AI leadership and strategy with Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer

Aaron Feuer:

Welcome back everyone to the Leading and Learning with AI podcast. I'm your host, Aaron Feuer. And today we're diving into one of the biggest questions in education right now. How do we move from AI exploration to AI leadership? And across the country we're seeing districts and states experimenting with AI tools, building AI literacy and asking smart questions about what's possible. But I think the real opportunity and challenge is figuring out how we lead responsibly and how we lead strategically in this new space. And to help us unpack that, we have an Incredible guest today. Dr. Julia Rafael Baer.

Aaron Feuer:

Julia is the co founder and CEO of ILO Group, a woman founded leadership focused education policy and strategy firm. She's also the founder and CEO of Women Leading, editor and a co founder and partner at the Forum for Educational Leadership. And earlier in her career, Julia taught special education in the Bronx, worked with new profit on city level initiatives and earned her PhD from Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar. And simply put, Julia is one of the most forward looking and influential voices in education and an extraordinary leader trusted by so many in our space. So Julia, welcome to the podcast. We are really grateful to have you here.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

Thanks so much for having me, Aaron. This is going to be a lot of fun and there's a very generous introduction. Thank you.

Aaron Feuer:

It is going to be a lot of fun. So let's start with the big picture. You know, a lot of leaders right now are exploring AI, experimenting, testing tools, learning as they go. And you know, I think we got to flip that curiosity into a strategy. And I'm interested in kind of how you're seeing what it looks like to move from AI literacy and exploration to AI leadership and AI vision.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

Thanks Aaron. So couple different thoughts on this. I think first, backing up like sort of how have we gotten into this moment that we're in and even this idea that we can be on a podcast talking about AI literacy is just like a normal thing that people are using as terms these days. We've seen a huge arc over the last three years. I mean you think about three years ago when it started to become much more normal in the media and in the public to talk about AI and like it was just, it started to become an ever present term. People use chatgpt as if that was the term for all things AI and it started become ubiquitous in so many ways. I think for many of us who've led through many different points of education over the last few decades, there was a real wondering one, was this gonna just be more hype? You know, we sort of had seen some, some of that with some of the claims about what would happen with the metaverse. But then there was a real wondering, like, are we actually seeing a real breakthrough on AI? Knowing that for people, particularly in the assessment world, this wasn't new, the idea of artificial intelligence being a part of things.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

But what was new is the speed and the technical abilities of this generation of AI. And so for me personally, as somebody who has now seen through many different changes over the decades, I thought there was a real leadership moment here, A moment to be able to think from the perspective of state and district superintendents about how they as leaders would really think about what AI meant. Like, what was it going to mean to lead in a world where AI is everywhere, where our students will grow up with AI as part of their lives. And in turn over time, that kind of notion that AI is everywhere, that AI is something that our kids are going to be growing up alongside, I think for many people has now morphed into what we're calling AI literacy. This idea and thought about what AI can do, what it never should do. The lines in the sand around ethics and principles and guardrails. And so for me, it was never going to be enough to just talk about the shift from a digital literacy world to an AI literacy world. For me it meant really starting with what do leaders need to know and understand to lead with purpose? And how could we help these leaders very early on to both understand the history of failed large scale efforts before them and also the risks that are seemingly always grounded in the same issue, a lack of really clear community engagement.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

And I think sometimes we talk about community engagement in this like abstract way, but I mean like really talking with students and caregivers and your community members, your educators, what are the problems that they want to see solved and how do you as a leader lead through that? And in turn, how do you build their skill set around AI? That to me, is this sort of intersection of what many are referring to as AI literacy. And what I believe is really fundamentally needs to start as a leadership moment in capacity, infrastructure and deep engagement.

Aaron Feuer:

That is terrific. And I like this framing of a leadership moment. And I wrote down what you wrote, the leading with purpose. I think purpose feels like a piece that can easily be missing in some of these moments. And I'm interested when a leader is looking to lead with purpose and to kind of lead with their vision and approach and AI, what does that look like in practice?

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

Number one, a leader's be clear about what they're leading towards. Right. Like, where is the gap between what their community is telling them are the problems that they think are worth solving, and where the leader had identified and believed that those problems were. And your job always as a leader is to bridge that gap between where your community is and where, you know, things need to get to. That's fundamentally the act of leadership. And I think too often what ends up happening for many leaders is for a variety of reasons, they feel compelled that they need to just get started by having some fragmented pilots. And I'm not saying that fragmented pilots is like the wrong answer, but I think it's the wrong answer to the extent that you're doing it without first having deeply understood where your community is and where they're asking you to be leading towards so that those pilots are a part of a systematic effort. Ultimately, for every leader, there is going to be what I refer to as strategic abandonment.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

There are going to be things you have to let go of, initiatives and other efforts that are not advancing your core priorities anymore. That is always the trickiest thing for many leaders. Many people start the opposite. They try to layer AI onto everything else that they're doing. Not only is that, like, just bad for everyone, right? It just creates more work and more energy and more output. And so oftentimes people will say, see, that didn't work. When the reality is that you didn't go through that strategic abandonment. You didn't try to think about where you were going to start making intentional focuses and focusing your resources, your attention.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

And fundamentally, in many cases, like letting go of some things that you were doing. I think a version of this is one that we often see with tutoring. I think people are always talking about, like, oh, I tried tutoring and I couldn't get the schedule to work. And, you know, that is something that, like, now you. You really have to understand that, like, if tutoring is what you're fundamentally building with, and that's going to have to be a part of the building blocks of your schedule. And I think it's that same idea here with AI and thinking about how you get to a place where these aren't fragmented pilots, but that you're really building with this sense of strategic abandonment in mind.

Aaron Feuer:

I think it's so powerful. I mean, what I hear in that is sort of this. This flip from we want to try many, dare I say, even incoherent things to we want to create coherence. And it's funny, when you say it, it seems so simple and almost obvious, but it's actually Very unique that we need to start with. We got to start with, what do you want to achieve as a leader? And that's the heart of it. You talked about community engagement earlier and that is such an important lesson. And I'm interested in what does community engagement done right look like?

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

Hi, community engagement. I had that same feeling when I was assistant Commissioner during Race to the Top. And you know, you're running at these rapid speeds in these change moments. And I remember really concretely coming to understand the depth of community engagement as you started to really see the impact of what policy was looking like and that intersection with practice when there oftentimes was not enough time upfront on the engagement. Which is why for me, in this moment for artificial intelligence, three years ago, ILO group went in the other direction. We were like, oh, we are going to actually talk to leaders while it's still early. While people are not just going straight to like procurement decisions. Like, how do we help these leaders to understand the ethics, the guardrails? How do we help them to understand what's real amongst all of the hype that's in all of this? And then in turn, how do they go back to their communities and mirror this in an extensive process? And not one that's like, we've hosted some meetings and we've gotten some feedback, but like an early and often an ongoing.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

I actually believe in the age of AI that community engagement is just going to actually be more ubiquitous with how we run things generally in our communities. Because this is going to continue to evolve as people have more experience and exposure at different levels and as more questions start to emerge for us. Great. Community engagement starts with a multi tiered process. I think for many communities you're going to have to do a large scale survey. And I think an example of this with Charlotte Mecklenburg. Typical Charlotte Mecklenburg surveys get like a thousand people. When they did their survey around artificial intelligence back about 18 months ago, they had 10,000 responses to this survey.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

These lots of people want to weigh in on this. Lots of people are hearing about this. And it's something that people have lots of information, important feelings about that they want to express. So getting that large scale data is always important, but then coupling that with a lot of focus groups, being able to bring students together, caregivers, educators, your central office team, your principals, and like really deeply trying to understand where people's hopes and fears are and where those things are coming from. And always in all of this, really grounding in the kinds of values that we teach our kids, right? Like how do you think about this moment? Always grounding in things like fairness and transparency and kindness and remembering that where people are coming from in this moment is coming from really deep places. Right? People's fears and worries about what AI can do. We hear this over and over again. Concerns from students about whether or not they're going to be prepared for the workforce when they leave.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

Will they be competitive when they go to college based on where their community has been on the kinds of skills they're getting around. Artificial intelligence. You hear over and over again concerns from caregivers around the chatbots, and like this concern that this is going to create an enormous new wave of mental health issues, particularly coming off the heels of us all really deeply understanding just how bad the impact of the intersection of social media and cell phones have been and the proliferation of data to be used in very problematic ways. And so for us, it's grounding in this process of collecting the data and the surveys, these deep focus groups, to elicit where your community is, the problems that they want solved and trying to package that into ethical principles and guardrails that help to then guide your next stage of work as a leader and as a team, so that you're building the right guidance and training off of where your community is and understanding deeply where you're going to have to start to go even deeper to meet where people are in this moment.

Aaron Feuer:

That's a terrific playbook. And I appreciate the kind of call out to sort of the curiosity and caution and guardrails about how leaders balance and what you're describing, balancing this leadership moment and doing so thoughtfully with ethics, with integrity. You know, I almost feel like this is a moment for our values to shine through in the strongest possible way as leaders.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

Yeah, I think that is a beautifully put way of thinking about all of this. I mean, especially, like, we're all learning this in real time, right? Like, this is something that things are so ever changing. It's not like three years ago when we first were hearing about the rise of AI across our society at the rate that we were, that any of us could have imagined the place we would be today of kids taking their lives as a result of chatbots. I mean, it is absolutely horrifying where we have gotten to on some of this. And so it's even more, from my perspective, a moment of leadership. Like this is now here. These problems are in front of us, and we need, as leaders to really be clear about where these ethical guardrails are going to be and hear our community out very Deeply around it. And in all of this, I think you and I have both been in this work for a long time.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

We know how important is that people think about the role of artificial intelligence for the way in which it can help you see insights and trends and information and make kids lives better by providing educators and those working in these systems with far more actionable information. And so from my perspective, the leadership moment here is making sure that we are really clear about what things should always remain human, where there should always be human interaction and relationship and care, and where are the places that artificial intelligence just should not be a part of the way that we do schooling and learning. Then to understand that like part of this next stage is going to be the ability to hold multiple things as true, that these guardrails we put in, these principles that we put in are going to evolve as we continue to learn more. And that's the importance of the transparency at a community level from my perspective.

Aaron Feuer:

It's well said. And your point about the learning journey is spot on. And I'm interested from a learning perspective. I know that recently ilo, under your leadership launched the AI Strategy and Leadership Network to support leaders in building this work. And it's a big milestone for the field. And I'm interested in just learning more about what were you seeing that inspired its creation and can you tell us more about the network?

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

Yeah. So three years ago, as all of this work was starting to become so ever present in our society, the first realization for me was, wow, these are not conversations that state and district leaders are having in their networks. Not at all. Aside from one or two conferences a year that focus within the world of tech, it was really absent from what the real day to day conversations were. And then as time was going, I started to realize that so often the conversations that we're getting had were very focused around products and not around what we're talking about in this conversation around ethical principles and guardrails and the deep stakeholder engagement and asking these questions around what should remain human and what is this core purpose of schooling? And then in the leadership moment here. And so I saw it as a chance over the last couple of years to start to evolve. Would it become a working group that we had brought together just sort of ad hoc? We brought together 40 different districts and state superintendents and to just start to have the conversation around what they believed needed to be true, where their concerns were very much mirroring a lot of the stakeholder engagement work I was sharing in our early working groups. From that we Developed frameworks that we put out publicly that we built for the working groups around how to think about the political, operational, technical and fiscal realities of AI implementation at every division within your state and district.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

Thinking about it both internally, like how do you think about AI and AI readiness within your own systems, but also how to think about it from your leadership moment and what that looks like to lead within your community. From doing that, those frameworks, we realized there were a lot of people putting out different guidance and templates and things. And so we wanted to make it easier for leaders to use our frameworks without having to rely on us. And so we built an AI coach that that was grounded within our framework so that people could then take those frameworks and use them. And then what we started to realize was that we really needed to bring these leaders together in a much more actionable way. This school year, we were being told over and over again that leaders did not feel like their teams were actually prepared for what this next stage of implementation looked like. You know, a small percentage had guidance documents, but no one felt like they had any kind of real training and systematic implementation around that. And the thing they kept telling us over and over again is they really did not have a space to pull back and get out of the world of pitches and pressure and to really just deeply engage with their teams.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

And so we decided that we would bring these leaders together. It's something that we have been known for, creating these kinds of cohort opportunities that are both meant for leaders to help to upskill themselves and to feel comfortable and confident in leading, but also to be able to have that kind of confidential space with their teams so that they can think about AI in local context. What I'm trying to do that's making this more distinctive is everybody who applied and gets in commits to a concrete project with concrete key performance indicators. And then part of our commitment is that we are building a knowledge management library, cutting edge research, deep understanding around what's working and what's not within implementation. And, and then for every system, the projects that they commit to over the course of this year will be made available to the rest of the cohort members so that we're really trying to open source for each other, where people are picking problems to solve what their implementation roadmaps look like, and then they're going to share transparently what worked, what didn't, under what conditions. That is the ILO way ILO stands for in the life of, and our whole core ethos is that we only do work that we think is going to help leaders to make things a little bit lighter and make change a little bit easier. And, and so that's our commitment with this cohort and that's what we're trying to accomplish is make this a little bit lighter and a little bit easier during a time that can feel like there's not a whole lot of helpful resources meant to be in the life of these leaders right now.

Aaron Feuer:

I love that model. I think it's going to be so powerful to take this individual place by place exploration and bringing it together so that we can learn faster as a space. Right. We can learn lesson from someone else instead of relearning the same thing over and over. We can actually build collective expertise. And I'll just say I am so excited to see what this network can hold. I think it's going to play a really important role in helping our leaders get this right for kids. Looking ahead, if you think about the next few years, what does effective AI leadership look like to you and what do you think are some of the capabilities and mindsets that are going to define effective leadership over the coming years?

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

I love this. I mean, for me, first and foremost, it's going to be about ethics and values. Do you as a leader deeply know yourself? Do you deeply know where your lines in the sand are? One of the things that I train leaders as part of my coaching work that I do is this importance of solitude and leadership. This idea that actually solitude is one of the most important qualities of leadership. Learning to be alone with your thoughts and, and deeply knowing your values. So that when you are in these moments that can feel really tough, whether they're, you know, crisis moments or moments of urgent decision making that you're not feeling like, like you're backed into a corner, but that actually you really weighed and thought through things and that you have the right, I call it board of advisors, right? But those individuals that you can call on that can help you in these important moments. It is going to be even more important as a new generation of leaders takes on these roles of superintendents across the country, that they do deeply understand their own values, that they do understand the ethics and importantly that they really understand what has happened in previous implementations. Both the societal, aspects of moving into a world of digital, to the world of cell phones, the world of social media, that they have perspective themselves, even if they've never led large scale technology implementations, but that they have led large scale change efforts.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

We talk all the time about the importance for superintendents to have strong skills around political Navigation and stakeholder engagement it's going to be triple. So as we continue to evolve, because you have so many headwinds that are happening at once, right? You're going to have artificial intelligence that's going to continue to deepen and expand and increase in its power, coupled with, in many places, declining enrollments and for far too long, school closures that have been kicked down the road. And in the end of all of this, we've been in an ongoing education crisis on the academic side. And so you've got a lot of headwinds that are coming together that leaders are going to have to grapple with. And it's going to be important that they have a perspective on the kinds of problems their community wants solved, how they are going to do that, and really think about how they're leading across their system in this world of AI. Not just thinking about this in fragmented pieces, but really thinking about what it looks like to have a whole system effort in all of this. I think there's a big gap right now between where leaders personally are, their own readiness, the kinds of training they're receiving. And that gap is an enormous opportunity for those of us that can help to build technical capacity.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

And then there's a huge research component in all of this for this next generation of leaders. They're going to have to be even smarter when it comes to understanding research, knowing how to ask the right questions, because in so many ways, artificial intelligence can help to magnify, like you think, about all of the opportunity ahead that agents will be able to bring to education. We've already seen some incredible things in the health sector, and so I'm really excited about what that means for leaders around the kinds of questions they can ask and the research agendas they can drive. How to think about that gap between what their strategic plans say and what's happening every day on the ground. And using those insights from artificial intelligence to drive your system forward with strong research agendas is something that I'm really excited about. We're spending a lot of time thinking about what an assurance laboratory can look like. It's essentially a structure that would allow for the testing of claims and being able to give transparency to the public, to your educators, to your community about these tools, how they're working and what that looks like. And it's stuff like that that I'm excited about and are going to be so important for leaders in the path ahead to really have perspective and to use effectively.

Aaron Feuer:

Julia, this has been terrific, and I just want to say thank you for being here. But more importantly, thank you for your leadership and your insight in the space and I think helping everyone think not just bigger but also more deeply about how we approach this work. You know, I'm struck in today's conversation, it's so easy to feel like the AI moment is about all of these, as you say, kind of the products and scattered pilots and all of these, like, what does this product do? And I think, you know, your wisdom helps us zoom out to this is a leadership moment, and you got to start with your vision. You've got to look deeply at your values, you have to engage your community and you have to learn and that there's a great amount of possibility here. We should seize that possibility, but that we get there through leadership. And that's kind of some of the lessons that I've taken away from what you shared today.

Dr. Julia Rafal-Baer:

Thanks so much for having me, Aaron, and thank you for your leadership. There's certainly not a lot of partners like you in this space who are thinking as deeply and thoughtfully about this implementation work and how to lead an organization in this moment. So I appreciate your leadership just as much.

Aaron Feuer:

Thank you, Julia. And for everyone listening, this is exactly what the Leading and Learning with AI podcast is about. You know, helping talk about this journey from exploration to leadership, from curiosity to confidence, from pilots to purpose. And I will plug if you want to Learn more about ILO's AI strategy and leadership network. We'll share more information in the show notes below. It's a really terrific vision, so thank you so much for tuning in. As always, keep leading, keep learning, and we have a great amount of possibility in this space. So thank you again, Julia, and thank you all for tuning in.