Good Brain/Bad Brain: Mark Sparvell on Thriving Amidst Educational Change

Mark Sparvell

Director Of Education, Microsoft

Author: Good Brain Bad Brain

Quotes of the Podcast: Schools are places where society is created and recreated, so, it follows, teachers are the architects of that preferred future.

Introduction of Guest BIO – 

Mark Sparvell is a global award wining educator and leader, currently a Director of Marketing at Microsoft, specializing in education. He leads strategy, messaging, and customer storytelling across AI, data, and cloud solutions, partnering with K‑12 and higher education leaders globally to drive meaningful, responsible digital transformation

Interview

Agents of Change: Leaders/Innovators.

• 30,000 Ft. View – Why so we, as a society invest in education?
• What drew you to education?
• EI
• AI
• What are the biggest challenges to you?
• What would you like decision makers to know?”

Podcast/ website/ book shoutouts

My Superspeaks podcast http://aka.ms/superspeakspodcast 

Buy my book http://bit.ly/goodbrainbadbrain Book a keynote http://marksparvell.com

Explore education stories http://aka.ms/educustomerstories

Explore education videos http://aka.ms/educustomervideos 

Try Reading Coach http://coach.microsoft.com

Education Perspectives is edited by Shashank P

Intro and Outro by Dynamix Productions

Transcript

Liza Holland [00:00:02]:
Welcome to Education Perspectives. I am your host, Liza Holland. This is a podcast that explores the role of education in our society from a variety of lenses. Education needs to evolve, to meet the needs of today and the future. Solving such huge issues requires understanding. Join me as we begin to explore the many perspectives of education. So, welcome back to Education Perspectives. We're so excited to have Mark Sparvell with us here today.

Liza Holland [00:00:33]:
He is an educator with over 35 years experience and he is the author of Good Brain, Bad Brain. Mark, welcome to Education Perspectives. We're so excited to have you.

Mark Sparvell [00:00:44]:
Yeah, thanks, Liza. I'm delighted to be here and have a conversation with you.

Liza Holland [00:00:47]:
Well, I'd love to kick you off with our 35,000 foot question. Why do you think that we as a society invest in education?

Mark Sparvell [00:00:57]:
That's a great question. When people ask me, what's the purpose of schools and education broadly, I think they're expecting me to say that. Institutions where people go to learn, but beyond that, you know, they are places where society is created and recreated. They're the engine houses of civic and civil society. And, and as such, you know, it places the role of educators as architects of a preferred future. So why should we be focused and interested? Well, because 2.6 of the world's population are teachers, but they hold on to 100% of the world's future population.

Liza Holland [00:01:36]:
That is a fabulous answer. Thank you. I really enjoyed that one. It's funny to me how I ask that question and every single time I get something a little bit different and I'm just going to have to pick on some of yours. That was wonderful. So you've been in education for a long time. What drew you to education?

Mark Sparvell [00:01:52]:
That's a big question. I'd thought about this when I've been asked that, and I think it's about curiosity. You know, as a kid, I was always curious about how things worked, both in the real world, but also with inside people and how people worked. And I found myself probably like a lot of people railroaded into, you know, a job and a career path that didn't allow me to unleash that and explore it. You know, I became a banker and I changed ink roles in typewriters for my first job. Now I coordinate agentic AI. Go figure. But it was that curiosity.

Mark Sparvell [00:02:28]:
It's a great motivator. Without curiosity as an educator, you're left with compliance, which is a poor substitute for motivation. Curiosity is at the heart of empathy. So when I was looking for a career path, I looked for something which would allow me to explore the things I was curious about, whether it was ancient cultures or the solar system or how rain is formed. And there's no other job that lets you explore that kind of stuff than becoming a primary school or an elementary teacher. And then, as it turned out, much to my surprise, a huge surprise to me, I was actually pretty good at it because I was curious about how things worked and discovered that kids are curious and sometimes, perhaps education gets in the way of their natural disposition to be curious and to learn.

Liza Holland [00:03:22]:
Boy, I agree with you there. One of my. One of the people that I respect so much in education was Sir Ken Robinson, and he often brings up that we're basically educating them out of that curiosity with the system that we have currently in place.

Mark Sparvell [00:03:35]:
So, yeah, no, I love that greater YouTube or Ted talk of his around. You know, creativity back in the day is, you know, still super resonant today. You know, with all of these changes in AI changing all of the time day by day, it seems it's easy for educators to lose focus at times around what matters most. And yet there are some things that remain very solid about what we know from learning. Science, what we know from behavioral science, what we know from the science of motivation, even science and curiosity. We know the science of learning. And our challenge is to keep that as our North Star as things change around us.

Liza Holland [00:04:17]:
Well, I think that that's a really important piece because right now, with the change that you're talking about, I'd love for us to talk about that a little bit more, but I feel like we really need to be creating lifelong learners in our education system, because the pace of change is such that you're not, you know, the specific content that you're learning right now may be completely obsolete by the time you get out of school. And so that Curiosity piece, I think, is really one of those fundamental keys to making that happen. So you mentioned agentic AI and technology in schools, which obviously has a. It's in the news a lot right now, and I'd love your perspective on how we can effectively use technology and yet foster that creativity.

Mark Sparvell [00:05:06]:
Yeah, and I guess, you know, when we talk about, particularly AI, you know, the conversation from November 2022 was largely dominated by generative AI. You know, what it can generate, what can it make, a picture, a movie, sound. And that's still a part of it. But the conversation has moved beyond what it can generate to what it can reason upon. I see there's this big shift, right? This is a different agenda in education than, you know, when Apple released its iPad and apps came out, or when the World wide web came to a classroom near you. What's shifted fundamentally recently since AI and Generative AI was launched is it's changed our relationship with information. So up until that point, we essentially created documents. We, we saved them, we shared them, we edited them, you know, we deleted them.

Mark Sparvell [00:05:58]:
Now what we're doing is dialoguing with documents. We've shifted from, you know, from dealing just with content to dealing with conversations. And to be able to have conversations with content, with data, you need a lot of it. So we can't have that same mentality. There's an app for everything, or there's a, you know, an AI agent for everything. They've got to be able to be sitting on connected pools of information to really unlock the intelligence in organization. So the opportunity, if you like, is to unlock intelligence and, you know, trust is the accelerator for that. It's got to be within trusted, safe, secure environments.

Mark Sparvell [00:06:39]:
But if you can unlock all of that information across a school, a system, a state, then you can use AI to start for the business of schools. You can drive improvements and efficiencies, you can automate workflows, you can get things done faster. But, and here's the big bump, education is different than other industries. It's different to retail, it's different to banking, it's different to all the others because we hold developing brains in our hands. So the other side of our business, when we think about AI, which is the instructional side, you don't want a race to the fastest answer. You do want that in hr. You don't want that in a grade three classroom. You don't want to skip the pleasant frustration of learning itself.

Mark Sparvell [00:07:26]:
You want to use AI to do what it does best to support those young people in the development of their deep learning, their critical thinking, their unlock, their creativity, help close feedback loops, help show them next steps, help them work in groups together with an AI assistant as a extra member of a group. Fundamentally, learning is a social process. It's something best done together. Again, I keep going back to we need to lead like scientists through this current phase that we're in, which will never end. We need to lead like scientists in going to the evidence and research as educators, particularly around instructional design, around learning architecture. Go to what the evidence teaches tells us and then leave that AI to amplify and extend that. And again, learning is a social process. It's best done together.

Mark Sparvell [00:08:22]:
So the notion of just having AI in classrooms as a tutor, one to one, you know, is a Very thin piece of what will help a young person become able to flourish with the right skills, dispositions and attitudes into the future.

Liza Holland [00:08:37]:
Absolutely. You make me think, I love that. Let's stick with technology just for a little bit because we're getting a lot of. Okay, let's just ban it from the educator side of things. What is your take or what is your argument for a good blending of the technology and instruction?

Mark Sparvell [00:08:59]:
Yeah, I guess I would go back a step from there. I sit on a number of AI advisory boards in a voluntary capacity in the UK and also in the us so if you like a chance every day, every week, every month to engage with people. And they're not necessarily Microsoft shops, they're just regular districts and collectives who are wrestling with how do we diffuse AI across our organizations. And I get a lot from that as a person sitting on those committees and boards and councils. And here's one thing that that comes through clearly with that. And also the work that I lead for Microsoft, which is the chief AI story Hunter, that's my unofficial title I gave myself, I love it. When I look at what's the root cause of success, that almost to a point can avoid that scenario, which is a real one, that is the involvement of everybody, particularly teachers and students, shock horror in the very shaping of policy guidelines, practice conversations about ethical responsible use. I'll use a quick example, the Mid Pacific Council I sit on, which covers a number of islands in Hawaii.

Mark Sparvell [00:10:15]:
Further out, you know, the young people they have from high school or secondary school, depending on your listeners background, are active members of the advisory board. They sit alongside people from Microsoft, people from Nvidia, people who are lawyers. They sit alongside them and they hold their own and they have an active voice in shaping the policy and guidelines. But so do their educators. Their professional judgment and practice is recognized and valued in the shaping of policies and guidelines and guardrails and effective use models for that school or that system. And I see that time and time again across the large districts, small community colleges, higher education settings that I work with across the globe. It comes through over and over again. And it would be fair to say another key factor in avoiding that scenario is the absolute pinnacle of leadership, whatever that might be.

Mark Sparvell [00:11:12]:
You know, it's a head teacher in an academy trust in the uk, which is like a small district in the us it's the superintendent and their leadership team or it's the principal or the administrator if they understand and are bought into both the risks and the rewards. And they are tuned into the fact that there are some things we can do quick and get quick wins, administrative, organizational, operational. Like they're going to see super fast efficiencies, you know, they're going to become familiar with the tools and the features, they're going to be able to get their governance and get their guardrails sorted and then they can start to flow that on into instructional practice. But that group need to be fully bought in and fully skilled up. And I'll just make one final comment based upon this sort of 30,000 foot view I have across the globe. Where there isn't pushback, where there's active exploration is where the AI agenda is just a support mechanism for the broader school or system or district priorities. Example Babson Community College. We're all about entrepreneurship.

Mark Sparvell [00:12:27]:
AI helps to unlock. In fact, we're giving $250,000 worth of grants to students who are entrepreneurs to build the next great AI solution. You know, it's all about entrepreneurship for them. If it's married at school in Malaysia, in Malaysia, it's all about English proficiency. It's all about how do we best prepare young people for a future of work which is largely English spoken. Let's use AI to help propel our students along. If it's about closing skill gaps, if it's the British Youth Theatre and it's about how do we best prepare the next generation of creatives for employment in theatre, how do we use AI? We can use it to drive real life scenes, simulations of what it was like living in the 17th century and our young actors can dialogue with people from that period of time. Or we can use it to generate improv scenarios on the fly and refine our crap.

Mark Sparvell [00:13:25]:
We can use it to listen to us and get feedback around expression and tone. We can train an AI bot, specifically, let's say I was in one of the medical universities, University of Kentucky can train up a, you know, a specific agent that is just queued into a specific area of the medical learning, let's say pharmacology or whatever it might be. And the students who couldn't access support 247 before because lecturers aren't available, you know, after 3pm have now got access to that because they're all about improving learning outcomes for everyone. So it becomes connected to their equity desire, their desire to create the workforce for Kentucky's future. So long answer. I know, apologies. Where the agenda is not a technical deployment agenda, where the agenda is a this is our purpose for being agenda, then there's not that kind of we're going to ban it Instead, it's okay. What are we concerned about? We're concerned about privacy, security, safety.

Mark Sparvell [00:14:33]:
Do we need to have that conversation around academic integrity? Is it about plagiarism? What is it that's got people most bothered? If you ask kids, which I've done, and by kids I mean, you know, ranging from secondary through to higher education students. And I've said, what's your bit of advice? What do you want from your teachers and your leaders around this AI thing? And universally they say, just be clear with us. Like be clear with us about when, where and how. And generally they kind of go, we don't want to be caught out for cheating when we're not. And the truth is they're using all of these talks outside, but they're happy to comply inside. But there's a lot they know. There's a lot they can learn. I've had, yeah, young people teaching again in the mid Pacific.

Mark Sparvell [00:15:22]:
I was in a session where young people were teaching the grownups how to build agents. And again, super powerful and a way of reducing that friction. People tell me that all the time. I've heard it my whole career. Education is slow to adapt. Educators are cautious. We're not cautious. It might look like caution, but you know, we're conscious of the risk because again, we're holding a population that especially in K to 12, is incredibly vulnerable.

Mark Sparvell [00:15:56]:
You know, you're holding on to developing brains, you're holding on to brains which at times don't have their full regulation switches turned on in the head, not because they're careless, but because they're biologically not at that point in the trial. 23 year old range where the frontal cortex is fully hardwired for risk assessment. So we've got a really, really important job in education to engage young people in a guided release of responsibility and autonomy using these tools. Which is why AI literacy, AI readiness needs to be intentional and not accidental through all of our work, regardless of the discipline.

Liza Holland [00:16:41]:
Well, and I see, I've done a number of interviews with teachers, particularly around deeper learning. And what comes to me on a regular basis is the most precious commodity for teachers is time. And we're not giving them enough time. So it just seems to me that this is a real opportunity for us to be able to give back to the educators so that they can think deeply, that they can really think about what they're doing with their particular lesson planning and whatnot. If we use AI to help them write the lesson plan, all of a sudden you've bought yourself back a good 30 minutes and you can use that to be intentional and to be really good. I've also heard you were talking about the fact that students are often more knowledgeable technologically than the teachers. And I wonder if there isn't some opportunity there to begin to have a give and take of knowledge and education and let students be in the driver's seat for a little bit as far as teaching their teachers how to be able to utilize this technology.

Mark Sparvell [00:17:51]:
Yeah, that's an interesting one. Two things on there. One is agree that the, you know, the students have confidence and probably a broader awareness of the Squillian individual AI tools which are out there. The educator has the deep knowledge around instructional design and learning, design and learning intent. So it's a bit like with social media. Just because you awesome TikTok or editing up a snap doesn't mean that's going to benefit you engaging in some project based learning, you know, around, you know, understanding the, you know, the hydrological cycle. It doesn't apply straight across. I think there is a fusion between those two and I think the more the dialogue is open between the students and the educators, which is why it's important to have them on advisory groups understanding not just what they're using, but understanding why they're choosing and using and conversely them understanding about the critical role of privacy security.

Mark Sparvell [00:18:56]:
You know I heard of a, I've heard of a number of schools and districts that have done an audit on AI. Let's call them AI apps, chatbots, agents, Agent Sprawl is the thing. And you know, they've discovered not just hundreds but thousands of unsanctioned tools sitting within their network. Right. And again we saw that happen with, didn't we, with iPads and schools where somebody found a great app and downloaded it onto the class. IPads, no big deal. It's a big deal now because as you know, education is one of the most targeted industries for cybercrime. Cybercrime with an annual profit margin of around 4 trillion and placing it as the third largest GDP outside of China and the US with education sitting at times as the number one target or the number two or three.

Mark Sparvell [00:19:48]:
Like education, big business. And with that sprawl of AI it introduces risk. So again it comes back to AI literacy and readiness. It's not about this is terrible, we should ban it. But it's, let's recognize the benefits and the scenarios where the use case is best and let's ensure that it goes through the process that we have set up in our district at school to ensure that we fully understand, you know, this tool. We've come through a process of vetting it, that this tool complies with our responsible and ethical standards and practices around. Data is gathered, stored, used, sold, deleted. Like, if you can't answer those questions, then it shouldn't be sitting within your education system.

Mark Sparvell [00:20:37]:
Again, because the, you know, we're holding on to a vulnerable population. And again, this isn't necessarily anything new. We've had networks around in schools, we've been plugged into the world Wide web for decades now. But it's part of the, it's part of the good stewardship that as education leaders we need to be involved with. But my point is it's everybody's business. It's not the IT department's business because hackers aren't hacking in to schools, they're logging you. You're often with stolen credentials. So it's everyone's business, it's students business, the teacher's business as they click and drag and they're thinking, yeah, I want to share Liza's emerging rapport so I can collaborate with the other grade three teachers.

Mark Sparvell [00:21:22]:
But the school network's a little bit mucky to navigate. I'm just going to pop it on my personal drive, cloud drive, and we'll share and collaborate it. What happens in some schools now when you try to do that, and I'll give you an example, Coquitlam School district up in Vancouver, Canada, when that teacher tries to do it, guess what happens? An AI agent stops them. So it doesn't just alert stops them and it says to them, you know, this is a breach for that policy around, you know, secure and safe storage of files. And then you save into the network, contact this person. So they could not do that themselves, right? They couldn't do it themselves. They, they might. There's the big district, they got thousands of files being saved each and every day.

Mark Sparvell [00:22:11]:
It's a problem. Agentic AI created a automated workflow to help them manage that issue. But in doing that, just helping to raise to everybody's awareness that this is a shared, this is business. Like I said at the start, trust is the accelerator in this future space. When safety governance are clear, then people can start to engage in the kind of change thereafter. The risk isn't change, the risk is unmanaged change.

Liza Holland [00:22:42]:
That makes a lot of sense and that risk to benefit ratio that you've kind of been referring to makes so much sense. And it's just hard because there's so many people who are very much on the beginning edge of Even understanding what AI is, it was just fairly recently. I feel like I'm kind of an early adopter sort of person. But it was just recently that I learned all about the agents and how you can assign them to be members of your team and give them different perspectives to look out for and whatnot. And again, I'm worried that our teachers don't have the time or maybe the access to the best education to, to teach them about all of that.

Mark Sparvell [00:23:26]:
Yeah, I mean, a quick comment I'd make there too. Again, one thing is you're absolutely right. And again, for the administrative, the organization, the operational side of a busy district or a busy school. I've been a principal for, you know, for years, but it's, yeah, hands down, it fundamentally changes your work. We weren't designed as humans to sit doing emails all day. It's not the high point of our 50,000 year development to get to that. It can pick up, still keeping the human in the loop. It can pick up a lot of those workflows.

Mark Sparvell [00:23:58]:
And these days with tools like Copilot Agent Builder, you can build those agentic AI solutions as you need within the safety and security of your school setup. So it's not going out to other places. It's secure, which is great. And then of course you've got, as we talked about before, you've got that instructional piece that's not always a separate AI. It's sometimes just embedded in the tools that they use. In fact, what I would suggest is one of the things I'm seeing a lot of is the more that AI is just embedded in workflow, embedded in the workflow of leaders, embedded in the workflow of teachers, embedded in the workflow of students in the environment they're already in. The more effective it is. We've got some tools like a free learning accelerators.

Mark Sparvell [00:24:47]:
Reading Coach is a great example. Reading Coach, Reading progress. It's AI powered, but it's not there as a separate thing. It's just part of how it runs right. AI sits in the background, students generate an original text, or, sorry, the educator can generate an original text based at whatever Lexile level they want. The students can have control over the settings, the characters, they practice, their reading, the camera, the microphone listens to them, AI ranks their fluency, accuracy, tone substitutions, basically a running record gives them a result. There's a version that's free to use at home and there are examples of whole countries using it to help improve reading proficiencies. But my point is it's AI embedded.

Mark Sparvell [00:25:35]:
Another one is speaker coach. Like, you know, am I speaking well? Do I have to do a presentation at school? Am I a teacher who needs to rehearse? How good am I at doing a zoom or teams lesson? So built within PowerPoint, it sits there. It's just part of PowerPoint. It's not a new buy feature. You know, I can go to speaker coach and I can run through my slideshow and the moment I'm finished and hit stop, boom, you've got a full report on did I use, you know, how did I articulate this? Did I just read from the slides? And then it's got prompts and suggestions and places to go to improve your presentation. And I can do it again and again. And imagine if you're a kid whose background is in English. Imagine if you're that kid who's just a little bit shy.

Mark Sparvell [00:26:22]:
Imagine you're the person who, feeling a bit cognitively overwhelmed at this moment in time. These tools that are built right inside of the everyday tools you use unlock the power of AI without it being this do I have to write a prompt? And again, that's where I'm getting away from. Not getting away from, but just recognizing this isn't just an agenda. About. Can you generate me an email? It's about embedded AI help intentionally build education solutions sitting within a trusted, safe environment. Your school environment can benefit everybody.

Liza Holland [00:27:01]:
Oh, that's so cool. I'm going to try the speaker coach. I'm glad you brought that up.

Mark Sparvell [00:27:07]:
I'll make sure the link's available for your show notes because particularly Reading Coach, which is people can use them in their schools, but kids can also use it at home for, you know, for practice themselves. Because here's the truth. Not every kid has the advantage of a tutor or somebody listening to them. Not Everybody has that. AIs got the potential for it. As we know, across the globe, potential is equally distributed. Access isn't. And some of these AI tools can provide that access to help unlock potential.

Mark Sparvell [00:27:42]:
I'll give you a real quick example because it's kind of cool. There's Clifton School, which is just out of. Out of Belfast. It has students with profound and multiple disabilities, cognitive, developmental. And they've never been able to really like, produce artwork that really represents what's in their head. And now what they do is using either a picture, keyboard or talking to a paraprofessional. They describe the image they want in their imagination. Or maybe it's a recall from a story they've heard and that's entered by the paraprofessional as a prompt and copilot generates that image on this big screen for them and then they re prompt it by adding more chickens or by making it nighttime or they want to have a red hat.

Mark Sparvell [00:28:27]:
And it reimagines that for them. And for those kids, the look on their faces when for the first time in their life, their imagination was translated into the real world where their ability to imagine and create was unlocked by AI. Like, think about that. Rather than, here's a kid with a disability, here's a kid whose ability has been unlocked. And the head teacher, you know, said, this is a game changer. This is the first time that these students have ever seen their imagination represented. Like that's the potential. Are there pitfalls and risks? We've talked about that.

Mark Sparvell [00:29:10]:
Absolutely. And educators are right to be conscious and cautious because we've got an important job. We're the architects of the future, but the power of the possible also sits in our hands.

Liza Holland [00:29:24]:
That just gave me chills. That is so marvelous. I can envision. My imagination is envisioning those students faces right now. That's, that's incredible.

Mark Sparvell [00:29:33]:
I'll make sure I share with you for the, the show notes link to the video that contains it because it is inspiring.

Liza Holland [00:29:39]:
Yes. Oh, that's marvelous.

Mark Sparvell [00:29:41]:
You know, I'm here as a director at Microsoft, but this agenda is, you know, in education, our challenges are shared challenges and our solutions are shared solutions as well. So, you know, the more that we can collectively recognize those challenges and share those opportunities and solutions, the better it is for everyone.

Liza Holland [00:30:03]:
Absolutely. Lifts all boats. That is great.

Mark Sparvell [00:30:06]:
Assuming you've got a boat to begin with.

Liza Holland [00:30:08]:
Yeah, well, that's true. But let's pivot to good brain, bad brain. You have obviously lots of really great experiences globally. What inspired you to write this book and what does it tell us?

Mark Sparvell [00:30:22]:
Yeah, over the last couple years of 30 years, I've just had this most remarkable opportunity to work with incredible thinkers around positive psychology, around emotional intelligence, social and emotional learning. And along the way, I've realized that, you know, this isn't a separate agenda to even the work that I'm doing today. They're like strands of DNA, you know, you can't extract emotional intelligence away from any of the other agendas. In fact, emotions are the gatekeeper. They're the gatekeeper to motivation. And we talked about that right at the start when we talked about curiosity. Emotions are the gatekeeper to motivation, to cognition, how we process information around the world. So emotions are the gatekeeper to motivation, cognition and attention.

Mark Sparvell [00:31:12]:
And that Attention piece is critical because that's one of the things that we don't have enough of at the moment. You know, attention management, distraction management, we're hearing a lot about that. So as a teacher and then as a leader and a computer teacher and a principal and a deputy and all of those jobs that I've had along the way, they've just continually reinforced me about the critical role of emotional intelligence. How we get to a point where we're skilled up enough to be able to recognize, as Mark Brackett says from the Yale center for Emotional Intelligence, you know, how we recognize, understand, label, express and regulate ourselves so we can navigate our own selves, but we can navigate ourselves in social situations matters greatly in education wise. As I've said before, learning is a social process. Therefore it's deeply tied to emotional states. The other bit that's emerged over the years, which has just propelled me along with this agenda and resulted in me writing the book to try to bring all those thoughts together, was the fact that emotional intelligence has continued to rise to the top. When we look at any study around, what are the work skills required to flourish in an AI powered economy? The Work Trend Index called out, I think about seven.

Mark Sparvell [00:32:34]:
The first five were uniquely human. The third one was emotional intelligence. Others included things like critical evaluation and cognitive flexibility. But anytime you look at any index at the moment, yes, it's going to be technical skills, bias detection. Everybody's got a new first job in managing the work of an agent or an AI tool. So we need to be able to manage, delegate the work of others. But the top skills are always our ability to work with others, to be able to have, you know, those powerful communication skills, solve problems which are fiddly and complex and maybe draw upon lived experience. And you know, AI does not have the lived experience of a human.

Mark Sparvell [00:33:24]:
It simulates it and simulates it well. So empathy, self awareness and human judgment have become, if you like, the differentiators, not the optional soft skills. They've become the differentiators for young people, for all of us in this current environment where AI is working with us and alongside us. You know, if you look at what it means to become a frontier organization. That was a resource published. I'll drop the link in the show notes. It talked about this kind of model of what's the optimal number of humans and agents and AI features. How does that.

Mark Sparvell [00:34:06]:
What's emerging is the best mix because we're keeping the human in the center all of the time because we need to have that human judgment sitting there. I put it this way. AI can process information. Emotional intelligence helps people process life. That's why it matters. So the book came upon, like, how can I make this practical? Like, how can I get out of my head the things that I've researched, that I've heard from experts around the globe in a way that's going to help people feel they have a little bit more control. Because in a. In a world that can feel out of control, the one thing we do have control over is our thoughts and our responses.

Mark Sparvell [00:34:47]:
So how do we exercise that? We develop skills and emotional intelligence. This can be developed at any time in life and just through intentional practice. So the book is, I think, 25 strategies to try Monday, not someday, that you can use with a team. People can use it with their family. They can just open the book and think, okay, I'm going to try this one. And some of them, I got to say, are pretty funny, but they're all based on evidence and research. A quick example would be a few years ago, people walking around talking to themselves. You know, they were usually people who were having some sort of struggle with mental health issues.

Mark Sparvell [00:35:26]:
These days, we all do. You know, we're on a call, we're talking to somebody. The good thing is you can use that to your advantage because talking with your inner voice, so in your head is good, but talking out loud to yourself is good. So put your headphones in and have a good conversation with yourself and talk through the challenges of the day. Give yourself some motivation. In fact, the book suggests five different conversations you can have with yourself that are actually turns out, from a psychology perspective, it's a really healthy thing to do. And people won't think you've got a mental health challenge anymore. They'll just think you're on a conference call.

Mark Sparvell [00:36:05]:
And if you're really stuck, the book recommends honoring someone who maybe passed away, who you used to phone, who used to just talk about. And they would just listen, wouldn't offer you any advice, would just listen to you. And you can do that to them. Bizarrely. And I'll add this to the mix, maybe not too bizarre. You can have that conversation with co pilot or whatever your trusted AI is, and you can just say to it, hey, I just want you to listen to me. And at the end reflect back to me what I seem to be talking about. And off you go for your walk along the lake, talking about something that was vexatious or challenging or wonderful or perplexing.

Mark Sparvell [00:36:43]:
And at the end you stop and say, so what are you hearing and getting that little bit of feedback, it's a good thing. It helps an out of control brain feel like it's in control of its own thought processes. And when you give yourself back a sense of control, whether it's with students, and that's critical, it lowers cortisol, you know, it lowers, you know, the blood pressure level, it slows down the heart rate. People start to get in a more comfortable space for learning. It's almost like neurohacking. But you know, we know that our young people are stressed right now. Like they haven't bounced back magically from COVID In fact, many statistics coming through are showing that they're even more stressed, tired, bored. You know, if emotions are the gatekeeper to cognition, motivation and attention, they're not people ready to learn.

Mark Sparvell [00:37:34]:
Doesn't matter how great your curriculum is, right? So, you know, how do we create the space? How do we ensure that people realize that social and emotional learning isn't something extra on the plate, it is the plate. And it turns out this is how you develop the skills required to flourish in a world powered by AI, you know, filled with misinformation, filled with at times, what can see challenging situation. I'll just make this final comment on that little, that little dialogue and that's this. You know, I say this in the book. The human brain, you know, has been busy cooking itself to its current form for 50,000 years. In fact, the chances of you and I having this chat today are about 1 in 4 trillion. You know, the number of variables that could have killed off DNA along the way. Famine, fights, pestilence, disease, a whole range of, or just not even meeting each other, like could have happened.

Mark Sparvell [00:38:30]:
One in four trillion.

Liza Holland [00:38:31]:
Wow.

Mark Sparvell [00:38:31]:
That brought you and I here today. And you know what? It tells me this and I say it in the book. You're carrying every one of us right now. Every kid in your class, every stressed out teacher, every stressed out parent. You're carrying the DNA of survivors. You know, your brain is perfectly designed to adapt. Not only are we going to adapt through this, we're actually going to flourish through it because we've got the DNA of survivors.

Liza Holland [00:38:57]:
Well, I love that. What a great way to look at it.

Mark Sparvell [00:39:01]:
Yeah.

Liza Holland [00:39:02]:
You have given me so much to think about. It's so exciting. Tell me as you. Cause you are, you have a real global perspective on this and have been working everywhere as far as this kind of how we carefully and thoughtfully integrate all of these pieces. Not just the technology, but the social, emotional, learning and all that kind of a thing. Into our what school needs to be, I guess, because what we had in the past is not necessarily really working for what the needs are today. As you go in, especially in new situations, what have been the biggest challenges that you faced?

Mark Sparvell [00:39:38]:
There's a lot of structural reasons why even educators with the best intentions can't do what they do or implement what the research clearly tells them. And education broadly is under a lot of pressure across the globe. You've got geopolitical instability, you've got rising fuel costs which actually place pressure on not only families but schools just to run themselves because it impacts their business. You've got increased mobility of populations across the globe, whether it's as a result of conflict or seeking employment. So education has a lot of complexities and challenges which can reflect as at times, barriers to adoption or new approaches or things that are perceived to be additional or optional. So that's the challenge. I think if I look at an example from Broward county over here in the U.S. you know, it's super large district, super diverse, many languages represented, lots of challenges, had a huge budget shortfall.

Mark Sparvell [00:40:45]:
I think it was 100 million or something. It was big. And you know, at a time when funding is being cut from post Covid, but instead of maybe withdrawing from innovation, they double down on their investment in innovation. They look to where they could work differently. So, you know, it's not about working faster in this agenda with AI, it's about how does it let us work differently. Perhaps, you know, that's that kind of frontier mindset of what can we do different here to better serve our young people. Again, coming back to that primary driver. So they embarked upon this incredible, I've never heard about it in A K to 12 school globally where they built digital twins built on with a partner through Microsoft Azure.

Mark Sparvell [00:41:29]:
They built a digital twin of their entire distributed district and used that to better manage one of their number one expenditures, which was facilities. They're able to identify inefficiencies, they're able to attend before things break down. They're able to provide better working environments for teachers. They don't have to go out to each building all the time and look, they've got full live data coming through. They're saving millions over years as a result of that. And that's again another example where AI is leaning into allowing people to do different. But what's cool, what did they do? Those funds and resources, they increased the programs and the resourcing for students around using AI to ensure that they're AI literate. They're able to every kid.

Mark Sparvell [00:42:23]:
So in this diverse district, again driven by this equity agenda, these young people are being best prepared to make what's next to get a job, keep a job or create a job using AI tools and skills. And you know, you hear stories like that and it's not to sort of recognize your question. There are, there are challenges and struggles aplenty in education. It's easy to problematize it. We always do. You know, we're large education as an industry, we're highly visible, we're highly accountable to boards, to political agendas and we have those other to, you know, an availability of skilled and ready teachers, you know, a global challenge for everyone. So it's easy to problematize. I like to take an appreciative lens that's not a toxic positivity lens, but go across the globe.

Mark Sparvell [00:43:20]:
Where are we flourishing and why is that? And it's all around the planet. It's from Estonia to Ecuador, it's in a university or a district at Catholic Education in Brisbane and it's all the way through to Wichita and it's all the way through to, you know, University of Kentucky. And then it's something amazing is happening in Rigor Strata's largest research university in Latvia. And that's what kind of gets me out of bed every day because I get to capture these and find out what makes them work and then share them back to people. And I'll make sure all of those stories and more are available for you to share with your listeners. A quick comment I'd make. It's easy to teach a blame that's a popular, it's super popular because it's really easy. But the truth is teachers sit within schools, schools sit within districts, sit within states, states sit within countries, and there's an entire ecosystem of decision making that ultimately filters down and either empowers or disempowers depending upon, you know, the particular education system.

Mark Sparvell [00:44:29]:
And some across the globe have great autonomy and individual schools or districts, some have little autonomy and are highly federated. So it's a, it's a very kind of varied mosaic across the globe.

Liza Holland [00:44:42]:
Well, you know, that almost is a good answer to what would you like decision makers to know? Because it is so diverse and so different. And I love the concept of being solutionary instead of pulling all the problems because you're right, it's not posit, you know, it's not toxic positivity. There are things that are out there like growing like saplings in our education systems that are working super well, for our students, how can we, you know, protect those? How can we make sure that they don't go away because a particular person left? How can we systemize some of the successes? It's a big challenge, but it's also a very exciting one.

Mark Sparvell [00:45:24]:
Yeah, and it is that. It comes back to a couple of things. One is, this is often, if I go back to emotional intelligence, this is often an emotional agenda. It's not just a technological agenda, because you're dealing with change, which affects people. And as humans, you know, we're motivated by our biological imperative to acquire and defend, you know, resources, status, power. Like, if you look at humans, we acquire. We acquire status, we acquire power, we acquire possessions. And then instinctively, we want to protect them, we want to defend them.

Mark Sparvell [00:46:03]:
Right? So when you challenge somebody's status, let's say AI is going to take a job. Like, an instant reaction is to defend, you know, to attack or to. If you take flight, fight or fawn, to fawn. To move into a passive acquaintance and take no action. So all of these agendas, from the very top level down, we've got to recognize that humans are actively involved in this. And if I go back to what I said earlier on about motivation, that got me into teaching and curiosity. If you haven't activated people's emotional state, made them curious, help them see the possibility, shown them the like in Broward, showing them the remarkable savings. If that's their driver, what is their driver to engage? Is it about efficiencies, or is it about improving learning? Or is it about supporting, as in the example of Clifton House, every young person to unlock their ability? Is it about providing those young girls in Puerto Rico with the skills they need to get out of poverty and get jobs? What is that agenda? What is that, to quote Michael Fulham, what is that driver to engage? Once you've unlocked that driver, then the rest of it starts to fall place and you start to focus on and the guide and the policy and the sovereignty and whatever the specific issues are for that country.

Mark Sparvell [00:47:37]:
But right at the very top, you know, I would say for, you know, for district leaders, particularly those who are, you know, about to embark upon or midway through it would be. There's a number of pragmatic things that everybody does, and this sits, I guess, above those, which is understand your big why. You know, like, not to sound like Simon Sinek, but understand that big why is absolutely true. Like, what's our vision? What are our graduate outcomes? Why are we in the business we're in? What are we hoping to do broadly as an organization and how does AI sit within that? And then there's a number of very pragmatic things people do. They all do it. They do an infrastructure order. I mean, you got to know whether you where's our data? Like, do we have the infrastructure to be able to move forwards? What's our cloud migration? Because if you're not working on the cloud, it's going to be really hard to maintain that trust as an accelerator. Because you know, if you're using cloud storage and cloud processing for your district, your network, your school, providing you with a, you know, a super trusted provider and you're getting that compliance, you're getting that security, you're getting that certainty that you know your, your data is your data.

Mark Sparvell [00:48:52]:
So people do that. Then of course what they do is they. Some of them, and here's where it's interesting. Some of them engage in intentional pilots and some of them go in full, like top to bottom, immediate. Some of them do pilots, some of them go in full. But regardless, running alongside of this is really, really robust capacity building for specifically not on general AI, but specific for the workflow of the people that you're dealing with. If it's administrative or if it's instructional, but really intentional, customized personalised professional learning which allows them to embed it within their work. So got to be embedded in their workflow, which we know, again, there's no surprise there.

Mark Sparvell [00:49:39]:
It's the basics of adult learning, but again, applied to an AI environment, people shouldn't treat adults like their children, as learners because, you know, pedagogy is about children's learning and adult learners are different and they want quick wins. They need to see how it connects to their everyday work. They bring more bias, but they also bring more skills and knowledge into the so a well designed capacity building program always runs alongside successful implementation.

Liza Holland [00:50:09]:
So incredibly insightful. I love this entire conversation has just been inspiring to me today. Mark, thank you so much. I feel like I could continue to talk for hours, but I guess we've come to the end of our time together. Tell us before we go, you are also a podcast host. So what is your podcast and how can our listeners access it?

Mark Sparvell [00:50:29]:
Yeah, I'll make sure I send that to you afterwards to pop in the show notes. So for a couple of years now I've been hosting a podcast called Super Speaks where I find people who are a lot smarter than me. So thought leaders, academics, researchers and practitioners who are exploring the intersection of AI and education from their point of view and ask them the big and hard questions. One of my recent guests was an author of a book Lost in Automatic Translation, and that was around what's the impact of the fact most of the large language models are in English? You know, what's the impact of that? Or I've spoken to the people that developed the SAMR model and the TPAC model and said, how does this work in an AI education environment? Or people that have developed new models to look at thinking about AI Dr. Helen Crompton and her work. So it's a collection of thoughts and insights from across the globe around AI education, particularly from a leadership perspective.

Liza Holland [00:51:31]:
Oh, that sounds awesome. So if you like, I want to go down that rabbit hole. Please, please take a look in the show notes and check out the podcast. And Marc Sparvell, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us here on Education Perspectives.

Mark Sparvell [00:51:46]:
It's been my absolute pleasure. A great conversation around topics that matter greatly to the profession right now and

Liza Holland [00:51:53]:
see us next time on Education Perspectives. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Education Perspectives. Feel free to share your thoughts on our Facebook page. Let us know which education perspectives you would like to hear or share. Please subscribe and share with your friends.