Happy 2025, Readers!
To me, anything beyond the year 2000 still feels like the distant future, and yet, here we are 25 years later. Tempus fugit!
I’m excited to share a number of announcements in the weeks and months ahead, but will start the year off with just a brief introduction to this issue. More soon.
In the meantime, enjoy this issue to start of the year!
Peter
This week: The two feature articles both focus on pedagogy, as a reminder that teaching and learning are ultimately what school is about. In one post, find a reminder that balancing high expectations and support for students is at the very center of good teaching. And in the other post, find a reminder that providing autonomy within the context of high expectations and support helps students develop agency. (To this day, Daniel Pink’s book “Drive,” about intrinsic motivation, is the book that has most influenced my teaching.)
Elsewhere in this issue, find several year-in-review posts, find posts on diversity efforts in our new climate, and find a remarkable report on the rebirth of Notre-Dame, including a history of its construction.
Also this week is an article on pornography and adolescence. This is a complicated topic, and sometimes even mentioning it turns people away, but it’s important for adults in schools to know how pervasive pornography is in adolescent lives today — and the advent of generative AI makes it even more complicated. See the Adolescence section for more.
Last, at the end of this issue are some stunning developments in AI, as people begin turning to AI for spirituality, as people’s engagement with AI as social companions deepens, and as uses cases for AI in instructional design begin cohering.
All these and more, enjoy!
Peter
Browse and search over 14,000 curated articles from past issues online:
“Giving kids agency doesn’t mean letting them do whatever they want. It doesn’t mean lowering expectations, turning education into entertainment or allowing children to choose their own adventure. It means requiring them to identify and pursue some of their own goals, helping them build strategies to reach those goals, assessing their progress and guiding them to course-correct when they fall short.”
“It is a common misunderstanding that demandingness is the same as strictness. However, demandingness is deeply connected to personal concern for, and belief in, students’ success. Warm demanders believe every student can grow to be the best version of themselves.”
“On average, Americans first see online pornography at age 12, according to a 2023 survey of adolescents by Common Sense Media, and 73 percent of those aged 17 and under have seen it, a figure consistent with other research.”
“For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.”
“"Now we are going to practice changing our dynamics. We will get louder, move towards a strong forte, then back to a piano. Understand?" she asks… A hand shoots up. "Miss–," the student begins, “can we play another note today? Maybe a song?” Suddenly her face flashes red. She slams her baton down, then aims her finger at the student. "We don't have the time to play… music!" she stammers. "We need to play with proper dynamics!" The students squirm.”
“This year more than usual, those of you who wrote to me asked where you should find hope. Where you should find joy. Where, at a minimum, you should find a reprieve. In language. That’s one of my answers. To read what some of the most talented writers can do is to be reassured of human ingenuity, human sensitivity, human spark. We’re a cunning and capable species, even if we spend much of our time (and many of our elections) trying to prove otherwise.”
“Mathematicians have been extremely busy this year: they’ve discovered the biggest prime number yet, a new formula for pi, mysterious patterns in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and even a whole new kind of shape… Here’s a look at a few of the most exciting mathematical discoveries we wrote about this year.”
“Now, two years into the effort to comply with the class-size law, the Department of Education has adopted a new approach: For the first time, schools were asked to create their own plans to lower class sizes and apply for funding to help them do so. Before, the D.O.E. used a formula designed by the State Legislature to send funding to schools identified as places where class sizes could be reduced.”
“Spatial proficiency… goes beyond the aesthetics or functionality of classrooms. It’s about aligning physical spaces with the dynamic needs of students and the practices of teaching and learning. Classroom spaces tell a story—about what we value, how relationships are formed, and how learning unfolds. They are more than the sum of their parts; they are dynamic systems that reflect the culture of a school and the priorities of its teachers.”
While much is made today about the effect of AI on teaching and learning — and while it will take time for our profession to adapt to this technology (it took more than 20 years for math teaching to adjust to the arrival of the calculator) — the greatest impact of AI will be on our social world, for students and adults alike. This week’s features show continued glimmers of our AI-filled future.
One feature post shows early signs of the role AI will play in people’s spiritual lives. Anything that is not easily explained has a touch of the mystical — it’s how humans ascribed meaning to the moon and stars for centuries — and it seems inevitable that people will put their faith (literally) in AI. See how this is already beginning.
Also in the features, read extraordinary reporting from the Verge on how AI companions are playing surprising roles in people’s lives — with all the benefits and risks that come with it.
And with teaching & learning, find a number of useful resources, especially Dr. Philippa Hardman’s informal survey of what works for instructional design.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
“Mr. Cooper has not since used the technology to help write sermons, preferring to draw instead from his own experiences. But the presence of A.I. in faith-based spaces, he said, poses a larger question: Can God speak through A.I.?”
“Though this list is based in science, it draws even more from experience. Like any form of wisdom, using AI well requires holding opposing ideas in mind: it can be transformative yet must be approached with skepticism, powerful yet prone to subtle failures, essential for some tasks yet actively harmful for others. I also want to caveat that you shouldn't take this list too seriously except as inspiration – you know your own situation best, and local knowledge matters more than any general principles.”
“They never thought they were the type of person to sign up for an AI companion, by which they meant the type of person you might already be picturing: young, male, socially isolated. I did speak to people who fit that description, but there were just as many women in their 40s, men in their 60s, married, divorced, with kids and without, looking for romance, company, or something else… Many of these people experienced real benefits. Many of them also got hurt in unexpected ways. What they had in common was that, like Naro, they were surprised by the reality of the feelings elicited by something they knew to be unreal.”
“This time, she fed PowerPoint slides, self-produced YouTube videos, and course notes from previous iterations of the class into an AI platform called Kudu, which consolidated them into one text that she reviewed. Nothing in the book is actually written by AI. “It’s my words, my writing,” she said. The images in the book, like maps and paintings, are not AI-generated either. The resulting book is a compilation of Stahuljak’s expertise that she says would otherwise be bound by the classroom’s walls.”
“A nationally representative survey of more than 1,100 teachers, principals, and district leaders conducted by the EdWeek Research Center in September showed that 67 percent of them believed that their students had been misled by a deepfake.”
“This year, I've worked with ~300 students on my bootcamp. Together, we've explored ~50 different use cases for AI across the end to end instructional design process. At the end of each cohort, I always ask: which tools & use cases you will integrate into your process, and why? Here's the verdict, hot off the press from my November cohort.”
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