Read the full transcript of Episode 92 of the NAIS New View EDU podcast, which features host Morva McDonald bringing together two experts from disparate backgrounds to share their thoughts on AI, social media, and navigating the delicate balance between preparing kids for the future and mitigating harm. Barry Davis, author of The Preventioneers, and Laura Tierney, founder of The Social Institute, discuss the current landscape, what concerns them, and what excites them about developing technologies.
Morva McDonald: Technology is advancing all around us. Our understanding of the effects on our students, their learning, their mental health is also evolving, actually in real time. As school leaders, in part because of our deep care for our kids and our desire to prepare them for the future, it can be difficult to feel like and be ahead of the technology curve. Given the pace of change, it's hard to make informed decisions about how to manage, resist, and make use of social media, digital learning tools, and AI.
Today we will be talking to two people who have been reading the signals and looking for ways to proactively manage these decisions. They're both coming at this challenge with the goal of reducing harm and improving kids' well-being. I'm excited to talk with them and hear their thoughts on what school leaders need to be considering right now.
Barry R. Davis, who's an M.D. and a Ph.D., is a physician, biostatician, public health researcher who helped lead several landmark clinical trials in cardiovascular prevention. He's the author of the Preventioneers, which explores why societies sometimes act on early warnings and why they so often wait until preventable harm has occurred.
Laura Tierney is the founder and CEO of the Social Institute, which equips students, educators, and families with modern life skills to navigate technology and social media in healthy, high character ways. Through #WinItSocial, an interactive peer-to-peer learning platform, the Social Institute integrates teacher professional development, family resources, student voice insights, and more to empower entire school communities to make positive choices.
What's exciting about this episode, actually, is that these two people don't know each other, so we've invited them in to have a really exciting, interesting conversation, and I'm very much looking forward to it.
Welcome, Barry and Laura. Our overarching kind of idea or question we're trying to get at is like, how do we design schools that honor human development while preparing students to flourish in an increasingly digital world? So before we really get into that, I'm interested in learning from both of you, like, tell us a little bit about what brought you that to this work and how you became engaged in this particular issue.
Laura Tierney: Sure. Well, my connection to this topic, I think, is professional and personal. Personally, I was a teenager growing up with a phone in my hands and social media accounts, and I come at it from that perspective. I also was a student athlete growing up, played with Team USA, played for some really wonderful coaches, and love the psychology of coaching and how do you coach around a topic that is very complex, like technology.
And then personally, having worked in the social media industry for major corporations, that gave me just a front row seat to how tech might be pulling at our attention, to say the least. And so I founded the Social Institute to really help fill those gaps of putting excellent coaches and discussions in front of students in a proactive way that helps really empower and equip kids rather than simply scare and, and restrict.
Morva McDonald: I really appreciate thinking about like a coaching model as a way of thinking about coming to the work with kids in particular. So I think that that'll be interesting to disentangle. Barry, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and how it is you came to this topic?
Barry Davis: I came to this topic through a sort of a tangential way. Throughout my career, I've studied situations in which people were being harmed, and society had to decide whether evidence was sufficient enough to do something about it. And so most of my career was in statistics in hypertension and clinical trials, but everything involved in public health, whether it's smoking or automobile safety or infectious diseases, I have covered.
And the question has always been, do we wait until every uncertainty has been resolved or do we decide to do something about it if we feel that some evidence is there? And it seemed that when I wrote a book about it, but when things had started coming up after that, which just seemed like it would apply. One of these was social media and digital technology, another was AI, and there are many other things that could apply too, but there's this history of prevention in which certain principles apply, and I felt that this was one area which it did.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think putting together this notion of prevention and public health and this coaching idea is kind of an interesting, they're aligned in some ways, complementary in some ways. So it's great to talk to you both about it. I'm interested in like if you could like think about standing on a balcony and looking out right about where we are right now, and if you could encapsulate the problem that you're seeking to solve for schools and students, how would you describe that?
Barry Davis: So there's a lot going on. This digital technology is moving at an incredibly rapid pace, let alone the fact where there was the cellphones and the social media. Now we have AI and that is moving at a pace which I fear may be getting away from us.
But there's so much to deal with, and I actually sort of have a lot of sympathy for the younger generation, because they are just living in an age of rapid, rapid, rapid evolution of ideas and technology. But somebody needs to do something about it.
Now, there's this whole thing in prevention about personal responsibility versus societal responsibility. And I think of this, you know, many of the times this has come up and they talk about is this social media's big tobacco moment? And I've written a lot about big tobacco. What happens is that there's so much that can be done from a personal level, whether it be the students or the parents or the teachers. But there's also the opposite thing where the people, the companies who make this stuff, whether it be AI or social media, they have responsibility. And the government has a responsibility to rein companies in to do things.
So the, what this is just, it reminds me not so much even of cigarettes, it's more of auto safety. You know, people can't be responsible for everything that happens in the car. They need to be responsible drivers, they need to follow the rules of the road, but the cars need to be made safer, and they were, but they can even be made safer still.
Morva McDonald: Mm-hmm. It's an interesting tension that I think you're pointing out, and Laura, you mentioned your take on this is the tension, right, between individual agency, responsibility, right, and what a society is responsible for holistically as we look out at what's, what the future holds. And in this case, as it relates to AI and social media and all these contexts, and kind of thinking about that tension. So thinking about what Barry's commented on, Laura, like how would you kind of conceptualize the problem that we're facing right now?
Laura Tierney: Yeah. I mean, I think Barry described it well. I think we are looking at, I would argue, is one of the grandest problems or moments of tension, like in our time, in our era. And I agree. Students are navigating some of the most consequential technology ever, like of our lifetimes. But we're not always getting the most practical coaching from institutions that are 100% committed to preparing students for their futures. And because it's evolving at such a rapid pace, you know, schools are being thoughtful, taking the time. How are we going to, what policies are we going to have? What frameworks do we want? But it only, it will sometimes widen the gap.
And it can sometimes feel like that that gap you're looking at is like the Grand Canyon, with students on one side and adults on the other. And that puts schools in a state of playing whack a mole and you're just reactive. And I think it's a, it's a both and. You can be reactive, and how do you also be proactive, so that you're building up the education and responding to the incidents that occur because of technology.
Morva McDonald: If I were drawing a picture of this for myself, given what you guys have just said, I would be like on the one side of the continuum is like individual agency. That's one side, and on the other side of the continuum is like large society, government structures, and smack dab in the middle are these smaller institutions. And in this case, schools, independent schools being one of the institutions that sits between, is balancing the both, right?
The individual agency of kids. The large kind of decisions, right, that society at large is kind of making about the container that we all sit in related to this technology. And so, just to point that out, I think it's interesting to think about the way that schools are positioned in really difficult places, right, to manage the problem. From your, from both of your perspectives, I mean, what do you think are some of the biggest challenges that schools are facing right now?
Barry Davis: It's not just one challenge, there are many, but the biggest issue is all the stuff is coming at you, it's like a fire hose. And I agree that there's this spectrum of individual agency versus the societal, but in the school system what's involved is the students, the parents and the teachers, and probably the staff too. And they all have to be sort of on the same page. And it's kind of hard to get that to happen. But having to deal with these issues.
But on the other side of the spectrum is this incredible, the companies and the government, they have to be forced, in which they are now doing, to do something about their products and rein it in because their products are such that they have made it incredibly difficult for the students and the parents and the teachers to deal with this.
Morva McDonald: That's helpful. And Laura, I'm interested in kind of your perspective. What do you, what do you think are the large barriers facing schools? I'm interested in how you're thinking about this problem, kind of using your idea right around coaching and that theory of change or support, if you will.
Laura Tierney: Yeah. Well, as someone who watches a lot of Ted Lasso, I'll make an analogy here. But you know, it's like, you know, you play on a team, it's intramural or it's a college team or you know, whatever team it is. And if the coaches aren't on the same page, you know, the culture, right, you see it start to crack. And you know, it's so fun watching that show because, you know, seeing how they get alignment, you know, between the coaches and very different personalities is very fun to watch.
And I think schools have wrestled with it, with the world of social media. You know, parents, you know, don't want them online, but they might use YouTube in class for certain reasons. And it's like, how are the role models on the same page? And so, Barry, like as he was talking, I was literally envisioning this triangle. You know, students are on one, you know, end of the triangle, parents are on the other end, and then educators are on the third and final corner. And how do you get all three groups aligned, especially the role models in the room, which include parents, educators, and older students, you know, or student leaders.
And that's, I think, no easy thing, because AI is changing every week. You know, there's students that are being negative role models to younger students. And you really need to create this, you know, team-oriented, I think, culture and environment where you're getting everyone on the same page. And I think that's harder to do when technology is throwing you curveball after curveball every week. But I think the, what's hopeful, I think, about this is that the same skills are required, you know, that we needed 10 years ago to navigate social media. As you see the evolution of AI happening, you need proactive communication, you need common standards, you need frequent communication to families and teachers. And so I'm hopeful that you can get alignment, but you do have to think about those three groups very thoughtfully.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, I'm interested in this. I mean, I am a parent of four young adults, right? And manage a lot of different things around their social media lives and their use of AI right now. And I'm interested in and spend a lot of time with teenagers talking to me about, like, as an adult, I don't—as an older person, I don't understand, actually. And I'm interested in this problem with the two of you, which is, you know, there's a pretty big gap, I think, from a kids' perspective about what educators and older adults understand about their technological lives.
So that's an alignment problem to your point, Laura, right? Can you actually get kids on the same page? And at the same time, I think kids experience it as adults being very fearful of technology. So I'm curious from both your perspectives, like how do you imagine managing the problem of like, this kind of fear-based narrative around technology that doesn't actually read very well with teenagers, right?
Barry Davis: Yeah, there is a gap. There's always been this generation gap, especially with digital technology. You know, I always try and ask people younger than me to help me with things, until I caught up. But it is, it's like any new technology, there's always a fear of it, and there's good and there's bad. But the problem is, is that this technology is advancing incredibly rapidly.
Each new technology we have in society seems to just move at such a rapid pace. And this one, you know, everybody, even the experts in AI, will tell you that this, the world is going to change. So that's why people are fearful.
The other thing is that most people, I've learned, are not familiar with what AI really is. I actually have a background in AI from when I was a graduate student. And it's just incredible what it does, but you gotta realize also what it is. It's not a person, it's an algorithm. It's an incredibly fantastic algorithm, but it's not a person, and people—adults and students— get caught up in it. They think they're talking to somebody who's real. And it's not, it's just predicting patterns. And you have to take everything sort of with a grain of salt. And I think that needs to be incorporated not only for the students, but for the teachers, the parents too, and the older adults.
So there's a fear of that, but we have to learn to accept it. In fact, I wish that more people would learn what these elements of AI are, so they would know, with the input that they're putting in, what their output is, and what, realize what is happening there.
Morva McDonald: It's interesting 'cause it’s like a piece of advice, right? I mean, part of your advice might be that actually educators can help kids understand what it actually is, right, versus what it isn't.
Laura Tierney: There's a phrase I came across in the last week, with all the back-to-school PD sessions and everything going on, and it stuck with me. And I wrote it down on a post-it note, and it's: Know them, show them, grow them. And I love that, the idea of knowing students, showing them positive examples, and then helping them grow their own skills to make positive choices in the future.
When we polled students, you know, through our curriculum, we find that out of all challenges, the students want the most help with balancing screens in their life. And I think they want maybe more help than we give them actually credit for, and that there is more self-awareness there. Now there's also algorithms pulling at our attention and are designed to keep us, but I think they are raising their hand and aware of the help that they need.
I also think there, the other gap that I see is just, is around AI and policy, where in a survey that we did with students, we found that 10% of upper schoolers report that their school has clear AI guidelines. And four in 10 say that guidelines exist, but they haven't really been clearly communicated. So that there's a gap. And now you see the challenge emerging, too, of like false positives, you know, with AI scans of their work.
And so I just, I think again, proactive frequent communication around how your school community is approaching AI, there is not such a thing as overcommunication around AI. A lot of undercommunication around it. And, and so I think that can help us get ahead is really knowing where students are with AI through surveys, through active huddling and ongoing conversations, showing them what thoughtful policies and frameworks look like. And then of course, growing student skills within the grounds of those policies.
Morva McDonald: I mean, I appreciate that stress on communication. I'm wondering if you could say more. If you were to say to a head of school, for example, like when you think about your communication, right, however that is about AI, what are the three things you want to be super clear about, right? What in fact do you think they should be communicating to kids about AI usage in schools?
Laura Tierney: Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I'd, I'd see that as like a two parter, you know, what do you communicate and how do you communicate it?
Well, let me tackle the second one first. I was in a room with of head of schools recently and they were talking, one raised their hand and talked about the how and they said that they, you know, every week in their, in their email out to their community, they have a section on AI and what they're seeing in the space and what their community might want to, how might it be relevant to their community? New tools that are emerging.
And I just thought that weekly cadence, and how they did that was they set up a scheduled task, you know, in their AI platform that they use, whether it be it like Claude or Gemini. And it's just like, hey, here's some background on my role, the school that I work with. You're not sharing any sensitive data that you're not able to, and say, I'm looking for the most interesting news going on that could be relevant to parents and what I could be sharing with them. So how they set that up, I thought was pretty brilliant and just very, very practical and proactively communicative.
And then the what, I mean, you could be sharing, of course, reminders about what your policy is. You could share, you know, here's any updates that we've made to our policy and of course where you could find it. So any and all things policy updates is an obvious win. But then also understanding you could be sharing positive use cases of how students might be using AI for better study habits, you know, to do better research. You could share tips on what, how you vet, you know, your search results, your results with AI. Showing that your school is actively plugged into this ongoing evolution of, you know, this technology, and parents can rest assured, you know, that you're staying up to date on it, I think is a great win for leadership.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, overall I hear you saying, like, more explicitness, transparency, more frequency of communication. And I really appreciate the modeling positive usage, right? in terms of how schools are thinking about kids should be using it.
I want to go back to something, Barry, that you have said a number of times. I'm curious about your thinking about it, which is the kind of the rapid pace of change. And you know, we're balancing rapid pace of change with care for kids. And I'm wondering from your history of prevention work before, how do those two things really come together?
Barry Davis: I'll preface it by saying that it's never been this fast before. This is just at an incredible pace. But you try to, as Laura said, try to make sure that everybody's communicated with and informed. One of the problems though I see is that there can be this overwhelming amount of information all the time. You know, if there's like a weekly update, a monthly update, you know, parents have to juggle all these things. The students have to juggle all these things. It can be hard. And what should be is just, communication is the key all the time, to tell people what's going on, what's going to happen, what they may see.
But they should also be communicated a lot of times as to what they don't know. I mean, one of the big problems that public health had, especially during the pandemic, is they needed to better communicate what they did and did not know, to have trust. And if you want to have trust, you need to be honest about what you know and what you don't know.
The other thing is that I'll go back to the thing that Laura said. I thought it was a great analogy about the triangle. But this triangle is built by the companies as to what's happening, whether it's the cellphone or the social media or the AI. And they have to be responsible partners for what goes inside there. And if they're not, then you know, people can go around and around and not be able to deal with it.
Morva McDonald: This is a perplexing problem though, right? Because as you know from other research, our trust in institutions is on a significant decline, right? Has been in a significant decline. This is one of the things that schools are facing, right? Is like, can I trust a school? Does a school know what it's doing? How do I believe in that institution? And so your recommendation is well taken, right?
And we have this other thing in our context, I think that's quite challenging related to the overall trust, society's trust in institutions more broadly.
Laura Tierney: It's also a game of like, control the controllable, you know, because there can be positive steps forward, but you know, at the end of the day, you know your child best or you know your students best. And so no matter what updates that ed tech platform puts, when a child is learning on their device during the school day, you still always have the authority as the educator to know what's best for your students. And it's a game of control the controllable. So I think the, you're seeing positive steps forward from institutions, but the question is, you know, is it enough that you don't need that agency to step in.
Barry Davis: No, I would always agree the agency is important. You have to have that. But you have to also be able to, as you said on the other side, that they have to contribute, too. I mean, there are so many things in prevention where, as I mentioned about the automobile, but you could look at Americans' diets. You know, we all as adults have agency in what we choose to eat and what we do not. But we're surrounded by fast food, restaurants, grocery stores pushing stuff on us. And it's hard to control ourselves. So it's a combination of the things.
Morva McDonald: Yeah, the contextual influence is tremendous, right? I think we are, we are, we agree that there's an interaction, right, between this notion of agency and the broader context that's influencing us. And schools, of course, in this time of uncertainty, right, they, because of the pace of rapid change, they grab for ideas and straws. And so one thing we can see, right, is that schools across the country have done things like institutionalize policies that ban phones from schools. What do you think of that strategy?
Laura Tierney: I think having rules and standards is always a good thing for students and adults, not just the students. So I think of it as a both and—have the rules in place at a school and combine that with education, combine it with practice, because the rules are not there when the bell rings and a fourth grader goes home on their family tablet or starts playing in a multiplayer, you know, video game with their friends. And the rules are not there. And they're left with what standards did they build with the institutions and communities that they're part of?
I just think schools have an extraordinary opportunity to teach kids about social skills in the most social setting that they will ever be in, which is school. And you could talk about how people are making positive decisions and here's what they would do in these different moments online or offline. And I think that's incredibly encouraging and an opportunity for schools to take advantage of.
Morva McDonald: If you were thinking about the harms from your perspective related to like, kids' digital lives and you were advising a school, like, first of all, what do you think those really extreme harms are, and what do you think schools should actually do about them?
Laura Tierney: Yeah. I mean, first thing I would have my school community do is an audit and I would be hunting for like, technology that isn't so ethical by design. And I would, I know that there is technology out there that is ethical by design. It keeps students' eyes up. It doesn't have them looking straight out at a computer for a continuous amount of time. And it, in fact it encourages face-to-face conversation. And there is technology out there that does that. And there is technology where you see the gamified elements, like how do I get students just answering one more question, one more question, one more question? And it's losing the purpose of it. Because that, those companies are built on screen time stats and advertising and more.
So the first thing I would do is a tech audit. And then the second thing I would do is I'd assemble not my like captains of the sports teams, but I would assemble a very diverse committee of students to tell me about kind of moments throughout the day that might pull away from our culture that we're trying to build and tell me about kind of how technology is connected to those moments. Again, I don't think tech is always bad, but I think hearing from the students about how it can be an enabler of culture or a detractor from culture is huge. And then you of course start with student voice too. So that would be number one on my list.
Morva McDonald: The audit, I think, is such an interesting idea, right? Like what, what are we using? What's happening? What's, ethically, what are the tools we're using that have an ethical component to them, right? That turn kids and adults actually towards one another rather than away from one another, I think is always a way to think about it.
And Barry, I'm interested from your perspective, given what you know about prevention. I mean If you were to advise, let's say I was, I'm a head of school, you know, what would what would you tell me? What would you say?
Barry Davis: Well, I, first of all I would agree with what all that Laura had said about doing the audit and having the teachers and the parents and the students all contribute. But the other thing too is that you know, people have tried these different things, whether it be cellphone bans or not getting people on social media until a certain age. And I don't know whether these things are going to work. People are trying to study them and do something about it.
But in the history of prevention, people don't always wait for absolute certainty before they take action. And sometimes things work out and sometimes they don't. And that's how we learn. But you know, on the face of it, so a lot of people, you would say, well, that makes sense, that makes sense, it may not. And the relationship of all these things to mental health is evidence for, and then there's evidence that says, well, it's not that big a deal.
But I'm always in favor of trying new things, doing it. But Laura also had a very important point about, you can do all these things in school, and when they leave school, they're on their own. I mean I know that like in Australia and the United Kingdom, they're trying to do things, but kids find ways around it. So it's always a battle, and we hope that we can find our way to the right path to accomplish these things. There's never going to be one solution fits all, and there's never going to be a, a perfect solution. But we're all trying to do better.
Morva McDonald: I mean, I find that, yeah, I find that somewhat relieving as a leader in a school to think about, which is I'm not going to institute something that's going to solve this problem, probably. Right? But I can try something that I'm going to then learn something next about how to work on the problem that I know we're going to continue to face. Right? So it's not to say like cellphone, banning your cellphones is a good idea or a bad idea, but you'll learn something by doing that, right? That might lead you to the next thing.
As you've mentioned, you know, AI in particular has sped up the pace of change and how things are moving, particularly in the education space for sure. Talk to me a little bit about like, what's one thing that you think is actually really exciting about AI as a tool as it relates to kids and learning and education? Like it's given it's not all bad, right?
Barry Davis: Sure, if you learn how to use it correctly, it can be a great tutor for you at any level. If you want to learn something and you know, learn how to use it, it can start very simple and create lessons for you that go higher and higher and it can teach you almost anything.
To me, it's just amazing because you know, I'm back in the days when you’d have to go to the library and do things and have to search and search. Now I can do something in five seconds. But yeah, the technology there can be, it's like all new technology. It has great potential for good and great potential for harm. And we have to learn how to navigate it.
Laura Tierney: Yeah. I mean, what I'm most excited about for AI is how AI to me is one of the biggest sparks for curiosity. And if you are curious about something, AI can turn you going from well, I wonder, to like let's find out about this. You know, my son, nine years old, you know, and so fourth grade, has some, will have questions, you know, in the evening or on the weekend, you know, why do clouds kind of look like that? And, you know, it's never like, well, let's just go look it up quickly. It enables conversation.
But for middle schoolers or high schoolers, you can now build a business and like, and build out your business idea within like 48 hours of just QA back and forth with Claude. I mean it's incredible. And there's even, you know, this weekend, you know, my son is into NBA basketball and Harry Potter and Pokémon. And so I look up, you know, what standards is his teacher teaching this quarter, and how can I relate that to Pokémon, you know, and NBA, and fuel his kind of love of learning.
So I just think it, the love of learning that it enables is so exciting. But you do need to understand the fundamentals, which is that, you know, if it's giving you information, you need to make sure your rules are set so that you vet the sources that it's giving you and more. So again, you could dial it up for your curiosity, but you equally have to dial up the, the fundamentals of misinformation and vetting what it gives you.
Morva McDonald: One of the things I think schools are thinking about, and to some extent, educators in particular are thinking a lot about is like what is the knowledge, right, that kids need to know? What do they actually need to know at this point? And how do you think about what the human capacities are that are more important now in an AI rich world, right, than they were before previously? You know, I would say like one is like discernment, you know, and curiosity, but I'm curious, like, because educators are really thinking a lot about this. Like, what is the knowledge base that kids actually need to know in a context that's like this?
Barry Davis: I think that, you know, I would agree with you about the discernment, but they, people need to be able to question and have some knowledge about what's possible and what's not. I mean to me the basics are still there. I mean I'm, I worry a lot about kids not reading, because of all this stuff. But they really do need to still be able to read and absorb and understand.
I would like to see more of this being able to just go off and read a book just for pleasure's sake, just so they can do this. And the basic skills of math I still think are important. But there is a lot of stuff that I used to learn, I bet everybody else used to learn, which is just a lot of facts. And they were great to know that, but you know, you don't have to know all that stuff because you can ask the right questions of AI and get that information.
But you have to be able to know what's real and what's not. You have to be able to know a lot of things, in my field, about the difference between things like causation and correlation. Just because something is associated with, doesn't mean it's happening. And a lot of people do that. And it happens in society over and over and over again. So there are some some basics that need to be done, but we could take advantage of this new technology to emphasize those rather than some of the stuff that we used to do.
Morva McDonald: Laura, what are your thoughts on that, as a parent but also as a person who pays a lot of attention to education?
Laura Tierney: Sure. I mean, I'm, I hope my answer isn't too biased given the name of my organization, but I just feel like the future is in social skills. It's being able to, you know, look people in the eye, you know, when you're talking to them. It needs being confident in being yourself when you could have AI write an email to your teacher that doesn't sound a lick like you. And you have to be confident in your own writing style, right? And you could teach AI about your writing style too. Like that, that's possible. And here's how I enjoy kind of reading or writing.
But you cannot, when you are in the working world, you cannot just go to AI and say, you know, give me an email I could send to my boss about this really sensitive topic because I don't want to talk to them face to face. And so you're going to need those communication skills more and more.
And I think how AI kind of supports you in that is really exciting to think about. How can you have a QA with Claude before you go into a really tough conversation, you know, with your teacher or with your boss and have it poke holes in your, in what your argument is, you know? But nothing will ever replace your ability to have a good face-to-face conversation with someone with good human judgment, with good ethics, with good curiosity and most importantly maybe being able to see from someone else's perspective. I think of it as a both and though. I think it's exciting to think of the in-person skills and how AI can support you in those skills.
Morva McDonald: Mm-hmm. It's a partnership model, which a lot of people are talking about now, right? The partnership between an individual person and AI as a tool to complement their capacity, I think.
Just to close out, I'm, I'd love to hear from each of you just one thing that kind of gives you hope in this moment of time for the future.
Barry Davis: Sure. Well, a lot of things give me hope in that people like us, like Laura, people realize there's problems and they try to solve it. And what gives me hope is that there's, for every time you think that things are going so badly, there can be a leader that comes forward and does something about it, pushes forward for, in my case, prevention.
And in the stories that I told about prevention, there was always resistance. No matter what was being done, whether it was smoking or auto safety or climate change, there's always resistance. People put barriers in your way. And, but there are many people in society that are saying, No, this needs to be done, and here's how you do it. And they just persist and persist. So I'm hopeful that there are people out there that will be the leaders of tomorrow that will show us the way and make things better.
Morva McDonald: Thank you, Barry. I appreciate that.
Laura, what are your thoughts on that question? Kind of what gives you, when you step back, what gives you hope?
Laura Tierney: While I think student voice is always important, it's more important than ever, especially when it comes to technology. I think one like key through this are curious educators. I think if we can maintain our curiosity for staying open-minded about AI, and it's not going to destroy our lives, those, the same way you saw headlines, you know, come out a while ago, social media destroying our lives. Granted, there's a lot there's a lot of negatives that have been done, but at the same time, it's also been a force for good. And I think if educators can have that open mindset, I think that will cascade down to the students. And I think you just have a more curious community overall.
Morva McDonald: You know, it's the Fall and people are excited about being in schools. And it's good to leave them with a moment of hope of thinking about how do they manage, to your point, Barry, this this very rapidly changing, very complex situation that's full of uncertainty that we're not going to know, but we do have to try things. You know, and have faith, I think, in the deep kind of humanity of kids, but also of adults in this space. So I really appreciate you both. Thanks for coming today.
Laura Tierney: Yeah. Thanks for having us.
Barry Davis: Thank you, Morva. Thank you, Laura.