Educator’s Notebook #476 (February 16, 2025)
INTRODUCTION
Accelerated Classes, Leadership, Persistence, DEI, the Halftime Show, and More
This was a truly extraordinary week. But to start, this week’s features include excellent nuts and bolts.
This week’s reading took me back to some early research on tracking and grouping, which have in my previous reading yielded inconclusive findings. This report from 1998, while also affirming ambiguous results, also yields slightly more nuanced conclusions, indicating that students who receive an accelerated curriculum do show boosted achievement. See the feature for more. Also in the features, Gallup has gathered many of their resources together for an excellent summary of various elements of effective leadership. The sum of the information they pull together makes for a helpful mini-curriculum for leaders. Add to this the robust Leadership section this week, and you could put together a helpful professional development retreat for leadership.
Also this week, find helpful resources in the character section, some truly remarkable advances in AI (in the AI Update), and robust sections on Reading/Writing, Humanities, and more. Also, if you didn’t watch the halftime show at the Super Bowl, find a link to it here in the Humanities section, as well as how teachers have engaged with it.
DEI
But I want to linger for a moment again on this time that we are in. In a democracy, it is healthy for opposing opinions about the size and shape of government, about foreign policy, about the economy, about social issues, and more to vie for — and even replace each other in — public dominance. These changes in leadership reflect changing opinions in the population, opinions that often emerge because of shortcomings in the previous leadership’s vision, perspectives, and/or outcomes. No group ever gets it all right all the time, and the swinging of the pendulum is a periodic, helpful, sometimes corrective act. But, to focus on education now, what we’re experiencing at present, with the attempt to completely erase diversity initiatives across the education sector (and in government sectors and the private sectors) directly inhibits educational progress.
Don’t be distracted from good practices. The research is relentless that democracy, business, and education thrive with diversity. And diverse settings require psychological safety. Don’t let national headlines get in the way of common sense care for kids, common sense leadership, and common sense teaching and learning. Is it ok to celebrate black history month? Yes. (“I [President Trump] call upon … educators… to observe this month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.”) Is it ok to support students with affinity groups? Yes. (See relevant law for clear guidance — also, confirm with your school counsel.) The erasure of federal DEI initiatives doesn’t end the work of supporting all students. Here again is a newsletter from two weeks ago with articles from Harvard Business Review on how organizations might think about the essential work of DEI in more politically palatable ways.
Unrelated/related
I’ve been preparing for a presentation at the upcoming NAIS conference in which I’ll be sharing lessons from ten years of curating this newsletter. One of those lessons is that when national news is more chaotic, education news covers less of what matters most: good teaching & learning, collaborative classrooms & workplaces, and the importance of care & high expectations for kids. While some of the national chaos this time around has more of an impact on education, and while I’ve added a Government section to highlight these every now and than, I hope to keep the newsletter focused on what drives positive practice and community for teachers and school leaders.
With that in mind, in this week’s issue also find posts on presentation skills, desirable difficulties, knowledge in the curriculum, and more.
Thanks as always for your interest, and please do let me know if you’ll be at either NAIS or SXSWedu.
Enjoy!
Peter
What do people want from their leaders? See Gallup’s summary in the Leadership section.
Browse and search over 14,000 curated articles from past issues online:
FEATURED
How To Be A Better Leader - An Excellent Deep Dive
“Leadership can often be equal parts high confidence and self-esteem and worrying if you're doing it right while continually searching for answers. Whether you're a leader in an organizational setting or have high influence in some other capacity, improving your leadership begins with a focus on what you're already good at."
“Making Sense Of The Tracking And Ability Grouping Debate” (1998)
“When students are ability grouped into separate classes and given an identical curriculum, there is no appreciable effect on achievement. But when the curriculum is adjusted to correspond to ability level, it appears that student achievement is boosted, especially of high ability students receiving an accelerated curriculum. Heterogeneous grouping has not been adopted by enough middle and high schools to conclude whether detracking produces achievement gains—for poor, minority, and low achieving students or anyone else. In sum, research comparing tracking and heterogeneous grouping cannot conclusively declare one or the other as the better way of organizing students.”
ADMISSIONS
ADOLESCENCE
“How Mental Health Professionals Can Help Teens Struggling With Social Media Use”
“In the rest of this post, I explore how social media platforms shape adolescent psychological experiences, the risks they present, and practical interventions for mental health professionals helping young people navigate this digital landscape.”
“A Restorative Approach To Student Discipline Shows Promise”
ATHENA
ATHLETICS
On The Origin Of Ultimate (Frisbee), And The Parking Lot Where It Started
“On hallowed ground in Maplewood, N.J., a small group of impassioned athletes braved the January cold to fling a disc. Some had gray hair beneath wool caps. Some were in street clothes. One wore shorts and a beard to rival Father Time’s.”
CHARACTER
Persistence: Becoming Great Comes From Spending Time On The Job
““Wow. There’s no sign that you have any talent for radio. Like there’s not even a hint that you’re ever going to be any good.” Not only was she right, Glass said, but he revisited other episodes from his archives and was struck by how, even 15 years into his career, he still wasn’t very good. “The key thing,” [Ira] Glass told the three college students, “is to force yourself through the work it takes to force the skills to come.”
“Zadie Smith On Optimism And Despair”
“Only the willfully blind can ignore that the history of human existence is simultaneously the history of pain: of brutality, murder, mass extinction, every form of venality and cyclical horror. No land is free of it; no people are without their bloodstain; no tribe entirely innocent. But there is still this redeeming matter of incremental progress. It might look small to those with apocalyptic perspectives, but to she who not so long ago could not vote, or drink from the same water fountain as her fellow citizens, or marry the person she chose, or live in a certain neighborhood, such incremental change feels enormous.”
Boredom: Good Thing Or Bad Thing?
“Study Something You Love In Depth!”
“Spend 45 minutes tonight studying something you love. Watch the first five minutes of your favorite movie 7 times. You will notice new things.”
CURRICULUM
Can Mathematics Reconcile The Two Cultures?
“The clash of cultures between the humanities and the natural sciences is reignited over and over because of two images that portray the interrelationship of mind and nature very differently. To achieve peace between the two cultures, we need to overcome both views. We must recognise that the natural and the mental order of things go hand in hand. Neither can be fully understood without the other. And neither can be traced back to the other.”
What Is The Research Foundation For The Return To Knowledge In The Curriculum?
DIVERSITY/INCLUSION
How Does The New Dept of Ed Interpret DEI And Anti-Affirmative Action Law?
“In Texas, colleges first renamed centers for marginalized students, then shuttered them after the state ordered it was not enough to comply with an anti-DEI law; they also froze or revised all race-based scholarships. In Missouri, after the attorney general issued an order saying the SFFA decision should apply to scholarships as well as admissions, the state university system systematically eliminated its race-conscious scholarships and cut ties with outside endowments that refused to change their eligibility requirements.”
“Some Schools Act After Trump’s DEI Orders. Others Say They’ll Resist”
ELEMENTARY
GOVERNMENT
What Did Linda McMahon Say In Her Confirmation Hearing?
5 More Takeaways From Linda McMahon’s Confirmation Hearing
Are Education Research Cuts “A New Beginning Or Just Slashing And Burning”?
Education Research Arm IES Targeted For Federal Cuts
More Than 2,000 Datasets Have Been Removed From Government Open Data Catalogs
“On January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on data.gov. As of Thursday, there are 305,564 datasets.”
HEALTH
HIGHER ED
HUMANITIES
A Snapshot Of The Gulf Of Mexico In 1765
“This is not the first mention for the Gulf of Mexico though. That belongs to a map from 1550, according to Paul Galtsoff’s article (1954) for Fish and Wildlife Service”
“The Pedagogy Of Kendrick Lamar At The Super Bowl Halftime Show”
How Do We Teach Students About Race In US History?
“Humanities = Jobs” — A New Narrative Emerges
“The number of undergraduates majoring in the humanities at the University of Arizona has increased 76 percent since 2018, when it introduced a bachelor’s degree in applied humanities that connects the humanities with programs in business, engineering, medicine and other fields. It also hired a humanities recruitment director and marketing team and started training faculty members to enlist students in the major with the promise that an education in the humanities leads to jobs.”
Lesson Plan On Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show
Watch Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl Halftime Show
“Salutations, it's your uncle, Sam, and this is the great American game.”
What Is Going On With The “Gulf Of America”?
“The Gulf of Mexico has been renamed to the Gulf of America in the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) by the U.S. Geological Survey… Only the main title changed though. “Research in the Gulf of Mexico” appears underneath and if you follow the link, Mexico is the point of reference… People using Maps in the U.S. will see “Gulf of America,” and people in Mexico will see “Gulf of Mexico.” Everyone else will see both names.”
Civilization VII Has Arrived, The Game That Simulates The Development Of Human Civlization
“The Problem With Primary Sources In Black History Education”
“Do you know how to put Black history sources in context?”
LEADERSHIP
How To Cultivate Relationships As A Leader
Start Your Meetings With Connection
What Followers Want From Leaders: Hope, Trust, Compassion, Stability
“Once the need for hope is met, thriving rises to 38%, and suffering dips to 6%.”
12 Mistakes To Avoid In The Boardroom
Three Ways For School Heads To Be Instructional Leaders
LEARNING SCIENCE
On Creating “Desirable Difficulties” To Enhance Learning
“When instruction occurs under conditions that are constrained and predictable, learning tends to become contextualized… In contrast, varying conditions of practice—even varying the environmental setting in which study sessions take place—can enhance recall on a later test.
PEDAGOGY
READING/WRITING
Romance As A Literary Genre Is Going Mainstream. What Does This Mean?
Book Vending Machines In Schools
50 Quotes To Help Writing
““The fact is one's own voice is not heard anywhere else. It's a challenge to be yourself. It takes a lot of courage.” —Yusef Lateef”
Wordle As Literacy Tool?
SAFETY
“Want To Keep Schools Safe? Hire More Nurses.”
“The result of our culture’s focus on crisis management over prevention is more security staff in high schools than there are full-time registered nurses… In a world of limited funds, the philosophy of what truly makes a campus safe must shift from fear to facts. When administrators and policymakers focus on hiring security staff over school nurses in the name of safer schools, they are missing the bigger picture of campus safety: student health… Students are safest when schools employ a full-time RN, both in relation to preventing and handling medical emergencies and in the role they play in the intervention and triage of mental health concerns."
WORKPLACE
On Comparing Yourself To Colleagues
Against Innovation, For Rethinking
“I love the distinction between the slick promise of “innovation” and the disciplined work of rethinking… The productive way to approach “rethinking” is by recognizing that schools are organized in ways that waste time, overburden educators, misuse technology, and alienate parents.”
GENERAL
A.I. Update
A.I. UPDATE
Agents, Research Assistants, and more
So many compelling posts in this week’s newsletter.
Particularly compelling to me, and more practical than it sounds, is the feature piece arguing that AI is a significant philosophical turning point in the human experience. This is more significant than just academic. In November of 2021, a year before ChatGPT came out, Eric Schmidt, Henry Kissinger, and Darren Huttonlocher argued in The Age of AI: And Our Human Future that for millennia our reality was grounded in faith, but then our most recent centuries have been grounded in the scientific method, and that this philosophical reorientation for our human experience caused significant shifts in how we understand ourselves and how we live our lives. But their further thesis is that AI is bringing a new grounding for our reality, and that this asofyet undetermined future will shift our lived experience in similarly dramatic ways as the scientific method did. In short time, their suggestions have proven out: Now, AI companions, AI counselors, AI spiritual leaders, and AI fortune tellers are all growing. People are turning to AI for answers and support the way we have historically turned to faith and science. These trends will only grow in the coming years. This week’s feature in Noema explores how our philosophical understanding of ourselves is bound to change in the years ahead.
Also in the features this week, and most practical for our teaching & learning, is an excellent walkthrough of what planning a lesson can look like with AI as an assistant. It offers a helpful overview and also detailed tactical guidance. This is a valuable post for any teacher or any teaching & learning leader.
Also this week, find announcements about two extraordinary product releases from OpenAI: their deep research tool and their new agent called “Operator.” The deep research tool is excellent for opening up research perspectives and sources, even if it, like other LLMs, generally requires iterative prompting to get specifically to where you want to go.
These and more, including a “can you spot a deepfake”quiz, enjoy!
Peter
What percentage of all AI usage (of Claude) belongs to what professional settings? See the Uses and Applications topic for details.
TECH/AI: FEATURED
“Why AI Is A Philosophical Rupture”
“Today, we appear to know that there are some baseline qualities to intelligence such as learning from experience, logical understanding and the capability to abstract from what one has learned to solve novel situations. AI systems have all these qualities. They learn, they logically understand and they form abstractions that allow them to navigate new situations. However, what experience or learning or understanding or abstraction means for an AI system and for us humans is not quite the same. That is why I suggested that AI is intelligently slightly different from us. …As we have elaborated in this conversation, we live in philosophically discontinuous times. The world has been outgrowing the concepts we have lived by for some time now. To some, that is very exciting. To many, however, it is not. The insecurity and confusion are widespread and real… In the absence of new concepts, people — the public as much as engineers — will continue to understand the new in terms of the old. As this doesn’t work, there will be decades of turmoil.”
“How To Unpack A Learning Standard [And Design A Unit] Using ChatGPT”
“[I] developed an eight-step process that educators can use to unpack a learning standard with ChatGPT (or a similar chatbot). This process supports a number of objectives: Reflects a purpose-driven approach by including clear assessment criteria and rubrics. Combines effective educational practices with new technology. Affirms the important role of the educator. Works with a variety of tools, such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, or any other large language model. Saves time and effort. Enables teachers to learn about GenAI along with their students.”
TECH/AI: EDUCATION
How One Professor Adjusted Her College Writing Course For AI
Culatta: On Rethinking Academic Integrity In An AI World
What Does AI Automated Feedback Look Like?
An AI Literacy Lit Review
19 Public And Charter Schools Share AI Practices
UNESCO’s Framework For AI Competency For Teachers
TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK
Hank Azaria On Voicing The Simpsons - And AI
“A misconception about voice acting is that it takes only a voice. But our bodies and souls are involved to get the proper believability. When I first watched Dan Castellaneta, who plays Homer, and Harry Shearer, who plays Mr. Burns and many other characters, doing vocal recordings, I was almost embarrassed by how silly they looked. They were jumping around and giving a full performance to no one — just a microphone… It’s the neck-up version that I can see A.I. being capable of, at least right now. The body and soul part will be harder.”
“Can You Spot A Deepfake?”
TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
“Hands On With Deep Research”
“The length and complexity of OpenAI’s response is much greater than either Perplexity or Google, but Perplexity actually offers significantly more sources than either: 57 versus OpenAI’s 21 and Google’s 17. Obviously, quantity is not necessarily quality, but I find it interesting that there is such a marked difference. The nature of the sources is also different, with Google tending more to news stories, Perplexity with significantly more official government websites, and OpenAI drawing on blogs, news, and legal websites with a handful of government pages.”
People Appear To Prefer ChatGPT Therapy Responses Over Human Responses
On OpenAI’s Operator And The Start Of The Agentic Workforce
“This could usher in an era of “No UI” applications, where AI agents interact with each other in the background, bypassing traditional user interfaces altogether. Welcome to the no-human web: a machine-to-machine ecosystem where AI talks to AI and humans simply orchestrate rather than directly engage. If this materializes, it could fundamentally reshape UX/UI design (not for human usability, but for AI efficiency). If AI agents do indeed handle all our browsing and subsequent interactions with information, what happens to digital literacy? Should schools be teaching students how to manage and direct AI agents? How do we develop skills to validate AI’s reasoning and choices when we’re no longer clicking, navigating, or directly engaging with content ourselves?”
Introducing OpenAI’s Deep Research Tool
“Deep research is OpenAI's next agent that can do work for you independently—you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst. Powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model that’s optimized for web browsing and data analysis, it leverages reasoning to search, interpret, and analyze massive amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the internet, pivoting as needed in reaction to information it encounters.”
How To Train Your LLM
TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS
"Which Economic Tasks Are Performed With AI?”
“Our analysis reveals that AI usage primarily concentrates in software development and writing tasks, which together account for nearly half of all total usage. However, usage of AI extends more broadly across the economy, with∼ 36% of occupations using AI for at least a quarter of their associated tasks. We also analyze how AI is being used for tasks, finding 57% of usage suggests augmentation of human capabilities (e.g., learning or iterating on an output) while 43% suggests automation (e.g., fulfilling a request with minimal human involvement).”