For over 40 years the Middle States Association Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools (MSA-CESS) has been a valuable partner in the growth and development of Esol Education schools. As a leading accreditation body, MSA accredits all 8 of Esol’s American international schools, and supports their continuous school improvement efforts. STRIDES catches up with MSA President Christian Talbot for a deep dive into the modern K-12 education landscape, and gains his insights on the challenges and exciting opportunities that lie ahead for education leaders.

As a leading accrediting agency for American schools, what would you say are the key areas of focus at MSA for the coming years? 

To answer that question, I need to provide context. Everything we do at Middle States starts with our purpose: “to inspire wise change in schools.” I have been a head of school twice, and many of my colleagues have also been school leaders and teachers. So we approach the work from that perspective.

Middle States has always helped school leaders create wise change through the mechanism of accreditation, but in the last three years we have significantly expanded our support for school leaders.

For example, we are the only accreditor in the world to provide endorsements for schools in AI, and this summer we will launch the world’s first endorsement for K12 governing boards. Last year we launched The Journey, the world’s only education summit entirely devoted to leading change in schools. Earlier this year we launched the Evolution Academy, our professional learning platform. We are about to launch Evolution Stories, a podcast focused on how change happens in schools. We are currently piloting a Next Generation Accreditation protocol designed to support innovative school models. And we now offer custom consulting engagements.

I hope this shows that Middle States is not just an accreditor. We are here to inspire wise change with every kind tool that a school leader might need. And it all comes from the heart, because we have been in the shoes of school leaders. At our staff meetings, we talk about school leaders all the time!

American international schools are fantastic melting pots. By weaving American educational approaches with local cultures, they enable kids to become comfortable and skilled at navigating relationships with diverse communities. In our connected world, that is priceless.

MSA accredits over 3,200 schools, a community of over 2 million students. What are some of the most cutting-edge teaching and learning practices you are seeing at the forefront of K-12 education today?

We have a strong point of view on this, and it is different from what others talk about. Cutting-edge teaching and learning practices have to be guided by a North Star. We believe that the leading edge of teaching and learning is grounded in what we call the “Declaration of Powerful Learning.” We created this new asset for schools pursuing the endorsement in “Essential Learning Experience with AI,” the schools participating in our AI Fellows program, and the schools piloting the Next Generation Accreditation protocol. 

We define it this way: “In a powerful learning experience, learners experience purpose and agency as they develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions.” We distilled this definition from Mehta and Fine’s groundbreaking study In Search of Deeper Learning (2019).

Some schools design for powerful learning through project-based learning. I’m thinking of Middle States member schools like Beyond 8 in Chennai, or The Innovation Fellowship in Tokyo. Other schools design for powerful learning through IB programme capstone work. And  other schools are now using AI to help students learn through social entrepreneurship (we did a fantastic social entrepreneurship design sprint with a school in the United States—each team of students also included an AI teammate).

There are many other cutting-edge teaching and learning practices that I could talk about, but they all have in common deliberate moves—selected by teachers and supported by school leadership—that bring to life a school’s definition of powerful learning.

What do you think are the top challenges faced by school leaders today?

We have members in 117 countries, and all around the world school leaders tell me that governance is their biggest challenge. Governance challenges probably explain why the average tenure for school heads has been declining for several years. This summer Middle States is piloting an endorsement for boards in excellent governance so that boards can  protect their school’s present and future.

School leaders also tell me about other challenges: the pace of change is breathless (especially given the rapid evolution of AI); students are struggling with social emotional well being and development; and faculty and staff are often exhausted by the midpoint of the year.

American schools in an international context provide a powerful, globalized education model. In your opinion, what are some of the key areas where American international schools excel?

For starters, American international schools excel at blending strong academics with student agency. At Middle States, we love when we see “powerful learning experiences” in which students apply their knowledge to problems or new situations with purpose. American schools often make learning meaningful in this way.

American schools also tend to be the first to adopt new technologies in service of that powerful learning. Other school models sometimes seem afraid to take risks with innovations before they have been proven repeatedly. 

I’ve noticed that American international schools are fantastic melting pots. By weaving American educational approaches with local cultures, they enable kids to become comfortable and skilled at navigating relationships with diverse communities. In our connected world, that is priceless.

MSA and Esol Education have enjoyed a relationship that goes back over 40 years. How would you describe the evolution of Esol Education and its schools from your perspective as President and CEO of MSA?

Let me tell you about my first conversation with Tammam Abushakra. He and I met at an AAIE conference in early 2023. As soon as I told him that we were planning an endorsement for AI literacy, safety, and ethics, his eyes lit up. He leaned forward and started asking thoughtful, probing questions. What could AI enable students to do that wasn’t yet possible? How could schools protect young people from the biases and potential harms of AI? How could schools use AI to become more relationship oriented in their teaching and learning? It was clear that Tammam shared our vision for education that is “human-driven and AI-informed,” as we say at Middle States.

That conversation confirmed what my predecessor Dr. Hank Cram had told me when I first arrived at Middle States in 2022: “Meet the people at Esol as soon as you can. They are a great community doing wonderful work. And the Abushakras truly care about their schools.”

In accreditation, it’s really clear whether a school simply wants to check a box or earnestly undergo an improvement process. By choosing to seek the gold standard in accreditation, the Abushakra family has consistently demonstrated their commitment to providing—and then improving—quality educational opportunities for all of their students. 

Esol has also partnered with Middle States to advocate for rigorous quality accreditation for all schools around the world. The way I see it, Esol is contributing to the common good at a time when others prefer to merely check a box.

AI is an exciting space in every industry. Do you feel it will be a game changer in K-12 education? How?

The moment I used ChatGPT for the first time in early December 2022, I thought, This will be the most transformational technology since the public internet. Maybe the most concrete way to think about that comes from Tom Vander Ark, a member of the Middle States AI advisory team, who recently said on his podcast, “The information age was about access to data and information. With the introduction of ChatGPT, we’ve moved into access to intelligence.” Schools have never dealt with access to a “co-intelligence,” as Wharton professor Ethan Mollick calls it. To be honest, this is both an opportunity and a threat.

On the opportunity side, kids can now do more, and they can do it faster and better. In a project-based learning environment, a student might have had to wait days or weeks or months to get expert feedback on their work. AI can now simulate that expertise and provide guidance so that students can prototype more rapidly and get to real world impact sooner. If you believe in powerful learning that allows students to apply their knowledge to problems and new situations, AI is a total game changer.

At the same time, there are enormous potential risks. Cambridge University professor Philippa Hardman has written, “Every week more AI-powered education technologies come to market, but the vast majority accelerate, automate and scale traditional, broken methods of instruction.” Translation? The world isn’t going to reward kids who have done more worksheets just because the teacher used AI to create infinite versions. But if teachers use AI to automate and scale broken methods of instruction, they will activate another risk: students will begin to outsource their thinking to AI. 

But kids can’t develop cognitively without doing the hard work of learning to think for themselves. So the pressure is on for schools to get serious about designing those “powerful learning experiences,” because those are the experiences that make kids want to do their own thinking! The third major risk is children are already experiencing the simulated intimacy of chatbots. And AI is only going to sound more and more human—yet AI is not, and cannot be, human. If social media was the world’s largest uncontrolled social experiment of the last twenty years, then simulated intimacy with AI might be the largest uncontrolled experiment of the next twenty years.

Can you share more about MSA’s RAIL initiative, the impetus behind its launch and its key goals?

RAIL stands for Responsible AI in Learning and its the name of our series of endorsements for schools in AI. The first is “AI Literacy, Safety, and Ethics,” and the second is “Essential Learning Experience with AI.” We have more planned. By the way, the American School of Bahrain, an Esol school, was in the first cohort to earn the endorsement in “AI Literacy, Safety, and Ethics.”

The goal of RAIL is to enable schools to “stay safe and stay ahead” with AI. In the early phase of any new technology, nobody knows what to do. Someone has to explore the unknown frontier, learn what is there, and then bring back lessons to make it safe for others to follow. At Middle States, many of us are former school leaders, so we knew that we had to make that unknown territory safe for schools. The result was the world’s first endorsement for schools in AI, whose goal is to ensure that schools are systematically literate, safe, and ethical in their use of AI. The endorsement addresses how AI affects every part of a school’s operation. In that sense, it’s sort of like an accreditation process.

But safety isn’t enough-in this moment, we need schools to leverage AI to create transformational learning experiences. That is why we built the second endorsement to help teachers design powerful learning.

Pre- and post-RAIL surveys show that every school working with us-over 70 schools from 30 countries on 6 continents-experience huge improvements in their ability to be literate, safe, and ethical in their use of AI. We are even more excited about the impact of the second endorsement in “Essential Learning Experience,” whose first cohort just started their work.

Christian Talbot has served as the President of The Middle States Association Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools (MSA-CESS) since July 2022. A seasoned educator and leader, Talbot previously served as interim president at Regis High School in New York. He also served as Head of School of Malvern Preparatory School. 

He is a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, founder of Basecamp Consulting and JUNO Strategy & Design. He holds degrees from Georgetown University and the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis and has served on several educational boards.