Teacher Goals for Their First Day With Students

There is nothing like the first day's blend of content and community.

When technologists get over-excited about AI in education, it’s often because they believe learning looks like a solitary individual taking up a single idea in their long-term memory.

Technologists recognize that particular learning process pretty easily because they spend lots of time alone with their computers, Googling stuff in between emails, querying ChatGPT in between Slack messages, watching YouTube videos after Zoom calls, taking up the ideas they read or watch in their long-term memory.

Where this gets them into trouble is when they imagine schools as rooms full of students having that same interaction every day for an entire school year.

Teachers are not so misled. Teachers know they have to consider the rhythms of the school year, the need for a variety of learning experiences across the days, weeks, and months. Even if students were able to learn well from a video on one day, that doesn’t mean they can learn just as well from a video on the second, tenth, or 180th day of the school year.

Teachers also consider the value students bring to each other, how the group’s learning can be more than the sum of its parts.

Many technologists find these ideas of schooling hard to understand because they successfully learned something new from ChatGPT last week and they now believe we should copy and paste that interaction across every student in a class across an entire school year.

The difference between those fantasies and reality are most apparent at the start of the school year. If the fantasies of technologists were the reality, we would ideally see students get their laptops and headphones and chatbot accounts provisioned on day one and jump straight onto their individualized learning pathways.

Yet I asked teachers on Twitter, “What is your #1 goal for your first day of school with students?” 

And across all years of experience, teachers responded with similar goals.

Teachers are trying to help students build community and learn content at the same time.

This is true every day of the school year. It’s just especially obvious on the first day of the school year. 

If you’re a technologist interested in making an impact in education this school year, I would urge you to understand that learning in schools is different from the way you often learn now, alone with a laptop. Perhaps the single best way to understand that is to find a way into schools—as a substitute, as a volunteer—and participate in schooling.

BTW. If you’re interested in checking out some of the specific ways teachers blend content and community, check out this list of teacher-curated activities for the first day of school, including some of my own.

BTW. My colleagues at Amplify (including many fine technologists) have just released 100+ free K-12 activities at teacher.desmos.com, any of which could support your first days of school.

Odds & Ends

¶ If you are a teacher or a technologist, do enjoy (or feel convicted by) this video by Sophie Theodorou lacerating edtech companies who test their products on teachers without compensating or understanding them.

¶ English and language arts teacher Chanea Bond explains why (and how) she’s banning AI in her classrooms this upcoming school year.

The idea is that all of their initial writing, their outlines, every component that goes into their final drafts, will be written down first. This allows both of us to see and evaluate their ideas first, and then focus on getting those ideas into the final product, and then step back and reflect on the differences, on how did you get from point A to point B?

AI boosters often claim that AI can help students write their first draft, but experienced writing instructors like Bond argue that the first draft is the essential crucible where your own ideas are formed, the terrain where you figure out what you yourself believe. AI cannot tell you what you yourself believe.

¶ Hannah Bowlus keeps the stream of coverage flowing into the relationship between Los Angeles USD, its superintendent Alberto Carvahlo, and AllHere, the company they contracted to build an AI chatbot system for students and parents. I think this is the first I’ve seen anyone report that the relationship between AllHere and Carvahlo extended back to his tenure as the superintendent of Miami-Dade CPS. The New York Times had a piece on this catastrophe some time ago, but I’ve been extremely impressed by the investigation from smaller groups like EdSurge, The 74, and Westside Voice here. Extremely tenacious work.

¶ Dylan Kane wrote about his experience on a curriculum adoption committee and the areas where the curricula often underperformed his expectations.

¶ Benjamin Riley has synthesized many of his concerns about AI in education into a whitepaper called Education Hazards of Generative AI. I found the section on “hazards posed by training” especially useful:

Given that many instructional materials found online are low-quality, LLMs may not have been trained on high-quality lesson plans or on lesson plans aligned with specific content standards.

¶ character.ai raised a ton of money from investors and built one of the most popular AI chatbot startups in the world. The fact that they had to sell-ish the company this last week is perhaps an example of nothing whatsoever or perhaps an early indicator that these companies aren’t making anything valuable enough for users to pay enough money for the company to continue operating. The implications for AI chatbot startups in edtech are left as an exercise for the reader.

¶ Pure anecdata but I helped kick off the school year on Monday in one of the ten largest school districts in the US and you could count the number of teachers I overhead discussing AI excitedly, or discussing AI at all, on zero (0) hands.