Open Office Hours, Thursday
Thursday, August 6, 11am to noon Central, I'm holding free open office hours. Bring one AI question from your school, district, or classroom and we'll work it live. You leave with one concrete next step. No pitch, no slides, no registration. Join from anywhere: https://meet.google.com/qrf-hhir-ita. Forward this to a colleague who's been asking about AI. Everyone is welcome.
I build in the open here, so this issue goes behind the practice. The content, the website, the podcast: none of it produced my first real client conversations. People who already knew me did. This issue is about why that is the normal path, not the embarrassing one.
Behind the Practice: Warm-Network Activation
When I planned Evalve, I imagined clients finding me through content. The math said otherwise. This is warm-network activation: the deliberate, slightly uncomfortable practice of telling people who already know you what you do now. Warm outreach outperforms everything else at the start. There is a real difference between reaching out and asking for favors. And the weekly rhythm that makes it stick is simple: five contacts, personal messages, follow-ups on a schedule. If you are building anything solo, a practice, a program, an initiative inside a district, the mechanics transfer.
AI and the future of education: disruptions, dilemmas and directions by UNESCO. A wide-angle piece on where AI is pushing education systems. I do not agree with all of it, but it asks the right uncomfortable questions about what schools are for when drafting is free. Useful for leadership team discussions that need to get past tools and into purpose.
Teachers Are Using AI to Help Write IEPs. Advocates Have Concerns by Education Week. The concerns in this piece are legitimate and worth sitting with, especially around individualization. My read: the answer is not banning AI from IEP work, it is drawing the line in the right place. AI drafts, professionals decide. If your teams touch IEPs, read this and then write down where your line is.
Designing the 2026 Classroom: Emerging Learning Trends in an AI-Powered Education System by Faculty Focus. Higher ed focused, but the design thinking transfers down. The piece treats AI as a constraint to design around rather than a product to adopt, which is the healthiest framing I have seen in a while. Good staff meeting fodder for instructional leaders.
Set up a two-minute feedback loop for any pilot.
Most pilots collect feedback the wrong way: a long survey at the end, when it is too late to fix anything. Here is the loop I recommend instead. It takes two minutes a week from each participant and you can build it today.
Step one, make a three-question form. Question one: what did you use it for this week? Question two: where did it break or disappoint you? Question three: on a scale of one to five, would you be annoyed if we took it away? That third question is the only satisfaction metric that predicts anything.
Step two, schedule the ask. A recurring Friday message with the form link, sent automatically. Do not rely on people remembering. The loop lives or dies on the schedule, not the form.
Step three, close the loop out loud. Once a week, reply to the group with one sentence: here is what you told me, here is what changes. The first time people see their complaint turn into a fix, response rates go up. Feedback systems fail when they feel like a suggestion box bolted to a wall.
Step four, keep the record. Drop every week's responses into one running document. At day 90, when someone asks whether the pilot worked, you will have a dated record of what broke, what got fixed, and whether people would miss it. That is evidence, and evidence is what wins the scale conversation.
Did this issue land?
One more thing. If trust is what really starts a practice, the least I can do is show my receipts. I put up a new page, evalveconsulting.com/running/, that lists exactly what I'm running this quarter, what I'm building, and what I've killed, versions and all. I'll keep it current every month.
That's it for this one. If something here landed, share it with someone who'd get something out of it. If it didn't, that's part of the deal too. You can find more of what I'm working on at evalveconsulting.com, or book a call if you want to talk through what you're dealing with.
Talk soon,
Chris