Cognition Education is the proud facilitator of the National Professional Qualification for Executive Leadership (NPQEL) Programme.
Recently, Cognition successfully ran our first residential for participants on our National Professional Qualification for Executive Leadership (NPQEL) programme. This programme will develop talented leaders from all backgrounds to deliver educational excellence in a self-improving system, and high-quality outcomes for pupils and students.
We were delighted to welcome Kriti Sharma to come along and speak to our participants about her own leadership journey, and to share with us how she arrived at the place she is today, which includes Forbes magazine listing Kriti in 30 people under the age of 30 changing technology, and the breaking news tech media Recode saying she is one of the top 100 people in the world who made a real impact on society last year, alongside Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Discussion ranged from the impact that technology is having on all of us right now, and in particular the need to ensure that talented young people from all disciplines are involved in the design of Artificial Intelligence (AI). We spoke about the need to debunk the myth that only maths and IT ‘geeks’ can get involved in developing AI. In fact, we know that AI is already capable of writing its own coding, therefore, the need for this skill, although still important, is far less important than ensuring that we have innovative and creative people involved in designing AI.
Kriti spoke about her passion for education, and the work she does with young people, who start their day with her thinking they cannot create any type of AI at all, and finish the day believing, and understanding, that it is possible, and they can! She spoke passionately about young people consistently designing and developing AI that will solve problems and help others, and the power of education, and indeed educators, who have the ability and the responsibility, to harness this pool of talent that exists within our educational institutions.
Ensuring that we have a diverse pool of people involved in the design of AI will help to ensure we create unbiased AI for the future good of all, and with that in mind, we set our school leaders a task to design an AI that could be used in education to help both students and teachers. The task set included developing an AI with a name, a personality (including a background story), a voice, and, of course, the problems it would help solve, three for students and three for teaching staff. The four working groups came up with four different models, but all were based around solving similar issues, and all of them really impressed Kriti and Julia, Cognition Education’s Commercial Director, EMEA, who led the session with Kriti. Kriti and Julia have therefore tasked these four groups to translate their original picture designs into words and to share these with us. They will also nominate individuals from each group who will work collaboratively with us to take these initial designs to the next stage of development.
This was a fantastic opportunity to bring together leaders in education with someone who is at the very forefront of developments in AI, and the outputs of this collaboration have tremendous potential.
Having her share her experiences and work with our participants was quite exceptional, as one participant put it, “I would love to take action on AI and help in whatever way possible. Kriti was so inspirational – I was in awe!”
We are delighted that we have had such a fantastic response to our first NPQEL programme, and we are excited about the prospect of not only supporting the development of these school leaders, but the potential to develop innovative, ground breaking technology that will benefit teachers and students.
You can find out more about our NPQEL programme, including how to apply, here.
You can watch Kriti Sharma’s TEDx talk by clicking here.