Educator’s Notebook #507 (November 16, 2025)
INTRODUCTION
Alternative grading, AI board members, learning science, and more
An excellent issue!
In this week’s features, find an excellent piece by Zaretta Hammond in Cult of Pedagogy on tactical moves to help students build meta-learning skills. Looking to help your students become more self-aware learners? This is a good place to look. Also in the features, see the post from Grading for Growth that explores four pillars for alternative grading. Looking to rethink your assessment practice? Consider starting there.
So many other great posts: leadership, language, learning science… and those are just the L’s!
Among them, find an HBR post on how AI can support governing boards (!). It’s actually a fascinating piece that details a study in which human teams were compared against multi-agent AI teams with the same charge. The researchers observed that the AI teams more often followed best practices, surfaced more diverse perspectives, and accomplished the board goals, while the human teams often allowed individuals to dominate the conversation and lost track of time, and were therefore unable to finish what needed to be done. Both groups also self-assessed. My knee-jerk reaction was defensiveness; maybe this discursiveness is what makes us human and is the source of our creative, messy, human spirit. Surely, this is true. And yet, we will surely also benefit from assistants that help us engage more people and help us reach our goals. Balance, as ever, is key. Who knew we’d live in an age when this was even a topic?
Also, I had a wonderful and wide-ranging conversation with Morva McDonald from NAIS’ New View EDU series about AI, teacher collaboration, the innovation imperative for independent schools, and more. Find a recording here or wherever you get your podcasts.
Also this week, a reader is running some research on high school teacher knowledge of ADHD. If you have 15 minutes to share your experience, he would be grateful. The survey is at this link.
These and much more, enjoy!
Peter
PS. More dates are coming together for the spring.
- January 11-14 – FETC (Orlando, FL)
- Feb 18: NAIS Webinar (online, members)
- February 25-27 – NAIS (Seattle, WA)
- March 9-12 – SXSW EDU (Austin, TX)
- Mar 18: NAIS Webinar (online, members)
Pre-order Irreplaceable: How AI Changes Everything (and Nothing) in Teaching and Learning
The Four Pillars of Alternative Grading. See the feature for more detail.
Browse and search over 15,000 curated articles from past issues online:
FEATURED
“The Four Pillars Of Alternative Grading”
“Clearly Defined Standards… Helpful Feedback… Marks Indicate Progress… Reattempts Without Penalty”
“Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power With “Learn To Learn” Skills”
“We can teach our hearts out, but in the end, only the learner learns. So, how do we get students to own their learning? That’s the question I’m answering in Rebuilding Students’ Learning Power (Corwin, 2025). Rather than simply talking to students about how their brain learns or trying to motivate them, we want to couple these approaches with specific tools and moves that help them become a good information processor that makes learning sticky. We start by offering them a set of learn-to-learn skills.”
ADOLESCENCE
ARTS
ASSESSMENT
CHARACTER
“As We Grow Old, We Endure Many Losses, Yet We Become Happier. Why?”
Five Steps To Calm Down
“What To Do When A Joke Hurts Your Feelings”
CREATIVITY
CURRICULUM
DIVERSITY/INCLUSION
“Teachers Value ‘Patriotic’ Education More Than Most Americans”
“More than 80% of K-12 teachers thought it was “very” or “extremely” important to teach students about the Constitution’s core values, and 62% found it similarly crucial to teach that America is a fundamentally good country. In both cases, teachers were more likely than parents or the public at large to favor teaching these concepts.”
GOVERNMENT
Jim Ryan Details Government Pressure Campaign For His Resignation
Atul Gawande On The Shutdown Of USAID
“As of November 5th, it estimated that U.S.A.I.D.’s dismantling has already caused the deaths of six hundred thousand people, two-thirds of them children. The toll is appalling and will continue to grow.”
HIGHER ED
HUMANITIES
LANGUAGE
More Reflections On Language Learning In A Time Of AI Translation
6-7 Is The Word Of The Year For One Dictionary
“Why Teach World Languages… In An Age Of Automated Translation?”
“In spite of, and due to, automatic language translation, the goal of foreign language education in CCR’s model is to render students fluent in one to two more languages than their own native one, by starting during early childhood and deep learning. CCR advocates for second language acquisition due to the following benefits:”
LEADERSHIP
Four Tips For Making And Communicating Tough Decisions
Three Stakeholder Relationships For Turning Around School Culture
Can AI Replace Board Members?
“AI chairs reliably drew in every participant, checked for alignment, and gave floor for expressing dissenting views. Human chairs, instead, often let vocal members dominate while others remained on the sideline.”
LEARNING SCIENCE
A Dive Into How Motivation Works In Schools, And How To Improve It
Marshall Memory: An App To Help You Remember Things
“Marshall Memory sends automatic, spaced retrieval prompts to commit items like these to long-term memory – while giving you cognitive "strength training.”"
PEDAGOGY
READING/WRITING
“How To Reverse Outline An Academic Article”
Whole Books Or Excerpts? Does It Make A Difference?
Five Principles For Teaching Writing
STEM
TECH
Novelist Paul Kingsnorth with Ross Douthat On Technology Today
Playing Video Games In Person With Others Correlates With Better Wellbeing
Technology Is Making Trust More Difficult In Schools
Duckworth: “The Farther The Phone, The More Restrictive The Policy, The Better The Outcome”
WORKPLACE
GENERAL
A.I. Update
A.I. UPDATE
AI companions, tutoring, world-building, agents, and more
So much continues to happen…!
I trimmed the six features down to the two about AI companions. One is stories of people who found love with AI companions in mid-life. This is happening more often than we think. The other looks more holistically at AI companions at all stages of life, but again through what they tell us about human love. It’s surprising that, already, this is not a niche topic.
And there were still four other posts I wanted to put in features. Find them in other sections: education (AI-supported tutoring is showing measurable gains), ethics and risk (AI now rivals humans in political persuasion), industry development (AI labs are building world models to prepare for embodied AI), and uses and applications (how to assess your workplace for agentic AI). Each of these marks significant advances that will change the texture of our lives. We live in remarkable times.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
Looking for a mechanism for measuring your AI progress? The AI Innovation Index is designed to assess progress with AI readiness across students, staff, leadership, culture, and more. See the Education section for more detail.
TECH/AI: FEATURED
3 Stories Of People In Their 40s and 50s Who “Fell In Love AI Chatbots — And Found Something Real”
“How do you end up with an A.I. lover? Some turned to them during hard times in their real-world marriages, while others were working through past trauma. Though critics have sounded alarms about dangers like delusional thinking, research from M.I.T. has found that these relationships can be therapeutic, providing “always-available support” and significantly reducing loneliness. We spoke with three people in their 40s and 50s about the wonders — and anxieties — of romance with a chatbot.”
An Excellent Survey Of Research On AI Companions And Human Love
“The global scale and reach of AI companions is astonishing… These numbers tell us three things. One, AI-human romance isn’t niche—it’s mainstream, especially among young adults. Two, globally, gender is nearly balanced—slightly more male than female—or nearly 50-50 across major reports. And three, most users dip in for comfort or curiosity rather than long-term attachment—suggesting that what people seek from AI love may not be “romance,” but reliable empathy. That gap itself may teach us something important about what people really want from AI love.”
TECH/AI: EDUCATION
On AI Fluency Vs AI Literacy
“Cheating On Process-Oriented Assignments Using AI Is Harder Than I Thought”
“This is a language of metacognition [students] likely do not know. They have no ground truth to draw from because they may never have been asked to observe, let alone describe, their own cognitive process in this way. They can’t tell the AI how to forge their identity because they don’t even know what that identity is. It takes extensive language and cognitive skill to do so, if it’s even clear what’s desired.”
Another Study Shows AI Support Can Improve Tutoring
AI Tutoring Is Getting Better
Clever Releases Its 20205 Classroom Of The Future Report
More And More College Instructors Are Using AI In Teaching And Learning
“Look across college campuses and you can find evidence for any point you’d like to make about generative AI. Professors have used it to design courses and are thrilled with the results. Others tried and abandoned it, feeling disappointed or frustrated. Some AI users, like Davis, find the process “weird” but are willing to engage.”
Students Want To Use AI, But They Also Want Guidance
An Excellent Framework For AI Engagement In Schools
“The AI Innovation Index positions school systems to 1) gauge their AI innovation progress vs national benchmarks and sector-wide averages and 2) identify top-performing peers to learn from. The Index measures school system AI innovation across three pillars.”
Stanford Updates Its AI Use Policies For Academic Integrity
“Emerging Patterns of GenAI Use In K-12 Science And Math Education”
TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK
“AI Rivals Humans In Political Persuasion”
“Participants showed more openness to opposing views when the arguments were attributed to AI, perceiving it as more objective. The findings raise concerns about potential misinformation and increased polarization, with researchers urging caution in utilizing AI in political discourse.”
TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
“Agentic AI: Nine Essential Questions”
What Is Fei-Fei Li’s World Model Company?
Yann LeCun Reportedly To Leave Meta To Build World Model Startup
Fei-Fei Li Pivots To Building World Models, The Next AI Frontier
“Spatial Intelligence is the scaffolding upon which our cognition is built. It’s at work when we passively observe or actively seek to create. It drives our reasoning and planning, even on the most abstract topics. And it’s essential to the way we interact—verbally or physically, with our peers or with the environment itself. While most of us aren’t revealing new truths on the level of Eratosthenes most days, we routinely think in the same way—making sense of a complex world by perceiving it through our senses, then leveraging an intuitive understanding of how it works in physical, spatial terms. Unfortunately, today’s AI doesn’t think like this yet.”
“AI Diffusion Report: Where AI Is Most Used, Developed, And Built”
Google’s “Introduction To Agents” - A More Technical Look
TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS
AI Generated Ads Are Going Mainstream
What 47,000 ChatGPT Conversations Reveal About Humanity
“Almost 1 in 10 users said the main reason was for social interaction… OpenAI estimated last month that 0.15 percent of its users each week — more than a million people — show signs of being emotionally reliant on the chatbot.”
How To Assess Your Organization For Use Of Agentic AI [Podcast]
Google Maps Adds AI Features
GenAI Aids Handwriting Deciphering In Historical Documents
“I tried it out on transcribing some handwritten texts and the results were shocking: not only was the transcription very nearly perfect—at expert human levels—but it did a something else unexpected that can only be described as genuine, human-like, expert level reasoning. It is the most amazing thing I have seen an LLM do, and it was unprompted, entirely accidental. What follows are my first impressions of this new model with all the requisite caveats that entails. But if my observations hold true, this will be a big deal when it’s released.”
On Status Quo Bias In GenAI Adoption In The Workplace
Change Roadmap For AI Agents In An Organization