We both look at each other. Check the driveway again. Check the street. Gone.

Then I notice, my car isn’t there either…

Both cars. Same night. Stolen from our own driveway.

What followed was one of the most logistically chaotic weekends of our lives. Five kids. Multiple schools. Work commitments. Speaking engagements. Lacrosse tournaments. Rides that needed to happen at the same time in places twenty minutes apart. Insurance calls. Police reports. Rental car negotiations. Borrowed vehicles. Rescheduled meetings. Favors called in.

I could keep going, but most likely you get it. You’ve been there with some type of situation at home, or at work, or somewhere.

In the last post, we made the case that distraction is a system problem. It is something that disengaged learning environments specifically help create. The device is often an escape hatch from a learning experience that wasn't worth paying attention to in the first place.

That argument was about the present.

This one is about what's coming.

Because if the distraction problem was urgent before AI, it is now a five-alarm fire. Not because AI is inherently bad for learning (it isn't when used correctly), but because AI dropped into a system already struggling with engagement, will accelerate every existing failure mode while adding several new ones we don't fully have language for yet.

Understanding why requires being honest about what AI actually is, what it does to cognitive effort, and what that means for a generation of learners who are now growing up with instant answers available to every question they've ever had.

Buckle up!

The average time spent on any single screen before switching has dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to around 47 seconds today.

Sit with that for just a second. It is less than a minute before something pulls us somewhere else. And we wonder why it's hard to learn anything deeply.

Are you still reading this post? I kid, I kid…but, seriously, you may have been distracted!

The distraction conversation has gotten loud and for good reason. Phones in classrooms, social media algorithms engineered to capture and hold attention, streaming platforms that autoplay the next episode before the credits finish…

Here's the part of the conversation I kept missing, even when I wrote a book on distraction.

Distraction is not just something that happens to learners from the outside. It is also something that learning environments create from the inside.

In a recent article, I made the case that a Portrait of a Graduate only works if it's connected to your vertical curriculum, otherwise it's just fancy laminated wallpaper.

But there's a reframe I want to push even further.

I initially kept calling it a Portrait of a Graduate, and that's part of the problem.

When we frame the portrait around graduation, we accidentally signal to students (and teachers/parents) that these competencies are something you arrive at, not something you practice becoming.

So, what if we flipped it?

What if we called it a Portrait of a Learner, and made it clear that the skills we care about (adaptability, communication, empathy, problem-solving, responsibility) aren't outcomes waiting for students Senior Year, but skills actively developed from kindergarten forward?

A few years ago I was sitting in on a district leadership meeting where the conversation was entirely about programs.

Which reading program should we adopt? Which SEL curriculum should we purchase? Which intervention platform has the best data? The entire two-hour meeting was spent comparing vendors, reviewing slide decks from sales reps, and debating the merits of Program A versus Program B.

Not once did anyone mention the teachers.

Not the ones who would be asked to implement these programs. Not the ones who had been doing incredible work without them. Not the ones who were burning out, because they lacked support.

I've been in education long enough to have seen this cycle play out dozens of times.

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.