Superintendent Michael Nagler is reimaging time, space and pace in the classrooms at Mineola Public Schools in New York. Nagler, a featured speaker on FETC 2025’s District Leader Track, is also letting students “build their own grades.”
What does all this mean? Nagler’s careful to point out it’s an evolution, not a “revolution.”
The transformation that is necessitated by technology—from the good old Internet to AI to ChatGPT—is making traditional teaching obsolete. Nagler’s goal, which he will detail at his FETC 2025 sessions, is to let students choose the content they want to learn and now they learn it—all within the guardrails of state standards.
“Kids pick and choose and earn points based on the difficulty of the task, and they literally build their grade,” he explains. “If you have that, then your classroom looks a lot different in how you use time, and it becomes more like an elementary classroom where you have center rotations and you have different activities that kids can do.”
One of those new centers would be regular “conferencing” between teachers and individual students. Using artificial intelligence effectively in K12 will require more—not less—interaction between instructors and learners.
“We’re going to have to talk to you to see what you actually understand,” he says of students. “When I think about what kids need to know when they graduate, it’s a good knowledge of themselves and what makes them tick and how their brain operates.”
Michael Nagler’s FETC 2025 sessions include
Here are some of the key topics Nagler will cover at FETC 2025:
- Reimaging Time, Space and Pace: Creating a Student-Centered Classroom
- You’re Not Born Smart: You Grow Your Neurons Through Hard Work and Effort
- Threading and Embedding Computer Science and Computational Thinking in the PreK-12 Classroom
- Developing and Implementing a Personalized Competency-Based Education for All
