--- title: "But What are You Doing for YOUR Kids?" slug: "dacia-toll-coursemojo-but-what-are-you-doing-for-asu-gsv-2026" author: "Dacia Toll, Michael Sorrell, Stephen Jull, Patrick Youssef" date: "2026-04-14 12:00:00" category: "Premium" topics: "ASU+GSV 2026, conference transcript, PreK to Gray, K-12 Education" summary: "This panel, moderated by Patrick Methvin (Gates Foundation), brought together education leaders who are also parents -- Dacia Toll (CourseMojo), Michael Sorrell (Paul Quinn College), and Stephen Jull (Teach for All) -- to explore the disconnect betwe" banner: "" thumbnail: "" --- > **ASU+GSV 2026 Summit** | Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 3:50 pm-4:30 pm | The Forum ## Speakers - **Dacia Toll**, Coursemojo - **Michael Sorrell**, Paul Quinn College - **Stephen Jull**, Teach for All - **Patrick Youssef** ## Key Takeaways - This panel, moderated by Patrick Methvin (Gates Foundation), brought together education leaders who are also parents -- Dacia Toll (CourseMojo), Michael Sorrell (Paul Quinn College), and Stephen Jull (Teach for All) -- to explore the disconnect between what they build professionally and how they raise their own children with technology. - A recurring theme was the importance of maintaining relational, human connection alongside technology use, with Jull articulating a "substitution test" for whether technology replaces or enables relational learning experiences. - Sorrell shared his family's strict no-phone policy (featured on Oprah), arguing parents should not "concede raising" children to unknown algorithm designers, while Toll described differentiated rules for her two sons based on their different relationships with screens. - The panelists converged on two key tests for ed tech: does it increase cognitive lift and productive struggle, and is it pro-social or anti-social? - They closed with a shared concern that a world of no unanswered questions threatens the contemplative capacity children need to develop. ## Notable Quotes > "We're not going to concede his raising or my daughter's raising to people we don't know, we don't trust, and frankly, probably don't like." > > — **Michael Sorrell** > "My biggest concern as an educator, as a parent, as a person in the world is that very soon there will be no unanswered questions... We want unanswered questions in the house." > > — **Stephen Jull** > "Who exactly is answering the question? Who fed the material into the prompt? History has taught me I'm very well served asking those questions." > > — **Michael Sorrell** > "My biggest fear is a lot of that conversation is missing in some of the tools that are being developed for teachers in classrooms... we still seem to be building ed tech products as these solitary experiences." > > — **Dacia Toll** > "Look at Isabel Howe's work in relational intelligence. I think it's incredibly important work." > > — **Stephen Jull** ## Full Transcript ♪ Afternoon, folks. This is the, like, big cocktail day, right? Tuesday, so this is the last one before that. So, I'll get us kicked off. I'm Patrick Methvin. I'm the Director of Post-Secondary Success at the Gates Foundation, and we're going to talk about education technology in our kids. And, you know, across K-12, higher ed, AI, people are making decisions right now that are going to affect the next generation, consequential decisions. I think we learned a few things about those consequential decisions from the social media era. Those things were not good lessons. So, someplace like ASUGSV, behind the politics, behind the product roadmaps, there's something even more real, which is our kids. So, that's what we're going to talk about today. When I was talking with Debra Quazzo this fall about what kind of stuff do you want to see on stage, I said, I want to hear what people are doing with their own kids, selfishly, as a parent, and I want to hear particularly from people who are on both sides of it. They're leading educational institutions, education technology companies, et cetera, and they have kids. Where's the disconnect? Is there a disconnect? How do we manage that? As Debra usually does, she said, great, you can lead that panel. I said, I just wanted to know what we were talking about. So, here I have today, I have a higher ed leader, I've got an ed tech leader, and I've got a global head of AI of an education organization, who, importantly, are all parents. So, the point of this is we'll have an opportunity to introduce ourselves, get a chance to know them a little bit through their kids. So, as humans, talk about what they're doing educationally, and then we'll merge the two. Where do they see disconnects between what they're doing for the people who they serve, either through companies or through institutions, and what they're asking of their kids. So, next to me, I have Daisha Toll. Daisha's co-founder and co-CEO of CourseMojo, which embeds AI supports for students and teachers in top-rated ELA curriculum to improve student learning and teacher efficacy. Daisha lives in New Haven with her husband and two teenage boys, 14 and 16, God bless you. Next to her, I have Michael Sorrell. For the past 19 years, really, man? 19 years, president of Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Texas, is husband to a beautiful wife. His adjectives, in case you were streaming that, as well as two wonderful children. I hear that one of them has recently sprouted to six foot six and is taking great pride in being the tallest in the household. Last but not least, we have Stephen Jewell. Stephen's the global head of AI and educational technology at Teach for All, visiting fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School, and exited co-founder of GeoGebra. He began his career teaching in remote communities in Canada's Yukon Territory and now lives in Cambridge, UK with his family. So, I said we'd anchor the conversation in the human. And so, a two-part question for each person. Daisha, we'll start with you. Maybe introduce your kids or one of them to help us get to know them through a brief anecdote or story and then tell us what you want your kids to be able to do by the age of 25 and whether that requires any form of a credential. Okay, so I've got two teenage boys. They are very different. One way to understand their differences is what they did on Saturday. So, my 16-year-old spent six hours doing chemistry, competing in the next round of the National Chemistry Olympiad. My 14-year-old spent six hours playing poker with his friends, and so much so that when he walked through the door at 11.30, I did have a 15-minute assessment conversation with him to see if there was anything extracurricular involved in the poker or any. So, they're wonderfully different. And what I want for them, I suspect there's a lot of commonality in this room, what I want for them when they're 25 is I want them to be gainfully employed. I would like for them to earn what they need and do what they love. I would like for them to be healthy, mentally and physically, and happy. In terms of whether that takes a credential, my 16-year-old's plan is to get into a competitive college, meet a co-founder, drop out and launch a startup, which I will say I did make it through college, but I have launched a couple startups at this point. And my 14-year-old does not know what he wants to do yet. And so, I suspect he will end up going to college by default. That is not necessarily what I want for him. I think if there's a purpose-driven alternative, that would be perfectly good. But I think that is still the default for folks who have a certain level of education, certainly the default in our family. Well, I have two children. I have a 15-year-old boy and a 11-year-old girl. To sort of follow your lead on the differences between the two, my 15-year-old boy, who is now 6'6 and loving every inch of it, is one of the best basketball players in his age group in the country. We spend our time talking about colleges, and now this era is the NIL era. And the amount of money that he stands on the verge of making is staggering, right? Absolutely staggering, because he has the ability to put a ball through a hoop at a high rate. And so, our conversations are, you have to pick academically superior institutions, and his are, but I wanna be somewhere cool, right? So, we're balancing that. My 11-year-old daughter is hilarious. She fences. But to give you an idea of where her mindset is, the fencing academy she attends is run by people who originated from Korea. They have conversations in Korean that she is not privy to. She got angry about this, signed up for Duolingo, and every morning before she goes to school at 6.30 in the kitchen, she's teaching herself Korean with the help of Duolingo. My son wouldn't know what Duolingo was if you threw it at him. My daughter has embraced it fully. So, we have already begun visiting colleges. She wants to go to Yale, or she wants to go to Michigan. My son is, ironically, starting to be recruited by Harvard and Yale, and if his sister looks like she might wind up there, he wants no part of it. So, we're trying to sort it all out. Thanks, guys. I think you jumped the gun on bringing the tech in early, honest, Michael, there, so like, and I have some things to say about Duolingo, but I love it as much as the next guy, but. So, thank you. Canadian raised, but I've been living in the UK since I did my PhD over there. I married a Brit, and like most Brits, they can't leave the rain, so I live 365 days under a gray, slatey sky, and that inspires all kinds of innovation, so it's been brilliant. Maybe that's the reason, too, why we have five kids, is either that, or I think we were gonna move to Utah, and I don't mean anything by that, other than my wife does love Utah, because we spend some time in the high desert plains, and we were in Victoria a few years ago. So, I live in Cambridge, and my eldest is 16. He's a boy, and then I've got two girls, 14 and 12, and then I have a nine-year-old and a seven-year-old. So, the two girls in the middle, and I, you know, my first degree was in zoology, and I was always, you know, this is nature-nurture divide, you know, and I was always a great advocate of kind of the nurture component, of course, and the power of nurture, and that is a fact, and it's true, but I've come to realize that nature plays a powerful role in how kids operate in the world. So, thank goodness we've got two girls in the middle. They keep us all on track. They're incredibly interesting and delightful, as all of our kids are, and unique in every single way, and I think the one story I'll share about them is that they all play music, and that's one of the things that I really promote, you know, with all educators and parents that I speak with. Yes, you have to do your math homework. Yes, you have to pay attention to, like, English literacy and those core subjects, but also, yes, you must also practice your piano as their first instrument, and they have the option of a second instrument, and my wife and I, we've said to them on a couple of occasions, particularly the older ones, this is the hill we will die on, and so we get, that's the kind of, like, conversations we have with our kids about what's important in life, and that sort of maybe will set the tone for our conversations about technology, et cetera, but if I had to make one advocation here today is that music is a brilliant training ground for the mind and for the future, particularly in an age of AI, yeah, thank you. And credential or no in terms of, will that be part of, by the time they're 25? Thank you, you know, I'm of two minds about this. I did four degrees, and I'm one of those perpetual students. I love education. I was a teacher, and I just love the idea of sitting, you know, and thinking and thoughtfulness. I think it's brilliant. My wife has a philosophy degree. When she did her degree many years ago, people kind of, like, you know, scoffed at that. I think now philosophy has become probably the most important, you know, domain around logic, so yes, credential, and I'm hopefully nurturing the kids in the direction of combination of philosophy and physics. I have to be very literal about it. I think that's the perfect Venn diagram for the future. If everyone did physics and everyone did philosophy, I think we're gonna be set up nicely, so who knows what that future looks like for work and life and et cetera, but yeah. Great, so I think we've established we have a spectrum of parenting types on the stage, which is fantastic. All of them seem to be doing pretty well. Let's flip to the professional, and then we'll come back to the merger of the two. I'm curious, either A, where are you spending your most energy related to education or education technology right now? And then B, do you have a most promising use of AI, most potentially detrimental or scary element of AI? Again, in your professional, not about how you counsel your kids right now, just in your regular job. Maybe we'll go in reverse order. Steven? Yeah, can you just give that to me one more time? I heard it, but... Yeah, so first piece, where are you devoting the most of your energy regarding educational technology right now, and then kind of most upside potential of AI and most risk, again, as a professional? Okay, yeah, so I'm Global Head of AI and EdTech at Teach For All. Wendy Kopp, an amazing CEO and founder, just spectacular person who's contributed three decades of commitment to education, equity, social justice, people making a real difference in their communities. So that's the organization I joined about eight months ago, and I feel very privileged to be in that space. So one of the things we thought about as Wendy was thinking about bringing the organization into this next generation and ensuring that the fellows that come through the program are feeling both at the front of the curve, relevant, paying attention to the conversations, is that we needed to think about what are the tools that we can use that pass this test that we have, which we conceived when I first joined the organization. It's called the ESSE test, Equity, Sustainability, Scale, and Impact. If it doesn't pass those three tests, then didactically, we'll say we just don't do it, I mean, but notwithstanding, okay? So with that in mind, cutting to the chase, the thing I'm focused on mostly at Teach For All is working with the free foundation models, whichever ones, from the Frontier Labs, and ensuring that teachers feel like these are tools that they can pick up, they can use, they can innovate, and they can develop the kinds of solutions that historically, before AI, were always produced by some other ed tech company, including my own historically as well, somewhere else in the world, packaged up and bundled, either as a free, a freemium, or a paid model, which created dependencies, and so I'm a big fan of the thesis of we can move towards an agency model by using these free foundation models off the shelf, and working very, very closely with the Frontier Labs to ensure that those improve over time. Yeah. Great. Michael? I have a unique challenge. My school, the residential portion of it, about 80% of our students are Pell Grant students. They are people whose families and communities are going, who are already significantly being left behind by the society that we have currently created. AI is only going to expedite that reality for them. Therefore, we have to prepare students to be able to compete in a world where this is now their reality, when we don't even understand all the ways that their current pathways are going to be disrupted. Last year, and let me back up. I've been coming to this conference for more years than I can remember, and I remember sitting on a panel once, having a discussion with some folks from McKinsey about a report they authored that talked about the disruption and the job loss that was going to take place because of AI. All of the conversation was focused on the disruption and job loss in the, what I would call under-resourced community jobs. There had not been contemplation at that moment, at least publicly, of the white-collar disruption that would take place. Fast forward to last year. At the beginning of last year, on higher ed campuses, there weren't very many people that were talking about the job loss that would be taking place with our graduates in the spring. By springtime, we all were facing the reality that what we thought was years off had come to our doors already. So now we have to prepare in real time for making sure our graduates have competitive opportunities that give them a chance to have the skill set that will allow them to be successful without a significant period of unemployment, which we had not contemplated two years ago. We thought we had more time. And so I spend my time now obsessively focused on the power of entrepreneurship as a tool to disrupt the disruption that AI is creating. We have created a pathway at our school where now to graduate from Paul Quinn, you have to create a business. Every student must create a business. We have a second wave of this that I think is going to be absolutely even more promising. But these are the things that we are having to do in real time to continue to be the purveyors of hope to families that have gambled so much on education, providing them opportunities that they have not had access to. So I'm spending my days and nights and everything else when you run a startup obsessing over how to use the power of AI to improve reading achievement. So specifically Course Mojo embeds AI supports for students and teachers in the high quality instructional materials that a lot of districts have adopted. And as for students, as a kid said, it's like the handout is talking to me. And for teachers, we're trying to give an assist to help all teachers execute the moves of effective teachers. And the good news is we're seeing significant gains in achievement, particularly at the middle school level. I think folks know there's been a lot of very promising work done in the elementary grades aligned to the science of reading. The Mississippi miracle or movement or however you want to think about it in a number of states and eighth grade NAEP scores are the lowest they've been in 30 years. And so that's what I'm spending a lot of time on. I simultaneously, you know, we refer as others do to AI like electricity. We are working with something so much more powerful. I personally am a lifelong educator, teacher, principal, led a network of schools. I would not be doing this if not for AI. Because historically I think our track record as an ed tech sector has been to over promise and under deliver. And I think this could be different. But if we operate differently. And in my opinion, the specialized products that bring in a tremendous amount of domain expertise are much more likely to do better than the generic products. And so I think part of your question was, like, what are we excited about and what are we concerned about? I am excited about products that have coherence, which I think is hard. Because we're used to creating little point solutions. And I think as somebody who ran a whole bunch of schools, we're tired of point solutions. Like we're passing the complexity down to the teacher. So it requires us to work together across a lot of different things. We are working with an assessment partner. We're working with PL partners. And it adds a lot of complexity, but at least on us. As opposed to what a teacher or school has to wrestle through. And I'm really hopeful that, and I spent today, we're one of the GSB cup 50. And so I got a chance to see all the other founders demo. And I was actually quite impressed. And one of the things I was impressed by was how we seemed to be breaking the silent solo ed tech paradigm, where kids get on their own personal devices and go down their own personalized pathways. There were so many that were powering small groups, like actively encouraging collaboration, even giving feedback on collaboration. So I found that encouraging. So heard a little bit about the professional. Let's connect that to how you parent. And a few months ago, I was at home getting dinner ready. And my older daughter, who's a freshman in high school, had Notebook LLM up there doing a podcast for a biology textbook. And she had rigged up a friend, basically a FaceTime sort of thing with a friend, because it wasn't integrated. It wasn't social. And she made it like this weird pro-social thing. They were both asking Notebook LLM basically the questions, right? So I'm curious, do you have rules at your house regarding ed tech? And I'm going to start with Michael, because I remember you had some rules about phones and technologies that got quite a buzz. I even heard about it in Seattle, down from Dallas. Now, you probably show up in my news feed for different reasons, but what are your rules on ed tech in your house? And I'd just love to hear the same from others. Yeah. So what he's referring to is my family was on Oprah Winfrey several times, because we don't allow our children to have phones. And my son, again, freshman in high school, incredibly popular kid, and is teased by his friends because he doesn't have a phone. Now, he tells me, Dad, it's hurting my popularity. I'm like, my man, if it's hurting your popularity, you can't take having a phone, right? You are plenty popular enough. And we just, you know, we don't know who's creating the algorithm that is helping us raise our child. And we're not going to concede his raising or my daughter's raising to people we don't know, we don't trust, and frankly, probably don't like. So we are parenting them the old-fashioned way. When he gets a car, he will drive. He can have a phone. There's no telling when he's getting a car. But in terms of the educational applications of it, we absolutely recognize the value in that. I mean, we talked about my daughter in Duolingo. My son uses different forms of it for his classwork at school and engaging with his peers. And there is absolutely real value to it. We just think the social media aspect of it is highly problematic. And I will just tell you this. Part of the reason we became absolutely convinced of this, as I said, he's an athlete. He has a Instagram page. Well, I have his Instagram page. And when we put him on there, he started getting lots of friend requests from what we think are women that were older and completely inappropriate for when he was a 12-year-old boy. So I'm going through, and I'm seeing this. And it is disturbing. And I started thinking about this. I said, well, let me just go through the pages of the people reaching out to him. Yeah, no, you can't reach out to my child. But when you start thinking about the amount of time that you spend scrolling, you can't control those images. It's a lot for me. And I'm an adult. And the amount of images you see in just 15 minutes, we have students who are spending hours scrolling through this stuff. So I love the educational applications of it, right? I mean, the things that it allows you to do, breathtaking. But there have to be guardrails that make sure that what you are supposed to be doing, you are actually doing. That's what we try to control in our house. Stephen, any rules? Amount of time? Specific applications that they do or do not use AI for regarding learning? Yeah, I mean, I've been in a tech for a long time, builder, since my PhD. So my kids have been beta testing their entire lives. Like, literally, I have these funny photos of them sitting up in rows, first two, and then three, and then four, and then five, progressively moving through a tech. So they're hardened beta testers. But actually, it's a nice kind of example, because it leads to the thesis that we have in our house. And it's not entirely mine, because I pay attention to the ecosystem, my colleagues, and researchers. And there's this idea about substitution. So if you substitute, yeah, you know where I'm going with this. If you substitute technology or whatever it happens to be with the relational experience of being in a family, school, community, you pick your unit of analysis for scale. That's where the problems occur. So we invite tech into our house, and we have always. And there's not really an age barrier for it. It's our analysis from Hannah, my wife, and I, we always think about, is the way that we're using the technology with our child substituting the relational experience of learning? Or is it enabling that experience? So here's some real examples. The youngest, who's nine, just went on this very lucky, privileged kid who sings in a choir that happened to do a tour in Italy with the choir. I feel silly saying that, but that's just the crazy stuff you do when you're in Europe. And so he was last week on a tour in Italy at nine years old. But so he decided to learn Italian, a few things, just so we could get by and be polite and respectful. We didn't use Duolingo, but historically, we always would. But we used Claude, because it's just a bit easier, and no one's ever learned a language on Duolingo. Cut that out from the video. But I love Duolingo, as much as the next person, of course, as well. But so at the kitchen table, because- You just can't learn anything from Duolingo. We love it, but you can't learn anything. We love it. I just love the celebrations. Who doesn't? Like the streaks, I mean, talk about addictive, right? Those guys, there's some, yeah, let's talk about, OK. But so my nine-year-old at the table exploring that, but we're in the room, and we're talking with him. So the relational part exists. OK, so you can see how that kind of works with a nine-year-old. 16-year-old can use his, he chooses Claude as well, too, at the moment. He also uses OpenAI as well, just to cite a few names, a few brands, not for any of them. Even though Claude's billed for 18-plus? Yeah, it's true, but we work that out, because he likes to borrow phones. So like, did I just- No judgment. There's another thing. So I've done two faux pas that need to be removed from the video. But in relation to how does relationality work there, I mean, he uses it, of course, to understand revision rubrics, which means studying in the UK. So if you're revising, you're studying. And so it helps him do that. He helps him work through his problems. He works with, in this case, his LLM of choice to find his way through his work. But then what he does is he comes down, and he discusses it with us. OK, we talk through what he's done. So we maintain that kind of relational component, his own control of his learning, because now he's 16. Teenagers are independent. I think if we ignored it completely, and we weren't then, then that would be a significant problem. So that's kind of, if I had to frame it, relationality. Isabel Howe, in her kind of context about these sorts of things, very important. Deja? So I think one of my parenting challenges is that I actually think my two boys need different rules, because they're different kids. And so the 16-year-old uses tech in an extremely purposeful way. Like, he is into physics. You'd be happy. Astrophysics, he has coded his own model, originally by hand, and now using Claude Code to analyze publicly available lunar dust data. So that kid's off jamming. I'm like, you do you. That's fine. And at one point, I got on this thing for the exact same reasons you said, that I was going to ban TikTok. And I took it off their phones and put the parental controls on. And actually, his advisor at school was like, it was kind of the one normal thing he did with his other friends. So he actually convinced me to put TikTok. So his 15 minutes of scrolling that he would do was OK. My wonderful 14-year-old, who I love deeply, is addicted to screens. It became very clear to me that he had an unhealthy relationship with his phone. And so we had to take his phone. And that feels super unfair. So welcome to my dinner table and what is a constant conversation. But I try to explain that they're in a different position in terms of their. So the only time he's able to get his phone, for now, this will evolve over time as he evolves, which is what I explained to him. But they have convinced me. And I hope this is not a commercial on poor parenting. I'll let you all be the judge of this. They've convinced me that part of the socialization now that kids do is they log on to the same video games together. And then they stand their phone up. And they simultaneously FaceTime and play video and have conversations and all of this. And so, believe it or not, I actually let him have his phone for some of these sessions with his friends. I do determine which video games I think are accessible and not accessible. So there's other kinds of choices there. But I think the other thing is we have very clear for everybody, and honestly, my husband and I sometimes need it as much as they do, like moments when there are no screens allowed. Like the dinner table, never any screens. If I have to drive you somewhere, which I have to do a lot, and it's under an hour, there's no screens for the entire time. I will say we all sort of give in after an hour when we're on the long car trips. They both generally have a summer experience that is a screen-free three weeks. Like my 14-year-old will be canoeing in the Canadian boundary waters for three weeks. And so I think there are times like that when I think forced disconnection is just super important. And it absolutely makes a difference in terms of the quality of our time together. Other tips or tricks? I mean, literally, this is just the panel I wanted to listen to for my own advice. So you guys are like passengers on this thing to some degree. So any other tips or tricks? So we've got pro-social, we've got boundary conditions. If it's a ride under an hour, no screen. We've got a handful of these. Michael, any others? Or Steven, to throw into the mix here? You know, the one thing I'll say that's really, really interesting, we took Mike out of school for a year, and he and I traveled, right? And we studied the transatlantic slave trade, and he came to me to work every day, and I made him attend all my meetings. And to watch the competitive advantage that he has in terms of engaging with the world and adults and how he is able of doing that as compared to his friends, which don't really wanna talk to you, they just engage you long enough until they can get back to their screens. It makes me curious to see what this translates into down the road, because we're already getting feedback that he has an advantage in class. an advantage, you know, with his teammates, like our coaches, and, you know, people are talking about his leadership capacity. Now, how much of that is that and how much of it is he's grown up in a home where all he's ever seen are his parents lead things, right? But I think it's really interesting trying to figure out how to create opportunities for you to still be a kid, right, in the environment in which all your friends are in, but prepare you to be a leader and have the social skills necessary to do those things. And I don't know what the right answer is, but I do know, and I have some of my students here with me now, the three of them who are here, ironically, three students who I don't see spending as much time on their screens, right, and I watch how they move around the campus and the world. And I just think trying to figure out how to navigate this is something that we do the best we can and hope that we don't screw it up. I guess I have one thought about there's something I do make a distinction between the phone and some of the laptop use cases, and I think there is it just drives me bananas to see the kids walking around looking down or sitting in a group of young people all on their phones. And there is something I think almost uniquely addictive about it, again, probably if we're being honest for all of us to varying degrees. And I do but when I ask myself and I think about the ed tech on laptops, because I have not taken that even for my kid who's needing a reset in his relationship with screens, I think there are two things I would say we're all fundamentally concerned about that become my test for whether they can use this product or that product. First is it increasing the cognitive lift on that? Are they having to do more productive struggle in their ways in which they're using the tech that actually facilitates like an expansion of their horizons and their quality of the thinking they need to do? And then second, is it prosocial or antisocial? And I think fundamentally those are the things we're concerned about. So sometimes when we just have a simplistic conversation about screens or no screens, those nuances get lost. Yeah, that does seem to be the sweet spot is the technology engaging enough to keep them in the struggle and making the struggle increase so you get the deeper learning. It's a tough sweet spot to hit, but absolutely. So let's get kind of a bit of the meat of the conversation. The title for this is riffing on Lisa Delpit's seminal educational equity book, Other People's Children. And so I want to talk about differences that we see. And you can answer this one of two ways. Either one, what is your biggest pet peeve that you see educational technology designers, some of whom may be here, doing and preaching versus what they're doing at home with their kids? So that could be option one if you want to get a little friction in here. Or option two is, where's something where you actually are doing something different for your kids than either the children or faculty that you're designing for or working with? You can take either one. Depends on how spicy you want to be. Go in whatever order you want to go. Yeah, I'll jump in here. First of all, reinforcing my colleagues here that we love a bit of zero screen time too and just rocks and sticks on holidays is kind of the rule. And it's just great to have a break. And we even appreciate it as well, too. I'll keep mine really brief because I know we're getting close to time and to say that my biggest concern as an educator, as a parent, as a person in the world is that you can almost say now, but very soon there will be no unanswered questions. So there's an answer for everything. And in fact, our questions will be, what does that mean? So that's a real problem. And so one of the things that we're really big on as parents is that we don't answer all the questions. The kids are always like, let's Google that. This is classic. Two, three years ago, we would have Googled it. And now we're hypersensitive to it. And it's like, no, we don't need to know. Let's just contemplate the idea and not ask said LLM. Let's not Google it. That's a big part of the vernacular that's come into our lives, I'd say, in the last year is we want unanswered questions in the house, whether it's something at school, whether it's why the sky is this color at sunset. We just contemplate it. We don't need to know. And I think there's a period of time I want that to last as long as possible for my kids. But I'll pass to you guys. Mine is, whose answer is it? Right? Whose answer is it? If history was written by the victors, who are the victors in this moment? So yes, it's great that we can type in questions and get answers. But who exactly is answering the question? Who fed the material into the prompt? So I'm not sure it actually is the answer or the answer that I want them to accept without questioning. And that's the piece. What are the cultural sensitivities? Whose perspective is this? Who else did you engage with to arrive at this moment? And again, am I just supposed to trust that you asked experts that I can trust? History has taught me I'm very well served asking those questions. So I have the honor of being one of the Center for Reinventing Public Education AI fellows. One of the things they had us do is come up with a school model for the future. And in that design, one of the things that was important to me, honoring cognitive science, is actually knowledge still matters. And the foundational skills of reading, writing, and math still matter. But beyond that, sort of widespread windows and mirrors, core knowledge matters. And I guess somebody was arguing, like, oh, no, we're moving beyond that. And that's just not like one thing that is not changing is how the brain works and how our brain works. And if you don't actually have a knowledge base there, there's nothing for it to hook onto. So I would still have a morning focused on students learning a lot of the things that one might call quite traditional. But I would do it in different kinds of modalities with seminar discussions and at times powered by AI. But I would have very little of it be solitary. And so I think my biggest concern, sorry for being repetitive on this panel, is that we still seem to be building AI when it no longer we still seem to be building ed tech products when AI should have freed us from it as these solitary experiences. Because the second thing I would have is I think we are, as everybody says, we're going to need our human skills more than ever. And we have to not just have a conversation about how do we improve teaching and learning with AI and what do young people need in the future, in an AI powered future, but how do we understand what they need and then build teaching and learning solutions that do that. So my hope where I see some of the tensions is that we are not, in my opinion, there is a lot about what we've been going after that is still fundamentally essential. And then there's a whole new set of skills. So in my model in the afternoon, there's interdisciplinary real world projects where you actually required to use AI at various points to accomplish what you want to accomplish because I think that will be essential. And I guess I just the conversations at times feel overly simplistic. And it feels like we're still only building point solutions, not school models. I would include myself in that. Like I am building a specific solution to power ELA classrooms right now, as opposed to at least working backwards, which is part of what I'm trying to change. So what do we believe is a potential model for the future of school and how do we make sure that even our iterative vision is aligned to where we would like it to go? Michael's had a few things to say about new school models. We're coming to a close. So speed round, we are with a room full of folks who are the builders, the developers, the policy people who are impacting what is going to happen with education in the future. If those things are going to impact your kids' education, what is one thing you would ask people to do differently starting tomorrow? I'll just say, look at Isabel Howe's work in relational intelligence. I think it's incredibly important work, so yeah. Make sure you're getting culturally diverse perspectives inside of your design mechanisms. Design with deep knowledge of cognitive science and don't give up on productive struggle and on convincing kids that productive struggle is important. Excellent. Well, I'm going to watch this stream with my family when I get back, so there's great tips here. I would ask you to thank our panelists for sharing their wisdom with you today. --- *This transcript was put together by our friend [Philippos Savvides](https://scaleu.org) from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on [GitHub](https://github.com/savvides/asu-gsv-2026-summit-intelligence). Licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).*