Virtual Coaching Videos: Answering Your Questions — from catlintucker.com by Catlin Tucker (Emphasis below by DSC — and I would like to thank Catlin and people like her who are sharing their knowledge — free of charge — as they help others learn and grow!)
I am excited to announce the launch of a new video series on YouTube called “Virtual Coaching.” I have the privilege of working with thousands of educators every year who are expanding their teaching toolboxes to include blended learning models, UDL, and student-led instructional strategies. I understand how challenging it can be to shift practice. I encourage the educators I work with to reach out if they hit bumps, have questions, or need support as they implement new instructional models. Every year, I field hundreds of questions from the educators I work with and people who read my blog or listen to my podcast.
Having a reliable resource to ask questions and receive timely, practical responses when trying something new is crucial. That’s the goal of my new video series, “Virtual Coaching.” I want to answer your questions, tapping into my experiences and resources as a teacher, coach, and professional learning facilitator. I hope these videos will be valuable as you strive to design and facilitate engaging, effective, and equitable learning experiences.
Each virtual coaching video is designed to provide you with actionable advice that you can apply immediately. These videos cover various topics, including implementing new teaching strategies, overcoming classroom challenges, and exploring innovative ways to engage students. Time is a limited commodity, so I keep my videos short and sweet. The goal is to provide my community of educators with support, insights, and inspiration without overwhelming you or consuming too much of your time.
As someone who regularly works with teachers on topics like blended learning, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), and student-led learning, one recurring theme I encounter is control. There’s a pervasive fear among educators when it comes to releasing control and allowing students to take more ownership and responsibility for their learning. This begs the question: Why don’t we trust our students? What is it that we really fear?
If we maintain all the control, we hinder our students’ ability to develop the essential skills they will need in the future. The rapidly changing demands of the workplace and life require individuals who are self-motivated, adaptable, and capable of critical thinking and problem-solving. By not allowing students to take more responsibility for their learning, we risk leaving them unprepared for these future challenges.
From DSC: This item re: control makes me think of this graphic, which readers of this blog will recognize.
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have developed a VR training system for physicians, aimed at tackling racial and class health disparities.
…
“Ultimately, this virtual reality training system could become a viable tool for practicing communication with diverse patients across different types of health care professions. “There’s no reason why nurses couldn’t also use this across different health care contexts — not just for Black maternal health, but chronic pain, diabetes or some of these other health issues in which we know that there are disparities based on markers of difference such as race or class”.
Two additional VR training modules are under development, aimed at promoting self-reflection by helping medical students to identify their own biases and learn how to mitigate them. The third module will focus on students practicing intercultural communication skills through interactions with a virtual patient, an approach that is seen by the researchers as more cost-effective than recruiting people for role playing with medical students.
From DSC: I’ve often thought that VR could be used to help us walk in someone else’s shoes….to experience things as THEY experience things.
A while back, I wrote about some of my thoughts on generative AI around the copyright issues. Not much has changed since then, but a new article (Academic authors ‘shocked’ after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI) is definitely stirring up all sorts of concerns by academic authors. The basics of that article are that Taylor & Francis sold access to authors’ research to Microsoft for AI development without informing the authors, sparking significant concern among academics and the Society of Authors about transparency, consent, and the implications for authors’ rights and future earnings.
The stir can be seen as both valid and redundant. Two folks’ points stick out to me in this regard.
What aspects of teaching should remain human? — from hechingerreport.org by Chris Berdik Even techno optimists hesitate to say teaching is best left to the bots, but there’s a debate about where to draw the line
ATLANTA — Science teacher Daniel Thompson circulated among his sixth graders at Ron Clark Academy on a recent spring morning, spot checking their work and leading them into discussions about the day’s lessons on weather and water. He had a helper: As Thompson paced around the class, peppering them with questions, he frequently turned to a voice-activated AI to summon apps and educational videos onto large-screen smartboards.
When a student asked, “Are there any animals that don’t need water?” Thompson put the question to the AI. Within seconds, an illustrated blurb about kangaroo rats appeared before the class.
Nitta said there’s something “deeply profound” about human communication that allows flesh-and-blood teachers to quickly spot and address things like confusion and flagging interest in real time.
While the traditional model of education is entrenched, emerging technologies like deep learning promise to shake its foundations and usher in an age of personalized, adaptive, and egalitarian education. It is expected to have a significant impact across higher education in several key ways.
…
…deep learning introduces adaptivity into the learning process. Unlike a typical lecture, deep learning systems can observe student performance in real-time. Confusion over a concept triggers instant changes to instructional tactics. Misconceptions are identified early and remediated quickly. Students stay in their zone of proximal development, constantly challenged but never overwhelmed. This adaptivity prevents frustration and stagnation.
InstructureCon 24 Conference Notes — from onedtech.philhillaa.com by Glenda Morgan Another solid conference from the market leader, even with unclear roadmap
The new stuff: AI
Instructure rolled out multiple updates and improvements – more than last year. These included many AI-based or focused tools and services as well as some functional improvements. I’ll describe the AI features first.
Sal Khan was a surprise visitor to the keynote stage to announce the September availability of the full suite of AI-enabled Khanmigo Teacher Tools for Canvas users. The suite includes 20 tools, such as tools to generate lesson plans and quiz questions and write letters of recommendation. Next year, they plan to roll out tools for students themselves to use.
…
Other AI-based features include.
Discussion tool summaries and AI-generated responses…
The landscape of education is on the brink of a profound transformation, driven by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence. This shift was highlighted recently by Andrej Karpathy’s announcement of Eureka Labs, a venture aimed at creating an “AI-native” school. As we look ahead, it’s clear that the integration of AI in education will reshape how we learn, teach, and think about schooling altogether.
…
Traditional textbooks will begin to be replaced by interactive, AI-powered learning materials that adapt in real-time to a student’s progress.
…
As we approach 2029, the line between physical and virtual learning environments will blur significantly.
Curriculum design will become more flexible and personalized, with AI systems suggesting learning pathways based on each student’s interests, strengths, and career aspirations. … The boundaries between formal education and professional development will blur, creating a continuous learning ecosystem.
.
Solving chronic absenteeism involves tackling big structural problems like transportation and infrastructure. But we also have to make our schools places where young people want to learn. Too many teens, in particular, had negative feelings about school even before the pandemic. Yale researchers conducting a national survey of high school students found most teens spent their days “tired,” “stressed,” and “bored.” Fewer than 3 in 100 reported feeling interested while in school.
Decades of research prove that students learn more when they experience high levels of academic engagement and social belonging in school.
Students at all four schools experience internships, work-based learning and partnerships with community organizations, which they said make classwork feel more relevant.
An internet search for free learning resources will likely return a long list that includes some useful sites amid a sea of not-really-free and not-very-useful sites.
To help teachers more easily find the best free and freemium sites they can use in their classrooms and curricula, I’ve curated a list that describes the top free/freemium sites for learning.
In some cases, Tech & Learning has reviewed the site in detail, and those links are included so readers can find out more about how to make the best use of the online materials. In all cases, the websites below provide valuable educational tools, lessons, and ideas, and are worth exploring further.
How to Kill Student Curiosity in 5 Steps (and What to Do Instead) — from edweek.org by Olivia Odileke The unintentional missteps teachers and administrators are making
I’ve observed five major ways we’re unintentionally stifling curiosity and issue a call to action for educators, administrators, and policymakers to join the curiosity revolution:
“Learning is one of the most personal things that people do; engineering provides problem-solving methods to enable learning at scale. How do we resolve this paradox?“
—Ellen Wagner
Wagner: Learning engineering offers us a process for figuring that out! If we think of learning engineering as a process that can transform research results into learning action there will be evidence to guide that decision-making at each point in the value chain. I want to get people to think of learning engineering as a process for applying research in practice settings, rather than as a professional identity. And by that I mean that learning engineering is a bigger process than what any one person can do on their own.
From DSC: Instructional Designers, Learning Experience Designers, Professors, Teachers, and Directors/Staff of Teaching & Learning Centers will be interested in this article. It made me think of the following graphic I created a while back: .
We can help students deal with change by using transitions between activities as an opportunity to strengthen their executive functioning, resilience, and independence. Executive functioning development grows cognitive flexibility, working memory, and self-control. These are skills that require guidance and practice, as they do not come naturally.
By using positive language, modeling and co-regulation, we encourage children to be actively involved in planning and making choices. These important life-long skills also increase their social emotional well-being. Our support and intervention can be adjusted based on a child’s skill set and progress.
Tips for Promoting Calm in Preschool — from edutopia.org by Sasha Michaud These strategies help students regulate their emotions, both individually and as a group
Here are some strategies for helping groups regain their focus during transitions:
Whisper: “If you can hear my voice, put your fingers on your nose,” and then wait to see how many children hear and join. Repeat with another body part, sometimes quieter or slightly louder to gain interest.
Ask: ”I’m thinking of an animal (or food, plant, teacher, child, etc.),” and then give three clues. The children listen closely and wait for three fingers to go up (one with each clue) and then guess. You could have them practice wiggling their fingers, or raising their hands to guess.
Sing: “I’ll put my tippy tappy fingers on myyyy… forehead!“ As you sing this body parts song, tap your fingers along different body parts and sing, sort of like another common children’s song, but do random body parts to engage the children as well as ground them in their bodies.
These games have saved me from getting overwhelmed countless times.
Using AI to Support Vocabulary Lessons — from edutopia.org by Monica Burns Seeing AI-generated images of the words they’re learning can help boost elementary students’ engagement.
You can use a chatbot like Gemini or ChatGPT to gather a list of ideas for an upcoming lesson, but let’s take a look at how you can use generative AI tools to create images that help bring vocabulary to life. It’s a topic I’ve covered on my blog and podcast, and I recently had the chance to work with elementary educators in New York to put these ideas into action in their classrooms. .
Meanwhile, a separate survey of faculty released Thursday by Ithaka S+R, a higher education consulting firm, showcased that faculty—while increasingly familiar with AI—often do not know how to use it in classrooms. Two out of five faculty members are familiar with AI, the Ithaka report found, but only 14 percent said they are confident in their ability to use AI in their teaching. Just slightly more (18 percent) said they understand the teaching implications of generative AI.
“Serious concerns about academic integrity, ethics, accessibility, and educational effectiveness are contributing to this uncertainty and hostility,” the Ithaka report said.
The diverging views about AI are causing friction. Nearly a third of students said they have been warned to not use generative AI by professors, and more than half (59 percent) are concerned they will be accused of cheating with generative AI, according to the Pearson report, which was conducted with Morning Consult and surveyed 800 students.
What teachers want from AI — from hechingerreport.org by Javeria Salman When teachers designed their own AI tools, they built math assistants, tools for improving student writing, and more
An AI chatbot that walks students through how to solve math problems. An AI instructional coach designed to help English teachers create lesson plans and project ideas. An AI tutor that helps middle and high schoolers become better writers.
These aren’t tools created by education technology companies. They were designed by teachers tasked with using AI to solve a problem their students were experiencing.
Over five weeks this spring, about 300 people – teachers, school and district leaders, higher ed faculty, education consultants and AI researchers – came together to learn how to use AI and develop their own basic AI tools and resources. The professional development opportunity was designed by technology nonprofit Playlab.ai and faculty at the Relay Graduate School of Education.
Next-Gen Classroom Observations, Powered by AI — from educationnext.org by Michael J. Petrilli The use of video recordings in classrooms to improve teacher performance is nothing new. But the advent of artificial intelligence could add a helpful evaluative tool for teachers, measuring instructional practice relative to common professional goals with chatbot feedback.
Multiple companies are pairing AI with inexpensive, ubiquitous video technology to provide feedback to educators through asynchronous, offsite observation. It’s an appealing idea, especially given the promise and popularity of instructional coaching, as well as the challenge of scaling it effectively (see “Taking Teacher Coaching To Scale,” research, Fall 2018).
…
Enter AI. Edthena is now offering an “AI Coach” chatbot that offers teachers specific prompts as they privately watch recordings of their lessons. The chatbot is designed to help teachers view their practice relative to common professional goals and to develop action plans to improve.
To be sure, an AI coach is no replacement for human coaching.
We need to shift our thinking about GenAI tutors serving only as personal learning tools. The above activities illustrate how these tools can be integrated into contemporary classroom instruction. The activities should not be seen as prescriptive but merely suggestive of how GenAI can be used to promote social learning. Although I specifically mention only one online activity (“Blended Learning”), all can be adapted to work well in online or blended classes to promote social interaction.
Stealth AI — from higherai.substack.com by Jason Gulya (a Professor of English at Berkeley College) talks to Zack Kinzler What happens when students use AI all the time, but aren’t allowed to talk about it?
In many ways, this comes back to one of my general rules: You cannot ban AI in the classroom. You can only issue a gag rule.
And if you do issue a gag rule, then it deprives students of the space they often need to make heads and tails of this technology.
We need to listen to actual students talking about actual uses, and reflecting on their actual feelings. No more abstraction.
In this conversation, Jason Gulya (a Professor of English at Berkeley College) talks to Zack Kinzler about what students are saying about Artificial Intelligence and education.
Welcome to our monthly update for Teams for Education and thank you so much for being part of our growing community! We’re thrilled to share over 20 updates and resources and show them in action next week at ISTELive 24 in Denver, Colorado, US.
… Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Educator features Guided Content Creation
Coming soon to Copilot for Microsoft 365 is a guided content generation experience to help educators get started with creating materials like assignments, lesson plans, lecture slides, and more. The content will be created based on the educator’s requirements with easy ways to customize the content to their exact needs. Standards alignment and creation Quiz generation through Copilot in Forms Suggested AI Feedback for Educators Teaching extension
To better support educators with their daily tasks, we’ll be launching a built-in Teaching extension to help guide them through relevant activities and provide contextual, educator-based support in Copilot. Education data integration
Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Student features Interactive practice experiences
Flashcards activity
Guided chat activity Learning extension in Copilot for Microsoft 365
…
New AI tools for Google Workspace for Education — from blog.google by Akshay Kirtikar and Brian Hendricks We’re bringing Gemini to teen students using their school accounts to help them learn responsibly and confidently in an AI-first future, and empowering educators with new tools to help create great learning experiences.
Frontier intelligence Claude 3.5 Sonnet sets new industry benchmarks for graduate-level reasoning (GPQA), undergraduate-level knowledge (MMLU), and coding proficiency (HumanEval). It shows marked improvement in grasping nuance, humor, and complex instructions and is exceptional at writing high-quality content with a natural, relatable tone.
2x speed
State-of-the-art vision
Introducing Artifacts—a new way to use Claude We’re also introducing Artifacts on claude.ai, a new feature that expands how you can interact with Claude. When you ask Claude to generate content like code snippets, text documents, or website designs, these Artifacts appear in a dedicated window alongside your conversation.This creates a dynamic workspace where you can see, edit, and build upon Claude’s creations in real-time, seamlessly integrating AI-generated content into your projects and workflows.
If you teach computer science, user interface design, or anything involving web development, you can have students prompt Claude to produce web pages’ source code, see this code produced on the right side, preview it after it has compiled, and iterate through code+preview combinations.
If you teach economics, financial analysis, or accounting, you can have students prompt Claude to create analyses of markets or businesses, including interactive infographics, charts, or reports via React. Since it shows its work with Artifacts, your students can see how different prompts result in different statistical analyses, different representations of this information, and more.
If you teach subjects that produce purely textual outputs without a code intermediary, like philosophy, creative writing, or journalism, your students can compare prompting techniques, easily review their work, note common issues, and iterate drafts by comparing versions.
I see this as the first serious step towards improving the otherwise terrible user interfaces of LLMs for broad use. It may turn out to be a small change in the grand scheme of things, but it sure feels like a big improvement — especially in the pedagogical context.
And speaking of training students on AI, also see:
Schools could enhance their curricula by incorporating debate, Model UN and mock government programs, business plan competitions, internships and apprenticeships, interdisciplinary and project-based learning initiatives, makerspaces and innovation labs, community service-learning projects, student-run businesses or non-profits, interdisciplinary problem-solving challenges, public speaking, and presentation skills courses, and design thinking workshop.
These programs foster essential skills such as recognizing and addressing complex challenges, collaboration, sound judgment, and decision-making. They also enhance students’ ability to communicate with clarity and precision, while nurturing creativity and critical thinking. By providing hands-on, real-world experiences, these initiatives bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, preparing students more effectively for the multifaceted challenges they will face in their future academic and professional lives.
Our vision for Claude has always been to create AI systems that work alongside people and meaningfully enhance their workflows. As a step in this direction, Claude.ai Pro and Team users can now organize their chats into Projects, bringing together curated sets of knowledge and chat activity in one place—with the ability to make their best chats with Claude viewable by teammates. With this new functionality, Claude can enable idea generation, more strategic decision-making, and exceptional results.
Projects are available on Claude.ai for all Pro and Team customers, and can be powered by Claude 3.5 Sonnet, our latest release which outperforms its peers on a wide variety of benchmarks. Each project includes a 200K context window, the equivalent of a 500-page book, so users can add all of the relevant documents, code, and insights to enhance Claude’s effectiveness.
Today’s microschooling movement continues to attract major coverage in national and local media outlets around the country. This week saw important new feature articles highlighting microschools in two of the most influential.
The New York Times ran this piece by its lead national education reporter Dana Goldstein, who visited several Georgia microschools and conducted research and interviews with leaders there and around the country. “…The appeal goes beyond the Republican base and includes many working- or middle-class Black and Latino parents — especially those whose children are disabled, and who feel public schools are not meeting their needs,” the article found. The National Microschooling Center was pleased to see several of the Times’ explanations and background about our exciting movement cited in our own published research.
It’s part of a growing trend, both in Maine and nationally, of new schools and spaces offering smaller, more individualized, more flexible learning options that parents and teachers desire. Many of these programs, including School Around Us, are part of the VELA Founder Network that supports alternative education environments across the U.S. with grants and entrepreneurial resources.
According to the new Johns Hopkins UniversityHomeschool Hub, homeschooling numbers now hover around six percent of the total K-12 school-age population, a dramatic increase from pre-pandemic estimates. Maine has seen its homeschooling numbersremainhigh since 2020.
Some readers may be surprised to learn that many U.S. high schools deny entry to legally eligible students. It is, after all, conventional wisdom that public schools are open to all families and that they eagerly seek to serve all potential students.
…
Available to All launched in early 2023 as a nonpartisan watchdog defending equal access to public schools. We have documented many cases in which schools turn away students, either unfairly or illegally, based on discriminatory criteria…
Families should have the legal right to apply to any public school, and the school should be required to publish a formal letter of denial if a child is rejected, explaining the legal basis for the decision. Every public school should be required to publish application and enrollment data, and every American family should have the right to appeal denial of enrollment to a neutral third party (as families already do in a handful of states, including California and Arkansas).
SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, 2024/PRNewswire/ — Leading online learning platform, Outschool announced today the launch of Courses, new classes and features designed specifically for homeschool and alternative education families. Outschool’s Courses is designed to empower homeschooling families and power-users of Outschool to craft their own individualized education with expert teachers, unique and engaging classes, easy scheduling, and progress tracking. Outschool Courses has been created to help families put their learner’s unique educational needs first.
More American children than ever are qualifying for special education, but schools are struggling to find enough teachers to meet their needs.
A record 7.5 million students accessed special-education services in U.S. schools as of 2022-2023, including children with autism, speech impairments and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. That is 15.2% of the public-school student population…
From DSC: For anyone who really believes that teaching is easy, try attending a few Individualized Education Plan (IEP) meetings. You’ll be blown away about how intricate and challenging teaching can be.
We have to provide instructors the support they need to leverage educational technologies like generative AI effectively in the service of learning. Given the amount of benefit that could accrue to students if powerful tools like generative AI were used effectively by instructors, it seems unethical not to provide instructors with professional development that helps them better understand how learning occurs and what effective teaching looks like. Without more training and support for instructors, the amount of student learning higher education will collectively “leave on the table” will only increase as generative AI gets more and more capable. And that’s a problem.
From DSC: As is often the case, David put together a solid posting here. A few comments/reflections on it:
I agree that more training/professional development is needed, especially regarding generative AI. This would help achieve a far greater ROI and impact.
The pace of change makes it difficult to see where the sand is settling…and thus what to focus on
The Teaching & Learning Groups out there are also trying to learn and grow in their knowledge (so that they can train others)
The administrators out there are also trying to figure out what all of this generative AI stuff is all about; and so are the faculty members. It takes time for educational technologies’ impact to roll out and be integrated into how people teach.
As we’re talking about multiple disciplines here, I think we need more team-based content creation and delivery.
There needs to be more research on how best to use AI — again, it would be helpful if the sand settled a bit first, so as not to waste time and $$. But then that research needs to be piped into the classrooms far better. .
How Learning Designers Are Using AI for Analysis — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman A practical guide on how to 10X your analysis process using free AI tools, based on real use cases
There are three key areas where AI tools make a significant impact on how we tackle the analysis part of the learning design process:
Understanding the why: what is the problem this learning experience solves? What’s the change we want to see as a result?
Defining the who: who do we need to target in order to solve the problem and achieve the intended goal?
Clarifying the what: given who our learners are and the goal we want to achieve, what concepts and skills do we need to teach?
Two new surveys, both released this month, show how high school and college-age students are embracing artificial intelligence. There are some inconsistencies and many unanswered questions, but what stands out is how much teens are turning to AI for information and to ask questions, not just to do their homework for them. And they’re using it for personal reasons as well as for school. Another big takeaway is that there are different patterns by race and ethnicity with Black, Hispanic and Asian American students often adopting AI faster than white students.
We’ve ceded so much trust to digital systems already that most simply assume a tool is safe to use with students because a company published it. We don’t check to see if it is compliant with any existing regulations. We don’t ask what powers it. We do not question what happens to our data or our student’s data once we upload it. We likewise don’t know where its information came from or how it came to generate human-like responses. The trust we put into these systems is entirely unearned and uncritical.
…
The allure of these AI tools for teachers is understandable—who doesn’t want to save time on the laborious process of designing lesson plans and materials? But we have to ask ourselves what is lost when we cede the instructional design process to an automated system without critical scrutiny.
From DSC: I post this to be a balanced publisher of information. I don’t agree with everything Marc says here, but he brings up several solids points.
As news about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) continually splashes across social media feeds, including how ChatGPT 4o can help you play Rock, Paper, Scissors with a friend, breathtaking pronouncements about GenAI’s “disruptive” impact aren’t hard to find.
It turns out that it doesn’t make much sense to talk about GenAI as being “disruptive” in and of itself.
Can it be part of a disruptive innovation? You bet.
But much more important than just the AI technology in determining whether something is disruptive is the business model in which the AI is used—and its competitive impact on existing products and services in different markets.
On a somewhat note, also see:
National summit explores how digital education can promote deeper learning — from digitaleducation.stanford.edu by Jenny Robinson; via Eric Kunnen on Linkedin.com The conference, held at Stanford, was organized to help universities imagine how digital innovation can expand their reach, improve learning, and better serve the public good.
The summit was organized around several key questions: “What might learning design, learning technologies, and educational media look like in three, five, or ten years at our institutions? How will blended and digital education be poised to advance equitable, just, and accessible education systems and contribute to the public good? What structures will we need in place for our teams and offices?”
From DSC: Very interesting to see the mention of an R&D department here! Very cool.
Baker said ninth graders inthe R&D department designed the essential skills rubric for their grade so that regardless of what content classes students take, they all get the same immersion into critical career skills. Student voice is now so integrated into Edison’s core that teachers work with student designers to plan their units. And he said teachers are becoming comfortable with the language of career-centered learning and essential skills while students appreciate the engagement and develop a new level of confidence.
… The R&D department has grown to include teachers from every department working with students to figure out how to integrate essential skills into core academic classes. In this way, they’re applying one of the XQ Institute’s crucial Design Principles for innovative high schools: Youth Voice and Choice. .
Client-connected projects have become a focal point of the Real World Learning initiative, offering students opportunities to solve real-world problems in collaboration with industry professionals.
Organizations like CAPS, NFTE, and Journalistic Learning facilitate community connections and professional learning opportunities, making it easier to implement client projects and entrepreneurship education.
Important trend: client projects. Work-based learning has been growing with career academies and renewed interest in CTE. Six years ago, a subset of WBL called client-connected projects became a focal point of the Real World Learning initiative in Kansas City where they are defined as authentic problems that students solve in collaboration with professionals from industry, not-for-profit, and community-based organizations….and allow students to: engage directly with employers, address real-world problems, and develop essential skills.
The Community Portrait approach encourages diverse voices to shape the future of education, ensuring it reflects the needs and aspirations of all stakeholders.
Active, representative community engagement is essential for creating meaningful and inclusive educational environments.
The Portrait of a Graduate—a collaborative effort to define what learners should know and be able to do upon graduation—has likely generated enthusiasm in your community. However, the challenge of future-ready graduates persists: How can we turn this vision into a reality within our diverse and dynamic schools, especially amid the current national political tensions and contentious curriculum debates?
The answer lies in active, inclusive community engagement. It’s about crafting a Community Portrait that reflects the rich diversity of our neighborhoods. This approach, grounded in the same principles used to design effective learning systems, seeks to cultivate deep, reciprocal relationships within the community. When young people are actively involved, the potential for meaningful change increases exponentially.
Although Lindsay E. Jones came from a family of educators, she didn’t expect that going to law school would steer her back into the family business. Over the years she became a staunch advocate for children with disabilities. And as mom to a son with learning disabilities and ADHD who is in high school and doing great, her advocacy is personal.
Jones previously served as president and CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities and was senior director for policy and advocacy at the Council for Exceptional Children. Today, she is the CEO at CAST, an organization focused on creating inclusive learning environments in K–12. EdTech: Focus on K–12 spoke with Jones about how digital transformation, artificial intelligence and visionary leaders can support inclusive learning environments.
Our brains are all as different as our fingerprints, and throughout its 40-year history, CAST has been focused on one core value: People are not broken, systems are poorly designed. And those systems are creating a barrier that holds back human innovation and learning.
