Designing Schools

When did an adult first name your thread, and how old were you? Oprah was four, standing up in a little church in Mississippi. This episode brings together my favorite conversations of the month, and every one of them kept returning to agency, ambition and alignment. Jensen Huang tells Ezra Klein the worry about AI is his to carry so everyone else gets his optimism. Noam Brown says more than ten p...

What do you say to a principal who watches a chatbot rewrite her goals and then asks, "Why'd you hire me?" In 2024, OpenAI trained its models to refine their thinking and catch their own mistakes, while schools kept grading that same behavior out of kids. MIT's 40-page report on AI named judgment as the answer and never said how to teach it, and a Grammarly survey found 55% of st...

What is a kid learning when he films his homework every night to prove he didn't use AI? In one week in September 2026, OpenAI's chief scientist wrote that we need to "preserve human agency," and Gallup found that only 20% of Americans say schools do an excellent or good job teaching kids to think critically and solve problems. This episode makes the case that agency is the skill the Class of AGI...

Picture a ninth grader who graduates in 2030. Adults are deciding how she can use AI. Who’s asking what she hopes to do with it? This week on Designing Schools, Dr. Sabba Quidwai examines AI restrictions in New York and Los Angeles, Gallup’s findings on student hope and belonging, and the question every school leader needs to answer: What are we preparing our students for? From a teacher looking f...

AI detection may tell educators that a model was involved, but it cannot answer the question that actually matters:  Did the student think, learn, and grow?  This episode explores why schools should stop auditing productive struggle and start designing for it protecting the friction that builds learner agency while using AI to remove the institutional friction that keeps educators disconnected.  T...

AI tools can look transformative in a demo and fall apart when they encounter the messy data, workflows, and institutional knowledge of a real organization. Drawing lessons from former Lululemon CIO Julie Averill’s warnings about “AI wishing” and “AI washing,” this episode challenges school leaders to stop chasing tools and instead identify where valuable expertise is trapped and build systems tha...

New research from OpenAI, Google, PwC, LinkedIn, and Coursera offers a clearer picture of how AI may reshape work and why teaching’s most human qualities may become its greatest protection. This episode explores why trust, judgment, coaching, and connection matter more than ever, while challenging school leaders to decide deliberately what AI should automate and what must remain fundamentally huma...

When 98 high school students from all 50 states gathered in a replica of the U.S. Senate, they did what many adults have struggled to do: debate and pass a detailed policy for AI in schools. But their Students First Act reveals something deeper—not just what young people want from AI policy, but how deeply traditional ideas about assessment, fairness, and learning shape what students believe schoo...

With Claude for Teachers, ChatGPT, and Gemini all competing for classrooms, school leaders may feel pressure to pick the “right” AI platform, but that’s the wrong place to start. This episode explains why sustainable AI strategy begins with identifying broken workflows, capturing your organization’s proprietary knowledge, and building systems that can work across whatever AI model comes next.    E...

As Nobel laureates, economists, and AI researchers warn that society may not be ready for AI-driven disruption, Dr. Sabba Quidwai asks the question educators actually need answered:  What does “act now” look like in schools?  This episode explores why access restrictions and predicting future jobs miss the larger challenge—and makes the case for  judgment intelligence , the ability to decide, eval...

A dramatic cheating case at Brown University reveals a much deeper issue than AI misuse—it exposes an education system that rewards grades over genuine learning. Drawing on new Microsoft and Docebo research, Dr. Sabba Quidwai connects the challenges facing schools and workplaces, arguing that the future belongs to people who develop judgment, critical thinking, and the ability to partner effective...

AI has already become a daily thinking partner for most students, yet many are navigating its use without the decision-making frameworks needed to use it responsibly. In this episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores new research, the OECD and European Union's AI Literacy Framework, and practical tools like WISE and the Confidence Check to help educators, parents, and students build judgment, not ju...

As AI transforms both classrooms and the workplace, educators face a growing crisis of trust. In this episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores why AI detection tools are creating unintended harm, how surveillance is replacing meaningful assessment, and why portfolios, not policing offer a more human-centered way to prepare students for an AI-driven future. Timestamps 00:00 – The Mirror Test & The T...

While many headlines claim Gen Z is using AI as a "cheat code" to avoid hard work, 17-year-old developer Olivia is proving that the opposite is true. In this episode of  The Spark Effect , we debunk the narrative that technology is eroding critical thinking by going behind the scenes with a high school senior who isn't just "adopting" AI, she’s fluent in it.  From teaching...

Stop telling young people to wait for the future, they are already building it. In this premiere of "The Spark Effect" series, high school senior, author, and entrepreneur Eme Williams shares how "baby steps" in the real world built the confidence she never found in a classroom lecture. As AI begins to automate traditional schoolwork, this conversation explores how to nurture t...

Jacob Kantor was the number one sales rep everywhere he went - McGraw Hill, LAUSD, Varsity Tutors, Revolution Prep. He could have kept doing that forever. Instead, he created JK K12 Consulting and gave himself a title nobody had ever heard of: Chief DODO, which stands for District Office Door Opener. In this episode, we dig into what it actually took to design a career from scratch, why the best f...

Drawing on Microsoft's new  Preparing Students for the Future of Work  report, Dr. Sabba Quidwai challenges the common narrative that AI is replacing workers. Instead, she argues that AI is eliminating traditional entry-level tasks and accelerating graduates into roles that require judgment, leadership, and decision-making from day one. Through examples from workforce research, organizational...

In this thought-provoking episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores how the narratives we tell about AI are shaping our perceptions, decisions, and sense of agency. Through stories ranging from a viral Monet experiment to commencement speeches that sparked student backlash, she argues that the real challenge isn't AI itself—it's the stories institutions, leaders, and individuals tell about the f...

In this deeply reflective episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores the emotional question underneath today’s AI conversation:  Do I still matter?  Through stories of corporate layoffs, classroom innovation, leadership transformation, and emerging AI practices, she unpacks why the future of work and education depends not just on technical skills, but on preserving human agency, identity, empathy, and me...

In this episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores the growing challenges facing today’s graduates as AI, economic instability, and outdated educational systems collide. Drawing from Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index, historical research on the digital divide, and real-world examples from business and education, she argues that the real issue is not access to AI tools, but whether young people have gui...

This episode explores the overwhelming pace of AI advancements and the anxiety it creates, arguing that the real solution isn’t chasing every new tool but building intentional systems. Through stories from educators and students, Dr. Sabba highlights the growing gap between how AI is used in schools versus the real world—and why designing thoughtful frameworks for learning is more critical than ev...

This episode unpacks the recurring cycle of adopting, blaming, and retreating from new technologies in education—highlighted by LAUSD’s recent screen restrictions. Dr. Sabba Quidwai argues that the real issue isn’t technology itself, but the failure to redesign learning experiences and build systems that empower educators and students. From classrooms to workplaces, the message is clear: without a...

In this episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai challenges the dominant narrative that AI is eroding students’ ability to think, arguing instead that the real issue is a lack of human agency in how technology is used. Drawing on new research, workplace trends, and classroom insights, she reveals how students and workers alike are struggling not with AI itself, but with systems that fail to empower them. The ep...

This episode explores the tension between fear and opportunity in the age of AI, drawing parallels from history to show that technological disruption is not new—but our response to it matters more than ever. Through real-world examples from Oracle, Stanford research, and student behavior, the conversation highlights a critical truth: success with AI depends less on the technology itself and more o...

In this episode, Dr. Sabba Quidwai explores why the biggest barrier to effective AI adoption isn’t the technology—it’s the lack of systems and mindset. Drawing parallels to the iPad rollout in education, she explains how history is repeating itself and why a “mobile mindset” is essential for success in an AI-driven world. The episode challenges listeners to shift from tool usage to intentional des...