Preparing Students for the AI-Enhanced Workforce— from insidehighered.com by Ray Schroeder Our graduating and certificate-completing students need documented generative AI skills, and they need them now.
The common adage repeated again and again is that AI will not take your job; a person with AI skills will replace you. The learners we are teaching this fall who will be entering, re-entering or seeking advancement in the workforce at the end of the year or in the spring must become demonstrably skilled in using generative AI. The vast majority of white-collar jobs will demand the efficiencies and flexibilities defined by generative AI now and in the future. As higher education institutions, we will be called upon to document and validate generative AI skills.
Think all incoming teachers have a natural facility with technology just because most are digital natives? Think again.
Teacher preparation programs have a long way to go in preparing prospective educators to teach with technology, according to a report released September 12 by the International Society for Technology in Education, a nonprofit.
In fact, more than half of incoming teachers—56 percent—lack confidence in using learning technology prior to entering the classroom, according to survey data included with the report.
AI-Powered Higher Ed — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman What a House of Commons round table discussion tells us about how AI will impact the purpose of higher education
In this week’s blog post I’ll summarise the discussion and share what we agreed would be the most likely new model of assessment in HE in the post-AI world.
But this in turn raises a bigger question: why do people go to university, and what is the role of higher education in the twenty first century? Is it to create the workforce of the future? Or an institution for developing deep and original domain expertise? Can and should it be both?
In my previous position with Richmond Public Schools, we chose to dive in with computational thinking, programming and coding, in that order. I recommend building computational thinking (CT) competency first by helping students recognize and apply the four elements of CT to familiar problems/situations. Computational thinking should come first because it’s the highest order of problem-solving, is a cross-curricular skill and is understandable to both machines and humans. Here are the four components of CT and how to help students understand them.
They talked instead about issues like pay, stress and the sense that they no longer had the solid backing of school administrators.
Sue Harper, who retired this summer from Kreeger Elementary in Fowlerville, blamed what she called “bulldozer parents.”
…
“I have never been one to quit anything, and teaching is my passion, but this is not teaching,” one teacher wrote. “This is hours of endless paperwork, this is social work, this is counseling, this is parenting, this is babysitting, this is coaching, this is everything but teaching.”
Now a change management coordinator for Fifth Third Bank, she said, “I don’t take the stress from my job home. I don’t feel guilty, like I always could be doing more for someone.”
Thousands of experienced teachers have retired or left the profession in the years since the COVID-19 pandemic first closed schools and shifted classes to Zoom.
Teachers say they’re burnt out, tired of a lack of support and lack of respect, feeling the impact of the increasingly acrimonious politics surrounding public education.
So, in addition to asking ChatGPT to think like a school communications professional, a principal, or a teacher, what if we asked ChatGPT to think like the populations we’re serving, as a way of improving the education (or UX) we’re delivering?
Why I Keep Teaching — from edutopia.org by Rachel Jorgensen A veteran educator explains why, despite the many challenges, she continues to try to change students’ lives, in turn enriching her own.
EVERY TIME I SHOW UP FOR WORK, A STUDENT MIGHT CHANGE MY LIFE FOR THE BETTER
EVERY TIME I SHOW UP FOR WORK, A STUDENT MIGHT CHANGE MY LIFE FOR THE BETTER
MY WORK HAS INVISIBLE RIPPLE EFFECTS
34 Ways to Quiet a Rambunctious Class — from edutopia.org by Daniel Leonard From “Silent 20” to imaginary marshmallows, these teacher-tested strategies for all grade levels can help you snap an unruly classroom back to attention.
Per EdSurge:
‘THE MOTH’ GOES TO SCHOOL: For more than a decade, the nonprofit behind the popular storytelling podcast The Moth has run workshops in schools to help students share impactful stories from their lives. Now the group started a spin-off podcast, Grown, highlighting those student stories. Here’s what they’re learning, and why they say storytelling needs to be taught in schools.
The Mass Exodus of Teachers — from educationoneducation.substack.com by Jeannine Proctor Understanding Why Educators Are Fleeing the Classroom and How to Bring Them Back
Stemming the tide will require nuance, empathy, and listening to what teachers say they need. While pay raises are indispensable, they alone won’t be enough. Districts must take an integrated approach that also addresses unmanageable workloads, lack of resources, and toxic school cultures.
Some best practices include utilizing multi-classroom teaching models, providing duty-free “coverage” periods, and hiring support staff to shoulder non-instructional burdens. Investing in mentoring and leadership opportunities can stem the turnover of principals and administrators too. Public recognition and appreciation can also go a long way.
Most importantly, we must work to restore teacher well-being, purpose, and passion.
From DSC: The primary things that would help this very troubling situation:
Dee’s analysis found that since the pandemic the number of students who were chronically absent nearly doubled to about 13.6 million, with 1.8 million of them in California.
Compared with before the pandemic, Dee found that about 6.5 million additional students became chronically absent in 2021-22, including more than 1 million in California.
The idea of default is also an important idea. If we do it by invitation, what we have noticed is that those who know about it know to say yes to the invitation. If it is a default schedule, and then you have to opt out, then our ability to address equity and enrollment for our low-income students and students of color, it makes us much more successful.
The number of people studying for careers in education has been declining for years. At the same time, schools have struggled to hold on to new teachers: Studies indicate that about 44 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years.
Then the pandemic came along, hammering teachers and the profession as a whole.
“The first three years of teaching are really, really hard even in a perfect school system,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. So for teachers who entered the teaching profession at any point during the pandemic, “this has been a helluva ride.”
A study from World Remit shows that the cost of school supplies in the United States has increased by over 25% compared with 2022.
Though inflation is the lowest it has been since March 2021, high prices are still stressing shoppers and increasing their reliance on local and national back-to-school drives. The nonprofit organizations that sponsor those drives, in turn, are struggling to meet the growing demand.
Excerpt from Tom Barrett’s Dialogic #329:The Transformative Power of Compassionate Leadership
Your Next Steps: ?Commit to action and turn words into works
Reflect on your current leadership style and identify opportunities to incorporate more compassionate practices. Consider the Appreciative Inquiry model to guide this process.
Develop an empathy-driven approach to problem-solving and team dynamics, focusing on fostering a culture of understanding, collaboration, and mutual respect.
Revisit your feedback mechanisms and explore how they can be made more compassionate. Consider how critique can be delivered with kindness to empower, rather than tear down.
Against that backdrop, Ken Montgomery, co-founder of Design Tech High, known as D-Tech, and Keeanna Warren, who just became the CEO of the Purdue Polytechnic High School network, joined me to talk about their school designs, in particular the importance of:
helping students connect to something bigger than the school itself;
offering competency-based learning pathways with a transformed assessment system;
allowing students to find their creative purpose aligned to the common good;
and building a more permeable school that is connected to the community and offers a deep sense of belonging.
They also talked about the role of AI (artificial intelligence) and the anxiety that their students feel around its emergence, as well as the barriers that arise to building school models that break the traditional molds—from policy to human capital.
I get weary of AI hype auto-generated by *gasp* ChatGPT without any real applicability to the classroom. I’m collecting blogs of teachers who are in the classroom actually use AI and have practical, real examples to share. Got links for those teachers? Enough of the junk.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., July 26, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — A new survey of teens conducted for Junior Achievement by the research firm Big Village shows that nearly half of teens (44%) are “likely” to use AI to do their schoolwork instead of doing it themselves this coming school year. However, most teens (60%) consider using AI in this way as “cheating.” The survey of 1,006 13- to 17-year-olds was conducted by Big Village from July 6 through 11, 2023.
From DSC: In a competitive society as we have in the U.S. and when many of our K-12 learning ecosystems are designed to create game players, we shouldn’t be surprised to see a significant amount of our students using AI to “win”/game the system.
As it becomes appropriate for each student, offering more choice and control should help to allow more students to pursue what they want to learn about. They won’t be as interested in gaming the system if they truly want to learn about something.
DC: Interesting to note the word “feeling” here. I’ve often wondered about the place/role of emotion in learning (both positive & negative).
…“the mental state students are in while learning, representing the intersection of feeling and thinking”. https://t.co/Q1z5zMgmvR
— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) July 26, 2023
Related topics from DSC:
Getting someone’s attention
Having the information sink in and mean something to someone
Inspiration
Goal setting
Motivation
Metacognition?
Getting psyched to try something new out!
From DSC: Engaged students do not just absorb content, they try to make meaning of what they study. Engaged learners ***care about*** the subject, ***feel motivated or excited*** to learn, and take ownership of their learning.
There are many reasons for the paucity of Black teachers. But a June 2023 analysis of college students in Michigan highlights a particularly leaky part of the teacher pipeline: teacher preparation programs inside colleges and universities.
The status quo is far from inevitable. In fact, we know the solution to this reading crisis, but we are not using the solution at scale. More than 50 years of research compiled by the National Institutes of Health, and continued through further research, provides a clear picture of how skilled reading develops and of effective literacy instruction. These strategies and methods—collectively called scientifically based reading instruction, which is grounded in the science of reading—could dramatically reduce the rate of reading failure. Past estimates have found that while 3 in 10 children struggle to read (and that rate has grown higher since the pandemic), research indicates that more than 90% of all students could learn to read if they had access to teachers who employed scientifically based reading instruction.
Post-AI Assessment Design — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman A simple, three-step guide on how to design assessments in a post-AI world
Excerpt:
Step 1: Write Inquiry-Based Objectives
Inquiry-based objectives focus not just on the acquisition of knowledge but also on the development of skills and behaviours, like critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration and research skills.
They do this by requiring learners not just to recall or “describe back” concepts that are delivered via text, lecture or video. Instead, inquiry-based objectives require learners to construct their own understanding through the process of investigation, analysis and questioning.
Just for a minute, consider how education would change if the following were true –
AIs “hallucinated” less than humans
AIs could write in our own voices
AIs could accurately do math
AIs understood the unique academic (and eventually developmental) needs of each student and adapt instruction to that student
AIs could teach anything any student wanted or need to know any time of day or night
AIs could do this at a fraction of the cost of a human teacher or professor
Fall 2026 is three years away. Do you have a three year plan? Perhaps you should scrap it and write a new one (or at least realize that your current one cannot survive). If you run an academic institution in 2026 the same way you ran it in 2022, you might as well run it like you would have in 1920. If you run an academic institution in 2030 (or any year when AI surpasses human intelligence) the same way you ran it in 2022, you might as well run it like you would have in 1820. AIs will become more intelligent than us, perhaps in 10-20 years (LeCun), though there could be unanticipated breakthroughs that lower the time frame to a few years or less (Benjio); it’s just a question of when, not “if.”
On one creative use of AI — from aiandacademia.substack.com by Bryan Alexander A new practice with pedagogical possibilities
Excerpt:
Look at those material items again. The voiceover? Written by an AI and turned into audio by software. The images? Created by human prompts in Midjourney. The music is, I think, human created. And the idea came from a discussion between a human and an AI?
…
How might this play out in a college or university class?
Imagine assignments which require students to craft such a video. Start from film, media studies, or computer science classes. Students work through a process:
I continue to try to imagine ways generative AI can impact teaching and learning, including learning materials like textbooks. Earlier this week I started wondering – what if, in the future, educators didn’t write textbooks at all? What if, instead, we only wrote structured collections of highly crafted prompts? Instead of reading a static textbook in a linear fashion, the learner would use the prompts to interact with a large language model.These prompts could help learners ask for things like:
overviews and in-depth explanations of specific topics in a specific sequence,
examples that the learner finds personally relevant and interesting,
interactive practice – including open-ended exercises – with immediate, corrective feedback,
the structure of the relationships between ideas and concepts,
Designed for K12 and Higher-Ed Educators & Administrators, this conference aims to provide a platform for educators, administrators, AI experts, students, parents, and EdTech leaders to discuss the impact of AI on education, address current challenges and potentials, share their perspectives and experiences, and explore innovative solutions. A special emphasis will be placed on including students’ voices in the conversation, highlighting their unique experiences and insights as the primary beneficiaries of these educational transformations.
The use of generative AI in K-12 settings is complex and still in its infancy. We need to consider how these tools can enhance student creativity, improve writing skills, and be transparent with students about how generative AI works so they can better understand its limitations. As with any new tech, our students will be exposed to it, and it is our task as educators to help them navigate this new territory as well-informed, curious explorers.
The education ministry has emphasized the need for students to understand artificial intelligence in new guidelines released Tuesday, setting out how generative AI can be integrated into schools and the precautions needed to address associated risks.
Students should comprehend the characteristics of AI, including its advantages and disadvantages, with the latter including personal information leakages and copyright infringement, before they use it, according to the guidelines. They explicitly state that passing off reports, essays or any other works produced by AI as one’s own is inappropriate.
Thanks to the rapid development of artificial intelligence tools like Dall-E and ChatGPT, my brother-in-law has been wrestling with low-level anxiety: Is it a good idea to steer his son down this path when AI threatens to devalue the work of creatives? Will there be a job for someone with that skill set in 10 years? He’s unsure. But instead of burying his head in the sand, he’s doing what any tech-savvy parent would do: He’s teaching his son how to use AI.
In recent months the family has picked up subscriptions to AI services. Now, in addition to drawing and sculpting and making movies and video games, my nephew is creating the monsters of his dreams with Midjourney, a generative AI tool that uses language prompts to produce images.
To bridge this knowledge gap, I decided to make a quick little dictionary of AI terms specifically tailored for educators worldwide. Initially created for my own benefit, I’ve reworked my own AI Dictionary for Educators and expanded it to help my fellow teachers embrace the advancements AI brings to education.
After 20 years as a classroom teacher & senior leader, I've collated lists of all the best stories and non-fiction I've bought, bookmarked or reviewed in my career and put together this collection of recommended books for children: from EYFS to KS5. https://t.co/8tGflWVXKS
In particular, TutorND’s emphasis on applying principles of cognitive science – the science of our how minds work – in tutoring practice has not only bolstered the interest and confidence of some of its tutors to pursue teaching, but also strengthened their instructional skills and meaningfully contributed to PK-12 student growth.
Today, TutorND trains and supports 175 tutors in schools across the greater South Bend community and across the country. Given that these tutors are students, faculty, and staff interested in cognitive science research and its application to student learning, they’re able to bridge theory and practice, assess the effectiveness of instructional moves, and foster learning experiences for students that are rigorous, affirming, and equitable.
Yet the history and research of intelligent tutors show that using the right design to harness the power of chatbots like ChatGPT can make deeper, individualized learning available to almost anyone. For example, if people use ChatGPT to ask students questions that prompt them to revise or explain their work, students will have better learning gains. Since ChatGPT has access to far more knowledge than Aristotle ever did, it has great potential for providing tutoring to students to help them learn more than they would otherwise.
13 Formative Assessments That Inspire Creativity — from edutopia.org by Paige Tutt Sometimes mixing in formative assessments that go a step beyond exit slips and low-stakes quizzes can inject some fun—and creativity—into learning.
Excerpt:
Quick checks for understanding aren’t new, of course, but when time allows, occasionally injecting an element of creativity into formative assessments can deliver unexpected benefits. For example—regardless of a student’s artistic talent—research suggests that drawing the information they’re learning can increase student recall by nearly double. And when kids are encouraged to tap into their imagination to show what they know, they tend to ask more innovative questions of themselves, brainstorm fresh solutions to problems, and synthesize material in original and surprising ways.
Here are 13 formative assessment strategies that lean into creativity—inspired by the work of several Edutopia contributors, and from Finley’s handy list of quick checks for understanding.
Also see:
Is This Elementary School Near Pittsburgh the Future of Education? — from smithsonianmag.com by Kellie B. Gormly; with thanks to Tom Vander Ark out on Twitter for this resource Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle School is an innovative blend of children’s museum and classroom
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
At Seneca Valley’s Ehrman Crest Elementary and Middle School, K-6 students are benefiting from an unusual collaboration. School leaders, architects and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh teamed up on the $63 million project,which opened in August 2022 after 790 construction days. With a student capacity of 1,400, the 200,000-square-foot facility takes a novel approach, forgoing the traditional school design for the playful, interactive, colorful elements of a children’s museum.Time magazine declared it one of the “Best Inventions of 2022.”
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Matilda McQuaid, acting curatorial director at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, says this is the first time she has heard of a museum collaborating with a school to create a new environment from the ground up.
From DSC: I love this collaboration — a children’s museum and a school district! — and the energy and creativity throughout this learning space!
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