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Our guest in this episode is Dr Fiona Aubrey-Smith, an independent researcher who studies the relationship between pedagogy and digital tools, and the lived experience of students in the classroom.
Fiona opens by explaining why identical classroom practices can produce completely different outcomes depending on the belief system behind them. Her example of two teachers greeting students at the classroom door in seemingly the same way, but for very different underlying reasons, shows how policies alone don't determine impact; the intent behind them does.
The conversation moves into belonging and dignity, including research showing that struggling students typically ask for help only 1-3 times in a lesson regardless of how much support they need, while confident students almost never ask to be pushed further. Daniel and Fiona discuss the tension between protecting a student's dignity and the value of productive vulnerability.
From there, Fiona lays out her framework for introducing technology into schools: start with the purpose of school, define the role of the learner, describe what the learning experience should feel like, define the role of the teacher, and only then decide which tools will help deliver it. Starting with the tool itself, before asking why, is a costly and common mistake.
Two school case studies illustrate this in practice. At Haileybury, an embedded one-to-one, on-demand digital provision (available at the point of need rather than simply issued to every student) has freed teachers to rethink classroom layout entirely. At Connect Education Trust, a similar model has extended digital skills and connectivity into the home, empowering families to support learning without needing their own digital capability, coinciding with outstanding inspection outcomes.
On generative AI, Fiona shares some thoughtful use cases she sees, such as chaining AI tools to help secondary students revise, and using AI image generation to help primary students with their descriptive writing.
She wraps up with a challenge for school leaders. Rather than starting with policies or tools, ask what your school would leave behind if it closed tomorrow, since that gap is where the real human value lies. From there, let AI and digital tools take on the automation and acceleration, so teachers are freed up for the parts of the job only a human can do.
