Educators who haven't struggled as learners themselves risk becoming disconnected from their students' experience, according to a former school superintendent who spent years deliberately mastering new skills to rebuild his teaching practice. The insight challenges conventional professional development and suggests that personal intellectual growth may be as important as pedagogical training for effective teaching.

What Happens When Educators Stop Being Learners?

After running six schools in six years, the superintendent described in a recent article hit a wall. By 2016, he was experiencing classic burnout: weight loss, irritability, and a pervasive sense of exhaustion. But something deeper had shifted. "I'd lost my curiosity," he reflected. He had become so focused on managing everyone else's learning that he stopped paying attention to his own intellectual growth. The result was a creeping sense of becoming "a competent bureaucrat" rather than an educator.

This realization prompted a radical career shift. After leaving school leadership, he spent the next several years deliberately tackling one ambitious learning goal per year, treating himself as his only student. He approached each pursuit with the same rigor he once applied to school management: building a scope and sequence, identifying component skills, establishing benchmarks, and culminating in a final exam or public demonstration.

How Can Educators Rebuild Their Learning Practice?

The superintendent's approach offers a practical framework that other educators can adapt:

• Choose a Skill Outside Your Expertise: Select something you've wanted to learn but abandoned, whether it's a sport, language, art form, or technical subject. The goal is to experience genuine struggle and incompetence.
• Build a Structured Curriculum: Break the skill into component parts, establish a logical progression, and set measurable benchmarks. This mirrors how you'd design a course for students.
• Create Accountability Through Performance: End your learning year with a tangible demonstration: a competition, certification exam, public performance, or portfolio. This forces authentic mastery rather than surface-level familiarity.
• Reflect on What You Learned About Learning: After completing each goal, examine how the experience changed your understanding of pedagogy, motivation, and the emotional dimensions of being a student.

Over nine years, the superintendent cycled through powerlifting, screenwriting, surfing, tennis, novel writing, biochemistry, and Italian cooking. Each pursuit deepened his understanding of how people actually learn.

How Does Personal Learning Transform Teaching Practice?

The superintendent's experiments challenged several long-held beliefs about education. He had been skeptical of collaborative learning, viewing group work as an excuse for free-riding. But during two months in a Tuscan kitchen, he witnessed how tacit knowledge gets transmitted through observation, imitation, and real-time correction from teammates. That experience shifted his perspective on the value of learning alongside others.

He was also initially skeptical of personalized learning, having seen too many schools oversell technology to secure funding. But during his biochemistry year, preparing for the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), he was struck by the quality of online educational content available. "This was worlds away from when I was in college," he noted. "Back then, we got exactly one explanation of the citric acid cycle from our professor and maybe another from the one textbook we were assigned. Now with the push of a button I could access thousands of high quality videos from experts competing against each other to offer the best explanation." This experience forced him to reconsider the role of the teacher in an age of abundant information.

"If you haven't been truly bad at something lately and climbed your way to proficiency or mastery, then you are out of touch as an educator," the superintendent stated.

Former superintendent, author of "The Invisible List"

The superintendent also gained practical insight into concepts he had only understood theoretically. Cognitive load theory, the Feynman technique, and spaced repetition became visceral when he had to apply them under pressure while studying for the MCAT. Similarly, his experience being filmed while learning to surf gave him a new appreciation for video-based feedback, a tool he had championed as a school leader but never experienced from the student's perspective.

What Role Does AI Play in Reshaping How Teachers Think About Their Work?

The superintendent's observations about personalized learning and abundant online content connect directly to current conversations about artificial intelligence in education. With the emergence of AI tutoring systems, the traditional role of the teacher as the primary source of explanation has fundamentally shifted. Universities and school systems are now grappling with how to redefine teaching when students have access to AI-powered tutors that can provide unlimited, personalized explanations.

At the University of Sydney, a newly launched research center called CARE (Centre for Applied Research in Engineering and Computing Education) is tackling this exact challenge. The center is investigating how to deliver genuinely personalized learning at scale, drawing on learning analytics and responsible use of artificial intelligence. One of its strategic projects involves building course-specific AI agents that can support learning across any unit of study, not just a handful where someone has had time to develop one.

The center is also addressing what researchers call an "illusion of learning," where students can produce credible answers using generative AI without doing the cognitive work that produces understanding. Researchers are piloting a platform that analyzes assessment specifications to identify tasks that AI can simply solve, then generates redesigned alternatives that keep critical thinking with the student.

How Are School Districts Developing Practical AI Policies?

While universities invest in research, K-12 school districts are slowly developing guidance on how students should use AI in classrooms. Massachusetts districts are taking a more permissive approach than New York City and Los Angeles, which instituted blanket pauses on most AI use to examine its impacts.

Districts that have developed policies are creating nuanced rules that allow AI use in specific contexts while restricting it in others. Lexington Public Schools specifies that students can use AI for "personalized tutoring," such as explaining a complex topic or organizing notes, but they cannot use AI-derived facts in a report without verifying them with a primary source. Medfield restricts students from using AI to write self-reflections or generate topic ideas independently, and students cannot develop or expand arguments in their writing without first seeking teacher permission.

Boston Public Schools launched a teacher training program backed by a million-dollar philanthropic donation, aiming to instill foundational AI knowledge in students at all grade levels. During a weeklong workshop in late August 2026, two dozen teachers from middle and high schools participated in discussions about what tasks are being automated by AI, including critical thinking, in-depth research, and writing.

The challenge for teachers is detecting when students are improperly relying on AI. As one superintendent noted, this requires "vigilance" and relies on teachers knowing their students' writing styles well enough to spot inconsistencies. However, nearly one in five students ages 9 to 17 say they use AI for school on a daily basis, with ChatGPT as their leading tool, according to a March 2026 poll by Common Sense Media. Yet half of students polled said they weren't taught by their schools or teachers whether the AI information they receive is accurate.

The superintendent's core argument remains relevant in this context: educators who understand what it feels like to struggle with new technology, to be uncertain about its reliability, and to navigate its limitations will be better equipped to guide students through the same challenges. Personal experience as a learner, whether in traditional subjects or emerging technologies, appears to be an irreplaceable form of professional development.