Douglas Kiang

Hands on the Wheel

Hands on the Wheel is the practical companion to The Wonder Table: a grounded, classroom-focused keynote about how to decide when AI should help, when it should stay out of the way, and how to keep students doing the thinking that matters. Using a simple framework—clarify the goal, identify what must remain human, decide what can be delegated to AI, and determine what evidence will show that learning actually happened—the talk gives teachers and school leaders concrete ways to redesign assignments, customize AI tools, preserve productive struggle, and assess process rather than polished output alone. The emphasis is not on banning AI or embracing it indiscriminately, but on using professional judgment to decide which parts of the work can be automated and which parts are the learning.

Best for: teachers and school leaders who want a practical framework for thoughtful classroom AI use and assignment design.

You've Been Training for This for Fifty Years

The Original Prompt Engineers

Computer scientists spent the last decade making the shift teachers made fifty years ago: from sage on the stage to guide on the side, from writing the rules to designing the conditions where learning happens. Alison Gopnik says the goal is to raise new, intelligent, autonomous creatures, which has always been a teacher's job and never a programmer's. In the age of AI, care and empathy stop being the soft skills and become the essential ones. Faculty leave seeing themselves as the original prompt engineers, not beginners.

Best for: an opening faculty day, or any audience that needs to feel capable rather than behind.

Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus

Managing AI in a Human-Centered World

AI is the pigeon, and it will always ask to drive. Can I rewrite this? Can I take the wheel? The skill worth teaching is the film director's: never touch the camera, but hold the vision and decide what gets reshot. As agents take over the execution, a student's real work becomes defining where the bus is going and judging whether the work that came back is any good. Come and experience a teacher's-eye view of what's working, what isn't, and what comes next.

Best for: a forward-looking audience thinking about agents and student judgment.

My Mother Became a Songwriter in Her Eighties

The Keyboard Was Never the Point

My mom wrote lyrics in her eighties, then used AI to turn them into a Hawaiian slack key song, complete with a vocalist singing in accurate Hawaiian. She never learned music or the language. The barrier to making the thing she heard in her head dropped to zero. This talk holds the honest tension of that moment, whether it counts and whether it was earned, and arrives at the question that matters more than the answer: when the role shifts from player to director, what are we actually asking students to master?

Best for: a creativity, arts, or humanities audience. The emotional centerpiece talk.

We Didn't Ask for This

AI wasn't an educational initiative. It was thrust on schools with no pilot, no planning time, no professional development, and no say in the matter, and it makes the gold rush look like a piñata grab. Teachers are losing assignments and methods they built careers around, and the five stages of grief apply for real. This talk gives faculty permission to feel the loss before asking them to move, the same way the best teachers met the pandemic by starting from what they already knew. You'll see how students can use AI as a creative collaborator without surrendering the thinking that makes their work their own, and you'll leave with practical strategies for designing assignments where AI raises the ceiling instead of lowering the floor.

Best for: a resistant, exhausted, or skeptical faculty.