I recently had the pleasure of joining Dr. Cyndi Burnett and Dr. Matthew Worwood on the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about teachers, technology, and creative agency.

We explored a question I’ve been thinking about for years: What happens when we see teachers not just as instructors, but as designers of learning experiences?

Here’s the thing—most technology in classrooms wasn’t built for classrooms. Microsoft Excel wasn’t designed to teach math. Your cell phone wasn’t designed to demonstrate Newton’s laws. And yet, when teachers approach these tools with a designer’s mindset, they can repurpose them in ways no curriculum developer ever imagined.

We dug into the TPACK framework, my concerns about top-down edtech that flattens the rich complexity of teaching, and—inevitably—AI. I shared both my genuine excitement about AI as a creative collaborator and my deep concerns about bias, hallucinations, and the way this technology has been positioned as inevitable.

My daughter says I’m “schizophrenic” about AI. One day I’m marveling at what it can do; the next I’m worried about humanity. I think that tension is exactly where we need to be right now.

Listen to the full episode here: