Mindfulness-Based SEL is the Foundational Ethical Framework for HI and AI to Flourish Well
Almost every application you open now has some kind of AI powered tool or enhancement feature – from social media apps, document programs like Adobe and Google, to banking. Whether I’m trying to write my About Me section in my profile in LinkedIn, learn where my monthly finances with Wells Fargo aren’t in alignment with my spending habits, or trying to learn about key words and patterns in a PDF document that could save me time and energy in editing, AI is the new force that is giving me some of my precious time back, helping me sound much smarter, and encouraging me to make better decisions. These are good things, and there’s more good things to come. But, many good things come at a price and that price is the road bumps to growth and development along the way.
I facilitated a professional development session in the spring of 2024 on AI, Time Management, and SEL. I wanted to introduce educators who haven’t experienced the power of an LLM (large language model) like Chat GPT, to learn about the features, time at school to play with a new piece of technology, and plant seeds of familiarity and understanding to support adopting a new perspective on how AI can enhance their professional lives. Those in education in almost every role from teacher, leader, staff member are burned out. There’s a lot on everyone’s plate which makes time management an essential skill, and AI can enhance this by augmenting our output capacities in less time. While time management is vital, another great skill to have is knowing how to harness the right resources, like AI powered chatbots such as Chat GPT, at the right time, and with right thinking. You might be asking, “Yes, but how do we do that?”
I’m not going to belabor all the cool new AI powered offerings we have right now. There’s a lot out there and a lot of incredible experts writing and talking about them, whether you’re in education, working in business, manufacturing, or service. AI is changing our lives in ways we likely don’t even realize, and I think it’s for the better for the evolution of our species and planet. But, I’m not talking about evolution either. I’m going to share with you the human intelligence (HI) skill that we must have, that our young people must have, to thrive in an AI powered world and the 3 core values that must guide us in cultivating this foundational skill. However, for any skill development to successfully flourish we need an approach to guide the cultivation, development, and growth of that skill. I will also be sharing an approach you can use to develop this core skill that’s vital to the positive collaborative efforts of AI and HI.
Remember, as educators and anyone working in any role within education, our goal is to prepare students with future-ready skills and, with AI becoming deeply entrenched in our everyday lives, human intelligence skills are vital to the successful collaboration of AI and HI. There are some human skills that are irreplaceable and the one of the most important HI skills needed in today’s world is discernment. Let’s back up before we dive into this uniquely human skill because we have to have a system to help us cultivate the skill, and that system, or framework, is mindfulness-based social and emotional learning (SEL).
Mindfulness-based SEL’s contribution to the collaborative efforts of AI and HI is unique in that it guides us to train and develop the habits of mind that are critical to upholding and perpetuating the human ability of discernment for furthering the core values of truth, freedom, and justice. These habits of mind and values serve as cornerstones for our society, for and to the benefit of our global community, and in the interest and goal of propelling humankind forward in positive, progressive, and collaborative ways in an age of new exploration, living, and being. Additionally, we must harness it as an ethical framework that guides the collaborative efforts of AI and HI because the skills fostered by MBSEL are not only irreplaceable, they are the skills needed to in fact collaborate with AI in constructive and meaningful ways.
So, I will start with what the approach is, how the approach must be grounded in our society’s core values of truth, justice, and freedom, and why the foundational skill of discernment is key in the collaborative efforts of AI and HI. Then, I will share some practical things we can do at an institutional level to ensure we are integrating this in sustainable ways to prepare our students and staff with future-ready skills.
We often hear that AI complements HI and vice versa. But, how do AI and HI actually collaborate? How do we prepare our students to navigate this new world and do it for the positive benefit of society? Who must we be or become when interacting, developing, or advancing AI? The answers to these questions start with mindfulness-based social and emotional learning.
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, Emotional Learning established a wheel of social emotional learning (SEL) competencies known as the CASEL SEL framework. These SEL competencies consist of five (5) domains: self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness. Also situated within this wheel are the environments where students and adults practice, grow, and actuate on the SEL competencies: classrooms, schools, families, and communities.
The CASEL SEL Framework model is a great model, but it doesn’t encompass the very foundation in which the five (5) SEL domains can develop well. One must develop the habits of mind for these domains to flourish. What I mean by the habits of mind are the practices that aid one in refining their relationship to their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors that drive our actions – mainly that means to cultivate our attention to these inner states so we can develop the five CASEL domains well. In order to cultivate our attention we must lean on mindfulness-based practices that involve a different kind of learning. In mindfulness-based practices we aren’t taking in information, synthesizing it, and evaluating it, as is commonly done when teaching higher order thinking skills, but rather, we sit with experience and simply notice it without judgment. We move from an informational domain per se, to an experiential domain based on observing our inner states of being, noticing thoughts, emotions, and sensations. So, in this sense, the refined framework I’m referring to must be grounded in mindfulness-based social emotional learning (MBSEL). The Coalition of Schools Educating Mindfully (COSEM) is launching their MBSEL Integration Framework which blends these concepts together and propels this work further.
I’m proposing that MBSEL is the foundational ethical approach for AI and HI to flourish well, and that it also must be grounded in our society’s core values of truth, justice, and freedom. To clarify what I mean by ethics, I mean a set of moral principles or moral conduct that guides us to live in accordance with and actuate these core values. Values are mental, attitudinal, and behavioral guideposts that help us reach a goal, and in this case, the goal is for AI and HI to positively collaborate for the common good and flourish well together.
AI is a powerful tool, capable of incredible processing, information sharing, intuitive connecting, and creative imaging. You can talk to a chatbot and feel as if it’s another human, even your trustworthy friend. We even have AI powered avatars that look and sound like real humans on the screen! That’s an incredible power in relating, communicating, and sharing information across domains and ages. Given that great power, we also have great responsibility. As Theadore Roosevelt said, “Power always brings with it responsibility.”
Given the powerful nature of AI, not only must we harness it as a collaborative partner to complement and augment human intelligence, but it also puts us in an important crossroads where we have to rethink how we prepare students for an AI powered world where unbridled information consumption is not the name of the game anymore. While Bloom’s taxonomies are still a vital teaching model to help students reach higher-order thinking skills of analyzing, evaluating, and creating, particularly as we collaborate more and more with AI, we must also be focusing on the human intelligence skills that will help us engage in positive AI and HI collaborative efforts well, and do it within an ethical framework of MBSEL grounded in truth, justice, and freedom. As I mentioned earlier, these values guide us to work towards the common good.
To prepare students successfully for an AI powered world, I noted we must teach them the HI skills that are required to excel in this new world, particularly MBSEL. One of the foundational MBSEL skills that must be cultivated with practice is discernment. Right now I want to take a moment to differentiate between 2 different types of discernment, and highlight the one students and adults need to thrive in an AI powered world.
I will briefly differentiate between two types of discernment – mind-centered discernment and mind + heart-centered discernment. When we think of Bloom’s taxonomies as I referred to earlier, we might think about the higher order thinking skills of analyzing, evaluating, and creating as a touchstone point in a student’s intellectual development. When we can read, write, evaluate, analyze, and create we are practicing good higher order thinking skills. This is a mind-centered discernment approach. We need it, but we also need another kind of discernment, what I’m calling mind + heart-centered discernment. This is where MBSEL becomes foundational to the collaborative efforts of AI and HI, particularly because of the immense power involved, and room for abuse of it if foundational HI skills aren’t developed well.
Let me elaborate for a moment what I mean by discernment. According to common dictionary definitions, discernment means “keen perception or judgment”, “acuteness of judgment and understanding”, “to distinguish or discriminate”, “to recognize or perceive clearly ([including] differences). The origin of the term from Latin discernere “to divide, from dis- (apart) + cernere to separate”. I’m going to go with this version, “to recognize or perceive clearly”, for the purposes of this discussion here.
A mind + heart-centered discernment develops from an experiential and embodied kind of learning, not from thinking or cognition in the traditional sense we might think of that term when talking about learning and developing the higher order thinking skills of analyzing, evaluating, and creating. This kind of discernment requires us to shift from thinking and analyzing to observing and experiencing without judgment for what we are noticing through our sensations coming into direct contact with experience.
So, what does this look like in a school or organizational setting? While students are learning higher order thinking skills (synthesizing, analyzing, evaluating, creating) in core classes like english language arts, science, math, etc., they also need to cultivate the mind + heart-centered discernment skill, a foundational human intelligence skill, that aids them in refining their own traditional higher order thinking skills of cognition, but also creates the necessary mental guardrails to ethically engage with the the world, including AI. To put it simply, through mindfulness-based SEL practices, like mindful breathing, movement, and reflection practices, it helps us see more clearly. With a clear mind, we can take clear action.
On an everyday level in the classroom this looks like incorporating mindful breathing,movement, and reflection practices into the classroom and school routines and procedures, and into the core lessons through a Do Now (per Teach Like a Champion Strategies), integrated brain breaks, or some other transition time that works for the educator. For school-wide routines and procedures from an adult perspective, this looks like incorporating these practices into staff meetings, school communications, professional development, and offering staff moments of curated practice and/or resources through special events or offers. MBSEL requires daily committed practice in small increments of time.
That’s how well-formed habits are created. Small, daily steps in skill building, and in this case, we are building an inner framework, mind + heart-centered discernment, that will become the foundational ethical framework for HI and HI to flourish well.
