Nate McClennen, Mason Pashia

Catching Up! | An AI Research and Leadership Framework, Humanities 2.0, and Incentivizes that Fuel Communities of Learning

Share

Key Points

  • Schools must envision their future with AI, integrating it into teaching and learning strategies to remain relevant and effective.

  • The shift towards applied humanities shows the importance of interdisciplinary education in preparing students for a rapidly evolving job market.

Shownotes

Transcript
Guest Bio
Shorts Content
Links
Youtube Channel

In this episode of Catching Up, Nate McClennen and Mason Pashia explore the evolving landscape of education with a focus on AI leadership, applied humanities, and innovative learning spaces. They dive into key topics such as the role of AI in transforming educational practices, the shift towards applied humanities in higher education, and the potential of community spaces in schools to enhance learning experiences. With insights from recent developments and thoughtful discussions, this episode offers valuable perspectives for educators, administrators, and policymakers looking to navigate the future of education. Tune in to discover how these emerging trends are shaping new pathways for learners and educators alike.

Outline

Introduction and Episode Overview

Nate McClennen: We’re really excited about this episode. We’re going to start with this ping pong of things that we’ve seen in the landscape back and forth, which we always do in our opening. And then we’re going to finish

Another great theme song this time created by Mason. So make sure you stay till the end and listen to the theme song. We think it’s one of our best yet. Here’s a couple of things that I’m going to talk about in the deep dive. Really thinking about what schools should be imagining and thinking about in terms of being an AI-first organization based on Ethan Mollick’s blog that just came out, thinking about businesses. So we’re going to jump into that for a little bit. Then we’re going to talk about the use of simulations and coaches generated by AI with VR and audio coaches to increase efficiency—maybe around teacher coaching, maybe around leadership coaching, things like that. So two deep dives there for me. What’s your deep dive today, Mason?

Mason Pashia: Yep. I’ve got a couple of interesting developments with incentivizing developers with childcare and learning spaces. Just kind of rethinking the learning space. Also, colleges across the country are considering changing humanities to applied humanities, and they’re seeing some pretty great results from that. So we dive into what is an applied humanity, and then we also invite you to think about creating a pop-up for the future. So stay tuned to learn more about what that is.

Mason Pashia: Nate, great to have you back. It’s time to catch up.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, it’s time to catch up. Good to be back. I had some good travels with family, and now my brain is reset and ready to go. So excited to catch up.

Mason Pashia: What is the best vegetable on pizza when you are actually in Italy?

Nate McClennen: Ooh, best vegetable pizza. I think I had one that was roasted eggplant and mushrooms. It had zucchini on it as well, so it was like a full veggie pizza. All the pizzas where I was in central-south Italy were really affordable and cheap, like six euros each. You go into a restaurant and there’s like a hundred pizzas to choose from. They’re really hard to choose, but they’re all really good. I’m aspiring to make a crust like that because I can’t quite figure out how to make a really thin crust. I think I need a giant pizza oven that’s wood-fired and I just can’t do that.

Mason Pashia: You gotta have it like ripping hot to get the dough to that level. Otherwise, it just slowly rises in there.

Nate McClennen: Totally. I think also I need to, one other thing I’m going to do is I’m going to cook the dough first. I’m going to put the crust in, I’m going to cook the crust, and then add the toppings and cook it again. That’s my next step.

Mason Pashia: That may be a good home approach. Well, awesome. Welcome back. A lot has happened and, of course, we’ve been thinking about a lot. You’ve been having a lot of airtime, so you’ve had even more time to think.

Nate McClennen: So much writing. Maybe we should just ping pong back and forth.

Educational Innovations and Legislation

Nate McClennen: One thing that popped up on my feed was just Middle States Association, which does a lot of accreditation across the country. They have just released a micro, they’re piloting a micro schools accreditation process, which is much leaner, cheaper, and really focused on a specific type of school. It’s customized to the school rather than having a generic version. I think it’s really smart. It ties into the playbook that we just released with Learning Center Collaborative and Transcends about micro schools and micro schools in the public system. But when the more diverse schools are, how do we account and determine quality is a really interesting question. A lot of micros are resisting outside influence because that’s the reason they might have been, especially private micros. But the more we have public micros, the more we’re going to have to think about this. I think we do need lean accreditation processes. I know Victoria and our team were helpful in that process and sort of interested to see how that plays out against this larger system and bureaucracy of accreditation. So kudos to Middle States Association for thinking about that.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that’s super important.

Nate McClennen: What’s up on your side? Let’s ping.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, another thing that I saw is this Educational Choice for Children Act HR 3250. It’s just something to keep an eye on. This is the Developing and Advancing Innovative Learning Models Act, which is super interesting. It’s out in New York and it’s signifying an important commitment to fostering education innovation, which, you know, we love. That helps better meet the needs of teachers and students in the classroom. So this is an exciting thing. Our friends at Ally, the Alliance for Learning Innovation, are talking a lot about this and doing some important advocacy. It’s just a great bill. We’re aligned with a lot of the things in it and something to keep an eye on.

Nate McClennen: I wonder if it’s going to, it is a response to the cuts in the whole innovation system at the federal level with EIR, etc. Maybe it’s going to be a leaner, more innovative replacement or maybe it’s just a way to get that money back in. Who knows? But yeah, supportive of it. Love the language of it. We’ll see if it pushes forward. So, interesting.

Mason Pashia: Totally.

Future of Learning: Digital Wallets and AI

Nate McClennen: You and I are both fascinated with digital wallets. I really appreciated your posts that you wrote about imagining the learner in 2040. So I’m encouraging anybody listening to this to read Mason’s post. It was my favorite so far in 2025, giving it a stamp of Nate’s favorite post so far in 2025, and we’re about halfway through, so kudos. It’s on our site right now, but it just kept reminding me of, there is a vision. You are painting a vision for the future. To me, it seems very feasible, and you and I riff back and forth on Slack about, alright, there’s a doom version of this as well. It’s like, what happens if every learning event in your life gets recorded and put into a digital wallet? Is that good or bad? Certainly, it opens up a lot of opportunities with skills-first hiring and really capturing things out of school, but some of me was saying, oh gosh, it feels big Brother-esque. But if it’s self-sovereign, then it’s helpful. We’re doing a ton of work in Michigan right now, as you know, and came across a Michigan Learner Wallet that’s working with a number of districts there to help badge and credential learning experiences in the K-12 space and putting it on this wallet. We’re seeing, you know, Goble has one of these that’s emerging. We know down the Alabama triad, Alabama has one, North Dakota is building one. More and more states are creating these. California has their, what is it, a hundred million dollars investment in building a digital wallet.

Mason Pashia: Sizable.

Nate McClennen: So I like to see ones that are actually in practice. This Michigan one, which we hadn’t heard about, called the Michigan Learner Wallet, is functioning and they’re learning a ton from that. Really interesting. So read Mason’s LER post and check out the Michigan Learner Wallet and determine what they’re learning around that in terms of how do we get this LER ecosystem to be fully functional. My last one, I was in Brooklyn because we got stuck in Newark and on the way back from Italy and I was visiting my brother and his family who live in Brooklyn and walking along the park there, there’s a Brooklyn Bridge Park and it runs all the way down below the bridge and around that area. Came across this super cool little small, looked like a water feature with some bushes and trees and a bunch of stones. They called it the Water Lab. In the summer, my brother was saying that it’s full of water and you can go in there. There’s an Archimedes screw that brings water up and there’s different tubes and pipes that move water around and the kids can go in and play. It’s really just an immersive outdoor learning experience that’s free and open to everybody. It made me think. How much learning must go on in a place like that when you put three to seven-year-olds in this type of place where there’s water, machines, natural features, all in one place? Kudos to Brooklyn Bridge Park for creating a broader ecosystem for learning. It’s kind of a pop-up feature that’s just there and it’s permanent. Really, really like that.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. Let me give you a quick hit because I want to come back to this later in the conversation. I’m going to give you our whole conversation to think about it. I was listening to this podcast yesterday with this author named Rob Hopkins. He’s a futurist. He wrote a book recently called How to Fall in Love With the Future. He’s generally someone that postulates this thing that I think both you and I agree with, which is in order to have a future that we actually want that is better, you have to really design it now. You can’t just stumble into a better world. That’s not the way inertia works. So he does all these things, which he calls “portals to the future,” which is like a pop-up event in a place where for a moment you take it over and you make it like the future you want, and you let people inhabit it, and then it kind of goes away. It’s like, how do you let people experience the future now, so that they can sort of aspire toward it? My question for you is, what pop-up would you make to have people experiencing the future that you want? We can answer it now or later, but I’m captivated by this.

Nate McClennen: Oh, this is interesting. So this brings up a couple of things. One is it reminds me of that book, Ministry for the Future, so it’s the political version of how do you create a ministry that’s thinking generationally down the road. Humans are not very good at this, as we know. A type of pop-up, it’s gotta be something with AI and I think it would be something with interacting with multiple AI agents who are helping me learn something in an immersive way. We’ll talk a little bit about this as I was playing around with some VR stuff and thinking about audio and AI and how do you learn through avatars in that way. So I think that would be my immersive, if you go in and you interact with something that was trying to teach you something that was not human-based, imagine the future.

Mason Pashia: One of the examples that Rob Hopkins was talking about is in 2019, the climate activists, Extinction Rebellion. They closed down the Waterloo Bridge in London for four days by basically standing up people and they brought in a full forest to put on the bridge as a future pop-up. They were just like, what if it was like this instead? Birds started coming and the whole soundscape of the area changed where it was just a place for people to do yoga, a place for live music, and all this stuff. It’s just this pretty radical “what if” that I’m sure was incredibly disruptive to anybody going to work in London. But I think it’s bridges again, showing this really interesting space where there is this transitory mode that I think you could make a metaphor about it, connecting the past to the future. Connecting two land masses. Just these portals of the future are super interesting and ed and screw is a good way to start.

Nate McClennen: It is a magical thing. I think I built one of those for a middle school science project, probably along with 95% of other middle school science projects. Alright, let’s do some deep dives. We’ve got a couple of cool topics. Start us off, Mason.

Applied Humanities in Higher Education

Nate McClennen: You have something around humanities here and you and I are bullish on humanities. Let’s take a dive.

Mason Pashia: Jumping from the science project a little bit, but I think ultimately we never really leave science projects. I’ve been seeing people talking about this new-ish term called applied humanities, which is kind of the new language for colleges who are trying to get more humanities enrollment. This is a lot of Hecker reporting, so I’ll share a link to that in the show notes. Barack Obama recently was addressing Hamilton College, and he said something along the lines of, I would argue right now, unless you are really good, like one of the top 1% in terms of understanding how to code, you’re better off with a liberal arts education, which rang an alarm for a lot of people being like, what are you talking about? This is a huge shift in the narrative. Getting Smart’s been talking a lot about the changes in the workforce and kind of where AI is sinking its teeth in first. Just a really interesting provocation, but Hecker shouted out that the University of Arizona has a bachelor’s degree in applied humanities now, which is really connecting the dots between liberal arts, business, emerging technology, and medicine. Their undergraduates majoring in the humanities there has increased by 76% since changing the name of this degree and making it a little bit more spanning in terms of its scope. There’s also a couple of instances of Humanities Institutes, which really bake all of this into one program. Nate, what are your thoughts on this? I know humanities have always been a bit of a risk, but they’ve also been kind of like the source for so many people, like the source of why they’re alive, what they get out of the world. What do you think about this?

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I mean, we know that this is a battle right now. There are massive economic drivers, especially in higher ed, to get more specialized, to focus on STEM, to focus on business, things that have a clear return, especially when measured against salaries for the future. I think the counterargument that I think you and I have talked about is that as a human living in this modern era, how do we actually know things? Understand history to inform the present, understand the sciences to inform how we understand how the world works. The liberal arts or these applied humanities, it feels like, in an increasingly AI-centered world where everything is at our knowledge, is at our fingertips. We don’t have to know much, but we should know a lot. So it’s not that we have to, but we should in order to… You know how we were talking about the puzzle before and that we have this incomplete puzzle of the world because there’s so much information? It feels like something like applied humanities, liberal arts in general, help fill in puzzle pieces more for us, right? So you don’t just, you have less gaps. I love the pivot for applied because then, you’re reading texts from a thousand years ago or something like that, and those texts can then apply to common and phenomenon during the modern era. That to me is good teaching, right? Everything should have been applied. Humanities, we should always be thinking about contextualizing what we’re learning from the past or what we’re learning in science to the real world and what, how it applies to us. It feels a little bit like branding, but that’s an important thing for the survival of higher ed. But it also feels like a good pivot, especially for college professors who sometimes get really, really, really hyper-focused on a very specific discipline, to have them broaden their aperture a little bit to help students see relevance in a liberal arts education. What do you think?

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I mean, I think that it is branding, but I do think at least within this reporting, there’s some indications that it’s actually more interdisciplinary as a result of the name. I do think it changes some of the subject and the curriculum. I’m bullish on the liberal arts. I’ve always said that what an English major specializes in is synthesis, not literature. Synthesis is useful for every single field. It’s like synthesis and communication, which you’ll need in everything forever, which is kind of why there’s that English major adage that you can do anything with an English degree, but you can also do nothing. It’s like how it points you nowhere, which means it points you everywhere when you graduate. So I’m a little more hopeful that what this is, is it’s a gesture toward getting rid of some of these majors that have just been so siloed for no reason. Not to say that the subject goes away, but just like the aperture broadens and applied humanities is kind of just like a degree in living. It’s like, how do we, we’re all applying humanities every day. We empathize with each other. We are communicating with each other. We’re doing all these things and making all these connections with each other. So I don’t know. It was just an interesting move. I think it’s smart. 76% increase is substantial. That seems like a pretty big jump, so I’m curious how much more marketing dollars they put into it too, but it struck me and Obama’s saying big stuff up there on the stage. That’s a bold statement.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Also, it ties into this work on competencies that we’ve been talking about, right? So, and development of competencies. We, the erasure of discipline boundaries in more interdisciplinary real-world projects, especially in the secondary level and higher ed applied projects where you’re using those competencies, those durable skills seems to matter. We know that there’s a push. We have core skills, which are how you do basic literacy, basic math, things like that. The durable skills, which are transferable across many sectors. Then we have technical skills, which are going to be specific. Technical skills are going to become, especially in the technology sector, the extinction rate has to be really, really fast right now. Durable skills extinction rate is much, much slower. Core skills, I think extinction rate is, it doesn’t become extinct because you’re using those core skills throughout your life. Maybe the applied humanities push is something along the lines of pushing durable, a better learning experience to help students develop durable skills and transferable skills. Now, the question is, can it transfer down to high school or secondary schools? I think I still keep math separate except for maybe statistics and a few other things. But a lot of, when we see good project-based learning schools, they’re really well-integrated, and you could call them applied humanities type schools because they’re out taking content from different former disciplines and putting it together in a particular area integrating standards and competencies together to have purposeful real-world projects. Colleges maybe are catching up to that.

Mason Pashia: What I really want to see is, and if somebody’s doing this, please send us your story. We’d love to share it on the site. I’ve always thought the link between data and literature is actually very close, even though they are usually kept at opposite ends of the building. I want to see a high school class on data storytelling because there’s a website called Pudding Cool that does these really incredible data visualization stories that tell stories through data. I think that’s really what data is for at the end of the day. If you just extract data forever, you’re not really doing anything with it. You have to figure out how to put it back together to actually mean something. I would love to see some examples of that at the high school level. So if you’re doing some cool integration of language arts and data and statistics, please show us.

Nate McClennen: It’ll start, it has emerged in the data science type courses, which are becoming more and more popular. There’s still this conflict between the calculus strand of you’re going to college, you need calculus, which I don’t think is true, and the data science strand is you’re not interested in math. The reality is everybody should take a data science course. Not everybody needs to take a calculus course. Part of the data science work is how do you visualize data? I don’t think it’s highly emphasized there. I have a small caveat of maybe our AI agents will do that for us, but we still need to help them visualize what that looks like. Even if it’s text-based vibe prompting to get a good data analysis and a good visualization, important. I do appreciate that. Let’s keep an eye out and hopefully someone will ping us with a good example.

Mason Pashia: Alright. What you got for us?

AI in Schools: Leadership, Crowd, and Lab

Nate McClennen: Can I pivot? Our favorite, Ethan Mollick, we like what he writes and he’s super profound and thoughtful out of Wharton. In his blog, One Useful Thing, the last post, he had this whole context of leadership, crowd, and lab. The context was a bit about business. His context was what should businesses be thinking about in the age of AI? His three areas were leadership: you need leaders who can paint a clear vision of what the future of that particular business will look like in an AI-infused world. Second is crowd: how are all your employees using AI and how are you allowing them to use AI rather than restricting them? The third was around lab: how do you actually create a specific R&D center that takes some of the crowd ideas, brings them into the lab, codifies them, and then replicates them into the business model. Interesting. Very business-oriented. Wharton is a business school. That’s what Mollick’s thinking about. I wanted to riff on what does this look like for a school superintendent, a school board, or a school principal? This leadership crowd and lab, I’m going to walk through it, and then I’m going to ask for your reaction to it and see if you have any additions. If I was a school leader, a principal, or a superintendent, I have to think about leadership. What will my school look like using your date of 2040 from your last blog post in 2040 when AI is a thousand times more than any AI derivative? Because I think there’s going to be a lot of derivative products that come from the current large language models. What is that going to look like and how can I paint a vision? So many schools in the country are like, let’s build policy. Let’s figure out what it is. Let’s build policy, let’s restrict it. Often they’ll adopt an AI platform. Gwinnett County Public Schools in Georgia has done a really good job of infusing it in their system. They have a portrait of a graduate that’s really AI-infused, which I like to see, but they’re an anomaly out there. So really think every school leader needs to be thinking 10 years or 20 years into the future saying, what will my school look like when AI is absolutely permeating every aspect of our human culture? Second is the crowd. We know that no matter what you limit your students and your educators, your teachers to in terms of this is, you can only use this during the school day, they’re going to use something that makes their lives easier. The students that may be completing assignments that they don’t find compelling using AI for teachers, it’s going to be the same thing. How do you unleash the crowd in a way that allows a lot of experimentation to help increase learner outcomes and learner engagement? That would be my crowd part of it. The lab, and this ties back into our R&D type conversations that we’ve had is I continue to be convinced that every school in the country needs an R&D lab. That might be a quarter of someone’s position. It might be a group of people, a committee, but someone is responsible in an organization for taking the learning, in this case, the AI learning, bringing it in, figuring out ways to test and scale and share more widely. I like this idea of leadership, crowd, and lab. I think some of our micro schools work, so both Hidden Valley Middle School and Escondido in California, Myrtle Avenue Elementary. I was working with both of those folks, Myrtle Avenue’s in Lamont Elementary, also in California. Both of those schools are building micros and they consider them labs for the rest of their school. Meaning those schools are out front incorporating the portrait of a graduate that they’ve already created or a learning model or a learning set of design principles. So that concept of lab lives in the micro schools and public spaces world as a possible solution. Leadership, crowd, lab reactions, does my interpretation for schools make sense? How would you amend it or push back?

Mason Pashia: No, I think it totally makes sense. I’m going to kind of go one by one through those. For the leadership stuff, we saw a really interesting example of this also in Santa Ana Unified School District where they actually were doing, I think it was Institute for the Future was maybe consulting with them, but every quarter they would have them come in and run future scenarios to pressure test their POG against. Santa Ana had really embedded AI in their whole, their portrait and some of their internal teams as well. It was just a, I love this iterative version of these portraits, and how can you actually pressure test a vision with scenarios or these things that we’ve been talking about already this episode, like these popup future events where you’re actually taking something, assuming something might happen, and then seeing how what you think now changes. I think that’s such a valuable exercise. So all in on vision and leadership, I think that’s a great idea.

Nate McClennen: Pause for a second. I love the idea of pressure testing POGs against different types of features. I think a lot of people see POGs as static. You’ve done the work, you’re done, you post it and you’re ready. I love the idea that Santa Ana is continuing to pressure test it. Okay, so check plus there. Love that. I like the ad. Go next.

Mason Pashia: No, and I think that’s an interesting, just because POGs so often look so similar, I think they’re creating a bit of an echo chamber where all of them have critical thinking, creativity. It’s basically the four Cs kind of repurposed a lot of the time. Which is cool, but anytime everything starts to look the same, that’s a really good indication to maybe shake something up and see what falls out. I think that you have to pressure test that at risk of becoming the choir and then just being like, oh no. We all bought into this the whole time and nobody thought twice.

Nate McClennen: Not to say that it is bad if everyone has critical thinking as a primary goal.

Mason Pashia: No, I would love.

Nate McClennen: That’s a compelling argument for me, even if it is the choir.

Mason Pashia: Yes, I agree. Absolutely not knocking the four Cs at all, but just saying that is a sign to keep thinking too for the crowd. I fully agree. I mean, I think that this is happening a little more. I do think that some places are being given sort of a wider berth to actually explore what AI can do. Something Mollick said in that post, if I remember correctly, is he just made this simple reminder that basically there’s just no experts. I think that’s so important as leaders are working with their students to not have this approach be, this is how you use AI to do this. It’s actually like play, how do you keep play at the center of the crowd for me is so much of what the AI thing is about because we’re all figuring it out. Some of the most roundabout versions of things, prompting, things that I’ve done, have resulted in the most wonderful response. I would just encourage crowd, yes. Exploration. Yes, keep play very central in that piece of this framework.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, the Play Lab, like Play Lab is a great technology solution that we’re friends with those folks and they’re doing such great work to give people tools for the crowd to play. That’s the name. That’s a powerful thing that should be incorporated in, I think, in the PD of any learning organization right now is let people loose on Play Lab or other models and say, think about your current situation. Think about the situation 10 years from now and build around that. Like you said, play.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. For the lab, I think that this is true we absolutely need R&D in every school and I think that the place where AI can actually be really interesting in this is AI can not only be the thing that you are researching, but it can be your avenue of research. I’m just thinking about all these different sense-making tools that AI are supporting. Cortico.ai is one that I love that comes to mind. They’re these tools that basically gather qualitative research data and then sort of repurpose it into a useful way. I think my only ad here is just as people are thinking about these R&D implications and how to approach AI with an R&D lens. I would also encourage using AI in that process. Check out Cortico, basically a version of this would be like you could have a conversation or record a class in Cortico. It could do some really interesting processing real time of what was going on in the class, what seemed to work, what didn’t. That can become a public artifact that you then share with your broader community. It enables you to communicate in a lot of different directions. Your learnings from something such that you can get this thing that you and I keep talking about with abundance, which is these feedback loops, these rapid feedback loops within this broader community setting. I think for R&D to stick and work, you’ve got to invite a lot of people in, and that is where people get nervous a lot of the time because then they’re like, that’s just going to be a slow process if we bring a lot of people in. Yeah, just totally think R&D is important and also the AI tools that support that are really powerful.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Luckily, we already have good tools out there. Action research in education coming from the sciences is a really great tool to embed in any district. Many districts have the PDSA cycle, plan, do, study, act, and these are all rapid iterations. I just, they tend to be often extra, not core. I think if we as school leaders need to think about how do we, especially around AI adoption and visions for the future, is how do we make sure this is core to every job description is that you are part of a crowd, you have an option to be part of a lab. As a leadership group or collective co-design leadership, we can paint a picture of the future so that we’re not caught off guard, which is honestly what happens to education a lot.

Mason Pashia: Hey, just because I’m just, I’m still trying to piece together this new framework that we’re working on at Getting Smart, the Getting Smart Learning Innovation Framework. Where does R&D sit within that framework?

Nate McClennen: That’s a good question. I think that probably R&D sits within the scaling and sharing piece. Once you have adopted something within the framework, so it might be one of the five core elements. Let’s just take learning model. You have adopted, based on our pod yesterday, we were looking at using AI to help do better teacher coaching in classrooms. You have an innovation, you bring that in, and you want to figure out how to share that within your system or scale it within your system, or share and scale beyond your system. I think that bottom part of our framework, the sharing and scaling, we tend to ask that question, what’s next? You have one teacher who tried it and thought it was awesome, what happens next? That scaling and sharing piece happens.

We could figure out, I mean, obviously it could tie into strategy as well, the strategy layer, that could hit any of these. Once you have to create a strategy in order to implement.

Mason Pashia: Of course.

Shorts Content

Reimagining Community Spaces in Schools

Mason Pashia: Well, on the subject of labs that kind of takes me into my next deep dive. So just this, I think will be a briefer one, really expanding this idea of community spaces in schools using schools as multipurpose facilities. Rethinking the structural components of what a school building is. I was reading this article recently in The New York Times about the incentives that are being provided to developers for early childhood programs. This just rattled a bunch of things in my brain that I think about all the time. I know you and I have talked about how great would it be if there was a micro school in every business, just such a cool idea. I’m going to read a couple of quotes from the piece and then I’d love your thoughts if you got any builds. Basically, the developers are excited about this process because it ultimately will “make the city stronger and therefore bolster the businesses.” So there’s this piece of huge incentive for the developers. It also has popularity. If you have a community skeptical of a new building adding preschool can really help win support. It’s really helping the developers. A quote here is, “and as I talk to developers and people in the real estate industry, many of them told me that they really see amenity spaces being underused in existing condo buildings. So we may well see other developers thinking about converting spaces that just aren’t being used into amenities that can help the whole neighborhood, including preschools and childcare facilities.” I know this is true. I used to stay in an apartment complex in Seattle and the lobby was this space that clearly had been done with a lot of care, and I never saw a soul in it except for the person cleaning it in the mornings. The lobby’s not the best place necessarily for preschool, but there’s all these spaces that really emerged in the design of apartment buildings in like 2010 forward, where they have a WeWork kind of floor where it’s like, oh yeah, you can go do this, mingle, whatever. There’s just so much space that’s underutilized. So many people are needing childcare and spaces for childcare, especially in these expensive cities. I just love these things where it’s a two-sided market and both sides are leaving satisfied. It just feels like there’s the least friction to me. I’m curious if anything came to mind for you in this.

Nate McClennen: It remains, it makes me think that the WeWork equivalent is WeLearn, and maybe it’s early childhood but maybe it’s all sorts of education. Maybe this, it’s a learning center. It has an early childhood center. It has a makerspace, it has an upskilling space, it has a, whatever the case may be that anyone in the complex could come and use as part of your membership, quote unquote, in that complex. You would outsource to intermediaries, nonprofits and, and you’d have all sorts of benefits that may take care of underutilized space and also provide a benefit for the community. I like the idea. I bet you there’s examples out there of this. I don’t have a sense of them being connected to apartment complexes necessarily. There are certainly community learning spaces, but they’re not necessarily associated with a large apartment complex. I like the idea. Again, promo listeners, if you have an idea, if you have heard of something like this, please let us know and we’ll talk about it next time.

Mason Pashia: How cool would it be if you were inside like an architecture, like a six-story architecture building or something, and you had a space that was kind of a lobby that nobody was really using because those types of offices often have a lot of flex space and basically that office like sponsored a lab micro school to be within their building. So you actually maybe that third R&D budget that you’re talking about, the third of their salary, maybe in some way that can be sponsored by this business to be like, hey, we actually really want design thinking to be a thing that these schools teach because that’s super valuable in our design field. That’s a really cool, possible kind of satellite lab that could exist. Also incentivize, be a part of this broader developer incentive structure.

Nate McClennen: It makes sense. It totally makes sense in terms of the human race in that we all need to be learning, and that’s part of the fundamental part of our nature. I think we’d have to do a deep dive into the business model. There are many apartment buildings. The first floors are shops and bodegas and things like that. So that’s a clear business use case where you’re building on top. But this is a different idea. This is about focusing on learning. It doesn’t mean that you can’t charge for it, but it’s a whole different mentality of just, hey, we have empty space. Let’s lease it out. It’s, hey, we have empty space and let’s make it a benefit for our residents in some way that benefits the larger community.

Mason Pashia: Just to put a kind of final pin in this, to make it more tangible, in Seattle, there’s an incentive where you can build a higher building if you include a childcare floor. So you can, it’s actually incentivizing the developer long term to be able to have more tenants and do more things if you meet the satisfying criteria. I think it’s both a repurposing, but also as we’re thinking about new structures, how can we put these incentives in place to really serve a community and to kind of make it healthy all around.

Nate McClennen: All right here. Here’s my last one.

AI in Job Screening and Hiring

Nate McClennen: We’re pivoting back to AI, our favorite topic. I’ve had a few different demos in the last couple weeks that were interesting. I did one demo with Body Swaps, which is mostly focused on higher ed, not a whole lot of secondary penetration in terms of their market. They work with a lot of the community colleges, for example, in Wyoming. Body Swaps is teaching core skills or teaching durable skills and transferable skills through virtual avatar-based interactions.

Mason Pashia: I thought it was just Freaky Friday.

Nate McClennen: Well, it is like Freaky Friday in that you get to then watch yourself speak afterward. So it gives you a flip flop. So you’re listening to yourself and you’re actually, you do the demo and then you have some sort of, you’re swapping so you can actually hear yourself. So there’s a reflection piece. It was interesting and it made me think a little bit about the graphics and video are going to get better and better. Ultimately, it might be a conversation like this you and I are having, but I’m having a conversation with the AI version of Mason and Mason. The AI version is helping me work through some particular challenge or helping me learn something. After I did the demo, it pops up and says, here’s how you did on the particular scenario, and actually, I didn’t do very well in the scenario. It was really interesting because the scenario was empathetic listening, so I, that’s what I was being evaluated on or something along those lines. The scenario was a peer comes up and wants to talk to you about their boss or another colleague and basically say this isn’t working and do a lot of complaining about why this isn’t working for them. I kept saying, have you talked to your boss yet, or have you talked to your colleague yet? I don’t like triangulation. The person, the AI agent or that was acting, kept saying no, but I really want to talk about this. Can you listen to me? I’m like, but have you talked to them yet? Is that a possibility? So my scores in empathy were really low. So that happened. Our work and continued interactions with School Joy and Ian and their parallel platform called Nemo, and they built up and spun up a school innovation coach for us that I know you’ve practiced and I practiced using. You had an interesting discernment around is it really a coach or is it a simulation? I think that’s interesting, but the question for me is, can a leader get quicker, faster through a simulation or can a school leader get coached into moving a strategy forward through an AI agent? We have that, so we have Body Swaps, School Joy’s Nemo platform, and then Project Cafe from the Urban Assembly. Hubby Bangura, who we did a pod with yesterday, grateful for him and the team for letting him do that. It was an awesome pod. They’ve created Project Cafe, which is using AI to help accelerate the busy work of coaching when you use video, which is watching the whole video and cutting out pieces and aligning it to your framework where you’re looking at growth for teachers. All of these things sort of reminded me or prompted me, like this idea of where in education will AI simulations and coaching accelerate efficiencies? In the Project Cafe example last night, I was thinking, wow, if every teacher, let’s replace the human coach with an AI coach five years down the road when it’s more sophisticated and still use video. Then that every teacher in the country or the world could have, as long as they have a video that can video themselves, will have massive iterations of feedback that’s not limited by human staffing. It doesn’t mean that humans shouldn’t go in and work with the teachers. I’m not saying that, but I’m saying, can we get to a thousand X iterations and practice for teachers? Whereas right now we’re at one X sometimes. The same for coaching. Every leader who is busy and needs a quick five-minute conversation with a reliable coach, what does that look like? If it’s an AI coach that’s informed. Same for obviously learning around, can we, we talked about this before, but the practice of demonstrating durable skills, the real world’s going to need it all over the place. But it’s really hard to practice in the real world. The demand for experience is much higher than the supply for valuable experiences. So it just, the agent work is interesting. What does that look like?

Mason Pashia: It’s super interesting. I hate to tell you this, but the real Mason has never been on an episode of catching up. So this has been a simulation the entire time.

Nate McClennen: The real Nate hasn’t either, so this is actually true AI avatars talking to one another. We have divulged our secret only after less than 10 episodes. Mason, we shouldn’t have done that. No one’s going to listen to us anymore.

Mason Pashia: We shouldn’t have done that. We’ve also never had a real listener. They’re also bots. So this is just like existing separately in its little, it’s like its own Archimedes screw, just.

Nate McClennen: Is this like students who use AI to create essays and then submit them to teachers who use AI to evaluate the essays? Is this the same thing?

Mason Pashia: Yeah, and the teacher also used AI to come up with the prompt for the essay, so it’s just a full self-cannibalizing snake.

Nate McClennen: So listeners, if you’re out there and you’re not AI and you’re human, or if you’re AI, that’s fine too. We need some sort of vote to determine whether or not we are AI or we’re human. So that’s kind of a prompt for everybody.

Mason Pashia: I agree. If we have a hundred ratings at the end of this episode, we will know that we have some real listeners.

Nate McClennen: Outcome.

Mason Pashia: Just to build on your agent’s thing, I saw this interesting. Have you checked out Skillfully at all? It was shared by Robert Badger.

Nate McClennen: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think I’ve seen that. But remind me and our listeners.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, so Skillfully is this interesting tool where basically you can, as an employer, set up a set of simulations like you’re talking about that are AI-powered to kind of assess a potential candidate’s potential skill. Or you could do it to sort of do internal testing with your team or whatever. It got me thinking, so you and I have been talking a lot about credentials and all these things that are really like, how do you communicate to an employer at first blush what you know and are able to do? I just, part of me wonders if once AI processing is cheap enough, is a job listing just going to be like a simulation? Anybody can show up and participate. It’s going to audit and based on that, plus maybe some stuff you submit, be like, these are the top five candidates who you should interview, don’t interview anyone else. It will reduce so much friction for everybody to have that be the first pass. Also, there’s some concerns there. I think we’ve kind of seen an example of this within the coding assessment architecture where people are doing these coding tests and people are now using AI to kind of cheat through these or cheat, but through. I don’t know. It got me thinking a little bit differently about hiring and kind of where you actually communicate your skills, and if that’s something you actually have coming in that’s verified or if you just have to verify it on the fly with sort of no additional touchpoints or context before you jump in. I’m curious what you think about AI agents or simulations being this kind of barrier or threshold between you and a possible career opportunity.

Nate McClennen: I absolutely think that if you think about the amount of time it takes to screen applicants, and this could be school, let’s talk education specifically if you have a hundred applicants for a position, which isn’t always the case, and there’s some schools that get zero to one applicants, especially in rural spaces. Just acknowledging the difficulty there, but in terms of screening, it takes an extraordinary amount of time. I think very quickly, and it’s already happening in business. This is not fiction at this point, this is reality. Your first screen will be, there’ll be two parts to it. One will be an AI screen of your wallet or your resume or whatever the case may be, to link up. This is why job applicants are actually using AI to create their resumes because they can match directly to a job description and which then helps those AI bots make their application rise to the top. The second is the preliminary screen will be an AI, some version of an AI agent that you are conversing with, and then you’re going to get coded and articulated, and that’s going to help you rise to the top or not, because especially if you’re in a giant company and you have a thousand or 1500 applicants, you can do that all instantly. Your quality of applicants may go up in terms of the final selection. The challenge is, of course, you’ve got bias. How do we make sure all learners have practiced in this? Going back to schools is, if this is the way to get a job or even maybe get into higher ed in some places with more highly selective schools, then we have to give learners a lot of practice in this. If you are an AI-first leader, going back to the leader crowd and lab, if you’re a leader and painting a picture for the future along with your team, we should start thinking about workforce and that HR screen is going to be something that we need to prep students for.

Mason Pashia: Strongly agree.

Human Expression and Music Therapy

Mason Pashia: Well, Nate, let’s move into our human expression section for today. I think there’s, we both have a couple and I’ll start with just this. I feel like I’m quoting a lot of places this week, but I do, lately I’ve been trying to do a little bit more reading of journalism to support things in this strange moment. I saw this article that just really, I love this and so I’m going to just read the kind of quote. Los Angeles County is eliminating the medical debt of 134,820 residents with no strings attached. This is the quote from Los Angeles County. This kind of debt often gets bundled and sold to debt collectors for pennies on the dollar, who then go after families aggressively for the payment. But we asked ourselves, what if instead of collection agencies buying the debt, Los Angeles County bought that? What if instead of collecting it, we just forgave it? That’s exactly what we’ve done. So keep an eye on your mailbox. I just, I love any moment like this. They bought 134, this debt of all these folks for like a million dollars. It was not a huge sum of money, and the debt was worth like $300 million in terms. But debt is such a weird thing to trade in that you’re like buying it for pennies on the dollar as they’ve said. I just loved that this gesture of human forgiveness that I thought was really wonderful and a great example of expression, taking different forms.

Nate McClennen: I love that. Let’s talk math for a second because I don’t actually understand. On this. If they bought it for a million, is that, and it’s worth a lot, it’s actually 300 million or whatever the case may be. That’s the reason. Is all the interest that gets paid over time on that, is that, that the user will have to pay, or the person that owes the debt would have to pay?

Mason Pashia: Yes, it’s the interest that they owe. Because debt is sort of like a thing that you assume someone’s going to pay, but they may not pay it. There’s some amount of baked in, like possible loss or sort of assumption that you may not see it. So it actually had like an on-paper value of X, but it was worth Y. The county basically just forgave all of the potential value of this debt. But they paid the million that.

Nate McClennen: Because the long-term benefit for the county is you now have 134,820 residents who don’t have this debt, who can then use that resource to do the things either that they need to survive, food, shelter, etc., but also to buy things in the community, etc., etc. It feels like the ROI is really high on that. That’s brilliant, right? That’s amazing.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, and medical debt usually affects marginalized communities far more than others. It just feels like all around incredible. It made me smile. Needed to share it.

Nate McClennen: Here’s my smiling is that I listen to way too many podcasts and not enough music. I was thinking about music and thinking about, we’ve unplugged our Alexa because we don’t want it to listen to us, which you don’t have a choice anymore with Alexa. Now it’s like one extra step to get my Spotify account playing on a speaker in our house. This is not a big issue, but as I was playing music, it did make me think a little bit about an article I had read and just this idea of music therapy. So I did a quick deep dive, and the evidence around music showing that music can reduce pain perception by 20%. This idea that music matters. For me, which I love music and I just don’t listen to enough of it. I know you love music. I don’t have any major pain going on, but I love the idea of, hey, there are benefits to music far beyond just entertainment. I love the science interaction of that. That made me smile on my side.

Mason Pashia: This may be damning given the platform that we’re currently on, but I don’t know if this is true for you, but if I don’t listen to podcasts in the morning, I write so much better. If I listen to music only in the mornings, there’s something about, I’ve heard science or kind of science in quotes about if people, if you’re scrolling your phone or listening to stuff, you have four hours of intake that you can do a day that’s generative to you. There’s sort of a theory that if you max that out before you really start your day, you’re kind of just running on fumes mentally or whatever. I feel like anecdotally there’s some truth to that. You obviously still have time to, I don’t know, listen to catching up in the morning or something for like an hour. You don’t have to.

Nate McClennen: We should definitely prioritize that because that’s, it’s kind of music to everybody’s ears, right? In some ways.

Mason Pashia: Right. Yeah. There’s music in here and I think we’re about to get to that, but yeah. Anyway, I strongly advocate for maybe take a day out of your week where you’re like, no pods, just music today. It is really healing.

Nate McClennen: I am doing it. I’m committing to it. It’s just like the commitment to memorize that poem that you gave me, which I still haven’t done, but it’s up in my browser and sometime before the end of 2025, I’m going to recite that poem on catching up and we’re going to see how it goes.

Mason Pashia: The great thing as a poem is timeless, so it’ll be waiting for you when you’re ready for it.

Nate McClennen: Or my AI avatar will recite the poem. They’re pretty good at memorizing things though.

Mason Pashia: That’s true. They probably were trained on it.

What’s That Song?

Mason Pashia: Alright, so you spoke of music. It’s time to get into our music for the week as we kind of bring this to a close, Nate. I got a song for you today. Going to need you to guess the prompt as usual. Just a heads up. The verse is more helpful for the prompt than the chorus. We’re going to just do verse one, chorus one.

Nate McClennen: Okay.

Song plays: The city changing like the. The light flash bright with shadows used to hide. I feel the rest beneath my steady feet. I’m moving away. Life’s never on repeat. Catching up. Yeah, I’m catching my strike on and doing life with my arms open. Wide change won’t stop. Let the moments collide. Catching up. Catching up. I’m alive.

Nate McClennen: Wow.

Mason Pashia: That’s our jingle for today, thanks to Suno.

Nate McClennen: So, alright. I think every theme should be catching up. We’re creating every episode we’re creating a new theme song. So that’s, I think that you’re starting to hone in on that.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.

Nate McClennen: Okay. Good. I always have to waste some of my very precious character count on making sure catching up is in the chorus and then I have like 40 letters left. I’m going to say some sort of acapella pop, and I really like the line. Life’s not on repeat. This is the puzzle thing that we’re trying to fill in, and it’s a fire hose right now. Catching up is our attempt to figure this stuff out. Awesome. Thanks for sharing.

Mason Pashia: You got acapella pop right on. I was trying to describe Boyz II Men, but if you put in an artist’s name, they don’t let you do it for IP reasons. So I was like ’90s, so acapella R&B pop and then they would not give me a male vocalist. I asked like eight times and used all my credits. It’s very funny what they will and will not do in Suno. Amazing, great job.

Nate McClennen: Great catching up. It was a good session today, a lot to talk about, and hopefully, listeners send us prompts back, pings back. Let us know what we missed. Let us know what we should be talking about. Mason, we’ll see you next time.

Nate McClennen

Nate McClennen is the Senior Partner of Strategy at Getting Smart. Previously, Nate served as Head of Innovation at the Teton Science Schools, a nationally-renowned leader in place-based education, and is a member of the Board of Directors for the Rural Schools Collaborative. He is also the co-author of the Power of Place.

Mason Pashia

Mason Pashia is a Partner (Storytelling) at Getting Smart Collective. Through publications, blogs, podcasts, town halls, newsletters and more, he helps drive the perspective and focus of GettingSmart.com. He is an advocate for data and collective imagination and uses this combination to launch campaigns that amplify voices, organizations and missions. With over a decade in storytelling fields (including brand strategy, marketing and communications and the arts), Mason is always striving to inspire, as well as inform. He is an advocate for sustainability, futures thinking and poetry.

Subscribe to Our Podcast

This podcast highlights developing trends in K-12 education, postsecondary and lifelong learning. Each week, Getting Smart team members interview students, leading authors, experts and practitioners in research, tech, entrepreneurship and leadership to bring listeners innovative and actionable strategies in education leadership.

Find us on:

apple spotify stitcher

Related Reading

0 Comments

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. All fields are required.