An Innovative Teacher Designs a ‘Driver's License' for AI
With guest Mike Taubman
Do we – or don’t we? Teachers are both under pressure to press 'pause' on AI in the classroom and to prepare students for the future with AI. On this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy and Betsy connect with Mike Taubman, a veteran teacher at Uncommon School in New Jersey to explore how he's bringing decades of hard-earned pedagogical insights to bear in guiding his students into AI usage. As a long-time English teacher and career advisor, nothing is more precious to Taubman than face time with students. But he also wants them to be able to go under the hood and understand the assumptions and mechanics of AI. His solution: To start building an “AI Driver’s License” for high school students. Taubman shares what's working--and what's under construction--along with why Newark's Mayor Ras J. Baraka recently stopped by Taubman's class. Spoiler alert: Taubman wasn't the one who invited him.
Mike Taubman
Mike Taubman is a veteran teacher and leader who works at the intersection of AI literacy, career-connected learning, purpose development, and moral inquiry, all to help students flourish in an evolving world.
At Uncommon Schools's North Star Academy Washington Park High School campus in New Jersey, Mike teaches the "Summit" program he founded in 2020, which provides purpose development and career-connected learning experiences for about 100 juniors and seniors every year. In his role as AI Innovation Lead, Mike also helps steer instructional AI strategy for 20,000 students and 2,000 teachers across 52 schools. In 2027, he's planning to expand the Summit program into an Innovation Studio to develop and disseminate new pedagogies, while continuing to co-teach an AI Literacy class built on his AI Driver's License framework and to help shape Uncommon's network-wide AI strategy.
Since 2005, Mike has served as a teacher, instructional leader, and program director at Uncommon. During that time he spent a decade as a Relay Graduate School of Education adjunct working with new English teachers. As a three-year Stanford Digital Education fellow, he helped bring hybrid Stanford courses to Title I high schools. He's currently an AI fellow with CRPE, AI for Equity, and Playlab.
Mike's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Chalkbeat, and books including Teach Like a Champion, Leverage Leadership, and Love and Literacy.
Further Exploration
Mike Taubman got his start as an English teacher–so, no surprise, you can follow his work by reading both what he writes and what he likes to read.
Taubman writes frequent updates about his classes and other experiences on his Substack, AI Waypoints. (Browse here for details about the “AI Driver’s License” curriculum Mike and fellow teacher, Scott Kern are developing as well as Mike’s exchange with protesters at the 2026 ASU-GSV meeting.) The NYTimes wrote about the AI Driver’s License here.
Check out this fabulous story about how two of Mike’s students convinced the Mayor of Newark, NJ, Ras J. Baraka, to visit their school and managed the whole visit. Here’s Mike’s description of the visit, too.
Books recommended by Taubman include:
The Lifecycle of Software Objects by Ted Chiang, a Hugo Award winning science fiction novella from 2010 that describes the “raising” of digital entities. It’s included in a compendium of Chiang’s work, Exhalation (2019).
Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 2021, is a fav of both the NYT’s Ezra Klein and Barack Obama.
In Search of Deeper Learning: The Quest to Remake the American High School, by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine from 2019, is an overview of the state of US high schools.
And of course, the 2013 movie, “Her,” by Spike Jonze.
We also talked about this (meta) study from Stanford University on 800 academic papers on the relevance of AI for K-12 education.
Finally, you can also watch this segment on NBC’s Future Education about Taubman’s colleague, teacher Scott Kern, who built chatbots to support his students.
