Across nearly four decades as a teacher, principal, superintendent, funder, and now leader of a large education nonprofit organization, the experience that most shaped my view of learning wasn’t a grand reform or a shiny new program. It was a Friday physics lab in Brooklyn. My students predicted a graph that couldn’t exist—a vertical line for velocity and time. What followed was confusion, debate, trial, and error. And then discovery: Velocity requires both displacement and time. That brief struggle taught me, the teacher at the time, more about how learning really happens than any policy memo ever has.
That moment endures because it represents what school should unlock every day: inquiry, persistence, and the joy of figuring something out yourself.
Too often, students still move through school executing a “recipe” of steps without understanding ideas. In math, science, history, and English language arts, they follow the recipe and miss the point. That approach may be tidy, but it’s not transformative. It shortchanges imagination, curiosity, and the “a-ha!” moments that make knowledge durable.
HOW TO EMPOWER STUDENTS
I believe that learning is only powerful if it combines agency, purpose, curiosity, and connection to empower students for the future. What does that mean? It means that learners should pursue knowledge through action. Through choice. And through voice. They should have opportunities to develop authentic and meaningful contributions. They should explore new ideas and experiences to better understand their world. And they should make connections between ideas, experiences, and people.
When students are allowed to experiment—to wrestle productively and recover from mistakes—they don’t just master content; they build the habits of mind that matter in life and work.
TECHNOLOGY’S ROLE
Emerging technologies hold enormous potential to make these kinds of experiences more common. They help curate simulations, prompt inquiry, and scaffold experimentation. It can create new entry points for students to explore, revise, and connect their ideas. The “little” moments of technology matter, too—like a 90-second BrainPOP animation that unlocks a tough concept. An interactive that prompts a classroom debate. A quick, purposeful game that turns practice into understanding. These are the sparks that turn a lesson into learning.
Technology is not a recipe to follow; it’s a set of instruments to conduct. If we want learners who can think with and about AI, then classrooms must invite students to do what my Brooklyn High School physics class did: predict, test, argue from evidence, and revise. This last part can demonstrate the evolution in a student’s thinking processes and how they can move through conceptual phases of understanding. This requires commitments like access and teacher expertise, as well as ensuring quality over quantity.
I’m heartened to see some schools rising to meet this challenge, like the Ypsilanti Community High School in Michigan, with its new AI Lab.
The first-of-its-kind collaboration between the school district, leading tech companies, and nonprofits equips students with advanced tools for AI-powered learning. This includes processors designed to handle complex AI computations, audio-visual equipment, and 3D modeling software. The lab doesn’t simply build AI literacy; it allows students to explore ideas that matter to them using advanced technology. At once, they gain hands-on experiences in emerging fields while also fostering a sense of creativity and innovation. The lab challenges them to think critically, pushes them to be creative, and strengthens their real-world problem-solving skills. These are the kinds of experiences we need to provide for students to prepare them for an AI-driven world.
LET STUDENTS LEARN THROUGH DOING
As we increasingly integrate AI in classrooms, students must be allowed to experiment and explore with it, to argue from evidence, to fail, to productively struggle. When done right, we see the right kind of noise. That means classrooms buzzing with questions. It includes debates. And students make lifelong connections.
I still remember that Brooklyn lab as if it were yesterday. Not because of the graph, but because of what it revealed: When students are trusted to do the intellectual heavy lifting, they surprise us—and themselves. Our job is to design schools where discovery is not an accident, but the plan.
Jean-Claude Brizard is president and CEO of Digital Promise.
