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Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI
31 Plays1 year ago
In this month’s episode, we explore how generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping education — from how students learn to how educators teach. Digital Promise President and CEO Jean-Claude Brizard joins us to discuss the opportunities and challenges AI presents. Whether you are an educator, parent or student, or just curious about this innovative technology, the conversation offers valuable insights for navigating the future of education in the AI era.
Episode Resources:
- Artificial Intelligence in Education – Digital Promise
- ‘We Have to Really Rethink the Purpose of Education’ - The New York Times
Recommended
Transcript
Role of Free Speech in Democracy
00:00:03
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I think what we need to do is explain how our principles of free speech, free inquiry, will help serve the cause of justice.
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The First Amendment, the constitutional freedom of speech and freedom of conscience that is the bulwark of our democracy.
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There was a passion in what was being said, affirming this, what people consider a sacred constitutional right, freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Introduction to 'Speech Matters' Podcast
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From the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, this is Speech Matters, a podcast about expression, engagement, and democratic learning in higher education.
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I'm Michelle Deutschman, the Center's Executive Director and your host.
Impact of AI on Education
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The rate of societal change can be mind-boggling, including the explosion of artificial intelligence into what feels like every part of life.
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It allows us to retrieve information at an ever-increasing speed.
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What are current fashion trends around the world?
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Grab a summary of a book you didn't have the chance to read for book club.
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Get an assist on how to approach a tricky email or text message.
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The ability to utilize AI for learning has left schools and universities grappling with how this technology will impact how professors teach and students learn, how we understand and communicate with one another, and how the public evaluates the value of education.
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Joining us to unpack how to productively integrate AI into American schools is Jean-Claude Brizard, an education leader and reformer.
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He is the president and CEO of Digital Promise, a global nonprofit focused on harnessing the power of technology to improve learning.
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Before we dive into our discussion with Jean-Claude, let's turn to Class Notes, a look at what's making headlines.
Legal Challenges in Education
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In the ongoing battle between Harvard University and the Trump administration, there is a significant update.
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Last week, the Department of Homeland Security revoked Harvard's Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification, which authorizes the university to enroll international students.
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This move will have a considerable impact, given that international students make up a quarter of Harvard's enrollment.
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In response, Harvard filed a lawsuit arguing that the administration's action violates the First Amendment.
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This past Friday, a federal judge granted a temporary restraining order allowing the university to continue enrolling international students while the case proceeds.
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In a different conflict, this one between the Trump administration and Colombia, on Thursday, May 22nd, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights announced that Columbia University violated Title VI by demonstrating deliberate indifference towards student-on-student harassment of Jewish students from October 7th, 2023 to the present.
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Although the findings did not result in any announced penalties, the Trump administration is already withholding more than $400 million in federal grants and contracts from the university.
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Also last week, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from firing more than half of the Department of Education's workforce, around 2,000 employees, in Trump's continued attempt to make good on his promise of shutting down the Department of Education altogether.
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Lawyers for the administration argued the reduction in workforce was needed in order to improve efficiency and accountability.
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A federal judge in Massachusetts disagreed, holding that the administration's true intent was to effectively dismantle the department without congressional approval.
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This decision is seen as a rebuke to the administration's attempt to refashion the federal government's role in education.
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Now back to today's guest.
Jean-Claude Brizard's Educational Leadership
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Jean-Claude Buzard is president and CEO of Digital Promise, a global nonpartisan nonprofit focused on shaping the future of learning and advancing equitable education systems by bridging solutions across research, practice, and technology.
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Formally, Jean-Claude served as a senior advisor and deputy director at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he focused on PK through 16 education.
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Before working in the world of philanthropy, he served as chief executive of Chicago Public Schools and prior to that as superintendent of schools for the Rochester, New York School District.
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His experience also includes a 21-year career as an educator and administrator with the New York City Department of Education,
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where he served as a regional superintendent as the system's executive director for its 400 secondary schools.
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Welcome Jean-Claude, thank you so much for joining us today.
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Michel, thanks so much for having me.
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And in addition to everything that I just shared with you, I just learned that he's also a pilot.
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And we were actually talking about the use of AI in that area.
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So many different vantage points that you've had about this technology.
Origins and Role of Digital Promise
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All right, so back to the issue at hand.
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When I was preparing for our conversation today, I learned that digital promise is a result of bipartisanship, which is something rather unheard of these days.
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It was authorized by Congress in 2008, signed into law by President George W. Bush, and then formally launched by President Barack Obama in September 2011.
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You joined in 2021, right as pandemic learning loss and gaps were coming into clearer view.
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And of course, most recently, you've been channeling your tremendous education expertise into how to harness the power and possibility of generative artificial intelligence.
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So can you start by sharing some of Digital Promise's current priorities and how the congressional authorization at its core might impact those?
Redefining Educational Success
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So first of all, my board until very recently were appointed, the original board of Digital Promise, appointed by both sides of the aisle.
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So we bring the kind of perhaps expertise and point of view that really crosses right and left, red and blue across the country.
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So, you know, my experience in the classroom and leading schools and school systems has been foundational to everything I do.
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So the work we do at Digital Promise, I've got a push to take us back to what the core work that we need to do to make sure we close gaps in literacy, mathematics, etc.
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One of the things that I pushed really hard when I got here, gosh, more than four years ago, was this idea of redefining success.
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Let me explain that in two different ways.
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One is that I've been a fundamental belief, a believer, that math and reading proficiency are means to an end.
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They're not the end means.
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In so many of our schools, that is the North Star.
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When you look at the life outcomes all of us have, especially those of us who have had the opportunity to have really good jobs and good careers, you know, the math and reading proficiency was a pathway to getting to where we want to get to.
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So that has been showing up very, very strongly in the work that we do and pathways,
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economic mobility, in fact, our goals speak to that, right?
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Economic mobility, agency and well-being.
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But we also focus on the kinds of classroom level work, both higher ed and K-12, for that matter, early learning, K-12 in higher ed, that really propels a young person or learner toward a kind of success.
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So that kind of through line has been a big part of the efforts here at Digital Promise.
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Let me add one more layer to that.
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We also have come to really understand through the learning science that the non-academic competencies that we often often is implicit in middle-income communities or families need to be explicitly taught in our schools.
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Things like perseverance, you know, tenacity,
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The things that begets success are things we have forgotten about, frankly, in our everyday teaching and learning.
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We're trying to make that much more visible and explicit in what we actually teach.
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So it's the internal effort.
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It is the external stitching of systems to really propel.
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We describe those young people as those who have been historically and systematically excluded.
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But frankly, we serve all kids, right?
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We serve kids in South-South Chicago.
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in Appalachia, in more affluent communities in New Jersey.
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We do it all in supporting all young people toward that kind of success, but we do over-index on those that have been historically marginalized.
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Thank you for that answer and for kind of setting the table that way.
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And I also really like how you are talking not just about skills, but about values and how those go hand in hand.
Optimism for AI in Education
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So today we're going to focus on AI.
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And as you well know, since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, emotions have run pretty high about this technology, right?
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Excitement, anxiety, optimism, foreboding, just to name a few, have filled the news and our social media and our inboxes.
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And that includes how
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it may or may not transform education for better and worse.
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So I want to start with the better part of the question and ask you, I know you've said that you're sort of bullish on AI and what it can do for education.
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And I'd love for you to expand on that.
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I am bullish on AI and the possibilities, frankly.
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First of all, I'm bullish on tech, on ed tech in general.
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We've got a lot of work to do there.
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Perhaps my own personal experience as a teacher may provide some highlight to that.
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I taught physics in New York City for years in a vocational high school of all places, right?
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My class averaged 90 to 100 percent pass on the New York State exam in physics.
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because I discovered the power of technology in supporting what may appear to be amorphous or complex in making that concrete for kids.
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I discovered the Vernier software suite with the probes and the planks and everything else.
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That really transformed the way I did laboratories in physics.
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You may remember your high school class, right, where you did a cookbook lab.
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You followed procedure, and at the end, you have no idea what you did, right?
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and you asked to analyze what you did the week before, et cetera.
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What I did with Vernier, thanks to the City University of New York and their donation of equipment, we completely flipped the paradigm.
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The experiment lasted 90 seconds, maybe 15 seconds.
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The discussions and arguments, the inquiry lasted half an hour.
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So completely flip the script.
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And I'll tell you, my kids begin to really understand what it meant for physics.
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So we take that to today's newest emerging technology.
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And AI is not the last one.
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We have quantum computing coming our way.
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It's a matter of time.
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It's still a tech-enabled
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bottom line.
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And that bottom line is what happens between teachers, students, families, and content.
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It's the Richard Elmore framework from Harvard.
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We know that it's the most important relationship in education.
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It's what learning science tells us really is critical.
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The question of technology, or AI for that matter, is how AI can actually enhance
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connect and accelerate that kind of understanding and learning, right?
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How we can take the minutiae, frankly, the work that we do every single day, it provides a level of acceleration.
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It can also take perhaps concepts that may be difficult to understand and make that real for kids.
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Let me qualify that.
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I taught earth science in a middle school.
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and I used to teach plate tectonics, right?
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I had the models in my hand.
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I'm like showing and moving things for these poor eighth graders, right?
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They had never seen an earthquake.
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You're in Brooklyn.
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They had never seen an earthquake, heard of an earthquake.
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Can you imagine now, think of your days in the magic school bus.
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Can I take those kids?
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Let's go see the incident injury as well.
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Let's go take a look and see what is happening there, right?
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All of a sudden, what may be complex or difficult to understand becomes real and understandable.
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I had an experience a few weeks ago at Arizona State University with a dreamscape lab.
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I walked away walking on air because I had fully experienced a number of things, biology, I experienced art history in a way that I never understood before.
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My daughter has a minor in art history.
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Now I appreciate much more the way she was describing architecture to me, especially medieval architecture.
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We walked through a structure in Turkey that changed over a thousand years.
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And through VR technology, I experienced the art history personally.
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And now I fully appreciate more now when I walk into a temple, whatever it may be around the world.
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So that kind of experience can be enhanced.
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It can change mental models.
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And I think of American history.
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One example I use in this Pennsylvania keynote I gave a few weeks ago, I ask the audience, when you think of the American Revolutionary War, who do you think about?
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the typical George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, et cetera, right?
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This project at ASU is walking you through understanding the real Americans who fought in the Revolutionary War.
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You're interviewing, you're talking to, you're engaging these individuals who are long dead, right?
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Think about what that could do to a number of different things that we have in history, to really showcasing what really needs to happen.
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So I think AI has a potential beyond the efficiencies and the acceleration, has the potential to really provide a level of engagement that we know is so important in teaching and learning.
00:12:56
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I have a strong feeling that if you had been my science teacher, that I might have enjoyed science more.
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Well, I know you would have.
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I thought physics, I'm a chemist by training.
00:13:06
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You have to have fun as a teacher, right?
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Otherwise, that kind of excitement does not transfer to your kids.
00:13:11
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Well, and I think if I had, if it had been more accessible for me in high school, then maybe I wouldn't have spent all of my college career trying to avoid taking math and science.
00:13:20
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Yes.
00:13:22
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So at the beginning, you really talked about wanting to elevate the experience and enhance the experience, especially for groups that have maybe not always had the same access to education.
00:13:33
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And I'm curious if you could talk about how you think AI can assist in meeting that goal particularly.
00:13:40
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Yeah, so it goes back to basic access to technology, which I know has been a challenge.
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You know, I just came back from visiting with our Global Cities Network, some of our League of Innovative Schools here in the US.
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We're in Uruguay, in South America, looking at a country that leveraged our assets to digital promise.
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And they have completely closed the digital learning gap.
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And now, for kids are focusing on AI across the country by teaching computational thinking, something, again, we have defined here at Digital Promise, right?
00:14:13
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So, but when you see that kind of strategy that is done across an entire nation, rural, urban, suburban, we're deliberately making sure that kids access to one-on-one laptops, a way of fixing those laptops, and the pedagogy follows, right?
00:14:28
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I saw a class in computational thinking
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being taught by a teacher in Argentina, teaching a class in Uruguay.
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They've moved the pedagogy.
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We can do this in the US and we've seen that example here in the US.
00:14:41
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We have an amazing structure here called the Verizon Innovative Learning Schools Program that provides one-on-one technology nearly 700 schools across the country.
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It is a model around technology access.
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As AI is being overlaid on that, you provide a full access
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to every kid.
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The last FCC chairwoman, was in Warsaw, used to call it the homework gap.
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Can we close the homework gap?
00:15:04
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Giving kids access to what is happening at home as well too.
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So when AI is already showing up in every tech tool, but the work of AI shows up in a concrete way, in a way that provides that kind of access that closes what we call the digital learning gap, not just digital gap.
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The second thing I would push, and there are two districts I'm very proud of who are doing this work.
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One is in Talladega County, Alabama, rural school district.
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The other one is Fayette County in Pennsylvania, who are teaching computational thinking across the core content.
00:15:34
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So in Talladega, I walked into a pre-K class and I saw kids learning about the kinds of skills that are required to transcend technology.
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algorithmic thinking, pattern recognition, debugging.
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This was in a four-year-old, five-year-old class.
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I drove a course time with a superintendent in a senior level, honors level, Shakespeare class, and saw very similar discussions happening at that particular level.
00:15:59
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So my point is that when you think about access, it is not just the machine and the tool, it's the pedagogy, it's the teaching and learning, it's teaching young people the skills and competencies that will allow them to navigate not just today's world, but tomorrow's world.
00:16:13
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That kind of full access is a foundation for closing gaps.
00:16:18
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Otherwise, we're going to exacerbate the challenges that we've seen in the last 50, 60 years in this country.
00:16:23
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Thank you.
00:16:24
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It was intentional that I asked about the positive aspects first, because I do feel like often when at least I read about it, it's really like a long list of negatives and maybe there's a few references to the possibility.
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So I really wanted to focus on that.
00:16:37
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But I also do feel like I have to ask, we talked about the better part and now I think we need to talk about the worst part.
00:16:43
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Because as you know, there's a deep well of concern about the potential for devastating consequences, not just to education, but
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by AI.
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For example, last month, there was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that was titled, Is AI Enhancing Education or Replacing It?
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Technology Should Facilitate Learning, Not Substitute for That.
00:17:02
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So I'm curious, do you think these kinds of fears are overblown and why or why not?
00:17:08
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So the fears are not overblown at all and they're real and we're seeing it.
00:17:12
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We're trying to do whatever we can in collaboration with others, including ISTE, COSIN,
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all of us in ed tech in this country to try to push this.
The Human Element in Learning
00:17:22
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Even the national ed tech plan, the last one that was published, we're very clear about making sure that folks understand the ramifications of ed tech and AI and not doing that.
00:17:32
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First of all, we know education is human development.
00:17:35
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And I can give you an example of an experiment I saw a few years ago.
00:17:39
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So without a full understanding of the neurobiology, the neuroscience, the learning science, how people learn,
00:17:46
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Right.
00:17:47
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It would be some would try to replace teachers and not augment the intelligence of teachers.
00:17:53
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Right.
00:17:53
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Or the pedagogy, thinking that a machine can teach, they can enhance, they can accelerate, they can support, they cannot replace the human because you need a kind of human connection for that kind of work.
00:18:03
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Let me add two more things.
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One is that there are certain human ingenuity skills that we know has to be taught.
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Go back to what begets success.
00:18:12
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A machine cannot teach you perseverance, cannot teach you tenacity.
00:18:16
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All the non-academic development that we know is so critical for learning and learning science cannot be automated.
00:18:23
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At the same time, we do know what can be automated will be automated.
00:18:27
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In preparing young people for the future, we have to think about that as well too, so they don't end up in debt-end jobs.
00:18:32
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I walk into a school,
00:18:33
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that had truck driving as a pathway, right?
00:18:36
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I actually left with a heartburn.
00:18:37
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I was like, oh my God, you know, it's a matter of a few years before trucks are all fully self-driving, right?
00:18:43
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So what are you preparing these high school juniors to do in the future, right?
00:18:47
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But go back to the learning science.
00:18:49
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I was at the iLab at the University of Washington a few years ago when I was at the Gates Foundation working around with Pat Kuehl, who's the executive director for the center.
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She showed me an experiment where they had a mom and a baby
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and the mom reading to the baby, and both had wire meshes on their heads.
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You can see the new ones firing.
00:19:08
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Then the exact same experiment, put the mom in a different room, had the mom on video with the child, the exact same book, et cetera, nothing happened.
00:19:17
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So I don't know, we don't know the answer yet, but we do know there is a human connection here that is required for the kind of the level of brain activity that we need for learning to actually take place.
00:19:29
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So there's a lot happening in the schools of psychology teaching us about how people learn and the importance of the human connection in teaching and learning.
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So that for me is what worries me.
00:19:40
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You have folks who are technologists,
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who don't really understand the learning process or developing tools to bypass the human being thinking they can do this.
00:19:48
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And that terrifies me.
00:19:49
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So I thought you would begin to see that kind of attempt at replacement in developing countries.
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That was my biggest worry.
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Lo and behold, it was a school that just got authorized in Arizona that aims to replace 85% of teachers.
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in one of our states here in the US, right, in quote, first world country.
00:20:08
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That really is what gives me heartburn that folks who are doing this don't really understand or appreciate neuroscience, neurobiology, and learning science.
00:20:16
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I'm still thinking about that experiment, about the neurons.
00:20:19
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I mean, that is really fascinating.
00:20:21
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One of the things I think
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we have to touch on is the issue of cheating.
00:20:26
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And again, I think this is something that has been so, we've been saturated with it.
00:20:30
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And I don't know if you listened to Ezra Klein, but a couple episodes ago, Rebecca Winthrop was on, and I will share that I did not understand sort of the breadth of possibility, right?
00:20:41
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First, the student is putting
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the prompt to write the essay into one platform.
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Then they're going to somewhere else to make sure it's checked for plagiarism.
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Then it's going somewhere else to humanize their chat GPT essay.
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I mean, it just goes on and on and on.
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And so I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about
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cheating and the concerns about cheating and who needs to be making changes.
00:21:05
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Is it about how we use the technology?
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Is it about how teachers integrate it into classrooms?
00:21:09
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Is it about talking to students about how to use it responsibly?
00:21:13
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Share with us.
00:21:15
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Look at this, there's so much here.
00:21:17
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First of all, I'm a massive fan of Rebecca Winthrop.
00:21:19
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I mean, I just saw her a few weeks ago here in California.
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She's one of my heroes.
00:21:23
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I really like Rebecca.
00:21:25
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I do listen to Ezra Klein.
00:21:26
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So let me just say that when cheating, folks are worried about cheating, for me, it means your pedagogy is not elevated.
Integrating Technology in Pedagogy
00:21:33
Speaker
And I can qualify that.
00:21:34
Speaker
So when I was a teacher of physics, I had one of my students who is now a professor of physics, of all things.
00:21:39
Speaker
He gave me the answers to one of his cookbook labs in my first few years of teaching before I discovered the technology solution.
00:21:46
Speaker
And he had a perfect 0% error on his experiment.
00:21:49
Speaker
The data was absolutely amazing, right?
00:21:52
Speaker
And I pulled him aside and said, I said, Salim, I said, the machines you're using have built-in errors.
00:21:56
Speaker
There's no way you got 0% on the error, right?
00:22:00
Speaker
He laughed because he was smart enough to back map.
00:22:04
Speaker
and create a data set from a 0% error.
00:22:07
Speaker
Smart kid.
00:22:08
Speaker
So look, learners and people are going to do whatever they have to do to create the conditions for their success.
00:22:15
Speaker
If they're smart enough, frankly, to make sure they're building errors, including the possibility of cheating or et cetera, they're going to build that in.
00:22:23
Speaker
We do know the tools, frankly, that are being used to check for plagiarism are not perfect.
00:22:29
Speaker
There are lots of errors built into that.
00:22:30
Speaker
I know young people who are getting blamed for plagiarism
00:22:33
Speaker
We're not doing that.
00:22:34
Speaker
Let me give you one more example.
00:22:35
Speaker
I just came from my kids' middle school, elementary, middle school, what they call a portfolio day.
00:22:40
Speaker
My nine-year-old showed me he had written a script.
00:22:43
Speaker
He read the whole script to me.
00:22:45
Speaker
And then it was an AI feedback to the script and his teacher's feedback side by side.
00:22:51
Speaker
And he explained the difference between the two.
00:22:53
Speaker
Right.
00:22:54
Speaker
And at the end, I said, which one do you prefer?
00:22:56
Speaker
Because my teachers like why?
00:22:58
Speaker
Because it was more depth.
00:22:59
Speaker
It was if it felt more humanistic was exactly his word.
00:23:02
Speaker
Right.
00:23:03
Speaker
He's nine years, almost ten.
00:23:04
Speaker
So for me, that is a school and a teacher who is embracing a technology and leveraging the technology to teach someone about how to use the technology.
00:23:14
Speaker
And I've elevated her pedagogy.
00:23:16
Speaker
That's what we need to do, both in terms of assessment and pedagogy.
00:23:20
Speaker
When I was a first year physics teacher in New York City, the graphing calculator was banned as a tool in the classrooms because it was seen as a cheating tool.
00:23:31
Speaker
Fast forward, I became head of high schools in New York City, and I remember getting the email from our chief of staff who said, how quickly can you buy TI-83s?
00:23:40
Speaker
I said, what's going on?
00:23:41
Speaker
He said, Board of Regions in New York just now mandating the tool on the assessment.
00:23:47
Speaker
So in one week, I spent $13 million in buying TI-83s for New York City, right?
00:23:52
Speaker
Had to figure out which kids couldn't afford it and do it very quickly.
00:23:56
Speaker
But one thing changed on the assessment.
00:23:58
Speaker
One line, show your work.
00:24:01
Speaker
That was it.
00:24:02
Speaker
That was it.
00:24:02
Speaker
So my point is that if we elevate pedagogy where you either have the children using the tool or you know they're going to use the tool to get them to do something that only a human can do, and I can give you, if we have time, give you examples of what that could look like in pedagogical practice.
00:24:19
Speaker
But just like any technology tool that comes that way, the question is, what do we need to do to move our pedagogy and lift it so the tool becomes a tool?
00:24:29
Speaker
and not the answer to the question.
00:24:31
Speaker
You give a child a five paragraph essay, which is nonsense, by the way, you know, go to Gemini, go to child GPT, right?
00:24:37
Speaker
Name the LLM, it's going to write the essay for them.
00:24:41
Speaker
But you ask them to analyze, explain with a partner, et cetera, and use the tool to juxtapose two different positions on that particular controversial question.
00:24:49
Speaker
Now you're leveraging the tool for a different kind of pedagogical practice.
00:24:54
Speaker
Okay.
00:24:55
Speaker
So a couple of comments.
00:24:56
Speaker
First of all, you sound like you have a very savvy young adult coming up in the world.
00:25:01
Speaker
Second of all, I did want to make a note of who Rebecca Winthrop is so that our listeners can benefit.
00:25:06
Speaker
She's the director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institute.
00:25:10
Speaker
Wanted to mention that.
00:25:12
Speaker
And then going back to elevating pedagogy, a couple more questions.
00:25:17
Speaker
So one of them is that this sounds like it's really the responsibility of the teacher.
00:25:21
Speaker
And one of the things I want to ask about is like, what responsibilities do students have?
00:25:26
Speaker
And how, especially in a higher education setting, would you say that
00:25:30
Speaker
faculty can help students understand either literacy issues and kind of responsibilities sort of especially at scale and we're talking about not a classroom where there's 30 or 40 kids but you know these huge lecture halls especially in large public institutions yeah i mean it's okay it's it's i think it's a responsibility of all of the above institution professor teacher and learner but again
00:25:57
Speaker
I would argue that the weighted responsibility is more on the instructor and the institution, more on the instructor.
00:26:04
Speaker
Learner has to be taught of the importance.
00:26:07
Speaker
Let me come back to the aviation piece for a second.
00:26:09
Speaker
The plane I fly, it's very automated, right?
00:26:12
Speaker
And some of the other planes that are more expensive can lend themselves.
00:26:16
Speaker
Every plane you fly commercially can lend itself.
00:26:20
Speaker
And if you're not careful, your skills can atrophy.
00:26:25
Speaker
by just sitting there, letting the machine do everything, right?
00:26:28
Speaker
I know good pilots in their training, and even in their everyday flying, every once in a while, we'll do a hand fly landing, the hand fly the plane to land it, right?
00:26:38
Speaker
They know they've got to keep their skills sharp.
00:26:40
Speaker
We call them stick and rod skills, right?
00:26:42
Speaker
They got to remain sharp, otherwise you lose some of that kind of autonomicity that we tend to have in education.
00:26:48
Speaker
When you also look at the workforce that is emerging right now, again, what can be automated will be automated.
00:26:54
Speaker
The question of how you use technology to do something different, something more elevated in the workforce, right?
00:27:02
Speaker
Young people, learners need to understand they've got to keep those skills sharp and really understand that the machine is an enabler and a supporter.
00:27:09
Speaker
It goes back to this idea of teaching computational thinking, right, in the grade levels to get you there.
00:27:14
Speaker
So that kind of teaching for understanding that those skills in companies are critical for success, of continuing success, is part of the pedagogy that we have to have in our schools, right?
00:27:25
Speaker
The idea of being a lifelong learner means you got to keep learning, right?
00:27:29
Speaker
How do you keep learning?
00:27:29
Speaker
It's important, otherwise you lose.
00:27:31
Speaker
Same way that you can basically calculate it.
00:27:34
Speaker
If you never add two numbers together and you never do it, you lose that kind of automatic response.
00:27:40
Speaker
But I want to come back to the pedagogy, which is why the institutions, school systems, universities have to create those kinds of avenues and opportunities to learn all kinds of competencies and skills, not just can you do history, can you do calculus too,
00:27:57
Speaker
But do you understand the beauty of this mathematics?
00:27:59
Speaker
Do you understand the beauty of this physics and science, et cetera, or even history?
00:28:04
Speaker
Hanging out with my daughter in Montreal, walking into the cathedral, and going nuts about how they had renovated the Notre Dame.
00:28:15
Speaker
That was explicitly taught to her about how she got to appreciate art history in every form.
00:28:25
Speaker
The institution have to create the structure.
00:28:29
Speaker
The professors have to understand that they're teaching a human being and developing a human being.
00:28:33
Speaker
and learning to understand too that you can outsource your intelligence to a machine.
00:28:39
Speaker
All that I think is part of the work that we need to do, frankly, to stay ahead of the kinds of technology innovations coming that is in the water system right now.
00:28:51
Speaker
It is not tomorrow.
00:28:54
Speaker
Right.
00:28:54
Speaker
It's here.
00:28:56
Speaker
You know, you mentioned the graphing calculator, and I was actually going to reference that because I had read that you talked about that, about how that was an example of something that went from being something you would work
00:29:07
Speaker
it was forbidden to use to being something that you needed to have.
00:29:10
Speaker
And it made me think about how education and pedagogy has had to adapt through many decades and many iterations.
00:29:18
Speaker
And I wondered if there were any other kind of historical examples that we could use to sort of either learn lessons from or to look back at so that maybe we aren't as afraid as we look forward.
00:29:30
Speaker
Because I do feel like there's a lot of fear, which I think is natural when people don't understand education.
00:29:35
Speaker
things the way that they want to?
00:29:38
Speaker
It's a great question.
Adapting to Technological Changes in Education
00:29:40
Speaker
First of all, AI has been around since 1975 in education, so it's not new.
00:29:45
Speaker
I think what's scaring people is the pace of acceleration, right?
00:29:50
Speaker
I think is what's terrifying people.
00:29:52
Speaker
I mean, it's hard for me to think very quickly of other kinds of very specific examples, but tech has been here.
00:30:00
Speaker
What's different today is that level of acceleration and the fact that
00:30:05
Speaker
many instructors, professors, and teachers feel they don't have any control as to what is happening.
00:30:10
Speaker
The technology is moving faster than they actually are.
00:30:13
Speaker
There are examples, perhaps, I would argue, it may be not in education.
00:30:17
Speaker
Again, I'm going back to another love I have with aviation.
00:30:20
Speaker
You think about the kind of ecosystem that exists
00:30:23
Speaker
within aviation that demands a level of professional learning or continuing learning, which we don't really have baked in a concrete way in our education system.
00:30:34
Speaker
We do professional development, but tends to be to a spaghetti at the wall, right?
00:30:38
Speaker
But when you look at, for example, the way in which airplanes have evolved and they continue to evolve, becoming safer, right?
00:30:45
Speaker
As required, instead of continuing learning from pilots, controllers, et cetera, that even the certification process, the credentialing process has kept up as well too, right?
00:30:57
Speaker
To making sure that every time a new type of plane comes in, there's training.
00:31:01
Speaker
Pilots every six months are going back to training.
00:31:04
Speaker
We have to have that kind of perhaps structure in education system to making sure that our skills will become esoteric, right?
00:31:12
Speaker
That we remain on the forefront of understanding, whether it be learning science or technology, all of it is part of the work that we have to do in education.
00:31:22
Speaker
I really hear that.
00:31:23
Speaker
It's about how do you make the continuing education meaningful, right?
00:31:26
Speaker
As an attorney, every three years, you have to complete a certain amount of legal education.
00:31:31
Speaker
And the truth is, I think a lot of people end up listening to like 20 hours of webinars a week before.
00:31:40
Speaker
And is that meaningful?
00:31:42
Speaker
Probably not as meaningful as something that would be a little bit more intentional.
00:31:46
Speaker
So I think a lot of what you're talking about is intentionality.
00:31:49
Speaker
about how we think about the technology and then how we teach about it and then how we use it.
00:31:53
Speaker
Can I keep you a bit of a, you just triggered a memory too.
00:31:57
Speaker
I'm thinking about both cell phones and laptops, right?
00:32:01
Speaker
In schools, social media is another.
00:32:03
Speaker
We've not been prepared for anything.
00:32:06
Speaker
I've been in classrooms with a laptop, the one-to-one technology, the screen becomes a substitute.
00:32:12
Speaker
It goes back to the full integration and the foundations of teaching and learning.
00:32:16
Speaker
When you see wonderful work happening, people see it as a tool to be used to enhance the work that they actually are doing.
00:32:21
Speaker
But the pace again of what's happening right now is what is terrifying people.
00:32:24
Speaker
Well, and I also think there, you just kind of triggered me to think about something about cell phones because my kids and a lot of children in LA and other districts, the schools had to invest a huge amount of money in these yonder pouches, right?
00:32:38
Speaker
So I love the intent of it, which is that the phones are not accessible.
00:32:42
Speaker
But even my seventh grader was like, this is awful.
00:32:45
Speaker
Why our school doesn't have all of these things.
00:32:48
Speaker
Why do we have to invest all of this money into like
00:32:51
Speaker
basically keeping the technology away from the kids.
00:32:54
Speaker
So it just raises a lot of issues.
00:32:56
Speaker
In some ways that feels like it was sort of something that had people been able to foresee a little bit better that we might've been able to sort of integrate something in earlier on.
00:33:05
Speaker
But it is kind of hard when you think about a limited pool of resources like that being
00:33:10
Speaker
sort of have to be utilized, not so much to enhance the technology, but to prevent people from using it.
00:33:15
Speaker
And of course, in this case, I think it's great.
00:33:16
Speaker
I don't want my kids to have their cell phones at school, but it does create sort of a dissonance, if that makes sense.
00:33:23
Speaker
No, it does.
00:33:24
Speaker
It does.
00:33:24
Speaker
And I've seen people offer solutions beyond the pouches.
00:33:30
Speaker
Like when I was in New York City, we were forcing principals to collect cell phones at the door.
00:33:34
Speaker
I mean, it just puts a burden on the school leader to have to collect these things.
00:33:39
Speaker
And when they get lost, you know, kids get upset, et cetera.
00:33:42
Speaker
So I don't subscribe to this idea of banning anything.
00:33:46
Speaker
The question is, how do you leverage it?
00:33:47
Speaker
Look, my 13 year old, my 15 year old both have cell phones, right?
00:33:52
Speaker
They know enough never to take it out in the classroom.
00:33:54
Speaker
And that's a culture that's been built in that school.
00:33:56
Speaker
We don't take it away, but these are the rules we follow, right?
00:33:59
Speaker
Let's follow these rules.
00:34:00
Speaker
And again, the culture exists in that particular school where it's not an issue.
00:34:05
Speaker
But in some places you see it as an issue and you get to this banning sort of cascading of circles of challenges that you're giving to the teacher and the principal.
00:34:16
Speaker
Well, and of course, once you ban something, it becomes even more interesting.
00:34:18
Speaker
So my understanding for my 15-year-old is that students spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to open up the yonder pouch and use the phone and then put it back before they're caught.
00:34:28
Speaker
But that's a whole different topic.
Higher Education's Role in AI Development
00:34:30
Speaker
I do want to, especially since so many of our listeners are members of the higher ed sector, I wanted to ask a couple of things about that.
00:34:37
Speaker
And right now, we're seeing a lot of
00:34:40
Speaker
cutting, slashing of federal funds that are going to research and development in all kinds of areas.
00:34:47
Speaker
And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about higher ed's role in terms of AI research and development.
00:34:52
Speaker
Are they a big part of that, a small part of it?
00:34:55
Speaker
Are they working in collaboration with private corporations?
00:34:59
Speaker
If you could talk a little bit about that landscape.
00:35:02
Speaker
No, I mean, they're huge responsibilities, frankly.
00:35:06
Speaker
Yesterday on NPR, listening to this discussion on AI and higher ed professors and students who are catching their professors using AI to build, to grade, et cetera, right?
00:35:18
Speaker
actually getting upset saying, I'm looking at my tuition, I paid $8,000 for this class.
00:35:22
Speaker
Why?
00:35:23
Speaker
So it's on both sides of the equation.
00:35:26
Speaker
And it goes back to this idea of elevating pedagogy and expectation and learning how to use the technology actually getting there.
00:35:33
Speaker
But beyond what we've discussed already in K-12, I think that the same thing matters in higher education, perhaps a bit more so because those learners are closer to the workforce than a child say it was in the ninth grade.
00:35:44
Speaker
And when you look at what is happening in workforce and AI,
00:35:47
Speaker
there are clear alignment and issues in preparing a young person for economic mobility, right?
00:35:54
Speaker
Because the kinds of careers we know exist are changing every single day.
00:35:59
Speaker
Even law, frankly, is changing, medicine is changing every single day because of AI.
00:36:03
Speaker
So how we prepare a young person to harness the power of a machine versus, you know,
00:36:09
Speaker
We pay for a debt-end job is a big part of the conversation.
00:36:11
Speaker
In the research, because we have a large research team here at Digital Promise, one of my co-leads for research is a PhD in computer science.
00:36:18
Speaker
And he is an expert in AI.
00:36:20
Speaker
He's been playing with AI, doing AI work since the 80s, right?
00:36:23
Speaker
And the work that he actually has been doing.
00:36:25
Speaker
We know there's a massive responsibility in really informing two things, informing the sector what the technology is, how it can be used in pedagogy and curriculum, right?
00:36:35
Speaker
Again, my obsession around how we can reinvent curriculum and instruction using Gen AI is the kind of research we need to do.
00:36:41
Speaker
We need to understand, again, what is happening between the School of Psychology and the School of Education, so educators really understand what is happening around learning science and brain science, bring that back to the pedagogy and the technology.
00:36:54
Speaker
The kind of pre-service work that needs to happen for teachers, I think is huge.
00:36:59
Speaker
Those schools of education that are part of university or training the next generation of teachers need to understand that they cannot be afraid of these kinds of tools.
00:37:07
Speaker
They have to harness and leverage it.
00:37:09
Speaker
That kind of pre-service work is so critical and important.
00:37:12
Speaker
Again, those same institutions provide license or the training for principals.
00:37:16
Speaker
Big, big part of that work.
00:37:18
Speaker
Looking at entry-level jobs beyond university and college, beyond those kinds of
00:37:23
Speaker
preparation for learners, I think universities can lead the discussion in this country.
00:37:28
Speaker
Yes, what is happening right now at the federal level is heartbreaking.
00:37:33
Speaker
It gives me heartburn, to be frank.
00:37:34
Speaker
When you're watching research institutions being gutted, as a country, we've led the world in these kinds of conversations.
00:37:41
Speaker
I travel quite a bit in many countries of the world.
00:37:44
Speaker
They look to the US for leadership.
00:37:47
Speaker
We cannot lose that.
00:37:48
Speaker
It is terrifying.
00:37:51
Speaker
But I think universities can lead in our discussions around how we leverage technology, how we understand how to teach and what to teach, how to do it better, frankly.
00:38:00
Speaker
And I would argue that professors in higher ed can teach us in K-12, many of us in K-12, what we need to do to prepare young people for what's coming after.
00:38:11
Speaker
not the least of which is or are the kinds of non-academic competencies that will know provide success in higher education.
00:38:18
Speaker
When you look at the numbers, there's a lot of issues with kids who are historically marginalized who walk into these all-one institutions and think,
00:38:28
Speaker
It's not the academic preparation, and we have lots of evidence for this.
00:38:31
Speaker
It's not the academic preparation necessarily, it's navigation skills.
00:38:35
Speaker
When you have a child who may have maximized their environment in a particular district, being a valedictorian at X school, and they're walking to an R1 institution and they lose, they get lost.
00:38:48
Speaker
They can teach us how to do that and prepare young people for the future, access to these kinds of institutions.
00:38:52
Speaker
This is a lot that can be done in terms of really looking at research, research in technology, in pedagogy, that really can inform the work that we do in K-12 or P-12 for that matter.
00:39:03
Speaker
I really...
00:39:05
Speaker
like that you are talking about it very holistically.
00:39:08
Speaker
And I'll say just through the trajectory of this conversation, I felt more excited and a little less fearful.
00:39:15
Speaker
And in terms of the folks in higher education, usually at the end or close to the end of each episode, we ask our guests to help provide something more pragmatic or practical that one might do.
00:39:27
Speaker
And I'm wondering if there's
00:39:30
Speaker
things that you could say to people who teach or work or learn in a college or university that they might do to improve their relationship to artificial intelligence technologies.
00:39:42
Speaker
And that might be something that's the same for kind of all the stakeholders, or it might be something different for students or teachers or staff.
00:39:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, so I mean, I've given the same advice to K-12 educators, right?
00:39:55
Speaker
If you are in the research arena, you do this kind of work, you know what it is, right?
00:39:59
Speaker
But I've pushed on educators to do two things.
00:40:02
Speaker
One, please be crew and not passengers in this effort, right?
00:40:06
Speaker
Because you're a passenger, you've been taken for a ride, right?
00:40:09
Speaker
But when you're crew, you're helping build.
00:40:12
Speaker
It is part of our DNA here at Digital Promise in doing co-creation and centering the practitioner in the research and the development process, right?
00:40:19
Speaker
So I tell people, play, get familiar with the technology.
00:40:23
Speaker
Don't try and keep up with the latest version of Gemini or JATGPT.
00:40:26
Speaker
I mean, you're going to get lost.
00:40:27
Speaker
Let the technocrats or techie folks worry about that.
00:40:30
Speaker
There are tools being generated that bring all these elements together into one place.
00:40:36
Speaker
But play, get excited, embrace the technology so you know what your students are doing.
00:40:41
Speaker
And actually, because they're running my nine-year-old, I mean, he's not using AI yet, thank God, right, outside of school.
00:40:48
Speaker
But my 13-year-old, when he was 12, told me, Dad, they gave me an essay.
00:40:53
Speaker
Every one of my classmates used ChatGP to do it.
00:40:55
Speaker
I did.
00:40:56
Speaker
You should be proud of me, right?
00:40:58
Speaker
I said, OK.
00:41:00
Speaker
So I had a talk with this teacher about, can we pull up the pedagogy of Ohio?
00:41:05
Speaker
But play, get familiar, test it, right?
00:41:08
Speaker
More importantly, focus on the human ingenuity.
00:41:11
Speaker
There are skills that we know only people can do, humans can do.
00:41:14
Speaker
And many of them are malleable.
00:41:16
Speaker
We can teach them.
00:41:17
Speaker
Make sure they're part of your pedagogy.
00:41:19
Speaker
Make sure they're part of the syllabi, right?
00:41:22
Speaker
To make sure that we are teaching in a way that prepares young people for the next generation careers and the kind of tenacity we know is so necessary, right?
00:41:31
Speaker
To be able to be successful.
00:41:32
Speaker
Those of us who are successful, we know how to navigate.
00:41:35
Speaker
We do it all the time.
00:41:36
Speaker
Learn how to manage the machines, play with it, get familiar with it, and embrace it, I think is what I would push.
00:41:44
Speaker
Thank you.
00:41:45
Speaker
And it's even interesting in some of the languages that you're using, I'm really feeling like it connects to your pilot analogy, even the navigation, I mean, right, which is literally like what you do when you're in the air, but it's also what each of us has to do every day as we move through the world.
00:42:01
Speaker
You have been very generous with your time.
00:42:02
Speaker
And so I will just end by giving you, before I thank you, a chance, if there's anything else you would just like to add or touch on that we haven't been able to cover, that would be the moment.
00:42:12
Speaker
Can I choose and say too, go back to what you just said on aviation and navigation.
00:42:17
Speaker
When you fly somewhere, the destination, more often than not, is typically non-negotiable.
00:42:23
Speaker
The way you get there, you meander and navigate, weather and everything else.
00:42:28
Speaker
The same thing applies to education.
00:42:29
Speaker
We've got to navigate.
00:42:32
Speaker
When I was getting my instrument rating, I was told the moment you think you have nothing to do, the sequence of events for crash starts.
00:42:38
Speaker
Stay ahead of the airplane.
00:42:39
Speaker
The faster the airplane, the further ahead of it you got to be.
00:42:43
Speaker
we gather the same thing here in technology.
00:42:45
Speaker
Let me close with this.
Ensuring Equal Access to Technology
00:42:47
Speaker
Andrew McAfee, who was a professor at MIT, he was an economist at MIT, 10 years ago had these TED talks, the machines are coming for our jobs.
00:42:56
Speaker
It was really amazing.
00:42:57
Speaker
I love them.
00:42:58
Speaker
I used to ask educators, are you terrified or excited when you read this, when you watch these videos?
00:43:02
Speaker
More often than they were terrified because you can't meet basic proficiency.
00:43:06
Speaker
Yet these machines were coming very quickly.
00:43:08
Speaker
It's happening.
00:43:09
Speaker
What he said though was that at every technological revolution,
00:43:13
Speaker
We always left the generation behind, but we always maintain near full employment.
00:43:18
Speaker
We kept the population behind.
00:43:19
Speaker
Let's not do that this time.
00:43:21
Speaker
Let's make sure we provide the kind of equal access to high tech to people so they can get access to the best jobs coming our way in the next number of years.
00:43:30
Speaker
I like that we're ending on a high note, and I just want to thank you so much for joining Speech Matters and sharing some of your wisdom with us.
Closing Remarks and Acknowledgments
00:43:38
Speaker
Thank you.
00:43:39
Speaker
It's been a pleasure.
00:43:41
Speaker
That's a wrap.
00:43:42
Speaker
Thanks so much to Jean-Claude Broussard for joining us.
00:43:45
Speaker
For those students who are spending their final days on a university campus and are graduating, the Center shares its congratulations.
00:43:52
Speaker
For all those listening who pour their time and energy into educating our young people, thank you.
00:43:58
Speaker
Talk to you next time.