I don’t find myself out and about too much these days, but I couldn’t help but go see Project Hail Mary a few weeks ago, after having read the book last year. For someone that loves movies, the sheer enthusiasm around this film was electric and felt like a callback to a bygone era of moviegoing.

That said, right near the middle of the film, as things were reaching an emotional crescendo, someone’s phone goes off. No problem I think to myself It happens, and reckoned that would be the end of it. Boy how foolish I was. The phone was not silenced, but in fact the disruptive patron took the call at his seat. And half across the theater I hear the gruff voice “grumble grumble... Wisconsin... grumbled grumble... about two hours ... grumble grumble.”

The teacher in me wanted to redirect the off-task behavior, or perform a restorative conversation with the patron out in the hall. And I was just on the verge of releasing one curt shhh (the ultimate trump card), but knew it wouldn’t be wise to get into a power struggle in front of his peers. In hindsight, I suppose I should have first built a strong relationship with everyone in the multiplex to get ahead of these management issues while the trailers rolled, but I digress.

The packed crowd was a good mix of kids and adults. Teens in particular get a (perhaps well deserved) bad rep for ruining the movie going experience, and boisterous professors have proclaimed this generation’s inability to sit through movies in the first place. But out of everyone in that theater, the only person who picked up their phone to have a full-blown conversation appeared to be a middle-aged man.

In the education scene, there is a hyperfocus on children and adolescents being addicted to their phones, doomscrolling on TikTok, getting spoon fed slop, chatting with their AI companions, but adults are just as guilty of the same.

Heck, I’ve had to educate more of my adult family of certain AI hoaxes than I have my own students (bunnies on a trampoline notwithstanding). This behavior stems from an inundation of all things online: personalized algorithms, clickbait content, 24/7 news cycles, never-ending feeds — For the perpetually online, these are their bread and butter. All of this noise distracts us all, not just our students. The buzzes we get on our wrists, the incessant checking of email, the inability to sit down and read. All of these are symptoms of our inability to focus.

So, that experience in the theater really struck me. How are we supposed to foster the deep thinking needed within our schools if we are just as distracted as our students? Well, the answer is simple, though its execution is complex: We need to model it. As teachers and administrators, we need to craft a school that is an incubator where deep thinking is inevitable, not a choice. This means that we need to take hold of what we can control within the school walls in order to support a balanced relationship with technology, normalize reading for fun, build intentional areas for solitude and collaboration, develop student executive functioning, and fundamentally rethink our approaches to social media. We have the power to create a microcosm of what the most ideal version of our respective communities inside of our schools, and act it out in real time. Like language learning, we need to take an immersion-approach to deep thinking, and it relies on transforming our schools in subtle, but potent ways.

Minimize the digital, go touch some grass

Beyond the obvious of removing cell phones from the education equation, students are still achieving record high screen time through their 1:1 devices provided by districts. In order to construct our Incubator of Deep Thinking (IDT) therefore, we need to be hyperintentional with how technology is utilized within our classrooms. Simply substituting pen and paper for an iPad cannot cut it. The boasted conveniences of totally digital classroom materials in the post-pandemic era has had severe implications on students handwriting ability, their ability to comprehend and retain material, all the while paying little mind to the lack of computer literacy skills of these so-called “digital natives.” So students lack the high-level computer skills to navigate the unintuitive digital world, and their ability to interact with the analog has atrophied — What are we to do?

There is an imperative here to get students to touch grass, or to get them in touch with analog tools and experiences. The analog provides perhaps the most intuitive tools for thinking, learning, and creating. This may mean a lot more printing for teachers, but it gives students the most intuitive non-linear space to play with ideas, interact with text, and retain information at a deeper level.

Take simple brainstorming for example, which is absolutely supercharged when using an online application. Canva, for instance, provides collaborative infinite canvas boards stocked with countless graphics, images, and decorations. But the overhead here is substantial. Students need to have their device and charger (because you know as well as I that it is dead), share the document out for collaboration (using the timeless ceremonial invocation ”What’s your email” to each group member), and learning the app itself, idiosyncrasies and all in order to even begin getting their ideas down. Though it can provide more depth, technology can often become a barrier to thought rather than an aid, especially for a group that can only type 30 words per minute. As we are building students capacities for deep thinking, we need to be earnest in giving them tools that provide the least friction possible to transfer these thoughts to a solid medium.

Typically, I would be the first to champion the promise of utilizing technology to aid classroom instruction. Large swaths of my career involve project-based learning where students use devices to communicate and create digital media. But, I firmly believe that skills cannot effectively transfer to a digital medium without knowing first how to do the base skill in the analog realm. You simply cannot effectively teach the skill and the medium in tandem. If a student does not know how to take effective notes, giving them an iPad with Notability is only going to make that process more confusing and difficult. They now need to learn the skill and the program all at once — How is that worth anyone’s time?

We need to be diligent in selecting technology that can transform the learning task, not to merely act as a substitute. This intentionality will surely lead to the omission of 1:1 from a variety, if not the majority, of classroom activities, but in turn will model an atmosphere that respects the balanced relationship between the digital and analog. Being digitally minimal in the classroom removes distraction, emphasizes deep thinking, and reserves the power that computers bring for when it is truly revolutionary.

I am begging you to read some fiction

Any educational leader worth their salt already has a keen understanding that enacting change necessitates teacher trust and buy-in. If the goal is to create our IDT, we need teachers to model it, both in and out of their classroom.

The smallest change a building can do to push their culture toward IDT is to normalize reading. Teacher reading habits do appear to have some positive influence on reading habits among students and teachers who do read regularly tend to choose more effective pedagogical practices. Reading begets focus which begets deep thinking. Just the simple habit of carrying a book and reading it in the school environment, effectively models for students what good readers look like, which in turn provides a schema for how and why this reading occurs in the first place.

This shouldn’t be confined to the classroom bells either. Rather, it should be spread and publicly displayed all across the building. As we pursue systems for students to build healthy relationships with their technology, we must follow suit. This means that when idle time arises, we put down our phone, shut our computer, take out our headphones, and pull out a book. Though perhaps performative in nature, I would argue that the only way to shift a culture is to perform towards our given ideal. The more students see reading happen, and the more instruction they are provided to build their literacy skills, the more normalized reading becomes. This is not to say that students will magically start reading if we do. No, this is in pursuit of modeling what good readers look like, and how to meaningfully create distance from technology.

This is why fiction is perfect — It’s not work. It’s not tedious. It’s not a chore. It’s fun. The more we engage in this activity, the more focused we become, the healthier we are, and the more prepared we will be to guide students through the perilous act of reading, no matter the subject.

Building fortresses of solitude

There is also a great deal to be said for schools to construct bespoke areas where deep thinking can take place. Much of this in the past has been performative. We have a library, but secretly it is a second lunch room. We have study areas that turn out to be more hang-out areas. We have a tutoring center that is, you guessed it, a third lunchroom. These are real problems my school currently is trying to sort through.

The tutoring center as a lunchroom mentioned before is no joke. We just rebooted our tutoring center last year for the first time since COVID, and it devolved rather quickly. We were not respecting the space for what we labeled it. As midterm quickly approached, something had to be done. So our teachers and administrators got together to get on the same page about policy and expectations about this deep thinking space. Since that moment, it hasn’t been an issue, and our Freshmen-on-track rates have been getting progressively better.

The power that clear communication, routine follow-through, and collective efficacy holds on our IDT is crucial to recognize. Without it, our school does not have the tools to adequately define and respect the spaces we construct. The moment we started to treat our tutoring center as a place for deep thinking and learning — a fortress of solitude — it quickly found its people. This area today is no less full than before, but now it is filled with students seeking refuge from the chaos in order to think.

Fortresses of solitude can come in all shapes and sizes: from a booth by a window, to a desk in the library. The essential elements, though, are constant: quiet, unstimulating, and comfortable. These ingredients come together to create an environment where focus is unavoidable. As a teacher in pursuit of my own fortresses, I quickly found how difficult they are to come by. Near every corner of my building is stuffed with distraction. Given the goal of an IDT is to carve a path toward in deep thinking, we need to be conscientious in providing environments for this to occur, and following through with our expectations in these areas.

This is not to say that chaos is bad. In fact, you can’t have deep thinking without chaos in the equation somewhere. Large common areas bring about vast opportunities socialization, community building, negotiation of meaning-making, and a healthy dose of serendipitous encounters. But it is the intentionality that is required when constructing an IDT to determine which spaces are which, and to respect the space for what it is.

There is profound resolve needed to create these common areas, all the while possessing the restraint to provide our fortresses. Each are worthy in their own right. The more flexible we make our spaces and the higher expectations we have for students that utilize them, creates an environment that shouts “We care about you, your focus, and your thinking, and we’re here to help.”

Please bring back the planner

The awe-inspiring capabilities that modern technology shepherds today to organize our knowledge is indispensable. Though Socrates may have opposed the act of writing things down, thinking that it would lead to a weaker mind, today we recognize the meaningful connection writing has with deep thinking and learning in the pursuit of accomplishing our goals. I have noticed though, that not only do students struggle with these executive functioning skills, but schools rarely provide them with the tools to begin learning them.

Out of sheer necessity, we as educators have enormous experience juggling an increasing cognitive load, constant context-switching, and time/task management needed to do this seemingly impossible job to the highest of standards. It is not easy. In my time mentoring new teachers, there comes a point in the middle of their first semester where they make a mad dash to keep all of their plates spinning, only to be devastated when some start to come crashing down. Something I always relay in these crucial moments is this: Teaching is one of the most demanding knowledge work jobs that exists. You need to allow yourself the time and patience to focus on keeping your fine china spinning, and tending to your IKEA plates when you can. In time, not only will you grow stronger, quicker, but you’ll figure out how to keep them spinning without you even tending to them.

So, it comes as no surprise we need to teach these skills to our students as well. For too long have we settled on letting students figure out their workflows on their own, only to watch them sink into a disorganized trough, handing you a mangled paper that you would have thought came out of a bad car wreck rather than a Paw Patrol backpack.

In our IDT then, we need to instill a system to support executive functioning, providing students with the tools and structure to learn how to keep their plates spinning. The most basic way to do this is with a simple planner. But handing them a spiral notebook in August and expecting it to change their lives is nonsense. We need to go deeper to intertwine their organizational tools into each of our classrooms. This is why collective teacher efficacy is an imperative. If we all hold the line on these routines, it transforms a simple, isolated action into a habit that is relentlessly reinforced. Our ideal here is that the pen and planner serve as the means in which one clears their mind, priming it for deep thinking. It stations their thoughts on stationary stationery, reducing their cognitive load, unburdening them from the turbulent swimming of tasks, due dates, and goals.

Back to basic communication

Social media is perhaps the foremost plight for students today, going hand-in-hand with smartphone addiction. If we truly want to build our incubator for deep thinking, how can a school possibly square this vision while in tandem using social media for all forms of communication? These platforms are closed-off, harvest your data, are a pit of algorithm-ized slop, and more often than not I hear students complain about their images being online rather than appreciate it. This is perhaps the most controversial of my proposal.

Nevertheless, community engagement is essential to a thriving school culture, and social media is the most powerful driver of communication ever before seen. To cut it out would lead a complete lapse in the relationship between school and stakeholders, and scream that our school is regressive and technophobic. But there is a great tension here between social media and our need for an incubator for deep thinking. How can we utilize the power of the web while still following through with our new systemic beliefs?

Well, the answer has been with us since birth of the web. We need to go back to the beautiful, aspirational, idyllic world that Web 1.0 originally offered, which I think can be distilled into two simple parts: Newsletters and Sites. Newsletters would offer direct home communication and updates, while sites would be individualized to showcase important resources, details and photos for clubs/sports, or even communication from students themselves by resurrecting the school newspaper.

Social media has provided this purpose in a disparate manner, but these two systems can provide the exact same information in a cleaner, more controlled, more respectful, less time-consuming manner. Here we are using the school system as a whole to model for our students. And the best part? We already have this technology functioning today. It’s stable, open, and eliminates the need for traditional “followers” because we can directly communicate with our audience of stakeholders through email, which we already use daily. No need for an additional account, no regressive algorithms distracting you, no advertisements that enrich Big Tech coffers. Simply what you want delivered, going right to you.

It may seem silly or overly headstrong, but if we are to truly bind ourselves to the values of an IDT, we need to demonstrate it through action, else it comes across hollow and hypocritical. We are at a pivotal time in education, and the only way we can begin to shift our school culture is by embodying our beliefs to our core.

There is so much more that can be said and done to make schools more effective, and there are many educators in the blogosphere that can give you a wider view of our copious problems. But as we are approaching an historic reckoning in this intersection between technology and education, we are now better positioned than ever to begin addressing these issues through even the subtlest of changes.

Sure, some of these measures may be performative, some may be more challenging to implement than others, and issues will undoubtedly remain in our schools in the aftermath. However, we have so much control over the school environment that we can seize for the betterment of our students, staff, and communities. The routines and habits we want to build within our students are entirely supported by the environment that we choose to create, which is defined by our systems actions. Compound this with the effects of collective teacher efficacy,1 and deep learning can become inevitable with this recipe for positive change.

And maybe, just maybe, if movie theaters somehow still exist in 20 years time, and people still turn out in droves to watch a wacky original Sci-Fi flick, I hope to see a generation that can recline in their plush chairs, munch on a Bavarian pretzel, and fully give themselves to the whims of a filmmaker and their art, without distraction. Or at the very least, I hope they have the courtesy to take their calls into the hallway.

Warning: What lies ahead are some practices that educators should never do when using AI, and should be taken solely for educational and entertainment purposes. Love with your heart, use your head for everything else.

Taking control of my lesson materials has become a core tenant of mine in my journey to use technology to maximize my capacity as an educator. This last year, I have been getting my materials off the cloud, and making them into tangible file formats that I have the freedom to do anything with1, and not beholden to the all-mighty EdTech gods who can shutter on a whim. And when Apple announced their Creator Studio this past January, I was greatly intrigued. My dream would be to get the deluge of content that Canva offers, in an offline file format that works and cannot be taken away against my will.

The subscription-based suite of apps comprises of the premium versions of the free productivity software Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform, as well as paid professional-level creative software Final Cut Pro (with companions Motion & Compressor), Logic Pro, Pixelmator, and MainStage. It is Apple’s clear attempt to compete with Adobe’s (horribly expensive) Creative Cloud as well as (free for educators) Canva.

For a bundle with educator pricing2 at $29.99 a year (which to my dismay upon purchase does not include primary/secondary educators), the professional-level software is a steal. However, here I want to examine the productivity apps that directly compete for education users that Canva would otherwise occupy. So, here is what I’ve been mucking about with from the perspective of an educator, and how it influences student experience and teacher workflow.

We Few Templates

One of the more precarious aspects of this suite are the premium templates. Hiding these behind a paywall almost indicates that free users will forever and always get the short end of the stick for software that has historically been neglected, and may never get another significant update in the aftermath of this release. This would be incredibly frustrating if the premium templates given were not so sparse, general, or poorly thought through.

Numbers

Numbers gives only six to templates to choose from, of which the most emblematic example is the gradebook. Take a look at the free and premium gradebooks side-by-side. If you squint your eyes looking at both, the differences are nearly negligible. At a glance, the table at the top has a near identical format with names and assignment percentage, and both have graphs below. But what is fascinating is that the free version actually has better and more relevant information overall. It’s graph, for example, shows a grade distribution for the entire class, which quickly gives the teacher the ability to see how they’re doing overall. The premium version swaps this information out for a graph that information information as the table above it, but with no labels. I am hard pressed to think of a situation where I would want numerical information shown visually without units, when I have the information literally right above in a more readable format. These rehashes are frequent in Numbers and it is so disappointing. They offer nothing particularly new, relevant, or niche for a group of people who are likely subscribing for a power user experience. There are so many other simple spreadsheets that could have been provided that dive deeper into the needs of students and teachers. One of the free templates is a bespoke probability calculator; You’re telling me Apple could not provide niche spreadsheets dedicated to education subscribers?

Keynote

As you may know, PowerPoint is Not Pedagogy, but I do hold some selfish value on making presentations that are easy on the eyes and use the medium to display information in a dynamic way to augment a lesson. Keynote has always been good at this, but Canva has historically been even better. “Educator Playful”, one of seven premium education templates, is probably the closest to come to the Canva aesthetic. Clean arrows, colorful headings, and underlines galore, I think they look great, and pair well with the new Content Hub for Canva-level clip art and images. If there were even more playful, colorful, themed templates for educators with baked in graphics, it would be a great option. But for now, Canva’s diversity and openness to user-created designs is just too vast to pass up if that is something that is important to you. This is one of the largest critiques of Apple Creator Studio: Though useful looking on its face, it is clearly too shallow of an implementation to move the needle on anyone’s workflows.

Pages

This leaves Pages. Similar to Numbers in terms of “diverse” offerings, what makes it even more frustrating is that many of these are clearly geared toward school teachers, who again are somehow not included in the bundle’s education discount. I am hard pressed to think of a college-level instructor who would use “School Simple Lesson Plan” as their planner, though education majors may get some use out it. The same goes for “Math Geometric Certificate.” Obviously this is designed for primary school students with its colors, graphics, and structure. Overlooking school teachers and students in this market is a large misstep in Apple’s product strategy, as well as the resources dedicated to developing these designs in the first place. Who will use them if not us?

There remains a vast an unexplored world with these templates, and if Apple really wants to make this suite more appealing for an annual subscription, they desperately need to up their game on templates. As of right now, Canva still reigns. You’re better off downloading a PowerPoint/Word file from there and uploading it back to Keynote or Pages. Annoying and cumbersome, so Apple should really look to fill this gap.

Is Apple Intelligence Any Good?

The entree in this new and improved lineup is its deeper integration with Apple Intelligence, which has had an infamously delayed and scattered rollout since its announcement all the way back in 2024. The hype for AI around knowledge work, especially academia, is palpable, but I think an important metric to judge these tools is through it’s rebuke of psuedo-productivity3 — We should either be accomplishing tasks faster at the same quality or obtaining a higher quality product for the same about of work.

Keynote got the most love in this update with similar crossover features to the other apps, so that is what I’ll focus on. Broadly, the update is composed of a handful of image generation features as well as two that are LLM focused, mainly utilizing ChatGPT under the hood. The generation limits are relatively generous, at 50 images, 50 presentations, and presenter notes from 700 slides, which resets each month. To play around and capture all the screenshots for this feature, I hit 25% of my monthly usage.

In classic Apple fashion, the menus here are highly accessible, with much of the prompting to ChatGPT happening completely behind the scenes without the user ever needing to see or write any verbose prompts, which I think works well. Many of the LLM features solely require the click of single button to produce a rapid response, which is paramount to building a solid workflow during a 45 minute planning period. Let’s see how much we can accomplish.

They’re Worth 1,000 Words

Images are the pride and joy of the ACS experience. Content Hub provides thousands images, graphics, and shapes to choose from without ever having to navigate to a browser or copy and paste. The flow here is simple and fast: You click on Content Hub, type what you want, click it, you blink, and it’s inserted into your slidedeck. The images are high quality, though painfully generic. Searching “Lincoln” yields a single picture of the Lincoln Memorial, some pennies4, and Mount Rushmore, among few others. A simple connection to public domain images through the National Archives would make a world of difference for this feature. For now, I still find myself jumping to a browser to prep.

Now, instead of searching the Content Hub, you could generate any image your imagination can whip up to support a classroom. This is obviously nothing new Apple is offering, and that trademark ChatGPT look is pungent. It’s certainly not ideal for anything that requires authenticity, accuracy, or artistic intent5, but for my language learner classroom, this is superb for making illustrations alongside on-screen instructions for our activities. The time saving is negligible when compared to stitching together clip art I suppose, but it is a different way to make a slideshow more appealing and saves me the time and bandwidth from going to a site to generate an image in the off chance I need one.

By far my most beloved feature is Super Resolution. The ability to take a low-quality image and upscale it for a presentation has haunted me since the beginning of my career. Visuals in any ESL class are pivotal to connect concepts to language, and so it’s devastating as a teacher to find the perfect image, only to find a low quality version that is difficult to parse when blown up onto a projector. Paste in an image you found online, click the Super Resolution button, and within seconds you will see it in higher quality. And the best part? This is an entirely local process happening entirely on your computer. No internet connection necessary. This is AI at its best: clean, fast, local, and saves a ton of time. The limits of this feature are apparent. It works better with simple images without a lot of detail, and around words it gets that AI fuzz, but it is serviceable, and is the most useful feature by far for images.

Don’t Try This At Home: The Madness of the Language Model

The weakest premium feature set by a long shot stems from the ceaseless, sycophantic vomiting of the large language model. There are two major features here to speak for: Generate Slides & Generate Presenter Notes. The features on their face may perk some critical ears. You may be thinking to yourself: If I am creating a presentation for a lesson, why in the world would I outsource the workload to AI, just to turn around and fix all of the things it created? To this I am completely confounded. In the same way that writing an essay requires your thoughts and judgement, so does a presentation. What to keep, what to add, what visuals to apply are skills that (for the foreseeable future) simply cannot be accomplished by a simple Generative AI application.

After playing around with this feature with my own descriptions and getting lackluster results, I decided to do what literally no teacher should ever do ever: Take a pre-made lesson plan (in this case, I took Digital Inquiry Group’s lesson on Castro and the US), paste it into the description dialogue box, and see what it comes out the other end. And it is under these laziest, malpractice-worthy, most detailed of conditions, that the cracks in this feature-set become evident.

Take a look at the results for yourself. Slides are bare with some only having a title. There is no real formatting to speak, and not a single visual is present that did not come as default in the template. Sure it broke information into individual slides, but with such a vast library from the Content Hub, you would imagine that it could be easily paired with Generate Slides. It is a colossal oversight. Perhaps if you just wanted ChatGPT to automatically press the “Add a Slide” button for you ten times? Maybe if you just wanted to use the “Contents” slide it provides as an agenda? I simply see no reason for this feature to exist other than to tempt users to try outsourcing their thinking, and waste their time going over the information with a fine-toothed comb to ensure accuracy and fidelity if that is any priority of yours.

Generate Presenter Notes is more of the same: Taking guesses at what you want to say in a feeble attempt to shield you from using your brain, tricking you into believing you got more done. And that is the true problem with the incorporation of LLM’s into Keynote. These resolve nothing for a teacher’s workflow other than creating more noise to sift through. Am I really going to create a whole slidedeck just to read ChatGPT’s notes on it in front of an audience? Again, I beg the question: What is the point?

Any practitioner who uses either of these features would be forced to go back to each slide, edit text size, add images, and ensure that nothing was hallucinated, at which point you might as well have created your own slidedeck at the onset. Lucky for me, DIG’s outline for the lesson was detailed enough, and ChatGPT was conservative enough to produce a notes where no major hallucinations were formed. But is that really the objective? History teaching inherently involves storytelling6. The relationship between the US and Cuba is fascinating, intricate, and more relevant than ever, and the slides and presenter notes created simply cannot match the forethought, study, and delivery that a good instructor provides. It is the perfect example of AI for the sake of AI.

This is nothing new to the Big Tech, who has continually attempted to monetize AI by cramming in as many features as they can, useful or otherwise. But it is annoying that Apple is simply following suit.

Dreaming of Electric Sheep

Apple Creator Studio is a cavalcade of missed opportunities, with an agonizing breadth of potential that has not been realized. Here is my wishlist for future updates:

• Styled, niche templates that solve more diverse problems for power users in a given field, and many of which are low-hanging fruit

  • Deeper data analysis sheets

  • Cornell Notes

  • Calendar designed for planning

  • Infographics

  • Syllabus

  • KWL guide

  • ADDIE guide

  • Vocabulary sheets

  • Progress trackers

  • Kanban Board

You get my point. If you have any other ideas, let me know.

• Offer the Education Discount to all students and educators.

• Expand Content Hub’s image offerings, providing access to Public Domain images and diagrams, and deeper integration to make recommendations for graphics

• The addition of more image editing tools

• Automatic mind maps in Freeform based on given input

• Stop the LLM slop. It is garbage quality and no amount of extra GPUs, RAM, or water consumption can mend this

Honestly, I am looking forward to seeing what future updates look like. The world of Apple Intelligence has been chaos over the last 2 years, but with the implementation of a white-labelled Gemini serving as its Private Cloud Compute, the potential for our workflows to get faster and more efficient beckons. Only time will tell what we can continue to do with this technology moving forward.

The year was 1982 and Apple was in dire straits. Their stock was in decline, still riding the high of the then 5-year-old Apple II’s success and licking their wounds from the Apple III’s concrete-denting thud upon reception. They were just on the horizon of a series of monumental failures as well as the infamous ouster of Steve Jobs as CEO. It was here that an oft overlooked deal in the world of education was struck.

A significantly underesourced and untapped market Apple recognized was schools. Steve Jobs later recalled in his 1995 interview with the Smithsonian^[1] that “...one of the things that built Apple was schools buying Apple II’s.” Jobs was a strong proponent in bringing computers into schools remembering “We realized that a whole generation of kids was going to go through the school system before they even got their first computer so we thought the kids can’t wait.”

His idea was simple: Apple can donate a computer to every school in America and they get a tax credit for their donation, taking a 10% loss on the product, but gaining a powerful hook into this market. By pure coincidence I’m sure, the unspoken benefit of this donation is that it would invariably lead to schools buying more computers and software from Apple, bolstering their coffers. After a year of personally lobbying Congress, shaking hands with the vast majority of the House, the federal bill died in a Senate lame duck period^[2], and Jobs quickly grew impatient, losing interest soon thereafter.

Hope was not totally lost, though. The California State Government swooped in to create a similar program, and with reportedly little input from Jobs or Apple, The Computers in Schools tax credit (A.B. 3194) was born. So in 1983, Apple’s new Kids Can’t Wait program distributed over 9,000 Apple IIe’s across Californian schools, along with some accompanying software, and free teacher training for this new technology.

Thus, the inseparable bond between tech companies and schools began – The rest is history.

As hardware and software continued to evolve – and technology became more ingrained in students learning and teacher workflow – so too did the business models, which shifted from ownership of materials to the licensing of them. Software as a Service (SaaS) has promulgated into each branch of our profession, stretching budgets thin, making faculty reliant, and leaving IT powerless. This is the effervescent you’ll own nothing and be happy model that demands consumers pay a subscription to watch a movie, rather than just buy the Blu-ray. And it has been extraordinarily profitable for businesses, and deprives individuals of control over what they use and how they use it. Schools continue to license software and create dependence on systems that may not exist in the years to come, and with budgeting issues all across the country, it is more important now than ever to take inventory of the systems our schools choose.

In this way, my taking part in some agonizing meetings this year with textbooks sales representatives (whose branded merch and evasive answers were not taken kindly to) and the subsequent PLC’s after choosing a vendor shine a bright spotlight on this new collective reality: With the deluge of technology that flooded the educational landscape, we are more beholden than ever to thorny software which shape our systems, rather than adaptable technologies that adjust to us.

For the last few months we have painstakingly attempted to get the textbook to communicate with Canvas and both to communicate with our gradebook. We have had to create hacky work-arounds and janky workflows so that this software fits into our lives, all for a service that we may not renew in 5 years time. With trivial results and hours wasted, it is apparent that this work has little to do with our ultimate goal: to help our kids learn best. EdTech here serves as an active detriment to what teachers should doing and how technology should be harnessed to empower us to teach and our students to learn.

In the programming world, they describe these companies as Merchants of Complexity. Renowned programmer David Heinemeier Hansson had this to say back in a 2024 blog post:

You see this syndrome all over the tech industry. Basic problems people could easily solve for themselves, cheaply and quickly, getting turned into scary and insurmountable challenges that only a sophisticated solution (usually on a subscription!) will cure.

Education is clearly one of the most lucrative sectors for tech companies to sink their teeth into. Like any government entity, and a company like Apple in 1982 reportedly sustained an entire quarter of their business on education sales alone. SaaS companies today have seeped in to the landscape with subscriptions galore to solve problems that they themselves created. But if Hansson is right that we have the power to solve it ourselves, then how?

Earlier in this chaotic semester I ran into an issue: I planned for a simulation in one of my history classes, but there was last-minute IEP meeting scheduled that pulled me out of class that period. Given the choice to either adapt the simulation or not doing it at all in my absence, I turned to Gemini. Within about a prep period of work, I was able to adapt the simulation so that it can be played with a partner, with instructions and rules, completely interactive, in a static HTML site that I hosted on GitHub Pages. When coming back the next day and following up on my day of absence, it was clear that the game actually connected with students, achieving some (though not all) of the outcomes I planned to address had I’d been in the classroom.

This led to my core revelation: If a tech-enthusiast educator like myself with microscopic coding knowledge can create a bespoke piece of software with AI, then what else can we build to ease our workflows and increase the capabilities of our educational systems without the need for these merchants of complexity? We are now living in an unprecedented time where teachers and schools can own the means of technology. The creation of bespoke software has never been easier and has the ability to individualize our tools to best befit our systems, rather than our tools continuing to dominate us. These would be tools that we completely own, which, if not replace our current technology, can ease the tension between our disparate systems.

As my colleagues and I sit around and banter about the shortcomings of our online gradebook, one of us jokes “I could create a better gradebook on Sheets!”

Honestly, we can and we should.

1. This interview was surprisingly filled with Jobs’ takes on the education system. His pro-Voucher and anti-Union postitions were put on clear display. His thoughts on the inability for computers to replace teachers were quite prescient.↩︎

2. In the words of our dear nameless Boy in the song I’m Just a Bill “By that time it’s very unlikely that you’ll become a law. It’s not easy to become a law, is it?”↩︎

Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy in his Opinion piece for the NYT on AI and the workforce (gift link):

Because of this, my friend has decided to commit 1 percent of his firm’s profits to help people learn new skills for jobs, demonstrating what leadership looks like in the A.I. age. I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should follow this lead and dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced.

And you'll never guess what platform would provide this job training...

This is not to diminish Khan's attempt to pursue a noble cause, and one that may somehow prove true in the coming decades. But there's no denying much of the hype around AI is predicated upon grandiose visions of a future, which at present have little to support the premise of unprecedented job loss. And it is curious that the only people that generate this effervescent frenzy around AI are the ones who materially gain from these predictions. But Khan intentionally created his company as an non-profit (unlike it's freemium, for-profit peer, Duolingo). This structure should act as a defensive barrier against the perverse incentives that push companies to echo these verbose claims. Planting his flag on the spurious nonsense of AI as an ideology seems juxtaposed with the supposed goals that Kahn puts forth. While Khanmigo, he asserts, is not designed to replace a teacher, Khan is more than confident that AI will replace "80 percent of [the] work force."

Admittedly perplexed, I descended a touch deeper and found some more confounding examples of strange moves KA and it's creator have engaged in that raise red flags. Peter Greene wrote a great piece examining how KA's own research is fudged, and John Warner wrote a scathing review Khan's 2024 book about AI and education, which compares more to a barking charlatan to peddle his AI projects than that of an educational expert. But to what end? It is not as if the organization was in dire need of cash prior to the introduction of Khanmigo in 2023. Just look at the CEO's previous salaries or KA's own supporters page to see for yourself.

The situation raises all of my internal alarms, warning me of a large-scale grift, but I cannot seem to spot it.

This very public display of amity between Khan and OpenAI over the last few years is suspicious at best and at worst threatens to undermine the conceptions of what the public believes a quality education necessitates. The discourse online about KA seems overwhelmingly positive by educators, students, and autodidacts alike, but there are many vocal detractors of the traditional education systems as well who use KA as rhetorical ammo to show the uselessness of contemporary schooling. There is a troubled history of those who wish to rid us of one of the greatest pillars of democratic society that is socialized education. The advent of GenAI is just one more stage in this fraught war.

I'll leave you with this 2 year old aged-like-milk comment from a deleted account on r/OpenAI on Khan's partnership with the company, which really speaks for itself:

Education as wel know is obsolete. I expected a subscription model first to come into play, like onlyfans for teachers. But seeying this, I reckon that step can be skipped. Give it a year and you have your personal ai teacher that know how to work with you, knows what buttons to push to make you understand new concepts. Same for musical teachers.

A provocative post from Tom Pepinsky on Bluesky:

What the fuck is this guy talking about?
You get the sense that perhaps deBoer has never been to a college in this U.S. before, or that he doesn't really know what a college is
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/is-there-a-more-pathetic-figure-than

The article attached, from Freddie deBoer on Substack, present a scathing tirade against a particular type of professor:

They wear black jeans and Chuck Taylors to class, except maybe on the first day, when they stroll in wearing semi-ironic suits designed to contrast with their ample tattoos. Their syllabuses are printed in Helvetica. They mention Chappell Roan in the first fifteen minutes of the first day of class.

deBoer continues for another 3,000 words digging deeper through this same path of logic, which is a roller coaster of straw-men, misguided pedagogy, as well as some reasonable frustrations. I want to examine some of that here.

1. Student connection should not undermine authority

deBoer makes the claim from the outset that relating to students is the first blunder that a professor can make to appear Cool:

Many, many students groan internally on the first day when the instructor gets up and starts performing relatability and engaging in “I’m just like you” theatrics. They’re just too polite to say so.

The research has been clear on this for decades, student-teacher relationships are one of the foundational factors that influence students achievement. Relating to students in a way that is authentic to you does not immediately imply that you are somehow a worse teacher, quite the contrary. I would like to think that deBoer is not ignorant of this fact, but if that's the case then this particular point simply comes across as contrarian for its own sake.

2. Critical pedagogy is not "always and forever self-defeating"

deBoer in an overlong parenthetical aside:

[F]or the record, the fundamental dictate of critical pedagogy is always and forever self-defeating: if you inspire your students to rebel against your authority in your own classroom, they’re still following your lead and thus not rebelling at all.

Which I believe is a willful and malicious misrepresentation of the theory. deBoer has an intense fixation on this idea that Cool professors attempt to hide their authority, despite being bestowed it. The logic of critical pedagogy, which I am confident deBoer already understands, is to give students the tools to become critically conscious to fight oppression, not merely to thwart authority.

Authority and critical theory are not ideologically opposed, and certainly does not necessitate hiding your authority as a teacher, but rather embracing and accepting it.

Freire himself makes this clear:

I have never said that the educator is the same as the pupil. Quite the contrary [...]. The educator is different from the pupil. But this difference [...] must not be antagonistic. The difference becomes antagonistic when the authority of the educator, different from the freedom of the pupil, is transformed in authoritarianism.

Which again, is simply what good teaching looks like. So yes, you can have a critical classroom that is hierarchical. To be afraid that if students learn critical theory, they may rebel against your authority, should indicate to you that your teaching may reinforce oppression and antagonistic hegemony. To consider that a "defeat," completely misses the underpinnings of the theory. This may be a good opportunity for some professional self-reflection.

3. Learning is uncomfortable

There is a good deal of common ground I can find with deBoer, one of which is that learning is inherently uncomfortable.

But then, the job of a teacher is not to minimize discomfort; indeed, a good teacher will necessarily make their students uncomfortable, on occasion, as it’s often only in the space of genuine discomfort that we’re inspired to achieve our deepest growth.

Plato's aporetic dialogues appeared at the very infancy of pedagogical thinking, and for good reason: we learn best when we are actively challenged. Vygotsky's ZPD echoes this same notion, in a much more scientific manner, over two millennia thereafter. Students can best learn when presented with a task that is in a sweet-spot of uncomfortableness. To say that a teacher's job is not to minimize discomfort, though, is outright incorrect. A good teacher will ultimately differentiate the challenge given to their respective students to best develop their capacities in the most efficient way.

In the same way that video games have a difficulty curve throughout, educational programming does too. Some players may like to skip the tutorial, having already acquired the requisite skills, though others genuinely need it as a scaffold to success.

4. Feedback and high standards are critical

Perhaps the most spot-on idea that deBoer brings up that aligns with best practice is his stance on high standards and feedback. He says:

Students, meanwhile, are left to flounder. Most of them don’t know what they don’t know. (That’s why they’re in school!) And they’re trusting you, the instructor, to provide the structure, the feedback, the push. You don’t do that by affirming everything they say or handing out A’s like candy. You do it by guiding them through difficult material, correcting their mistakes, setting high standards, and being honest when they fall short.

Grade inflation does appear to be a significant issue in our current educational landscape, but I do not believe this is because of the Cool professors of the world, but rather a system tied with perverse incentives from the consumerization of education.

Guiding students through difficult material, correcting their mistakes, and having them rise to your expectations is paramount to the role of educator, but deBoer quickly undercuts this notion in the very next section.

5. A need for growth mindset

Even rarer, and even more important, is to sometimes say “I don’t think this will ever be something you’re very good at.” This shouldn’t ever be done with cruelty or malice. But real teaching does require honesty, and a willingness to risk being disliked.

This whole concept is misguided and untrue, and I pity the students that may have to hear that from you. It's not honesty. It's being a jerk. The high expectations that you set up are quickly dashed when you set the tone that some students will never be able to reach them.

A good teacher doesn't throw their hands in the air in a huff because their students aren't getting it, they just teach it to them. It is precisely what you are there for (For those that don't know, teacher is defined as a person who teaches^[1]). You cannot call yourself an educator if you say the same things five times to students and half the room doesn't get it:

Explaining the same concept for the fifth time because half the room still doesn’t get it, without pretending that the problem is with the concept and not the students.

Now, hear me out: maybe you should find a different way to teach the concept. Your job is not to force students to excel in a given field, your job is to adapt to students to teach them the material. It is here and only here, that students are "left to flounder," and directly opposes what deBoer stated that good teachers do just paragraphs prior.

A vibes-based litmus test

The piece itself comes across as bitter and monochrome. It becomes a vibes-based litmus test made to resoundingly declare a group of teachers that I don't like as wrong and ineffective. It's like deBoer received his end of semester student surveys, and seeing that students marked him lower than he thought just, wrote this verbose article to blow off steam at all the teacher's he perceives as Cool(TM), who likely got higher marks.

The big takeaway from his dismissive and condescending argument for this dubiously existent phenomena is that teachers should be rigid and cold beings, who simply deposit knowledge in student brains rather than actually teaching them. It spits in the face of evidence-based practice that has been mounting for decades.

Again, not all of what deBoer writes is incorrect, but the premise of this mythological, tattoo-laden, jeans-wearing professor, who hangs out with students in lieu of teaching, is entirely misguided.

Anyway, here are some of my favorite responses to the article on Bluesky:

That was an extended hallucination

— Kevin M. Kruse (@kevinmkruse.bsky.social) July 24, 2025 at 1:00 PM

Is the Cool Professor in the room with you right now?

— Rick Godden (@rickgodden.bsky.social) July 24, 2025 at 4:42 PM

Uh, Helvetica is the cool and rebellious font now?

— Christopher Shea (@lordshark.bsky.social) July 24, 2025 at 1:03 PM

1. Thank you, Miriam-Webster, for the in-depth definition ↩︎

Earlier this week, one of our multilingual student used AI to write their ESL class to compose their personal narrative essay. The evidence to their teacher could not be much more clear. Their grammar was spotless, the essay structure was advanced, and their vocabulary was far beyond what has been noted throughout the class hitherto that assignment.

I find myself recently constantly grappling with how to get students to utilize AI in class responsibly. The dead-end argument that I always come back to is: Why even bother learning how to write or learn another language when AI can become the middle man in the process? I want to believe that these skills are still essential, I want to believe that students still need to learn it, and I think teachers need to be on the same philosophical page in order to teach them.

Writing is thinking

The practice of writing ensures that you are thinking. Even if a student pays little attention to their word choice, grammar, or style, in order to craft a work that makes sense, they need to ruminate on how abstract ideas can answer some essential question. Once they begin this intense pondering, they sharpen their ideas through these components to more precisely communicate their meaning. If doing it properly, you are piecing together and picking apart your own thought processes bit-by-bit, ensuring they are sound. Like a vulture picking the final scraps off a bone, you methodically hunt down words, sentences, ideas, or sources to tweak so that we can communicate with true lucidity.

I truly (perhaps naively) believe that this skill will endure as an essential element to teach students to perform at a high level, regardless of coming inventions. In the same way that a math teacher requires students to show their work, learning to write cohesively is the most efficient way for students to showcase their cognition, their knowledge and their voice; achieving precisely what you mean, exactly how you mean it.

Technology has always been a gateway for conveyance, eliminating all obstacles that prevent you from converting your personal electrical signals to a readable and transmittable format. From the days of papyrus and soot we have been able to log our knowledge and collect our beliefs that endure through time. By teaching writing, we are presupposing that our thoughts and experiences are valuable, and technology is a vehicle to produce these ideas with ease.

In a way, this is why the mechanical keyboard community has such a large following. They know more than anyone the power of hardware and software as a tool to eliminate friction between your brain and the world. This hearkens back to László Bíró on his invention of the ballpoint pen1:

Well, writing comes from the heart. If we can help the hand to perform the task, what is so wrong with that?

Technology and writing have a deeply intertwined relationship, that is certainly not going away. The problem is when the technology stops acting as a catalyst, and starts to become the reaction.

But that school assignment needs to get done. It's due tomorrow. I am just gonna paste the teacher's prompt and the rubric into ChatGPT, copy and paste, and voila! All done!

This is not to blame them at all; billions of years of evolution always guides us toward the logical path of least resistance.

In the same way that the "Whole Language Theory" was infamously misguided to assert that students will learn to love reading when we provide them with the freedom to choose their own texts, it is a fallacy to set our sights on getting students to love writing for its own sake. This goal is fruitless. Writing is important because it makes learning visible, it enables deep thinking as it is cross-disciplinary, it empowers us to create, and it can facilitate the development and preservation of our mental health and identity. This list could go on, but can be put more succinctly when simply drawing our attention toward the LLM's for which I am critical. Without the vast array of our original thoughts, information, and research freely available online, these LLMs could not be as great as they truly are. Meta's alleged stealing terabytes of copyrighted works to produce Llama is a compelling example.

This is not to come across as some hermitic Luddite. Students absolutely hate writing and will avoid it at any cost, and they should harness any resource in their grasp to shepherd their authentic thoughts into reality. This does not mean they should be enabled to skip this process altogether though.

A means or an end?

We've been lucky that our most vital institutions so far have rejected the prospect of using generative AI in lieu of their own critical thought, and we need a system to get students to understand the same.

To this end, I present a straightforward litmus test for AI use: Am I using AI as a means or an end to a product?

This line of thinking is relatively intuitive. Whether it is brainstorming, outlining, researching, or writing, teachers act as the lighthouse which students use to steer their work toward the right direction, and this simple test can help maintain the goal posts for teachers and students alike.

Reviewing the sources from the ChatGPT search function? That's a means.

Putting in your rough draft to have Mistral completely re-write it to sound more academic? That's an end.

Through effective modeling and formative work that leave the door open to using these tools, our little test can slowly become a routine, nagging in the back of students minds while they work. When consistently applied to classroom activities, it becomes far more clear what use AI can present, and where it does not belong, in the same way we teach students the uses of Wikipedia for academic research.

But this test does not occur in a vacuum, and building this routine is clearly not a cure to the determined-to-plagiarize pupil. Educators ought to continue to utilize current best practices for AI in their teaching, while keeping in mind this overarching philosophy of where our AI line is. Whether it is using Google Assignments to see document version history, placing constraints on assignments to keep students honest, creating scaffolds and check-ins that task students to explain their evidence and reasoning throughout a project, or requiring a degree of specificity that would be difficult for an LLM to adhere to at a high fidelity, this line of thought should guide you in making your own pedagogical decisions.

Students like our dismayed learner from the beginning of our tale are by no means uncommon. They're young, they're human, and they just want to get our assignments done. Though this mistake is dire, it is not the end of the road. We'll have them complete their narrative with a tutor who can work directly with them. As the semester marches on, we can reinforce what we want to see in their work, and why we want to see it. With clear reasoning, expectations, and routines, we can implicitly guide all learners to become independent thinkers who use technology as a tool, not a crutch. Though Moore's Law carries us forward, clear habits of thought like this will develop an intuition which will prepare us to respond to our rapidly changing world as it passes before us.

1. The first commercially successful ballpoint pen, you sweet little pedant. See John J. Loud for more ↩

Tara García Mathewson from The Markup discussing online censorship on school networks, mentions Aleeza, a high school student in California:

When she was taking a debate class, she ran into the blocks regularly while researching controversial topics. An article in Slate magazine about LGBTQ+ rights gave her a block screen, for example, because the entire news website is blocked. She said she avoids her school Chromebook as much as possible, doing homework on her personal laptop away from school Wi-Fi whenever she can.

Wide-sweeping, totalitarian decisions made on behalf of students and families is certainly nothing new. We need to do our due diligence in providing an appropriate and safe learning environment for our students, and that is not solely exclusive to the physical world. But when schools begin to disrupt the academic realm, preventing students learning about their world, is where things begin to break down.

Learning is, by nature, an uncomfortable affair. We cannot astroturf our way around the sensitive topics that reality brings. Once students step outside the artificial school bounds, they will become keenly aware that what they are learning in school does not align with what their eyes see.

It is complicated, it is uncomfortable, and that's the sweet-spot where learning truly occurs.

We need to embrace the grey and provide a space for students to learn in an intellectual playground. When we put up synthetic barriers to our students' learning, we actively limit their potential to think. It is difficult for teachers to do this in the same way that it can be difficult to manage a classroom, but this does not mean that it is impossible.

Quite the contrary, teachers can be actively equipped with the proper tools to help students investigate meaningful evidence on a topic. If students are to have any semblance of a productive academic discourse and students' critical consciousness to be engaged, open access is the only way to make it happen.

Without transparent internet block rules, teachers lose one of the most vital assets in making their students think at the highest levels. All for what? Trying to push the existence of the LGBTQ+ community to the back of the network closet?

Students are not oblivious to the outside world. With technology always at the palm of their hand, many are able to have full access to the internet without limits every second of the day. Clearly schools need rules on what is and is not appropriate, but once network administrators begin to make decisions fueled by the culture wars, they violate a clear tenet of intellectual freedom that academic institutions should embrace.

Subverting the firewall

Obviously to get around this, make friends with your local IT department. They are underpaid and always talk to people at their worst moments -- You'll have a lot in common. Then, when you are planning a lesson with and article by Slate or whomever, just send an email asking for the block to be lifted.

But let's say you are in a bind in the middle of a lesson, and won't hear back quick enough. What can you do?

Here, I highly encourage you to visit Archive.org's1 Wayback Machine. Simply copy and paste the URL of the article you are trying to access, and more often than not, there will be a recent archive of the site, virtually identical to the one blocked on the network. For student research, I'll typically have students email me their link, and I send them a working Archive.org one back. Works like a charm.

As the culture wars continue to heat up, and academic institutions face greater scrutiny, the battle against academic censorship will continue to be at center stage.

1. If your school does not already block it. There are many other website archive tools out there, but YMMV ↩

Meghan Hargrave, Douglas Fisher, and Nancy Frey writing for ASCD, "Bringing Artificial Intelligence to the PLC Table":

In this ongoing analysis, it seems that team members would rather not disrupt the community by challenging ideas presented by their colleagues. When AI is used as a thought partner, the results are profoundly different. The end products are stronger because the team spends more time refining ideas, engaging with student data, and developing content based on the rich discussions had.

Look, I love this idea. I think any tool to help teachers facilitate conversations between one another in order to benefit teaching and learning is exceptionally important. I am all in on making PLC meeting time as efficient as it possibly can be. I've been in too many PLCs that have little direction, provide minimal analysis, and/or take too little action. It becomes a colossal waste of everyone's time.

The authors here highlight the planning and implementation of day-to-day strategies, which is invaluable in it's own right. The elephant in the room though, is how educators will use AI to analyze student data, which in my opinion is one of the most time-consuming aspects of these meetings.

The authors briefly address this idea near the end of the piece:

AI can also analyze data using an open-ended prompt such as, “What is this student already doing well, and what should they do next?”

Quick Note: For those that don't know, I am rather large proponent of ensuring the safety and security of student data and privacy in schools. In fact, this topic was the first article I published on this platform years ago. We are actively living out the Wild West of the LLM era. There is an open sea of possibilities for its use and few regulations to restrict future advancements. We need to be careful that educators know not to simply dump student data/work into for-profit platforms with shady privacy policies.

But let's assume that every teacher removes all personally identifiable information from these data reports properly, the expectations of educators also need to be appropriately dialed in. This technology cannot and should not do the thinking for you. It's a great buddy and brainstormer, but when utilizing such a broad prompt for the sake of analysis, teachers cannot just take the response as gospel.

I find so many of my colleagues treating an LLM as a person. Anthropomorphizing this tool using pronouns like "he" or "she," or discussing what ChatGPT "thinks" is astonishingly prevalent, years after it's introduction.

It's not thinking. It's not all-knowing. It's just guessing, and giving you want you may want to hear1. One part of me knows intuitively that this is just a shorthand for communication, but the other part is terrified that these words may start to shape our perceptions of LLMs.

The authors enunciate this point beautifully:

Of course, while chatbots are capable of producing human-like responses that can enhance the level of discourse, they cannot replace the insights of experienced educators.

Hargrave et al. provide a great use-case for AI beyond the classroom with solid guidelines. It is well worth a read and to keep in your back pocket as you approach meetings using AI. As educators and schools adopt discernible practices for AI usage, I surmise that the potential to become more productive and less-exhausted professionals is on the horizon. But we cannot become complacent. We need to keep ourselves in the loop and craft the critical decisions needed to set our students up for future success and improvement.

1. If our robot overlords have taken over by the time you are reading this, then I truly apologize for this ill-thought-out statement. ↩

I was a horrible reader as a child, and am a notoriously slow reader to this day. I empathize a great deal with my students who are not in love with reading - I was quite like them. While TikTok (or whatever other social media American teens are now flocking to) may seem like a detriment, there is evidence that short form video content trends like #BookTok has had a positive effect on literacy engagement for adolescent readers.

Despite this glimmer of hope, there has been a steady and severe decline in reading scores in my district, and our performance is well below our state average, which has led us to look for solutions to improve. For our elementary schools, the solution always seems to be: Let's just keep changing the curriculum until something sticks. Curriculum companies, likely foaming at the mouth, are more than excited to peddle their wares with the promises of increased test scores and daily lessons that are perfectly planned to save our teachers valuable time. Oh if it only ever truly worked that way.

The US as a whole is not too much different than us. If you've been following the online educator space recently, you may have heard that the 2024 NAEP Reading and Math scores have been announced. The overall results may not exactly shock you: Reading scores declined nationwide.

Now, there has been a great deal of debate about how to interpret this data, and how to more accurately adjust the data based on student demographics. I am not here to engage in that particular discussion, but rather to systematically analyze the results and methodologically-- Wait a second -- You see that right there? That deep shade of purple in the Deep South?

What in the world is going on in Mississippi?

We have to talk about Phonics...

Phonics teaching (that is, teaching students to read by sounding out individual words) rather than whole word teaching (getting students to recognize patterns of words in order to read) have been at odds with each other for decades. This academic debate for the best reading method have divided educators, scientists, and politicians alike in a period known as the Reading Wars.

The history of the Reading Wars are marred by conservative propaganda, Cold War ideology, and an undermining of education as a science, which still affects the discourse on the topic today. Removing the politics from the discussion for the moment, the intensive research conducted is straightforward: phonics-based education has a significant impact on student performance in elementary school.

Mississippi is the poster child for phonics education in younger grades. Just over the last 10 years, they have launched themselves from near last place in the NAEP report from 2015, to gracing the top ten in the nation in the latest results. This Mississippi Miracle as it's been coined, has been a predominant talking point for educators and politicians across the country, in part due to Mississippi's interminable devotion to phonics teaching in the classroom. Obviously this cannot be the only aspect involved in Mississippi's recent successes, but it would be difficult to claim that phonics played no part.

When looking at the research, there are many caveats to consider when utilizing phonics instruction. Everybody's favorite literacy academic, Dr. Timothy Shanahan of University of Illinois Chicago, expounds the use of phonics in early primary school education, and implies (with the limited research available) that using methods to explicitly teach the skill of decoding in middle and high school can have positive benefits when paired with other interventions targeted towards students that demonstrate the need for those specific skills. How to do this and which methods are best, however, are up for debate and further research.

Even whole word teaching may also have significant merits when addressing high school-aged youth. Like anything, it is not a one-size-fits-all strategy.

This goes for our language learners as well, Shanahan states in 2017:

No matter what your background, if you are trying to learn to read English, you will have to learn to decode. That means that you will need to be able to perceive English phonemes in oral language and that you will need to learn the relationships between the letters and spelling patterns and those sounds or pronunciations.

Today, we have a plethora more studies to pull from than Shanahan had at this time, which makes things ever more clear. Throughout just the last five years, studies have shown the benefits of phonics for language learners' reading fluency as well as increased reading comprehension and vocabulary development. This principle may have the capacity to efficiently teach language learners, but research is still lacking on which activities are best in order to facilitate this learning, especially for older students.

There is still much to be studied before making more weighty conclusions, but at the very least the research does not indicate teaching phonics will have any negative impact on learners in need. This may be the best we have to go off of for now.

In other words...

I've been on a streak of wanting to shatter the notion that there is any one panacea to a given educational problem. If someone is attempting to persuade you of this, then they are probably trying to sell you something. Education is in a large state of flux with threats to defund, ban, or outright eliminate leadership for one of America's most invaluable institutions. Some predatory professional development charlatans or curriculum hawkers are ready to take advantage of a school at any moment of desperation in order to siphon off public funds with large promises, but few tangible results.

If we want to get the United States education system on the right track, we are not looking at a single program that schools pay for. We need to engage all teachers in effective literacy practices, and accurately identify students in need to provide targeted interventions.

Despite the growing obstacles in our path, educators and educational leaders alike can make changes now that will positively impact our students in the long run. We do not need a shiny new curriculum or PD. We simply need research-based practices that we adjust to our individual students and circumstances, and effective systems created and supported by administration to implement them.

Maybe not so simple.

Reading is an indispensable component to create a civically-minded populace. It single-handedly enables people to efficiently analyze any topic imaginable. Being able to have this silent dialogue with an author who may be long gone, is one of the most fascinating combinations of human cognition and technology. If we have any hope in preserving and sustaining our democracy, we are obligated to put our eggs in this basket regardless of the actions of our leaders.

Andrew Limbong of NPR's Book of the Day Podcast on YouTube Shorts talking about digital library services like Libby:

Lisa's library buys their digital copies from OverDrive, which is the big digital distributor for libraries. And they have 88 copies of "The Women" in ebook format at 60 bucks a pop, that comes out to $5,280. Which Lisa will have to rebuy some of those copies 24 months after purchase if she wants to keep up with demand.

The apparent issue, at least to me, stems from the simple issue of ownership. In the physical world, a library could pick up copies of a new book for anywhere between $8 and $30 for a single volume. If 88 copies are purchased and 24 months goes by, do you know what happens? The library simply continues to checkout the books with no additional cost. Oh, how did these poor despairing publishers possibly manage in an age before ebooks?

Online digital libraries are so widely popular for their sheer convenience especially in the wake of the pandemic. Because of this, companies like OverDrive, who are backed by private equity, are attempting the most straightforward method to bleed public library funds dry. This singular aspect of perpetual subscriptions facing our educational institutions is a feature, not a bug. Now that the public expects these amenities, rates are skyrocketing.

Limbong goes on:

Author advocacy groups such as The Author's Guild say the issue isn't the price libraries are paying, but the lack of funding for public libraries. Because, you know, people need to get paid.

The Guild has taken the stance that it would like to recover potential losses of ebook or audiobook sales that libraries would eat into, but I find this unconvincing. This is not to say that I do not want authors to get their fair share. I certainly do. But the fact that there is now a middle man like OverDrive in the picture combined with money hungry publishers, there is now a perverse money printing machine for a product that takes 3MB of space on a server and takes virtually zero effort to distribute.

As of the time of writing this, a federal funding freeze has caused a great deal of uncertainty for public institutions and non-profits throughout the United States. Now more than ever are libraries in a delicate position due to this modern-day, unending culture war which threatens one of America's most valued, long-standing, and inherently democratic establishments.

With predatory subscriptions, diminishing funds, political meddling, and surging responsibilities, who knows what the future will hold for our institutions, but the books are not stacked in our favor.

...harder-to-read, or disfluent, fonts hold promise for promoting recall and retention of written information...

It almost defies logic that a font that is inherently more difficult to read would help with greater understanding of the text, but the authors' reasoning is sound:

This could provide support for the hypothesis that it is the greater cognitive processing, which is required for reading a disfluent font, that gives the retention improvement.

It is fascinating that their conclusion applied to students with and without dyslexia, and by a significant margin. Could this explain the phenomena I found where Redditors are claiming to read more fluently simply because of a font change?

To me, the authors' research is just pure fun to read. They cleverly open another window for further research to uncover more of this curiosity to promote further accessibility to literacy in education. With more resource creation tools at our disposal than ever, and more teachers coming to the profession as digital natives, we have to power to seamlessly utilize technology to foster greater learning.

To reinforce the crux of my previous rant on fonts: Each change in isolation may not have a wide-reaching effect, but in aggregate can become bigger than the sum of it's parts.

From here on out, you'll see me using Papyrus) on all future columns. Maybe I'll try out Webdings for my midterm study guide.

... Adams has also cultivated an increasingly close relationship with Trump, sitting down with his “Border Czar” to discuss shared priorities, visiting Trump in Mar-A-Lago, and attending the inauguration in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Adams, who was indicted on federal corruption charges last year and could theoretically receive a pardon from Trump, has said his efforts to cooperate with the new administration are for the benefit of the city, and that his focus for immigration enforcement is on people who have committed crimes.

For anyone that has eyes, it is unmistakable that the only way to attempt to survive in the current political climate is to play ball. Many of the most powerful people in the country are bending over backwards in order to appease the current administration, in a perhaps not-so-subtle attempt to evade political retribution or gain favor for if things go south.

Speaking of which, the authors continue:

The mayor has said he will not criticize Trump publicly, and declined to take a stance on Trump’s decision to open the door to ICE making arrests at schools — a position some educators said undercuts his attempts to reassure educators and immigrant families.

The cowardice that Adams has shown in this nightmare scenario demonstrates the sheer spinelessness that our most powerful leaders are demonstrating.

So many articles in the education space this last week have revolved around creating clear plans and procedures for ICE interactions with staff and students, maintaining schools as a safe place as the threat of attendance decline looms, and sharing resources with families so that they can work within the confines of the law to protect themselves. What is heartbreaking, though, are the schools that are wholly unprepared to deal with these interactions, and have waited until the midnight hour to create such policies.

Schools had a responsibility to figure this out back in November. My district, with over a thousand students learning English as a second language, many of which from Latin America, waited until this week to issue communication to families. It is just too little too late. People are scrambling for answers in their time of need, and educational leaders need to step up to ensure students and families are equipped with the tools to work within the confines of a law as these political threats become a reality.

A vacuum of information and a thrown together policy due to lack of definitive leadership is creating chaos. As of the writing of this, it is still unclear if an encounter at a Chicago Public School actually occurred earlier today.

Families are afraid. Students are afraid. Undocumented faculty and staff are facing pressures on all sides of their personal and professional lives. This cowardice and unpreparedness of governmental and educational leaders is an embarrassing blunder for educational institutions throughout the US.

Does anyone else use Opendyslexic font?

I have never been diagnosed with dyslexia nor had any symptoms but using this font just makes reading easier. I can read for so much longer without getting tired using it. Am I dyslexic and just didn’t know it?

Putting that last sentence aside, could there be something to this? And of course While teaching a subject where heavy reading is an absolute necessity, could this be a game changer in my classroom? Could a simple change to this miracle font be a secret tool for teachers to utilize in order to increase students reading ability?

As a lover of both typefaces and universal accessibility, I was now resolute in launching my investigation, no matter the cost.

Lucky for me, the creator of OpenDyslexic, Abbie Gonzalez, was diligent in providing a section entirely dedicated to the research that both inspired and were conducted using this font (or it's more expensive cousin Dyslexie created by Christian Boer). I was surprised, though, that of the 12 studies listed, few focused solely on OpenDyslexic, and the results were mixed and hardly conclusive. Gonzalez’s honesty shines through on the page as they state that the studies were not commissioned, are not in any particular order, and some are only tangentially related to OpenDyslexic.

Here's a select few that I could find online that were relevant (with links for your convenience):

• Hoffmeister's (2016) literature review finds no evidence that dyslexia fonts bolster reading ability

• Jackson (2016) also hints that there needs to be more study on the topic, but that previous literature has found that many do not prefer dyslexia-specialized fonts.

• Broadbent (2023) was one of the few that found OpenDyslexic to significantly improve reading ability of students with and without dyslexia.

Looking at academic databases independently, similar themes arise:

• Wery & Diliberto (2017) find that OpenDyslexic may not provide benefit for readers

• Joseph & Powell (2022) found no increase in reading fluency using Dyslexie

• Kuster et al. (2018) clearly sum it up in their title "Dyslexie font does not benefit reading in children with or without dyslexia."

In Dyslexie's research page, there is a not-so-subtle insinuation that this font can do more than what can realistically be expected. Stating that the font has a "overwhelmingly positive effect" on readers, the page indicates:

72,2% of the tested persons are able to read faster with Dyslexie font
73,2% of the participants make fewer mistakes with the font
About 84,3% of the dyslectics would recommend using Dyslexie font to others

To be clear, the study referenced was from a self conducted survey of 250 people. From my perspective, it would be difficult to say anything definitive using that particular methodology, let alone to showcase on a page attempting to convince people to purchase it. Knowing that Dyslexie is for-sale for individuals and businesses, it is difficult to see their research page as anything other than a overt marketing attempt.

What was most shocking was that there is no evidence that either OpenDyslexic or Dyslexie were created in conjunction with evidence-backed research nor educational organizations or experts to guide it's creation. For a font that is geared toward assisting with the most well-known reading disorder, you would think it would be created alongside reading specialists and students.

This is not to take a stab at Gonzalez, Boer, or both of their incredibly successful work (though the marketing tactices of Boer’s Dyslexie leaves much to be desired). In fact, I adore how they designed an entire typeface to address an issue in accessibility online. I also commend Gonzalez for making this project completely open source for all to enjoy. Clearly, it struck quite a chord with it's user base, where many anecdotally swear that it improves their reading speed significantly. Despite this preference and perceived benefit, I am unconvinced as an educator that putting this font in front of students provides any reasonable benefit, and could serve as an active detriment1.

Another Miracle Font?

This is where our story should have ended. It would have been a simple cautionary tale not to take the claims of these miracle fonts at face value. But just a few weeks ago, I saw yet another post on Reddit2:

I love my Kobo Clara BW and Atkinson Hyperlegible

[...] I’ve discovered the Atkinson Hyperlegible font with this Kobo also. While not having any sight issue.. I found it amazing! [...]

And of course what piqued my interest the most:

[...] I actually read faster and I honestly have the feeling of having to focus less on the screen.

Color me skeptical.

Created in conjunction with the Braille Institute of America in 2019 with NYC design firm Applied Design Works, Atkinson Hyperlegible gets its name from BIA founder, J. Robert Atkinson. Obviously a lot of thought, care, and effort went into the design of this open source font. Though technically sans-serif, it combines both serif and sans-serif elements together in an attempt to create glyphs that are unique, unmistakable, and as the name suggests, hyperlegible to readers with low vision.

In a lecture at the Type Directors Club3, the creative leaders at Applied Design explain that they actively collaborated with people with diverse forms of low-vision and specialists to research, test, and retest Atkinson to function best with its target audience. Each iteration would lead to these experts obtaining feedback from low-vision users, which would then influence the design team’s decision making for the next version. Rinse and repeat.

In the Q&A portion after the lecture, Elliot Scott had the most salient and level-headed answer relating to our particular conversation:

To be honest, it's a typeface. It's not gonna solve like low vision all that much. It's a tool - It's one component for vision...

In the educational world, we would call Atkinson Hyperlegible a classroom intervention. Only when combined with other appropriate and targeted interventions for students with specific needs (whether low-vision, dyslexic, or otherwise) can teachers begin to move the needle on student success. This is nothing new. This is what you learned back in EDU 101. That's just good teaching and no single font can change that.

I was hard pressed to find any academic study utilizing Atkinson in the educational sphere to illustrate positive outcomes for students. To hazard a guess on the matter, I'd imagine the results would likely be at least negligible in the classroom environment, given that Atkinson (unlike Dyslexie) adheres to the common form and function of your average serif and sans-serif fonts.

In fact, I see no real problem in using Atkinson Hyperlegible tomorrow in your own lesson, as long as you level your expectations beforehand.

It has been added to Google Docs for you to use on handouts and presentations, as well as Canva if that is more your thing. At worst your Arial-inclined students may think there is a glitch with their chromebooks, and at best you make an activity more accessible for a student with low vision in a researched-backed manner. Pending further study, Atkinson Hyperlegible may not provide students with a faster reading ability (it doesn't claim to), but can at least be a net-neutral addition to your classroom.

Whether you wholeheartedly believe that one of these fonts makes you a better reader, or you simply like the aesthetic appeal, educators need to be careful with the reasoning behind making these kinds of instructional choices. Elliot Scott's emphatic rejection that a typeface will solve low-vision applies more broadly to education as a whole: There is no one panacea for better reading skills. Only when combined with researched-based practices and collective teacher efficacy can we begin to see positive change occur. It takes a village, not a font.

⛾

1. Wery & Diliberto (2018) states: “On measures of reading fluency, OD produced negative results, or decreased students’ outcomes compared to both Arial and TNR”
   Though my money is on OD having a benign effect judging by their data. ↩

2. I know, I follow a lot of ebook subreddits - I have a soft spot for E Ink. ↩

3. I love that an organization of geeks like me exist. ↩

I remember very vividly throughout my youth the rhythmic system of testing the ruled the education landscape. Having been a student at the height of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), high stakes testing was all the rage. Every April I remember distinctly yearning for testing season to begin. For a kid that certainly had no affinity nor inherent talent in the public school system, I adored sitting down and being left alone for multiple days in a row. The tangy taste of Goldfish given to us during our breaks; The refreshing nourishment provided by the tiny water bottles, which were promptly taken to a landfill en masse. There's just not a better feeling than that.

Entering high school, though, this feeling quickly dissipated. Now these tests actually mattered. They determined how my future would end up, and for a student who did not particularly like school, these PSATs, ACTS, mandatory SAT Prep courses all led to feelings of self-doubt, inadequacy, and the deafening slamming of doorways to greater opportunity. Of course now I realize that this could not be further from the truth, but it goes to show how profound of an impact these tests effect a student's sense of self-worth. Today, though the landscape has changed significantly, mandatory college entrance examinations like the SAT and ACT impact my students in much the same way.

When taking my EdPsych course this past summer for my master's degree in Educational Administration and Leadership, I was again reminded of the terrors of intelligence and aptitude tests, and the effects they have on children throughout history. Aptitude tests as a whole possess inherent issues in equity by limiting and even targeting students of color and students who are economically disadvantaged.

This whole story is certainly nothing new. Intelligence tests and the like have horrifying use-cases since their very inception by upholding the tenets of scientific racism and monetary hegemony. Let's go through a quick history.

Binet’s Early Intelligence Test

It was Alfred Binet and Theodore Simon who created the first intelligence test. Originally consisting of 30 questions of increasing "difficulty", the test grew rapidly in popularity throughout the psychological community. These tests would be given to children in order to see how they compare to other age ranges amongst students. The goal was not necessarily to help these children with targeted interventions to help improve their learning, but rather these tests were made simply to identify children who were below "normal". In his writing, Binet clearly states the purpose of the test is to categorize children based on how well they do on this test. He specifically states in 1905 that this is where the test begins and ends:

Our purpose is in no wise to study, analyze, or set forth the aptitudes of those of inferior intelligence. That will be the object of a later work. Here we shall limit ourselves to the measuring of their general intelligence. We shall determine their intellectual level, and, in order the better to appreciate this level, we shall compare it with that of normal children of the same age or of an analogous level.

Perhaps one of the largest problems of this test was the cultural dependence of it's questions. Consider the following question for 25. Verbal Gaps to be Filled:

The women gather up the large sheets which are as stiff as though they had been [...]

If you had answered "starched" then you would be correct.

Obviously, this question may perhaps be incredibly confusing to some of you in this day in age, who have solely used detergent and and fabric softener in your washing machine. Clearly, the question relies on the listener already having a cultural association with how laundry is cleaned in the western world. It implies that people unfamiliar starching laundry (like myself and others all around the world) have a developmental deficiency.

This problem comes at no surprise given that the scientific and cultural landscape in the West was engrossed by the concept of racial and ethnic dominance over others. If you did not understand questions that were made by a western culture, then you were developmentally delayed just by being raised in another part of the globe.

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IQ and the US Army

When the First World War began, these tests became further institutionalized in order to recruit and categorize soldiers based on their "mental age" or the newly coined concept, intelligence quotient (IQ). Stephen Jay Gould in his monograph The Mismeasure of Man dives into the inherent racism that these tests led to in American society. Yerkes' IQ tests, Gould states, led to a greater ideology of the time that IQ was inheritable, which fit insidiously within the American social context which was dominated by racism and Social Darwinism. It should come to no surprise that establishing and IQ of different races, would perpetuate societal inequities, and even further fuel the pseudo-scientific bunk that eugenicists thrive upon.

What may come is a surprise is that Carl Brigham, who helped create Yerkes' army tests in the 1910s, would be the one who took this knowledge to schools when inventing the SAT. Covering vocabulary and arithmetic, the 315 question SAT was unveiled and given to thousands of students in 1926. The same inequities that were reinforced by Yerkes' test were further perpetuated in schools. Not only did the biases of the test prevent many students of color from being accepted into a university based on score alone, it also served as an obstacle for students to receive scholarship money to afford a particular college in the first place.

Chomsky Problematizes

Richard Herrnstein, co-author of the problematic text The Bell Curve (1994), utilized these IQ tests in order to create the argument that different social classes and races possess an inherited IQ, which (he states) explains social racial inequity within America. Harking back to the eugenicist rhetoric of the early 1900s, this is a preposterous and disgusting argument that is predicated upon many assumptions that can be easily thwarted.

Noam Chomsky dismantles Herrnstein's argument by effectively usurping the argument at it’s core. Herrnstein first assumes that people simply work to gain wealth and power. As a working teacher, I can anecdotally tell you that this is false. Chomsky also points at the social-constructedness of race by effectively stating that it is absolutely useless to assign a mean IQ to an entire race, but only a racist society would find value within these numbers. It is much more important to look at individuals as individuals rather than as representations for an entire group. IQ tests are an incredibly dangerous tool used to oppress those of different races and social classes, and was quickly taken up by social-Darwinists, eugenicists, and racists alike to “prove” their varied agendas.

The post-modern thought is precisely what was needed to effectively break down the inconsistencies of societal presuppositions that are inherently false.

Today's Multiple Intelligences

This all leads us to contemporary conceptions of intelligence. Though college admissions and other aptitude tests are still widely utilized in order to graduate high school, many colleges are now "test-optional" when completing their application process. This still does not serve to help those applying for scholarships in order to make college more affordable, but is certainly a step take to erode the foothold of aptitude and intelligence examinations within the American school system.

In 1983, Harvard University professor Howard Gardner coined the concept of multiple intelligences. Over the last few decades, nine intelligence modalities have been defined with room for expansion as time goes on. Though perhaps illusive and subjective, the concept in and of itself has taken a strong hold in extant educational psychology. You may have heard of this theory ad nauseam in your professional development about the wonderful world of learning styles, but Gardner has been consistently trying to distance his work on multiple intelligences from this. This is perhaps a deep-dive for another time.

This all goes to show that intelligence is not simply one monolithic term that defines how "smart" or not a person truly is. To be "intelligent" in the colloquial sense is a culturally loaded and problematic concept that assumes that there is only one true intelligence that people should care about. Luckily, the world seems to be slowly moving on from this idea. This is why "growth mindset" has become such unabating buzzword in the educational sphere.

Throughout history, the American educational system has been a petri dish for racial and social inequity, but educators all over the world are working tirelessly to rectify this with groundbreaking classroom methodologies, philosophies, and research. With enough time and healing, we can hopefully bring education to new heights as we gain a further understanding of how each of us can thrive as learners, rather than defining them by an assigned number.

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Since the beginnings of state-sponsored public education in America within the one-room schoolhouse, educators have been captivated by the methods in which students can best learn. Today, Horace Mann would likely see our school system today and marvel at what methods have changed over the last 165 years as well as what has completely stagnated. One of the main consistencies in this time has been the overarching and formulaic cycle of planning, teaching, assessment, and repeat with new content. Educators and administrators alike are looking toward alternative methods for teaching and learning, especially in the aftermath of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. One of these methods that is rising in popularity is the concept of “Mastery Learning” in order to support student development in a time where they may need it most. Mastery learning serves to break down this formulaic method of teaching that has primarily dominated the educational sphere for over a century in America. While being an educator in a public high school for the last 4 years, my district has actively moved toward this philosophy of learning. Throughout this time, there have been many challenges, and a lot of professional development to get teachers adjusted. Without a more nuanced understanding of mastery learning, educational leaders would be left in an environment that could be rife with misinformation about the topic, and even hamper how the policy is implemented within the everyday classroom.

History & Definition

As time progressed beyond the one room schoolhouse and into more traditional places for education that is familiar today, educational psychology and methodology progressed as well. In 1968, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom developed the revolutionary concept of “Mastery learning”. Traditional grading styles hitherto that point, Bloom asserts, create a self fulfilling prophecy by establishing a criteria for how many students will likely get what grades, and students effectively being assigned those grades. This is effectively what we understand to be the old school system of the bell curve. These grading expectations are ultimately flawed in that they lead to decreased motivation and competency for a given subject area. Thus, “Mastery learning” (as he coins) is the ability to structure schooling so that all can succeed through a structure of teaching, assessing, reteaching, and reassessing in order for students to have the opportunity to achieve “mastery” in a given area. Through the use of diverse learning methods and mediums, the delivery of quality instruction, a students ability to persevere, and allowing for more or less time to an individual student as they are achieving or have already achieved a given goal. This dynamic style is what truly distinguishes mastery learning from most other curriculum and grading models. Here, teachers have the time built into their schedules to more thoughtfully differentiate learning and assessing for their students. At the time, Blooms idea served as a novel theory, but more radical research was needed in order to determine the actual outcomes of this form of learning. 

The conversation behind mastery learning in the last 5 years has been grown an incredible amount, likely due to the introduction of this model from popular educational platform, Khan Academy. Addressed in a video from 2018, they see mastery learning describes how a learner can obtain “gaps” in their knowledge by simply not understanding a concept in the first place, which in turn leads to significantly decreased competency in a given area. By being able to progress at an individualized pace, and being given individualized learning activities, students can theoretically thrive in a subject that they previously thought was not possible. The core of this methodology here is the necessity to provide students with multiple opportunities to be assessed, and the ability to gain feedback and grow in between assessments. Similar to that of a video game, their philosophy relies on near instantaneous feedback given to students to help them improve just as quickly.

The visual above from Otus, a popular EdTech platform for educational data, presents a more modern framework for how this type of learning is structured in schools today beyond the conceptions of 1968. Beginning with pre-assessment, it is first essential for teachers to know what knowledge students are coming in with in order to start the differentiation process. After instruction takes place, formative assessments are used to gauge student knowledge of the instruction that was given. Depending on how students perform on these more minor check-in assessments, they will obtain opportunities to be re-taught the material or enrich themselves in the material further. This step is absolutely critical when comparing these steps back to the original framework for mastery learning, because it supplies students with a differentiated opportunity to master and succeed in the content instruction. Hence, this chart supplies a method to visualize the theories of mastery learning into actual practice in a classroom. With all of this in mind, the research below will put this theory into practice and see if mastery learning actually helps student development in both the physical and online classroom. 

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Mastery Learning within the Classroom

To demonstrate these ideas in action, the video above shows an example of mastery learning from a secondary classroom. A student gives a phenomenal testimony on how mastery learning has benefitted his experience as a student by stating that their learning benefits greatly by being self-paced and creating their own deadlines for assignments or exams. This flexibility provides students with the ability to achieve mastery at a pace that best fits them. This presents an incredibly differentiated environment, and one that raises students' understanding and competencies. Through their program “Connect”, students ultimately set their own goals and work at their own pace for those that would like to graduate early. Through the use of flexibility and meaningful goals, students are able to challenge themselves in a significant way. In this way, success for students will beget greater success in the future as they build up their competencies to mastery level. It obvious that in order to achieve mastery, students must already have bought-in to learning and the classroom.

At an elementary level too, teachers can utilize a “Grid” method to achieve master learning at the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade levels in a gifted classroom. The Grid Method has the teacher break down a greater topic into 5 separate levels ranging from simply explaining and defining a concept all the way to creating and constructing an end-product using that knowledge. Students work up a ladder of Bloom's taxonomy in order to achieve mastery of the subject. Tiffany Ott describes the success that she had with her students, stating that they are able to effectively take responsibility for their day to day tasks, and she works as a facilitator. The bulk of the work for teaching, Ott, comes at the beginning of every unit, planning out what students are going to achieve and how they are going to achieve it. From the teacher’s perspective, mastery learning can allow teachers more time to provide targeted students who are struggling with more one-on-one attention. Of course one major trickle-down effect of this is that teachers are able to more intentionally build relationships with students.

The Research

In the 5 decades that have passed since it's introduction, there has been Perhaps the most efficient method to interpret the effectiveness of mastery learning practices is through the work of Kulik et al. (1990) and their meta-analysis of mastery learning studies. Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), the authors state, is a program characterized by the use of student-paced lessons, regular assessments, and students who fail formative assessments are sent back to restudy the material and take additional assessments until mastery is obtained. In particular, the authors describe Bloom’s “Sigma 2” study, in which a student who is experiencing one-on-one instruction utilizing mastery learning methodology can perform significantly better than students in a traditional classroom. Out of the 108 studies of mastery programs studied, 96 studies reported significant positive effects using these practices. In terms of student attitudes toward a mastery learning program, students were overwhelmingly positive, although no specific comments were cited about why students like this program. With this said, this certainly lines up with the classroom videos that are seen above, in that both students and teachers alike reacted positively toward this method of learning. Thus, an incredible foundation is laid out to support mastery learning within the classroom environment.

More recent research demonstrates that mastery learning can be for vocational learning, which has become increasingly popular over the last decade. McGaghie et al. (2014), examines the use of simulation-based mastery learning (SBML) specifically in medical education. The researchers were able to determine that SBML, which uses the same key pillars of mastery learning including little variation in outcome and amount of time to master is varied, is a profoundly effective way for students to practice clinical experiences. Utilizing SBML can also lead to improved patient care practices, better patient outcomes, and greater cost savings for the school with greater learner retention of material. From an administrational standpoint, this part is particularly appealing. The study demonstrates the realistic potential of this type of learning when applied to active simulations for a given vocation, and makes a compelling argument for both tangible and intangible rewards for implementing this type of practice.

To get more specific on this effectiveness, it is important to zone in on how mastery learning synergizes with the main principles of social cognitivism. By analyzing mastery learning using group-based practices, Guskey and Pigott (1988) are able to fill an important gap in literature. Guskey and Pigott (1988) create a firm meta-analysis of group-based mastery learning mastery learning studies. In a synthesis of 46 studies that research the effectiveness of mastery learning, the authors establish diverse criteria to create a fascinating conclusion:

• student outcomes

• student achievement

• retention of material

• engagement in learning activities

• student affect

Overall across all of these domains, consistently positive effects were had. With this being said, the positive impact on student achievement, the meta-analysis found, had varied effects across the board. In terms of how teachers relate to mastery learning, the research shows that it likely only takes 3 weeks to fully adapt to mastery learning, that teachers using mastery learning take greater responsibility for their students learning, and overall feel much more positive about their roles as teachers. By seeing such positive outcomes of group-based mastery learning from a birds-eye-view, it helps develop a greater understanding of how both teachers and students alike benefit. In this way, the benefits of both mastery learning and collective intelligence are combined to theoretically create a classroom atmosphere that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Limitations & Conclusions

With all of these potential benefits of mastery learning in and out of the classroom, it is clear that the study of this particular topic, nor its implementation is incredibly exhaustive. The largest limitations stem from the restrictions placed on the traditional American school system, and the infrastructure created based upon decades of legislation to support this system. Arlin (1984) states it best when discussing “time-achievement-equal” dilemma. This dilemma correctly identifies time as a finite resource within the public school system, and that mastery learning necessitates that every student needs different amounts of time to master certain material. By giving students equality of time, a clear argument can be made that educators are presenting students with inequality of achievement. This dilemma is perhaps the first thought coming to an educational leader's mind when researching mastery learning, and quite clearly these thoughts are confirmed. The current American school system inhibits true mastery learning from taking place, given that a pillar of this method is giving students ultimate flexibility in the time that they have to learn. Assigning separate grade levels in and of itself is at odds with mastery learning. Thus, in order to reach toward mastery learning with much higher fidelity, the concept of time needs to be much more thoroughly examined in order to see if it can be further adapted to fit the American school system or if the American school system needs to ultimately change. Food for thought.

In the end, it stands to reason that there is a significant benefit to utilizing mastery learning to promote student development both inside and outside of the classroom. Mastery learning can potentially serve as a valuable method to raise student competencies in a meaningful manner, which realistically prepares them for learning outside of the classroom. As we continue to march down this path within the classroom that I teach in, it is also requisite for an educational leader to keep in mind the significant limitations that this method can have without a more considerable reconstruction of how the typical high school functions within America. The time given, assessment needs, and all-encompassing goals set up by historical and contemporary lawmakers alike, certainly stands at odds with the core principles of these practices. But by keeping expectations in check, working within the confines of these boundaries, and supplying all teachers with the proper resources to make mastery possible, the impact that can be had on student development certainly makes this implementation a worthwhile endeavor. Possessing this newfound understanding regarding how mastery learning can be implemented within the contemporary physical and online classroom, I hope you too can influence a greater change within our educational institutions. The more improvement we collectively demonstrate with this form of learning, the more likely the system will slowly adapt to the research.

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Toward Emotional Intelligence

In our post-COVID educational world, behavior problems as a whole have been on the rise. It is not uncommon for schools to see an outburst of fighting between students. Your school may be the same. It is absolutely disheartening to see. What is scary on top of this is that in some schools, this behavior is becoming so common that students as a whole are becoming more desensitized to these acts of violence. As we progress into this proverbial brave new world while our students are continuing to cope with the consequences of COVID-19, we as educators can support this growth by helping students become more socially and emotionally intelligent. Research here is seemingly sparse, but there is an indication that SEL is our best bet to reduce school extreme behavioral issues in the classroom. Though it may be controversial from an outsider's perspective, below I will give you my tools to achieve CASEL's four other domains in a meaningful, authentic, and safe way that can be easily setup in your classroom.

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2. Building Relationships

How exactly do we relate to others in a responsible and constructive way? Building a true community in the classroom is one of the most difficult things for teachers to cultivate, but once established can have significant benefits to student learning through collaboration.

Community Circle (5 to ∞ Minutes)

One of the best parts of the job is talking and getting to know students, and though a little contrived, community circles can be an incredibly fun way to build a relationship with a student as well as amongst students. Here, the class is brought together to answer a meaningful question as a group in order to generate conversation. Asking a simple question like "What is your favorite food?" can quickly light a flame in students to discuss and share, and find commonalities between their rich identities and cultures.

For my classroom, I always establish norms every time we have an in-class discussion like this:

• Be Kind

• Be Respectful

• Listen

• Have an Open Mind!

Even for my students who are learning another language, community circles can be a fabulous way for students to practice English in more of an authentic and conversational way. In some of my classes, we have even implemented a "talking stick" to solid success for classes that needed that tend to talk over each other out of excitement. As an accommodation for students that experience greater social anxiety, I always give the option to opt out of the whole class discussion, but will always follow up with the student during or after the rest of the lesson.

In terms of implementation, community circles can be easily integrated in the class, and even serves well as a "Plan B" for new teachers still adjusting to creating whole-class lessons. With a simple whip around the classroom with one-word answer and no follow-up questions (which would be very difficult for me), this activity can take as little as 5 minutes. In the nightmare scenario where the internet cuts out and you completely online lesson goes down the drain, a series of community circle questions can be a fun, low-prep, and incredibly meaningful way to make the most out of a bad situation.

A simple Google search for "Community Circle questions" will yield a ton of results, but this website in particular has solid questions.

3. Self Responsibility

How can we get students to grow and reflect to become the best version of themselves possible? Through Self Responsibility, students will be able to continuously build themselves even beyond the walls of the schoolhouse.

SMART Goals (15 to 30 minutes)

I try to do this nearly every year for my students. For me, I usually attempt to plan for an entire class period in order to explain what a SMART goal is, writing them, revising them, and even sharing them/displaying them to keep as a consistent reminder.

SMART actually stands for something that can help shed light on how students write them. SMART goals are:

• Specific

• Measurable

• Achievable

• Realistic

• Time-bound

To help break this down for students, I usually supply students with a graphic organizer to put down their thoughts similar to this.

Now, it is not simply enough to do the activity, but you must actually do something with the product. I know some teachers who have these goals chronically displayed in their class, and will revisit them throughout the quarter/semester. For me, I will usually have students simply submit them online, and once each quarter ends we will have an opportunity to reflect on and revise their goals. Though it takes a hefty amount of time to dedicate to, students will be able to begin monitoring their abilities and continue their growth.

4. Collective Responsibility

How can we best instill a deep understanding of how our actions change and grow the world around us? Particularly as students transitioned back to in-person learning last year, the responsibly we have to ourselves and our peers as learners is immense. The choices we make ultimately determine our success and our impact on the world around us.

Classroom Contract (~45 minutes)

I absolutely love creating a classroom contract. I think it is a fabulous way to get students actively engaged in how they want our classroom to run. Though there are many ways to facilitate classroom contracts, the hear of the activity stems from students collaborating to create rules for the classroom environment.

To create materials for this activity, I looked through and modified the procedures laid out in the Facing History lesson on Contracting. I actually made a Nearpod that takes students through different sentence prompt that students will complete such as:

• When we have an idea or question we would like to share, we can...

• When we have an idea but do not feel comfortable sharing it out loud, we can...

• When someone says something that we like, we can...

• When someone says something that might be confusing or offensive, we can...

• To make sure all students have the opportunity to participate in a class discussion, we can...

• If we read or watch something that makes us feel sad or angry, we can...

• To show respect for the ideas of others, we can...

Students complete these prompts on a collaboration board (I make all of mine anonymous in order to lower the social stakes), and we will created rules based on the common responses that we see. With Nearpod, I was even had students sign their names to the "contract" if they agree with it, and printed out different copies for each period I have.

Likely the most difficult thing regarding the classroom contract is actually remembering the specific rules that are implemented. For one of my classes, students said that if they hear something they like, they will clap. We did this for the first few weeks, and one Tuesday morning after a 4 day weekend, I forgot about this rule all together. It was absolutely phenomenal to see students actually begin applauding an idea they liked without me. Stunned, this moment really got me contemplating how little buy-in there would be if I had not consistently followed up with our laws in the beginning weeks of class.

5. Social Consciousness

How can we build lessons that help students see the world beyond their own identity? This is where the vast majority of the controversy for SEL stems from. Though some vocal stakeholders may believe that this tool is pushing a leftist or social justice narrative, all this tool effectively does usher in empathy and recognizing other points of view. This is absolutely essential skills when building strong leaders for the future work force.

Underrepresented Voices (Ongoing)

This is not as much of a clear cut activity as much as it is an ongoing practice to bring diverse voices into your own field/subject. This practice is vital to expanding students world view in order to promote a sense of empathy and compassion for other human beings.

This can be such a fresh and exciting opportunity for teachers to learn about and showcase divergent and relevant concepts to students who may feel disconnected from the classroom material. Investigating underrepresented voices can elevate and given new connections to students and their own identities in the classroom. The more they see themselves in the curricula, students will likely be more engaged and gain a more profound understanding of the content at hand.

Social studies and Language Arts classes have been entrenched with these ideas for some time, but implementing diverse voices within STEM can prove to be much more difficult. This topic alone is deserving of a post in and of itself, but two quick ideas for implementation in Math and Science respectively could be:

• How math can be a tool for inequity when used by the police to solve crime.

• The dangers of pseudoscience to fuel racism.

Now, it is best if the curriculum is built with these ideas in mind, but as I am sure you are well aware, this is not the case everywhere. There can be substantial value by initiating discussion on how to implement this within your curriculum, and more intentionally dedicating time to it within the greater classroom/school curriculum. You may need to start small and "pilot" individual lessons, but the positive benefits mentioned above should be more than enough motivation for more widespread implementation.

It is clear that out of all of these elements within this toolbox, Social Consciousness is likely the sole domain which takes the brunt of the criticism from the greater American public. In the same way that CRT is criticized for showing alternative narratives to American history and race, this SEL tool can quite easily fit the same parameters. Perhaps in some school districts there will be a necessity to ensure how this is implemented in classes, but ultimately I find that perspective-taking and demonstrating empathy are two soft skills that are vital to our modern age that I believe most all communities can get behind.

The next time that you meet with your PLC's (if you school environment allows) consider inquiring about different ways to work in underrepresented voices within the classroom.

Overcoming Fear and Apprehension

Perhaps the single largest obstacle to overcome as educational leaders across the country begin to implement some form of SEL is teacher and community pushback. From the teacher perspective, the most common hurdle new and veteran teachers will come across is: How in the world can I possibly make time to accomplish another task in my small 45 minute period? As you likely have already surmised, the best part of SEL is that it simply and effectively mirrors many of the practices that you are already implementing in the classroom. We are simply putting a new name to a familiar face. Many teachers have likely already brought in underrepresented voices into the classroom, have created lessons around goal-building, and have mini-community circles with students as they come back from a long holiday weekend. There is nothing new or surprising here. Now, for teachers who have not quite implemented mindfulness, enforced collective responsibility, or practices reflective writing, it is important to note that some of these practices only take minutes to implement, and are modular in that they are designed to fit into your classroom at any point in time. In all, demonstrating the need for these types of practices on a large-scale, as well as presenting the immediate benefits of these activities on a small-scale can certainly help spell out the why and the how to SEL.

As for the community writ large, the answers are less clear. With clear communication and a well established vision as a leader, the community can learn a great deal about the intentions of its local educational institutions. By providing clear, concise, and non-partisan information (though difficult to come across), many schools may be able to reach a consensus with the local community regarding what degree of SEL implementation they are ready for. As you have likely seen throughout this series, many of these activities clearly illustrate good teaching. Building relationships in particular is a cornerstone of effective pedagogy in the modern age, and frankly should be inoffensive to any concerned stakeholder. I want to be clear, the concern over SEL is certainly nothing new from a historical standpoint, and public oversight of their educational institutions, I believe, should be held to a high degree of scrutiny and transparency. But these tools are just that: tools that we can use to help us obtain the best educational outcomes for the future of the world.

I hope you enjoyed this two-part series and I hope you got something tangible out of it to implement in your classroom soon.

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Over the last decade, there has been a significant rise in popularity of social-emotional learning (SEL) within schools across the country. Especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in remote learning programs on a large scale, SEL has become a major talking point for educators when addressing concerns regarding students mental health after a long period of isolation. As of April 2021, there are nine states that require SEL in their K-12 programs, but all fifty states have legislation passed to require SEL in Pre-K programming.

Now this is not to say that SEL does not have its critics. It has become clear in this time that utilizing these social-emotional strategies can be incredibly controversial. The conversations and ideas inherently held within SEL activities, topics and resources regarding sensitive topics are bound to come about. With race being such a radical societal variable that influences the social and emotional lives of all students, SEL has been implemented to promote "Social-Awareness" (a major aspect of CASEL's SEL framework) which is predicated upon having students actively practice "Taking others’ perspectives" or "Showing concern for the feelings of others". This has actively been co-opted to imply that students are being taught to hate their identity. NPR has an illuminating article on this recent history. Obviously proper PR and communication of the actual goals of SEL is vital to its sustainability. In a time period where students are still reaping the consequences of a world-wide pandemic, regardless of the powerful influence their identity can have on their emotions, I firmly believe that there are many tangible benefits when implementing SEL into the modern classroom. As is customary in this field, politics muddies the waters of an otherwise impactful, research-backed concept. This conversation cannot simply happen in a bubble, removed from a political context, so I understand if you take these ideas with a grain of salt.

Does SEL Actually Work?

Social and emotional conditions affect learning a great deal within the greater school environment. There are obviously distinct social and emotional factors that lead specifically to bullying perpetration, and this can be attacked head-on when utilizing SEL in the school environment. This stems from the modern work of Dr. Dorothy Espelage, Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. What is ideal about this intervention, Espelage finds, is that SEL is not specifically targeted and all students can ultimately benefit from it. Not only does SEL help the overall environment with bullying by lowering sexual harassment, homophobic, and aggressive behavior, but it also helps all students in the long-term by positively impacting academics by lowering bullying behavior.

Dr. Espelage's ideas on the need for "high fidelity" social-emotional learning in the school environment rings true anecdotally as well. Within my experience teaching high school, there was a significant push back from some teachers when attempting to performing SEL activities within our classes. Educational leaders need to be concerned with the fidelity of which these programs are put into effect in order to see the most realistic long-term results. Many educational leaders are apprehensive to make large changes in the first place, and even then they are made, they can be quickly rolled back after significant pushback or due to short term results. These type of "fad policies" as I call it, only serve to hop on a band-wagon of a trendy policy rather than actually make significant change for the better in the school context.

Beyond bullying, Special Education is perhaps the single department within a school environment that may gain the most benefit from these practices. Looking into this, Merrell et al. (2008), investigated this exact topic. The study utilized age appropriate programming for students whose grades range from 7th-12th grade who were classified to have an “emotional disturbance” for 1 hour weekly sessions across 12 weeks. By the end of the SEL programming, the students actively improved their behavior, getting closer to their goals within the Special Education program. This is vital when looking at the benefits of SEL beyond an intervention for bullying, but as an overarching program to support students that struggle with emotional control and mental health.

Of course, this research has been garnering much more political scrutiny, so I am interested to see the conclusions of future research.

With all of this being said, these methods will only truly work when done with consistency and fidelity. Doing a simple "mood meter" as described later on, once at the beginning of the semester and calling it effective SEL, is simply not enough. Can educators get away with doing one 10 minute activity, and think their students have successfully learned a concept? If only teaching were that simple. No, we must consistently reinforce learning with high quality activities, which align with the teachers own philosophy and personality in their own authentic way. Without this fidelity, students will see right through the thin veneer of this inauthentic implementation, and valuable classroom time is ultimately wasted.

My Toolkit

When looking inside my own SEL toolkit, I have attempted to assemble a realistic activities that I implement in the classroom that are modular, and can fit in to nearly any lesson. I have also provided ranging timeframes for how long these activities take to complete within the classroom. One of the largest factors that I hear that impact my colleague's ability to implement SEL is time. Within the 45 minute class period, it can be daunting to enact yet another activity into the period, especially when you have bell-to-bell lessons already prepared from previous years. So hopefully this post helps eliminate some of this apprehension.
I have listed these using the CASEL 5 Competencies, given that this framework is regularly used in professional development trainings across the country, and should be relatively familiar to most educators. I re-named some of these competencies to more effectively communicate how I use them within my classroom. This week, I will discuss one of these competencies and some activities I use implement this concept with fidelity.

1. Knowing Yourself

Know who you are, and how to calm and build yourself in a hectic world. Self-regulation is an indispensable skill that will set any student up for success in any future they choose.

Mood Meter (1 to 5 Minutes)

This is one of the easiest strategies to implement that I always direct alarmed colleagues to when told that of our school expectation of SEL. The Mood Meter is just a simple chart divided into 4 quadrants (Green/Pleasant-Low Energy, Blue/Unpleasant-Low Energy, Red/Unpleasant-High Energy, Yellow/Pleasant-High Energy), where students describe what category they fall into, and what sub-emotion they are feeling on a greater spectrum. This can provide teachers with vital intel on what interventions/care that students may need most on a given day, and help students most effectively describe and articulate their emotions in a healthy and constrictive manner.

In the height of COVID and remote learning, we had students take one minute to fill out a survey, mapping out where they fall on the mood meter and are given an opportunity to describe what they are feeling in their own words. This proved incredibly helpful to view this information in a simple Google Sheet, in a time where we did not see our students face-to-face.

Luckily for our teachers, my school actually prints, laminates, and places these inside of every classroom. Here, teachers can have students point to/say where they fall on the mood meter to gauge student moods. This can be done any time of class, but probably best fits as a beginning Check-In. Teacher's have the opportunity to understand how students feel on an individual basis, and can be followed-up with in a meaningful way. By doing this regularly, students can build the important skill of pinpointing their emotions, describing how they feel, acknowledging it, and using this information to guide their actions. There is a language-learning theory from Richard Schmidt called Noticing Hypothesis. To put it simply, it says that students cannot learn without first noticing the features of what they are learning. By learning to notice their emotions, students can learn who they are and how they work as human beings.

Mindfulness (1 to 10 Minutes)

Particularly for regulating emotion, mindfulness activities can build a scaffold for students to self-reflect and calm themselves when anxiety inevitably strikes. To accomplish this, I typically use the Headspace YouTube channel. Headspace (known for their app of the same name) has hundreds of free videos on YouTube ranging from 1 minute mini-meditations in English and Spanish (as well as German, French, and Portuguese), to much lengthier 10 minute or even hour long meditation sessions for more advanced groups. I typically start small and work my way forward as time goes on to ease students into practicing breathing and mindfulness techniques. The beauty of headspace it that these videos are free, quick, professionally guided, and even feature faces from familiar franchises, including Sesame Street and even Star Wars.

For those of your more inclined to creating your own activities, Headspace provides meaningful resources for educators including posters and classroom guides. My school also uses the tool Calm Classroom for pre-recorded activities. This site also provides written scripts for teachers to read out to the class.

If you're as much of a fan of Nearpod as I am, they recently implemented the feature "Brain Breaks" which can be brought into any Nearpod lesson completely on-the-fly with the push of the "Brain Break" button. It is becoming easier now than ever to incorporate mindfulness into your classroom, and the results of which could help students exponentially .

These activities can be incredibly impactful in my experience, directly before a high stakes exam, but more frequent practice should be implemented in order to make mindfulness an instinct for students in a stressful situation.

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My students and I were absolutely fascinated last week when he heard about the story about the winner of an art contest not being a human artist, but rather an artificial one. The concept brought some meaningful discussion into what art truly is, and glanced toward our class inquiry about what "truth" is. This bell ringer discussion truly got me thinking even deeper about how I have been using AI to enhance the history classroom experience, and how I could potentially use AI tools in the future as this evolving technology becomes more accessible to the masses.

Below is a (non-exhaustive) examination of online AI tools that can be implemented into the classroom tomorrow.

AI Artist

As the bell ringer above eludes to, AI image generation has been an incredibly subversive way to create totally unique (and at times strikingly beautiful) works.

Using a tool like DALL-E 2, or the mini-equivalent through a site like Craiyon.com, students and teachers alike can put their imagination on full display by creating images based on a simple prompt being input.

This was generated when I typed in "George Washington is batman." It's certainly not perfect, but it generates quite a funny image, which demonstrates the power of this site to produce meaningful visuals that can aid in student understanding and more creative student work.

This can be taken into the realm of SEL with students creating a prompt to describe how they are feeling with the help of a Mood Meter.

In the English classroom, students can use this tool to story board a chapter of the novel they are currently reading. This opens the door to producing art that would have otherwise have been closed for students who feel as if they are not “good enough“ to draw.

Make it Clear

This is one of my new favorites for this year. Do you ever find the near perfect picture/map/political cartoon/diagram on Google images that shows off an essential concept, only to realize that it is far too small to show with any fidelity on the projector? This happens to me far too often. Even after reverse-image searching the picture, some original images, high resolution just cannot be found. And frankly, I just don't have the time to do this for every perfect photo I find.

Img Upscaler is my go to as the best free site that will take an image and upscale it to 4x as large. This tool works particularly well with images with illustrated images with less detail than a more elaborate photograph. The obvious downside to Img Upscaler is that you are limited to 10 images per week. Like any forward thinking consumer bombarded with YouTube ads, I have a VPN which comes in handy to get around this.

You're Now the Best Impressionist

One of the more difficult things to do in teaching the early years of American history is getting students to recognize that people in the past were, in fact, just people. One of the methods I have found to deepen students historical empathy is by using AI generated speech of historical figures using a sampling of their voices in real life.

In application, I have to modify many historical documents for my students, most of which are written and not spoken. Instead of putting on my best JFK impression, and read Kennedy’s letter to Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I can have Kennedy read it himself. It's one small way to help history come alive.

Students themselves can use these tools to fuel their own creativity. When creating a video presentation, students can borrow the voices of hundreds to deepen the quality of their work. Can you imagine students using the voices of their favorite YouTuber when creating a mock pitch in their business course? The possibility for student innovation is endless.

"Deep Nostalgia"

Similar to the speech generator mentioned above, pictures can also become "alive" through the assistance of AI and machine learning with the tool "Deep Nostalgia" from MyHeritage.

It is obviously not perfect, but can add some much needed depth to abstract visual aids of historical characters. One of the things my students struggle with the most initially is remembering that people within history are something greater and less fallible than people today, and perhaps this tool can assist in breaking down that notion. Regardless, it's a cool site to bring historical photos to life.

The "Thing" Translator

With a steady influx of students learning English as a second language heading into American schools over the last 10 years, the need for more efficient language learning tools is absolutely essential.

Thing Translator can help pick up the slack as a quick and efficient way for students to obtain words of everyday objects. As the camera on their phone or school-issued iPad crosses the path of an everyday object, it will show the name of the object in the target language. This can be effectively used to help students rapidly obtain meaningful survival English both inside and outside the classroom.

Students Are Now Experts

Wolfram|Alpha is an old-school computational tool that can hook students and teachers up with the quick answers to complex scientific, mathematical, and language-based questions that can be written in natural language.

Though this tool serves to provide answers rather than show work (on the free tier), but can help students significantly in determining the correct answer to a problem, and checking their work for accuracy. For the paid versions, students can use W|A to follow a step-by-step instructions on how the problem was solved, and even skip the step by step in order to try working it out on their own.

Clearly this presents a scary reality for teachers in that it can lead to increased cheating, but I think this ultimately serves as a fabulous tool to support student work.

Trepidatious Excitement

In all, these tools make me excited for what is to come for the classroom, but leaves some apparent vulnerabilities to the modern day classroom. Student's use of certain AI tools can potentially mitigate students learning in the modern classroom.

The greatest question that we, as educators, need to reflect on is: How can transform these potential disadvantages into teachable moments in the classroom?

For example, imagine a student in a photography class submits an AI generated photo as their summative assignment. The photo possesses all of the compositional elements studied in that unit (rule of thirds, cropping, negative space, etc). Instead of promptly failing the student for not submitting their own photo, I think the question that needs to cross teachers minds is: Does the students understand why this is a good photo?

If the students is able to defend the AI photo using the precise terms from the unit, can we say that the student has sufficiently demonstrated mastery of the topic?

Food for thought.

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