I have written much about AI in schools, including a few blog posts (1. Recent Reports about AI in Schools: What’s Happening and What Should Be Happening? 2. “Screens are hurting learning.” But what is worth learning? 3. Peace Treaty: Why Schools Don’t Change (Even When Everyone Knows They Should) 4. How to Change Schools Without Changing Schools) over the past few weeks. The basic message is that all available evidence suggests that if we don’t change the what and how of learning and teaching, the impact of AI is more negative than positive. Moreover, as AI has already started a rapid disruption to jobs, social life, and daily living, our children are not provided the opportunities to learn and examine the meaning of living and thriving in the age of AI. There is no question that schools must change if we want formal education to be relevant to students.

I have also written about why schools don’t change and what changes we actually need: the courageous minority. In this post, I am issuing an invitation to teachers around the world to start transformation in their controllable space for the sake of our children. I am inviting the courageous minority to join a global network to work together to imagine what can be done in the traditional education environment.

Why change must begin with the courageous minority

In recent posts, I have argued that schools do not change easily because they are held together by what might be called a peace treaty. Even when many people agree that change is necessary, the existing structure remains in place because it continues to serve important functions for different groups.

But this does not mean change is impossible. It means change often begins somewhere smaller and more realistic: in the spaces educators can actually control.

Inside every school, there is always a courageous minority of teachers who know that something must change and are willing to begin. They may not be able to rewrite policy, redesign transcripts, or abolish standardized testing. But they can transform what happens in their own classroom, project, unit, course, portfolio process, or assessment design.

Inviting The Courageous Minority

We are launching The Courageous Minority, a one-year global community for teachers who want to reimagine learning with AI in ways that are more personal, more meaningful, and more future-oriented.

This is not a program about using AI to do old schooling more efficiently. It is not about speeding up lesson planning, generating worksheets, or catching students with detection software.

It is about something much more important: helping teachers design learning that still matters in a world where AI can do much of the routine academic work schools have traditionally valued.

The community will bring together educators from around the world who are ready to experiment, reflect, design, and learn from one another as they make transformative changes in their own controllable spaces.

This community focuses on one group of courageous minorities: teachers because teachers directly impact students and can significantly transform their controllable space—the classrooms.

Three guiding principles

Our work will be guided by three principles.

1. Personalize learning so students can become uniquely great

Education should help students discover and develop their strengths, interests, and aspirations. The goal is not for every student to become “standardized excellent,” but for each student to grow into a person with distinctive capacities and purpose.

In an age when AI can support access to information and routine performance, the human advantage lies increasingly in individuality, judgment, passion, imagination, and the capacity to pursue meaningful directions.

2. Help students create value by solving significant problems for others

Learning becomes more powerful when students use it to do something that matters beyond school. Instead of merely completing tasks for grades, students can learn to identify meaningful problems, formulate worthwhile responses, and create value for others.

This shift matters not only educationally, but morally. Students begin to see that their own value is realized not by outperforming others on narrow measures, but by contributing something useful, thoughtful, or beautiful to the world around them.

The community is a continuation of my work with schools around the world for several decades. It is also based on extensive research on educational change, personalization, creativity, and the future of learning. These ideas are not simply reactions to AI, but part of a longer effort to rethink what education should become in a changing world. To learn more, you may wish to read my recent writings on AI and educational transformation, as well as my books such as World Class Learners, Reach for Greatness, and Fix the Past or Invent the Future.

3. Build human interdependence beyond meritocracy

Too much schooling is organized around meritocracy: one set of standards, one ladder of success, one narrow definition of achievement. This encourages comparison, ranking, and exclusion.

We need a different vision. Human beings are not valuable because they all excel in the same way. They are valuable because they develop different strengths, meet different needs, and can contribute to one another. Education should help students see difference not as deficiency, but as the basis for collaboration, contribution, and mutual reliance.

How the community will work

The community will meet synchronously online once a month for about one to one and half hours over the course of one year. The meetings will be recorded for those who are not able to attend. The first meeting is likely to be in June. The specific time and day will be decided with the group. We will also develop an online community for members to exchange ideas.

I will lead the overall learning and design journey. We will also invite leading scholars and practitioners working at the intersection of AI and education to share ideas, examples, dilemmas, and lessons from the field.

YEE Education, with which I have been working to implement significant changes in schools, will provide support and coordination.

This will not be a passive webinar series. It will be a working community. Participants will be invited to reflect on their own context, design new approaches, test them in practice, and refine them over time. The goal is not just to talk about change, but to make it happen where it is most possible.

What participants will gain

Participants will leave with more than inspiration. They will gain a clearer stance on what meaningful AI use in education looks like beyond both hype and panic. They will develop one or more learning designs that they can actually implement in their own setting. They will explore ways of assessing thinking, judgment, and contribution even when AI is available. And they will become part of a global network of educators who are trying to build the future of learning inside the constraints of today’s schools.

An invitation

If you are part of the courageous minority, I hope you will join us. Real change in education rarely begins with the whole system moving at once. More often, it begins with a few people who see clearly, act courageously, and create examples others cannot ignore.

We will have an online information session late April 2026. Please complete the interest form and we will let you know the details of the information session.