Connection before Content
A simple question about a ukulele song I wrote says a lot about where AI in education is going and what we should do to meet it there.
I turned this article into an AI-generated song, posted at the end. Think Run DMC meets waiting on hold with customer service—a real banger! Read on, though, to see why that may not be the right community-building move. Or it may.
I recently led an AI Literacy webinar in partnership with Common Sense Media. I was invited to talk to a few hundred of my closest friends about how to craft engaging AI workshops for educators (a workshop about workshops!), and I did what any AI Literacy facilitator would do:
I played the ukulele.
…Why?
Because it was fun. It was fun to write and it was fun to play. Even in professional development, that can be the best reason to do anything. In fact, it may even be the reason. Importantly for my fragile self-esteem, it was received well. Thank heaven.
It was a quick 4-line diddly, and it was also an intentional choice. Professional development—AI or otherwise—needs to be relational before it needs to be anything else.
Connection before Content, as my colleague Kate loves to say.
Building in some ukulele was meant to reflect that. It was meant to add a bit of levity, bring a sense of personability to the impersonal webinar format, and spark a smile or two before delving into some bullet-point tips and tricks of AI workshopping. One of those tips was to do just that—find ways to make it light and fun and interpersonal.
Because…
Working in schools is damn hard work. It’s lesson plans and emails and agendas, and it’s falling behind on all of those incessantly. Part of the background hum of the school mind is worrying that you are letting people down when you’re trying so hard not to—students, parents, colleagues, your parents. Just me? Cool cool.
It’s easy to forget to check in on each other.
That’s why side conversations happen in meetings and workshops. It’s why it takes so long for people to settle into meetings in the first place. It happens for a range of other reasons as well, but meetings are people and people need people before they need agendas. Therefore, pausing to embrace the human element of schools is an important part of any new meeting, initiative, or workshop.
If your first agenda item is not people, fix that.
The Question and Some Answers
Right after I finished that song, it was not wholly unexpected for someone to ask, “Did you write that with AI?”
It was a brief, simple question but speaks volumes about teaching, learning, and relationships in whatever Age we are calling this.
Two and a half years ago, that question would not have made sense. Now though, especially considering a workshop about AI workshops, the question was apt.
Did I think about outsourcing these 4 lines to Claude? Sure, for a hot minute. I’m busy. You’re busy. It’s all busy. But that would be much less fun and interesting to me. Maybe it would be for someone else, but not me. It was genuinely an enjoyable experience sitting down, thinking about what my goal was for that 30-second song, and doing the writing and strumming and editing to make it happen instead of having AI do it.
Invisible as that difference is, it’s important.
It’s important to know how an experience shifts from slight tweaks. That pertains to meetings and workshops as much as it does to a differentiated writing assignment. It pertains to teachers, principals, and workshops leaders as much as it does to students.
And it especially pertains to learning experiences and assignments with AI tools increasingly at the ready.
Learning is relational. The best teachers create meaningful relationships before they create challenging assignments, and the benefit of the former is that it helps students take on the latter. One of the most important elements of that meaning-making is the investment that teachers, themselves, have; students feel seen, heard, and understood by teachers who they know care deeply. Translated to meetings and workshops, leaders need to be invested in the people, the process, and the content. In that order. That’s something educators can feel.
And it’s why I didn’t want to offload that fun work to AI for this particular workshop. I’ve used AI to generate songs as a community-builder, but the context was completely different. For this one, writing it myself made me feel a bit closer to the experience, and that was important to me when it came to the passive silence this side of a webinar in my home office. Others may have seen it differently if they were running it, and that’s awesome. Someone else may have used their skills to quickly make an AI song based on chat responses as people joined or ditched the song idea altogether in favor of something else. That’s the joy of different perspectives in a diverse world.
Looking ahead, these micro-decisions about when and where to offload thinking to AI will be integral to building relationships and understanding in and out of the classroom.
Metacognition & Measuring Depth
It is easier for adults to identify subtlety, but students need help with it. They need experiences that build their ability not only to think and to create, but also to be aware of the depth of those thoughts and feelings when they do. Some experiences create more depth than others.
In school, that’s intentional.
The heavy lifting of learning needs to be balanced with the joyful rest of play. It’s important to push students to do things on their own as well as to learn how to take a break. It’s also important to teach that those activities look different for different people.
Not every workshop or meeting needs a creative jam, but they do need to create connection.
The process of doing, of creating is undergoing transformation each and every day, as is the accessibility to those tools. Of note, I don’t think that is the same as learning. Learning requires relationships and productive struggle, which is why building connection and maintaining it through a meeting or a workshop is so vital.
Schools will need to more explicitly discuss what it feels like to struggle and what it feels like to give up and what it feels like to be proud of yourself. For the most part, metacognition is a part of best practices already. But, AI tools and their growing ubiquity have created a necessary compare-contrast; asking students how they learn, how they think, how they feel is a very different question than asking them what that looks like compared to when they use an AI tool to do some or all of that work for them.
That’s the question I asked myself prepping for the Common Sense Media webinar, and that’s the question for all of us moving forward.
It goes for writing and editing arguments, for graphic design and graphing parabolas, for editing photos and AI images, for everything. Students will need to be able to identify what working efficiently means to them, and they will also need to be able to identify what a meaningful life means to them.
The same applies to us. It’s a value statement as much as it is anything else.
There’s no ah-ha moment without productive struggle preceding it. The question now becomes where and when to apply productive struggle and how to better get students to appreciate its value. One way to do that is to have students reflect on different experiences and the depth of their learning in them.
I’ve used AI in workshops, and I’ve used AI as a principal. It has been immensely helpful at times and meh at other times. But the most fun, the most meaningful has been the authentic connecting, the learning more deeply about who is in the room. In professional development, that needs to be the first objective. There’s more than one way to get there.
But get there.
AI Bonus Track 🎤
As an example of the above, I wanted to see what this post would look like as a song and how it may change the experience (for you and for me). I took the text of the article and asked Claude to make it into hip-hop lyrics. I then uploaded those lyrics onto Suno and created this elevator banger.
I find it fun and silly and genuinely interesting in how it did a decent job sampling and remixing my sentences into verses. Can I imagine a scenario where I would use it? Probably, but not as a means to help others to build initial understanding of how I think and feel. Can I think, more generally, about ways AI-generated songs can be good community-builders? For sure.
Question is: which do you prefer, and which do you get more out of? Better yet, when might one work for you better than the other?
These are the questions the world is asking our students now. Our job is to give them practice in answering them.
The latest single “Connection before Content” from Mr. Scuderi & The Eclectic Electives, off their debut album “Faculty Meeting Snacks.”
Former principal… enjoyed the read. Loved the bonus track, too!
Love this reminder! AI may change the pace and approach to tasks, but the need for humanness and vulnerability is integral to learning.
Connection reminds us of who we are - so we can use AI as a thought partner but still trust our own voice and judgement in that process.