Priten: Welcome to Margin of Thought, where we make space for the questions that matter.
I'm your host, Priten, and together we'll explore questions that help us preserve what matters while navigating what's coming.
Priten : Today's guest took an unconventional path to educational leadership.
From debate coach to technology director to associate head of school.
Joe Carver has spent his career thinking about how technology shapes learning, and more importantly, how can we adopt innovation without losing what matters most, the teacher student relationship.
In our conversation, Joe makes the case for thoughtful values-driven technology integration, one that involves stakeholders, centers, core educational principles.
And resist both quick adoption and knee-jerk resistance.
This is a conversation about balance, about using data to inform practice and about trusting that the next generation of educators can build on what we're learning.
Now, let's get started.
Joe: So I'm the associate head of school at the Meadow School, uh, now, which is a pre-K through 12 independent school in Summerland, Nevada, about a thousand students.
I probably, had one of the more non-traditional journeys to leadership.
I started as a debate coach in higher ed, moved into secondary education as a policy debate coach, took a break from schools for a couple of years and was brought back as the director of technology at a independent school in Miami.
Served in that role for a number of years before moving on as a Chief Innovation officer.
and then from CIOI became associate head of school.
So I think that, um, that having someone who served or was a sitting director of technology in independent schools in general leadership is a pretty unusual track.
And having someone who served as a debate coach, director of technology with no technological background is probably just as unusual.
So pretty, pretty irregular.
Um, but it's, but as a result of the various kind of roles that I've taken throughout schools, I have a really global sense of what happens in schools.
There are very few departments, in a school that I haven't either worked in or had report to me.
And so, um, I feel like I've got a pretty good grasp on what whole world of the school is.
Priten : tell me a little bit about that jump from debate to technology.
How did that happen?
Joe: I loved where I worked.
I loved the school I worked in.
I left because my wife was expecting, and we were both debate coaches, in fact, debate coaches in the same program.
And so we realized this is gonna be impossible.
How are we gonna travel and support a program?
And if I'm being totally frank and transparent, she was just better than me.
And anybody who works in the debate world who's gonna hear this will say, yeah, that was self-evident.
So I stepped away and while I was out of the community, I was working with a nonprofit to bring debate to, students in the Miami market
The former head of school that I had worked for was, had agreed to serve on that board, and we got to talking one night and I'd begun working with Apple, and we got to talking one night after a meeting.
and I was giving her sort of my riff on what I thought the challenges of technology at the school that we were at, were at why our students weren't as well prepared as they should be.
she.
Immediately said, will you come by and see me next week?
I wanna talk to you.
And I went in, had no idea what the conversation was going to be, and she said, I want you to be our director of technology.
And I said, I don't know really anything about infrastructure, technology.
I didn't know a firewall from an access point.
the team she had was relatively well established.
They'd been in the, in that department for, in some cases, 10, 12 years.
And she said, and this is the part that might be apocryphal and that I've distilled on my own, that what she was really looking for was not a technologist.
She was looking for a leader and she'd seen me lead and knew I could do it.
And so.
I jumped in.
I recently, this last year I won this, um, the Atler Atlas Pillar award, which was a great honor.
Uh, and when I found out, the first people that I reached out to were those original team members from that team because, that job could have lasted two weeks just as easily as it
could have lasted 10 years because it totally was reliant upon, their kindness, their willingness to let me lead, their willingness to let me grow and be vulnerable in front of them.
And they were just so gracious in every respect of that, that they own a huge part of that award.
So, um, and that's how I got started.
Priten : congratulations on the award.
I want to hear a bit more about your leadership strategy, especially when it comes to, um, technology, but before we go there, I'd love to hear what is your earliest memory, of an education technology tool that you used, as a student?
Joe: I have a twin sister and she and I switched schools in seventh grade to a one room school that was a K through eight, one classroom, 25 kids, one teacher, very non-traditional and very disruptive.
It's not something that either of us expected, and we needed it.
In retrospect, it changed the trajectory of my academic life, but at the time it was very disorienting.
I remember the first computers being brought into those classrooms, and I believe they were, apple.
I had a Commodore 64 that was a home computer.
but I think the first school computers were Apple.
And I think like a lot of people from my generation, we started by doing our sort of typing lessons on them.
and then, I have distinct recollections of spending an entire afternoon coding on the Commodore 64 to get a balloon to cross the screen.
But I think that, you know, like a lot of us, it was very, I, it was very much about.
a tool that replaced the teacher.
in a situation like that where there was only one teacher and kids across a nine year spectrum of learning years, it was really used to keep moving us forward so she could focus on the younger students in that time period.
Um, to me it didn't appear magical.
the first thing technologically that felt magical to me was the first real game I got for my home computer that involved, using a cassette recorder tethered to the Commodore 64
This cassette was transmitting the game to the computer was just mind blowing to me.
I don't have the technological acumen that a lot of my peers and directors of technology and schools have.
nor did I have the curiosity to like, break it open and figure out how it all worked.
I just remember thinking it was pretty magical.
then it just, continued to escalate from there, obviously.
Priten : That early experience of, seeing the typing program be a, um, a temporary replacement for, direct interaction with your teacher, reflecting back on it, and especially now in your role as a leader at a school, how do you view that, in retrospect?
Joe: Shortsighted because, I think at that moment we were thinking about what allowed the teacher to stay at the center of the classroom instead of envisioning a future where the teacher or the classroom, you know, educator was the compassionate guide.
I think we're still really challenged to displace that model.
some of my fondest memories as a student were being enraptured by, a literature professor talking about something that, you know, uh, Kate Chopin's the Awakening or, or, or whatever.
and just thinking what a brilliant pursuit to spend your life in books and to share all those ideas.
And so I I, I don't approach it from the lens that teachers aren't valuable.
I think we've hemmed in their value by positioning them as the expert in all things, as opposed to sort of the, like I said, the guide who's going through this learning experience with you opens up so many other
doors, from a student standpoint, from a neurological slash you know, nervous system standpoint, that in and of itself is just a much more regulating presence than someone who's at the front sort of managing the space.
when I look back at that, I think, oh, it's easy to see how we started to view these devices as a way to manage instead of, as a way to come together.
in some ways we're still sort of battling that in schools.
Priten : Those seem like the same questions that come up as we think about what role, artificial intelligence will play within our school systems.
Moving to the present day, it sounds like you're trying to balance that, approach to innovation, and maintaining some level of technological integration within the school, while continuing to figure out what the role of the teacher is, in that space.
There are folks who are on both extremes of this.
there are folks who think that, the personalized AI tutor will replace wholesale, need for teachers.
and there are folks who think that we have to keep our classroom, as technology free spaces and let the technology happen in other, realms.
sounds like you fall in the middle, but I'd love to hear from you what your philosophy is on finding that balance.
Joe: I'm pretty hard on myself and so I think of myself as being in the middle as almost an act of cowardice.
But, I think it's just much more pragmatic.
I really enter into the space the same way I entered into director of technology role, with an assumption that I don't know nearly enough to make a decision.
So I try to remain open.
one of the things that's worked to my advantage as a whole is just my curiosity.
what I've learned from being in the purchasing position is to not let my curiosity dictate the outcome.
So I have a process where I indulge myself in everything.
So the rabbit R one comes out and everyone's ordering them.
I'm gonna have one, right?
I'm also not going to buy 800 of them and distribute them to faculty and students, because I feel the pragmatic approach is to let some of these things play out.
it makes far more sense to use the North star of our like core values as an institution to determine where we do and what we don't.
I'll give you an example we had a number of cases at the end of the year where we had questionable uses of AI as relates to papers, and what is not,
appropriate, what counts as plagiarism, some of those things by virtue of a number of, of different factors that were not predictable, landed on my plate.
My first step was to bring the teacher in because they're on a day-to-day basis.
They're interacting with these tools, with students, using them, whether for right or the wrong.
The fact that I wasn't going to make a decision without spending the time and trying to understand what the challenge was helps, but it also probably puts us in the middle.
it means that we're doing so much due diligence before we adopt.
So we're in the process right now of deciding how we will approach, AI in the fall.
we might be right in the middle here.
Some schools have made decisions.
Some are still sitting, but we're really focused on how we handle it from a, handbook position, but how we also handle it from a network position.
So what age group do we open up full access to?
what age group do we want it to be guided access?
What age group do we want there to be no access.
And I just think that the process of involving all the right voices and those decisions almost by default, puts me in the middle.
Because it's more situational than it is, Institutionally, one policy fits them all,
Priten : I think the phrase that there's no award for being first, is important when we think about education technology in schools because,
we've seen a rush in some areas to, figure out how do we get 800 R ones to all, the students, because it's the newest and, greatest fad.
figuring out what that due diligence looks like, is an important consideration for technology directors, but obviously also classroom instructors as they figure out what their pedagogical strategy, looks like and how they're gonna adapt to the new technology.
so on that note, what does that due diligence look like for you?
what are the factors that you consider?
you talked about age appropriateness, but what else goes into deciding, what are those things that you're gonna bring into the school?
How will you decide what age ranges, will be exposed to them?
I think that'd be really helpful for both other technology directors across the nation, but also, individual teachers to hear
Joe: I think first and foremost that I look at this from the lens of a parent.
I have two young children, a 10-year-old and a 13-year-old.
And so I think I have a pretty good grasp of what the average 10-year-old is using these tools for.
I try to keep in mind what might be non-unique, what might be already inevitable.
And not let my ideology or concerns get in the way.
there may be a part of me that says, I wish I could keep my kiddo away from some of these tools until she's 15.
But realistically, if I know that's not the way that the walls outside of school are going to work, I need to figure out what that intersection looks like.
So I think that.
Some schools will say, we're just going to block everything.
We're not gonna allow any access.
we're a school that wants to be in partnership with our families and the community at large.
if we have a distinctly different set of rules that are outliers when the kids walk off campus, I don't know how effective it is.
We're not really.
Meeting the moment with them if that's the case.
we try to figure out what that is based on our core values if we have a core value of inquiry, then how does this tool get leveraged to support inquiry?
And if I can't trace back whichever decision we make.
To one of those things then it's a hard no for me.
And that was in, in Sacred Art Education, had the goals and criteria, and so you have those as your North Star to trace back?
Developmentally, it helps to decide what things are appropriate.
in our instance, those three stages are reflective of what we believe, which is no access, guided access, unfettered access.
And you try to divide into those three pods.
My goal.
Is for my upper school students to have the wise freedom, to have unfettered access, to understand the consequences and to know what ethical use looks like.
But I don't get them there if I don't have some sort of staged process.
So that's where we are right now, which means working with a tool.
that is a kind of walled garden version of the AI tool that gives us a chance to answer those critical questions in classrooms before transitioning.
In our case, we're a Google education school, so before translating into Gemini and as a ninth grader and having a little bit more unfettered use, but even that.
By virtue of our admin console, we have the ability to still intercede where we need to.
So I'd say that we take very incremental steps that we think are age appropriate when questioned about what constitutes how we make the decision about age appropriate.
There are a couple of voices that I think.
Always have to be in the conversation.
The first is the well eternal voice of what our core values is.
The second is our student support services.
folks that spend their day assessing, what it takes for students to be positioned best to learn.
and then division directors because the successful implementation of any of these policies will involve some measure of, for lack of a better word, mid-management support.
So in faculty feel like we've been too expansive about our or too, liberal in our sharing of allowing some of these tools, they're most likely to go back to division directors, their principal, depending on what school system you're in.
And if that principal's immediate reaction is, I, I, I agree with you, but this is what I was given Then you're done.
It's over.
it's really important to have all of those voices even if that slows us down We run into a division directory who says, gosh, I'm just not comfortable yet.
Then we pump the brakes because it's way more important to be aligned than it is, let's said earlier, to get there first.
Priten : listening to all those various stakeholders, is a philosophy I wish more schools adopted.
oftentimes we work with schools where, we come into a particular school in a district and they're.
they're like, we were told to do this.
We don't know even how to start.
I don't even think this is the right way to approach it, but can you help us do the next thing?
Because we have to.
it's definitely a concern we hear from both teachers who, who are given guidance from their principals, but also principals given that guidance from, whatever their higher.
whether it be the board of education, whether it be the superintendent.
that idea of listening to all the stakeholders that trickle down, Is an important one for folks to slow down and listen to.
Joe: No, It's funny because there's a particular conundrum when it comes to technologists Steve Jobs was famous for saying, why would I ever ask a customer what they want?
I build something and tell them that they want it because the idea is we're the innovators, you bring technologists in and they're like, I know the right answer.
It's to do X, Y, and Z. you can't fault them because that's what they're brought for.
but you've gotta know your community.
And, and in some communities it may be such that it's.
You know, we're running as fast as we can and we're okay with whatever happens as a result.
Some communities are gonna be slower than that.
And so in this instance, it's about figuring out what trumps like does your innovation trump your core values or do your desire for innovation, not trump your core values.
And I think that we had a conversation here a year or so ago, about a year ago and a half ago, and, We were talking exact, literally about the word innovation.
As that was part of my title for four years, you know, chief Innovation Officer a former Head of the board said to me, I don't know if this is us.
I don't know if innovation everywhere is who we are.
And if everyone in that room didn't hear that and take note, then they made a mistake.
Because that is a strong signal about where you are and what success is gonna look like.
you have to hear those voices because they're largely gonna be the ones who determine your success.
Priten : and how do you balance that, that.
Want to be innovative, that, desire to keep up with the latest technology.
the desire to make sure that the technology that the students are being exposed to, you're finding healthy habits for them, with figuring out how to balance your core pedagogical values, your, the human values that and build your institution as a whole.
there's some of these, some of this technology, does things that you can do other ways, like the technology is not the old end all be all way of achieving some of these things.
that's not, always true for everything.
but it seems like sometimes folks pursue that technology just because innovative, right?
even if it's not the only way to approach it.
So how do you balance that, desire to embrace the technology for your core values with doing it just for the sake of being innovative?
Joe: I think that I redefine the goal.
and so for me, if I find something that's really, truly innovative, but it's much to.
Large of a leap for our community to take together.
That doesn't mean that there's not a part of my community that won't benefit from it.
And so it might be that what I just discovered is life changing.
For the admissions team, it's a mistake to think that, the decisions have to blanket your whole community.
And so I look for pockets where innovation can be dropped and grow on their own.
And so what that does is it builds, a community of people who are also innovative.
You find those people who are fired up about it, right?
You drop in and you say, I've got a new toy.
You wanna try this out for me?
People love that opportunity.
but secondly, you're also creating a culture of innovators that way.
And this is probably most important because I can imagine it doesn't take long before people are tired of my voice.
It means they aren't only hearing about me talking about how to move forward.
So if I have a teacher who in a meeting raise their hand and says, I've been using this tool to do X, and it's saving me hours, that's worth me saying.
And so I think the way I manage it is to look for those smaller pockets and say, it may be one employee, it may be one person who has a use case that I was like, Hey, I'm gonna bring this in.
I think the Apple Vision Pro is a good example of this because it's definitely not something you would adopt for a school of a thousand, but given to the right employee, it could inspire tremendous
change in a classroom, We're not going to buy 30 sets of those, but it's this thing that somebody might look at and say, that's frivolous, or, oh no, we're not gonna all be wearing these.
But boy, if you know who that right teacher is who looks at that and says, I've been trying to figure out a way to capture the energy of what it's like to be in this space.
It creates a culture over time.
Priten : And that building of culture, with what the students walk into the building with.
that's another interaction I'd love to hear how you manage because, another concern we hear often is that, students are coming in, engrossed in the technology.
and a lot of the, technological, Schools that are brought into the school are reactive.
They're, oh, we got to keep up with what our students are doing outside of the school.
Our students are telling us that they are.
Already, they find it more engaging, they're more excited about it.
but that seems to be, a bit more myopic than the way you're approaching it.
just because the students find AI exciting isn't enough of a reason to bring it, into the school, but it probably plays our role, right?
it's not a non-factor.
how do you figure out what level to respond to those kinds of student either needs or, desires, with, again, maintaining those core values, which I think that people struggle with sometimes.
Joe: I consider it a professional responsibility to stay conversant in all of these things.
One of the greatest enemies we have for really successful education is complacency.
my expectation is that a teacher should be able to carry on a conversation about the merits of these tools regardless of whether we've decided to use them or not.
Nothing is less convincing to an adolescent than saying they can't use something that you can't figure out.
And so I think we had this conversation with an admissions director the other day, She said something about, you are different about that.
And I said, I used to think of that as a compliment, but I don't so much now because it disappoints me because the thing that made me different from what we were describing was the responsibility that I feel to stay up to speed with all of these things.
And I'm still, it's a struggle for me too.
we have a friend, you and I share friends, Stefan Bouchard.
I certainly don't have, the conversant nature in these things that Stefan has.
But I try and I think that we need to set the expectation with our faculty and our staff that's an expectation.
we expect professional learning.
and that professional learning shouldn't be just, a two hour seminar and a conversation.
It should come with the sort of incumbent responsibility to stay able.
To have these conversations with your constituencies, who are your students?
So if a student can talk to you about a tool and you're wholly unfamiliar with it, that's fine.
But if a week from now you're still wholly unfamiliar with it, then I feel like you are not holding up your end of the bargain.
One of the beauties of this technology is has the ability to liberate time for us.
And then the reinvestment as educators has to be in what connects us to students.
So that time that you're getting freed up, because you can use a comment bank in Canvas should be reinvested in the things that you know will continue to build connective tissue between you and your students.
That proposition does not inherently come with the promise that at the end, that knowledge will be a part of your classroom.
It's just a part of being a part of the community and being able to contribute in the community.
Priten : Maintaining that the human aspect of your school and your classrooms, um, and the connection between your teachers and the students.
that is another challenge that I think folks struggle with is, um, students already are so disconnected, from their peers, from their instructors, from educators, and the sense of community in our school buildings does seem to be deteriorating.
the more technology that is brought in, the farther we seem to be getting in some school districts,
It sounds like you're, again, like that this, this middle ground that you're balancing is, one that I'm hoping we can all learn from, of approaching the technology as a way to maintain, or build on that human connective tissue, or social tissue.
tell me more about what that balance looks like.
how do you inspire that for your faculty and for your students?
Joe: I don't know if this answers the question directly, but I think we have to reverse engineer the things that have changed about community building as a result.
I spoke at my former school about a year, uh, maybe two years ago, about this.
I had everybody from first to third grade in front of me.
how many of you are on a group text?
90%. Most of 'em go into iPads, parents feel great 'cause their kid doesn't have a phone, but they've got an iPad and they're on a group text.
, How many of you have a classroom group text where everybody from your classrooms on?
Everybody raises their hand.
Great.
Any problems in there?
Yeah, actually I, you know, my mom took me off of it and I got re-added without being asked a lot of kids.
Yeah, that happened to me too.
That happened to me.
I don't like it because they send messages throughout the night, And so shifted the conversation to the adults.
Do you have any idea Why this is happening?
Think about as an adult, the first time you were part of a group text, you'd already been building community in person for probably 15, 20 years.
Their first community when they're four years old has no norms, and they have no model for what those norms look like, and they never have a conversation about those norms.
They're just in it right away, which is why they're re adding kids, because when you have the conversation say, do you understand why someone wouldn't like that?
Yeah, I guess I do.
we know that because I spent 30 plus years getting to know what it's like to interact humans face-to-face.
Before I was in that situation.
They're not.
So when we reverse engineer and we say, what is this generation not getting that we did get.
Then we can start to build that and have those conversations.
that conversation ended with, alright, let's all get into small groups and put our group chat norms up on paper.
Let's write 'em out.
Let's talk.
And now we've taken that off the table.
They don't know what they don't know.
Overused, but entirely true, They don't know there should be a norm.
They're just going through it and it's happening so much faster.
so if we reverse engineer and think about, what's getting left out of this process?
What do they not know they're missing?
Then we can supplement it.
And that's truly what the classroom becomes about,
Because, my computer can easily teach me, calculus now, Classroom will always have content as it's sort of focal point, how we come together, but the opportunity
to use it to backfill community and relationships and norms is how we sort of get over that piece that you're talking about where we're also disconnected.
Priten : I think that idea of reverse engineering it is appealing.
and seems promising.
Before we end, I'd love to just hear, your biggest fear, in the next few years when it comes to, the way technology is moving, but also your biggest hope.
and hopefully you can end with the hope.
Joe: My biggest fear is usually about, reaction.
and in this instance, overreaction.
I know there are plenty of people whose biggest fear is, we jumped too quickly.
My bigger concern is that those schools that will have been determined to have jumped too quickly will have some repercussions.
that will cause other schools to overreact and lock down.
Yeah.
And we will become adversaries to innovation in the interest of self preservation, we should recognize that those schools that are the early adopters that are out there taking the hits, they're doing it for all of us, that we all benefit from them.
We shouldn't use them just as an example of what not to do, but we should take those lessons and use them to build on.
that's one of my fears that the way these things work cyclically is that we will turn our backs on some of this innovation when I see
it as having the potential to revolutionize the way that we teach kids and also to reach students that we've struggled to reach before.
Whether it's because of neurodiversity or class size the potential is limitless My hope is that.
institutions preparing future educators, whether in a, an education program, an undergraduate, or whether it's a master's program in your field, that they will all begin to really take stock of a couple of things.
One, how to leverage the data we generate.
to determine what best practices for future education.
And number two, to take on that responsibility of all of us in one way or another.
As an innovation teacher.
Now all of us, we have that choice, or we have another track for our, careers.
If we can't get behind the.
Idea of adopting innovation as part of our pedagogy going forward.
I don't have much hope my hope, is that we would turn our attention to the solutions that the data we've been collecting provide.
those programs will start to say, look, an expectation is that you learn how to use that data and building you the muscle to forever be innovating, just like you are forever revisiting your curriculum or class notes.
You need to be doing that as far as innovation goes too.
So data informed decision making with a focus on iterative improvement.
Priten : I think I, I share the fear and the hope.
I think that the, the backlash some institutions get, might scare folks.
I hope they approach it where.
they're taking a risk for all of us?
as a community.
a good note to end on, is that innovation comes with quite a bit of risk.
and taking that risk for us, hopefully we can learn from them and continue to innovate and not back away from that innovation.
I think that's a great way to frame the few years ahead of us.
Thank you as always.
so much insight, that I think will, I'll have to reflect on and I'm sure other folks will reflect on.
there's, so much to learn from your experience of figuring out that middle ground.
I think sometimes you hear those extremes and try to figure out which camp you're in.
And I think trying to figure out, rather than we know which camp am I gonna, just settle down and figuring out, okay, how do I balance all these things, is, I think is a much more productive way for all of us to approach, these questions.
So thank you.
Joe: It was my pleasure.
Priten : Carver showed us that leadership in the age of educational technology means holding multiple truths at once, embracing innovation, while protecting
the essential role of teachers, leveraging data while maintaining human judgment and staying open to change while grounding decisions and core values.
Stay with us this season as we continue asking the hard questions about technology learning and what we want to protect.
And don't forget to pre-order my upcoming book by visiting ethicaledtech.org.
Priten: Thanks for listening to Margin of Thought.
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Until next time, keep making space for the questions that matter.