Chong-Hao Fu Joins Edtech Insiders Podcast

The goal is the same for our kids — but the future is different.”

That takeaway, shared by a Boston teacher during a pilot program, captures the heart of the conversation between Chong-Hao Fu, CEO of Leading Educators, and Alex Sarlin of EdTech Insiders. Fu outlined a vision for how schools can navigate an era shaped by artificial intelligence, shifting teacher roles, and the urgent need for “future-ready” skills—all while holding onto the coherence that drives meaningful system improvement.

In this recap, we share highlights from the conversation and reflection questions for you to consider in your own work. 

🎧 Listen to the full conversation here.

1. Coherence: The Engine for Systemwide Gains

Across the country, K–12 systems face a paradox: there are more resources and tools than ever, yet teachers often feel pulled in too many directions. Focus matters. Chong-Hao notes that one Baltimore study found that new teachers receive feedback from as many as 18 different people, making it difficult to know where to focus and what to do next as they own a highly complex, ever-changing role.

That’s where clear goals and collective work can make a big difference.

In Harlem’s Community School District 5, where we supported educators to implement a new literacy curriculum as part of the NYC Reads initiative, educators described feeling overwhelmed by the new tech tools and platforms that were also entering their classrooms. But their perspective flipped after a year of coaching from Leading Educators on the value add of technology-enabled practices, drawing from our VATT framework. Chong-Hao paraphrases their sentiment as: “We actually have what we need. We just need more time to use it coherently.”

That shift happened when the district forced choices and alignment, defining a clear literacy block and mapping how tools and apps fit together.

Highlighting Charleston County School District (CCSD), Chong-Hao offers another example. During the pandemic, only five U.S. systems improved reading scores year-over-year—four of them Leading Educators partners. Charleston led the pack by anchoring all professional learning, coaching, and leadership supervision to a single high-quality curriculum.

As Chong-Hao explains:

When all four of those layers—teachers, coaches, principals, and principal managers—have the same goal and understand their role in supporting it, you can make things happen really, really quickly. Everyone’s focused on the same thing, they all know how they’re supporting it, and you just keep rolling cycles like that every quarter on what’s most important for teachers to support kids.”

⚡ Reflection Question: How can you align your system’s professional learning and support structures around one high-leverage instructional priority?

2. AI Should Make Teachers Pilots, Not Passengers

As AI enters classrooms alongside high-quality instructional materials, the central question is clear: Will it help teachers lead deeper learning—or follow a script? Chong-Hao stresses that technology must serve educator expertise, not replace it.

Reflecting on early efforts to design curriculum-based tools alongside Playlab and leading curriculum developers, he explains:

If a teacher just asks AI, ‘Hey, can you shorten this lesson? Can you create more problems? Can you make these problems more real-world?” in those things, AI is doing almost all the lifting and all the thinking for the teacher. And it’s not necessarily helping us as educators internalize the content. What we know from cognitive science is you actually learn more when you’re asked questions, and you have to do the active retrieval and the meaning making.

That’s why our apps are designed, for example, to help teachers identify the most important math concepts in the next lesson or anticipate the most likely student misconceptions they will encounter. This is the kind of focused experience with AI that Leading Educators wants to offer educators as they start to experiment, so that what we already know about excellent instruction stays front and center. Chong-Hao says:

The real question is how we create spaces for people to play, experiment, make things, and bring that back into their craft. That’s what makes them feel like pilots, not passengers. It’s way more than just AI literacy; it’s about building AI use, confidence, and creation.”

By building a “knowledge graph” of high-quality curricula like Illustrative Mathematics, large language models can provide aligned, accurate instructional insights. One early tool helps teachers internalize lessons in 10–20 minutes, anticipating misconceptions, surfacing key concepts, and offering suggestions while keeping teachers in control.

⚡ Reflection Question: How can your technology strategy position teachers as the pilots of instruction, not the passengers?

3. Redefining the Teacher’s Role in the AI Era

Innovation thrives when educators and leaders work together. That belief shaped the School Teams AI Collaborative, where a principal and teacher-leader team from each of 20 schools explored how AI could reshape instruction.

Using the Value Add of Technology and Teaching (VATT) framework, developed with Google for Education, teams explored how AI could:

• Do More: Improve efficiency (e.g., streamlining operations or data analysis).
• Do Better: Enhance relevance and targeted learning (e.g., building better lesson plans).
• Do New: Enable authentic, real-world experiences previously out of reach (e.g., GIS mapping for a civics project).

The work revealed a key tension: even enthusiastic teachers hesitate when district policies on academic integrity are unclear. One teacher feared students could be punished for “cheating” in another class by using AI, even if encouraged elsewhere. Chong-Hao emphasizes: “There needs to be system-level leadership and coherence that makes it safe to experiment.”

⚡ Reflection Question: How can you empower principals and teacher leaders to build a school-level vision for AI that aligns with district expectations and feels safe to try?

4. Scaling Change: Start Where There’s Flexibility

Chong-Hao is optimistic about scaling authentic, future-ready learning. The key is to find “entry points” where risk tolerance is higher—such as summer programming, the weeks after state testing, or pilot units—and model new approaches there.

He cites a math program, Mathalicious, in which teachers who taught just one unit found that it changed their teaching for the entire year.

 Chong-Hao notes:

Powerful learning experiences impact educators, not just students. When we design a really powerful unit or summer experience, we can change mindsets, skills, and competencies really quickly.”

This approach acknowledges that scaling is an incremental process. Instead of mandating change across an entire system at once, leaders can leverage the flexibility of summer learning and the month after state testing to build “concrete examples that people can get really excited about.” These successful models, like those from the AI School Teams Collaborative, can inspire broader, more lasting change across the system.

⚡ Reflection Question: What are the “lower-stakes” windows in your school year—like summer or the month after state testing—where you could pilot a transformative learning experience?

5. Future-Ready Skills: What AI Can’t Replace

Some skills remain uniquely human. In partnership with Denver School of Science and Technology and Boston Public Schools, Leading Educators piloted summer programs exploring the intersection of AI, civics, and leadership.

• In Denver, high schoolers used AI and GIS mapping to examine the impact of deportations on their community. They overlaid data on deportation sites with access to mental health services to recommend new supports. One student reflected: “I feel dramatically different about what AI can be used for. I feel leadership in school, and I feel different about my own agency in solving problems.”
• In Boston, middle schoolers spotted inaccuracies in an AI-generated transcript, sparking rich discussions about media literacy and “AI hallucinations.”

These projects show that future-ready learning isn’t about discarding what’s worked—it’s about using technology to amplify timeless human skills like empathy, creativity, and civic engagement.

⚡ Reflection Question: How can you design experiences that leverage AI to strengthen the human skills students will always need?

Build a Bridge to The Future with Us

At its core, education is a human-centered endeavor. Chong-Hao reflects:

We’re at an inflection point where people are asking: ‘What is the purpose of education? How do we design a future-ready system for our kids?’ There’s space now, more than ever, to think bigger and differently.”

Leading Educators is ready to help districts build that bridge. Our evidence-based supports can help you align AI integration, instructional priorities, and teacher learning into a coherent strategy.

If you’re considering how to navigate these shifts in your system, we’d welcome a conversation about what that could look like in your context.