Thursday's Three Things—Building, Discerning, Playing
Three Things. On a Thursday.
Thursday’s Three Things looks a lot like the school year’s WDYN Wednesday—but it recognizes the pace of the summer months, taking a page from Ecocycle Planning. Not every source will be immediately applicable, and some might even trend towards general, philosophical considerations in the world of teaching and learning. But we’ve no doubt found them useful in some way, and as always, they’ve made us think. As legendary former Girl Scouts CEO Frances Hesselbein said, “You have to carry a big basket to bring something home.” Consider this our basket. What you choose to take is up to you.
We’ll continue this weekly series through mid-August, when we shift gears and ramp up for the start of the year. Onto this week's Thursday’s Three Things below!
Thursday’s Three Things
If You Build It, So What?—Peps Mccrea’s recent post on The IKEA Effect and an accompanying paper exploring curriculum planning and teacher workload leads us off this week. We’ve written about The IKEA Effect before, but it’s something that keeps surfacing this summer. We humans have a cognitive bias that compels us to overly value the things we create or build, regardless of the value of said artifact. In independent schools there’s not much off-the-shelf curriculum, thus we’re frequently creating (and recreating) lesson plans, assignments, and assessments. And in the age of AI this becomes even more pronounced given just how easy it is to produce a finished artifact. If The IKEA Effect is about the value we assign to our own labor, this week's second sections asks a more difficult question: what happens to that value when AI does the assembling?
Built, But Was It Worth Building?—Two recent pieces from some of our favorite AI thinkers relate directly to the tension of The IKEA Effect.
In Context Is All You Need, Marc Watkins names two obstacles that get collapsed into one conversation: access to frontier models, and the imagination to explore what they can do once you have them. Most discussion on AI in education stops at access (can a school afford the tools, are they equitable across campus) without reaching the harder problem: even people with full access rarely push past using AI to complete tasks. AI stays generic, Watkins argues, until someone brings judgment, taste, constraint, and iteration to it. His metaphor is a pottery wheel: useful for speed and shape, only as good as the hands guiding it—and guiding it well takes time spent actually playing with the thing.
In Does It Matter if You Used AI to Make It? Josh Brake gets at a related question from a different angle. Riffing on a New Yorker piece about pitch decks that all look identical because everyone used the same AI design tool, he asks directly: does it matter if AI made it? His answer is “it depends,” and the depending comes down to where the value actually lives. He tells his own story of building a conference website with AI coding tools in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken him solo—and concludes it was the right call, because the site was never the point. It was a means to an end, a way to get information to people in the room. A pitch deck meant to carry someone’s actual thinking is a different animal entirely; hand that over wholesale and the outsourcing shows.
We frequently see this tension with teachers and AI in the classroom. They build a cool thing, they deploy it in the wild, and they move onto the next lesson. But one wonders of the impact on student learning and if the making of the thing moved the needle in any positive way. So we want to be wary of the IKEA Effect both because it can lead us to defend our own labor past the point of usefulness, and because AI now makes it so easy to produce a finished artifact that we can build something impressive without ever checking whether building it was the right call for student learning in the first place.
Do You Need to Build It Well?—We recently polished off David Epstein’s new book Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better and Austin Kleon’s new book, Don’t’ Call it Art: 10 Ways to Create Like a Kid Again, so when a conversation between the two landed in our inbox this morning, we called an audible for this third section. One of the words we use most frequently around engaging with AI is “play” and much of their conversation centers around the tension between mastery and play, which puts a bookend perfectly on this week’s edition. It also talks back to the tension that opened this week's edition. Where the IKEA Effect has us defending the one thing we labored over, Kleon's ceramics-class parable argues for the opposite instinct: quantity and play over a single precious attempt. Read together, the two ideas point the same direction: less attachment to what we build, more attention to whether building it was worth the hour.
Your Weekly Moment of Zen
The Weekly Moment of Zen is often about finding adjacent inspiration. Is it also a rip off of the longstanding Daily Show segment of the same name? Absolutely. Everything is a remix. Think of it as a final stamp on each week’s post. Typically it’s not explicitly teaching and learning related, but if you squint hard enough we think you’ll see some parallels.
This week’s Moment of Zen comes from legendary track coach Frank Dick, describing his definition of “winning” and the importance of challenge and performance. In a trackside clip from 2016, Dick tells a young sprinter who's just run a personal best that she hasn't lost, even though two others crossed the line first. Winning, he says, is being better today than you were yesterday, every day.
We’ll leave you with that—the squinting is optional.