How Can AI Fuel Deeper Learning? A Conversation with Kali Frederick and Aatash Parikh

Exploring AI's impact on education, deeper learning, and project-based learning with insights from High Tech High and Inkwire's leaders. The post How Can AI Fuel Deeper Learning? A Conversation with Kali Frederick and Aatash Parikh appeared first on Getting Smart.

Apr 3, 2025 - 12:28

How Can AI Fuel Deeper Learning? A Conversation with Kali Frederick and Aatash Parikh

It is the top of the second inning in the age of AI, and I think in the last few weeks we passed a new threshold of access to expertise. The information age, where my 40-year career was about access to data and information, has shifted. With the introduction of ChatGPT, we’ve moved into access to intelligence. The introduction of agents, operators, and reasoning engines in the last six weeks feels like global access to expertise, maybe even capability—meaning intelligence able to act hopefully on our behalf. Last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, estimated that their new product, Deep Research, could do a single-digit percentage of all economically valuable tasks in the world. That’s a wild milestone.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss these topics with Aatash Parikh, CEO of Inkwire, and Kali Frederick, a professional learning designer at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. We explored how AI can support educators in designing impactful learning experiences that foster student agency and community engagement. Inkwire’s tools aim to empower teachers and students to co-design projects, enhancing learning through real-world applications and performance-based assessments.

Here are a couple of things that I’m still thinking about after the conversation with Aatash and Kali:

AI as a Catalyst for Deeper Learning: AI technologies can enhance deeper learning by providing tools that help students and teachers design and execute projects that are meaningful and connected to real-world issues.
The Importance of Community Connection: Building relationships within the community and engaging students in projects that matter locally can reignite the joy of learning and develop essential skills for the future.

These insights underscore the need for educational policies and practices that embrace AI’s potential while ensuring students acquire the deeper learning competencies required in the modern world.

Aatash, you’re a technologist. Do you buy anything I just said? Is it a big deal that we now have global access to pretty great reasoning engines and at least the beginning of agents and operators?

Deep Research Tool Insights

Aatash Parikh: I think it’s definitely a big deal. It’s really quite unknown where it’s all heading, and what types of jobs it’s going to replace and what kind of real work it can truly do.

But I did have a chance to try out the Deep Research tool last week, and I was very impressed. It allowed me to do some market research for our startup that we could have done or we could have maybe hired somebody to do. But we never got around to it, or it was kind of a big administrative task, and I was able to pipe it to the Deep Research and come back in 10 minutes to see what it came up with. It was quite powerful, and it had references to data, articles, and sources that made it a level of trustworthiness higher than just ChatGPT on its own. So, I think there’s absolutely something there. We’ll see where it goes.

Tom Vander Ark: Aatash, Mason and I were talking yesterday about the labor market implications of reasoning engines and agents, and we’re already seeing evidence. We’re seeing tech companies engage in layoffs, and we’re starting to see signs of softening in the early labor market, particularly for graduates. Mason and I think we’re going to see college graduates this year face real challenges in hiring, both because companies are beginning to deploy AI, but it’s also they’re sort of living into the predictions of AI. Do you see these changes in the labor markets really becoming visible this year?

Aatash Parikh: I do, and I can speak, you know, even just from the perspective of running our business. I mentioned my use case with Deep Research. There are all kinds of things around administrative tasks, especially research-oriented data cleaning, data curation. A lot of those pieces I can see that would typically be entry-level roles for college and university graduates. I see folks turning to AI before looking to somebody for a lot of those tasks.

Tom Vander Ark: That’s really what I mean by access to expertise, that you really now have a group of graduate students’ agents that can do work that you would’ve had to hire for. So, as Reid often would say, a world of possibility has just opened up.

Tom Vander Ark: Kali, I want to try to make the link to deeper learning.

Tom Vander Ark: Larry Rosenstock, the founder of High Tech High, really outlined a commitment to deeper learning in a set of design principles that he developed back in the 1990s. They were evident on the first day of school at High Tech High when you opened in 2000. It’s interesting that the tech community in San Diego wanted a tech school, and Larry sort of snuck in a deeper learning school that is also, I think, the best art school in the world, best art network in the world. So, I think Larry was really prescient about seeing where the world was headed and building a response around deeper learning. Was he right? Is deeper learning now more important than ever? And do you see it as an adequate response to what’s happening in technology and in the workforce?

Kali Frederick: Absolutely. I mean, you all are speaking about the changes in the workforce and the needs for post-college economic participation, right? With the graduates, and looking at our K-12 schools, it’s going to be critical for our students to be prepared for young people to adapt to the needs, right? To their interests and really finding a way to bring their passions and interests and drive into the next formation of whatever this economy looks like. With the influx of AI supporting those administrative tasks, it kind of gets rid of those entry-level positions, right? Where you would build some of your reputation and your skills in these industries.

Tom Vander Ark: Put a big underscore under that. I think you made a point that we haven’t adequately noted: experience is more important than ever, but probably harder to get. It’s going to be harder to get those first jobs for high school and college graduates, and experience is more valued by employers. So, there’s a bit of a conundrum. It’s part of why career-connected learning is so important in high school because you’re creating valuable experience. You’re not just preparing kids; you’re inviting them into contribution, into valuable experiences.

Kali Frederick: I think, as you’re saying, this connection to the community and to organizations and to industry early on is critical for young people to develop those skills and the stories that they can share and the experience that they can share. Designing learning experiences that engage young people in the community and with the community early on is like the crux of deeper learning. Last year at the Deeper Learning Conference at High Tech High, Dena Simmons was the keynote speaker, and she spoke a lot about the disengagement of young people. One of the quotes that just stood out to me and continues to drive my work is she’s like, young people are disengaged right now in school because they don’t feel connected to their community. At the heart of High Tech High and its inception was always this idea that young people would have the ability to be active participants in their community. Now, whether it’s K-12, how do we design those experiences is the part where I’m excited that we use AI tools is in the design and supporting teachers in visualizing the scope of this kind of work with students.

Tom Vander Ark: Larry used to call it City as Classroom, right? There was a real commitment to place-based learning. For those not familiar with High Tech High, I’d love to have you check out hightechhigh.org. In the top middle of the website, you’ll see publications and projects and click on those just to get a sense of the quality and type of work that students have been doing in the High Tech High network for the last 25 years. You’ll see examples of third and fourth-grade classrooms publishing books on bird species and middle school students doing science research on the waterfront in San Diego. It’s a remarkable place connected to the community. Kids from kindergarten to 12th grade engaged in real-world learning.

Kali Frederick: Also, on High Tech High GSE’s Unboxed, that’s the adult learning journal. There is a tab for project cards, and that’s hundreds of projects from the perspective of the teacher and the student, how they engaged in these place-based, identity-focused experiences.

Tom Vander Ark: We’ll add that to the show notes. So Kali, we’ve both tried to make the link that what’s happening in the world requires more student agency, more community connection, more multidisciplinary project-based learning.

Linking AI to Deeper Learning

Project-Based Learning and AI

Tom Vander Ark: What does AI have to do with that?

Kali Frederick: Absolutely. The work that the professional learning team at High Tech High Graduate School of Education does is that we design workshops and learning experiences for educators and adults who are looking at harnessing their tools as curriculum designers, right? All teachers are designers, whether they identify as it or not. When students walk into their room, they’re making design choices on how their classroom looks and invites young people in and in the moves that they make to engage them in the lessons. Our work is trying to make how we design these community-based projects really accessible for educators. It’s scary to think that you’re not necessarily following a curriculum, and so you’re designing this experience with a community partner or an organization and your young people.

We’ve established or co-created the PBL essentials, those nine essentials. That was early on when Larry and Rob and Randy and Rob were all thinking about how to design these types of experiences. The PBL Essentials provides routines that you can rely on in your design. It’s things like developing an essential question, having an exhibition, having community partners engaged in giving feedback to young people, but also young people making, building, and doing something that supports a reciprocal relationship with the community.

In our workshops, it was about how do we help educators see how they’re already doing a lot of these essentials and then elevate their toolbox so that they can design these community-based projects. It was a little bit scary, right? It’s scary to build the confidence that you’re going to design your own curriculum. With the essentials, we found success in helping teachers identify what those rhythms look like on a day to day and week basis in a project. With Aatash and Inkwire, what’s beautiful about this collaboration is he took the kaleidoscope, those essentials, and with the support of AI, with ChatGPT, was able to provide this tool that helps teachers start to develop each of those essentials and to provide very rapidly a vision of what the scope and sequence of a project might look like.

In our workshops, we do a lot of the human connection of ideating parts of your project to build your confidence as a creative designer, and then we bring out the tool. Once they know the essentials, we bring out the AI tool and they start to enter some of their ideas into this AI tool and you see this collective gasp and they feel so confident in seeing a possible scope and sequence of a project. They feel ready now to embark on that journey with young people. That has been across the board, whether we’re working with High Tech High teachers and using the tool or working with other school districts. When we bring this AI tool out and they get to see how AI can be a tool, a companion in developing the essentials, and then providing a quick overview of what a possible scope and sequence might look like for a project, teachers feel ready to do this kind of work with young people and with their community.

Inkwire’s Role in Education

Tom Vander Ark: Aatash, what’s the origin story of Inkwire?

Aatash Parikh: Before I get to that, I think just to underscore some of the pieces that came up earlier around the role of deeper learning in AI and just to tie back to the examples that I was sharing earlier about how we’re starting to use it in our work. I think it’s becoming clearer and clearer that the deeper learning skills that High Tech High has been helping students develop for the last 25 years are the most critical ones. I’m having to, you know, how do you effectively prompt the AI and then how do you effectively parse what it’s giving you to know whether the information is accurate, trustworthy, has the right meaning and value, and then being able to connect with others around the work and some of the relational pieces that the AI can’t do? All of these are skills that deeper learning helps young people build.

In terms of Inkwire, Inkwire started as a digital portfolio and documentation tool inspired by some of my time at High Tech High and understanding and seeing that. One of the important ways we could help deeper learning spread is by changing how we actually measure and assess learning in that context. It was pretty clear that a portfolio did much more justice to the kind of work and skills students were building at High Tech High than any sort of standardized assessment could. We wanted to build tools that could help make that easier, help teachers facilitate projects, and help students build portfolios while doing those projects. That’s how Inkwire started. Last year, especially as we started to see some of the developments with generative AI, it just felt like a really important opportunity to make sure that we’re leveraging generative AI for deeper learning and not just for making traditional teaching and learning more efficient, which is what we were seeing happening with AI.

Kali Frederick: And if I can, I think looking at the deeper learning competencies of creativity and collaboration and critical thinking, it’s like how do we develop those skills in a way that students can apply them no matter what the future holds? These community-focused projects and students really looking at issues and themes that are coming up within proximity to where they live has become, as you mentioned, Tom, High Tech High’s way of developing these deeper learning competencies. For schools interested in diving into this work, thinking about taking students out into the community and redesigning a lot of how they are comfortable doing school is a scary position to be in. It’s like we have to, and teachers often when a school district says we’re going to implement PBL, teachers are like, another thing that I have to add onto my plate. It’s that recognition that it’s not necessarily another thing. It’s just diving more deeply and authentically into the work that we can do as a community, which in our times right now, being connected to our community and being able to talk to the person who is experiencing the issue, or to learn from somebody who is just two blocks away from your school, building those relationships, is going to be, I think, really critical for this next phase of our world. Then it’s supporting teachers in being able to fall back on some of the routines that they are comfortable with and that they’re used to using in their classroom, but then redefining them as community-based or looking at them in terms of the holistic project that they’re working on helps to ease them into that transition of designing their own curriculum. AI, the AI tool that we’re developing with Inkwire, helps provide those ideas really quickly to teachers. Community partners is a big part of project-based learning at High Tech High, and one of the essentials is community partners. A teacher who is not used to reaching out to the community might have questions about that. When they put some of the ideas they have for a project into the tool, but the community partners is empty, they can ask AI. AI starts to give all these beautiful ideas of who they could possibly reach out to in their community. That’s the confidence building that we start to see.

Tom Vander Ark: So, Aatash, is Inkwire a teacher-facing tool? Is there a student component to this? When, where, how are they invited into co-authoring? What’s your take on that? Is this a tool that supports teacher as designer or is there a student role here?

Aatash Parikh: Yeah, great question. I know Kali can speak to some great examples of students designing projects already with the tool. We are starting with really thinking about the teacher workflow and how to support teachers as designers. We very much have students in our design perspective, both thinking about co-design, what is teacher, what is, we know that the best projects that teachers design have are very much influenced by their students’ needs, but also their students’ input and feedback. So, how can we help teachers utilize that in their design process is one piece. How do we help teachers and students co-design projects, and then also how do we help students design their own projects, whether it’s a capstone project, a senior project, a passion project? We know that there are all kinds of skills that students can build when thinking about how to design their own projects, and if we can scaffold some of that work for the students too, that’s really exciting for us. The way we’re doing it right now is we’re starting to roll out with teachers, but with some of our partners, including Kali and her team, were starting to have students in there and doing some design work themselves as well.

Kali Frederick: Yeah, we’ve supported the High Tech High Chula Vista seniors. We’ve supported them a few times now in developing their project design skills because they have eight weeks to roll out their senior project. We did similar experiences that we would do with educators where we brought them in, they did some empathy work, getting to know themselves and their passions and their colleagues, their fellow peers and their passions, and then did some ideation around how do you develop a project, and what are all the pieces that could go into a community-focused project and then use the tool to help develop other components like the essential question component really provides these beautiful guiding questions that you can use in research and in interviews with community partners. We really brought the seniors into that experience, and it’s an incredible way too for students to see the scope and sequence that the tool provides. It provides a calendar of what your week-to-week of this project might look like based on the ideas that you put that were the inputs into the tool, and with students, with seniors, they got to see the calendar and it was still teacher-facing. It said students will research, but they had to then the analytical work became, what does that look like for me as an individual? Like I’m doing this project by myself right now, and so how do I take the calendar that they gave me and create my own to-do list for each week to ultimately get this project where I want it to get and where I want it to go. It was incredible to watch them develop their own ideas. We go back and do the project tunings, and we look at, here’s your rough draft of your design, how do we make this even stronger? That’s in person with colleagues, with community partners to really support young people in developing their project, but it’s the same process we would use with educators. They develop their projects and then they have a draft. We bring people to the table to give feedback on it, a diverse group of people to the table so that teachers can really develop these beautifully rich experiences with young people.

Policy and Educational Goals

Tom Vander Ark: Kali, I want to zoom up to the policy level and ask a question about goals and how we structured secondary schools. Thirty years ago, California, in a well-intentioned way, sort of locked in a college prep sequences set of requirements, they’re called A-G courses. I probably had a hand in helping that happen when we stood up Ed Trust West and an early advocate of that system trying to get all kids into a college-ready curriculum. It now strikes me that it feels quite obsolete and is one of the many barriers to promoting more real-world learning for more California kids. Is it time to update the California diploma? Do we need a new way to describe our aspirations? Do we need new signaling systems like portfolios to help equip kids to tell their story?

Kali Frederick: Oh, Tom. Okay.

Tom Vander Ark: We can skip that one because it’s a big hairy question, but I just want to acknowledge that.

Kali Frederick: Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Vander Ark: Doing all this innovation inside an obsolete framework that hinders rather than encourages deeper learning. Is that fair?

Kali Frederick: Hmm. Well, it kind of goes back to what Rob Reardon always says, creative compliance or creative non-compliance. It’s how do we, within any constraints that we have, whether it’s the New York Regents exam, which they’re starting to dismantle now, but those standards, that’s where I started my teaching career. So, my comparison is always the New York standards and then the Common Core when I came over to California. But whatever the constraints are, right, whatever the requirements are, how do we creatively consider how to achieve those, to show the body that requires them, right, that students are doing the work that they presumably feel is important and still do these community projects. One piece that we’ve found is that when we do these, when we’re doing project-based learning, when we’re designing rich projects with community partners, with young people’s voices and interests at heart and helping teachers be flexible and limber in their design, you achieve more than what the standards are requiring, right? You can achieve those standards. Those are easy to kind of input and you go above and beyond. So, part of me, I don’t know if we should publish this, but part of me feels like you can give us whatever requirements are needed and we’re still going to be able to input those while designing these deeper learning experiences because deeper learning goes beyond whatever the requirements are given.

Aatash Parikh: Yeah.

Kali Frederick: I do think portfolios and students being able to show their process, like Inkwire has this beautiful documentation part of their tool, and it really allows students to document their process, whether it’s through video, through audio, through images, of how they’re developing the skills. We often see like the standard might be to learn how to, I’m trying to think of Ted’s example of soldering, right? They might learn how to solder while taking the video. They’re also telling the person next to them how to do it. That might be a natural piece that comes out of videoing that wasn’t necessarily the requirement. Like we just want to see that you can solder. But in your discussion with your partner, you’re explaining how to do it, what’s happening with the soldering, and that wasn’t a requirement for the assessment. You get to capture that beautiful, like deeper learning moment happening when a young person is also sharing and teaching someone else. So, I do think the portfolios and the documentation, that’s the part that we really need to think about and get creative with, being able to then identify what are the skills that students are practicing and elevating in those moments.

Tom Vander Ark: So, Aatash, can an AI-powered project-based learner experience platform like Inkwire, really help foreground powerful experiences and, as the Carnegie Foundation hopes to do, move courses and grades into the background?

Aatash Parikh: That’s the goal. That’s the goal. I’m in New York now, and I’m watching some of those changes at the New York State level around replacing the Regents as a requirement with potentially more performance-based assessments. I see the work that ETS and Carnegie are doing. I think it’s very important that we are really thoughtful in what we’re building to replace those existing systems. I think the work that we’re doing with our portfolio system and designing that with partners like High Tech High. We’ve recently started working as well with the consortia, some of the consortium schools and the district in New York City that’s led by Superintendent Alan Chang. They had the ability to waive the Regent’s requirement and come up with their own performance-based measures for several years. So, as some of those changes affect a lot more schools and districts around the state, and as other policy changes around the country affect other organizations, we’re going to have to look at these models and see what effective assessment looks like that’s performance-based and portfolio-based and really make sure that we are building on what we know has worked and designing around those. I think there’s a lot of important work to be done on that front.

Kali Frederick: Can I just say one more thing too, just to add on to that? Because I feel like when we talk about these documentation and the assessments and the portfolios, it can start to feel really heavy, right? Again, teachers feel that when a new initiative is brought on or the standards are taken away, and now it’s portrait of a graduate that can feel really heavy. But at the heart of it, it’s how do we get back to these whole human experiences and supporting the development of the whole human, right? The humanity of it and our relationship with place and with our community, and just bringing back the joy and excitement that goes along with actual learning that happens. Young people finding out all the secrets that are hidden in the world and designing these types of experiences that really get young people into their communities working alongside their community partners and members brings back that intrinsic motivation to ask the questions and to research more deeply. The teacher documenting that process becomes a really joyful experience. It’s about getting back to that as the purpose of education, because when we’re in those joyful moments and asking those deep questions, that’s when the deeper learning happens and young people feel more prepared and connected to lead in their communities.

Tom Vander Ark: Closing thought. The subtitle to my last book was Schools Alive With a Sense of Possibility. My greatest hope these days is that we can help teachers create schools that are alive with a sense of possibility, and that’s what I so deeply appreciate about the two of you. High Tech High, the GSE, the Inkwire partner schools are creating powerful learning experiences for students. They’re equipping them to do work that matters, matters to them and to their community, and to produce products more powerful, more valuable than they or their teachers ever imagined. That’s the dream. That’s the hope. That’s why your collective work is so important.

Kali Frederick

Kali is a Professional Learning Designer with the Professional Learning team at the High Tech High Graduate School of Education. She started her teaching career in 2004 at a large comprehensive public high school in NYC. Through this experience she learned that centering students’ lived experiences was critical to creating a purposeful and joyful learning environment. She joined High Tech High in 2009 and has taught Humanities at both High Tech High North County and High Tech Middle Chula Vista.

Kali holds a Master’s degree in Education from High Tech High Graduate School of Education, a Master’s in Science of Teaching from Pace University. She is deeply inspired by bell hooks’ and designs adult learning experiences inspired with hooks’ reflection in mind “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility,” (Teaching to Transgress, 1994). She has an appreciation for dinosaurs, unapologetically loud music, gardening, and baking, and can often be found exploring with her family.

Aatash Parikh

Aatash Parikh is the co-founder and CEO of Inkwire, a platform that facilitates real world, project-based learning and portfolios. Aatash has worked as a software engineer at companies including Google & Khan Academy and as an educator in Oakland Unified School District. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from UC Berkeley and an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership from the High Tech High Graduate School of Education.