An excellent week (and a bit),
In this week’s features, find a reprint of the Atlantic piece on “lighthouse parents” (as different from “helicopter parents” and “snowplow parents”). Also, see a helpful collection of pedagogical moves for engaging students during lectures. It’s a helpful reminder that there are many excellent ways to teach a class, and not one pedagogy to rule them all.
Also find a deep dive on Bloom’s two sigma problem, on time for innovation, on the 2024 educator confidence report, and more.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
“A parent’s first instinct is often to remove obstacles from their child’s path, obstacles that feel overwhelming to them but are easily navigable by us. This urge has led to pop-culture mythology around pushy parenting styles, including the “Helicopter Parent,” who flies in to rescue a child in crisis, and the “Snowplow Parent,” who flattens any obstacle in their child’s way… I want to make a case for the Lighthouse Parent, a term that the pediatrician Kenneth Ginsburg and others have used. A Lighthouse Parent stands as a steady, reliable guide, providing safety and clarity without controlling every aspect of their child’s journey.”
“In a 2024 study, researchers compared a long lecture block followed by active learning activities—small group work and pop quizzes, for example—with an approach that interspersed the two approaches. They found that students learned the most when short lectures were punctuated by three-minute active learning activities… Here are six research-based activities—typically taking no longer than a few minutes—to break up your lectures and promote better learning.”
“Gérôme’s edges are crisp, where Monet’s are all hazy. His brushwork is invisible, where Monet’s is active and advertised. This was what artistic talent was supposed to be in 1874. Drama. Polish. Technique. Not some little sketch of a sunrise over a fisherman’s wharf.”
“I have a reputation among my bandmates for taking notes. I bring a little notepad and a pen with me to gigs and rehearsals as part of my gear and keep them next to me. If we're playing in a bar, in between sets while everyone else is getting a beer, I'm frantically scribbling notes from the previous set… Why do I do this? Why do I evaluate so carefully and give feedback so mercilessly? It's easy: I want the music to be as good as possible.”
“This school year, for the first time ever, more than 1 million of the nation’s 50 million K-12 children took advantage of private school choice, according to the nonprofit EdChoice, a leading advocate. A closer look at the private school choice literature reveals some consistent findings as well as a number of gaps in understanding. That’s in part because measuring the effects of private school choice on outcomes like student-test scores is no easy task.”
Some excellent posts this week.
Most significantly, research is beginning to bear out the ways in which generative AI tools can support learning, and especially tutoring. As is increasingly understood, these cases are not about replacing people, but about supporting people. See several posts this week — both in the features and education section — on this topic.
Also, for those interested in the quest for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), find several posts on the challenge of simply trying to define what AGI is.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
“White-collar workers are more likely to be using AI. White-collar workers are, by far, the most frequent users of AI in their roles. While 81% of employees in production/frontline industries say they never use AI, only 54% of white-collar workers say they never do and 15% report using AI weekly.”
“The new study offers a middle ground in what’s become a polarized debate between supporters and detractors of AI tutoring. It’s also the first randomized controlled trial — the gold standard in research — to examine a human-AI system in live tutoring. In all, about 1,000 students got help from about 900 tutors, and students who worked with AI-assisted tutors were four percentage points more likely to master the topic after a given session than those in a control group whose tutors didn’t work with AI. Students working with lower-rated tutors saw their performance jump more than twice as much, by nine percentage points. In all, their pass rate went from 56% to 65%, nearly matching the 66% pass rate for students with higher-rated tutors.”
“About half of the 130 teachers who said they used AI to help with their recommendation letters did so to take the stress out of the task, according to foundry10’s survey. And about a third of the 130 said they believed AI tools improved the quality of their letters. Far more teachers, 267 in all, said they did not use AI tools to help craft their letters of recommendation. About half said they steered clear of AI because they worried that their letters would lack a personal touch. And a little over 40 percent worried about the ethics of passing off work written at least partially by AI as their own.”
“Following a preregistered analysis plan, we find that students working on mathematics with tutors randomly assigned to have access to Tutor CoPilot are 4 percentage points (p.p.) more likely to master topics (p<0.01). Notably, students of lower-rated tutors experienced the greatest benefit, improving mastery by 9 p.p. relative to the control group.”
“This shift toward collaborating with AI doesn’t unsettle Myers or Murdaugh in the way that it has many professors. The reason, they say, is that the skills that students use to engage thoughtfully with AI are the same ones that colleges are good at teaching. Namely: knowing how to obtain and use information, thinking critically and analytically, and understanding what and how you’re trying to communicate.”
“If you asked me how to scale clean energy, I would prescribe a magical source of urgent energy demand. Someone willing to pay a premium to build solar+batteries, geothermal, and nuclear, in order to bring them down the cost curve and make them cheaper for everyone. That is exactly what AI data centres are. For the first time ever, securing clean 24/7 power is an urgent strategic priority for the most powerful organisations in the world.”
“The AI community has been loose in its use of anthropocentric language, using words such as “emergence” rather than “thresholding,” “reasoning” rather than “reckoning” and “retrieval,” “understanding” rather than “pattern-matching,” and “hallucination” rather than “confabulation.” Mercifully, after a couple of years of thrashing around with definitions and counter-definitions of Intelligence, a stasis has been reached where both psychologists and AI experts seem to agree that this is a dead-end, since the concept of Intelligence is too fluid to be pinned down. But if “Intelligence” cannot be defined properly, how can “Generalized Intelligence” fare any better?”
“If, as Marx argued, capital is dead labor, then the products of large language models might best be understood as dead speech. Just as factory workers produce, with their “living labor,” machines and other forms of physical capital that are then used, as “dead labor,” to produce more physical commodities, so human expressions of thought and creativity—“living speech” in the forms of writing, art, photography, and music—become raw materials used to produce “dead speech” in those same forms.”
Copyright
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