Embracing Tension In AI Education

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Welcome to a podcast on the future of AI in Canadian education. My name is Ryan Oliver, the CEO of Ampere and Canada Learning Code. And I'm Melissa Sariffodeen, the co-founder of Canada Learning Code. Today we're speaking with Heidi Siwak. Heidi is an experienced Ontario educator with a master's in education and leadership and policy from Boise, who has had many roles over the past 33 years as a classroom teacher at the provincial level.

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She's currently a teacher coach at I-think, which is an education charity started at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and she's focused on helping children and youth become optimistic and confident problem solvers. Most recently she's led, I-think's, work in artificial intelligence, launching the Intelligence Challenge Kit, which we dive into in this episode.

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Perfect.

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Awesome. Thank you. Heidi, for joining us for looking forward to diving into our conversation today. Maybe we can just start with you sharing a little bit about your background. You've spent many years in Ontario classrooms and now you're working at I-think. So we'd love to kind of hear the the journey, the trajectory and some of the work that you're doing now.

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Absolutely. First of all, thank you, Mel and Ryan, for inviting me to join you today. Yeah. My my journey. I was an Ontario teacher for over 25 years, K-12, K-8 education, mostly really focused on inquiry based learning and the role that technology could play in education, but also complex problem solving. What is it that we need to do in our classrooms to engage students at a deeper level of thinking?

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That did bring me around 2012, 2013 to, I think, integrative thinking for educators, which I'll talk about little bit, a little bit later. I went on to spend some time at the Ontario Ministry of Education, in their 21st century Learning Unit was called at that time supporting the development of global competencies, but also innovation research projects and school districts across the province and back in the classroom for a bit.

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And then, my last year of teaching was when ChatGPT disrupted our world. And my school board, I was with the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board at that point in time. They did something very brave. We were teachers who are interested from K to 12. We're invited to join this professional, collaborative inquiry. We were given an iPad with a VPN to bypass the block on ChatGPT.

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And they said, go figure this out with your students. So students weren't allowed to use it, but, teachers could try things out in the classroom. So I got to be there at the very, very beginning, grade six students over several months as all the news stories were happening weekly and see their thinking and their questions and what excited them and what gave them fear.

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And I retired that June. And Noga at I-think invited me to then come work for I-think and develop the artificial intelligence challenge because they knew something was needed in the province to support teachers and students, in a deeper way. And I developed the artificial Intelligence Challenge kit for the which has, oh my gosh, it's now in its fourth year, maybe fifth, fifth iteration that it's running.

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And we've just made that available free to, teachers across the province, which is great.

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I love this episode because Heidi goes into so many really great, concrete examples of how students and teachers are actually navigating, using, experimenting, building, and solving problems with AI.

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So the very first thing that I did with it, actually was at home and I had, ChatGPT generate a story for me about cell phone use in the classroom and a conflict between, parents and a child around cell phone use. And I brought that to the student, says, look, I didn't write this. I worked with AI to write this, and there was just puzzlement and wonder.

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And then we got access to the VPN, and, we put it up and let's see what it could do. And the kids started asking questions. And what was really interesting about their questions, it asked to do silly things, write a play for us, but ask questions like, Will you be our friend? Are you human? Are you sentient?

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Those were kind of the first things that we did with it. And then we followed the news stories. We tried many, many different things. But I would have to say, over the course of the year, what stands out for me was at the end, they landed on very deeply philosophical questions about what it means to be human.

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And they had fears about that, and they had excitement about that, and they had nothing to draw upon next of where to go with this. But they also felt appreciative because they had had this experience. They understood something about AI that they realized that their peers did, and they were concerned for their peers that they also had not had this experience because they may just dive into AI, not really understand the risks and benefits within it.

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Those are some of my big takeaways from that. That year. That's interesting to, you know, does the school still have such an open, acceptance of AI? Like, is that still an exploration that's happening at that school, or is it just kind of come in line with the rest of the province that it's provinces all over the place in terms of where different boards are at with education?

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So what did happen is that, there were there were a number of schools actually in the board, who then went on to do the artificial intelligence, a challenge kit that we developed that I think the approach the board is taking, as far as I understand, is, like thoughtful use of AI. I think everybody's still trying to figure out where to land on this, who to give access to it.

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It's all it's I think it's all very much in a state of tension. Within within the board. Yeah. That's fair. I want to circle back to something you said around deeply Human because I was doing a little work, looking, you know, research before this around, I think, in some of the key themes deeply human critical thinking, enhanced learning.

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And maybe you can just dive into a little bit more into the AI kit in general. Like what? What is it? How are people interacting with it? Like, I think it would be helpful for our audience to understand and, you know, to the extent you can connect to those main themes would be really interesting to. So the challenge starts with a question for students.

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We are all about student voice and agency and how can we help students. Make decisions about the role that I will play in their lives and learning. So student voice and agency and we give them a question, how might we use AI to enrich the lives and possibilities of every student in our school? That's huge because we know, school is not meeting the needs of all students.

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It can't right now, and for many of them, this is the first time they've been asked to consider the learning needs of their peers across the system. As they can say, we give them a letter to launch the challenge Kit, which outlines some of the issues and tensions we see in artificial intelligence. So that letter is we invite a principal or somebody who has, I guess leverage is my way.

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We describe it to read that letter to the class and launch the challenge, because it is real world problem solving. We're asking them to think about a problem for which there aren't solutions yet. The answers are are not know, and they're going to be figuring those out. And then we offer the students, to opposing models of approaches we could take the current iteration of the challenge, get has inquiry based.

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We could learn about artificial intelligence and speak to speakers and, you know, really dive into the critical thinking and complexity of artificial intelligence. But we won't use it in many cases because we're not allowed to use it yet in school. There's benefits and limitations to that because you lose out on the actual practical piece or let's go hands on.

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We'll dive directly into AI and we'll create things and we'll do things with artificial intelligence, and we'll learn by doing with AI. So we give the students to opposing models around which there are tensions. We ask them to keep three things in mind. Firstly, deeply human, fundamentally, artificial intelligence has to be good for humans. And what does that mean.

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So they're keeping that in mind as a theme as they move through all of the activities and the kit critical thinking well, what do students need to know and understand about artificial intelligence in order to be able to think critically about it? So we have activities that foster that. And finally, enhancing learning. How might AI enhance learning like is can it?

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Where might it we ask them to think about those things. So those are the anchoring themes of the kit. Then we provide them with a whole range of activities to learn about, engage with AI that I would say is a first half of the kit. And then there's the problem solving, which maybe we can talk about afterwards.

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I'm curious, you know, when when you work with I-think and I think it's kind of core, vision, it's rooted in this idea of real world problem solving. Like that is that is rooted throughout everything you do. Can you speak to, like, how how like why I think centers that so much and what and how that translates into AI.

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Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's founded around a methodology of problem solving called integrative thinking that was first developed by Roger Al Martin, who used to be the dean of the Rotman School of Management. And really, it's in this world of complexity where there are tensions and so many different ways to think about problems, and there's many possible solutions to problems that have complexity.

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We need something to help people navigate their way through that. And so I-think has problem solving frameworks that we that we use in all of our work to engage students deeply in thinking and problem solving. The key piece there, I think, is in this world, when we're facing these wicked problems, climate change and global conflict and everything that's going on in the world, we can get stuck and we can feel helpless and we can lose our optimism.

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And we believe that students can be and we have our research because it is research based, research informed to show that if you teach children to problem solve, in particular ways, they gain confidence and optimism, and they feel that they can can contend with these complexities. So our work is anchored in that. It was first tested, actually in a kindergarten class.

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There was a student in the MBA program who what a can be from K-12 thought let's try this out with a real class. And a class said, sure, come here. And the kindergarten children were brilliant in the methodology and the thinking. They are creative problem solvers, I think has grown from there. So we don't just do artificial intelligence.

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We have challenge kits around Remembrance Day, around how do we rebuild community. What does it mean to have well-being in our classroom? How might we partner with that? We also partner with organizations, who have real problems that need to be solved, and we connect them with classrooms and then organizations. Students work with the organization to generate solutions to the, you know, the problems they're experiencing.

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So it comes from a place of optimism and building confidence in young people. Yeah. And then just worth flagging for any teachers that are listening or any educators listening that all of these are available for free on your website. That is correct. Yeah. Including the artificial intelligence. Yeah. That's great.

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One of the things that I'm noticing the more we record this podcast, is these consistent themes that come up again and again critical thinking, cognitive offloading. And they kind of center on this whole idea of of cognitive friction. This is something that came up in the Ben, the Ben Riley interview, we talked about with Lisa a couple of weeks ago.

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As well as, the folks from clever, this idea that, like, we we want friction, we want this, this cognitive friction to to help offset the potential harmful effects of AI. As we get into that next.

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I have a lot of concerns and places where I see good things happening with it. When I look at the shift of how we thought about it, I think at the very beginning it was students are cheating with AI and that's cognitive offloading. And that, oh, it's actually cognitive surrender. Young people are surrendering to AI now, I think in terms of, cognitive sovereignty.

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How do you maintain control order over our own thinking? And like the most recent, pieces of research that I've been looking at and work comes from Peter Benson from New Zealand, and he's actually building a taxonomy of what are actual human cognitive vulnerabilities. Let's name those that put us at risk for losing our ability to have sovereignty over our own thinking, when we interact with AI.

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So for me, the tensions exist, the concerns exist. I think there are ways forward, but the work is not done yet. We're still figuring these pieces out. And I think by giving students like what I see, the result in the student thinking with AI, one thing that makes me very excited and hopeful is the depth with which they think about these things.

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If they're given the opportunity, but also the ideas that they come up with about what they want from A.I., what they don't want from AI, and how they imagine it being used within their education and not being used. I love that that's like an interesting just the ways that you've like, thought about these phases too. So that's really yeah that's great.

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Thank you. Back to the artificial intelligence kit. Just on this idea of like, like, explaining to teachers what they can expect to maybe haven't, haven't used that. Like what? What is that process look like and how do you interact and how does how does I think, work with teachers or, or not? Like if I'm a teacher who isn't feeling confident in artificial intelligence, is there is there support beyond the the kid here or is there enough in that kid?

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So our model has changed from when we first started, where there was a lot of a hands on support to now where we're just giving it out there. For teachers to use. But everything, that teachers need to run the kit is in the kit, so we've set it up. For example, there's a launch, activity.

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It's a video I 100, 101. It's the fundamentals. The what are the things we think are important for everyone to understand about AI. So you don't need to have any background knowledge of artificial intelligence to be able to use the kit. So there was the ladder to launch it. Then there's a series of activities. There's seven of them, eight maybe.

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Now within the kit. Each of those activities can be done separately. You can do them all so you can pick and choose. You don't need to do all of them in order to to, to be successful in the kit. There's also a facilitators guide that teaches the problem solving methodology in the. In that particular kit, we use something called the Pro Pro model.

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It's empathy based and it keeps everybody in a positive space. And they learn how to leverage attention to generate new ideas. We explain how to step by step, take students through that problem solving methodology. And then there's a place at the end. So the entire journey, from the launch, the activities ignite curiosity to the problem solving to how to build better models, to then there's celebration at the end.

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All of that is in the kit for them to use. It's it's it's well laid out. That's great. And then so you've had over 5000 students now go through the kit. What has been the response. What what are you hearing from students as they go through this? Oh my goodness. And students from, grade six to grade 12, in many different subject areas.

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We actually have a, student voice insight report, that was released in fall 2025, where we share some of our big takeaways from what we're seeing and student thinking. I would actually recommend everyone to have a look at the that, it's something that you can use, you know, in a team of educators to go through and see what students want.

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We highlight five big things in there. I'll just maybe touch upon a couple of them that what we're seeing the student. So data data shows up in a very interesting way in the student thinking. And they're excited about the idea that data is really useful to help us solve problems in the world. They start to recognize that.

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And they're not opposed to their own data being used in their learning, which I find kind of interesting. They're curious about. Is there a way I can use my data? The school can use my data to make learning better for me, but they're also really concerned about data in terms of the biases that are within it and protection of privacy.

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And, who's included and who's not included. We do a big piece in the, the introductory piece around data, you know, to show them all the large language models. Most of the data is coming from North America. Most of it's in English. The global, majority is not represented in the training data that we're using for, for large language models.

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So there are concerned about representation. So what we see coming out of the student thinking is the things they find really interesting in the ways they imagine, I being used and that they're not satisfied with what's on offer currently. And this is why. And the greatest thing is that they're able to articulate it and let me just give you a couple of exciting examples that students have come up with.

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So, this was from all the French school board, high school students. And, it's empathy based. So they're thinking about, you know, teachers, students, their, their peers, their parents, and one group of students recognize that actually, in our community, community, visually impaired students can't attend their local school. They have to go somewhere else for their education.

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And is there a way we could use artificial intelligence within our school system, within our classroom, so the visually impaired students can attend their local school? And they came up, you know, with a model of imagining of what that might look like. Amazing. Another group of students from a different school really landed, on the on inclusivity within the education system as well.

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But the many ways in which people are excluded, but also that they exclude themselves from opportunities, either because they don't bother to find things out, they're not aware of things that are happening, you know, all the issues and challenges that students have. And so they started imagining a way that what if, you know, within a, the data collection, like we really understood each child well within our school and that I could automatically connect them to opportunities that align with their interests or their skills or, challenges they're experiencing in their learning.

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And so they imagined AI becoming this really wonderful, inclusive way of making sure every student in their school had access to the learning they needed, but also opportunities, that are available and even opportunities that exist outside the classroom, outside the school, if the school is not having something currently available to them. They've also imagined, like, well, we could take AI and we could take our science curriculum and we could turn it into a completely gamified experience with coding.

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And we can learn, our, our content in entirely different ways. A very customized ways. So they're pretty amazing in what they come up with. Very, very innovative, very imaginative. I love that. Maybe just, on the educator teacher side. Right. You've been recognized, as, you know, one of Canada's most innovative teachers. You've won various accolades, and you can tell you're, you know, an early adopter to this.

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I'm curious what your take for educators like that are maybe innovative and in AI, like, is this the same profile of educator? Are there different skills that are being flex like, and what do you see for some of the, you know, teachers out there that may just be still reluctant about, you know, AI or just not feeling as confident?

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Yeah. I'm curious, your perspective. I think they are very right to be cautious, in their adoption of artificial intelligence into the classroom because there are huge risks with it and there's so many unknowns, and we really don't have strong evidence yet, research based evidence that this can actually positively impact student learning outcomes. And I say that, you know, as an example from some of the math studies that have come out where students had access to an AI tutor and other students had traditional learning in the classroom, and the students who had access to an AI tutor offloaded their their thinking to the AI tutor.

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And at the end of the research, it was a, you know, peer reviewed research with control group. We're worse off at the end. So the conclusion was that the use of the AI tutor had harmed these students. And then when we think of the limited time we have as young people in education, we can put them at risk if we do the wrong thing with it.

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So we're right to be cautious. That's not to say I shouldn't be used right. It's like, how do we use the AI to tutor effectively? So the right to be cautious, however it's there and there's really interesting potential with it. So starting with small experiments on your own as a teacher and seeing how, it might be helpful to you without even thinking about how your students are using it, is an interesting place to start conversations with students themselves.

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Like, in one of the starting activities in the artificial intelligence, challenge kit, it's just a, a diagnostic to see student where students are at. Right. What do you know about AI? What are your concerns? What are your fears? How much do you trust it? Getting the conversations going with students about artificial intelligence itself is a good bit way to begin in the classroom as well.

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But we're figuring this out together. We need to move forward, and there's some amazing things happening with it. So I'll give you an example. This is not outside of the AI challenge. My husband, teaches post-secondary. He has adopted large language models like right from November 2020 to when they came out and he saw his first interaction. He said, this changes everything for education.

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He he does it. And the way he's using it is incredible. Just yesterday he told me, he teaches cloud services and networking, at, at a community college. And he said with all of the content, it's content heavy and so much is automated in what he teaches. Yet there's still fundamental concepts that students need to understand that he doesn't have time to teach.

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He has all of his labs from the past 15 years of teaching this material, accessible. So he has an AI agent. When a student struggling with something and need some foundation knowledge, he sends his agent into his labs. Go find the conceptual pieces that this student needs to understand. Create an activity or, something, you know, for the student to learn from so they can get this foundation piece so that they can understands what's what's happening.

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This automated process at that, he says, go look at my courses that I'm teaching currently, my course and see find where I can embed this concept more directly into the work that we are doing. Hugely successful, working so, so, so well for him. So there's really potential within it to make learning better. And that's a piece that we're trying to discover.

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Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm curious. You know you again you've been teaching for a long time. And now of this different perspective. So much is changing. If you were to start your career from the beginning, like what type of teacher would you be striving to become or like, what are those skills? Or like, you know, you're has his examples really interesting too?

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Like, yeah, I'm just kind of curious taking you back. What would you know what would that look like? Would you do anything differently? I think it's really vital for young teachers to really understand the content piece as well, of math, of science, of history, of all those pieces to know your subject matter really, really well. I think learning the strategies of taking students into deep critical thinking about like, what are the actual conceptual frameworks that you can use with students so that they are developing understanding of the content that's needed, like they need that foundation knowledge, but they're able to think about that and problem solve with that in really structured ways.

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That is probably one thing I, you know, I wish I was better at from when I first started teaching. Yeah, that probably would be the big one. There's other things, but it'll give that there.

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Another theme that comes up a lot in in all these episodes we've done. And it goes back to the second episode we ever did with with Lakefield College School and Heather Adams. There is this idea of trust that schools, that they've lost trust in their students, that they're doing their work, independently and that they're doing it without AI help.

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And vice versa. I think it's like, what is the future of education in this, in this moment of trust? Yeah. I thought that was so powerful, especially the fact that students themselves unearthed the fact that, you know, a big opportunity is like, how do you really build that trust? And, you know, as a parent and educator myself and, you know, it was a big like moment for me about how students are actually viewing AI.

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And you know that there's two parts to that, every conversation. So it was great to jump into that next.

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I wanted to just, touch on the AI kid one last time, just in that, like, you know, you're rounding these three core themes deeply human, which we've we've we've touched on critical thinking, which just keeps coming up in this podcast in particular, and then enhancing learning and this idea that like, let's not, lose academic integrity, let's not replace skill building, but, but enhance learning for the students going through this, you know, like, what do you what do you think a student should know how to do when they graduate?

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That is maybe different than five years from five years ago. Pre GPT moment. What does that look like? What does that look like? I don't want to use the word soft skills. I'm going to give you an example. So I, I, I'm working with a school I don't think they'd have a problem naming it Tdsb Virtual school several years ago.

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They had a Great Dane class that did the AI challenge. And the recommendation students landed on was we need to rebuild trust between teachers and students. That has been ruptured through poor use of AI. I then went on to work with the whole school. Not all the students, but principal. And then, their, their tech consultant.

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Within that, they developed AI inquiry the next year and they, I did an AI 101 launch and then students and teachers were invited to stand to participate in an inquiry. And the idea was that they would offer guidance by the end of the year of what the policy should be in the school. Amazing. I have never been in a situation where teachers and students were co learners about a subject matter and doing something together to just construct something fabulous in that process.

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It did not take them long to realize this is not about AI at all. We actually need to understand what are who do we want to become? What are the skills we need to develop to become that person? And then where does artificial intelligence fit into that? And so last year was all about, exploring those questions and thinking about where AI fits into that.

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By the end of the year, the students and teachers had landed on a personal stance about what they valued, what they wanted, and where how they imagined using artificial intelligence. Within their lives and within their learning. I think that's the piece that's needed, right, for us to recognize who do we want to become? What skills outside of AI do we need to develop, and what's our path to get there?

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And then how might AI fit into that, rather than AI becoming the driver? Does that answer the question? Yeah, I think so. And I think like, what I appreciate about what I think together has always worked on, but you can really see it through throughout this kit. Is this, this idea that, like, we're all learning this together. This isn't like a, a teach something for a teacher to be the master of and just and instruct it is, is actually like a collaborative project.

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And then it will be probably for the next little while of us all figuring out exactly who we want to become in that sense. Yeah. It's great. And I just did two very different examples. I think about things, this was another school where, the school was working on a credit class on the Sustainable Development Goals and recognized they use a challenge kit and they recognize a problem in their school.

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Just it was what had to do with how garbage gets thrown out. The students not knowing, you know, what needs to be recycled, what's garbage, what goes into compost and that they became interested in data and data collection. Well, can we use AI to create our own app that can just scan the garbage that people are throwing out and tell them where they where they need to put things?

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So they developed a, you know, a concrete solution that leverages AI, and they learned how to train AI in order to develop a very particular solution for their school. So I guess the other piece coming back to your question is problem solving, our ability to problem solve and then figure out how we can use AI for problem solving, because fundamentally AI is for problem solving, right?

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So how do we use it? Yeah. That's great. I think you've answered this question, but our last question we kind of leave these interviews with often is, you know, if you leave one question with every parent and educator listening, what would it be? Is it as simple as who do we want it to become? Or is there something more for parents and educators to really think about in terms of our education future?

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With AI? Parents in particular? What I think I my heart goes out to for right now in this changing world, that they are experiencing and the risks that AI poses to their children in particular. And I think about that, you know, the way in which artificial intelligence is being used to, you know, fake identities, you know, creating non-consensual intimate images of peers in the classroom, things like that.

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There are really big issues around that. So when I think of, parents, I think what's needed for them, I think of the organization called, safe AI for Children Alliance out of the UK that was started by Tara Steele. You know, former intelligence officer. And they are constantly flagging things that parents should be aware of, but also how to have age appropriate conversation with children about the things that are coming up as AI and what people are doing with AI continues to involve.

00;32;08;13 - 00;32;31;08
So for parents, I think it's a toolkit in how to keep their children safe, but also exploring AI with your child together and having those conversations that this isn't real, it's a machine. It doesn't have feelings. It's not thinking like really getting their children clear on. It's just math that we're seeing here in action. That's all this is, is math, finding patterns and things.

00;32;31;14 - 00;32;54;05
I think those are two things for parents, but also to be excited about the future, like people are doing. Remark couple things with artificial intelligence. It's not all risk. They're doing incredible like out of Ireland. There's a study going on where they're using artificial intelligence to identify dyslexia in babies before they even, you know, even begin the reading process and then thinking out what the interventions are.

00;32;54;09 - 00;33;13;00
So to explore what are the exciting things and careers that exist because AI is now in our world. And how might there be pathways, for my child? Yeah. It's great. And I also just love this, like the notion of like how how, you know, like an exploratory. And I think there's so many great resources that you've mentioned, and we know the the site.

00;33;13;00 - 00;33;30;09
I think it's got tons as well. We encourage everyone to check out. Thank you so much for spending time with us. This is really, really insightful. We appreciate it. And you know, like every when we could talk for days longer probably. So maybe it'll be another podcast at some point. But we can really appreciate it. And thanks so much and thanks, Ivy.

00;33;30;12 - 00;33;43;26
It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you Ryan and Mel, I really enjoyed our conversation and learning about your work as well. I checked out your site, so that's really good. Oh great stuff Chloe.

00;33;43;28 - 00;34;03;08
And I is a proud Canadian podcast of the Pinnguaq Foundation in Canada Learning code. I am your host, Brian Oliver, joined by Melissa Sariffodeen. This show is produced by Zac Miller and edited by Zac Miller and Kyle Gordon. If you want support, I support the work we are doing and please consider a donation to the Pinnguaq Foundation.

00;34;03;10 - 00;34;05;16
You can find us on Canada Helps.