Educator’s Notebook #485 (May 11, 2025)
INTRODUCTION
Assessments strategies, new leadership models, AI skills, and more
Almost midway through May…
In the features this week, find a reflection on whether high schools should offer advanced career opportunities just like they offer advanced, college-level courses. Also, see the excellent post on the absence of downtime in kids’ (and adults’) lives these days.
Also this week, find powerful posts on AI developments in the AI Update below, as well as several new visions of leadership, several posts on civil discourse, and several explorations into character. Rich writing this week!
Last, if you’re looking for some AI motivation before you launch into summer, I’ll be co-leading three sessions at the “New Paths Forward: AI, Humanity, and the Next Era of Education” symposium hosted by Loomis Chaffee on June 3. We’ll be previewing three different chapters from our upcoming book, and the program is full of many excellent facilitators.
All these and more, enjoy!
Peter
See more from Austin Kleon’s reflections on Ursula Le Guin in the Character section.
Browse and search over 14,000 curated articles from past issues online:
FEATURED
Should High School Focus Both On Academic And Career/Technical Skills?
“Just as students who plan to go to college can get a head start through Advanced Placement programs, high schools, colleges and employers should work together to provide the relevant coursework to engage students in promising career opportunities.”
“On The Death of Daydreaming” And The Absence Of Downtime
“Boredom has a purpose. To understand and harness it, we need to give our minds more opportunities to experience it. In the rest of this post, I will explore the many ways our efforts to conquer boredom through technology have produced unintended consequences, including the near-total capture of our attention, the death of daydreaming, and the end of a healthy sense of anticipation in our daily lives.”
ASSESSMENT
Should Report Cards Have Grades For Both Academics And Behavior?
Five Other Ways To Measure School Performance
Maybe We Don’t Need Tests. Tests Aren’t How PhD’s Are Assessed.
ATHLETICS
CHARACTER
Brains Are Naturally Negative. Here’s How To Make Them More Positive.
How Our Understanding Of “Happiness” Has Changed Over Millennia
“Is it possible that happiness stayed big, and it’s only our way of talking about it that got small? Surely the old understanding, in which the pursuit of happiness is inseparable from shared commitments, hasn’t gone anywhere. On some level, we still know the difference between feeling good and flourishing, between the hedonic and the eudaemonic, between the algorithm’s next suggestion and the difficult and uncertain path toward a meaningful existence.”
“Sitting Quietly, Doing Nothing, Spring Comes, And The Grass Grows By Itself”
CURRICULUM
DIVERSITY/INCLUSION
HIGHER ED
A Gift Agreement, And A College Presidency
“Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?” (Visualization, May, 2025)
HUMANITIES
On The Challenges Of Being A History Teacher These Days
“With a curriculum that includes slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, two world wars and the Civil Rights Movement, American history teachers are used to venturing into emotionally charged subjects. Walking students through the unsettling complexities of the past has never been an easy job. But as history is about to take center stage in 2026 for 250th anniversary celebrations of the nation’s founding, there are growing signs that the work of teaching about the country’s past has become harder than ever.”
On Taking The Time To Debate Extremists
“Curtis Yarvin, the computer engineer turned neo-monarchist blogger… was in town to debate Danielle Allen, a prominent political theorist and democracy advocate at Harvard. From the moment the event was announced, some wondered why Professor Allen would risk lending legitimacy to such an extreme figure by debating him.”
LEADERSHIP
What Is “Grace-Based Leadership”?
“CEO As Chief Resilience Officer”
Cooperation As The Overlooked Leadership Skill
“How Can Leaders Overcome Cognitive Bias?”
LEARNING SCIENCE
READING/WRITING
“Re/Marks On Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, And Justice”
“Annotation—the seemingly simple act of marking a text—is often diminished as a marginal practice. It is prohibited in physical objects and considered irrelevant to social and political concerns. But what if annotation were reimagined as a critical and civic literacy that can inscribe public memory, struggles for justice, and social change?”
SAFETY
SUSTAINABILITY
“What’s The Carbon Footprint Of Using ChatGPT?”
“I am not saying that AI energy demand, on aggregate, is not a problem. It is, even if it’s “just” of a similar magnitude to the other sectors that we need to electrify, such as cars, heating, or parts of industry. It’s just that individuals querying chatbots is a relatively small part of AI's total energy consumption. That’s how both of these facts can be true at the same time.”
TECH
WORKPLACE
GENERAL
A.I. Update
A.I. UPDATE
Spiritual AI companions, student skills, supporting faculty, and more
Excellent posts this week.
First in the features, for your curriculum, see the post about the skills students need in an age of AI. You’ll be hearing more from me in the future about how, in an age of AI assistants, everyone is a manager. It’s essential that students understand the necessary skills for this role.
Also in the features, see the post about the continued emergence of AI companions — now for people’s spiritual lives. What’s emerging is not healthy, and I’ll keep banging the drum that the social impact of AI may be more significant than the work related impact. Certainly, we do not yet have the right guardrails in place, and the psychological cost is already significant. Couple the disconcerting stories in the feature with Mark Zuckerberg announcing (see Tech/AI: social) that Meta is leaning in to AI companions, and our alarm bells should be already flashing. In schools, we want to think about fostering conversation with students about healthy, prosocial AI use.
Also this week, the tech/AI: education section is particularly robust.
All this and more, enjoy!
Peter
See the feature for the growing impact of AI companionship.
TECH/AI: FEATURED
“With AI Agents, All Students Need Management And Leadership Skills”
“If students (and educators themselves!) are to thrive in a future populated by AI agents, the ability to "prompt" an AI for an immediate response is only the beginning. The more profound skills will revolve around effectively and responsibly managing these autonomous systems. It's about learning to direct AI at a higher level, much like a good manager guides a team or an individual.”
“People Are Losing Loved Ones To AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies”
“Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament… The replies to her story were full of similar anecdotes about loved ones suddenly falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania, supernatural delusion, and arcane prophecy — all of it fueled by AI… To make matters worse, there are influencers and content creators actively exploiting this phenomenon, presumably drawing viewers into similar fantasy worlds. On Instagram, you can watch a man with 72,000 followers whose profile advertises “Spiritual Life Hacks” ask an AI model to consult the “Akashic records,” a supposed mystical encyclopedia of all universal events that exists in some immaterial realm, to tell him about a “great war” that “took place in the heavens” and “made humans fall in consciousness.””
TECH/AI: EDUCATION
How Duolingo Has Turned Course Generation Upside Down With AI
“Duolingo's AI-powered expansion reveals three critical shifts in instructional design: 1. Role transformation: Human IDs are evolving from content creators to AI orchestrators, prompt engineers, and quality guardians. 2. Process acceleration: What once took years now takes months, with AI handling scale while humans ensure quality. 3. Evaluation revolution: Continuous, real-time assessment is replacing traditional episodic evaluation”
On Agency, AI, And How Education Is Evolving
“It means you still need knowledge, but now that pyramid of knowledge gets different. Rather than having mostly declarative, meaning memorization, and procedural knowledge, meaning how to run equations, you’re also gonna need conceptual and epistemic knowledge. Meaning, what is the concept behind what I’m learning? For example, in history, a concept would be geography is destiny. In exponentials, the concept would be deceiving, then explosive. You’re gonna need to understand the depth of that rather than just the procedural aspects. And then you’re gonna need to understand the epistemic of the discipline. Why do I use mathematics to solve this kind of problem, and how do I do so?”
“What Students Are Saying About Teachers Using A.I. For Schoolwork”
“We asked students: Are students cheating when they use A.I. for help with their schoolwork? Or is it a helpful tool that can support learning? Many of our respondents said it depends on how you use it. But others worried that the technology was becoming a crutch and that, eventually, it may stop adolescents from learning to think for themselves. Read a selection of their responses below.”
How To Scaffold Faculty Experimentation With AI
“Faculty don’t need another mandate. They need space. They need structure. And most of all, they need support that respects their expertise while helping them grow into a rapidly changing landscape. The Structured Sandbox Model isn’t about pushing AI into every classroom. It’s about creating the conditions where thoughtful experimentation feels possible—where faculty can move from What is this? to How might I use this? to What does good use actually look like in my context?”
“AI Makes The Humanities More Important, But Also A Lot Weirder”
“Language models are a genuinely novel teaching tool. Their impact is still uncertain. What that means is that now is exactly the time when people who are genuinely passionate about teaching and learning for its own sake — not as a scorecard to judge politicians, not as a source of corporate profit — need to take an active role.”
“How I’m Using AI Bots With My Writing Classes”
“I’ve tried two strategies with my students this year that have totally shifted my thinking about using AI in the language arts classroom, and I think they’re worth sharing. I hope my experience will encourage other writing teachers to explore AI and see if they can increase the support their students want during the writing process.”
Enhancing Student Creativity With AI Requires Explicit Guidance
TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
TECH/AI: SOCIAL
Meta Announces A Goal To Foster AI Relationships
“But the average person wants more connection than they have. There's a lot of concern people raise like, "Is this going to replace real-world, physical, in-person connections?" And my default is that the answer to that is probably not. There are all these things that are better about physical connections when you can have them. But the reality is that people just don't have as much connection as they want. They feel more alone a lot of the time than they would like.”
TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS
“AI Generated Likeness Of Murder Victim Forgives His Killer In Court”
“[She] had a thought. What if her brother, who was 37 and had done three combat tours of duty in the U.S. Army, could speak for himself at the sentencing? And what would he tell… the man convicted of manslaughter in his case? The answer came on May 1, when [she] clicked the play button on a laptop in a courtroom in Maricopa County, Ariz.”
The AI Avatar For Agatha Christie Is Teaching A Class