Technology Essentials in Education Episode 34:
Human-Centered AI Strategy for Education Executives

Welcome to today's episode of Technology Essentials in Education. Today I'm chatting with Marlon Styles Jr. about leadership strategies in the age of AI. I've had the chance to see him speak at different conferences and events and knew he would be able to really talk us through the leadership challenges as well as some of the strategies behind using AI in those roles. So he has served as superintendent in the past and now works with lots of different districts. He's seen so much in the field and he shares lots of tips and strategies in this conversation you're definitely going to want to listen in.

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Welcome to the podcast. I am so excited. Monica, thanks for having me. It's so good to see you again. Excited to be on the podcast today. Marlon Stiles, thrilled to still be serving educators across the country. I was superintendent for six years at Middletown City School District here in Southwest Ohio. I'm not an Ohio State fan. I love all things Michigan. Go Big Blue. Since I've left the superintendency role, I've been doing a lot of consulting with school districts across the country, serving as a thought partner, really trying to push what's possible in education as we serve our kids. I'm a keynote speaker, author, and just excited to be supporting educators from all walks of life.

You and I have known each other for a bit just from the different conferences that we got a chance to go to and the people we get to meet and chat with. I know your perspective is really in a few different roles, but particularly talking about leadership today and kind of the AI of it all. How has your background as a superintendent shaped the way you think about AI and decision making at that level?

Yeah, just with some leaders in Vermont here recently, we were having conversations about this exact topic. I think from an experience standpoint for me, and you're probably the exact same, it's not always been about the technology itself. For me, it's about the leadership strategy around making decisions and where is the place in that leadership strategy where AI can be invited into our strategy as leaders. I really like to stress this notion of when we have strategic decisions that we need to make, when we have critical decisions that we need to make as leaders, as executive leaders, as superintendents, there are certain types of decision makers out there.

There are those decision makers that are able to anticipate the moment when the strategic decision needs to be made, anticipate. And there are some leaders out there. I was this way my first few years as a superintendent. I was always reacting to the circumstance and the current reality. The reality was I was being forced to make that critical decision, the strategic decision. From an experience standpoint as a former superintendent, I really lean into this notion of how might we become more strategic about the moments where we anticipate having to make very big critical decisions.

And I can imagine right now, too, for so many leaders in different roles, it's no longer a surprise that they are going to have to have a conversation about AI. When we talk about leadership in the age of AI, what does that actually mean for an executive, the school leader, superintendent and their teams?

Now, if you don't mind, if I pause, you brought something very unique, the team, before we talk about AI being part of the team. As we think about the team itself, there is a decision-making structure in every organization. In my conversations with some school districts here recently, we've really been talking about this idea of when it's time to make strategic decisions, when it's time to make critical decisions, we often have a really bad habit of convening the same inner circles to make the decisions.

No matter if it's pressing, critical, or a strategic decision we can anticipate, we convene the same inner circles. For me, my executive team, as great as I felt that we were or thought that we were, other people might think differently, but I relied on that team specifically to make those big decisions. I would press the conversation to say as strategic decision-makers, can we become more aware of the expertise that we have inside our organizations? Might we think about abandoning the same inner circles for the decision-making and convening new inner circles based on the expertise in the organization and convening that expertise to tackle that big decision we're trying to make?

Particularly when it's a new kind of subject matter that might not be everyone's comfort level, let alone their expertise around that subject. That's a new habit for us as leaders, investing human capital and time to go capture the expertise out in an organization. It's a new behavior, a new mindset, but after we capture it, are we willing to shift our practice to leverage the right expertise at the right times to make the right decisions?

That's huge. I think for someone who might already feel like they've got a strong cabinet or a group that they lean on but may need to expand that or look beyond their normal trusted sources as they're thinking about this new or big topic. There's a lot of conversation about AI for teachers and for students and what that looks like, but a bit less about AI for the people making those big-picture decisions in a district. Why is this conversation around executive use of AI something that might not be front and center for someone looking in? Why is that so important?

It's important for two reasons. Number one, we focus on teachers a hundred percent of the time because they're closest to the most important assets in our communities and that's our kids. We as administrators are service minded, so we're always going to be thinking about others. Sometimes we don't focus on the strategic opportunities. We have to elevate our capacity as leaders, part A. Part B, the other reason I think it's pressing is because we don't really pay attention to that old-school movie called Knight Rider. Remember that movie? Watch that show, Knight Rider? I'm familiar enough with it, even though I'd like to think I'm right on the edge of it being before my time.

I feel, these are my feels, I feel like we as leaders can become a little bit more like David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider. If you go back to that show, Kit was the car. Hasselhoff had a companion as he had to make decisions in every single episode. He relied on that companion to help him think. Kit offered companionship, thought partnership, and acted in different ways. Kit didn't make decisions; Hasselhoff made those decisions. So I think we as leaders might be able to shift the focus back to ourselves and entertain this idea: how might we invite AI into our practice, similar to how Hasselhoff did Kit? Can we bring Kit in, create our own Kit as an AI companion to be part of our decision-making strategy?

I think the importance there for leaders is we might fear that AI is going to be the decision maker. It's not. It's just going to be a companion. We as humans will make the decision. We can rely on that companionship for thought partnership, for simulation, to identify blind spots, to offer us alternative perspectives on how to make decisions or run different types of simulations. It might analyze some information for us and give us some findings. But I might press on that topic a little bit as we focus on ourselves beyond efficiency in the role and look at it more as companionship as we think through different scenarios as leaders.

What a great visual, right? Just this idea of you are literally in the driver's seat when you're using AI, but you have that thought partner, that collaborator, this way to gather an idea, but you're really the one deciding on how or if you're going to execute on that idea. From a systems level too, what does it look like in practice when someone captures the expertise that already exists across an organization and how does AI play a role in that process?

I draw some inspiration from the Stanford research that came out around flash teams. It is some of my favorite reading here. The inspiration came from how emergency room teams really function. When a critical challenge shows up in the emergency room, you don't get the same team responding to every critical situation. Depending on what the situation calls for, different resources in the ER show up to try to tackle that problem. We can house all that expertise in the AI resource. As we identify strategic decision-making moments, we can engage that AI resource and it can navigate which pieces of expertise we need to convene. We can go extend those invitations to be at the table to contribute to the decision-making piece. I find that kind of inspiration really useful for us as executive decision-makers about how flash teams and AI might show up in our practice.

Especially if you are working in a large district and you have people who might not physically be present in the same building throughout the day. Like, how do I find the right person to help with a particular goal? That kind of gets me into my next question for you, which is around that strategic decision-making. For a superintendent or a district leader who wants to start using AI to support their strategic decision-making, what's a good first step or a good entry point for them?

I think a good entry point is just make a basic gem. And I mean the word basic. It doesn't have to be super complex. As a matter of fact, we don't want it to be complex. Keep it super simple. I might offer this perspective of establishing what a pressure test might look like for any decision that you might make. Take AI out of it for just a moment. What if your team built a concept map that talked about a pressure testing mechanism that the team would engage in for any big decision that they needed to make? That concept out on the wall. Don't even think about the technology for a moment. Big decision needs to be made. Here's our structure to go through to make the decision. Here's how we would pressure test any decision we make to make sure it's the right decision. Take that concept map and build your gem accordingly based off of that concept map. Then as your team entertains making these big decisions, just simply act with the gem, share the context that you need to and ask it to conduct the pressure test. Based on all those findings you get back from the gem, just re-engage your human-centered team again, respond to the pressure test, and then you can make some better decisions about whether you are on track or if you need to make some course corrections on what you might be entertaining.

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That's a great first step for someone who might already have frameworks that they're working with. They have already done that heavy lifting and hard work of saying what's important to us here, and then putting it inside of a space like a gem where you can have this repeatable experience. But like you mentioned, it's just one part of the process. You're bringing that back to the team, which I think is such an important point to make.

One thing that is oftentimes, I don't know, maybe I just hear more about it outside of education, agentic AI and using agents, I would imagine that in the level that we're talking about here in different use cases, agentic AI might have a place. I'm wondering if you have seen this, and if so, if you could tell us what it might look like, what agentic AI might look like for an executive leader, and how it's a little bit different than, say, a chatbot or some of the other use cases that we might be more familiar with.

You make me immediately start thinking of a couple things. Number one, when I think of what you just shared, I'm not very academic, so if this comes off differently, I'm just going to share what's in my crazy brain. I think about this vault of information. If I can take some of my local context and put it in this vault and close off what this agent is going to be able to reference, that's going to give me some confidence it's thinking similar to my local context. I'm going to take my strategic plan and put it in this repository of a library. I'm going to take my MTSS framework and drop it in there as well. I'm going to take my strategic communications plan that has my messaging and my district voice, and I'm going to put it in there. I'm going to put all these specific resources that make sense for what my team is trying to accomplish, and I'm going to feed it into this configuration. That's the knowledge bank that I want this agent to be able to interact with.

So I immediately go to, as a superintendent, I want to have confidence that what it's pulling from, I want to have confidence that it is us, that it's not just some random Monica resource or Marla resource. I want to make sure it's familiar to us, part one. So for those who are thinking about using this, they think about feeding and configuring it with the right knowledge of resources, part one. Part two, I might ask us to be thinking about as we continue to evolve, if we want to evolve our learning out in the school system, it's important to continue educating this agent on whatever those findings may be. If we want it to evolve its thinking and companionship with us, we've got to make sure that we continue to help it learn a little bit more about any of those discoveries or those new findings. I would say share that with the agent so it can evolve its thinking, part two. Then part three, I think it's about what we ask it to do for us. That's where the fun part comes into play.

If I'm going to make a decision, I might ask it to run a simulation. Here are the success indicators I'm looking for. Here's the impact I'm looking for. Here's a scenario. Here's the decision I'm thinking about making. Run three simulations and give me a perspective about what the outcomes may be. I might ask this agent, based on what we're thinking about going to do, are there any alternative approaches you think we should be considering as we make different decisions? I might ask it to identify some blind spots. Like I said before, what am I not thinking about in this decision-making process? Are there more things I should consider before coming back to make some decisions? I think that is a unique context to maybe think about as it relates to interacting with the agent.

And then I'll close out with this last piece here. As we make decisions as leaders, I'm going to say a shame on me statement. I'd make a decision, we put that decision in, jot down the spelling of the word you're going to play, and when things got back on the right track, my mind and our practices, we just moved on to the next thing. I think there's a unique opportunity for us if we're going to leverage agentic AI to go capture all of those new learnings and the decisions that we made, so that we update the memory or the agent that we're interacting with, so that when our next team gets together to make a decision, we have some of that learning that we can rely on that might better inform us as we start that decision-making cycle. So I think there's a unique opportunity for agentic AI to show up in that kind of context.

Yeah, and it's not just a one-time thing. There's this opportunity for growth together that I think is so crucial or different, like you alluded to, that we might think about other initiatives or other decisions that we're making. Just like we're getting new info and learning new things, we have an opportunity to train this tool to grow along with us.

I work with lots of different schools and different environments, and I hear lots of different big feelings, sometimes how I describe it, or healthy hesitations, which I think everyone should have when they're interacting with technology that's moving really quickly, that's feeling like it might be moving at a speed that's hard to stay ahead of. So how can leadership teams build a shared understanding of AI together? Jotform AI is a great way to bring people together, especially when they likely have team members at very different comfort levels with technology or very different feelings about the way AI is being used inside and outside of education.

Take your time. Say it again. I'm going to say it slow. Take your time. As a class, as a profession, when an emerging technology or trend shows up in education, immediately there's this vertical spike where it shows up in school districts across this country and in front of our learners. We're in that spike right now as it relates to AI, so not in a hurry to figure this out this exact moment. Be very strategic in how you approach this, and plan for it to be in your local context strategically for a period of time. We did this with one-to-one. We did this with personalization. That emerging trend showed up. We hustled to get there, and then there's this flat line. We'll go through that same experience with AI.

I like to encourage leaders to think about just taking your time, engaging your community, making sure we are calibrated on teaching with and teaching about AI as it relates to what we're trying to do with our students. Everyone should come up with that perspective, put your strategy together like any other big idea or big move you might make, move it in implementation, and as long as your team's doing it for the right reasons with kids, you'll be in a great spot. No rush. Take your time, but hurry up at the same time. Especially when people feel like this momentum or energy building around something, they kind of want to run to it. But I think that piece of advice is so perfect to leave listeners with, that it is important to take that pause, to take their time, and do all of the things we've talked about today around community and the conversations and really the intention behind some of these decisions.

So, Marlon, where can people connect with you? Where can they follow along? Where can they learn more about your work?

You can connect with me. It's very easy. MarlonStyles.com. You can check my website out. I got my book up there. Fresh Styles is out if you're looking for motivation each week or if you're looking for a speaker or someone to come facilitate in your district. Love supporting school districts across this country. Appreciate everyone and what they do. I want to thank all our educators for the service. And, Monica, I really appreciate you having me today.

Thank you so much for coming on and just sharing your energy, your enthusiasm, and your really practical strategies for leaders who are exploring something pretty big.

It was so much fun chatting with Marlon. I'm sure you jotted down a few takeaways of your own, but let's finish up this episode like we always do with a couple reminders, a couple things to put in your back pocket, some of those takeaways from the conversation.

First, shift from reacting to anticipating when it comes to strategic decisions and consider where AI can support that process. Expand your inner circle by identifying the right expertise across your organization for each decision instead of relying on the same team every time. Build a custom gem or agent grounded in your local context by feeding it your strategic plan, frameworks, and communication guidelines. And finally, use AI to run simulations, identify blind spots, and surface alternative approaches before finalizing a big decision.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Technology Essentials in Education. A big thank you to Jotform, the presenter of today's episode. To learn more about Jotform and how educational institutions can get a 30% discount on Jotform Enterprise, head to Jotform.com slash enterprise slash education.