Mike Paul

  • AI Schools and the Illusion of Efficiency

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    Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Pexels.com

    A recent investigation into Alpha School, a high-tuition “AI-powered” private school, revealed faulty AI-generated lessons, hallucinated questions, scraped curriculum materials, and heavy student surveillance. Former employees described students as “guinea pigs.”

    That’s the headline.

    But the real issue isn’t whether one school deployed AI sloppily.

    The real issue is whether we are confusing technological acceleration with educational progress.

    The Seduction of the Two-Hour School Day

    Alpha’s pitch is simple and powerful: compress academic learning into two hyper-efficient hours using AI tutors, then free the rest of the day for creativity and passion projects.

    If you believe traditional schooling wastes time, that promise is intoxicating.

    But here’s the problem:

    Efficiency is not the same thing as development.

    From a Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) perspective, learning is not merely the transmission of content. It is a process that integrates cognition, emotion, identity, and social context. Durable learning requires safety, belonging, agency, and meaning-making.

    You cannot compress belonging into a two-hour block.

    You cannot automate identity formation.

    And you cannot hallucinate your way to deep understanding.

    Connectivism Is Not Automation

    Some defenders of AI-heavy schooling argue that we are simply witnessing the next phase of networked learning. Knowledge is distributed. AI becomes a node in the network. Personalized pathways replace one-size-fits-all instruction.

    That language sounds connectivist.

    But Connectivism is not about replacing human nodes with machine ones.

    It concerns the expansion of networks of meaning.

    In a connectivist system:

    • Learning happens across relationships.
    • Knowledge flows through dynamic connections.
    • Judgment matters more than memorization.
    • Pattern recognition and critical filtering are essential skills.

    AI can participate in that network.

    But when AI becomes the primary instructional authority — generating content, generating assessments, evaluating its own outputs — the network collapses into a closed loop.

    AI checking AI is not distributed intelligence.

    It is recursive automation.

    Connectivism requires diversity of nodes.

    Not monoculture.

    Surveillance Is Not Personalization

    The investigation also described extensive monitoring: screen recording, webcam footage, mouse tracking, and behavioral nudges.

    This is framed as personalization.

    It is not.

    It is optimization.

    SoLD research clarifies that psychological safety and autonomy are foundational to learning. When students feel constantly watched, agency erodes. Compliance increases. Anxiety increases.

    You can nudge behavior with surveillance.

    You cannot cultivate intrinsic motivation that way.

    If our model of learning begins to resemble corporate productivity software, we should pause.

    Education is not a workflow dashboard.

    The Hidden Variable: Selection Bias

    To be fair, Alpha School reportedly produces strong test scores.

    However, high-tuition schools serve families with financial, cultural, and educational capital. Research consistently shows that standardized test performance correlates strongly with income.

    If affluent students succeed in an AI-heavy environment, that does not prove that the AI caused the success.

    It may simply mean the students would succeed almost anywhere. I often say those students would succeed with a ham sandwich for a teacher.

    The question is not whether AI can serve already advantaged learners.

    The question is whether AI, deployed without deep pedagogical grounding, strengthens or weakens human development.

    The Real Design Question

    The danger is not AI itself.

    The danger is designing educational systems around what AI does well.

    AI does well at:

    • Drafting content
    • Generating practice questions
    • Scaling feedback
    • Recognizing surface patterns

    AI does not do well at:

    • Reading emotional context
    • Building trust
    • Modeling intellectual humility
    • Navigating moral ambiguity
    • Forming identity

    SoLD reminds us that learning is relational and developmental.

    Connectivism reminds us that learning is networked and distributed.

    If we optimize for what AI does well and marginalize what humans do uniquely well, we create a system that is efficient — but thin.

    Fast — but shallow.

    Impressive — but fragile.

    What This Means for Public Education

    This story is not merely about a private school engaging in aggressive experimentation.

    It is a preview.

    Every district will face pressure to:

    • Automate instruction
    • Replace textbooks with AI tutors
    • Compress seat time
    • Increase data capture

    The answer cannot be a blanket rejection.

    Nor can it be an uncritical adoption.

    The answer is design discipline.

    We should use AI to:

    • Reduce administrative drag
    • Prototype lessons
    • Support differentiated feedback
    • Expand access to expertise

    But we should anchor every AI decision in two non-negotiables:

    1. Does this strengthen human relationships?
    2. Does this expand student agency and meaning-making?

    If the answer is no, we are not innovating.

    We are optimizing the wrong variable.

    The Choice in Front of Us

    We stand at a fork.

    We can design AI systems around human development.

    Or we can redesign human development around AI systems.

    One path amplifies Connectivism, relational trust, and whole-child growth.

    The other path creates compliant, monitored, hyper-efficient learners who score well but lack deep agency.

    Technology will not make that choice for us.

    We will.


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  • Why Do They Fear Dragons?

    For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.

    I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula K. LeGuin lately. Whether or not it’s because I hadn’t read much of her work before I read The Dispossessed last year, I’m not sure. But I wish I had.

    I’m working through her essays published in The Language of the Night and am transfixed by her words and thoughts.

    She’s so fucking good.

    As I watch the current state of the world play out and think about all the “bullies” who now sit in high political positions in our country, and I think back to my high school days and those bullies, there is a recurring constant: their hatred of all things fantastical.

    And this Le Guin quote feels very appropriate for this moment:

    For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it, too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons because they are afraid of freedom.


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  • Why We Still Need Shakespeare’s Words

    Before we argue—again—about whether Shakespeare is still relevant, it’s worth watching a three-minute clip that does more to answer the question than any curriculum guide ever could.

    On The Late Show, Ian McKellen closes an interview with Stephen Colbert by performing a speech written over 400 years ago. The words come from Sir Thomas More, a play never staged in William Shakespeare’s lifetime but widely attributed—at least in part—to him.

    McKellen doesn’t modernize the language.
    He doesn’t explain it.
    He just performs it.

    And suddenly, the room changes.

    The speech is addressed to a mob angry at “strangers”—immigrants. Instead of scolding them, the speaker does something far more dangerous: he asks them to imagine. Imagine families forced to leave. Imagine being driven out. Imagine becoming the stranger yourself.

    That move—imagine this is happening to you—lands just as hard now as it did in the early 1600s.

    This is the moment worth showing students.

    Not because it’s Shakespeare trivia.
    Not because it’s historically interesting.
    But it reveals what Shakespeare actually does when he’s at his best.

    He doesn’t tell audiences what to think.
    He doesn’t offer slogans or easy answers.
    He uses language to stretch empathy, flip perspectives, and force the listener into moral discomfort.

    When McKellen delivers the lines, you can feel it: this isn’t “old English.” This is a warning. A mirror. A test of imagination.

    This is also why Shakespeare still belongs in classrooms.

    Students don’t need Shakespeare because he’s canonical.
    They need him because he trains a skill we desperately need more of: the ability to see ourselves in someone else’s place.

    When we teach Shakespeare as a decoding exercise—translate the words, answer the questions, move on—we miss the point. Shakespeare was writing for performance, for crowds, for moments like this one, where language interrupts complacency.

    If students can watch this clip and feel its weight, then the question isn’t “Why are we still teaching Shakespeare?”

    The question is “What happens when we stop teaching students how to imagine?”

    And Shakespeare, inconveniently, still has some of the best words for that job.

    The Stranger’s Case

    Grant them [the immigrants] removed.

    And grant that this your noise hath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs with their poor luggage, plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation; and that you sit as kings in your desires, authority quite silenced by your brawl, and you in ruff of your opinions clothed. What have you got?

    I’ll tell you: you have taught how insolence and strong hand should prevail, how order should be quelled. And by this pattern not one of you should live an aged man; for other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, with self‑same hand, self reason and self‑right, would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes feed on one another.

    You’ll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses. Oh, desperate as you are, wash your foul minds with tears; and those same hands that you, like rebels, lift against the peace, lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees, make them your feet to kneel, to be forgiven.

    And say now the king, as he is clement if the offender mourn, should so much come too short of your great trespass as but to banish you. Whither would you go?

    What country, by the nature of your error, should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders, to any German province, Spain or Portugal—anywhere that not adheres to England—why, you must needs be strangers.

    Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper, that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth; set their detested knives against your throats, spurn you like dogs, and, like as if that God owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements were all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them?

    What would you think, to be thus used?

    This is the stranger’s case; and this your mountainish inhumanity…


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  • The Building is Closed, The Vibe is Open

    The Building is Closed, The Vibe is Open

    The first great snowstorm of 2026 hit Kentucky last week and sent many schools either to pure snow days or Non-Traditional Instruction (NTI) days. So, I spent most of last week sitting at my desk, unshowered, unshaved, and low-key fiending for in-person human interactions.

    Doing my best to keep spirits up, I put together a quick playlist with some of my late-70s baby post-punk/new wave goodness and shared it with my teachers.

    The reviews were overwhelmingly positive.


    The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

  • Belonging Is a Design Choice

    Belonging is one of the most talked-about—and most misunderstood—ideas in education.

    We often treat it like a feeling that students either bring with them or don’t. If students feel disconnected, we respond with posters, slogans, or one-off activities meant to “build relationships.”

    Those things aren’t bad. But they’re not enough.

    Here’s the shift that matters:

    Belonging isn’t a feeling problem. It’s a design problem.

    What the Science of Learning and Development Tells Us

    Research on the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) shows that belonging is deeply linked to learning. Students are more likely to engage, persist, and take academic risks when they feel safe, seen, and valued.

    But belonging doesn’t magically appear.

    It’s shaped by instructional choices:

    • Who gets to speak—and how often
    • Who gets choice and agency
    • Whose knowledge and experiences are treated as valuable
    • How mistakes are responded to
    • Whether feedback invites growth or signals judgment

    In other words, belonging lives inside the work itself.

    Why Posters Aren’t Enough

    A classroom can say “You belong here” on the wall and still send the opposite message through its design.

    If tasks are rigid, voices are limited, and thinking is narrowly defined, students quickly learn where they stand.

    Belonging isn’t something we add after instruction.

    We build it into it.

    Designing for Belonging

    Designing for belonging doesn’t mean lowering expectations. It means creating structures that invite students to participate meaningfully.

    That can look like:

    • Tasks with multiple entry points
    • Opportunities for students to connect learning to their experiences
    • Structured collaboration where every voice has a role
    • Feedback that focuses on growth instead of compliance

    When belonging is intentional, students are more willing to engage deeply—and learning becomes more durable.

    A Coaching Note from the Field

    When teachers ask how to “build better relationships,” I often start with lesson design.

    Relationships grow when students feel their thinking matters.

    Belonging isn’t an add-on.

    It’s an instructional choice.

    If this way of thinking resonates, I write a short weekly newsletter for teachers and instructional leaders focused on authentic learning, instructional coaching, and designing schools that actually work.

    You can subscribe here.

  • Engagement Is the Outcome, Not the Goal

    For years, we’ve treated engagement like something teachers should be able to manufacture on demand.

    If students aren’t engaged, the assumption is often that the lesson wasn’t exciting enough, interactive enough, or energetic enough. So we add activities. We add movement. We add tools. We add noise.

    And then we’re surprised when it still doesn’t work.

    Here’s the hard truth I’ve learned as an instructional coach:

    Engagement isn’t something you plan for. It’s something you earn.

    Why Planning for Engagement Often Backfires

    When engagement becomes the primary goal of lesson planning, we usually end up designing around surface-level behaviors:

    • Are students busy?
    • Are they moving?
    • Are they talking?
    • Are they smiling?

    But none of those things guarantees learning.

    In fact, classrooms can look highly engaged while very little meaningful thinking is happening. Students comply. They complete. They perform school.

    And teachers feel frustrated because they did everything “right.”

    What the Research Actually Tells Us

    Research connected to the Science of Learning and Development (SoLD) consistently points to the same conclusion:

    Engagement follows meaning.

    Students are more likely to engage when:

    • The task feels relevant to their lives or the world around them
    • They have some sense of ownership or choice
    • The thinking required actually matters

    When those conditions are present, engagement emerges naturally. When they’re missing, no amount of energy can save the lesson.

    This is why gimmicks don’t scale—and why they exhaust teachers.

    Shifting the Planning Question

    Instead of starting with:

    “How do I make this engaging?”

    Try starting with:

    “Why would this matter to a student?”

    That single question forces a different kind of design thinking:

    • What problem is being explored?
    • What decisions are students being asked to make?
    • Who or what is this work for?
    • Where does student thinking actually show up?

    When lessons are built around those questions, engagement becomes a byproduct—not a burden.

    What This Means for Teachers

    This shift doesn’t require abandoning structure, rigor, or content. It requires recentering the work on meaningful thinking rather than performance.

    It also reduces burnout.

    When students carry more cognitive load, teachers don’t have to bring all the energy. The work itself does more of the heavy lifting.

    That’s not about doing less—it’s about doing different.

    A Coaching Note from the Field

    When teachers tell me, “My students just aren’t engaged,” my response is rarely about strategies.

    It’s usually about the task.

    Fix the task, and engagement often surprises you.

    If this way of thinking resonates, I write a short weekly newsletter for teachers and instructional leaders focused on authentic learning, instructional coaching, and designing school in ways that actually work.

    No spam. No gimmicks. Just clear thinking from the field.

    You can subscribe here.

  • New Semester, New Quote

    "I'm gonna go grab a Coke or something caffeinated, because it's gonna be a long night." -Will Byers

    I have a small whiteboard outside my office door. Being the inspirational do-gooder that I am, I change out the quote at least once a week. Sometimes the quotes are fun, sometimes more meaningful.

    I though this was an appropriate quote for our first week back to class.

    “I’m gonna go grab a Coke or something caffeinated, because it’s gonna be a long night.”

    -Will Byers


    The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

  • New Tools I’m Trying in 2026

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    Photo by Tara Winstead on Pexels.com

    I’m revisiting some of my everyday tools as we head into 2026. Why? Because… reasons…

    Mostly, I’m thinking about how I move through my days and how I combine analog and digital tools to keep my monkey brain moving and productive.

    Tool 1: I’ve moved away from Google Search. Face it, friends: it’s trash. Whether beset by so many ads you can’t find actual sites or that actual, worthwhile sites are pushed further and further down the page because of the ongoing enshittification of Google and other services, I’ve switched to Kagi.

    I won’t go into all the details of why here (soon), but suffice it to say that Kagi just works like a good search engine should. Yes, I now pay for the privilege of decent web searches. Or, I ask ChatGPT for an awful lot of things before I try any searches at all.

    Tool 2: I’m abandoning Notion for all but one thing, and that’s tracking my reading. I’ve got a database for all my books (read, TBR, and want to buy) in a Notion database and using a tool called NotionReads, I can easily add books to the database, pulling necessary data for each book.

    I thought about just using a Google Sheet for this purpose, but Notion works well for this process. For my daily note capture and digital Zettelkasten, I’m moving to Obsidian. I’ve had it for a few years but initially went with Notion for note-taking. However, after dealing with more software bloat than I wanted and only seeing more of it on the horizon for Notion – why do we always want a tool to do everything rather than just doing one thing really well? – I’m jumping ship to Obsidian.

    I’m still using Readwise to capture highlights from the web and the few remaining Kindle books I’ve yet to read – more on my shift from digital to physical books soon – and I can import those highlights seamlessly into Obsidian. I’m using Steph Ango’s usage strategy for setting up my Obsidian vault since it makes the most sense to my seeing-all-things-as-an-interconnected-web brain. More on how that progresses soon, too.

    Pulling into the final year of my dissertation journey, there’s more to come from me this year. Besides, this year marks 20 years of publishing web content, so we’ll see what that brings.


    The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

  • MP Daily Telegraph: October 16, 2025

    Photo by Amsterdam City Archives on Unsplash
    Photo by Amsterdam City Archives on Unsplash
    • New Oklahoma Superintendent Rescinds Bible Mandate: Oklahoma’s new superintendent, Lindel Fields, will not enforce the previous mandate to place Bibles in public school classrooms. This change marks a shift away from the former superintendent’s focus on culture war issues. Fields aims to improve the quality of education and student outcomes in the state.
    • Life: The First Few Levels – Traditional education resembles old computer games in its reliance on manuals and tests. Modern games teach players through simple, fun challenges that build skills and allow failure without harsh consequences. Education should be more like these games, using real-life examples to prepare students for the future.
    • As more question the value of a degree, colleges fight to prove their return on investment: Many students and families now question if college degrees are worth the high costs. Colleges are working hard to show that degrees can lead to good jobs and higher earnings. Transparency about job outcomes and skills needed is helping students make better choices.
    • Why Stories Make You Smarter Than Self-Help Books: This is a quick read, but oh so important. STORIES MATTER.

    “A life of dangerous adventures might seem worth it now… but one day, you will have children, and you will not want that life for them.” — M. L. Wang, The Sword of Kaigen


    The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!

  • MP Daily Telegraph: October 15, 2025

    The Atlantic Telegraph 1866
    The Atlantic Telegraph 1866 via Internet Archive
    • Illustrative Math’s CEO on What Went Wrong in NYC and Why Pre-K Math is Up Next – Illustrative Mathematics created a K-12 math curriculum used in many U.S. schools, but its rollout in New York City faced challenges due to implementation issues. The curriculum encourages students to think about problems before teachers explain solutions, blending direct teaching with student exploration. The organization is now focusing on early math by developing a pre-K curriculum to help students succeed from the start.
    • Mark Rober’s underwater search for a flooded Gold Rush mining town – (This is so FREAKING cool) Mark Rober used sonar and a small submarine to search for a flooded Gold Rush town under Folsom Lake in California. The town was covered by water after a dam was built in 1955. Despite challenges, the team found interesting shapes and objects on the lakebed.
    • D’Angelo: 14 Essential Songs – D’Angelo was a talented soul singer, songwriter, and producer known for his unique style and deep musicianship. He released three important albums blending soul, funk, jazz, and hip-hop, influencing the neo-soul movement. Despite personal struggles, his music remains powerful and full of emotion, exploring love, pain, and social issues.


    The Eclectic Educator is a free resource for everyone passionate about education and creativity. If you enjoy the content and want to support the newsletter, consider becoming a paid subscriber. Your support helps keep the insights and inspiration coming!