Poly Presents at Second Annual Transformative Teaching Conference

As the Poly community commenced its spring break, Upper School Film/Media Studies Teacher Adam Feldmeth headed back to the San Francisco Bay area to present at the 2nd annual Transformative Teaching Conference organized by Crystal Springs Upland School’s Center for Transformative Teaching (CTT) on Saturday, March 21. This was the second year Adam has presented at the event, after being invited back following a co-facilitated workshop with Upper School Science Teacher Will Mason at the inaugural CTT conference at Crystal in 2025. 

The theme of this year’s conference was “Human in the Loop” (HITL), centering on the critical intersection of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in education. This trending phrase aims to address a need to consider a swiftly advancing world and the extent to which students, teachers, and future laborers alike remain inclusively a part of the process as well as beneficiaries of the progress to come.

Contributing to a robust range of workshops, Adam offered an occasion for attendees to synthesize all they had learned during the day in a discussion stimulated by thinking out loud together and catalyzed by the question: what does it mean to teach in turbulent times?

His presentation, entitled “What is Called Thinking Out Loud?”, modeled the Thinking Out Loud (TOL) initiative developed in a two-year study group Adam has sustained with colleagues Will Mason and College Counselor Garine Zetlian. This past October, the Upper School engaged in three TOL workshops with topics culled from faculty/staff interest including: Incorporating and Integrating Research Projects into Our Courses, Collaborating for Ultimate Student Performance and Success, and Teaching & Learning with AI. Facilitated by faculty members Megan Foley, Cynthia Garcia-Macedonio, Maya Seneus, Karen Barton, Katie Schuhl, and L Holmgren, these workshops aimed to catalyze further dialogues for the school year ahead. 

At the conference, Adam provided a brief background of the study group’s interest in further activating the tenets of Poly’s Portrait of a Graduate (POG) alongside the developing Portrait of a Teacher (POT) at a communal scale.  Facilitating the discussion, Adam drew upon Martin Heidegger’s 1954 text, What is Called Thinking?, in which the philosopher observed, “We come to know what it means to think when we ourselves try to think. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn thinking. As soon as we allow ourselves to become involved in such learning, we have admitted that we are not yet capable of thinking.” 

Exploring a sentiment expressed earlier in the day—that society has now entered the Age of AI—attendees complicated this by considering that we are in the midst of an Age of Acronyms. CCT, HITL, AI, DEI, LLM, FOMO, DOGE, ICE, PLC, POG, POT, TOL… The use value of such abbreviations in shorthand parlance serve to compress and hold meaning yet also require reciprocal decompression to begin accessing stored information and latent communicable value. In a time when artificial intelligence is rapidly impacting the myriad ways in which humans reconcile with long-standing qualities which have distinguished the role of the educator—namely, to foster critical thinking and learning—a question arises: Why have these descriptors been attributed to non-human agents in such terms as “AI Thinking” and “Machine Learning” (ML)?

Sifting through a host of etymological roots of common words adopted to provide some grounds for this groundbreaking technological moment including “artificial”, “synthetic”, “prompt” and “in/out of the loop”, members of the workshop negotiated the extent to which what is called [human] intelligence has always been, in a fundamental sense, artificial in-itself. 

Navigating tendencies that ascribe AI with a quotient of immediacy and performative certainty were pitted against the hesitation and doubt that are part and parcel of knowledge acquisition. Here, Adam emphasized the significance of grounding our courses of study in dis-course, asking: how can the gathering of thoughts, not yet articulated, be approached through discussions which shake apart [discutere] held conceptions of pedagogy so as to make them more pliant? Through encouraging an approach to questioning that holds open the threshold of sustained inquiry, the preemptive closures brought on by the allure of efficiency through immediate results for teachers and students become critically negotiable together.

Occurring in the last block of the day’s proceedings, this dynamic discussion of generative inquiries served as an impromptu gathering of endnotes to the conference’s proceedings. Rather than leaning into quick and fast opportunities to cognitively offload the middle ground between a prompt and the deliverable output, it remains prescient to ask if and how the incorporation of artificial intelligence in the educational experience enables a continued engagement in critical thinking for teachers and students alike in learning occurring along the way.