Humans are irreplaceable. We seem to keep forgetting that. AI is a tool. A powerful one, for sure, but still, a tool. We are in an age and stage where everyone is trying to figure this out, but I thought that discussing the aspects of being human that aren’t replaceable will help all of us think about where we might want to use AI and the human skills that we need to encourage and teach our students so they can help tomorrow become better.
Below I’m sharing the show, the audio podcast, and an essay I’ve written with research and an overview of each guest. I continue to experiment with the format that will resonate with readers and listeners while celebrating my own humanness and writing my own editorial content about what I feel about this show. I hope you enjoy!
So, let’s start looking at some research that should make us curious and help us ask questions about our uses of AI.
ActivTrak’s 2026 State of the Workplace report — analyzing 443 million hours of work activity across 1,111 organizations and 163,638 employees — found that AI adoption more than doubled the time workers spent in email and reduced daily focused work by about 23 minutes per AI user, with focus time falling to a three-year low (with engagement dropping.)
Meanwhile, High Point University’s 2026 Quality Enhancement Plan, titled “Emotional Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence: The Human Advantage,” argues that the very skill most needed in an AI-saturated world is the one AI can never have: emotional intelligence.
The World Economic Forum has consistently reported that AI in education should augment teachers, not replace them. (But what if everyone thinks screens are the problem and this becomes a non-issue. Sigh – it seems we learn so little over time. It isn’t the tool but how the tool is used, but I digress, and this is supposed to be a show, after all, not really a blog post. But hey, it is my show and my blog, so I can go there, can’t I? Something uniquely human also, the ability to digress with purpose.)
Interestingly, Khanmigo is no more as of early April (read Dan Meyer’s take, it is worth the read.) While Sal Khan claimed AI tutors were a revolution and Khan Academy increasingly tried to force students to use their AI tutor, it just wasn’t happening. Kids might use the videos, but they’re still turning to teachers for help, it seems. (Or, maybe, the AI tutor with guardrails that won’t give them the answer is just not what they want, but again, I digress. Smile 🙂 )
Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk, Head of School at Christian Life School in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and PhD in Rhetoric from Duquesne University, opens our conversation with a sobering observation: We all suffer from the “curse of knowledge.”
In 1990, Stanford researcher Elizabeth Newton conducted a famous study. She asked participants to tap out the rhythm of a well-known song like”Happy Birthday,” “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Then, the “tappers” were asked to predict how many listeners would recognize the tune from taps alone. Tappers predicted the listeners would guess the song around 50% of the time. The actual recognition rate? 2.5%.
Why does this matter in the classroom? Because we assume our students understand what we’re explaining when they don’t. We think our body language matches our words when it doesn’t. We believe we’re communicating when we’re actually creating confusion.
So, what conclusion do we have about the curse of knowledge? Emotional intelligence and relentless clarity. Say important things multiple times, in multiple ways, through multiple channels. Ask questions to genuinely understand what others are feeling. Stop assuming. Start connecting.
On the show we mention Amy Cuddy’s work on “power posing.” Her original hypothesis was the idea that the physical position of your body can influence how confident you feel. Close your arms, hunch your shoulders, and you may feel smaller and more anxious. Open your posture, stand tall, and you may feel more powerful and present. This isn’t metaphorical but it’s embodied cognition: your body and mind are not fully separate, and what you do with your body shapes what you experience.
Alan Lipton, a professional editor whose work has appeared in Edutopia, Deloitte, Fox Interactive, iVillage, and The Learning Company, walks us through something that sounds simple but is extraordinarily complex: editing.
Most people think editing is about catching commas and fixing spelling. It’s not. Lipton identifies five distinct forms of editing:
What makes human editing irreplaceable is something AI cannot do: Lipton reads your writing as a reader and writer simultaneously. He listens to the “mind’s ear”—how the language sounds, its natural rhythm, whether it serves the story you’re trying to tell. When we discuss on the show how often we authors must “kill your darlings” (cut something you love because it doesn’t serve the narrative) he’s making a judgment call based on craft, not rules.
AI tools like ChatGPT often always tell you you’re right. A human editor tells you the truth as they see it based on their experience and knowledge and how they experience the written word. I hope you’ll find the discussion with Alan as enlightening as I did.
As I worked on this show, I considered which show I thought truly encompassed this idea of how we as teachers truly teach on a human to human level and one educator stood out to me: Karen McCallum.
We step back to a vault episode from Cool Cat Teacher’s archive: April 12, 2017 when I interviewed Karen McCallum, elementary vice principal and kindergarten teacher in Okotoks, Alberta, with 33 years in the primary grades, shares two transformative stories about emotional intelligence.
Karen had a nonverbal girl in her classroom. No speech. Karen used two puppets named Matz and Penny to create a safe space for emotional expression. The girl began communicating through the puppets first, then gradually with other children, then with adults. How Karent used these puppets and taught emotional intelligence to children truly inspired me (and many other teachers – that was a popular show!)
Later, she describes a boy who’d had his finger stepped on during recess. Instead of erupting in anger, he simply shut down emotionally. Karen used the same puppet intervention to help him process his feelings and rebuild trust with his peers. As you listen, you might use puppets or some other method of helping children process their emotions but particularly at a young age, so much of emotional intelligence is shared human to human.
Then, I wanted to help us see inside the mind and philosophy of a school who has long not used technology. (As a technologist, it isn’t because I fully embrace this approach for schools, however, there are things I think Krise is bringing to this conversation that somehow we have lost in our classrooms as we have added so much we have lost some things, I think.)
Krise Nowak, Head of School at Ambleside School in McLean, Virginia (through grade 8), practices Charlotte Mason pedagogy—an educational philosophy that deliberately minimizes technology and emphasizes what Mason called “living education.”
So, what is this approach? Charlotte Mason’s “three tools” are narration, habit formation, and the use of “living books.” The approach focuses on engaging, beautifully written texts rather than textbooks.
Personally, I think that the practice of narration—asking students to tell back what they’ve read or heard in their own words—teaches far more than a quiz. It requires students to think, synthesize, and communicate. I am using oral conversations more frequently now and many educators are as well as we seek to understand what students know.
Krise describes the emotional impact of this approach: “I have my child back.” Her teachers report that when screens disappear, so does the constant fragmentation of attention. She says that children who were struggling suddenly found their footing. This is a very human-centered approach to learning and even in a school with technology, humans should still be central, I think.
Ambleside teaches robotics and engineering. But the foundation is human relationship, human conversation, human thinking—all things that thrive when screens are secondary (or not existent at all.)
Again, I don’t necessarily advocate no screens, but I do advocate being intentional and purposeful and that we know what we’re trying to achieve with learning. What is our education philosophy as a school and an educator?
As John and I close the episode, we talk about things we think AI cannot do (at least without a human.) We hope you draw your own conclusions because this is important. As Abraham Maslow wrote in 1966, “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Everything is relevant to being done by AI nor is everything relevant to being done totally by humans. Massive data sets, analysis of a lot of text for trends, and many other tasks are quite well done by artificial intelligence tools. But always, always, always, AI should be under the supervision of humans who are wholly accountable and wholly capable of having both the knowledge and the ability to supervise the AI as it does the work we intend it to do.
Can AI help? Certainly! There are places that AI can help? But not every place. Certainly, AI can help with data analysis, research aggregation, and routine tasks. Once we learn how to use it wisely and well, the hope is that effective AI use can free teachers to do what only humans can do: connect, inspire, challenge, love. (Although we know that this has yet to be proven; we are still in the early days of figuring out what AI can do, and honestly, AI drift is a problem and models that work today sometimes stop working tomorrow!)
The future of education isn’t AI-first. It’s human-first, with AI as a tool. I think that the teachers who will thrive will be the artisans we’ve always been and AI will be just another tool in our toolbelt. One of the best lessons I teach in my AP Computer Science Principles class is with a costume box and painters tape on the floor and my students’ computers buried deep within their backpacks as we learn about movement in a 2D plane. Knowing when to use what tool is a vital part of being a teacher and I don’t see teachers who understand this to be replaced soon.
BOGACZYK, DR. JEFF
Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk currently serves as the Head of School for Christian Life School in Kenosha, WI. He completed his undergraduate degree at North Central University in Minneapolis MN and later received a Master of Arts in Leadership and Liberal Studies and then a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, both from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. His research interests are in interpersonal and organizational communication and media ecology, particularly in the area of education. For the past 15 years, he has served in educational leadership and he currently serves as the book review editor for Explorations in Media Ecology and is a former board member for the Media Ecology Associate. As a hobby, he hosts a podcast and a blog, Mind For Life, where he explores leadership, personal development, entrepreneurship, human psychology, and media ecology.
Social Media: Instagram @mindforlife | YouTube @mindforlife321 | Threads @mindforlife | TikTok @mindforlife
Alan Lipton is a professional editor and writer whose work has appeared in publications and platforms including Edutopia, Deloitte, Fox Interactive, iVillage, and The Learning Company. He brings deep expertise in the editorial craft: conceptual editing, developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and proofreading. His approach to editing centers on understanding the writer’s intent and making their voice sing through careful, craft-focused revision.
I am an elementary vice principal and kindergarten teacher in Okotoks Alberta. I am in my 33rd year of teaching. My entire career has been in the primary area. I have my Master’s degree in Special Education and have spent half of my career working in special education and behavior support programming.
Krise Nowak is a seasoned educator with deep expertise in Charlotte Mason pedagogy. She has been in education for over 18 years, teaching students across grades. Krise graduated from Ambleside Schools International’s Master Teaching Program and has been recognized as one of the top teachers within its 25-school association. Now in her fifth year serving as Head of School, Krise continues to champion relational, Christ-centered leadership. Prior to this role, she served nine years at Ambleside as a respected and beloved middle school teacher, mentor, and colleague. Before joining Ambleside, she taught Geosystems and Biology at Mountain View High School in Centreville, Virginia, further developing her skill in engaging students through rich ideas and living science instruction.
She is also a long-time steward of school traditions, including the First Fridays middle school program, which she faithfully organized and led. Krise counts it a deep blessing to be part of the Ambleside movement and is eager to share the good news of this life-giving way of educating children. She authors a monthly blog to inspire and equip parents and friends in the wider community, and she hosts Coffee with Charlotte Mason, a monthly gathering for reading and guided discussion of Mason’s volumes. Above all, Krise is a servant leader in Christ. She led children’s ministry at Shepherd Gate Church and has devoted her life and work to shaping students and families through Christ-centered education. Mrs. Nowak holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from George Mason University and a Master’s Degree in Education from George Washington University.
Transcript Disclosure: This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain.
Vicki Davis (00:00)
Welcome to Cool Cat Teacher Talk, where we talk about what matters in the classroom. What AI can’t do, being beautifully human in the age of AI.
Vicki Davis (00:26)
Today we’re talking to us that help us emphasize some of the things AI cannot do. It’s important that the age of AI to understand the things that I can help us with, and the things that it can’t. We’re going to talk to Jeff Bogaczyk, a head of school and rhetoric expert, who is going to help us understand what are some of the things that we need to teach students about communicating and thinking.
Vicki Davis (00:54)
Then we’re going to talk to Alan Lipton, who is my editor for my next book, and then we’re going back to an older episode of my Ten Minute Teacher podcast. This amazing special needs teacher who had a really incredible way of helping students communicate and treat each other well and build that emotional intelligence with Karen McCallum. Finally, we’re going to talk to the head of a school that uses basically no technology, just a little bit of robot building and understand what are the human things they’re trying to teach with this approach.
Vicki Davis (01:34)
Let’s get started.
Announcer (01:36)
Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (01:39)
Today we’re talking with Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk. He’s head of school in Wisconsin. He holds a PhD in rhetoric and hosts the Remarkable Mind for Life podcast. His research focuses on media ecology. That’s the study of how our communication technologies shape the way we think, relate and learn. Jeff, it’s really interesting communication in this age of loneliness, miscommunication in division.
Vicki Davis (02:14)
Like this is a topic that’s resonating with people, isn’t it?
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (02:17)
Yeah. It’s great to be with you, Vicki. But just to address that, there was a French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, who wrote a book a while back called The Technological Bluff. And his basic interpretation of society was that we need to now look through the lens of technique and technology as we look into society. And basically, the technological bluff was about what technology promises humanity in order to advance itself.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (02:47)
I don’t know if you remember when back when the social media platforms were all coming out, and these are going to connect us better to human beings. These platforms are going to allow us to interact with other people and facilitate better human connections. That was a false truth. It was a lie. And here we are, more segmented in society than ever before.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (03:09)
People disconnected, as you mentioned, epidemics of loneliness, all as a result of these platforms. They are not bringing us together. They are distancing us. They are pitting one against the other. And it’s an unfortunate situation, but quite honestly, the money was worth it for them. When people will do and say whatever they have to do in order to be able to advance whatever their projects are and cash in on it, and that’s what we see going on.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (03:34)
Similar, I would say, Elon Musk with the promises of robotics and nobody’s ever going to have to work, and everybody’s going to have free income, and everybody’s going to be driven around by cars and robots. Is that really the world we want to live in? Because work does have a meaningful purpose in our life. We want to be able to do something that’s purposeful and working with people and being in relationships.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (03:54)
I don’t trust those guys, to be quite honest with you.
Vicki Davis (03:57)
What’s the saying? Fool me once. Shame on you for me twice. Shame on me. I was in the cell phone business. And how do we market cell phones? We learned that one reason back in the early 90s that that people would buy cell phones. That was for the safety of their children. Did phones make them safer? No. Social media.
Vicki Davis (04:12)
Did it make us more socially connected? No. It made us lonelier. This is one thing I teach my students. You have to be careful of the marketing line because AI, for example, is it processing? Is it doing data analytics? No, it says it’s thinking. It’s not thinking, it’s processing, it’s doing algorithms. And I asked them, hey, would you have used this if it said algorithmically calculating whatever?
Vicki Davis (04:33)
They said, no. I said, but how about when it says thinking. So they’ve intentionally anthropomorphized AI to make it think that it’s like a human brain, which it’s not. Now there’s some great uses of AI, but this is a really prevalent marketing technique of technology companies to tell us it’s going to make our lives better. Oh, don’t be afraid.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (04:54)
It’s interesting you say that because there is a, I would say, a foundational basis for interpretation of how people think of the human brain. People think of the human brain as a computer. That metaphor then extends to what computers do, that all the brain does is process information. And we know that it’s more than that. The brain is connected to our bodies.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (05:18)
It is connected to our nervous systems. The brain allows us to perceive the world in ways completely different, because of its connections to our body that computers can never do. And so people with that foundational interpretation of how the brain works extend it to machines. And I think there’s just a fundamental difference. We’re not machines, we are creations.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (05:42)
We are bodies. And there is something very unique and distinct about that, quite different qualitatively, you might say it from computers and robots and everything that they’re creating to try to mimic or recreate the human.
Vicki Davis (05:56)
So one thing I always tell my students is in the age of AI, emotional intelligence of us humans is far more important, and I always encourage them. We do activities to learn to read the body language of the other people, because they tend to want to look at the screen, and when they look at the screen, everybody around them looks at the screen.
Vicki Davis (06:15)
They’re not making eye contact. They’re not understanding. You know what? What we’re communicating. And you’re all about communication. Now you’ve got a 30 day challenge on your Instagram that by the time we air this, maybe all the way through. But I encourage people to go listen to it. And you had some really interesting statistics you shared about somebody tapping out what they thought was a rhythm.
Vicki Davis (06:40)
Could you share that study with us? Because it just really resonated with me.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (06:45)
The issue is the curse of knowledge, and everybody has internal knowledge of certain things that we often think other people have as well, but they don’t. In 1990, study at Stanford, where somebody who knew a song say, for example, Happy Birthday to You would just tap out the rhythm, happy birthday to you of that song and thought, oh, it’s so easy, because when you’re tapping out the song, you’re singing along in your own brain, the melody because you know the song.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (07:18)
And so that knowledge that we have internally of the song, we just think, oh, everybody else possesses that. They don’t. They’re not hearing the melody of Happy Birthday to You or The Star-Spangled banner, or Mary Had a Little Lamb or anything like that. All they’re hearing is taps in some type of rhythmic sequence. Without the internal knowledge, it’s very difficult for other people to understand what’s going on in our minds. (Read more about Elizabeth Newton’s 1990 study.)
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (07:46)
You know, as human beings, we’ve got a couple of problems. Number one, we think other people can read our minds. Like, you should just know what I’m thinking. In all of my past experiences, past knowledge and past history. Additionally, we think we can read other people’s minds. And so that comes back to emotional intelligence that we think people see our emotions and know our emotional states and can recognize those things when they don’t.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (08:14)
We often fail to recognize that we don’t understand other people’s emotional states and emotional intelligence, which I think is wonderful, and how you talk to your students about that, I think it’s incredible. That’s such a key quality to be able to understand. We’re more than just, again, information beings. We are emotional beings. And that emotion comes through and all of that.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (08:35)
So that knowledge goes back to one of the other things I talk about in this 30 day challenge is that illusion of transparency. We just assume that other people know what’s going on in our minds and they don’t. And so that’s why communication is so critical, asking questions to actually hear what somebody else is feeling or what they’re going through, and then communicating the knowledge that we have because we just have the expectation that you’re going to get it.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (09:05)
You should know this. You should get it. Well, they don’t they can’t read your mind. They don’t know what you’re thinking. And so being clear in how you communicate really does help to solve some of those things that prevent us from connecting with one another.
Vicki Davis (09:20)
So, Jeff, you’re a head of school. How do you take this to your teachers? Because so often what we think we’ve communicated to our students, we have an eye opening moment where we realize what I think I just said. They didn’t understand what I said. They understood something totally different, especially middle school. They kind of have so much going on so often, and it’s like, I didn’t say that at all.
Vicki Davis (09:45)
How do you help your teachers with this?
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (09:46)
What we try to do, it’s not easy. These are obstacles for communication that we deal with quite regularly and often, but we encourage our teachers to communicate out often and in multiple ways through. You might want to say it, multiple media, the expectations and what’s coming, and then to write it on the board to write it in the software system that people are looking at to communicate it to, to students verbally, just communicating out the expectations over and over again.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (10:20)
We do that from a leadership perspective as well, communicating out what we expect and what our vision and what our mission is. Somebody said this before and I don’t know who actually, but it does make sense the moment you’re sick of saying it, that’s the moment they’re finally starting to actually hear it. It just needs to be communicated over and over.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (10:39)
And for us, one of our expected student outcomes, which is a part of our portrait of a graduate, is confident communicators. We want to, through our school, through our curriculum, through our environment, produce students who are confident communicators. They can speak well, they can write well. They can think well, thinking to me as a communication event that interpersonal communication, you’re having a dialog with yourself when you’re thinking for our students that they can negotiate the most important relationships in their life.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (11:15)
And the way we do that is through communication. There is no relationship without communication. Communication is you might even say it is the relationship.
Vicki Davis (11:26)
There’s so much to unpack here because as I work to help my students understand, I love how you said that. We think we can read minds, but we can’t, you know. And one interesting little tidbit I had come across in one of my body language books, right? As communicators like to study those, was that there’s about 10% of the people who give cross messages.
Vicki Davis (11:47)
Unfortunately, a lot of those people end up in prison. I had a student one time that when he was telling the truth, his body language was that he was lying. And when he was lying, his body, it literally was the opposite. Because there were times that I knew for a fact he didn’t do it, and his body language was giving me.
Vicki Davis (12:04)
And I tried to talk to his parents. I said, listen, because statistically speaking, in this particular book, it was an FBI profiler interviewer said, you need to help those people that are the 10% because they usually end up in prison arrested for something they didn’t do. I was trying to help this parent understand your child is giving off mixed messages.
Vicki Davis (12:23)
You need to help him a little bit with his body language. And it was like not a real understanding with what I was trying to say, that we not only need to learn to try to read body language, we need to learn that not everybody gives off the same body language. And if we’re one of those whose giving off mixed messages, we do need to learn and help us with our own body language.
Vicki Davis (12:44)
So when you teach your students and teachers to communicate, how do you pull that in? Because this is an area I need a lot of help.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (12:50)
That’s very difficult to do. I would say that alignment between what you’re saying non-verbally and what you’re saying verbally is the goal. You need your messages to be coherent when what you say does not match up with what your body is communicating. Everyone believes what your body is communicated. We don’t believe your words, which goes back to your point of why people can say something and get arrested for something they didn’t do, because they’re telling people they didn’t do it, but their body is communicating something different.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (13:23)
You can of course, practice. You can develop confidence, communication habits, how to look somebody in the eye. And of course, those things require a lot of effort and 60 days of continued practice. But the habits that are really ingrained, quite honestly, communication how we communicate verbally and nonverbal verbally is a habit. It’s something we’ve just learned and done our whole lives so it can take place.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (13:53)
The first step is going back to emotional intelligence self-awareness. If you don’t know what you’re doing wrong or not doing well, you will never be able to correct it, or at least work towards rebuilding and redeveloping habits. Habits are just ingrained neural networks in our brains that operate on autopilot, if you will, and you can change those, but it just takes a lot of time and a lot of practice.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (14:22)
Con men, con artists, they’ve practiced how to communicate and align their messages and connect with people and build rapport over a long period of time. They just know how to do that. They practiced it, they’ve utilized it, and they use it to great effect, albeit to the detriment of people that they’re conning out of money. Those things can be built, they can be developed.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (14:43)
And of course, to your point, when you see it early on when someone is younger and growing up, that’s the time to really build in and retrain and develop those habits so that over time they start to overtake the ones that are not as effective when it comes to the mixed message part.
Vicki Davis (15:00)
So, Jeff, you built a Instagram following of 224,000 folks. That’s a lot. What’s the message that’s resonating the most where you’re getting people saying, wow, that that’s true.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (15:10)
Having the message is this a lot of people recognize that they’re not great communicators. And if you look at any relational problem, it’s always communication. Unfortunately, too many people, I think, want a quick fix. Give me the words to say, give me a quick phrase to say. A lot of it to me is ego driven. I want to win.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (15:33)
I want to get that person when they say something bad to me or make me feel dismissed. I want to be able to have the words to say to get them so that I can, like, boost up my ego and stand up for myself. Standing up for yourself is important, but what are we really trying to do in our relationships?
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (15:50)
What do relationships really mean to us? I think it’s about human connection that you are connecting with people and working together with them, and that you’re treating people respectfully. The communication space on the internet is weird, of course. Developing practices and strategies and techniques, all of its great, and there’s a lot of people that are out there doing that, but there’s so many people that just aren’t not great communicators, especially when it comes to public speaking.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (16:17)
Like one of the number one fears that people have is getting up in front of a group of people and having to give some type of a presentation. And people long for growth in those areas, and they’re looking for that. That’s to me, one of the insights I’ve had since this has only been two years, to be honest with you, of starting on Instagram two years ago and getting to where I am now and on TikTok as well.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (16:38)
So it’s unique to see what people are dealing with, and people recognize that it’s an issue to grow in, for sure.
Vicki Davis (16:44)
Then you get into embodied cognition, which is one of the things I teach my students is that if you close up and you and you close your arms and you close, you’re like that. Your body actually releases neurochemicals that make you more nervous. If you have a more open stance, you get less nervous. And so embodied cognition. How does that fit in this?
Vicki Davis (17:02)
And what is it? Because truthfully, you’re probably really popular because there’s not a lot of people talking about this stuff. And it’s really useful in the classroom.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (17:09)
Yeah. There’s actually a study done by Amy Cuddy. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it, but it’s about power posing. And they did a study about how the positions of your body release chemicals into your brain, and that when you are closed off, like you said, it releases the chemicals that lead to greater anxiety when you open up your posture. (See the editor’s note above — the felt-confidence effect has held up better than the original hormone-change findings.)
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (17:29)
They actually did the study about developing confidence by power posing. So she’s got a TEDx talk. You can watch about that. I would recommend it to your listeners. It’s millions and millions of views on that one. But when you actually put your body in a pose that is typically used to celebrate victory or confidence and you’re not confident, but you deliberately put your body in that position, it really starts to change the chemical makeup and allows you to be more confident.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (17:59)
So what they did was they had people in rooms practice power posing. These are these Superman poses standing up straight, hands up in the air, those type of things for three minutes before they were going into a job interview just to see. And they measured the actual chemical balances within their bodies. And it really was amazing how your body language doesn’t just communicate to other people.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (18:23)
It actually has an internal effect on how you engage the world. So really fascinating stuff and things that we don’t often think. But when everybody gets nervous or when everybody gets anxious, they shrink down into themselves. Like you said, they close their arms. They kind of like shrivel up into the corner. And in order to combat that, the answer is not to allow your body to do what it naturally does.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (18:47)
When you’re feeling those types of feelings, it’s to really take the stance and put yourself in positions to start to reconstruct that chemical makeup in your body, which then ultimately releasing you, having more confidence and feeling better about yourself. When people say, hey, if you’re feeling sad or feeling depressed, you should get up and take a walk. There’s actual science behind that.
Vicki Davis (19:08)
We could talk all day. We’ve learned so much. We’ve been talking with Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk. He has the Mind For Life podcast. He’s all over social media, and there’s so much we could talk about. And hey, we didn’t even get a chance to talk about AI today, so that’ll have to be another conversation about sure, technology has changed how we communicate.
Vicki Davis (19:28)
But, you know, here’s the thing. In the age of AI, the humans that will be successful are the humans who have the emotional intelligence, the communication skills. I love your profile of a graduate because it’s so important to be able to communicate effectively, whether it’s like we are online or especially face to face, just so we can have those good, healthy relationships so that we can reduce loneliness.
Vicki Davis (19:57)
If we could move from social media to just being social human beings, we would have a better world, wouldn’t we? Jeff?
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (20:04)
I think we would. Depends on how you would define better. I think both you and I would define it differently than some of the people that are advancing these platforms and pushing these technologies on us. So more humanistic, if we can say it that way, not in the secular, humanistic way, but just in the fact that we are connected better at the human level, which is an important thing.
Vicki Davis (20:27)
So, Jeff, thank you for coming on the show and thanks for all that you’re sharing. Mind For Life is a really great resource for all of us.
Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (20:34)
Vicki, it’s been a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me. I’ve enjoyed it and we definitely have to do it again.
Announcer (20:40)
Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (20:44)
I love the emotional intelligence that Jeff brought to the conversation, but now we want to move to something that people think AI can do editing. So when I first started writing for Edutopia, I met Alan Lipton. It was incredible the things that he could help me write better. I’ll admit I’ve been using Grammarly for years, but nothing has come close to what Alan Lipton can do with my writing.
Vicki Davis (21:14)
I think that true editing is a very underappreciated profession and something that humans, when they know how to do it, can do far better. Let’s talk to Alan Lipton.
Vicki Davis (21:31)
Writing is more important than ever. I know everybody talks about AI or AI can write for us. Oh no. AI is real good at average writing, but there are still stories to be told. There are things to be written, and writing is so important. So as we talk about and emphasize writing, our guest we have today is Alan Lipton.
Vicki Davis (21:51)
He has edited some of my pieces I’ve written for Edutopia in the past. He’s had many different clients Deloitte, Fox Interactive, iVillage, The Learning Company, so many others you’ve worked for Alan, and I know you write yourself and you’re also an editor, but talk to us about what do editors do? I’ve published a couple books. Editors are really important, but I’m not sure people value what editors do.
Vicki Davis (22:20)
So let’s talk about it.
Alan (22:21)
Okay. As I’ve come to editing as as a writer, I’ve always enjoyed collaborating with other people when I can. And I realize that editing other people’s writing is, in a way, a really ideal form of collaboration for a writer, because it’s taking something that someone else has said in writing and working with them to make it better, taking what’s really good and what’s really unique about it, and just making that part really sing.
Alan (22:54)
So I come to editing as a reader and a writer.
Vicki Davis (22:57)
So that’s the thing about you that when you’ve edited my work and I can say this publicly, my favorite editor I’ve ever worked with is you, Alan, because you do the thing that I didn’t know I’m beginning. I haven’t written my first book, but I’m doing some work for it. And when you’re a writer, you’re so close to it.
Vicki Davis (23:14)
And yes, you win awards and all that kind of stuff. Everybody says you’re a good writer, but what you don’t know is sometimes your closeness to the words interrupt what you’re trying to communicate. So what you do is you have the eyes of a reader, but you also understand the heart of a writer because we write to think.
Vicki Davis (23:34)
My husband says, Vicki, you talk to think and you write to think. It’s how you think. Because by the time I get to the end of a book, I know what I think about something and then I can speak about it and all of that because it’s a process. But I think that’s a mistake a lot of us writers make is we don’t understand the importance of having a second set of eyes on it, and people can say all they want about ChatGPT being a great editor, but it’s not because it always tells you you’re right.
Vicki Davis (23:59)
I’m not always right. You’re really good at finding the structural things. Hey, Vicki, why don’t you put it here? Why not put it there? None of this AI does that. But you do. And there’s so many editors like you. Do you think people, Alan, have a misconception about what editors actually do and the value of editors? Do they think they’re just for spelling or what?
Alan (24:20)
I think a lot of people think of an editor as kind of a police officer in some way. It’s like saying, no, you can’t do that. These are the rules. You have to follow them. And to an extent that is true. The idea of getting second set of of eyes on what you’ve written is that let me put it this way.
Alan (24:38)
You shouldn’t be thinking, well, let me run it by this person who will just pat me on the back and say that I’ve done a really great job. You know, to me, the whole point of editing is constructive criticism. My own approach to it is what I refer to as coming at it from like the minds ear that when I’m reading something, I’m listening to how it sounds.
Alan (25:00)
And what I really favor doing is having something that sounds really close to human speech without the stammering and the, you know, and, and the backtracking and, you know, and the misspeak to have sort of a natural flow to the language in the sense of grammar that is generally perfect if it’s not 100% following the rules all the time, that may be okay, because that’s natural speech.
Vicki Davis (25:30)
Everybody’s going to be saying, okay, Alan, what about the kinds of editing I thought editing was editing? So what are those other forms of editing?
Alan (25:36)
There are five, five different kinds of I’ve identified, and some of which I practice more than others. At the very, very first step would be conceptual editing, where a writer would sit down with an editor, say, I have this idea, let’s brainstorm it. What do you think about these ideas? What do you think is a good way to present these ideas?
Alan (26:00)
That’s before anything is even written. Probably an outline would be helpful for that. Then after that would be what is called developmental editing. What you need for developmental editing is you need a first draft. It can be rough as sandpaper, but it’s all the ideas are there in whatever form the editor is assessing your first draft. It’s kind of an overview of what do you have here before digging in deeper, we have structural editing that’s often called line editing, trying to set a structure for the text and clarity within that structure.
Alan (26:34)
The next level after that would be copy editing. That is sort of drilling down on grammar, punctuation, spelling, and just overall consistency.
Vicki Davis (26:46)
You try to get Vicki to fix her commas. You know, the good thing is I have Grammarly. Now, that does help me a little more with my commas so I can focus on communicating.
Alan (26:54)
That’s where we look at the commas. Also, another level of looking at the commas is what is called a proofing edit, or maybe proofreading, where the edit has nothing to do with the content at all. It’s just are there typos? How is this formatted? Is the formatting consistent? This is sort of a sidebar that there there are two additional features of line editing or structural editing, which are sort of on the nerdy end of things, that it’s not always part of the process, one of which is fact checking to make sure that they’re accurate about certain things.
Alan (27:30)
The other is what is generally called technical editing. That’s not so much specifically about technical writing. What that refers to more is it’s about points that are specific to the subject matter or specific to a given industry. Those are sort of subsets of line and structural editing.
Vicki Davis (27:49)
My high school writing teacher said, the thing about movies and books is that the pace moves faster than real life. In real life, there’s lots of corners we walk around. There’s lots of things we do that nobody would ever read a book or watch a movie about walking around corners. I mean, I’m sure that there are some people who try, but the pace has to be faster.
Vicki Davis (28:12)
Even if you skip a year, you don’t take a year to skip a year. You skip a year quickly. You know, that is hard to understand because we put ourselves in our characters. And there’s the saying, what? You have to kill your darlings, right? What does that mean?
Alan (28:25)
Basically, if you’ve created something that you absolutely love, it helps if you just look at it very coldly and say, sure, I love this. I had a lot of fun writing this. This little piece of writing may be a great piece of writing. How does it serve the story that I’m telling? And if it doesn’t, you either need to cut it out or you need to retell it in a different way.
Alan (28:55)
That makes sense to the general idea that you’re putting out the phrase kill your darlings. It’s very brutal sounding. You know it. It suggests that really looking at what you’ve created from a very technical angle, where there’s no room for feeling, feeling takes a back seat to the story and to to the intent.
Vicki Davis (29:18)
Yeah. So the dark night of the soul is a term I’ve heard in writing groups a lot, and I think that is that’s just when you’re in the thick of it. You’re writing your book and it’s not coming together. You’re lost and you can’t figure out what you’re doing. It feels like you’re in the dark. Is that what the dark night of the soul is?
Alan (29:40)
Exactly. Yeah, it’s that moment, and it might last longer than a moment. It might be a phase where you have lost the thread of what you’re trying to do. You’re not sure what you’re trying to say anymore. You don’t have the thread to follow.
Vicki Davis (29:57)
And how do you get out of that?
Alan (30:00)
Well, you could, you could take a break. You could take a breath and let your subconscious do the work. You could talk to someone about it. You could, you could do all of those things. Or you could engage what I would call tacit knowledge. You have knowledge that you don’t necessarily even know you have. When you’re being a craftsperson, when you’re involved in a craft like writing, you learn stuff intuitively.
Alan (30:30)
For instance, when I’m working with a writer, I might ask them, hey, what do you think about this? How does that feel? And when you rely on your gut feel, on your intuition, on your instincts, that is a form of knowledge that you can’t necessarily express explicitly.
Alan (30:50)
And I have a friend, I have an Aunt Chandra, and my aunt is a world-famous cook. And when you ask her, how much butter do you put in the cake, she says, well, it depends. She can’t really tell me explicitly how much butter she puts in a cake. She knows when it feels right. She knows when it looks right. She has tacit knowledge of cooking that comes from years and years of practice and intuition in the kitchen.
Alan (31:16)
The same thing is true with writing. Tacit knowledge is something that you have developed through experience and through practice and through engaging in the craft repeatedly. It’s not something you can necessarily express explicitly. But when you’re in that dark night of the soul, you can rely on that tacit knowledge and your instincts to help you find your way back to the thread that you were following.
Vicki Davis (31:39)
Alan, thank you so much for coming on the show. I can’t wait to write my first book with you as my editor.
Alan (31:45)
That’s going to be amazing. Thanks so much for having me, Vicki.
Announcer (31:48)
Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (31:52)
Now we’re going to talk with Karen McCallum. Karen is going back to one of my vault episodes that was called episode 53 from back in 2017. Now, Karen is an elementary vice principal and a kindergarten teacher. She has been teaching for 33 years, and she has some incredible stories about emotional intelligence and how she helps kids communicate.
Vicki Davis (32:16)
Karen McCallum, tell us just a little bit about what you do.
Karen McCallum (32:21)
I’m an elementary vice principal and a kindergarten teacher in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada. And I’ve been teaching in the primary grades for 33 years. I’m so glad you’re talking about the human skills that can’t be taught by technology. And I think communication and emotional intelligence and some of the things that we do in our classroom is really important. This year, I had a little girl who is nonverbal. She has never spoken a word.
Karen McCallum (32:51)
But what we did, one thing I did at the beginning was used little puppets. These are little hand puppets. We have two puppets called Matz and Penny. Matz is kind of a happy little guy and Penny is another little puppet. So I used these puppets to build a safe space for this little girl. I would sit with her and I talk through the puppets to create that safe space.
Karen McCallum (33:21)
And over the course of the year, this little girl began to communicate through the puppets with me, and then she began to talk to some of the other children. And eventually she began to talk to the adults, the parents, and other people in the classroom.
Karen McCallum (33:38)
We also used, Vicki, we have a boy who had his finger stepped on at recess. And this little boy, instead of being upset or coming in and being aggressive, he completely shut down emotionally. And so what we did was we used the puppets Matz and Penny to help this little boy process through his emotions and helped him build trust again with his peers.
Karen McCallum (34:01)
These are really important human skills that I don’t think that AI or any kind of technology can replicate. And we care about each student, and we want to help them grow and develop as humans.
Karen McCallum (34:14)
What I’ve found is, as teachers, we really need to listen to what the kids are saying, and we really need to observe the child and see how they’re reacting to things. Really be present with them.
Vicki Davis (34:25)
Karen, you’re talking about emotional intelligence. Jeff talked about it. Alan talked about it. As you teach your kindergarteners and first graders, what do you think emotional intelligence is?
Karen McCallum (34:37)
I think emotional intelligence is, you need to know your own emotional state, and you need to understand how you’re feeling. And then you need to understand how other people are feeling. That means being able to identify emotions in other people by looking at their body language or looking at their facial expressions. And then you need to be able to be empathetic towards them. And you need to be able to handle your own emotions as well.
Karen McCallum (35:07)
And so as a teacher, I model this. I model emotional intelligence in my classroom every single day.
Karen McCallum (35:15)
Thanks for having me back, Vicki.
Vicki Davis (35:17)
Great. Thanks so much for the memories, Karen.
Announcer (35:19)
Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (35:22)
Krise Nowak is the head of school at Ambleside School in McLean, Virginia. I know a lot of people who use Charlotte Mason education, and they love it. Krise, tell us about what makes your school unique.
Vicki Davis (35:36)
What kind of methodology is Charlotte Mason and how does it work?
Krise Nowak (35:43)
Well, Vicki, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I’m so grateful to be here. Charlotte Mason was an educator and writer in the 19th century, and she emphasized respecting the child as a person. She believed that children are persons, not projects, and she created an educational philosophy that centers around relationships, character formation, and the love of learning.
Vicki Davis (36:06)
Can you tell us what makes the Charlotte Mason school different? Because if I’m honest, the technology piece is one thing that strikes me immediately when I hear about Charlotte Mason schools, is they use very little technology. Talk to us about that. Can you explain that?
Vicki Davis (36:23)
What’s the point? Why? What’s the philosophy behind it?
Krise Nowak (36:28)
Well, the reason for that is Charlotte Mason had three main tools of education. The first is what she called a living curriculum. Now, this is not textbooks. Rather, it’s beautiful, well-written books. She had strong opinions about the quality of the books that students should be reading from, because she knew that when students read rich literature and well-written materials, they’re exposed to great ideas and to excellent writing at the same time.
Krise Nowak (37:06)
The second tool is narration. This is the practice of having students tell back, in their own words, what they’ve read or heard. This is the most important tool. The teacher reads aloud to the students, and then the student narrates back what they’ve heard. They don’t use tests. They use narration as a way of checking understanding. So when a student narrates, they’re demonstrating their understanding.
Krise Nowak (37:39)
And then the third tool is what we call habit formation. Character traits and good behaviors are developed through habit. So we focus on things like attentiveness, obedience, and diligence. And all of these habits are developed over time through practice and consistency.
Vicki Davis (38:03)
This is really interesting. I’m particularly interested in the narration piece because when I was teaching, I would sometimes read something aloud and ask students to put it in their own words. And there are multiple things happening. First of all, if they can’t tell it back, I know they don’t understand it. If they can tell it back, they’ve processed that information through their own thinking.
Vicki Davis (38:25)
They’ve changed it to their words. They’ve had to think about what mattered most and what didn’t. It’s a much deeper level of engagement than just a multiple choice quiz.
Krise Nowak (38:35)
Absolutely. And students take ownership of their learning when they narrate. They’re not just passively receiving information. They’re actively engaged in understanding and processing the information. And narration also builds confidence. When a student narrates, they’re speaking. They’re communicating their understanding. And that’s something that has to happen if we want our students to be thinkers.
Krise Nowak (38:56)
Students develop their thinking skills through speaking. It really is the primary tool that they need in order to learn how to think.
Vicki Davis (39:10)
So another thing that I’ve heard from Charlotte Mason educators is this phrase “I have my child back.” What does that mean?
Krise Nowak (39:18)
Oh, that’s a beautiful phrase. And I’ve seen it happen in my own classroom before I was a head of school. I was teaching middle school, and when we started using Charlotte Mason methods in my classroom, the children started coming back to life. The technology had been fragmenting their attention, and their brains weren’t able to focus. And once the technology was removed, we started seeing children who were struggling coming alive. We started seeing their unique gifts and talents.
Krise Nowak (39:46)
We started seeing them develop confidence and joy in their learning. And then we started seeing families transformed, because the parents began to see their children again, not just their children’s grades, not just their children’s test scores, but their actual children.
Krise Nowak (40:02)
One of our students says, I feel like my brain is working more efficiently now. And another student says, this is peaceful. I can actually think. And another student said, I like this because I can actually be myself. Those are powerful words. And I think that speaks to the fragmentation that technology causes.
Krise Nowak (40:24)
So we have very limited technology. We do teach engineering and robotics, but the foundation, the core of what we do is relational and human-centered.
Vicki Davis (40:37)
So Krise, we have something in common. We both believe that in the age of AI, the humans who will be successful and the humans who will be happy are the ones who develop the soft skills. The human skills. The emotional intelligence. The thinking. The communicating. The character. All those things. So we’re aligned on that perspective, and I’m so grateful that you’re out there running a school that’s aligned with that. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Krise Nowak (41:07)
Thank you so much, Vicki. It’s been a joy to be with you.
Vicki Davis (41:10)
So John Davis and I are going to do our closing conversation.
Vicki Davis (41:14)
So John, let’s talk about what we’re thinking about this episode. We talked to Jeff Bogaczyk about communication. We talked to Alan Lipton about editing. We heard from a kindergarten teacher, Karen McCallum, about emotional intelligence and helping kids communicate. And we heard from Krise Nowak about Charlotte Mason education.
Vicki Davis (41:33)
What is AI absolutely terrible at? What is AI can’t do?
John Davis (41:41)
Well, it’s the first thing that comes to mind is emotional intelligence. It can’t understand, truly understand, what it means to be a human being or what it means to be in pain or to be struggling or to be joyful. It can’t really understand context. It can have an idea of context, but deep understanding of context requires experience.
John Davis (42:06)
And experience requires embodiment. We need bodies. We need to feel and taste and smell and hear. We need to have those experiences to understand what’s really going on in the world.
John Davis (42:22)
Another thing that AI is terrible at is building genuine relationships. Relationships require trust. Relationships require vulnerability. Relationships require someone to put themselves out there and to take a risk. And all of those things require an understanding of what it means to be human.
John Davis (42:41)
And finally, I think AI is absolutely terrible at something that I think we all appreciate, which is joy. The ability to see the small everyday miracles in life and to appreciate them.
John Davis (42:54)
I think these are gifts that we humans have been given, and I think we need to nurture them. I think that if we focus on the things that AI can’t do, and we focus on our strengths, rather than trying to compete with machines, we’ll find that we have a lot to offer the world.
Vicki Davis (43:13)
You know, one thing that I think about is that AI can mimic human writing. Right? We know that. And you can see examples of good AI writing and bad AI writing. But what AI can’t do is have an idea. You know, ideas come from the human experience. They come from our suffering, our joy, our relationships, our challenges. And so even though AI can generate text, what it can’t do is generate an idea that will change the world.
Vicki Davis (43:42)
And so I think as we are in this age of AI, I think what we need to do is empower people. Empower ourselves and empower our students to be idea generators, to be people who think deeply, to be people who connect with other people, to be people who have something to say that matters. Those are the people who will lead the world, not the people who can use AI well.
Vicki Davis (44:06)
Those are the people who can think and who can relate. And I think that the sad thing is that as we’ve gotten more technology in our schools, we’ve focused on compliance and on testing and test scores. But what we really need to do is focus on developing the human. And I think what this episode has shown us is that there are schools and teachers and educators out there who are doing that really well.
Vicki Davis (44:33)
And I think what we need to do is empower those people and celebrate those people. So thanks for this conversation today, John. I think it’s been a good one.
John Davis (44:42)
You’re welcome. And thanks for having me, Vicki.
Vicki Davis (44:45)
Thanks for listening to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. I’m Vicki Davis, and I’ll see you next time.
Show URL: https://www.coolcatteacher.com/beautifulhuman
Runtime: 58 minutes
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