I received an early set of clickers in 2006 as a beta tester while a high school Chemistry teacher in the Boston Public School system and was eager to use them in my classroom. A class set of 30 of these handheld devices, which came nestled in a padded case, allowed each student to vote on multiple choice questions I projected and tallied the results. With this technology, not only could I ask my students questions but I could find out what the class knew, instantly. It appeared that this tool would change the way the classroom worked forever. While the clickers were engaging at first, the novelty soon wore off for students. The time cost of handing out and collection of the devices and the distraction of their use made the reward not worth the effort. I soon stopped using them. Before long they took up residence in the bottom of a closet and stayed there for the next decade before being thrown away. Of course, phone apps can now do this same function and give data on the votes of individual students, and a fun twist on the idea called Kahoot! is a class favorite for test review that I use several times a year. But what of the promise to dramatically change how teachers found out what students knew? Clickers were going to ensure engagement of all students and allow teachers to know instantly how well students had learned in a lesson. They were going to increase engagement and improve learning outcomes. But this didn’t happen.
The promise of tech innovation in K12 education
Technological innovations over the last 20 years have been brought to the classroom promising revolution, yet little has changed. Districts struggled to give all students a computer, because one-to-one laptops were going to instantly make every classroom equipped to deliver 21st Century skills. The introduction of the internet to the classroom meant that students now had access to more information than ever and would be unbounded in what they could learn. Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) were going to be the model of school in the future, enabling all students to learn directly from the rock stars in every field. With the advent of video conferencing, futurists painted a picture of students “attending school” from the comfort of their own home. Still, today’s K12 classroom functions much the same as it did prior to these tech innovations.
What happened when these promising technologies hit the classroom was different from what was expected. After achieving 1:1 laptop use, teachers are finding that students are often unable to resist the embedded temptations (games, shopping, social media) that come alongside their focused classwork and are moving away from laptop use in class altogether, returning to paper-based activities. Research projects require extensive website curation to avoid students pulling everything from Wikipedia[1]. MOOCs and online learning are growing in popularity for adults but have not replaced the K12 model[2]. And you only need to look at the research on K12 learning loss and socio-emotional distress during the COVID lockdowns to see how poorly “remote school” works for most kids. In our math department, we mark the year of remote schooling during lockdowns like a geologist marks a volcanic event: “Oh right, these kids are struggling with precalculus because they were in 7th grade during COVID and never really learned algebra.” Past promises of tech innovations changing the K12 model have not delivered because the anticipated benefits of these technologies have simply not materialized.
Why?
Most of the tech innovations discussed above were neutral at best for K12 students and sometimes even interfered with the learning activities. They failed to revolutionize the K12 classroom because they provided only limited enhancement of what teachers actually provide students in the classroom and they could not significantly reduce the constraints on teachers and students in how they work together in the classroom. And all cost time.
The result is that these tech innovations are hardly visible in the classroom. I know few teachers who regularly use clicker apps and many teachers in my current school are increasingly moving back to paper-based classroom activities to limit the distraction inseparable from laptop use[3]. Media clips and computer simulations are often integrated as parts of a lesson, but still, the operation of the K12 classroom essentially remains the same as if the tech tools never existed.
The good news is that if limited enhancement of what students get from teachers and persistent constraints on teachers-student collaboration are the problems, then those are also the areas where solutions can be found. We have a unique window of opportunity at this moment to introduce a new tech innovation into education, AI, in a way that could actually revolutionize the K12 classroom.
AI represents a tremendous opportunity to improve student outcomes because the nature of this innovation allows it to augment what is effective about teaching and learning in the classrooms without detracting from it. Because AI can work embedded and behind the scenes to do things like provide information, anticipate needs, and summarize outcomes automatically, AI has the potential to improve what teachers are able to do in the classroom by amplifying what only teachers in the classroom can do. The promise is there for AI to give teachers superpowers.
Most teachers are open to and excited for opportunities to use AI in their classroom and for what it will allow them to do for their students, but this is a finite time window. This eagerness will not last if tech tools fail to provide benefits or are perceived to interfere with learning, as past tech innovations have seemed to do. Teachers recognize that AI will change how all of us work in the future and they want to both stay on top of this development and leverage the technology in their teaching. However, this enthusiasm will not last if innovations do not save time and deliver sufficient benefits to the learning process in the classroom. Teachers have frequently been subjected to initiatives that are here one year and gone the next. Teachers are used to the “initiative du jour,” the program or schoolwide effort implemented for a year or two that then is then dropped for lack of effectiveness and replaced by something new. Teachers sensing a new initiative or tech tool is a du jour offering do not change their practice to adopt it, an effort that would waste many extra hours of scarce prep time. For AI to not be the change du jour, developers must build tools that work with what we know about the learning process that happens between teachers and students. That is what this blog is about.
To clarify, this blog is not about teachers creating lessons using AI where students themselves use chatbots. It is not about developing lessons using AI suggestions. Those strategies are indeed useful, have their place, and are worth pursuing. Instead, I will be working to support a different strategy – the embedding of AI in classroom activities. The aim of this support is to enable the creation of tech innovations that are both: a) not themselves the focus of the learning/activity, and that b) accelerate the curricular, personal, and social aspects of the classroom in ways that lead to better outcomes for students.
Why should you listen to me?
First, I am a 20-year veteran of the classroom, mostly as a chemistry teacher but also an administrator. I have served as a teacher-leader within schools, coached teachers one-on-one, and created professional development events for teachers at the high school and college level. Like anyone who has done something for a long time, I have instincts honed by a thousand bad choices: how to manage a classroom, how plan a lesson, how to conduct a class discussion. Though I continue to learn my craft every day in the classroom and continue to make mistakes, like my fellow long-serving colleagues, I can feel these things in my bones.
Second, I am an education researcher, who went back to school in 2017 while remaining in the classroom to get a PhD in chemistry with a focus on chemistry education research. I studied how teachers enact their beliefs in their classroom practices and the impacts of professional development on these beliefs and practices over time. I immersed myself in the research on teacher expertise and what affects the growth and development of teachers. It has given me conceptual maps for the experiences I and my teaching colleagues have had in the classroom and at the school level. It has also left me with an appreciation for how much we know about the complex ecosystem that is the classroom and a respect for how difficult it is to predict whether the impact of a proposed innovation will be positive. I am currently working on a pilot study with Eddo Learning and the Einstein Project investigating how AI-enhanced curriculum guides (the teacher “handbook” for a curriculum) can help teachers adopt the new curriculum faster, easier, and with more effectiveness.
Finally, I am an entrepreneur. I know how it feels to struggle to balance outlays and revenue, to see a slim profit slip away into an unexpected expense, and how many late nights and weekends get put into operations efforts that no one else ever sees. I also understand the joy and passion of creation that is entrepreneurship, and the drive to see your creation take form and thrive. We need more of this.
But mostly you should listen to me because I am here to tell you of the incomprehensibly, mind-blowingly massive amount of love that teachers have for their students (and, whether they admit it or not, students for teachers and for each other) and how this plays out in student-teacher interactions around learning. I’m here to tell you that this love is, at the end of the day, the fuel that drives this whole school thing. Yes, there is the job of learning to do, but let’s face it, information is everywhere; it is the humanity of school that brings people there. It is this humanity that explains why the traditional classroom has not, and likely will not, ever be fully replaced. This, especially, is what new AI-enhanced tools need to support and not interfere with.
The great promise of AI is that it just might be able to make teachers able to do the things that they have long been trying to do but have been limited by time and energy. To finally, truly, enable teachers to succeed with all of their students.
This blog is a request, a plea: help us help these kids better. There are so many things we teachers need to do that take us away from why we are drawn to teaching, and so many things we wish we could do for our students that are not within our reach. We teachers spend so much time with the struggles of our students, it fills us until we have no place left to put them.
But don’t worry, this blog is not a memoir; it is a technical training manual. A crash course in the inner workings of the classroom. A map of interaction. A blueprint of operation. This blog is intended to be used by builders to make the things teachers need so that they may do better with students. Take it and run with it – we have work to do.
What’s next
I plan on posting weekly, releasing on Sundays*. Below are the next few topics:
An hour in the life of the classroom (June 9th)
The skills and knowledge of an effective teacher (June 23rd)
What are teachers for? (July 7th)
Where tech can help in the classroom (July 21st)
A vision for the future (August 4th)
I could really use your help…
If you are a developer: What topics would you most like covered?
If you are a K12 teacher (or any K12 classroom-based professional): What do you think others should know about the classroom that they tend not to know when trying to help?
In closing…
If you have read to the end of this introduction, let me say thank you. I hope you find value in the work and return for future posts. I would love to hear from you so that I may tune future pieces to be more useful to readers, so please reach out!
best,
Greg
[1] I love Wikipedia and think it is a great place to get accessible, foundational introductions on scientific topics, but students too often stop there.
[2] There have been many tech innovations that have been successes as supplements to learning (e.g., Khan Academy and a suite of excellent YouTube videos on every subject, and web conference options for remote tutoring). However, none of these has been considered a candidate on its own to “be school,” and so the dominant learning experience of the majority of K12 students remains little changed.
[3] Note that there are strong movements that leverage a flipped classroom model (where students learn from recorded lectures either outside of or within the classroom, freeing up time during class for other activities such as guided practice). It does appear that this approach can work well with some students, such as those with attendance challenges or those who need/prefer to work at their own pace. More will be said about questions around the balance between individual vs. class focus that this approach raises later in the blog. A more recent example of this movement worth checking out is the Modern Classroom Project.
*This schedule was edited 6/23/24 - I had originally planning on posting every other week. However, drafts were getting too long to be a good reading length, but I did not want to delay getting the work out. This prompted a shift to weekly posts, though sometimes segments will have a part 1/part 2 format.