Helpful posts this week —
After a complicated week on school campuses, find a number of posts about managing complex issues and emotions in school communities. More specifically, I’ve been writing for a number of years about the difference between debate (which has a winner and a loser) and discussion (which aims to arrive and shared understanding, if not necessarily agreement). This week’s issue includes a number of articles that span across and stretch beyond this spectrum:
Also this week, I was surprised to see an article suggesting that the price of college is going down. While there appears to be a decline of tuition costs in public universities, the article acknowledges that these are because of increased subsidies that counteract rising costs. How reliable these subsidies will be in the future is unknown, and the underlying economics of the rising cost of education appear to be unchanged. This remains an essential topic for every school leader.
For the classroom, find increasingly helpful and nuanced resources on teaching and learning with AI in the AI Update.
Last, someone actually took the time to calculate whether a room full of monkeys would ever actually be able to write a Shakespearean play. I’m grateful the world has enough people in it that someone had the time and desire to look at this question as scientifically as they did, and then publish their findings. A welcome, light bit of science and math that also honors the humanities.
These and more, enjoy.
Peter
“Politics is the way a society defines which people have value and which people get value. Seen through that lens, teachers are unavoidably practicing politics in their classrooms every day. In classrooms right now, teachers are defining who is valuable, whose ideas are valuable, whose ideas are worth sharing with the rest of the class, who gets which opportunities to learn, who gets to feel like they contributed to their classroom. Given the infinite ideas students bring to their class and the finite time available to teachers, the teacher has to decide, “Will I ask questions that invite or suppress all of those ideas?” That’s a political question. If the teacher allows those ideas to reveal themselves, the teacher then has to decide, “What will I say about all of them? Which ones do I think are valuable? Which ones will I share?” Those are political questions too.”
“It was an incredible victory for American schools. Fewer struggling math students meant more opportunities to complete advanced coursework, qualify for good jobs, and earn higher wages. Unbeknownst to us at the time, 2013 turned out to be the high water mark. Achievement stopped improving. First, it stagnated. Then, toward the end of 2010s, it began to decline. And finally, along came COVID."
“In high schools across the country, there is a growing belief that debate-based pedagogies improve civility and academic success by encouraging students to think critically, engage in high-level academic discourse, and construct compelling arguments. We follow students in Boston and Chicago public schools to witness the methodology’s impact.”
“When you resort to deception to try and catch students cheating, you’ve compromised the values of honesty and transparency that come implicitly attached to our profession… Faculty are decent people. Students are as well. Both are in the wilderness now trying to navigate how to use or resist AI.”
“Much of my work with my younger clients has been focused not on deep psychological conflict or the impact of trauma, but on approaching the basic tasks of living, such as making friends, handling work stress, or going to new places. What they tell me repeatedly is that the discomfort of such tasks feels overwhelming, and their worlds are shrinking in consequence.”
“When Tom Brady was coming out of college, the scouting report on Brady read, “Poor build. Very skinny and narrow. Lacks mobility. Looks a little frail and lacks great physical stature and strength. Lacks mobility and ability to avoid the rush. Lacks a really strong arm. Can’t drive the ball down the field. Does not throw a really tight spiral.” …Along with his competitiveness and relentless work ethic, Brady’s scouting report could have read: Smart. Great at reading defenses. Stays poised under pressure. Very dedicated to preparation. Lacks an ego. Known for his ability to inspire teammates.”
“A dozen states had statutes requiring Asian American and Pacific Islander studies curriculum in K-12 schools as of Oct. 3, while recently introduced bills in another four states would require these studies, according to updated research by the nonprofit Committee of 100.”
“What the future will look like for the cost of higher education is unclear as a big reason for the decrease in prices has been from increases in federal, state and local funding.”
“Almost 30 percent of the 400,000 dual enrollees, roughly 117,000 students, earned a bachelor’s degree in four years. But a majority (58 percent) had not earned any college degree, either a four-year bachelor’s or a two-year associate, or any post-secondary credential, such as a short-term certificate, within this four-year period.”
“Teens are taking slang from the screen to the schoolyard. It’s reshaping the way that they connect with each other and the world.”
“You probably know that zombies have a fondness for brains. What you may not know is that zombies also like theories about how the brain works. Zombie Learning Theories, as researcher Bryan Goodwin has explained, are ideas about how we learn that have been killed (i.e., thoroughly debunked by research) yet still roam our classrooms… Let’s meet some of the most common learning zombies so we can recognize them for what they are when they appear.”
“The 2023-2024 school year recorded the highest instances of book bans and highest number of unique titles banned – over 4,000 unique titles were removed in over 10,000 instances of book bans.”
“The number of children and young people who enjoy reading in their free time continues to decline.”
“While there was little proof that tech directly made people lonely (plenty of socially connected, healthy people use lots of tech), there was a strong correlation between the two, meaning that those who reported feeling lonely might be using tech in unhealthy ways. The correlation was rooted in three main behaviors:”
“So I just started poking around on the internet and eventually got the right combination of search terms and number of Google pages results in and found this data set. As soon as I opened it up I was delighted, surprised, and amazed that the area they had mapped with absolutely no interest in finding archaeological sites at all was really archaeologically important. And one of their survey blocks which was intended to map trees had actually mapped trees growing on top of a really large Maya city that was previously unknown to the scientific community. And it's like a 15-minute walk off the highway.”
Last year, I circulated posts suggesting that we were going through a Cambrian explosion of AI technologies and that this year would be the Darwinian natural selection of AI technologies. In other words, this year and the years ahead would be a time of identifying when and how generative AI tools would actually provide value. It appears to be playing out this way. This week’s AI Update is full of increasingly focused use cases and evaluation of use cases.
In the feature section, find Dr. Philippa Hartman’s methodical assessment of how GenAI tools help with planning, and also see an excellent approach to including AI within assignments. Then find additional helpful use cases in the Tech/AI: Education section.
Elsewhere, an article near the end shares how Google recently revealed that a quarter of all code created by Google engineers is generated with AI. Since it is full of early tech adopters, the coding environment is a good advance view of what a future of generative AI supported writing might look like.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
“Spoiler: my findings underscore that until we have specialised, fine-tuned AI copilots for instructional design, we should be cautious about relying on general-purpose models and ensure expert oversight in all ID tasks.”
“I first ask students to “highlight how you used human and machine skills in your learning” in five potential categories, and offer them a range of options to characterize whether and how they used AI tools to do the work… Among the questions I list: What tricky situations arose when you used AI? How did you chart a path through them? Did bouncing ideas off AI spark your creativity? Were there any new exciting directions it led you toward, or did you wind up preferring your own insights independent of using AI? Which of your skills got a real workout from using AI? How do you feel you’ve improved?”
“Offline AI… Wearables… Agents”
“We need to make it so that what students are being asked to learn is not how to factor, but why you might factor a polynomial. Instead of focusing on how to graph trigonometric functions, questions should focus on what affects the graph and why.”
“Imagine that you’re talking with someone over Zoom and, as the conversation goes on, you begin to feel that they really get you — to the extent that a strong bond of trust quickly forms. Now imagine that this sense of trust is the result of an AI that, unknown to either of you, is manipulating facial features in real time to influence how each of you feels about the other.”
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