The Educator's Notebook

A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Educator’s Notebook #431 (November 27, 2023)

    • Harvard Business Review
    • 12/15/23

    “In honor of Thanksgiving in the U.S., we wanted to share a curated selection of our Management Tips on how to show gratitude and appreciation at work. We hope you find the advice useful at any time of year.”

CHARACTER

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

    • College Board
    • 12/15/23

    “Whether you’re reuniting with colleagues from our summer event in New Orleans or joining us for the first time, this workshop is designed to enrich your approach to incorporating African Diaspora topics into your AP Seminar classrooms. Part social gathering, part professional learning, the workshop will be an opportunity to share and reflect on highlights from the fall term, while providing a platform to prepare for the spring.”

HEALTH

HIGHER ED

HUMANITIES

    • Res Obscura
    • 12/15/23
    • Literary Hub
    • 12/15/23

    “While Whitehead’s own oeuvre represents a veritable catalogue of genres, it also chronicles nearly two hundred years of American history. If we rearrange his novels not by publication date but loosely by their historical settings, we end up following Whitehead from the slave narrative and folklore of the nineteenth century (The Underground Railroad and John Henry Days) to the hard-boiled civil rights noir and ethnic bildungsroman of the mid- and late twentieth century (The Intuitionist, Harlem Shuffle, The Nickel Boys, and Sag Harbor). From this vantage, it seems clear that Whitehead is not only a writer of genre fiction, but a prolific writer of one genre in particular: historical fiction.”

LANGUAGE

LEADERSHIP

    • Harvard Business Review
    • 12/15/23
    • Harvard Business Review
    • 12/15/23

    “This article presents a classroom experiment that compared a strategy developed by a team of MBA students in the traditional way with one developed using a virtual AI assistant, which was an interactive tool that linked a tried-and-tested strategy toolkit as a plug-in to the generative AI underlying Chat GPT. The results of the two independent processes were largely similar, with the AI-assisted strategy being, if anything, more original. The difference? The students took a week and the AI just 60 minutes.”

LEARNING SCIENCE

PEDAGOGY

    • Chalkbeat
    • 12/15/23

    “No one can be all things to all students, yet all students need love and a reason to show up. This requires a team capable of providing academic skills and content as well as consistency, emotional support, extracurricular activities, and so much more.”

READING/WRITING

SUSTAINABILITY

VISUAL DESIGN

WORKPLACE

A.I. Update

    • Fordham Institute
    • 12/15/23

    “Will AI replace human tutors and teachers? Yes, AI will. This school headmaster; this survey; DuoLingo guy here. No, AI won’t. Nathaniel Grossman in Fordham; Freddie DeBoer; Dan Meyer. Our question: What if AI has profoundly different effects on motivated and unmotivated learners?”

    • EdWeek
    • 12/15/23

    “Districts should aim for “good, strong, basic guidance” and “bring teachers into the conversation” to help inform it, since they are likely to bring up issues that district leaders may have never thought of… Two major issues to address: ensuring teachers understand AI’s strengths and weaknesses and keeping student data safe.”

    • Frontiers In Psychology
    • 12/15/23

    “Fifty social dilemma questions were randomly selected from 10 well-known advice columns. In a pre-registered survey, participants (N = 404) were each shown one question, along with the corresponding response by an advice columnist and by ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s advice was perceived as more balanced, complete, empathetic, helpful, and better than the advice provided by professional advice columnists.”

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

TECH/AI: GENERAL

Issues

Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.

Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.

Peter Nilsson

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