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).

Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Max Tegmark introduces a framework for understanding the evolution of life and the transformative, potentially existential impact of artificial intelligence.

Published all the way back in 2017 before ChatGPT hit the streets, this best-selling book explores how AI could lead to a future where life can design both its own software and hardware.

Tegmark categorizes life into three stages based on its ability to evolve and upgrade: 

• Life 1.0 (Biological): Life where both hardware (body) and software (behaviors/skills) are evolved, not designed. Examples include bacteria.

• Life 2.0 (Cultural): Life whose hardware is evolved, but whose software is largely designed by the life itself. Humans are Life 2.0 because we learn skills, languages, and behaviors during our lifetimes.

• Life 3.0 (Technological): A future form of life that can design not only its software but also its hardware, breaking free from the constraints of biological evolution. This stage does not currently exist but could be created through AI.

There's a fantasy at the heart of modern education (as well as corporate training programs) that if we get the curriculum just right, and the slides polished, the learning objectives crisp enough, learning will seamlessly follow. If you think we can engineer understanding the way we engineer a bridge, or a building, or any physical product…

We can't.

Learning is not a delivery mechanism. It is not something that happens to a person when the right content is transmitted at the right time. It is something that happens inside a person, in ways that are fundamentally beyond any designer's direct control. The best we can do (and it turns out this is quite a lot) is create the conditions in which learning becomes possible, even likely. But we should be humble about the distinction.

For those of you who want to jump right in, I’ve built out a case-study application/website that give you 10 ways to use AI with a purpose for K-12 Data Analysis: https://k12data.replit.app/

We created this site during my recent “AI-Ready School Leaders Certification Program” Cohort using Claude Code and Replit.

In the video below I break down the beginning steps for creating this K-12 Data Analysis Dashboard. One of the areas that we explored in our Cohort was how much time, money, and resources we can save by making custom AI tools. This was just one of those ways that resonated with the Cohort and I wanted to share with all of you.

In an article I wrote a few years ago I shared 10 AI-Resistant Practices for the Classroom. These were simple ways to design learning experiences that prioritize human thinking, discussion, and creation.

But AI-resistant learning isn’t just a reaction to ChatGPT or generative AI.
It’s actually rooted in decades of research about how people learn best.

When you look closely at the science of learning (constructivism, cognitive psychology, and social learning theory) you realize something that most effective learning experiences were already AI-resistant.

They emphasize critical thinking, discussions, experimentation, reflection, and human interaction.

Every teacher has had the moment. You're twelve minutes into a lesson you spent two hours planning, and you can feel the room slipping. Eyes glazing. The same three hands going up. Bodies turning sideways. You have two choices.

You can push through and hope it clicks, or read what's happening and adjust. I spent so many years just pushing through. Mostly because no one taught me what adjusting actually looks like in the moment.

As coaches, we never have that problem. Every coach at every level has a halftime. A built-in pause to look at what's actually happening versus what they planned, and recalibrate.

Teachers don't get a halftime, but we can build one. And the research says it might be the most important skill we’re not developing.