In the fall of 2022, I got a phone call from a parent at The Field School (DC) who was also an AI executive. He explained that in a few weeks, OpenAI would release a powerful large language model. “Do you think we’re prepared as a school?” he asked.
I responded with two questions: First, what exactly is a large language model? Second, based on the first answer, was the world prepared?
It might be hard to remember a time before ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and all the rest, but the feeling I had during that call was similar to a moment in June 2020 when we reopened our doors during the COVID-19 pandemic and someone asked me if the school was ready to undertake contact tracing.
Based on the questions parents ask me, it is clear that they expect school to change and adapt quickly to outside forces and big changes like these. At Field, we’ve built a culture that allows us to respond to change with intention, one that’s nimble enough to evolve yet grounded enough not to chase every shift. We don’t change for change’s sake, but we also refuse to bury our heads in the sand and pretend that things are the same as yesterday. We’ve built this culture by nurturing curiosity over certainty, collaborating, and modeling ongoing growth.
Learning to Love the Questions
School leaders at Field continuously ask how we can best meet the moment. However, we’ve learned that before we can respond to it, we have to name it. That realization leads us to a more foundational question: ”How do we define this moment?” In many ways, the answer is shaped by what we see, what we hear, what we think, and what we feel.
Defining this AI moment is hard. There’s noise everywhere—from political theater and sensationalist headlines to AI-generated junk. But there’s also sweeping policy that impacts millions, journalists uncovering untold stories, and AI-assisted medical discoveries.
In that environment, the challenge is discernment: deciding what deserves our attention, and how we should respond. To distinguish what matters, we resist rushing to simple answers, and instead, faculty and students commit to the conversation. We stay open to changing course midstream, and we are transparent when our thinking evolves. Some questions are painful to explore, especially sensitive or polarizing topics, but we also recognize their necessity.
In the lead-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Field’s school leaders asked a hard question: Were we unintentionally promoting polarization by not teaching our students how to talk—and listen—about the issues that matter to them? To pressure test that concern, we had 11th and 12th grade students read Try to Love the Questions: Moving from Debate to Dialogue in Classrooms and Life.
From there, we invited the author, Lara Hope Schwartz, a Harvard and American University professor, to conduct a faculty workshop focused on classroom strategies to promote conversation about controversial, sensitive or difficult conversations. During the workshop, we practiced disagreeing with each other on topics that mattered to us as individuals.
With that foundation in place, we revised the sixth- to 12th-grade history summer reading in developmentally appropriate ways, setting the stage for the opening unit of the school year to focus on democracy, elections, and polarization.
Then we kicked off the year with a schoolwide, two-day election teach-in, with teachers developing a lesson plan for each course that connected to elections in some way. In statistics, students studied polling and how results can be manufactured and manipulated. In 11th-grade English, they examined inaugural poetry and how it reflects the issues of its time. In sixth-grade math, they explored the pros and cons of the mathematics behind the electoral college.
This work built an appreciation for the systems, laws and traditions that surround elections. It also allowed our community to delve deeper into complex issues and policies that often are reduced to soundbites. It allowed space for each of us to invest in the conversations and see beyond ourselves.
Building a Faculty Culture of Learning and Collaboration
I’ve worked in schools where you can walk into a respected teacher’s classroom and see the same experiment, project, or lesson year after year, where it could be 1996, 2006, 2016, or 2026, and you wouldn’t know the difference. Where time seems frozen except for what students are wearing and talking about.
That is the antithesis of Field. Instead, we hire and support teachers who expect their practice to evolve. From the start, I’m explicit about what our culture requires: constant learning and collaboration.
We update summer reading in response to current events, revisit course content as global economies and alliances shift, and refine skill development as technology reshapes the workforce. To make that possible, we’ve built a faculty culture that connects course material to real world problems, aligns skills across disciplines and grade levels, and leverages collaboration among the whole school community to inspire and support teachers.
This approach is clear in the courses we offer. We teach 12th-grade electives such as Holocaust and human behavior (history, sociology, and psychology), and immigration and assimilation, co-taught by English and history teachers, that examine personal and cultural narratives in shifting geographic boundaries. In seventh grade, we decided to dedicate an entire year in a secular school to the study of world religions because students need that framing to make sense of current global events and cultural alliances.
This is also why, when I talk to prospective teachers, I ask not only what they teach, but what they hold sacred. I want to understand what circumstances would change their mind about the importance of that content because flexibility and a willingness to evolve are what ensures our curriculum and instruction stay responsive.
I wish it were simple to create a culture conducive to change, but it isn’t. In fact, for many people, change can trigger anxiety or fear. What I have learned over the years is that setting expectations matters. We must be clear that change is not an interruption to the work; it’s what we expect.
Modeling Adaptation
Over the last five years, our teachers have changed just about every aspect of their practice—from assessment tools and models to content and skills. And this work isn’t finished; it is a process we will undertake many times over the course of our careers. In that sense, our growth mirrors what our students will be asked to do beyond Field. That’s why we’ve made a conscious decision for ourselves and our students to be change-friendly.
This is evident in our approach to AI. After initially rejecting AI in early 2023 by simply developing policies around cheating, we brought students into the conversation. Through listening sessions with seniors, we discovered that they were desperate for coaches and collaborators. They were doing things with AI that their parents, teachers, and mentors were rejecting, and they wanted guidance. When our faculty heard this, they rose to the call.
Our academic leaders developed summer work for faculty, which included reading Co-Intelligence by Ethan Mollick and an assignment meant to further the faculty’s use of generative AI, such as using AI to plan an extensive family vacation; build spreadsheets tracking skills and standards through units of study; and read and summarize lengthy articles which could be collated into a reader for students.
For most faculty, this process meant we were truly learning alongside our students, a new and vulnerable position that has been extraordinary. Our English department chair and other academic leadership read John Warner’s More than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI as we were undergoing a review of our ninth-grade English curriculum. Now, with students serving on an AI advisory group, we are looking for ways to extend the conversation and tackle complicated conversations that mirror those happening around us.
Practicing Nimble Change
At Field, we have come to understand that adaptability is learned through intentional practice. It’s the commitment to curiosity over certainty, dialogue over debate, collaboration over isolation. It is the humility to admit when we do not yet know enough and the courage to rethink what we once held fixed.
Our students won’t just learn to navigate the world as it is; they will also learn to shape the world as it changes. The world they are inheriting will demand that they redefine moments again and again. It will ask them to distinguish noise from substance, to revise their thinking publicly, to collaborate across difference, and to work with and alongside emerging technologies. If we want them to be nimble, principled, and intellectually brave, we must practice those habits ourselves.
Our graduates need critical discernment and the confidence to evolve. In our world, that kind of adaptive thinking isn’t optional. It’s essential.