EdTech Voices: Sylke Wischnevsky on Schools, AI, and What Education is For
Short Bio
Sylke Wischnevsky is a senior education leader and former headmistress of the Otto-von-Taube-Gymnasium in Gauting. From 2003 to 2024, she established key initiatives in gifted education, including the TUMKollegs Otto-von-Taube and Werner Heisenberg. She has been a member of the TUM University Council since 2013 and now advises the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology.
Introduction Question
You have experienced education from many perspectives: as a teacher, headmistress, ministry official, and now as an advisory member at the TUM Center for Educational Technologies. When you look back on this path, how have these different roles shaped your understanding of what schools need in order to support students and teachers well?
Sylke Wischnevsky: Schools have the fundamental mandate to empower the young people entrusted to them to develop their talents, to lead a self-determined life, and to help shape our society actively and responsibly.
It is the task of everyone working in education, regardless of their position, to be aware of this. Depending on their area of responsibility, they must ensure excellent facilities, outstanding staff, and clear administration. They must never lose sight of the actual goal, nor of their passion for educating the coming generations. They must be open to new things, willing to take on leadership and to take risks, and able to take joy in the achievements of others.
What a leader needs, in my view, is: empathy for the people entrusted to them, teachers as well as students; passion for the cause; the active acceptance of one’s own role-model function; and, along with that, leadership with imagination and courage.
Academic and Advisory Experience
You have been a bridge-builder between higher school education and universities, especially through your work with the TUMKolleg. From your perspective, what made this model successful, and what lessons could the EdTech Center learn from it?
Sylke Wischnevsky: The actual goal of a Gymnasium education is the university. Not all students go there, even if they receive the general higher education entrance qualification, but they could. That is why the university is the natural partner of the Gymnasium. The TUMKolleg makes it possible to begin walking that path while still at school, and to explore one’s personal talents and options at an early stage.
The EdTech Center should be attractive to precisely these students and should make offers that inspire these particularly interested young people to engage with the faculty.
This requires close integration with the schools. An essential aspect of the TUMKolleg’s success is the fact that, thanks to the intensive cooperation, including on the administrative side, the collegiates can remain an active part of their school while also attending the university without missing anything at school.
From your experience in school leadership and public administration, where do educational innovations most often fail: in political decision-making, school organization, teacher training, technical infrastructure, or classroom culture?
Sylke Wischnevsky: As everywhere, among the people who work in education-related institutions the “forces of inertia” are strongly pronounced. Giving up what has been achieved, something one may have worked hard for, is difficult. Often it also has to do with a lack of willingness to leave one’s own “comfort zone.” It takes the never-flagging commitment of those in charge to push through changes or innovations. The individual has to see the need, as happened for example with the digitalization of teaching during the pandemic, or, as a teacher, has to be able to recognize that an innovation delivers better results without making one’s own working life much harder.
AI is already a reality in our schools: teachers and students live and work with it. The task of educational technology is to build the right tools: ones that support learning and teaching and guide them in the right direction.
Sylke Wischnevsky
In the context of digitalization and AI, what role should an EdTech Center play? Should the priority be developing and evaluating technologies, advising on policy, directly supporting educators, or acting as a bridge across all these areas?
Sylke Wischnevsky: The EdTech Center needs a deep understanding of what is needed in the schools: by the teachers, the students, but also the administration. It could help to interlock the processes of learning and teaching more effectively, but it could also, for example, help develop tools that ensure the validity of examinations. That would then benefit every level.
Insights concerning Education and Educational Technologies
Teachers are already facing shortages, heterogeneous classrooms, administrative demands, and new expectations around digital learning. Which teacher tasks should AI realistically help with first: lesson preparation, differentiation, feedback, assessment, communication, or something else?
AI is part of the “chalk of our time”.
Sylke Wischnevsky
Sylke Wischnevsky: By that I mean: if AI shapes the lived reality of the people in school, then the processes have to be adapted to it. AI must be seen as a “friend,” with whose help the acquisition, the imparting, and the assessment of education are made easier.
In an interview for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, you emphasized that schools need a different teaching culture, with teachers acting more as moderators than as lecturers. How can digital tools or AI support this shift without weakening the human relationship between teachers and students?
Students should be empowered to act as “masters of the process” and not to be the slaves of an overpowering force.
Sylke Wischnevsky
Sylke Wischnevsky: This applies, incidentally, just as much to social media. When one uses the tools made available by AI with confidence, more time for one another arises, not less. Student-centered teaching and internal differentiation in every lesson allow the teacher to engage intensively, phase by phase, with individual students, stronger or weaker ones, without any discipline problems arising. Everyone is always occupied with a task appropriate to them. A principle to be observed at all times in the classroom is the avoidance of boredom.
After more than two decades as headmistress and many years of cooperation with TUM, what still gives you curiosity or hope when you think about the future of schools?
Sylke Wischnevsky: Hope and passion for the coming generations are nourished by the deep conviction that the values of our Western civilization are valid. As I said above, young people must be empowered to develop their talents for their own benefit, but above all for the benefit of society. Schools must therefore reflect students’ present-day reality, and those responsible must be open to this and curious about the possibilities that present themselves for this goal, and must have ideas about how the educational process can be steered. In my many years as a headmistress, and in working with TUM as a whole and with the TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology in particular, I have met many people, among the teachers as well as among the learners, who were enthusiastic about precisely this.
Looking back on your many years in education, is there a moment with students, teachers, or colleagues that still reminds you why this work matters?
Sylke Wischnevsky: In my view, we live in a time of “de-civilization,” where the maxim “might is right” holds and, as in the jungle, the “strongest” gains the upper hand. To stand against this is the central task of education and will always remain so. There are, and have been, many moments that confirm this view. Only recently, once again, several parents thanked me for having helped their children along this path, concretely through my example, my active encouragement, or even through administrative requirements.
Looking Ahead
The EdTech Center is also interested in experiential learning, for example through virtual reality or simulations. In which school subjects or learning situations do you see the greatest potential for immersive technologies, and where would you be more cautious?
Sylke Wischnevsky: Since AI is omnipresent, in the future considerably greater space must be given, in all subjects, to oral expression, to interactive communication, and to the personal engagement of each student. Immersive technologies are ideally suited to this. For example, examination situations and also the content of examinations, could be simulated and dealing with them could be practiced; or intercultural communication could be made easier by removing language barriers and, beyond that, could generate more understanding, for instance of the other person’s mentality and worldview , and more scope for one’s own action.
The EdTech Center’s vision emphasizes personalized education, continuous monitoring of learning progress, and data-supported feedback. From a school and teacher perspective, what would make such data genuinely helpful rather than burdensome or controlling?
Sylke Wischnevsky: When data are collected in order to describe teaching and learning processes, their practical value must be comprehensible to those who supply the data. Under no circumstances should the data merely show what everyone can observe or suspect anyway; rather, they should serve concretely to search for treasures and to uncover deficits, and ideally should result in suggestions for how to proceed or for solutions.
Sylke Wischnevsky
Former Gymnasium Principal
Member of the TUM Board of Trustees
Advisory Board Member, TUM Center for Educational Technologies
