Back to School 2026 Toolkit

August 22, 2026 Shwetangna Chakrabarty Leave a comment

Girls walking to school in Dar es Salaam: Oil on canvas by Shwetangna Chakrabarty

What Belongs in Our Learning Toolkit in the Age of AI

As students and teachers return to classrooms for the 2026–27 school year, the usual back-to-school toolkit looks a little different. Alongside iPads, laptops, lesson plans and freshly sharpened pencils sits something far more powerful and far more complicated: artificial intelligence (AI).

AI is no longer something happening somewhere in the future. It is already helping students explain difficult concepts, generate ideas, translate languages, analyse information and receive feedback. Teachers are using it to develop resources, differentiate learning, generate questions and reduce some of the administrative load that competes with the human work of teaching.

The question for this school year, therefore, is no longer: “Should we use AI?”

A much more useful question is: “How do we use AI without giving away the very thinking that education is supposed to develop?” That distinction matters.

The OECD’s Digital Education Outlook 2026 makes an important observation: performing better on a task with generative AI does not necessarily mean that a student has learned more. AI can improve the product while, if used indiscriminately, reducing the cognitive effort involved in creating it.

So, as we begin another school year, perhaps our most important supplies are not technological at all. Hence, here are six things I believe every student and every teacher should have in their 2026 learning and teaching toolkit.

1. Curiosity before convenience

AI is extraordinarily good at giving us answers. Hence education must remain extraordinarily good at helping us ask questions.

The temptation this year will be to start every task with a prompt: Explain this. Summarise this. Write this. Solve this.

Instead, start with: What do I think? What do I notice? What don’t I understand? What would I like to know?

Then bring AI into the conversation. Ask it to challenge your hypothesis. Ask for another perspective. Ask it to identify weaknesses in your reasoning. Ask it to generate questions you have not considered. The goal should not be to become better at getting AI to think for us, but to become better at using AI to extend our own thinking.

That requires and nurtures curiosity.

2. A healthy dose of scepticism

AI can sound remarkably confident while being remarkably wrong. That makes critical thinking, source evaluation and verification more important, not less.

Students need to develop the habit of asking: Where did this information come from? Can I verify it somewhere else? Whose perspective is represented Whose perspective might be absent? Is this fact, interpretation or fabrication?

Teachers need the same habits. AI literacy is increasingly being understood not simply as knowing how to operate an AI tool, but as being able to understand, critically evaluate and use AI responsibly. The OECD and European Commission’s 2026 AI Literacy Framework places knowledge, skills and attitudes together at the heart of preparing young people for an AI-rich world.

Perhaps one of the most valuable phrases a learner can use this year is: “I am not sure. Let me check.”

3. The ability to know what NOT to outsource

This may be one of the defining learning skills of our time. Humans have always offloaded cognitive tasks. We use calculators instead of doing long division. Calendars remember appointments. GPS remembers routes. AI dramatically expands what we can offload. But can and should are not the same thing.

If I ask AI to improve the grammar in something I have already written, it may allow me to concentrate on my argument. If I ask AI to write the argument before I have thought about it, I may have outsourced the learning itself.

This year, students and teachers need to become better at identifying the difference between productive assistance and cognitive replacement. Cognitive offloading over cognitive outsourcing.

Before using AI, ask: What is the learning here?

If the struggle is part of the learning, don’t immediately remove the struggle. The indiscriminate cognitive offloading to AI is actually cognitive outsourcing which may weaken deep reading, sustained attention, perseverance and what it describes as cognitive stamina.

Sometimes the most educationally valuable response to a difficult task is still: Stay with it a little longer.

4. Transparency

Schools will continue debating AI detection, academic integrity and what constitutes acceptable assistance. But perhaps we should spend just as much time developing a culture of transparency.

Students should become comfortable saying: “I used AI to brainstorm possible approaches.” “AI helped me identify weaknesses in my first draft.” “I asked AI to explain this concept, then checked the explanation against these sources.”

Teachers should be equally transparent: “I used AI to help generate these examples, and I reviewed them.” “AI helped me adapt this resource for different reading levels.”

Instead of creating a perpetual game of catch the AI user, we can teach young people to document and explain how, why and when they used AI. Academic integrity in 2026 cannot simply mean proving that AI was absent. Increasingly, it must mean demonstrating that human thinking was present.

5. Human skills

There is a fascinating paradox at the centre of the AI revolution. The more capable machines become, the more valuable deeply human capabilities may become.

Creative thinking. Empathy. Collaboration. Resilience. Ethical judgement. Communication. Curiosity. The ability to listen. The ability to change your mind. The World Economic Forum’s research on the future of work continues to identify both technological skills and human capabilities such as creative thinking, resilience, flexibility and agility as important in a rapidly changing labour market.

Schools therefore do not need to become less human in order to prepare students for an AI-rich future. Instead they need to become more human. A meaningful conversation with a teacher matters. Collaborating with classmates matters. Making something with your hands matters. Debating an idea matters. Experiencing failure matters. Changing your mind matters. Belonging matters.

AI may be able to simulate many aspects of human interaction. That makes authentic human connection something we should fiercely protect.

6. Agency

Perhaps this is the most important item in the toolkit. We should not educate young people simply to become users of AI systems created by somebody else. They should understand enough to question them, influence them and imagine better ones.

Learning and teaching should position students not merely as consumers of AI but as responsible users and potential co-creators, emphasising a human-centred mindset, ethics, AI knowledge and AI system design.

That shift matters. The most powerful question we can give students this year may not be: “How can AI help you complete this task?”

It may be: “What do you want AI to help humans become capable of doing?”

That is a question about agency, values and the future we want to create.

The backpack test

So perhaps before students and teachers pack their metaphorical backpacks this year, we need a slightly different checklist. Bring your laptop. Bring your AI tools. But also bring:

Curiosity to ask better questions.

Scepticism to challenge convincing answers.
Judgement to know what to delegate and what to think through yourself.
Transparency about how technology contributed to your work.
Humanity to do the things machines cannot meaningfully replace.
Agency, the confidence to use technology deliberately rather than simply allowing technology to shape how you learn.

AI will undoubtedly become more capable during this school year. The technology our students encounter in June 2027 may be substantially different from what they encounter in August 2026. That makes trying to prepare students for every new AI tool an impossible task. Instead, perhaps our responsibility is to equip them with something more enduring:

“The capacity to decide when to use AI, when to question it, when to put it aside and when to trust their own minds.“

That might be the most important toolkit we can give them.

Paul Magnuson

Game Face

August 19, 2026 Paul Magnuson Leave a comment

Set & Match, one of three card games developed by Matthias, Impact Coach.

Summer 2002, at an IBM training facility north of Milan, Italy. We’re running an English immersion summer camp for kids of IBM employees, mostly Italians. My colleague Jeff and I had created a curriculum that simulates a town, giving radical agency to students. We set some initial conditions and turned them loose. Once the program took off, there was no way to know what specific interactions to expect and where it all would lead. We had talked it through with our staff members, we were pretty sure it would work even if we had never taught in quite that way, and now after lunch on the first day of the program we were walking down the hall to tell kids how wonderful it would be. Or at least, how we hoped it was going to be wonderful.

“Whatever happens,” we agreed with each other, “make sure your face looks like you believe in this simulation one hundred percent. It’s going to work.”

We looked at each other one last time, eyebrows raised, not really sure if it was going to work, and pushed through the swinging doors into the large meeting room. Staff were getting students to sit. Most of the eyes in the room swung toward us as we positioned ourselves at the front of the room. I was smiling like I had never smiled before and I saw out of the corner of my eye that Jeff was doing the same. Game on.

I’ve pushed through a whole lot of metaphorical swinging doors into situations where I had to convey more confidence than I felt. When I was well planned things generally went well. If I was underplanned my face hurt from smiling, my cheeks burned, and things were a bit dicey.

I’m having that feeling again this week during the orientation meetings with my new colleagues at this new school as we prepare to open its doors for the first time. I’m going to lead an as-of-yet untried progressive afternoon program. I need to do my best to help faculty members feel secure in their roles before the students arrive.

Comfortingly, I’ve had a lot of practice in life now, a quarter of a century after Jeff and I pushed into the meeting room at the IBM center. Even more comforting is the talent all these educators have. In the first few days together, the faculty, known as coaches, have been sharing their own passion projects, the things they love to do. We’ve heard about flower arranging and inventing card games, authoring and baking. Without fail, when my new colleagues start talking about their passion projects, their faces light up, their eyes shine brighter. Smiles are contagious and we all smile with them. Tears are contagious, too, when the passion sometimes overwhelms.

This is our collective game face, I realize. The face that we have when we are truly invested in what we are doing, the face we have when we get to share our passion with people who really want to listen, who really want to support us. And we don’t have to fake a thing, because the passion is real.

Now, just how do we pass that on to the students?

Nicholas Alchin

Hopes and Fears at the Start of the School Year

August 8, 2026 Nicholas Alchin Leave a comment

The start of the school year brings several thousand children back onto our Campuses over an exciting few days, with many hundreds of them arriving for the first time. It’s hard not to feel the energy – new students and their families meeting teachers, everyone seeking out friends, all of them exploring what’s ahead. Mostly it is smiles and laughter, but there is also a very understandable nervousness: for some, a first day in an unfamiliar place; for others, a new year group and a teacher they have heard about but not yet met. All of them wonder whether this year will go as well as the last. And I don’t mean just on the part of the children. For parents and teachers too, there is a tension that comes from caring deeply about what’s coming.

The tension is, I would suggest, quite different to other situations. When my own children were at school, meeting their teachers wasn’t like meeting lawyers, accountants or other professionals – my kids were spending so much time with their teachers, away from me, that it made me feel vulnerable as a parent in ways that were not immediately obvious. Similarly, teachers can be anxious. They are meeting children they do not yet know and have very little time to get it right; and they know that those children will go home and talk about them.

The similarities may not always be clear to teachers with no children or to parents who aren’t teachers. And even as a teacher and parent for over three decades, I realised I had only been dimly aware of this when I read this fascinating comparison by Thompson and Fox Mazzola, on the symmetries of the anxieties here:

Parents	Teachers
Parenting is inherently difficult and intensely personal. Parents find it hard to know if they are doing a good job. The first child in a family makes competent adults feel helpless, and every subsequent child challenges us in new and unexpected ways. All parents are amateurs and we know it.	Teaching is an inherently difficult job that is hard to measure and intensely personal. No teacher can connect with all children or guarantee great outcomes for everyone. When things do not go right in class, we cannot say to an unhappy parent, “You should have seen my class last year. It was amazing.” This leaves teachers feeling vulnerable in front of parents.
Parents and parenting are on display through their children. As parents, we know that our children will reflect on the way we bring them up – our parenting, our values and our characters. This can sometimes make us feel vulnerable and exposed.	Teachers’ faults are on display in front of the distorting eyes of children. Teaching is a public, exposing job and the child audience is not always appreciative or kind. Teachers are discussed in many homes many evenings, and the discussions are based on the sometimes distorted impressions of children. This can sometimes make us feel vulnerable and exposed.
Parents know that teachers have immense power over children’s lives. Teachers have the power and opportunity to support or to criticise, to nurture or to crush. Parents are keenly aware of teacher power, because as children they too had teachers who made them feel wonderful or terrible.	Teachers are not accorded enough respect in some societies This manifests in different ways; from the way teachers can be spoken to by students and parents; to the profession as a whole relative to other professions. It can be difficult not to feel that in a personal way.
Parents may feel trapped by and with their child’s school. Schools are not commodities and are not easily changed, even when things are going badly for a child. For various reasons of geography, friendships, affordability there may be no other options. This can make for anxiety.	Teachers cannot always offer exactly what parents want Over recent decades schools have taken on more and more responsibility for what used to be done at home; but large institutions are not and cannot be families, and so cannot be as responsive to individual needs. This can cause tensions between school and home.
In important ways, parents and teachers may know children differently. As children grow up they do not reveal all facets of their personality to their parents. Adolescents, especially, show their teachers sides of themselves that they deliberately hide from their parents. When teachers and parents meet, this is uncomfortable on both sides.

The table looks symmetrical, and mostly it is. But there is one central difference. Whether they have one child with us or four, parents’ attention is appropriately singular — this child, in this moment. We care about each child in each moment too, but our attention has to be broader, because we also have to care about several thousand others, this year and in following years. That means what we decide has to work across thousands of different children, now and in the future, and so our decisions can never be shaped around any one of them.

Schools need to be honest about this. And that only amplifies the need for us to decide carefully, explain why, and listen when parents tell us we have got it wrong — knowing that sometimes, having listened, we will still reach a conclusion they would not have chosen. All of which is easy to accept in the abstract, and much harder when the child in question is our own (I have been there). But it is still the right way to decide, because a school that bent to whoever asked most persistently would be a worse one, and unfair besides.

Given how much we all care about our kids and our students, and the intensely personal nature of parenting and teaching, it’s not surprising that these tensions can exist. In fact, it’s far better than indifference. We should acknowledge that despite differing perspectives we have a common root of shared hopes for the children in our care. Perhaps the way to deal with anxieties such as those I have mentioned here is to embrace them as natural parts of a home-school partnership and respond to each other in line with our values.

Taking the biggest picture, this is another step along the path toward our aim of fostering a sense of Belonging for everyone in our community. We can never take it for granted – because there is always more to do, and with families and staff moving each year, it is always a work of renewal. Seeing that we all share the same hopes and fears will help.

References

Thompson, M. and Fox Mazzola, A. (2011) Understanding Independent School parents. Create Space Publishing

What impact do we want to make?

August 8, 2026 Paul Magnuson Leave a comment

This coming academic year I’m focused on creating the best possible progressive high school program I can, collaborating with the students and my colleagues at Eastwood Montreux. I’ve had some successes with progressive programs in the past – and some failures – and am painfully aware that the deck is stacked against us. It’s a little Don Quixote, perhaps, a little naive, perhaps a little too hopeful.

But here we go.

Henry David Thoreau, the American thinker, writer, and activist of the 1800s, quit his first teaching job after two weeks because he refused to hit the children. He started a new school, in line with his own thinking, but it did not last all that long. I share Thoreau’s irritation of not fitting into many of the assumptions of our current schooling (fortunately corporal punishment isn’t often the issue!). I have shared the disappointment of starting something different only to see it fade and end. I also agree with Thoreau that there is a little bit of the divine in all us, in all students and teachers. We don’t hit what is divine, not physically or metaphorically. On my better days maybe I’m just a little transcendental. Maybe.

The school opens its doors on September 1, 2026. I’ll be a coach and I just updated my LinkedIn profile, adding “Coach at Eastwood Montreux” to my professional roles. The school will have a traditional academic curriculum, taught by online teachers in the mornings. I am familiar, in a general sense, with that curriculum, whether IB, IGSCE, Cambridge … There are the expected subject areas, students who are taught in age groups according to preset curriculum; standards to reach by the end of the course, regardless of where students were in their learning at the beginning of the course; and external assessments that sort and rank. I am critical of the approach, but also pragmatic – it is the approach we have co-evolved across the world. It is about as ubiquitous as water is to fish. It is the strange attractor that makes it so difficult for alternate versions of education to survive.

My passion is the afternoon program, when the students learn face-to-face with each other and their coaches, working toward ever higher degrees of agency and self-awareness. I see the afternoons as trying to establish an alternative strange attractor in education, one of collaborative student-led projects, one of design thinking, small bets, iterations, networking, and reflection. A learning environment that the students co-create and co-lead.

The program is called IMPACT and we hope to make one, demonstrating what school could be.

I’ve written down a few guiding statements for myself as I work to shape the afternoon program. They are the ideals I do not want to forget when schoolishness exerts its pull, as I know it will, often and forcefully. These are:

Everything starts with the student. Curriculum, instruction, assessment, timetables, year grades, academic grades, standards, etc. do not form the organizational principles of school, rather, the individual student is the organizational principle. Everything must be able to flex with the individual needs of the student.
When the adults, through the benefit of greater maturity and experience, find it appropriate to teach, they do so standing shoulder to shoulder with students, looking out at the horizon of possibilities. When the students are able to teach, they teach, with us at their shoulder.
Keep it Simple.

I plan to say to myself, before I answer a question, before commenting on the direction we might take with whatever issue we are wrestling with, “Start with the student, stand shoulder to shoulder, keep it simple.”

“Student, shoulder, simple.” Now let’s see where that takes us.

Daniel Kerr

Be Who You Needed

August 6, 2026 Daniel Kerr Leave a comment

So we’re about to start the new school year with kids and it feels great. The first couple of weeks sets the tone for the year in so many ways, and getting off to a positive start is so important when framing the attitude and experience of both teachers and students as the weeks begin to roll on. I spent a lot of time over the past 10 days thinking about what it is that I truly love about the beginning of a new year, and I came up with a quick top 5 list that I would like to share. Feel free to add to this list from your own perspective, so together we can celebrate the beauty and opportunity that a new school year brings to us all…here we go.

1. The Arrival – I’m not sure there is a better day in the year than the first day of school. Don’t get me wrong, I love summer holidays as much as the rest of you but there comes a time when I really start to miss the kids. Standing there at the gate and waiting for the students to arrive is so exciting for me, and when I see them from a distance getting closer my heart almost bursts with joy. I love watching them re-connect with their friends, and I love how eager, nervous, excited, and anxious they all are to begin this new chapter in their lives. There’s no better feeling in the world than when a student runs up and embraces you in a hug and starts telling you all about their summer adventures. It always brings me back to why I love education so much, and it makes me wonder how and why other people choose to do something else with their lives. I don’t understand how someone would want to do something else besides spending their days with kids 🙂

2. The Relationships – I love walking around during recess and lunch and watching our kids interact with each other. It’s amazing to watch the new friendships form, and the old friendships deepen, and to witness those courageous interactions when kids put themselves out there to try and fit in. I love popping into classrooms and watching how hard teachers are working to give our kids the start that they deserve, and the effort that they are making to build that ever so important relationship foundation which will carry them through the year. Finally, what’s more inspiring than watching a student walk over to a new kid who is nervously sitting alone, and sit down next to them with a smile, or to ask them to join their table group. I’ve seen this a lot over the past few years at SSIS and it makes me ridiculously proud. I’ve seen teachers do the same as well, and it brings me back to what is really important in education, the relationships.

3. The Collaboration – In many ways, the start of a new year brings out the best in educators. I find so much joy in watching (and taking part) in the collaborative conversations that happen throughout the school day, strategizing around how to set up the best possible situations for student learning to blossom. I listen to conversations about unit planning and assessment, learning principles, core values, data analysis, student agency, inquiry, personalized learning and extensions/interventions for kids, and all the rest…and it’s awesome. We are so much stronger as a school when we work together for the betterment of OUR kids, and listening to these collaborative sessions truly makes me smile. I love how open we all are to push into each other’s rooms, and co-teach, and co-plan, and work together to find the best ways to engage students, and ultimately, to inspire them to learn…wow.

4. The Struggle – I love watching kids struggle a little bit, and get pushed out of their comfort zones. I love watching the messiness of adolescence and the growth that happens when kids make mistakes. I love watching kids take risks and fail forward and then succeed, and I love how a new school year brings all of that out in kids in very profound ways. The beginning of a new school year can be hard for kids as they transition to new grade levels and encounter new and scary situations. The new teachers, new expectations, new classmates, new learning, and new developmental curiosities. The prospect of school, and being young and growing, is indeed a beautiful struggle and watching it unfold before our eyes is a gift that never stops giving. A young person’s life burns so brightly, and this burning is on display every second of every day, and it’s deeply inspiring if you take the time to notice, and become a part of it. Real learning often happens outside of the classroom with kids, and as educators we have the incredible opportunity to teach, to learn, and to be both role models and searchlight souls as our kids struggle to find out who they can be for our world.

5. Turning the Corner – There comes a time when the “start of the year” is officially over, and we fall into our daily routines. Kids and teachers turn the corner so to speak, and we find a certain level of comfort with our days. Relationships have been formed, schedules have been memorized, expectations have been set, and we move on to the work that lies ahead. We begin to dig deep into the curriculum, we have accessed prior knowledge, we have a sense of where to go with each student, and we begin to settle into the year. This often happens after the first month or so in my experience, and it’s a good feeling, especially if the first few weeks have gone according to plan. There is such a positive feeling when you turn the corner successfully, and I’m excited to watch it all unfold across the school in the coming days and weeks.

Okay, with all that said I want to wish you all an incredible first day and first week with our kids. Go out of your way to make this the best beginning ever, for every student, and prioritize the relationships above all else. Keep your smiles wide and your energy up, and send me a few more reasons why you love the start of a new school year if you are so inclined…I’d love to hear them. Remember to be great for our students and good to each other, and focus on being the person that you needed when you were young…it’ll make all the difference.

Quote of the Week…

Let us remember: one book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world

Malala Yousafzai

Inspiring Videos –

Every Kid Needs a Champion (A Classic)

GLOBAL BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS

August 3, 2026 Margriet Ruurs Leave a comment

Usually I review and recommend children’s books in this monthly column. However, during the summer months I like to also throw in some favourite titles for adult reading. And since you likely work at an International School and enjoy traveling (like me!) you might enjoy these books I recently discovered and loved.

On The Hippie Trail is written by well known travel writer and tour consultant Rick Steves. This enjoyable read describes one of his first travel adventures, in the 1970’s, via Istanbul to Kathmandu. Rick was 23 years old when he set out, with a friend, to travel from America through Europe and the Middle East to Asia. It’s fun to read about the early travels of this adventurer who was to become a well known world traveler – from experimenting with pot to making friends in many different cultures.

I love this quote, when Rick expressed his frustrations with the unreliable train schedules in India as compared to those of Europe: “I treat time like money, I even talk about it like money: I spend it, save it, waste it, and invest it. But in India, time is like bubble gum… it’s a mix of worthless and forever. You just fiddle with it. “

Besides learning about his specific travels, it’s a good book to learn about ethics and how to handle new situations.

The same is true for his earlier book, Travel as a Political Act. This is not one of Rick Steves’ many travel guides. It does not mention best hostels or affordable hotels. Rather, this is a philosophy of how to travel respectfully and in such a manner that you become a better world citizen. The book is largely aimed at encouraging Americans to expand their horizons and broadening their perspectives by traveling and seeing how their nation fits in to today’s world.

For this purpose, he selected seven destinations around the world and explains that country’s geography, culture, economy and political system, comparing it to the USA and showing its connections to that country. Also for non-Americans, this book can be quite an eye-opener to the interconnectiveness of economies and politics in different countries and how travel effects us all.

On the Hippie Trail, ISBN 978-1-64171-643-7, Avalon Travel, Hachette Book Group

Travel as a Political Act, ISBN 978-1568584355, Nation Books, Perseus Books Group

Margriet Ruurs is the writer of over 40 books for children. She travels extensively and shares her adventures and books here: www.globetrottingbooklovers.com

Lianne Dominguez

Helping Teachers Flourish: The Heart of School Leadership

July 28, 2026 Lianne Dominguez Leave a comment

This summer, I had the privilege of teaching and learning alongside almost a hundred teachers and school leaders through two back-to-back courses on instructional supervision and evaluation.

They represented different schools, systems, countries, and stages of leadership. Yet despite their diverse contexts, I was struck by how quickly our conversations converged.

The questions they asked were not just about observations, evaluation rubrics, or instructional frameworks themselves. Instead, they revealed something much deeper.

How do we create schools where teachers continue to grow, so that every student has the opportunity to flourish?

That question stayed with me long after the courses ended because it challenged me to think more deeply about what it really means for a school community to flourish.

We often talk about student flourishing, but perhaps we don’t spend enough time reflecting on what flourishing really means.

To flourish is more than to achieve success.

It is to continue growing.

To be challenged while feeling supported.

To develop confidence through purposeful practice.

To find meaning in what we do.

To belong to a community that believes we can always become better than we were yesterday.

If this is what we hope for our students, shouldn’t it also be what we hope for our teachers?

Teachers do not and should not stop learning the day they enter the profession. Like every professional, they deserve opportunities to reflect on their practice, receive meaningful feedback, refine their craft, and continue growing throughout their careers.

Perhaps this is where our work as school leaders matters most.

Our influence on student learning is rarely direct; it is multiplied through the teachers we support every day.

Throughout the courses, these conversations surfaced again and again through questions like:

How do we make classroom observations meaningful?
How do we ensure feedback leads to growth rather than compliance?
How do we balance operational demands with instructional leadership?

As I reflected afterwards, I realised they were all pointing towards the same question:

What conditions help teachers grow?

Four conditions kept emerging.

Clarity – Leaders create clarity by establishing a shared understanding of excellent teaching.
Trust – Leaders create trust by making coaching the purpose of supervision.
Evidence – Leaders strengthen professional judgment by grounding feedback in evidence.
Time – Leaders create the possibility for growth by intentionally protecting time.

Each of these matters on its own, but together they create the conditions in which teachers can continue to learn, refine their practice, and flourish.

Clarity

Teachers deserve a shared understanding of what excellent teaching looks like – not as a checklist to comply with, but as a framework grounded in research and the science of learning. Shared standards create a common language for professional growth and ensure that our feedback is anchored in evidence rather than individual preference.

Trust

Professional growth happens when supervision becomes a coaching conversation rather than a performance exercise. Teachers are far more likely to reflect honestly, take instructional risks, and refine their practice when they know the purpose of feedback is growth, not judgment.

Evidence

Professional judgment should be informed by patterns of practice and their impact on student learning and not isolated observations or personal preference. Evidence collected over time allows us to make thoughtful decisions about how best to support each teacher’s continued growth.

Time

Perhaps this is the condition we talk about least, yet it may be the one that determines whether all the others are possible.

Time to be present in classrooms.

Time to notice.

Time to listen before we speak.

Time to ask questions that provoke reflection rather than simply provide answers.

Time to coach.

Time to celebrate growth.

Time to learn alongside our teachers.

As another school year begins, I find myself returning to one simple truth: leadership is measured not only by the people we help grow, but by what we intentionally make time for.

After all, our calendars are often the clearest reflection of what we truly value.

Perhaps flourishing schools do not begin with programmes, initiatives, or strategic plans.

Perhaps they begin with leaders who intentionally create the conditions in which teachers continue to flourish.

So, as I prepare for the year ahead, I find myself returning to one simple question: What will I intentionally protect this year so that my teachers have the greatest opportunity to flourish?

Conrad Hughes

What the heatwaves are teaching us about education

July 27, 2026 Conrad Hughes Leave a comment

Europe is warming at a rate that is twice the global average. According to the European Commission’s Climate Action statistics, there were over 60,000 heat-related deaths in 2022 and over 47,000 in 2023 in Europe alone.

Recent summer heatwaves have exceeded 40°C (104°F) in the UK, France, and Spain, causing widespread drought and devastating wildfires.

It has become impossible to pretend that this climate deregulation is not a result of human activity. We are in the Anthropocene era and all the graphs and projections show it is getting worse quickly.

Over social media, many have criticized the European continent’s inability to deal with the heatwave because of a lack of infrastructural preparedness. Buildings and infrastructure are outdated in terms of insulation, passive cooling, or ventilation. Air conditioning is rare, which is understandable given the amount of energy it uses.

What is the lesson in all this for us educators?

While greening the curriculum tends to focus on individual behaviors and understandings that can reduce climate change, such as reducing our carbon footprint and understanding ecologically compatible ways of being, there are two other questions to consider.

Affect and Systems Thinking

First, the notion that the deeper route to greening the curriculum is through an affective approach, developing pedagogies that put learners in front of the beauty of nature and nurturing a love of nature within them. If we can develop this deep-seated love, we will surely be planting the seeds within young people that will drive ways of being that respect the ecosystem and care for it. Ways of doing this include field trips, outdoor learning, greening the campus and making the splendour of the wild express itself in the curriculum and the site.

Second, it is essential to teach a systems thinking approach to ecology: understanding how trade laws, markets and legislation have the overwhelmingly greatest impact on the climate. It is not by changing the consumer habits of each individual within an ecologically negative, plundering system, that real change will be activated. The whole system needs to be revised and this requires leadership, coordination and socioeconomic and political change. The teaching of economics, history, science and politics needs to take this into account, without turning the curriculum into an ideological proselytisation but at the same time ensuring that students are empowered to understand fully the complexities, externalities and interrelationships that define climate change and could help stop it.

Conrad Hughes

What the World Cup Taught Us About Assessment

July 19, 2026 Conrad Hughes Leave a comment

The contrast between the World Cup third-place playoff and the final was stark. In the former, England and France scored 10 goals in a palpitating, fluid game that kept spectators on the edge of their seats. Some of the goals were spectacular, there was a hat-trick, and at the end, a group of French and English players huddled together in a fraternal gesture. It was a fast-moving, dynamic game with an emphasis on scoring rather than defending.

The actual final between Spain and Argentina, on the other hand, was what so many finals have become: theatrics, diving, shamming, wasting time, red cards, and ending , of course, with a meagre scoreline after extra time. There was a lot that had nothing to do with the actual football while players spent their time exhorting the referee to give a yellow or red card to the other side and putting pressure on him at every play. The number of players who suddenly fell down, dozens of metres away from the ball while shamming a foul, was ridiculous. None of this takes anything away from a well-deserved victory by Spain, it is the style of play I am discussing here and what caused it.

So why was there such a difference in behaviour between these two finals?

One reason might be the difference in stakes. When you are playing in a final, the fear of loss is as great, if not greater, than the will to win, and this can create a sclerosis which essentially spoils the game, making it sterile and fundamentally negative. In the third-place game, on the other hand, the stakes are more symbolic, there is more risk-taking and free expression. You will rarely see players break down in tears losing such a match as they do in the finals.

This leads me to one of the most important principles in experimental psychology and the science of assessment: ecological validity. If a test is ecologically valid, it means that performance on it predicts behaviour in the real world. The more authentic an assessment is, the more natural the test-taking conditions, the higher the ecological validity.

If what we are looking for in forward-looking assessment systems is how to test 21st-century competences, such as creativity, criticality, intra- and interpersonal intelligence, systems thinking, and lifelong learning, then the conditions under which these are assessed should be as natural as possible. How do we ensure that students’ creative juices are flowing? How do we ensure that the test is not interfering with their critical thinking but allowing it to express itself? How do we ensure that the structure of the test-taking conditions does not distort the results?

The problem with high-stakes assessments, like the final of the World Cup, is that they bring out behaviours that are not actually the ones we are looking for, unless those engaged are able to ride above the stress and pressure and enter a flow, which can be done, but is very is difficult for experienced athletes to do, let alone high school students.

Perhaps the final was distorted by the stakes, which were so high that it was not an ecologically valid situation, if what is important to us is the beauty of the game and not the result and if what we wish to see happen in a football match is high quality football and not technical shenanigans . Ironically, the lower-pressure third place playoff, by being less stressful, created these conditions much better.

We should view the testing conditions we create more as a third-place playoff than a final, releasing students of the fear of failure that inhibits a joyous, free-flowing expression of competences. Let’s continue to work together in schools and universities to ensure high ecological validity so that the beauty of learning rather than the pressure to perform develops. Alternative assessments such as projects, portfolios, internal assessments, and other naturalistic, long-term tracking of competency development tend to do this better than the traditional high-stakes, narrow terminal assessment we have been using in schools for the last 200-odd years.

John Mikton

Dear September

July 14, 2026 John Mikton Leave a comment

Some thoughts and reflections from a year of learning, sharing, and leading workshops, keynotes, and coaching for school leaders and educators, and, more importantly, teaching children ages 3 to 11. This year that thinking became a letter, written to September.

Dear September,

I was thinking of you as an opportunity to begin, even though it’s the fall and it seems like the end of a season. For many educators, September feels different after a summer of rest. You come back with hope, with excitement, ready for what’s ahead.

As I write to you in June, after a full year, I have some thoughts, and maybe some anxieties, about what you’re going to bring to me, to my world, to the work I do supporting educators in schools. How this accelerated change surrounds us, mainly shaped by geopolitics and technology. What can we expect? I’m both excited and apprehensive.

Two things really stuck out this past year. One, doing the podcast I co-host International Schools Podcast, a guest, Warren Apel, Director of Technology, mentioned this idea, “the AI tool you are using today will be the worst tool you will ever use.” Part of this change is AI moving from answering to doing. That resonated, because it connects to how fast things have changed. I think there have been three or four moments this year where suddenly I felt a jump, in capacity, capability, in just how powerful this is becoming.

And then, facilitating workshops, I noticed participants are often bold in the breakout rooms, really willing to reframe school, to challenge what the value-added benefit of a human is in a world more and more run by AI. Another guest on the International Schools Podcast, Adam Morris, Product Director: Integrations, Faria Education Group, shared the idea not engaging with AI is pedagogic malpractice. That got me thinking, part of what we’re doing wrong is thinking of AI as a tool, when actually it’s an ecosystem woven into everyday life, and keeps growing, often faster than we can keep up with.

And that pattern, bold ideas in the room, turns into caution once people return to their own context, I think it’s partly because we’re not aligned in our boldness, not all willing to start over, to think of the moment and the future rather than letting the past dictate. The hesitancy to be bold in a school setting has a lot to do with timetables, exams, the busyness, the organisational trappings, getting caught up in being human, in the feelings and emotions and seasons of how much capacity you actually have. What does it mean to change, not just enhancing what we already do, but really thinking from a blank slate. Whatever we did before, we’re not doing again, we’re thinking of something completely new.

I do this myself, in my own workshops and keynotes. I’m aware that if you provoke people, push them outside their comfort zone, there’s uncertainty, and uncertainty brings an emotion that can be defensive, a discomfort. Often the response is to push back, another is to ignore it, run from it. So I’m mindful of how important it is to stay relevant, and true with what people are actually dealing with, even though accelerated change often feels distant until it hits us personally or professionally.

But maybe we should be more uncomfortable, more often. Maybe if we got used to discomfort, we’d build greater resilience, greater capacity to adapt with agility. Not that people aren’t already adaptable, but the kind of adaptation this moment asks for, with AI ecosystems accelerating the way they are, is different. You take the hype with a pinch of salt, but there’s a sense that something is taking place, and it’s bigger than us at times.

This is why I want to get bored this summer. You know those rainy days as a child, nothing to do, sitting in your room a little annoyed, your parents telling you to keep busy, and then suddenly you start making something out of nothing. A toy off the shelf, a piece of paper, moving the furniture around to build a house, something imaginary. Just that capacity to sit there with nothing in your head and create anyway.

There’s no doubt the seamlessness of these AI tools is addictive. What’s easier than being able to quickly subcontract out our thinking and get something else to do it, maybe more efficiently, with greater depth than we are? This idea of cognitive offloading is something Tim Cook, who writes on cognitive privacy and AI in education, a guest on the International Schools Podcast describes well and shares in his writing, the difference between adults, who can lose a skill and still get it back, and children, who never built it and have nothing to get back to.

Think of what children have growing up around them, Alexa at home, watching parents talk to a chatbot, the sense that the answer is just there, that the process, the heavy lifting, doesn’t need to happen. Just the transaction, and the dependence on it. That might be fine for us adults, who’ve had practice with the grit of learning. But if we don’t protect that for children, if we don’t make sure they still engage with the struggle, they’re going to lose something they never had the chance to build. And for ourselves, we have to keep reminding ourselves, critical thinking, the heavy lifting, the resistance, the adaptability, these are essential. We have to be the guardians of that, however exhausting, however efficient the shortcuts on offer.

In my teaching context, I often observe this with the students I work with. They want the immediate answer, struggle to focus for long, avoid having to problem solve, and default to the teacher, for help or the answer. They want it now. And that need for instant answers comes at the cost of creativity, because if we can’t sit with something on our own, push through the difficulty, the effort of getting to a new idea, what are we losing? We need to teach this as a skill and a way of thinking to support a change in mindset against just wanting a quick answer and letting someone else do the thinking. We as educators need this too.

September. We want to change. But good grades, what parents and students expect, and schools still built for another time, all hold us back. How do we get comfortable with discomfort? How do we learn a new adaptability, completely different from our past?

And in the many conversations with school leaders, I notice we really want rules, a policy we can carve in stone and live by. We want artificial intelligence to be a set of tools we control, this one’s appropriate, this one isn’t. I understand why consistency, certainty, and rules matter. But are we willing to be flexible? The policy might need to shift every few months, even every few weeks. It’s really guidelines, not policy, knowing tomorrow it could change again. We need to model that with children too. Whatever tool we tie ourselves to today, ten more powerful ones are already coming, ones we don’t even know about yet. Our policy will already be behind.

This is a systemic change. It’s about a system, not a tool. The way we usually work isn’t built for this kind of accelerated change, systems that suddenly show up at home, in the car, online, everywhere around us. What can we do as leaders to keep remembering, the tool is not the focus. It’s the value-added proposition of us, of being human. How do we adapt and stay open to change, so that the value of being human is timeless whatever the latest AI tool release or upgrade ? Humans need to stay at the centre of this story, and we have to keep checking that what we think is right today might not hold tomorrow.

One small example of what that looks like in practice: I have a framework called CRITIC, built out of a lot of reading, a lot of other people’s work, nothing original really, just my own adaptation of what I’d learned. In one workshop, I gave it to a group of teachers as something to take and try between sessions. When we came back together, two of them shared what they’d done.

They’d used it with their own students, treating whatever the AI gave them not as the answer, but as something to question. What is it actually saying? What reasons does it give? What’s missing, a number, a source, an example. What other view could there be. What happens if we believed this and it was wrong. What would we actually go and check? And the teachers said their students started noticing the AI’s answer had a kind of curated voice to it, a perspective, even something like empathy that wasn’t quite real, and the only way to catch that was to slow down and really interrogate it, almost like being a detective.

That, I think, is the deviation worth having. Not using AI less, not using it more, being intentional, willing to plan and think deeply about how we put it in front of students, as a critical friend, a challenger, something cross-examined rather than copied. Because if we do that, it can only grow a student’s ability to think independently, instead of repeating back whatever was generated for them.

But I want to be honest about something that unsettled me more than I expected. I was working with a powerful AI tool for a short time in June. With it, you could give it complex tasks and it would generate artefacts, feedback, analysis, multiple engagements, as a critical friend or even as a challenger, and the quality of what it delivered was, for me, quite something. But then suddenly it got shut down, I won’t go into the details, by the time anyone reads this, something will likely have changed again. What I suddenly realised, and I’m guessing many others felt the same reading the articles afterwards, was that these systems we depend on are a bit like nectar. You taste it and realise how good it is, you want to use it, put it to work, and then you suddenly realise what happens when it is turned off. A government can order something this powerful to be shut down overnight, and the company has no real choice but to pull it from millions of users. And it becomes a bargaining chip. Maybe only a certain profile of people get to use it. Only certain companies. Only certain countries.

And suddenly the geopolitics of it, how technology companies and the power they’re generating through these AI systems, the infrastructure required, the impact on the environment, and then when these things become autonomous and powerful enough, how a government, or even an organisation, if they have the authority and the capacity, can shut everything down, and suddenly you’re left with nothing. It’s a bit like being an addict, and suddenly you don’t get to have it, and you go through the withdrawal. This made me think about how powerful these AI ecosystems, companies and technologies are. And how governments and organisations can really control our access to them, whenever they want

So maybe, September, what I’m really asking of you is for that renewal, the idea that yes, it’s the fall, it’s the end of a season, but I want to take that as a chance to think of it completely differently. Maybe September is the new spring. However uncertain things are, however much these systems will continue to reshape the world around us, I’m still excited by the fact that I’m human, that I have this capacity, if I give myself permission, if I plan for it, stay disciplined, and don’t reach for the shortcut, to go and get bored. Really bored. And then see what comes.

John

Thanks to Warren Apel, Adam Morris, and Timothy Cook for the conversations that shaped this letter. And thanks to all the educators, workshop participants, articles, and podcasts I learned from this year

Sharing stories, expertise, and experiences from international educators around the world. In the spirit of amplifying diverse voices. TIE's blog space is not subject to editorial oversight. TIE bloggers have a long history in various aspects of international education and share their thoughts and insights based on personal experiences.