Pope Leo XIV recently said something that stuck with us: “Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.”
Regardless of your religious affiliation, data matters in education. We should know whether students are learning. We should measure outcomes, identify gaps and hold ourselves to high standards.
But much of what makes teaching and learning work has always been difficult to capture.
A teacher reads a room and changes direction. A student struggles with an idea, persists, and finally finds a way through it. A question changes the direction of a discussion. Someone connects an idea to something nobody else had considered. A teacher recognizes what a particular student needs in a particular moment.
Judgment. Context. Relationships. Adaptation. Persistence. Creativity. Thinking for yourself.
These aren’t alternatives to academic rigor. They’re part of how you achieve it.
Yet most disappear the moment they happen.
That matters because the evidence we collect shapes what happens next. It influences how we assess students, develop teachers, manage schools, conduct research and make policy. When the human parts aren’t represented in that evidence, they have less influence over the decisions built from it.
AI makes this more important. As machines become better at producing answers, content and analysis, we need to become better at developing and recognizing what people contribute.
Fortunately, these things don’t have to remain invisible.
We can capture more of teaching and learning as it actually happens. We can preserve examples of students explaining, creating, collaborating and applying what they know. We can capture educators making decisions and adapting. And we can capture reflection—students and educators revisiting experiences, explaining their thinking and making meaning from them.
Together, these create a richer evidence base of what teaching and learning actually look like.
This isn’t an argument for less data. It’s an argument for better evidence.
If we believe the spark of humanity matters, it should be represented in what we value, measure and learn from.
And as AI reshapes our world, education should not only preserve that spark, but ignite it.