Pivoting Edtech Towards Humanity
Plus a roundup of news from teaching, tech, and learning.
With AI tutors underperforming the expectations of their creators and kids feeling increasingly negative about artificial intelligence, there is an opportunity and a mandate to pivot edtech towards humanity. What does that mean and what would it look like? Here is how I think about it.
Pivoting edtech towards humanity means using the power of technology to align one human’s desire to learn with another human’s desire to teach.
For Example
The physical classroom.
A bunch of people want to learn. A bunch of people want to teach. Until we connect them in time and space, those people are misaligned, their desire wasted. The technology of the physical classroom brings those desires into alignment.
Digital media.
As a new teacher, I noticed kids had a desire to learn how math connected to the world outside the classroom. I had a desire to teach them about those connections but very little ability to do so because the world outside of the classroom was outside and we were inside. The technology of digital projectors and cameraphones let me capture the world outside the classroom and bring it inside for our analysis. Technology brought our desires to learn and teach into alignment.
For Counterexample
If you ever have the feeling that edtech isn’t all that interested in humanity, it’s frequently because:
Edtech companies try to align human desire to the power of technology.
Edtech companies often take a particular technology as the answer and then retrofit teaching and learning into the question. This is why, for years, various companies insisted that teaching is something very close to playing a video of an explanation, which makes “just play YouTube videos” seem like the answer to the question “why is teaching hard?”
Edtech companies ignore second-order effects.
A student feels like their class is moving a little slower than they’d like. An edtech company then suggests having every kid learn on computers which let them work at different paces. The company ignores the second-order effect that “kids also like learning together and now they can’t.”
Misalignments That Interest Me Currently
Kids want to work on paper and it’s hard for teachers to know what they’re doing.
Teachers struggle to support a student’s thinking if it isn’t visible. Lots of thinking happens on paper and teachers often lack the time necessary to review and respond to it. How can we make that paper-based learning more legible for more teachers?
Coaches want to support teachers and teachers want their support.
Coaches often have too many teachers on their roster to support with model lessons and walkthroughs. Also, many teachers want support but not in the form of a model lesson or walkthrough. The desire to give and receive support are misaligned here.
Teachers want support in leading whole-class discussions.
Whole-class discussion is some of the most satisfying work for teachers and productive learning for students. But it is very hard work. Misaligned.
Caregivers want to support their kids but don’t know how.
Many parents and caregivers want to do more to support their kids’ learning than they do currently. But they often lack visibility into student learning and may need some education themselves. The reports that schools send home are frequently summative, low resolution, and a waste of ink or pixels overall. Teacher emails are much more useful but time-consuming for the teacher. What can schools and edtech companies do to help align caregivers, teachers, and kids here?
Who will do this work?
I could point to dozens of people doing this work of pivoting edtech towards humanity. They are exceptional. Many of them are my coworkers. Common to each of them is an excitement for new technologies and a desire to understand the work of teachers and the lives of students that I can only describe as “insatiable.” If that’s you, let me know what you’re working on in the comments.
Featured Comments
My obituary for Khanmigo and AI tutors inspired so many of you to share your own stories of grief. This newsletter is here for you. This was a common interesting interaction. From deep within their grieving process, someone would ask:
What’s the alternative? If Khanmigo doesn’t work, what’s the Plan B?
I’d point out the effect of Saga’s tutoring interventions in Chicago Public Schools as one of many interventions that has had a positive effect on student learning. Still grieving, this person would respond that this intervention is “difficult to implement at scale.”
This is such a strange standard for evaluating interventions in education. It is very true that good things are often difficult and expensive while useless things are often easy and cheap. Many people mistake this fact as an argument for doing useless things! (My colleague Chris Blackett develops this idea more at Talent Lab.)
Mae Baltz mentions another kind of subsidy Khanmigo frequently received: administrative mandate.
As a teacher in one of the areas that received money for Khanmigo I was asked to have my students interact with Khanmigo at least 10 times per month (each student).
In spite of those mandates, Khan Academy reported yesterday that “only around 15% of students who have access to Khanmigo engage with it.” That indicates pretty serious misalignment.
Katelynn Petersen describes the difference between AI and human tutors. Please write this down somewhere!
As soon as I started hearing about tutors being replaced by AI, I knew that the people responsible for such nonsense had never tutored a day in their life. 40% is remembering to ask about the novel they are writing, the tea they spilled about their friends, or the language test they’ve been studying for all year. 40% of my time is spent just building confidence and reassuring students they’re doing the right thing. 20% is actually teaching math.
Odds & Ends
¶ I have very little to say about Khan Academy’s new venture, announced just before I posted my obituary last week. An edtech visionary is stymied by traditional education and retreats to the friendlier terrain of corporate e-learning. Am I talking about the $10,000 degree Khan Academy will offer in partnership with ETS and TED? Or am I talking about the $7,000 degree Udacity offered in partnership with Georgia Tech after their disastrous experience trying to support college freshmen 13 years ago. Answer: yes. Hop in the time machine, kids. NB: Read Glenda Morgan’s pre-mortem or John Warner’s polemic.
¶ Marc Watkins writes about the same crisis of purpose in higher ed that I am seeing in a local eighth-grade class.
It’s easy to dismiss lazy students or burned-out teachers turning to AI, as many seem to do in the comment sections of social media posts, where we hear a litany of solutions from folks that range from bluebooks to oral exams to entire technology bans. But AI isn’t simply a crisis in assessment. No, the true crisis here is purpose.
¶ A couple of tremendous writers and thinkers take on the AI chatbot tutor’s promise of “infinite patience.” First, John Warner talks about his gratitude for the finite patience of his teachers.
Some of my most important formative educational experiences involved some teacher or authority figure losing patience with me.
Second, Julia Freeland Fisher asks, in a world of infinite patience, “whose while are you worth”:
AI’s champions often laud it as “infinitely patient.” AI’s unerring support is undoubtedly powerful, especially when time and resources are scarce. But it falls short of the experience that accompanies real patience: not just material support, but the feeling you are worth someone else’s while.
¶ I’ve worked in curriculum development for over a decade and this comment from Stanford’s Sam Wineburg on Justin Reich’s podcast earlier this year is a really rare insight.
Ultimately, curricula are not for kids. Curricula are for the teachers. And if the teachers don’t feel exuberant and don’t feel ennobled by being the mediators and the adapters of those curricula, they can be the best and most thought-out curricula in the world, but they’re ultimately going to find dust on some shelf.
¶ I’ll have more to say about the digital backlash someday. For now, I’ll let it suffice to say three things.
I think the coalitions that are forming are among the wackiest I’ve ever seen on any issue.
As a parent, I wish schools would scrutinize their use of edtech more closely.
I think the edtech companies that understand teaching and learning, that prioritize the humanity of teachers and learners, are probably going to be fine.
Beyond the specifics of edtech and teaching, I think the incubator chant of "does it/make it scale" has escaped into political arenas where it does some real harm. It got its cultural currency as a demand made of people making websites by the people lending them money, in an economic moment where the expectations of returns and the timescales to receive them more closely resemble mob bust-outs than any sort of infrastructure building. Websites are uniquely suited to blow up easily. They also routinely don't actually matter that much. The idea's escape into the world was mediated by people that ultimately hoped they could convince people that problems like poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and subpar educational outcomes could be solved by their expertise- making websites make money- and not by, say, taxing their website money to pay people with skillsets they openly denigrate. They are clearly both wrong and self- interested.
Everything scales if you're brave enough. There are about 75 million kids in the US- a little power-power-of-ten envelope math suggests that doing the most obvious things to maximize their learning- putting them in classes small enough to get personal attention (say, 10) and paying teachers enough to attract, develop, and retain competitive talent (say, $100K)- would cost about as much as the US's infamously excessive defense budget. Just as a thought experiment...
I’m dabbling in the parent / caretaker support sector. It’s a first iteration to get started.
https://www.whenmathhappens.com/parents
Trying to not only support parents with math but also strengthening relationships with their students.