thousand years, humanity figures out a completely new way to learn.

This has nothing to do with a better textbook. It’s not about a new teaching method. Not an updated curriculum framework. It is something more fundamental than any of those.

It’s a shift in the basic infrastructure of how knowledge moves from one human mind to another. A change so deep that it rewrites what learning is, who gets access to it, and what it costs to transmit everything a civilization knows to the generation that will carry it forward.

We are living through the third of these shifts right now (I know, it sounds extreme, but stay with me).