Higher Performance Insights | THINK AGAIN: What We Call Cheating Is Now Called Tuesday

May 27, 2025
higher performance insights

When yesterday's violations become tomorrow's job requirements


Here's what happened while you were drafting policies about AI violations:


  • 90% of college students used ChatGPT within sixty days of its launch.¹
  • AI benchmark scores jumped 18.8, 48.9, and 67.3 percentage points in twelve months.²
  • AI costs dropped 280-fold in eighteen months.³

Meanwhile, it took us twenty years to get computers into classrooms.⁴


The Uncomfortable Math


Your students aren't cheating. They're practicing.


Every "violation" you detect is a rehearsal for their actual careers. The collaboration you penalize? That's how every successful team operates. Are you banning AI assistance? That's how every knowledge worker will work.


Are we teaching students to succeed in 1995 while they're preparing for 2030?


What Are We Really Afraid Of?


It's not that students are using AI to think less; they're using AI to think differently.

And we don't know how to measure that kind of thinking.


The Real Question


The question isn't how to stop AI use.


The question is: What happens to institutions that teach students to avoid the tools that will define their professional lives?


Answer: They become as relevant as typing schools that banned word processors.


Think Again About This


When Chappaqua Central School District adopted its AI integration policy, it didn't ask "How do we prevent this?"


They asked, "How do we channel this?"⁵


When UTSA created its Student AI Partner Internship, it didn't ask, "How do we control students?"

They asked, "How do we learn with them?"⁶


The Answers Are Already Here


Stop looking for external salvation. Your faculty experimenting with AI integration? They're generating the insights you need. Your students seamlessly blending creativity with AI assistance? They're showing you what authentic learning looks like.


The classroom isn't broken, but your assumptions about modern learning might be.


What Changes This Week


The AI your students use today will be exponentially more powerful by homecoming, 2025. By fall of 2025, we'll have AI agents that can complete multi-step projects independently, models that seamlessly handle text, audio, video, and code simultaneously, and tools so integrated into daily workflows that using them will be as natural as using a search engine.


Your policies, procedures, and professional development timelines are not designed for this.

But many of your students will be. How will you keep them?


Fear Is the Enemy of Leadership


Here's what we know about transformative change: it requires courage, not a comfortable cadence.


When institutions approach innovation defensively—building policies around what students can't do and designing systems to detect and punish—they miss the opportunity to lead.


But your educators? Most of them are natural innovators. You've always adapted to serve your students better. You've navigated technology shifts before. You know how to turn challenges into learning opportunities.


The difference now is simply velocity.


Fear and creativity can't operate in the same space. Leadership requires curiosity, and education—real education—requires both.


The learning leaders already experimenting with AI integration? They're not failing their profession—they're pioneering its future. They understand that you can't teach students to navigate an AI-powered world from a position of avoidance.


The Choice You're Actually Making


You can spend this summer figuring out how to detect AI use, or you can spend it figuring out how to direct AI use.


Your people won't have the capacity to do both.


One of these approaches prepares students for the world they'll actually live in.


The Bottom Line


This isn't about technology disrupting education; this is about education catching up to how learning actually works.


The most effective learning has always been collaborative, iterative, and application-focused. The most valuable skills have always been judgment, creativity, and synthesis.


AI didn't change what good education looks like; AI just made it impossible to pretend that information hoarding was ever good education.


Your students are already living in the future. Your job isn't to slow them down; your job is to help them navigate that future more thoughtfully.


The question isn't whether you'll adapt but whether you'll lead the adaptation.


What are you going to tell your students in September?


More importantly—what are you going to learn from them?


YOUR TURN


Leadership Team Discussion Question:


If we discovered that our current policies were accidentally training students to avoid the primary tools they'll use in their careers, how quickly would we change those policies?


Now: What's different about AI?


The follow-up: What would we need to see, hear, or experience this summer to feel confident leading with curiosity instead of caution when classes begin?


References:



  1. New York Magazine, "ChatGPT in Schools: Here's Where It's Banned—and How It Could Potentially Help Students," based on January 2023 survey data
  2. Stanford AI Index 2025: AI benchmark performance on MMMU, GPQA, and SWE-bench between 2023-2024
  3. Stanford AI Index 2025: Cost reduction for GPT-3.5 equivalent model performance, November 2022 to October 2024
  4. Purdue University College of Education: Technology adoption timeline showing 97% of classrooms had computers with internet access by 2009, up from 25% with computers in 1986
  5. Chappaqua Central School District Policy 5110 on Generative Artificial Intelligence Integration, adopted August 29, 2024
  6. UTSA Today: "New UTSA internship empowers students to lead in AI innovation," April 28, 2025




Help Spread the Word

If you found value in this post, we’d love your help spreading the word! Please consider sharing this on your favorite social media platform and tag Higher Performance Group and Dr. Joe Hill. Your support helps us reach and inspire more awesome people like you!

Like What You've Read?


Get practical, research-based ideas to Accelerate Higher Team Performance delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday.

More Blog Articles

By HPG Info October 14, 2025
(They’re Just Waiting For Permission To Tell You The Truth) Here's a pattern nobody talks about: You implement weekly communication drills for your leadership team. They get better at board presentations. Faculty meetings improve. Parent nights run smoothly. Then something unexpected happens—feedback starts flowing everywhere. Not just in the drills. In hallway conversations. During budget reviews. In crisis moments, when you need honest input yesterday. You didn't plan for this. You were just trying to stop your VP of Academic Affairs from saying "um" seventeen times per sentence during accreditation visits. Turns out you'd accidentally built what researchers call a "keystone habit"—one small practice that triggers a chain reaction of positive changes across your entire organization. (Kind of like how buying running shoes somehow leads to meal prepping and going to bed before midnight. Except this one actually sticks.) 73% of educational leaders report their cabinet stays silent during critical decisions. That's not a personality problem. That's a systems problem. And the system you think you have? It's probably optimizing for politeness instead of performance. THE DIAGNOSIS Let's talk about this like adults who've survived at least three strategic planning retreats where someone suggested "blue sky thinking" with a straight face. Your last cabinet meeting looked like this: You asked for input on the enrollment decline strategy. Got three nods. Two "I think that could work" responses. One person checked their phone under the table (we saw you, CFO). Meeting adjourned. Everyone left. Then what actually happened? Your VP of Student Affairs texted your VP of Enrollment Management: "Did you understand what we're actually supposed to do?" Your Dean of Faculty sent a carefully worded email, "just checking on a few details," that was really code for "this plan makes no sense." Your Chief of Staff scheduled a one-on-one with you to "clarify next steps," which translated to "I have seventeen concerns, but didn't want to say them in front of everyone." You've got three concurrent conversations happening about the same topic. None of them are with each other. All of them are happening because your cabinet meeting optimized for agreement instead of alignment. Here's what nobody tells you in leadership development programs: Your principals, vice presidents, and department chairs might be brilliant at their individual roles and absolutely terrible at having difficult conversations with each other. Not because they're bad people. Because you've never created an environment where they can practice being bad at it first. Think about it. When was the last time your leadership team had a conversation that felt genuinely risky? Where someone said something that hadn't been pre-vetted in sidebar conversations? Where disagreement happened live instead of in post-meeting debriefs? That silence isn't a sign of respect for your leadership. Sometimes it's fear. Sometimes it's exhaustion from being a tool serving the strategic plan instead of a valued human solving real problems. Sometimes it's just learned behavior from every other organization they've worked in, where speaking up got them labeled "not a team player." Research on high-performing teams shows psychological safety—where people believe they can speak honestly without consequences—is the most critical factor in team effectiveness. More important than intelligence. More important than experience. More important than your strategic priorities or mission statement or the fifteen core values you spent two days workshopping. But here's the plot twist: Psychological safety doesn't manifest because you're nice or because you included "respect" in your values statement. It has to be practiced. Systematically. Repeatedly. Until it becomes more uncomfortable NOT to speak up. (This is actually why I created The GROUP —a free community where insights like this become Leader CORE Lessons you can facilitate with your team Monday morning, complete with discussion prompts and practice scenarios. But I'm getting ahead of myself.) The real problem? You're running a graduate-level organization with middle-school communication patterns. High IQ, catastrophically low Team Intelligence. Everyone's smart. Nobody's connecting. THE THREE CONVERSATIONS YOUR CABINET ISN'T HAVING Call this the Communication Layer Framework. Or don't. It'll still explain why your last "quick sync" turned into a 90-minute therapy session that resolved nothing. Communication research identifies three types of conversations happening simultaneously—often in the same meeting, frequently without anyone realizing they're in different conversations entirely: 1. Practical Conversations (The "What We're Supposed to Be Doing" Layer) This is where you live. Problem-solving. Action plans. Metrics. Timelines. "What are we going to do about the enrollment decline?" You think everyone's in this conversation with you. They're not. Half your cabinet is two layers away, and you're talking past each other like ships in the night. Very polite, very professional ships that will definitely send each other courtesy waves while completely missing the fact that one of you is about to hit an iceberg. 2. Emotional Conversations (The "How We're Actually Feeling" Layer) This is where your leadership team actually is when things get hard. Sharing feelings. Seeking empathy. Processing change. "I'm terrified we're going to have to lay people off, and I don't know how to lead through that." If you walk into a performance review in practical mode and your administrator walks in emotional mode, you're about to have two completely different conversations in the same room. You'll think you gave clear feedback. They'll think you don't understand their situation. Both of you will leave frustrated and confused about why the other person "isn't getting it." 3. Social Conversations (The "Who We Are to Each Other" Layer) This is about identity, relationships, and hierarchy. How we relate. Who has power. Whose voice matters. "Do I belong in this cabinet?" "Does the superintendent actually value what I bring?" "Am I about to get thrown under the bus for something that wasn't my fault?" When you're trying to discuss practical strategy and someone's operating in the social layer, they're not hearing your plan. They're scanning for threats to their position, value, or belonging. Every word you say gets filtered through "What does this mean for my standing here?" Here's what makes this devastating: Most leadership breakdowns happen because we don't match the conversation the other person needs to have. You walk into a meeting thinking, "I need to give practical feedback on instructional leadership." They walk in thinking, "I'm about to lose my job and nobody values what I've sacrificed for this school." Until you address the emotional and social layers first, your practical feedback lands like instructions shouted at someone who's drowning. The same dynamic plays out when your principals meet with teachers, when department chairs evaluate faculty, and when anyone on your team attempts a difficult conversation. THE CASE STUDY Let me tell you about a superintendent I'll call Marcus (not his real name, but Marcus, your cabinet definitely knows this is about them). Marcus had eight direct reports. Combined experience of 186 years. Multiple PhDs. National recognition. They could individually crush any challenge you put in front of them. As a team? They communicated like they were playing telephone through a series of closed doors during a fire drill. Cabinet meetings followed a predictable pattern: Marcus would present an issue. Ask for input. Get thoughtful-sounding responses that were really just people restating the problem using different words. Someone would volunteer to "take this back to their team." Meeting would end with a vague sense of progress. Then nothing would change. The real conversations happened after. In parking lots. In text threads. In carefully scheduled one-on-ones where people would share what they actually thought but "didn't want to say in front of everyone." Marcus kept trying to solve this with better agendas. Clearer objectives. More efficient meeting structures. (Classic practical-layer solution to an emotional and social-layer problem.) Then Marcus did something that felt almost uncomfortably simple: He started weekly communication practice sessions with his team. Not role-playing. Not trust falls. Actual practice giving and receiving feedback on low-stakes topics. Week one: Practice giving positive feedback about something specific. Week two: Practice receiving feedback without getting defensive. Week three: Practice disagreeing without it becoming personal. It felt forced at first. (One VP literally said, "This feels like kindergarten but for grown-ups.") But something shifted around week four: People started using the same language in actual cabinet meetings. "I'm in emotional mode right now—can we address that before jumping to solutions?" "I think we're having different conversations—let me check if I'm understanding correctly." Six months later, same people, different system. Cabinet meetings got shorter because people said what they meant the first time. Difficult conversations happened earlier instead of festering. Most importantly: The parking lot conversations moved into the conference room where they could actually be productive. Marcus told me: "We didn't become a better collection of individuals. We became an actual team. Turns out that matters more than I thought." The difference? They practiced being bad at communication in low-stakes environments so they could be good at it when it mattered. Now, if you're thinking "this makes sense, but how do I actually implement communication drills without my cabinet staging a revolt?"—I get it. That's the gap between insight and implementation. This is what The GROUP is for. Each week, I turn the newsletter topic into a Leader CORE Lesson and Guide: facilitation notes, discussion prompts, practice scenarios, diagnostic tools—everything you need to lead your team through this content without spending Sunday night googling "how to teach feedback to people who've been leaders longer than I've been alive." It's free, built for busy leaders, and designed for Monday morning meetings when you need something that actually works instead of theory that sounds impressive. Grab this week's communication practice guide: https://www.higherperformancegroup.com/the-group But whether you join The GROUP or not, here's what you can implement immediately... THE APPLICATION Here's what to do this week (assuming you're not currently managing a crisis, in which case bookmark this and revisit when things calm down to a dull roar): Step 1: Practice "Looping for Understanding" in Your Next One-on-One Ask a question. Repeat back what you heard them say. Ask if you got it right. That's it. Three steps. Takes 10-15 seconds. Proves you're listening. If they say "yes, exactly"—you understood correctly and can move forward. If they say "not quite, what I meant was..."—you just prevented a massive miscommunication that would have caused problems three weeks from now. If they look surprised that you actually listened—you have a bigger problem than this one conversation can solve, but you've just started solving it. This isn't just good practice for you. It's modeling the behavior you want them using with their teachers, staff, and faculty. Every time you loop in for understanding with your VP of Finance, you're teaching them to do the same with their department heads. Step 2: Start Developmental Conversations with Self-Assessment Before your next performance conversation, ask: "Tell me two things you think you do really well in your role and two things you think you could improve." Ninety percent of the time, what they identify as growth areas will match what you've observed. (Turns out people usually know their own weaknesses. They just don't know if it's safe to admit them.) Now they've given you permission to address those issues together. No defensiveness. No surprise. No "nobody ever told me this was a problem." Just collaborative problem-solving between two adults who both want the same outcome. Step 3: Ask Permission to Shift Conversation Types If a principal or dean comes to you in emotional mode about a difficult parent situation, and you need to move to practical problem-solving, try this: "I hear what you're saying. I've felt that way too. Can I share some approaches that helped me work through similar situations?" You're acknowledging their emotional reality before asking to move to practical solutions. You're not dismissing their feelings. You're not jumping immediately to fix-it mode. You're creating a bridge between the conversation they need to have and the conversation you need to have. If they say yes, you can move forward productively. If they say "I'm not ready for solutions yet"—they need more time in emotional mode, and pushing practical advice will backfire spectacularly. OBJECTION HANDLING "My team won't go for structured communication practice" Your team is currently having three different conversations about every issue, none of which are with each other, resulting in decisions that die in parking lots and initiatives that fragment the moment everyone leaves the room. They're already "going for" something—it's just catastrophically ineffective. The bar is on the floor. You're not asking them to do something dramatically harder. You're asking them to stop doing something that demonstrably doesn't work. "We don't have time for communication drills" You just spent 90 minutes in a cabinet meeting that could have been 30 minutes if people had said what they actually thought the first time instead of having seven follow-up conversations afterward. That's one meeting. Now multiply by four meetings per month. You're spending roughly 240 extra minutes per month—four hours—on communication inefficiency. That's 48 hours per year. You're hemorrhaging two full work weeks annually while claiming you don't have time to practice being clearer. THE MATURITY SHIFT Immature leaders think: "My cabinet needs to communicate better." Mature leaders think: "We need to practice communicating better together." Immature leaders assume communication skills are innate—either you have them or you don't—and spend board retreats wondering why their brilliant team can't seem to align. Mature leaders build systems where communication skills are practiced regularly until they become second nature. Immature leaders address communication problems after they explode. Mature leaders practice communication before crisis hits. The difference is the difference between hoping your team can have difficult conversations and knowing they can because they've practiced. One makes impossible feel permanent. One makes impossible feel temporary. Cabinet silence isn't a personality problem. It's a practice problem. And unlike enrollment declines or budget cuts, this one is completely within your control. Your turn: Think about your last cabinet meeting. How many conversations do you think were happening simultaneously that weren't actually being spoken out loud? What would change if you named those conversations explicitly? Drop a comment. Tag a cabinet member who needs to see this. Or screenshot this and text it to your Chief of Staff with the message "Let's talk about our next meeting." P.S. If you're thinking "I don't have bandwidth to create communication practice resources for my team"—I already did it for you.  The GROUP is a free community where every newsletter becomes a ready-to-deploy Leader CORE Lesson and Guide. Practice scenarios. Discussion prompts. Diagnostic questions. Everything you need to lead your team through structured communication development without the Sunday night scramble.
By HPG Info October 8, 2025
Your Institution Has 18 Months, and Here's What 23 Leaders Did on October 1st to Model the Way Forward "We've got about 18 months to figure this thing out." That's the window educational leaders have to transform proactively—or be forced to transform reactively in survival mode. On October 1st, 2025, twenty-three district superintendents and college presidents stopped planning alone and started building together. Not the leaders waiting for perfect strategic plans. Not the ones defending comfortable systems. The BUILDERS—leaders whose institutions have grown enrollment 15-40% despite demographic headwinds, who've launched partnerships generating $50M+ in regional economic impact, who've redesigned curricula around employer needs that traditional institutions haven't touched. What emerged in those 60 minutes wasn't comfortable. It was clarifying. Here's what 1.7 million lost higher education students and 1.2 million departed K-12 students since 2019 actually tell us: Students didn't drop out. They opted out. Traditional education lost not because our teaching failed, but because our thinking stayed small while the world moved fast. The market already voted. And it didn't vote for more performance optics. The Four Types of Leaders DR. JOE HILL opened with a framework that landed hard:  Four types of leaders populate education today. Coasters worship stability and avoid controversy. Climbers optimize metrics but often overlook whether those metrics matter to students. Dreamers create gorgeous strategic plans that rarely launch. And Builders —rare, hungry, idealistic—who possess what Hill calls "moral ambition."
Show More