Weekly Message from Head of School 2023/02/12-2023/02/18
Dear Keystone Community,
Welcome back to school! What a fabulous week it has been seeing all our students, faculty and staff on our campus. Our school awakens when our school campus is full of people learning and being in community together; it is alive, full of warm energy and joy. This week has once again breathed life back into our beloved Keystone Academy. And we are back to the good work of supporting our students’ learning! Today I’d like to share some reflections on the relationship between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Human Intelligence (HI) and what it means for us at Keystone Academy.
Since we closed school in late December, the hot topic in educational circles has been the rapid rise of accessible generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT. This does not come as a surprise to the educational field, although many have been impressed with the rapid acceleration of this accessibility. For many years educators and other leaders of other industries have been passionately proclaiming the urgent necessity that school teach children how to do the things that computers cannot do. Since the late 1990s, this has often been described as 21st century skills. These skills tend to be summarized as some combination of inquiry, creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and information and technological literacy. We might call these skills the core pillars of human intelligence.
Now, nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century this accelerated change in generative AI capacity and accessibility increases even further our sense of urgency for change. Fortunately for our Keystone community, this school was founded with a bold and future-focused vision which we continue to refine and adapt as the landscape changes. We are a school built to nurture and develop human intelligence in the face of a rapidly changing world. And we are much better situated than many to continue to adapt and evolve in our students’ very best interests.
For parents and professionals in all fields (including education), it is easy to see why some might consider the rapid acceleration of commercially available AI tools such as ChatGPT as a risk, or a threat. Meanwhile others may have a more optimistic point of view—seeing the new tools as part of human progress that calls us to support all of us as learners as we discover how to use these tools to do the work that matters most.
Even in ancient times, technological innovations have been seen as threats to learning and educational practices. Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 BC) scorned the written word, concerned it would diminish the quality of thinking and represented not knowledge, but the reflection of the knowledge of the writer. What might he have said about an innovation like the generative AI we see today? Even as recent as the past 80 years, we can think about innovations like the handheld calculator, or the word processor or even the internet. These tools that were once unthinkable in school environments are now ubiquitous.
None of that is to minimize the anticipated and already realized impact of generative AI on education. Experts believe that AI will have more of an impact on education than all those other things combined—and it is easy to see how. We already interact with AI every day, from our navigation apps to what companies recommend selling you based on your preferences, to insights about everything from our health and wellness, based on wearable technologies, and how to support your team better in productivity tools like Office or Teams. There are many fields where AI has already accelerated huge disruptions.
AI can help us be very targeted in our learning—it can help us accurately assess where we are with a given skill or knowledge base and put us on a path to focus our energies on learning right where we need them. These adaptable learning systems, again, are not new this month, they have been in development for years and those of us who have been watching closely have long seen these tools as ways to make the most of human intelligence. This is something educators need to embrace to make the most of precious time with students.
As two friends and educational thought leaders Reshan Richards and Steven Valentine wrote recently, “[N]othing about good human learning should change in the face of increasingly advanced AI.” If we view ChatGPT with some trepidation, it may be because we worry about our ability to develop and assess human intelligence in the presence of this very powerful tool.
How do we know what we know to be true?
This is among the oldest questions in all philosophical traditions, and something with which all 12th graders at Keystone grapple in their Theory of Knowledge classes.
As we promote human intelligence in this ever-changing landscape, we continue to examine our learning environments, instructions and assessments. It would be foolish for a teacher to give an assessment that a chat bot could complete for a student, just as it would be foolish to try to hide these tools from students. This is a delicate balance, of course. We have word processors, and students need to have fluency to generate content, to use writing and speech to clarify thinking and deepen and share their understanding. We have calculators, and students need to develop fluency with numbers to understand their foundational values and concepts. One must know what to put into the word processor or the calculator to make the tools useful. The same is true with AI, and Keystone will continue to scaffold access to all technological tools in learner and age-appropriate ways.
This semester, so much of the brilliant human intelligence that Keystone Academy cultivates will be visible and accessible to the broader family community in the form of student exhibitions and performances. Plans for demonstrations of learning that include parents are in the works across the school. Many of our signature experiences for students, including the Character and Community curriculum in the Secondary School, will allow Keystone’s unique and extraordinary commitment to human intelligence to shine. It will be so lovely to experience all of this together.
Our school is a place on the cutting edge of learning, poised to promote human intelligence by staying true to our values, being devoted to inquiry and continual improvement as we adapt to the world around us. Our collective future demands that we do no less. Our students and faculty thrive as we do the wonderful and complex work of being human at a time when it has never been more important.
Warmly,
Emily McCarren
