As we enter a new school year, the debate over the role of AI in education is heating up. There’s a sharp divide between those who urge us to embrace these tools and those who support a more cautious approach. Educators want guidance on the best ways to use emerging technologies without compromising privacy, encouraging plagiarism, or making learning less authentic. And yet, AI technology is evolving so quickly that it feels like we’re always playing catch-up.
Fortunately, earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology (OET) published new guidelines for EdTech companies, called “Designing for Education with Artificial Intelligence.” The report underscores the need for “responsible innovation,” adding that “feedback from educators and students must be incorporated into all aspects of product development, testing, and refinement to ensure that students’ needs are fully addressed.” As Dan Fitzpatrick noted in Forbes, “The era of tech-first solutions is over. Developers must collaborate meaningfully with educators from day one. Understanding pedagogy is as critical as coding skills.”
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The XQ Institute shares this mindset as part of our mission to reimagine the high school learning experience so that it is more relevant and engaging for today’s students, while better preparing them for the future. We see AI as a tool with transformative potential for educators and creators to harness — but only if it is developed and implemented with ethics, transparency, and equity at the forefront. That’s why we’re building partnerships between educators and AI developers to ensure that products are shaped by the real needs and challenges of students, teachers, and schools. This is how we believe all stakeholders can embrace the Department’s recommendations through continued collaborations with tech leaders, educators, and students.
Keeping technology and learning student-centered
XQ’s approach to secondary school redesign has always been student-centric. In that spirit, we need to move away from the idea that AI and other technological tools are only for educators; they also exist to improve students‘ learning. Rather than focusing solely on improving outputs (like lesson plans and assessment materials), creators should also emphasize improving outcomes, like student proficiency and engagement. Ann-Katherine Kimble, Director of School Success at XQ, said it’s therefore wrong to focus solely on how AI can save teachers time and make their jobs easier. “Our young people, teachers, and classrooms don’t deserve that,” she explained. “They deserve a point of view that believes AI can enhance your practice and knowledge, deepen your creative and responsive approaches, and help educators tap into the sweet spot where the art of teaching and the science of learning meet.”
At Crosstown High, an XQ school in Memphis, Tennessee, computer science teacher Mohammed Al Harthy sees AI as a partner in the classroom: something students engage with during the learning process but never rely on for the end product.
For example, in one project, his students explored how to build AI applications to track hand movements for American Sign Language, emphasizing the value of learning how AI works, writing code in Python and experimenting with tools like Google’s MediaPipe. Al Harthy isn’t so worried about his students simply copying and pasting as they learn. “Artificial intelligence never sounds like a high school student, so the concern about cheating is kind of silly,” he explained. “If you’re worried about that, you need to take a step back and reevaluate what your students are doing to begin with.” This approach fits with a national shift toward focusing on competencies and collaboration rather than routine answers, allowing students to use AI as a tool to improve their problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.
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Ensuring equal learning opportunities
At XQ, we believe that ensuring equal access means creating AI-powered learning experiences that are flexible, adaptive, and tailored to the unique needs of diverse student populations, particularly neurodivergent students and multilingual students. AI can help by creating tools designed to serve all students fairly and effectively without taking away from the individuality of our students.
One of the technology’s most promising capabilities is its ability to provide real-time, actionable feedback to students and teachers. Tim Brodsky, an AI thought leader who taught social studies at XQ High School Círculos in Santa Ana, California, was recently recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for his innovative use of generative AI to support multilingual learners in his AP courses. With automated, real-time feedback, Brodsky said systems can analyze data and provide immediate insights into student engagement, attendance and other factors to predict risk factors. “This takes the burden off teachers, who often have to dig through spreadsheets to find trends and nuances,” he said. “AI provides a better way to collect holistic data and a more effective way to measure it.”
Student data, however, has always come with caveats. All too often, algorithms reflect biases in the data they’re trained on. Stanford researchers found that this can result in the writing of non-native English speakers being mischaracterized as AI-generated, and experts at MIT found language models that classified certain jobs, like secretary or flight attendant, as female. XQ addresses this problem by working closely with developers to ensure that its products are more culturally responsive to the needs and outcomes that educators want their students to have.
For example, teachers at Crosstown partnered with edtech company Inkwire to develop project-based learning (PBL) experiences. The company’s CEO and co-founder Aatash Parikh said the collaboration was beneficial for both parties and influenced the evolution of the company’s AI products. “As teachers at Crosstown High School walked us through their workflow for designing project-based learning experiences, we realized what would make Inkwire a more complete solution for schools,” he said.
A former PBL teacher herself, Parikh wanted to ensure that Inkwire’s generative AI tools didn’t just stop at creating PBL plans, but also incorporated deeper pedagogical layers to be more responsive to teachers and schools. At Crosstown High, teachers including science teacher and Head of Innovation and Research Nikki Wallace showed the Inkwire team what they were learning from each other and how to incorporate that professional feedback into their platform. “We’re helping these makers understand how equity is created in the classroom, and helping them create more responsive products,” Wallace said. “Teachers learn best from other teachers.”
Promoting ethical collaboration between educators and developers
The days of tech-first solutions are over; what’s needed now is a deep partnership where developers and educators work hand in hand to ensure that AI tools are technologically sound and pedagogically effective. The DOE’s new EdTech guidelines refer to this as a “dual stack” approach: a framework that combines the “development stack” applied to product creation with an “accountability stack” to ensure those products are built with ethics, transparency, and public trust for use in the classroom.
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While many AI tools help create engaging projects and lessons, Wallace wanted a tool that better supported personalized learning. During her collaboration with Inkwire, she said XQ connected her with other AI makers, like Playlab, to build an AI Chatbot that would support an interdisciplinary, community-focused project for her students.
“We pre-populated the bot with all the information I need to create a successful learning experience in my classroom,” Wallace explained. Her students looked at statistics about infectious diseases affecting Memphis. Their chatbot then served as what Wallace called a “cognitive partner.” It guided them through the science project by unpacking and generating complex questions, such as, “What community partners in Memphis can I reach out to?” and “What information in the research might I have missed?” and “What government systems are in place?” From there, Wallace said, students figured out which learning competencies were tied to the project.
“We wanted students to be able to identify, build and then reflect on the project benchmarks, learning outcomes and learning pathways they would need to progress at their own pace.”
Wallace said this experience was based on two of the XQ Design Principles: Meaningful, Engaged Learning and Youth Voice and Choice. The chatbot helped make learning more personal and rigorous.
Betsey Schmidt, founder and CEO of MeshEd and an experienced curriculum designer, said that customizable large language models (LLMs) like PlayLab and Inkwire can transform lesson planning. “By understanding what excites and motivates students, educators can more easily tailor core curricula to connect with students on a deeper level, incorporating their passions, hobbies, strengths and growth areas — and making real connections to students’ profiles,” she explained. Schmidt has partnered with XQ to bring high school teachers and leaders into the AI-for-learning product design cycle
Looking ahead
By this time next year, generative AI will likely move from niche applications to widespread use whether we’re ready for it or not. But education systems and policies are incredibly resilient to change. The recent pandemic made that painfully clear, as schools often reverted to business as usual rather than embrace new models of learning, such as awarding credit for content mastery rather than time served (Carnegie units), a rigid system that has been in place for more than a century and is ripe for change. (XQ and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have teamed up to address this problem.)
AI is already showing us how to make education more personal and equitable. By encouraging tech leaders and makers to continue to collaborate with educators at events like EdTechWeek in New York City next month, we can work toward a future where all students can reach their potential — and where educators can make the most of their talent.
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