AI is hot today. Almost everyone is talking about AI with all sorts of suggestions, advice, comments, and emotions. The majority of the conversations are about how to integrate AI in traditional classrooms. But given the history of educational technology, it is unlikely that AI can do much in the traditional classroom that aims to teach students the same prescribed curriculum and pass traditional exams. For AI to realize its potential, we have to reimagine education.
Artificial Intelligence and Education: End the Grammar of Schooling is an article I wrote and published …

INTRODUCTION
Focus, focus, and focus! Focus is what this book is about. Here we aim to help school leaders understand what they should focus on and why. We share examples, vignettes, and practical advice to illustrate how to focus without losing sight of the big picture. School leaders often are overwhelmed (Klusmann et al., 2023). They feel they need to be responsible for everything happening in the school, from curriculum to pedagogy, from teachers to students, from finance to extracurricular activities, from the physical environments to school culture, and from systematic …

About five years ago, all schools embraced the idea of global competence. Governments wanted their students to be globally competent; organizations such as the Asia Society led the development of the content of global competences, and international tests such the PISA even administered an assessment of global competence of 15 years old students in different countries in 2018.  International study tours, global exchange of students and teachers online and offline, joint global projects in teaching and research, as well as publications and conferences on global competence were all on the …

Is it possible to reduce the time students spend in classrooms and schools? Would such a reduction be better for learning and retaining teachers? How should learning be more flexibly enacted in the post-pandemic era? Why are some schools have moved to 4 days a week?
Jim and I wrote this article to discuss the possibilities of rethinking school participation and calls for schools to reconsider the necessity and costs/benefits of forcing students and teachers to be physically present in schools for the traditional 5 days a week. It was published …

Improbable Probabilities: The Unlikely Journey of Yong Zhao
G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao
Published by Solution Tree, 2023 
Williamson McDiarmid is the Dean and Alumni Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Distinguished Chair of Education at East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Yong Zhao is Foundation Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Kansas, Kansas, and Professor of Educational Leadership at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Australia.
 
Introduction
Too often, the lives of people who have climbed out of dire circumstances and subsequently left their mark on the …

This is the draft of my chapter on creativity in the book Creative Provocations: Speculations on the Future of Creativity, Technology & Learning co-edited by Danah Henriksen and Punya Mishra that is recently published online. Read the published article here.
 
How Not to Kill Creativity?
Yong Zhao
University of Kansas
University of Melbourne
People in education have a very bad habit. Whenever something is said to be important, we try to teach it. Social and emotional learning (SEL) has gained importance so there are programs to teach it. Computational thinking is now considered important, so schools should teach. …

Improbable Probabilities: The Unlikely Journey of Yong Zhao co-authored by G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao will be published by Solution Tree in November. Below is the preface.
 
Preface
Everyone is born with a probability for their future. Birth locations, family circumstances, and community resources shape the likelihood of a particular life in the future.1 For instance, a person born in a remote rural area is much less likely to work on Wall Street than a person born in a wealthy suburb of a big city. Similarly, a person born into a family with …

Learning for Uncertainty: Teaching Students How to Thrive in a Rapidly Evolving World 
By G. Williamson McDiarmid and Yong Zhao
Published by Taylor and Francis on Jan 31 2022
Introduction
How do we prepare our children for a world that is yet to be made? This is the question we want to know and we try to explore in this book.
As we write this, educators across the globe are struggling to educate students amidst a world-wide pandemic.  Many are being stretched to adopt and use unfamiliar instructional technologies and pedagogies.  For their part, most students, …

I co-authored this article with Daniel Yiorgios Rigney, which is just published. Below is the abstract and you can read the entire article here.
Outcomes in education are complex and numerous. Seemingly simple instructional choices can have far reaching implications for a student’s interest in a subject, their social network, and even their psychological well-being. These types of outcomes are rarely studied however. Interest in short-term instructional outcomes is far more prevalent, as made evident by the popularity of yearly high-stakes testing. Combatting this trend will require educators and policy makers …

My article Build back better: Avoid the learning loss trap published in Prospects on March 4 2021. Below is the abstract and you can read here.
Abstract

A dangerous trap exists for educators and education policy makers: the learning loss. This trap comes with a large amount of data and with sophisticated projection methods. It presents a stunningly grim picture for education and it invites educators and policy makers to make wrong decisions and invest in wrong things. The article identifies a number of undesirable outcomes that their concerns could lead to. It also …