““Creativity, critical thinking, problem solving, communication, empathy — these are the skill sets people will need to cultivate in the future to be more effective,” Mr. FoFana said. “And, of course, learning how to manage the A.I. tools.””
“We all love things that other people think are garbage. You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage. What makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of the culture others have deemed “high” and “low.” When you find something you genuinely enjoy, don’t let anyone make you feel bad about it. Love what you love.”
“One simple idea: give young people who’ve faced displacement a space to share their stories. These workshops aren’t just about learning theatre techniques. They’re about giving a voice to those who have lived through loss, migration, and unimaginable challenges.”
“Art is not policy. It does not, at least as normally constituted, feed the hungry, shelter the unhoused, or clothe the indigent. To complain, as some do, that because art doesn’t fulfill these necessary social obligations it’s little more than a disposable frivolity, is to completely miss the point: art is not meant to do any of these things.”
“The book argues for a coherent curriculum that systematically builds students’ background knowledge to facilitate deeper understanding and better reading comprehension. This aligns with decades of research in cognitive science demonstrating that comprehension is not a transferable skill but is largely dependent on prior knowledge.”
“A record-breaking three in four (73%) grads said their education was worth the cost, a substantial increase from 2023 and prior.”
“We are tracking 123 bills in 29 states and the US Congress. Since 2023, 123 have been introduced. 15 have final legislative approval. 15 have become law. 71 have been tabled, failed to pass, or been vetoed.”
“There’s good DEI and bad DEI. And we need to make that distinction.”
“Teacher quality impacts student success more than any other factor in school. As a non-profit, nonpartisan research organization, the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) exists to ensure all students have access to effective teachers… Without the data, we have no light, and the result will be policymaking that happens in the dark—uninformed, disconnected from the best available evidence, stumbling without light. We will be unable to answer our most basic questions about schools and teachers.”
“As a legal and education scholar over the last 15 years, I have played a leading role in litigation on race-conscious admissions as counsel of record in “friend of the court” briefs filed before the U.S. Supreme Court. And I have examined the role of past guidance from OCR, which has historically served as a valuable resource for researchers, educators, and advocates. The current “Dear Colleague” letter deviates significantly from this tradition in several critical ways, which are important for higher-education leaders to understand… Specifically, the court noted that “nothing in [the] opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.””
“Here’s a poem about patience, about self-control, about the need to conserve your energy and constrain your desire. Fittingly enough, it’s a proper old-school sonnet, orderly and elegant: 14 lines of iambic pentameter, crisply punctuated, with syllables cut to measure.”
“I opened “Nothing New” on my laptop, seeing at once that it was indeed something new. It was originally inscribed inside a copy of Frost’s second collection, “North of Boston,” that was found in a retired educator’s home library by a family friend, a book dealer, following the educator’s death. It’s a good poem, short and aphoristic, from a period when Frost, writing at the height of his powers, had a special affection for poems of this kind: brief, rueful, tight, focussed.”
“Consider a graph where each vertex represents a Member of Congress. Now draw an edge between members each time they vote the same way on an issue. The resulting multigraph has hundreds of edges between members of the same party, and fewer edges between members of different parties. In the case of the current Congress (the 117th) graph looks something like this:”
“There is an attempt here to scare presidents, and they should avoid being scared into doing things that aren’t required.”
“Many college presidents and deans are issuing mealymouthed statements, ending long-standing programs, removing content from websites and otherwise cowering in the face of… attacks on higher education. Then there’s Michael S. Roth… “Leaders in higher educational institutions should stand up for their values.” Roth told me in an interview last week. “We should stand up for our values because we’ve said we believed in them for the last many decades now… I don’t look for trouble. But I would feel ashamed if I didn’t speak up for the values that have guided my institution and many others.””
“Employees whose psychological needs are met are intrinsically motivated by finding meaning and enjoyment in their work, which leads to not only better performance but also improved well-being. Using self-determination theory to manage employees can promote ethical behavior, innovation, and long-term commitment.”
Jokic: “You really brought a book?” Wemby: “I read before every game.”
“Ms. Schamis committed herself to staying at Marjory Stoneman Douglas until every surviving student from Room 1214 graduated in the spring of 2019. It was not easy.”
“The median number of views for a YouTube videos is just 41 views. 4% of YouTube videos haven't been watched a single time. 74% of YouTube videos have 0 comments. Around 89% of YouTube videos have 0 likes. The median YouTube video is only 64 seconds long.”
“For Sacchetti, who teaches precalculus and applied math, puzzles are powerful tools for developing resilience and flexibility—characteristics essential for success in math and life. "Students who enjoy puzzles tend to be more flexible in their thinking," he explained. "Even if they only know one piece, they’re willing to experiment and figure out the rest.”"
“John Giorgi uses artificial intelligence to make artificial intelligence. The 29-year-old computer scientist creates software for a health care start-up that records and summarizes patient visits for doctors, freeing them from hours spent typing up clinical notes. To do so, Mr. Giorgi has his own timesaving helper: an A.I. coding assistant. He taps a few keys and the software tool suggests the rest of the line of code. It can also recommend changes, fetch data, identify bugs and run basic tests. Even though the A.I. makes some mistakes, it saves him up to an hour many days. “I can’t imagine working without it now,” Mr. Giorgi said.”
“In a series of training documents, editorial guidelines laid out possible use cases for journalists, including prompts such as: How many times was Al mentioned in these episodes of Hard Fork? Can you revise this paragraph to make it tighter? Pretend you are posting this Times article to Facebook. How would you promote it? Summarize this Times article in a concise, conversational voice for a newsletter. Can you propose five search-optimized headlines for this Times article? Can you summarize this play written by Shakespeare? Can you summarize this federal government report in layman’s terms? Still, the company has bracketed its AI use, noting the potential risks for copyright infringement and exposure of sources. The company told editorial staff they should not use AI to draft or significantly revise an article, input third party copyrighted materials (particularly confidential source information), use AI to circumvent a paywall, or publish machine-generated images or videos, except to demonstrate the technology and with proper labeling.”
“College-aged students aged 18-24 primarily use AI tools for starting papers and projects, summarizing texts, exploring topics, and brainstorming creative ideas, according to our recent survey. For ChatGPT users who belong to this age group, just over a quarter of all messages are education- or learning-related (which means those messages are tagged as tutoring- or teaching-related by our internal classifiers), followed by writing assistance, one-off questions, computer programming support, and how-to advice.”
“Cognitive skills such as Critical Thinking, Reading Comprehension, Programming, and Writing had the highest prevalence. However, our analysis captures only whether a skill was exhibited in Claude’s responses, not whether that skill was central to the user’s purpose or was performed at an expert level. For instance, while Active Listening appears as the second most common skill, this likely reflects Claude’s default conversational behaviors—such as rephrasing user inputs and asking clarifying questions—rather than users specifically seeking out listening-focused interactions.”
“Research shows that, in general, AI feedback on written work is “in the range” of human feedback, said Tamara Tate, the associate director of the Digital Learning Lab at the University of California, Irvine. AI likely wouldn’t be as accurate or insightful as veteran teachers, but it might go toe-to-toe with a newer, less experienced educator, she said.”
“There are many legitimate reasons to resist using AI in education, and we should not be silencing them. There are also some real reasons why some people are very optimistic; concrete ones separate from the hype. As long as they’re not uncritical hype.”
“The five most common ways principals said they used AI tools include drafting and enhancing school communications, supporting school administrator tasks, assisting with teacher hiring, supporting evaluation and professional development, bolstering instruction or demonstrating how teachers can use AI in their lessons, and researching job-related topics.”
“We have created a four-step framework to help managers successfully design a co-thinking dialogue with gen AI.”
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