Teaching

The future of educational technology (from The Future of Everything)

Olivia Peterkin — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 22:46:25 +0000

The future of educational technology (from The Future of Everything) Olivia Peterkin Tue, 08/26/2025 - 15:46

This week we are sharing an episode from The Future of Everything, with host Russ Altman, featuring GSE dean and School’s In co-host, Dan Schwartz in the hot seat.

September 4, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

While there have been many suggestions for AI use in classrooms — from grading papers, to improving learning outcomes in less time — it can be difficult to know where the tool’s true possibilities and limitations lie.

Muddying the waters, according to �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) Dean Dan Schwartz, is the disconnect between how edtech companies are using the tool, and what teachers and students are looking to create with it.

“What’s happening in the industry is [that they’re] using the AI in the way that nobody else uses it,” Schwartz said. “Everybody who’s got this tool wants to create with it. Like my brother. It’s my birthday. What does he do? He asks ChatGPT to write a poem about Dan Schwartz at ��.

“Meanwhile, the [edtech] field is trying to push towards efficiency. Can we get the kids done faster? Can we get ’em through the curriculum faster? Can we correct them faster? In which case the kids are going to optimize for being really efficient. As opposed to just trying to be creative, innovative, and use it for deeper kinds of things. This is my big fear.”

This week we’re switching it up and sharing an episode from �� School of Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast, originally broadcast in August 2024, with host Russ Altman. In a role reversal, GSE Dean Dan Schwartz is the featured guest and he discusses the future of educational technology.

“The question is, how can, how can you take advantage of industry? You know, education’s a public good, but they still buy all their products,” Schwartz said. “And so going through those companies is one way to sort of bring a positive revolution.”

Transcript

[00:00:00] Denise: Hi everyone, it's Denise Pope and this week on School's In we're gonna do something a little different. While our team is supporting the opening of the new �� GSE building, we wanted to share an episode from another great �� podcast, the Future of Everything hosted by Russ Altman from the School of Engineering.

Russ sits down with my absolute favorite co-host, Dan Schwartz, to talk about all things artificial intelligence. The conversation originally aired last summer, and it's just as relevant today, if not more. So they explore what AI might mean for students, teachers, schools, everything from grading papers to how we can actually make learning stick.

You'll hear Russ leading the conversation, and it might sound a little more tech forward than our usual episodes, but at the heart of it, it's still about how we teach and learn. We are so excited to share it with you. So let's dive in.

[00:00:54] Dan: You know, the tough question for me is, should you let the kid use chat GBT during the test?

Yeah. Right. And, and we had this argument over calculators, right? And, and finally they came up with ways to ask questions, where it was okay if the kids had calculators because the calculator was doing the routine stuff, and that's not really what you cared about. What you cared about was could the kid be innovative?

Could they, uh, take us another, a second approach to solve a problem, things like that.

[00:01:27] Russ: This is �� engineering's the future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. You know, the rise of AI has been on people's minds ever since the release of chat, GPT, especially the powerful one that started to do things that were scary. Good. We've seen people using it in business, in sports, in entertainment, and definitely in education.

When it comes to education, there are some fundamental questions. However, are we teaching students how to use AI or are we teaching students? How do we assess them? Teachers grade papers with ai. Can students write papers with ai? Why is anybody doing anything? Why don't we just have the AI talk to itself all day?

These are real questions that come up in ai. Fortunately, we're gonna be talking to Dan Schwartz, who's a professor of Education and a dean of the School of Education at �� University about how AI is impacting education. Dan, the release of chat, GPT has had an impact. All over the world. People are using it in all kinds of ways and clearly one of the areas that AI and especially generative AI has made impact is in education.

Students are clearly using it. Teachers are thinking about using it or using it. You are the Dean of Education at ��. What's your take on the situation right now for AI in education?

[00:02:49] Dan: Okay, so lots of answers to that, but, but you know, the thing I've enjoyed the most is, uh, showing it to people and watching their reaction.

So I'm a cognitive psychologist. I study creativity, learning what it means to understand, and you show this to people and you just see them go, oh my Lord. And then the next thing you see is they begin to say, uh, what? What's left for humans? Like what's left? And then they sort of say, wait a minute, will there be any jobs?

And then finally they sort of say, oh my goodness, education needs to change. And as a dean who raises money for a school, this is the best thing ever happened. No. Whether it's good or bad, it doesn't matter. Everybody realizes it's gonna change stuff. And so it's really an exciting time.

[00:03:38] Russ: So that, that is really good news, I have to say, going into this.

And I, and, and I have to reveal a bias. I have often wondered if technology has any place in a classroom, and I think it's because I was, uh, I was injured as a youth. This is in the 1970s when some teachers tried to put a computer program in front of me and I was a pretty motivated student and I worked with this computer for about six minutes.

And I should say I'm not an anti computer person. I literally spend all my time writing algorithms and doing computational work, but I just felt as a youth. That I wanted to have a teacher in front of me, a human telling me things. Uh, and so that is clearly not the direction. I, I hear you laughing. So talk to me about the appropriate way to think about computers, because I really have a big negative reaction to the idea of anything standing between me and, and a teacher.

[00:04:34] Dan: You must have had very good teachers. I might have. So, so Ross, you sound like someone who doesn't play video games.

[00:04:39] Russ: I do not play video games. Yeah. So,

[00:04:41] Dan: so there's this world out there where people get to experience things they could never experience, uh, directly, and no teacher can deliver this immersive experience of you.

In the Amazon searching for anthropological artifacts, there's also something called social media. That people I've heard about this. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:05:00] Russ: I think we disseminate the show using it.

[00:05:02] Dan: So, so back in the day.

[00:05:04] Russ: Okay, so I'm a dinosaur.

[00:05:06] Dan: Uh, back in the day you got the Apple two maybe, and it's about 64. Okay.

Maybe it's got a big floppy drive and it takes all, its CPU power to draw a picture of a two plus two on the screen. So, so I think things have changed a little bit less they have, but, but I appreciate your desire to be connected to teachers. I, I, I don't. I don't think we're replacing them.

[00:05:30] Russ: I am not gonna give you a lecture about teaching, but I will say this one sentence that was reverberating through my brain when I was getting ready for our interview, which was when I'm in a classroom, and this has been since I've been in third grade, I am watching the teacher trying to understand how they think about the information and how they struggle with it.

To like understand it and then try to relay it to me. And so it is, that's where I'm learning I'm, it's not even what they're saying, it's they're painting a picture for their cognitive model of what they're talking about. And that's what I'm trying to pull out to this day. And so that's why I have such a negative reaction to anything standing between me and this other human who has a model that is more advanced than mine about the material that we're.

Struggling with, and I just, I'm trying to download that model.

[00:06:17] Dan: Wow. You're, you are a Cognos psychologist, Russ. I mean this like, like I had a buddy who sort of became a Nobel laureate and he talked about how he'd loved to take apart cars and I'd say, I love to watch you take apart cars. Right. Just figured out what you're doing.

No, so I, I think I'm gonna, okay, let, let, let's separate this. There's the part where you think the interaction with the teacher's important. I don't know that you need it eight hours a day. Yeah. You know, that's, that's an awful lot of interaction. I, I'm not sure I wanna be with my, yeah. My mom and dad for eight hours a day trying to figure out their thinking.

So you don't need it all the time. On the other side, you know, we can do creative things with a computer. So for example, I wrote a program where students learn by teaching a computer agent. And so they're trying to figure out how to get the agent to think the way it should in the domain. Turns out it's highly motivating.

The kids learn a lot. The problem was the technology. Quickly became obsolete because after kids used it for a couple of days, they no longer needed it. 'cause they'd figured out sort of how to do the kind of reasoning that we wanted them to teach the agent to do for reasoning.

[00:07:23] Russ: That's exactly what I was talking about before about my relationship with my teacher and you just flipped it.

But it's the same idea, which is that there's a cognitive model that you're trying to transfer and by, by doing that transfer, you get in, you introspect on it, and you understand what it is that you're thinking about.

[00:07:38] Dan: I think that's right. You know, so, so the concern is the computer does all the work.

Right, right. And, and, and so I'm just sitting there pressing a button that isn't relevant to the domain I'm trying to learn. But, you know, uh, one of the things computers are really good at, I like, as good as casinos, is motivation. So some computer programs, they gamify it. I'm not sure that's a great use of it.

Because you, you know, you try and you learn to just beat the game for the reward. Right, right. As opposed to learn the content. But things like having have teaching a, an intelligent agent how to think, there's something called the protege effect, which is you'll try harder to learn the content. To teach your agent, then you will to prepare for a test.

[00:08:21] Russ: Ah,

[00:08:21] Dan: right. So, so we can make the computer pretty social.

[00:08:24] Russ: Okay. So, so you are, you are clearly a technology optimist in education and in addition to the amazing fundraising and like, there's so many questions to be answered. What I think a lot of people are worried about is, are we at risk of losing a gen we've already lost.

A few generations of students. Some people argue because of the pandemic and the terrible impact it had, especially on, on people who weren't privileged in, in society and, and in their education. Are we about to enter yet another shock to the system where because of the ease of having essays written and having and grading papers, that we really don't serve a generation of students well?

Or do you think that's a overhyped unlikely to happen thing?

[00:09:07] Dan: No, it's a good question. You know, that I, part of this is people's view about cheating, you know, and, and so it's, it's too easy for students to do certain things. I, there's another response that I wanna hang on to. I, I wanna ask you, Ross. Yeah.

Are you using, you teach.

[00:09:24] Russ: Yeah.

[00:09:24] Dan: Are you, are you like putting in all sorts of rules to prevent students from cheating or are you saying sh use it, do whatever you can. I'm gonna outsmart your technique anyway.

[00:09:33] Russ: It, it's a little bit more on the ladder. So we, uh, I teach an ethics class, which is a writing class, and we allow chat, GBT, because the, my fellow instructor and I decided, and this was the quote, we want to be part of the future, not part of the past.

So we said to the students, knock yourself.

[00:09:49] Dan: Sorry. The future of everything, Ross. Thank you.

[00:09:51] Russ: Thank you. Thank you, Emma. Thanks for the plug. So, uh, we allow it, we ask them to tell us what prompt they used and to show us the initial output that they got from that prompt. And then we, of course, have them hand in the final thing and we instruct the TAs and, and ourselves when we grade.

We're grading the final product with or without a declaration of whether chat GPT is used. We do have engineers as TAs, which means that they did a, a careful analysis. Students who used chat GPT, and I don't think this is a surprise, got slightly lower grades, but spend substantially less time on the assignment.

So if you are a busy student, you might say, I will make that trade off. 'cause the grades weren't a ton worse. It was like two points out of a hundred, like from a 90, 90 to an 88, and they completed it in like half the time.

[00:10:42] Dan: Uh, do, do you think they learned less?

[00:10:44] Russ: So? We don't know. We don't know. And, uh, yeah, the evaluation of learning is something that I'm looking to you, Dan.

Uh, yeah. Yeah. How do I tell? So, um, so we do try to use it, but we are stressed out. We have seen cases where. People say they used chat, GPT, but tried to mislead us in how they used it. They said, I only used it for copy editing, but it was clear that they did more than copy editing with it. Yeah. And so there's, at the edges there are some challenges, but in the end we said motivated students who wanna learn will use it as a tool and will learn.

And the students who we have failed to motivate and it is our failure, you could argue they're just gonna do whatever they do and we are not gonna be able to really impact that trajectory very much.

[00:11:28] Dan: Yeah, you know, you, you sort of see the same thing with video, video based lectures. So I'm online, I've got this lecture.

Do I really want to sit and listen to the whole thing? Not really. I'm gonna skim forward to find the information. I skim back. I'm probably gonna end up doing the minimum amount if it's not a great lecture.

[00:11:45] Russ: Yeah.

[00:11:46] Dan: So I, I'm not sure this is a chat GPT phenomenon. It's just, it's sort of an enabler. I think the challenge is thinking of the right assignment.

[00:11:54] Russ: Yep. Yep. So,

[00:11:56] Dan: so like you can grade things on novel and appropriateness. So are they novel? You know, if they use chat GBT like everybody else, they won't be novel. They'll all produce the same thing.

[00:12:05] Russ: It's incredibly, yes. It, so it is, um, there's the, the most common type of, uh, moral theory is called common morality.

And it turns out that. Chatt PT does pretty well at that one 'cause there's so many examples that it has seen and it's terrible at KT Deontology. It really can't do. Okay, so let me, let me, let me Wait, wait.

[00:12:24] Dan: So, yeah, so let me get, let get back to your question. Yeah. So, so here's what I see going on right now.

There, there are like, uh, big industry conferences. Because they're gonna, they're producing the technology that schools can adopt, right? And there's a lot of money there. And 20 years ago there were zero unicorns in about, uh, I think last year, $54 billion valuation companies in ed tech. So this is a big change.

So what are they doing? They're, they're basically creating things to. Do stuff to students, right? So, so maybe they're marketing to the teachers, but it, it's, you know, it's, I'll make a tutor that, uh, is more efficient at delivering information to the students. Or, uh, I will make a program that can correct their math very quickly.

And so what's happening is the industry is sort of using the AI in the way that nobody else uses it. 'cause everybody's got this, this tool wants to create stuff, right? Like, uh, my brother. It's my birthday. What does he do? He has chat, GPT to write me a poem about Dan Schwarz at ��. What he doesn't know is that there's a lot of Dan Schwartz's, and so evidently I wear colorful ties, but this is what everybody wants to do.

They wanna create with it. Meanwhile, the field is trying to push towards efficiency. Can we get the kids done faster? Can we get 'em through the curriculum faster? Can we correct them faster? In which case the kids are going to optimize for being really efficient. Yeah. Right. As opposed just trying to be creative, innovative, use it for deeper kinds of things.

So, so this is my big fear.

[00:14:00] Russ: And so, and so you're watching these companies, and I'm guessing that they don't always ask your opinion about what's, what would you tell, so let's say a, uh, one of these unicorn, billion dollar or more companies comes to you and says, we wanna do this, right? We want to use the best educational research to create AI that can bring education to people who might otherwise not have quality education.

What would you tell them?

[00:14:22] Dan: So this is a challenge, right? This, this is something we're actively trying to solve. So we, we've created, uh, �� Accelerator for learning to kind of figure out how to do this, because I've been, I've been in this ed tech position for quite a while, and the companies come in and they say, we really want your opinion.

Mm-hmm. And then they present what they're doing and I go, uh, have you ever thought of? And they go, wait, wait. Wait, let me finish. And this goes on for 55 minutes where they're telling me what they want to do. And I'm trying to say, you know, if you just did this, and the way it ends is I say to 'em, look, you, you, you, if you do these three things, I'll consider being an advisor.

[00:15:00] Russ: Right?

[00:15:01] Dan: They never come back.

[00:15:03] Russ: So the message, the message you're sending them is just not in their worldview.

[00:15:08] Dan: It's 'cause they have a vision. Everybody wants to start their own school.

[00:15:11] Russ: Yeah.

[00:15:11] Dan: They have their vision of what it should be and, and they're urgent to get it done. And, you know, it's a startup mentality.

So trying to figure out how can we educate them, you know, I think we know a lot about how people learned that, uh, that we didn't know 20 years ago when they went to school. And the ai, you know, one of the things it can do is implement some of these theories of learning in ways that don't exist in textbooks and things like that.

So, so that's, that's the big hope. And the question is, how can, how can you take advantage of industry? You know, education's a public good, but they still buy all their products. And so going through those companies is one way to sort of bring a positive revolution. But again, I'm, I'm a little worried that the companies are, they're, they're sort of optimizing for local minimum.

You know, to, to accommodate the current schools and things like that.

[00:16:03] Russ: Should, should we take, so what should we take solace in the teachers? So many of us are fans of teachers, grammar school teachers, middle school teachers, high school teachers. Many of these folks are incredibly de dedicated. Will they be a final, um.

A final filter that looks at these, uh, educational technologies and says, absolutely not. Or, yeah, we'll use that, but we're gonna use that in a way that makes sense for my, for my way of teaching. Or are they not in a position to make those kinds of, what would you could call courageous decisions about kind of modifying the use of these tools to make them as good as possible, uh, in on, on the ground.

[00:16:39] Dan: Great expression, courageous decisions. I really like that. So it's pretty interesting, the, the surveys I've seen, uh, sort of over the last year, the different groups do different surveys. It, it's sort of, I take the average about 60% of K 12 teachers are using Gen ai, right? And about 30% of the kids, if I go to the college level, about 30% of the faculty are using Gen AI and teaching.

And about 80% of the kids are using it. So, so I do think in the pre-K to 12 space, yeah. Uh, the teachers are making decisions. They do a lot of curriculum. There are, so a great application is, uh, project-based learning. So pro project-based learning is a lot of fun. Kids learn a lot. They sort of develop a passion, a certain d.

As opposed to just mastering sort of the requirements, but it's really hard to manage. You know, when I was a high school teacher, I had 130 kids, right? If all of them have a separate project, I have to help plan 'em and make 'em goal, you know, learning goal appropriate. So the gen AI can help me do that. It can help me, uh, have the kids sort of help use it to help them design a successful project.

Uh, it can help me with a dashboard that helps manage them hitting their milestones, things like that. And, and there, you know, it's, it, the teacher is like, I can do something I just couldn't do before.

[00:17:56] Russ: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:57] Dan: It, it's different than the model where you put the kids in the back of the room who finished early and say, go use the computer.

[00:18:03] Russ: Right.

[00:18:04] Dan: But I think, you know, uh, most schools, kids are carrying computers in classes, so it's a little different. It's more integrated than it used to be.

[00:18:12] Russ: This is the future of Everything with Russ Altman. More with Dan Schwartz next.

Welcome back to the Future of Everything. I'm Rus Saltman and I'm speaking with. Dan Schwartz, professor of Education at �� University. In the last segment, Dan told us about AI education, some of the promises and some of the pitfalls that he's looking at on the ground, thinking about how to educate the next generation.

In this segment, I'm gonna ask him about assessment grading. How do we do that with AI and how do we make sure it goes well? Also gonna ask 'em about physical activity, which turns out physicalness is an important part of learning. I wanna get a little bit more detail, Dan, in this next segment, and I want to start off with a assessment.

Grading. I know you've thought about this a lot. People are worried that, um, AI is gonna start to doing, be doing all the grading. Everybody knows that a high school teacher with a big couple of big classes can spend their entire weekend grading essays. It is so tempting just to feed that into chat GPT and say, Hey, how good is this essay?

How should we think about, maybe worry about, but maybe just think about assessment in education in the future.

[00:19:32] Dan: Yeah, this was, this was, uh, remember the MOOCs? Yes. Massively online open courses. Yes. And, uh, you're hoping you have 10,000 students and then you gotta grade the papers for 10,000 students. So what do you do?

You give 'em multiple choice test, which can be machine coded. Right. So, so I, I think that's always there. I'm, I'm gonna take it a slightly different direction, which is, uh, I'm interacting with a computer system and while I'm interacting with it, it's, it can be constantly assessing. In real time, right? Huh?

And so there's a field that's sometimes called educational data mining or learning analytics, and there's thousands of people who are working on how do I get informative signal out of students' interactions. Like, are they trying to game the system? Are they reflecting and so forth. So, so this is something the computer.

It can do pretty well, right? It can sort of track what students are doing, assess, and then ideally deliver the right piece of instruction at the moment, right? So, so yours, you could use the assessments to give people a grade, but really the more important thing is can you use the assessments to make instructional decisions?

So I think this is a, a big area of advancement, but here, here's my concern. We've gotten very good at assessing things that are objectively right and wrong. Like, did you remember the right word? Did you get two plus two correctly? For most of the things we care about now they're like strategic and heuristic, which means it's not a guaranteed right answer.

And so what you really want to do is assess students' choices for what to do. So, for example, uh, creativity, it's, it's just, for the most part, it's a large set of strategies.

[00:21:11] Russ: Mm-hmm.

[00:21:11] Dan: Right? There's a bunch of strategies that help you be creative. The question is, do the students choose to do that? Or do they take the safe route?

'cause creativity is a risk, right? Because you're not sure. So I, so I think this is where the field needs to go, is being willing to say that certain kinds of choices about learning are better than others. Uh, and, and it's a, it becomes a more of an ethical question now. Instead of saying two plus two equals four, there's no ethics to it.

[00:21:36] Russ: Are you gonna be able to convince non-educators who hold purse strings, let's call them the government, that these kinds of assessments are, are important and need to be included? Because my sense is that when it filters up to boards of education or elected leaders, a lot of that stuff goes out of the window and they just wanna know.

How good are they at Reading Comprehensive And can they do enough math to be competitive with, you know, country X?

[00:22:04] Dan: Yeah. Yeah. So different assessments serve different purposes, like the the big year end tests that kids take. Those aren't to inform the instruction of that child. They're not even for that teacher, they're for school districts to decide are our policies working?

And so it's, it's really a different kind of assessment than me as a teacher trying to decide what should I give the kid next? So, so, so I think it's gonna vary. I, you know, the tough question for me is, should you let the kid use chat GPT during the test? Yeah. Right. And, and we had this argument over calculators.

Right. And, and finally they came up with ways to ask questions, where it was okay if the kids had calculators because the calculator was doing the routine stuff, and that's not really what you cared about. What you cared about was, could the kid be innovative? Could they, uh, take a, another, a second approach to solve a problem?

Things like that.

[00:22:55] Russ: Yeah, we, so I teach another class where it's a programming class, so pe the students write programs and we have switched. Um, and we've actually downgraded the, the value. So as you know very well, just as background, there is now an amazing chat. PT can also write computer code essentially.

And so a lot of coding now is kind of done for you and you don't need to do it. We are trying to make sure that they understand the algorithms that we ask them to code, and so what we're doing is where. Downgrading the amount of points you get for working code, you still get some, but we're upgrading the quiz about how the algorithm works.

Do you understand exactly why this happened the way it did? Why is this data structure a good choice or a bad choice? And so it's forcing us and, and you could have argued that we should have done this 20 years ago in the same class, but this is making it a more. Urgent issue because if we don't, people can just get an automatic piece of code.

They can run it, it'll work. They have no understanding of what happened. And so it's really a positive. It's putting more of a burden on us to figure out why the heck did we have them write this code in the first place?

[00:24:00] Dan: No, this, uh, this, this was my point. It makes you sort of rethink what, what is valuable to learn and you stop doing what was easy to grade.

[00:24:08] Russ: Right. And, and,

[00:24:09] Dan: uh, so, so I have an interesting one. This, this is a little nerdy. Okay. I love it. I love it. So I teach, I teach the intro PhD statistics course, okay. In education. And lots of students say, I took statistics. Right. And, and I'm sort of like, well, that's great. I, let me ask you one question and I say, I'm gonna email you a question and you'll have five minutes to respond.

You let me know when you're ready for it. And I ask him, uh, this is just for you, Russ, but why, why is the tail of the T distribution fat at small sample sizes? And I, what I get back usually is because they're small sample sizes.

[00:24:45] Russ: Right. Or because it's the T distribution

[00:24:48] Dan: or it's the Yes. Even better. And then I come back and I sort of say, well, have you ever heard of a standard error?

And I, I began to get at the conceptual stuff, right? And, uh, I, I suspect if I gave. So there are ways to get conceptual questions that are really important.

[00:25:04] Russ: This is great. But,

[00:25:05] Dan: you know, being able to, being able to prompt or write our code, you know, that's a good thing. You, you want them to learn the skills as well.

[00:25:11] Russ: Exactly.

[00:25:12] Dan: So I, so I don't know, you know, when the calculator showed up, there's a big debate, right? What should students learn? Can they use the calculator? The, the apocryphal solution was you had to learn the regular math and the calculator. Now you just had to learn twice as much. Yes. And so maybe that's what it's gonna be.

[00:25:28] Russ: And, and, and, and so I, that's a very likely transitional strategy. And then we'll see where we end up. Okay. In, in the final few minutes, I, this seems like it's unrelated to ai, but I bet it's not. You've done a lot of work on physical activity and learning. You've even been on a paper recently where, where you talk about having a walk during a, during a teaching session, and whether you get better outcomes than if you were just.

Standing or sitting. So tell me about that interest and tell me if it has anything to do with today's topic.

[00:25:58] Dan: I can make the bridge. I can do it, Russ. Right. So we, we did some studies, um, I've done a lot of it. It's called embodiment. Embodiment where? Yeah, there, it, I got clued into this where, uh, I was asking people about why.

About gears and I say, you know, you have three gears in a line, and if you turn the gear on the left clockwise, what does the gear on the right do far? Right? Right. And I'd, I'd watch 'em and they'd go like this with their hands. They, they'd model with their hands. And then, uh, I, I, I was sort of like, well, what's the basis of this?

And I'd say, well, why, why? And they say, because this one's turning that way, that one I go, but why? And in the end, they just bought 'em out. They just show me their hands. They didn't say things like one molecule displaces another. Right. Right. So that, that sort of clued me in that two body. This pinky

[00:26:44] Russ: is going up and this other pinky is going down.

[00:26:47] Dan: Yes. What don't you understand about that? Pretty much. Well, it was non-verbal. Yeah. So, so we went on, you know, we discovered that the basis for negative numbers right is actually, uh, perceptual symmetry. Huh. And we did some neuro, neuro stuff. And so, so the question is sort of how does this perceptual apparatus, which some people the, we're just loaded with perception, right?

The brain's just one giant perceiving. So how, how do you get that going? So part, part of the embodiment is my ability to take action, right? And so this is where we started, right? Right now. The AI feels very verbal, very abstract. Even the video generation, it's amazing, but it's pretty passive for me. So enter virtual worlds.

They're still working on the form factor where I can move my hand in space.

[00:27:37] Denise: Yeah.

[00:27:37] Dan: And something will happen in the environment in response to that. You know, I think medicine has, you know, really been working on haptics so surgeons can practice. Uh, there was a great, a great guy who made a virtual world for different heart congenital defects, and you could go in and practice surgery and see what would happen to the blood flow.

So, so I think, uh, that embodiment where you get to bring all your senses to bear. It's not just words, but it's everything can really do a lot for learning, for engagement. Uh, not just physical skills.

[00:28:10] Russ: So that's a challenge to, I'm hearing a challenge to ai, which is, as an educator, you know, that this physicality can be a critical part of learning.

And by the way, would this be a surprise? I mean, we're, we've been on earth evolving for several hundred million years and, uh. Would not, you would not, you would be surprised if our ability to manipulate and look at three dimensional situations wasn't critical to learning. And yet that's not what AI is doing right now.

So this is a clear challenge to AI among other things.

[00:28:38] Dan: Right. So, uh, I have a colleague, uh, Renata Ter, and, uh, she teaches architecture and she has students make a blueprint for the building. Right, and then she feeds the blueprint to a CAD system that creates the building. She then takes the building and puts it into a physics engine.

It can basically render the building and make walls so you can't move through 'em, and it has gravity and things like that. She then puts. The original student who designed the building in a wheelchair and has them try to navigate through that environment, at which point they sort of understand, oh, this is why you need so much space so they can turn around so they can navigate near the door.

I am sure that is an incredibly compelling experience that allows them to be generative about all their future designs. So, so yeah, this is a challenge and part of the. The co-mingling of the AI in the virtual worlds. I think this, this is a big challenge. It's computationally very heavy, but it will open the door for lots of ways of teaching that you just couldn't do before.

[00:29:38] Russ: Thanks to Dan Schwartz, that was the future of educational technology. You've been listening to the Future of Everything in I'm Russ Altman. You know what? We have an archive with more than 250 back episodes of the future of everything. So you have instant access to a wide array of discussions that can keep you entertained.

And informed. Also, remember to rate, review, and follow. I care deeply about that request. And also if you wanna follow me, you can follow me at on X at RB Altman, and you can follow �� Engineering at ��, ENG.

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Faculty and Research

Digital literacy in the AI era (Part 2)

Olivia Peterkin — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 20:09:38 +0000

Digital literacy in the AI era (Part 2) Olivia Peterkin Wed, 07/30/2025 - 13:09

Students | Teaching | Technology

In this episode of School’s In, a live panel including GSE Professor Emeritus Sam Wineburg and �� journalism lecturer Janine Zacharia discusses how to help students discern reliable information online.

August 7, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

With online information that is vast and varied, how can schools help students learn to separate fact from fiction online — while competing with shrinking attention spans?

According to Valerie Ziegler, a teacher of history, economics, and politics at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, one way educators can equip students is by becoming familiar with AI, creating discussions around its use, and incorporating it into classrooms.

“I think the first thing is that, as educators, we have to practice what we preach, and use these tools,” said Ziegler during a live recording of School’s In.

A panel including Ziegler, GSE Professor Emeritus Sam Wineburg, �� journalism lecturer Janine Zacharia, and �� senior Alvin Lee joined host and GSE Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss the importance of teaching students how to discern reliable information online, and how it can be built into course curricula.

“I think Gen Z is better equipped than other generations in navigating the complexity of disinformation online,” said Lee, who is founder and executive director of GENup, California’s largest youth-led education policy organization. “But I think by and large, we still really need to hammer in the importance of digital literacy very early on in our public education systems to make sure that we’re really addressing this crisis.”

This ability to determine trustworthy sources extends to news, especially since young people are increasingly turning to social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram for information.

“I think that it’s an urgent national priority that people understand how credible, fact-based news works and how to identify what you’re seeing in the news,” said Zacharia, who teaches journalism skills and techniques for understanding the changing news environment.

“In terms of identifying credible information, if you look at the sources, as opposed to reading everything that captures your attention, or echoes your confirmation bias without caring who they are, we’d all be in a better place,” she said.

Learn more about our LIVE event and view the event recording on the Cubberley Lecture/School's In LIVE event page.

Transcript

Alvin Hong Lee (00:01):

We still really need to hammer in the importance of digital literacy very early on in our public education systems to make sure that we're really addressing this crisis.

Denise Pope (00:12):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights and learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at ��'s Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:36):

And I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education and the faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:46):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed.

Dan Schwartz (00:56):

So, in this section, Denise, who is a superb interviewer of a panel, is going to engage people with different kinds of expertise about the information ecosystem. So, Alvin Lee is pursuing a BA in Political Science at ��. He describes himself as a proud product of California public schools. We'd like to think of him as one of ��'s rock star future alums. Alvin is founder and executive director of GENup, California's largest youth-led education policy organization, and he has news. He was one of four �� students named as Rhodes Scholar for the fall of 2025.

(01:39):

Next is Valerie Ziegler. She teaches at Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco. She's been working with Sam for over a decade and was one of the first teachers to pilot Sam's new approach to teaching history through primary sources and trained her SFUSD colleagues to use it as well. So just... No, wait. Just this week, she had her students record their own podcasts about their AI experiences. So, Valerie, you may just be more prepared than us. And not surprisingly, she was named a California Teacher of the Year. Now.

(02:16):

Last, Janine Zacharia is the Carlos Kelly McClatchy Lecturer at ��, where she teaches journalism skills and techniques for understanding the changing news environment. She's written extensively on tonight's topic, including a newsroom playbook for propaganda reporting, helping even seasoned journalists manage the flood of misinformation. She may be the only female journalist unaccompanied married Jewish woman ever to be in Saudi Arabia. She went in 2011 during the Arab Spring to report for the Washington Post. It's really impressive. So thank you, Janine.

Denise Pope (02:57):

All right. I'm really excited for this panel. The way it's gonna work is everyone's gonna have a little chance to say a response to, after hearing the podcast, what is one idea that resonated with you, and then we'll open it up to more a conversation among us. So I wanna start with you, Alvin. If you think about that conversation, what's one idea that really resonated with you?

Alvin Hong Lee (03:21):

This is a bit sort of more specific. I, I, the two of them can probably more talk about the broader picture, but, uh, Sam had a point about how a lot of students these days are using AI as a way to understand, uh, different information and literacy sources they're navigating. A lot of my friends are huge perplexity fans. We're obviously sort of in the ivory tower here at �� in terms of how we consume information and leverage digital, digital technology.

(03:44):

But again, AI has this very powerful danger of hallucinations. Uh, I've seen a lot from firsthand experience. And so when we talk about misinformation and disinf- disinformation, it's not just about the overabundance of false information that's coming our way all the time, but even in these, uh, very narrow institutions and technologies we use to interact and understand the world around us. So I think that's something to think more critically about too, is how AI is really transforming how we understand and perceive information.

Denise Pope (04:14):

Okay. We're gonna, we are gonna definitely delve further into that in a minute, V- but thank you. Valerie?

Valerie Ziegler (04:19):

I'll key on two things. I think the first thing that Sam pointed out is that we could have this conversation in two weeks and it might be different. And as a classroom teacher, I am just trying to keep up with what the brain rot is this week-

Alvin Hong Lee (04:31):

(laughs).

Valerie Ziegler (04:32):

... 'cause it's always changing and the technology's really changing and where students are getting their information is changing. And I think that that's a challenge for us in the classroom to keep up and to, to navigate and to shift and to really be able to serve students. The second thing is that I actually see the positives of how students are now approaching their online selves.

(04:52):

And I think when we started this work initially, they didn't look for things to be fake. And now it's sort of the reverse, "That's fake. That must be AI." And so I think they're coming to it with a lens now of growing up in a world where they don't trust everything. And I think once they have the skills that we actually have a lot, I have a lot of faith in students to be able to do the digital literacy on their own.

Denise Pope (05:15):

Well, that makes me happy. Could you... We gotta teach that to my mom-

Valerie Ziegler (05:18):

(laughs).

Alvin Hong Lee (05:18):

(laughs).

Denise Pope (05:20):

... but okay. (laughs). Janine?

Janine Zacharia (05:22):

All right. I have a lot of thoughts, but first I wanted to say that, I wanted to, when you said, Sam, you know, our eyes deceive us and just, obviously, how hard this all is. And I was thinking back to the original problem, which is basically the internet turned everyone into a publisher, right? And so there are advantages to that. So you get to read more w- things than just, you know, everybody has a voice, but there are serious problems. And the second thing was just how angry I feel about the fact that it's all on us to, to figure this out. Well, who, there are other people who are responsible for this, namely many who live within 10 miles of here, the companies that have created these algorithms that are rewarding, um, engagement rather than accuracy. And so until we solve that problem, we're gonna be constantly fighting for downloads of curricula, right?

(06:07):

And so I think that needs to be centered. And, just how urgent it is for people to do what Sam's saying about knowing the author of the, thinking, being curious even. I was on a hike this past weekend and one of the guides heard what, me telling what I do, "I teach at ��, da, da, da." And, so I started asking him, "Well, what do you, what's your media consumption?" You know? And he was telling me about a, a podcast that he really likes, and I said, "Oh, tell me about the podcast." So it was called, I think The Emerald. And he was talking about it. And I said, "Oh yeah, who is it? He's, who, who does the podcast?" And he really relies on this podcast, right? He said, "Oh, it's Josh something." I said, "Well, who is Josh something?"

Denise Pope (06:47):

(laughs).

Janine Zacharia (06:47):

He had no idea. And this, I think, is people are, you know, resonating with material without even the basic curiosity of who's putting that material out there. So that is just so critical to teach.

Denise Pope (07:01):

Yeah. Sam, what, this is, these are the ahas, do you have a reaction to, uh, a- any of these before I go deeper?

Sam Wineburg (07:10):

The reaction I have, I, I, I wanna pick up on something that Valerie said, and, um, this woman is an extraordinary educator. One of the reactions that people have is the opposite of being gullible is not trusting anything. My colleague, Mike Caulfield, calls it trust compression. When we distrust everything we say, you can't believe anything that you read on the internet.

(07:37):

Ultimately, we put our hand, we put ourselves in the hands of authoritarians. And so when a, a leader says, "You can't believe anything, believe in me," that is a very dangerous place for democracy to be in. And so the critical question for us as educators is how to cultivate a sense of discernment of what to believe in and what to reject, not this sense of you can't believe anything.

Denise Pope (08:05):

Yeah. No, I think that's so important. And, and I wanna go back to Alvin because you're talking about misinformation and disinformation and all of your peers are using this. So what are some things that you and your peers do when you face this? Uh, are, are we in this like, well, we can't believe anything mode? Or are there actual things that you're doing?

Alvin Hong Lee (08:23):

Yeah, that's a great question. I think it's sort of in between. I think there's a lot of information where, you know, students might have requisite knowledge where, you know, they can sort of discern that this is probably fake news. Our generation, Gen Z, was the first generation that sort of grew up chronically online. And so I think the benefit of that is, you know, we understand the utility of the technology. We understand how to navigate this information ecosystem, obviously, not as well as we'd like to, but I still think there's that fundamental knowledge. But I think that where it gets really complex is when you're talking about information like political news, for example, right?

(08:57):

Uh, most folks are incredibly disengaged and civic engagement is very critical because not only are students, uh, playing this role in social society, but your vote really sort of has profound impacts on very critical policy issues that are affecting all of us today that we're experiencing in 2025. So, uh, I think there's different levels to it. I think Gen Z is better equipped than other generations in navigating the complexity of disinformation. But I think, by and large, we still really need to hammer in the importance of digital literacy very early on in our public education systems to make sure that, uh, we're really addressing this crisis.

Denise Pope (09:32):

So, Valerie, you see this daily. What are, what are some of your, I mean, you're Teacher of the Year, what are some of your hot tips? We've got a bunch of educators in here to help the sort of peer group of Alvin, uh, a- although there he's a little bit older than who you teach.

Valerie Ziegler (09:47):

I think the first thing is that as educators, we have to practice what we preach and use these tools. You know, I have been on ChatGPT and used it for different things. And when I started with the Digital Inquiry Group, looking at some of the lessons they were creating about AI, I said, "Before I can do this, I need to test all these things out and really get an understanding of how they work." So I think that's the first step. I think the other piece is just really helping students understand how lateral reading works.

(10:17):

We do a lot of that in my class. That 30 seconds, that's what you need, but also just really engaging them. And what's great is when you put a bunch of students to ask AI a question and they're all doing it a table of four, and they're all trying to get the same answer, and they all get different answers on the same topic, then you have a conversation, right? And so then you have this ability to say, "Why are we all getting different answers? What does that mean? How do we go look at these sources? How do we ask the questions in the right way to get where we wanna get?"

Denise Pope (10:46):

To me, Janine, this is like the core of journalism, right? I mean, is i- you're the professor, I'm not. So what, when you're teaching future journalists, and also future consumers, w- what is it that they should be looking for to know the credibility of a source?

Janine Zacharia (11:03):

So, I think it's an, ur-, I can't overstate this, I think it's an urgent national priority that people understand how credible fact-based news works and how to identify what you're saying, Denise. It used to be enough. I've been teaching at �� for 14 years. It used to be enough for me to go into the classroom and teach 15 to 20 students a quarter, these nice little, "How do you find news? Um, how do you do an interview? How do you verify information?" and send them out into the world? It is not anymore. And I can talk more after about the things I'm doing to expand that reach. But in terms of identifying, I mean, it's very, you know, it's doing a little bit of what Sam said, but knowing what leg- that legacy media, the much-maligned mainstream legacy media, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, AP, Reuters, they're your Encyclopedia Britannica.

(11:55):

They're your history books that you teach in, in schools, and they abide by a certain set of standards, like there's an editor-reporter relationship, that there's actually like a team working there. It's not just one dude with a, with a microphone, right? That there's accountability that, "If I make something up, I'm gonna get fired." That, uh, there are rules on anonymous sources that you can see published on their ethics standards on their website. And that most importantly, they actually publish corrections. These are things that you can clearly identify to know it's a credible fact-based source in a news or news source.

Denise Pope (12:31):

Super helpful, right? The fact-checkers, right? The fact-checkers exist for some of these places, but they, they call me up and check my quote.

Janine Zacharia (12:39):

Right.

Denise Pope (12:39):

Not everyone does that, very few, but the ones that do, it gives me faith.

Janine Zacharia (12:44):

Absolutely. I mean, well, The New Yorker's fact-checking is, you know, it's legendary. Unfortunately, with cutbacks to journalism, we can talk about how that's the, that's a, that's a headwind that's affecting all these things I want them, you know, to do. But you don't have as many editors, right? So newspapers are struggling.

(13:01):

But still, your local legitimate daily newspaper, The Denver Post or wherever, you know, you're from or something, has a team, you know? And so that's what you... It's really not that hard. If you, if you look at the sources, right, as opposed to reading everything that catches your attention or ha- e- e- e echoes your confirmation bias without caring who they are, we would all be in a better place if everybody knew this one thing.

Denise Pope (13:26):

I 100 percent agree, but Alvin's friends are not getting their news from those places, right?

Alvin Hong Lee (13:33):

Yeah.

Denise Pope (13:34):

Where do you get your news? I mean, I'm putting you on the spot.

Alvin Hong Lee (13:37):

(laughs) Uh-

Denise Pope (13:37):

You're probably different from your friend. You can speak more generally. Speak more generally,

Alvin Hong Lee (13:40):

Uh, more generally speaking, uh, I think T- TikTok is by far the biggest way that at least speaking for college students consume their news. Uh, Insta Reels is another really popular one. I think YouTube was mentioned earlier. I don't really know if people are using YouTube. That might be like a younger thing. I'm kind of old now. There's like two Gen Zs now. I didn't know about that. I'm like the older generation of Gen Z.

Denise Pope (14:01):

Wow.

Alvin Hong Lee (14:01):

That's, that's trippy, aging (laughs). Um, but I'd say TikT-

Denise Pope (14:04):

(laughs).

Alvin Hong Lee (14:08):

(laughs) I say that as a 22-year-old (laughs).

Denise Pope (14:09):

Yeah. Oh to be 22.

Alvin Hong Lee (14:11):

Yeah.

Denise Pope (14:11):

Yes, yes.

Alvin Hong Lee (14:12):

Uh, but I'd say TikTok and, uh, Instagram, for sure. Uh, it's, it's, it's concerning, frankly, because, I mean, I have a lot of peers right now who are product design majors or Sym Sys majors here at ��, right? Uh, and their job literally is to then go into these tech companies, apply the latest cutting-edge, uh, psychological research, and basically help make this product more addicting. And it's really, really concerning because nowadays, TikTok, social, Instagram, these little 15-second reels that are pushed onto your feed, it's the primary way that these students interact with the world, right?

(14:45):

This is their identity. It's how they shape who they are, it's how they discover themselves. And that has really, really significant consequences that hadn't been seen before, sort of, digital media exploded. And so, yeah, it's, it's very scary. And I think that this is why digital literacy is so critical to that because it's very important that students learn, uh, how to understand the effects, uh, of this content that they're seeing.

Denise Pope (15:08):

So, Valerie, what's the pushback in your classroom? Do you say, "Folks, you know, you probably shouldn't get your news from TikTok"? Like what, what's the pushback?

Valerie Ziegler (15:16):

I, I don't say that actually.

Denise Pope (15:18):

Okay, good (laughs).

Valerie Ziegler (15:18):

Um, you know, I do current events once a week. I teach AP US politics, and, you know, I will show them a variety of sources, credible news sources, and then at the end I'll say, "Go find me a TikTok video about this topic."

Denise Pope (15:32):

Hmm.

Valerie Ziegler (15:32):

And again, then we have the conversation. And sometimes they are so different and some of 'em are nonsense, about 90%, right? But it's really that conversation of, um, and I'll sort of allude, opening their eyes to, "I would've scrolled through this, listened to that sound bite, and believed it." And it gets them to stop and say, "Okay, where, where's this information coming from? Where am I getting it?"

(15:56):

And just, I think, again, in high school, giving them the tools to think about that process, because again, their lives are digital. And when I ask students what do, what do they want their parents to know about th- th- their lives? They're just on their screens. And so I, part of that is having those conversations about where they're getting the information so that hopefully when they aren't sitting in a US politics class and someone's forcing them to talk about it and look at it, they're doing that on their own.

Janine Zacharia (16:20):

Denise, I wanna clarify something. We just did an event, our Rebele Symposium in the Department of Communication two weeks ago, right over there

Denise Pope (16:28):

(laughs).

Janine Zacharia (16:28):

... in an adjacent room called The New(s) Influencers-What Legacy Media Can Learn from Online Content Creators. So I'm not saying, uh, that everything on TikTok is, is wrong.

Denise Pope (16:38):

Sure.

Janine Zacharia (16:38):

Right? And so we had Peter Hamby, who has a very popular Snapchat news show that reaches like 11 to 19-year-old target audience, but he came from CNN and he abides by a certain set of standards. So people just, if they get psyched about someone, need to look at who that person is and what their training is. And on a positive note, I mean, I studied Sam's 2021 study, of course. I gave a talk at, um, our daughter's, they have, they go to a third through eighth public school in Redwood City, and they had a festival of words, and I made, like, an AI, you know, version of the principal. And I put it up next to the real one, and they-

Denise Pope (17:13):

(laughs).

Janine Zacharia (17:13):

... all very easily picked out, you know-

Denise Pope (17:15):

Which was right and wrong.

Janine Zacharia (17:16):

... the real one. And they were, they were screaming, having fun. And then a little fourth-grader raised his hand and he said, "What do we do when the President of the United States posts an AI photo of himself as the Pope?" I was stunned, you know?

(17:31):

But the point is, I think they are so aware. You know, my 11-year-old who's obsessed with, with skincare products right now and is on YouTube all day, and I'll say to her, "Edie, what, go..." "Mommy, I researched it and I..." So she, I mean, she, they know, I mean, not all of them, but I'm kind of more, I'm, uh... Is it bullish? What's the word? Like-

Denise Pope (17:54):

Yeah.

Janine Zacharia (17:55):

... on the younger generation than I am the older generation right now a little bit. I don't wanna sound a lot like Jeff Hancock. My colleague here is always like, "Everything's gonna be fine." But they know a little bit of this, you know.

Denise Pope (18:05):

Sam, you're making a face.

Sam Wineburg (18:07):

Well, you know, uh, what, what, what's the difference between surfing the internet and trying to figure out what to believe and, I don't know, uh, learning how to water ski? If you are learning how to water ski and something happens, you fall in the water and you get immediate feedback.

Janine Zacharia (18:25):

Mm-hmm.

Sam Wineburg (18:25):

When you're on the internet and you fall into a rabbit hole, you don't know that you've fallen into a rabbit hole.

Janine Zacharia (18:31):

Right. There's no cost.

Sam Wineburg (18:32):

And so I taught, I taught a class, uh, one of my last classes when I, before we spun out as a, as a nonprofit, called The Future of Information. And I want you to imagine some dude walking in with gray hair to a group of �� undergraduates presuming to tell them something about the internet. Uh, you know, essentially, they, it was a, it was a morning class, so, which had all of the �� athletes there, they were on their iPads looking at whatever else, but not at all paying attention until I gave them, uh, a website called the American College of Pediatricians and said, "Is this a bonafide source for you should, that, that you should think about on the question of adolescent bullying?" And we had a kind of U-Poll where you could, uh, immediately did it. And something like s- 87% of the students said, "Yeah, this is a, this is a good site."

(19:24):

This is a site that the Southern Poverty Law Centers calls it an anti-LGBT hate s-, hate site. And when we pointed that out, all of a sudden the students who were looking down at their, at their iPads saying, "What's this guy gonna tell me about the internet?" All of a sudden the recognition of, "I can be an easy mark. I am easily duped." So the first kind of step is to help people understand that how easily they can fall into a rabbit hole. Now, Alvin was a, uh, one of the engineers, or certainly one of the people who, who cr- helped support this piece of legislation, California AB 873, which mandates the teaching of, of digital literacy in the state of California.

(20:09):

The problem we have, folks, is we have mandates without materials. There is no budget line for creating the kind of curricula to actually put flesh on the bones of this piece of legislation. So right now, it has the status of essentially legislative hand-waving without the kind of budgetary consideration. One of the things that we're doing, and this is the way the nonprofit sector has to fill this goal, i- i- is with our, our nonprofit, is trying to seek support to create the kinds of materials that would actually be able to enact this piece, piece of legislation and give it meaning.

Denise Pope (20:47):

No, totally. And I think it's great, and I'm so excited that, that you and your, your group helped to do that, Alvin. And I can tell you from my own work that I do with, with Victor Lee at the GSC, the students are much more involved and on ChatGPT and other large language models, and the teachers really aren't. I mean, Valerie, you're an exception to the rule right now. And more... And now that's changing, and more and more teachers are learning about it, but there's also a real scarcity of professional development opportunities for educators to learn this, to even be able to, to put that curriculum into practice. Would you, Valerie, what, what, what's your view of that?

Valerie Ziegler (21:28):

I'm not aware of any training on, for teachers how to use. I mean, I mean, I'm curious.

Denise Pope (21:33):

The School of Education, Graduate School of Education, we do.

Valerie Ziegler (21:34):

Yeah.

Denise Pope (21:35):

We have craft, we have-

Valerie Ziegler (21:36):

(laughs).

Denise Pope (21:36):

.. a, a group that does it.

Valerie Ziegler (21:37):

But I'm saying that no one's coming into our school district and offering this.

Denise Pope (21:39):

Yeah.

Valerie Ziegler (21:39):

This would be something that someone would have to sign up on their own free time-

Denise Pope (21:43):

Yeah.

Valerie Ziegler (21:43):

... or do it on their own. There isn't any, you know... Imagine starting out the '25 - '26 school year with everybody taking a professional development about that.

Denise Pope (21:51):

Yeah.

Valerie Ziegler (21:51):

You know, that's different than me going on to understand ChatGPT and asking it to plan my vacation to Sicily based on the white lotus-

Alvin Hong Lee (21:58):

(laughs).

Valerie Ziegler (21:58):

Which is what I did, right? I wanted to see how it worked, right? Um, and you-

Denise Pope (22:03):

And how was that for you, Valerie?

Valerie Ziegler (22:04):

It made a beautiful graphic.

Alvin Hong Lee (22:04):

(laughs).

Denise Pope (22:06):

(laughs).

Valerie Ziegler (22:07):

Um, but again, you know, once I started using some of the materials that were created for, um, for Georgia State, which was interesting, those materials were created, if I'm wrong, for an online class. Correct? And I'm doing this in person. And once I started going through those lessons, I just realized there was so much that I didn't know. And again, that's the void. And I think you're right, it's this unfunded mandate aspect of it, but there's a lot of possibility in what c- could be. And I think teachers are very interested in it, they're afraid of it, and therefore, they would be open to having more training.

Sam Wineburg (22:37):

The point about Georgia State is, wh-, some research that our, that our nonprofit is doing is working with Georgia State University to put these kinds of ways of thinking into the regular curriculum. We were working with a professor of political science who is responsible for 24 different sections of the class and over 4,000 undergraduates. And he said, "Well, I'm not, I, I don't have the mandate, nor do I have the budget to bring all of my faculty in to retrain them."

(23:03):

And we said, "Let's offer this asynchronously and have students do this online." Where we created and paired the kind of digital materials about the executive branch, about, uh, uh, Brown Jackson's confirmation for the Supreme Court so that we dovetailed the kind of media with the topics that students were already, already going to study. And we saw just over a, a short, uh, semester, an 18% growth in students' ability to make wise decisions. So there's a lot of useful things we can do until we wait for the revolution. These small changes, if they accrue, can have a big dent. The only thing we can't do is nothing.

Denise Pope (23:49):

Okay. Let's get (laughs) this question over here from this microphone.

Audience Member (23:52):

Thank you. I work with 11th and 12th graders as an academic advisor, so I'm not exactly a teacher, but part of the thing that I do is help, uh, with, uh, college essays like admissions essays and scholarship essays. And I kind of, uh, ran into, this fall, a situation where lots of students were using AI to help them actually write their essays. And I think that this is the type of thing that manifests, uh, especially when there are material incentives on the line, like there's money, there's admission to a prestigious institution, um, and it also applies to assignments at school. There are grades involved. Um, and I found myself feeling just like, I mean, I didn't have AI when I was applying-

Denise Pope (24:34):

(laughs).

Audience Member (24:34):

... for stuff, so I don't know what to tell them except for like, "It's the wrong thing to do." But, like, is there any way to approach that? Is there anything that educators can do to address that kind of bad incentive?

Denise Pope (24:47):

That's a great question. Valerie, do you wanna give your 2 cents?

Valerie Ziegler (24:51):

A, a colleague came to me the other day and said that, um, w- when she finally went to the lockdown browser, if you're not familiar with that, when you take an AP course, the students take their test in this browser that they can't go out, and this kid bombed. And she's like, "It was so weird because everything he had done before in Google Docs was great. And then when he got to the fact that he had to have original thought, he couldn't do it."

(25:15):

And so she pulled him aside and he said, he admitted he had been using that. And she said, "Well, here we are. You can't write 'cause you haven't had to." And so I think the conversation is, you're gonna get into college on that premise that this is what you can create and you aren't able to (laughs). And I think that's the hard reality and that, and she made him redo every assignment that he had done, and he did it.

Denise Pope (25:38):

So, I wanna go back, Alvin, you told a story about, I think it was your mom, uh, when we were first talking. So I, I kinda wanna get into what is some advice for parents, right? We, we've already talked about what schools need. They need PD, they need Sam's curriculum, they need teachers like Valerie, they need the Janines out there teaching about legacy media and how it works. Tell the story about your mom (laughs), not to embarrass Alvin's mom, um, and then what your advice would be for, for parents and for kids.

Alvin Hong Lee (26:06):

She's gonna get really mad at me for this one.

Denise Pope (26:07):

Okay. Sorry.

Alvin Hong Lee (26:08):

(laughs).

Janine Zacharia (26:08):

(laughs).

Denise Pope (26:08):

I'm sorry.

Alvin Hong Lee (26:10):

No, no, no. It's all good (laughs). Uh, so back in, ooh, I don't even know how old I was, but in 2016, I remember right before the election, that was nine years ago, so I was, this is too much math for me, guys, 13 or 14 (laughs).

Denise Pope (26:21):

No worries.

Alvin Hong Lee (26:22):

I remember one day my mom asked me, I'm sure you guys remember about Pizzagate 'cause a lot of the sort of first gen Chinese immigrant communities, uh, used WeChat as their primary form of communication. Uh, it's also where they gather and garner a lot of their political news. And so Pizzagate was really sort of going around. Uh, and I remember we were at the dinner table.

Denise Pope (26:40):

Wait, can you just say what Pizzagate is for me?

Alvin Hong Lee (26:42):

Oh, yeah. This was a conspiracy theory that, uh, Hillary Clinton was sort of the center of a sex trafficking ring out of a pizza shop in Brooklyn, New York, I think.

Janine Zacharia (26:51):

Comet Pizza in DC.

Alvin Hong Lee (26:52):

Yes, that's right.

Janine Zacharia (26:52):

(laughs).

Alvin Hong Lee (26:53):

Yeah. It was associated with QAnon and all these really far, uh, right, uh, circles. But anyways, it was just really, really shocking to me that it had landed here and it was very revelatory in a lot of things. I think the big thing being, I mean, you know, I'm very inspired by my mom's trajectory. She was a first gen immigrant from China. She got her PhD in, um, in biology from the University of Kentucky out in Lexington. So this was someone who has this very educated pedigree who is asking me about this really ludicrous question, uh, that me as a 13-year-old would be like, "Wow, this is, like, insane. Like, why are you asking me this, Mom? This is obviously not true."

(27:28):

Uh, and so I think to your point earlier, and Sam's point earlier, yes, our generation is a bit better equipped at discerning these credible and infactual sources. And I think the older generation is very much sort of at risk right now. And it's, I mean, you're seeing this play out in politics right now, but that doesn't mean that, that we're free from it as well. And even with conversations from a lot of my friends as well, they really don't know what's right or wrong these days when they talk about politics and all of these different issues happening.

Denise Pope (27:54):

So a piece of advice for either a parent or for your pals-

Alvin Hong Lee (27:58):

Yeah.

Denise Pope (27:59):

... would be?

Alvin Hong Lee (28:00):

Ooh, just to question what you're consuming and just fact check it. I mean, I think to the lateral reading point, it's work, it's extra work, I know, to open Safari and go to Google, uh, and throw it in, in the search bar and maybe just scroll around and see what the different outlets are, but I think it's-

Denise Pope (28:18):

It's 30 seconds, apparently.

Alvin Hong Lee (28:19):

It's 30 seconds, yeah.

Denise Pope (28:19):

Right?

Alvin Hong Lee (28:20):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And honestly, 30 seconds is a lot, right? I mean, we're used to this 15 second immediate scrolling environment these days. Our attention deficits have really plummeted because of TikTok and the way we consume media. So, I mean, even 30 seconds sounds like a lot of work, uh, for most students, but I think, unfortunately, that's just what needs to happen.

Denise Pope (28:35):

No, that's-

Alvin Hong Lee (28:35):

But-

Denise Pope (28:35):

... what we're up against, yeah.

Alvin Hong Lee (28:36):

Yeah. But again, to the, to the final point, I think that's where digital literacy comes in. And I'll keep this really brief, 10 seconds-

Denise Pope (28:42):

No.

Alvin Hong Lee (28:42):

... but building on Sam's point, the beauty of this legislation and the call to action to everyone here in the audience today, 'cause I know we have a good amount of educators, is that this bill would require this state to look at incorporating media literacy standards into the statewide instructional curriculum. But it's really sort of up to local school districts, especially at the school district level, to have their curriculum committees then adopt this media literacy curriculum once it's rolled out by the state and then implement it at the school site level. So you all, as educators and members of the community, have a really big role to play in really ensuring that media literacy actually lands, uh, in schools and isn't just the state sort of waving a magic wand and virtue signaling.

Denise Pope (29:20):

No, I think that's so important. And, and, Valerie, you're in it every day. You're in the school, you're in the classroom. You know, let's say your, your peers hear about this media literacy. I can already hear in my head, "Wait, I'm a math teacher. I'm a, I'm a this tea-" You know, you, you have a, a- a- an edge, in a way, or people might say this, because of the topic that you're teaching. It seems like it really fits. So what, what would you say to your advice for your peers?

Valerie Ziegler (29:47):

You know, my other, I am a social studies teacher, but I'm also a CTE teacher.

Denise Pope (29:50):

Okay.

Valerie Ziegler (29:50):

And a lot of-

Denise Pope (29:52):

Explain what CTE is.

Valerie Ziegler (29:52):

Career technical education, um, and specifically in the energy utilities and environment sector. Um, and yes, there are lots of things out there about climate change, so that would be a natural. Um, but I, I think the conversation, again, is we're, there's content that's learned in high school, but there's also skills. And our job as, you know, as high school educators is really to equip students with the skills to be successful outside of it. There are soft skills, (laughs) you know, how to write a resume, how to have, get up in front of a group of people, how to have conversations. And I think this is one of these soft skills that all of us should be working together to make our students digitally literate.

Denise Pope (30:28):

Advice, Janine?

Janine Zacharia (30:29):

For parents, I think you have to model good behavior like everything else, right? Like, kick 10 bucks a month to your local public media, tell your kids what that is, put it on the radio. Um, subscribe to a newspaper and send them links to those articles and make sure they're logged in so they don't hit the paywall. Like, you know, ask them how they know things when they, uh, when they say something or ask them to show you the TikTok, "Oh, what is that? Oh, who is that person? Oh, really? Did you see that?" You know, engage with them about it. And that's what I try to do with our kids.

Denise Pope (31:00):

Love it. Sam, last word.

Sam Wineburg (31:02):

You know, the, the work that we're trying to do, which is to fill this gap and to give meaning to some of the kinds of things that we know need to happen. Right now, there's a, there is a chasm between students' lived experience and the experience that they have in school. We have to find a way to create a bridge between those two worlds.

Denise Pope (31:20):

Big round of applause for our panelists. Thank all of you for joining in this episode of School's In. It was so much fun to do. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast on Spotify or wherever you tune in.

Podcast

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GSE area

Faculty and Research

Faculty mentioned in this article: Sam Wineburg

Preschool counts: Building a strong foundation in math

Olivia Peterkin — Wed, 14 May 2025 21:11:19 +0000

Preschool counts: Building a strong foundation in math Olivia Peterkin Wed, 05/14/2025 - 14:11

Child Development | Teaching

In this episode of School’s In, Professor Emerita Deborah Stipek discusses why developing math skills is important for young children, and fun ways to engage them in the learning process.

May 29, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

Only 39% of fourth grade students and 28% of eighth graders in the United States are proficient in math, according to 2024 data from the Nation’s Report Card, which provides national data about student academic achievement and learning experiences.

Consistently low levels of proficiency from state to state have parents and educators concerned about ways to improve math skill development, and when to get started. For Deborah Stipek, chair of the Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education (DREME) Network at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), math should be woven into children’s lives from the start.

“We've learned through research that little kids actually can learn a lot of math, and develop that strong foundation,” said Deborah Stipek, who is also a professor emerita and former dean at the GSE. “There's also evidence that engaging in math activities teaches children other basic cognitive skills. So they end up developing memory skills and attention skills, and that sort of thing, that are valuable in whatever academic, or even social, endeavor.”

Stipek joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss early math’s influence on academic achievement, and how to overcome barriers to make math fun.

“You don't want to make this feel like work for them, so I would let your child be the guide, and engage in the kind of activities that your child seems to enjoy,” Stipek said. “Math is something that kids love to do, and we should give them an opportunity to do it,” said Stipek.

They also discuss research from the DREME Network on teacher preparation in early math, as well as early math resources for parents and educators.

“We have developed many, many activities for teachers and for parents, some of which are in Spanish, that they can implement in their classrooms, in their home childcare settings, (and) in their homes with kids,” Stipek said. “We (also) created a website that has a ton of resources, including lots of video clips and handouts, for the people who teach teachers.”

Transcript

Deborah Stipek (00:00):

Math is something that kids love to do, and we should give them an opportunity to do it.

Denise Pope (00:09):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting edge insights in learning. From early education to lifelong development, we dive into trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners of all ages. I'm Denise Pope, senior lecturer at ��'s Graduate School of Education, and co-founder of Challenge Success.

Dan Schwartz (00:32):

And I'm Dan Schwartz. I'm the Dean of the Graduate School of Education, and the faculty director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Denise Pope (00:42):

Together, we bring you expert perspectives and conversations to help you stay curious, inspired, and informed. Hi, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (00:53):

Hey, Denise. Good to see you. Hear you.

Denise Pope (00:56):

Good to hear and see you.

Dan Schwartz (00:57):

Well, thank you. So I have two questions for you?

Denise Pope (01:00):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (01:01):

In the first two years, how many synapses does an infant grow per second?

Denise Pope (01:09):

Oh, my gosh. Okay. How many synapses does an infant grow per second? My answer is, I have no idea. But I know it's a ton, because I know that synapses grow faster in the time before you're five, than any other time in your life. Something like that. Is that right?

Dan Schwartz (01:29):

That wasn't answering the question, but yes. So the answer, it's a million a second.

Denise Pope (01:34):

Wow.

Dan Schwartz (01:35):

That's the estimate, which is crazy. So it seems like early childhood's going to be important for the rest of your life, right? If that much is going on?

Denise Pope (01:44):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (01:44):

So you're going to take responsibility for that, Denise?

Denise Pope (01:48):

Me personally?

Dan Schwartz (01:49):

Yes. You need to get all the parents to bring math to their children, their very young children. How would you do it?

Denise Pope (01:59):

All the parents in the whole world?

Dan Schwartz (02:02):

Uh, we can be less ambitious-

Denise Pope (02:03):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (02:03):

... let's just say California.

Denise Pope (02:05):

All right. All the parents in California. Okay, here's my id- You're going to mock me, but this is my idea, okay. Remember when we wanted to have every baby sleep on its back, and not sleep on its stomach? I don't know if you remember this, but there was a huge ad campaign? So that even though we were telling people and maybe pediatricians were telling people, there was a huge ad campaign, "Baby on Back."

(02:28):

So I want a huge ad campaign like, "Math Before Five." Or something like that. Or, "Bedtime Math," or something like that, that really gets people, you know, like, "Your Brain on Drugs," was an ad campaign, a lot of people remember that of a certain age. So I want a huge ad campaign, for math for young kids in California. How about that?

Dan Schwartz (02:48):

I love it. That was my answer too, except mine was more humble. It was just like take out one ad during the Superbowl, but uh-

Denise Pope (02:55):

Oh. Well, okay. We're on the same page. I like that.

Dan Schwartz (02:59):

No, no, that was good. So we're lucky today, we have one of the world's experts on very young children learning math. And her name is Deborah Stipek. She was a professor at the Graduate School of Education, she's emerita now. So welcome, Deborah.

Denise Pope (03:14):

Deborah, I'm going to kick us off. You have spent many years encouraging teachers and parents to help young kids learn math. So why is math so important for little kids? Help us out.

Deborah Stipek (03:26):

Well, you're asking me now after you've already launched your ad campaign?

Denise Pope (03:29):

Yeah. Well, I was trusting that it was important. Now I want to know why?

Deborah Stipek (03:35):

Well, I think the first answer from my perspective, is that little kids love math. They love doing math, once they start learning to count, they're going to count everything. So my four-year-old grandson, when he asks for chocolate chips or crackers, the first thing he says when I say yes is, "How many?"

(03:53):

And if I say, "Five, because you're five," he says, "but Dale gets seven, so I want two more." And then he dutifully counts them out.

Denise Pope (04:03):

Okay. He's like a math genius. What have you done?

Deborah Stipek (04:05):

No. But no, he's not, that's the point. Is that once he got into counting, he loves counting, but he's not a particular genius. Kids love to count. You give a four-year-old a bunch of different colored beads, the first thing they do, I'd almost put my bank account on it is, categorize them either by color or size, or by both. It's just like there's this natural thing to do. Actually, the same thing happens when you give them to a group of teachers in a professional development. They start categorizing them by color.

(04:39):

So math is something that kids love to do, and we should give them an opportunity to do it. The other thing is, in early childhood, we're laying the foundation for future math learning. We want them to have a basic understanding of number, a basic concept of shapes and what makes shapes, and what the critical qualities of shapes are. So if they don't, then we're building house of cards in their future math. And what we find is that kids, as they move along their math trajectory, or get into more demanding math as it starts falling apart, and they start having a lot of difficulty, because that foundation is not there. We also have kindergarten standards now, which are much more rigorous than they used to be.

Denise Pope (05:23):

Ah.

Deborah Stipek (05:23):

And the reason they're more rigorous is, we've learned through research that little kids actually can learn a lot of math, and develop that strong foundation. There's also evidence that engaging in math activities, teaches children other basic cognitive skills. So they end up developing memory skills and attention skills, and that sort of thing, that are valuable in whatever academic, or even social endeavor.

(05:50):

And finally, we've learned through research recently, that the math that children know and their skill levels when they enter kindergarten, is very highly predictive of their math skills as late as 8th grade. It's even predictive of whether they finish high school, or go to college.

Denise Pope (06:06):

Whoa.

Deborah Stipek (06:06):

And that, I think, that particular finding is what pushed a lot of interest in math, among folks. And there is a huge gap between low income kids and middle class and more affluent kids, in their math skills at kindergarten entry. So it's also an equity issue.

Denise Pope (06:24):

I'm totally convinced. Dan?

Dan Schwartz (06:30):

I like it. I sort of want to know if this certain experience I had over a holiday with my niece, with the reaction to this. So she has, I think he's about a three-year-old. And there's candies out on the table and he starts spontaneously counting, and he counts all the way up to 17 correctly, in order.

Deborah Stipek (06:49):

How old?

Dan Schwartz (06:50):

Three.

Deborah Stipek (06:51):

Yep.

Dan Schwartz (06:52):

He counts all the way up to 17 correctly, I thought. And the mother says, "No, you're incorrect. You counted this one twice."

Deborah Stipek (06:59):

Mmm.

Denise Pope (07:00):

Oh.

Dan Schwartz (07:01):

Should the mother have done this? I mean, this was a amazing performance by this child.

Denise Pope (07:06):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (07:06):

And fortunately, my niece will never listen to this podcast. So you can be honest.

Denise Pope (07:10):

You can slam her to the ground, Deborah.

Deborah Stipek (07:12):

Yeah, yeah. You know, a little bit depends on how she said it, and what her relationship is with the child. But what I would recommend, is that instead of saying, "No, you're wrong," to say, "let's count that again," or maybe, "let's count it together." Often if children count a second time, they figure out their mistake very quickly, especially if you say, "Let's count it more slowly." One of the reasons so many people don't like math, is that they learned that math was something where you had a lot of rules.

(07:46):

You had to apply them correctly, and it was bad to get things wrong. And if you get them wrong, you feel bad. And if you get math problems wrong a lot, which a lot of kids do, because of the way we teach it, you start to develop a sense of yourself as being not good at math. So rather than right or wrong, I think we need to emphasize, and this is supported by research, the child's engaging again with the activity, maybe with a little scaffolding.

Dan Schwartz (08:17):

Hey, Denise, is Deborah right?

Denise Pope (08:21):

Yes. It was like-

Dan Schwartz (08:21):

Is this your math story?

Denise Pope (08:22):

Yes. It hit really close to home, Deborah, because I- I'm telling you, I just did not have that. I had exactly what you just said, Deborah. I learned math in a very formulaic way, there's a right or wrong answer, I got it wrong a lot. And all of a sudden, "Oh, I'm not a math person."

(08:37):

And it's carried on to this day. And we talk about it on the show a lot, it's like I start to kind of get heart palpitations if someone gives me a math problem to do. Which Dan does a lot.

Dan Schwartz (08:52):

Uh Deborah, so is there a critical window here? So like in language they often talk about there's a window for gaining accents, and things like that?

Deborah Stipek (09:01):

Mm-hmm.

Dan Schwartz (09:02):

Is there a critical period, or is the reason you want to bring it younger is just to get them started? The sooner they start the better? As opposed to, "If you don't do it when they're four, you can't do it when they're five?"

Deborah Stipek (09:14):

No, there's no evidence that that is true. But I think doing it when they're four or even three, is capturing their interest. They're eager to learn counting and things like that. And when they're five or six or seven, they may not have that same level of interest and eagerness.

Denise Pope (09:34):

Yeah. Well, because it's already been drummed out of you from how you got taught it in school. I think preschool teachers then are gonna to be the heroes, the math heroes, right? But is it taught to preschool teachers, is this a basic part of preschool training?

Deborah Stipek (09:46):

So math has not gotten very much attention in preschool, or in childcare. Even in kindergarten, you'll see much less math and you'll see literacy. Literacy is really predominated, and there's a lot of things, if you don't read by 3rd grade, you're doomed for the rest of your life. We don't have those same sorts of concerns with math. It's not true of reading either, by the way. You can still learn to read even if you're in 7th grade if you haven't learned. But it's harder, partly because you've developed all these attitudes and beliefs about yourself, as not being able to learn.

(10:19):

Preschool teachers typically will not describe themselves as math people. Very few of them were math majors. They love children, they don't necessarily love math, because of the way they were taught it, just as you've described. So one thing with preschool teachers, is just getting over their own anxiety about math, because then they're not really eager to teach it.

(10:39):

What we've learned is that actually helping them develop skills in teaching math to little kids, helps them get over their own anxiety about math. They develop their own self-confidence, and they also see that it's fun. It's like, "Oh, these games are really fun."

Denise Pope (10:57):

Wow.

Deborah Stipek (10:58):

Math's not so bad after all.

Dan Schwartz (10:59):

So there was a study, and you would know this better, if it's been followed up. Where the finding was, if it's a female teacher and preschool kids, and/or kindergartners, and they have math anxiety, it gets communicated to the young girls.

(11:17):

So it was very much modeling the anxiety and it came across. You know, I assume if it was a male teacher had math anxiety, it would've gone to the boys. It just so happened they only studied the women.

Denise Pope (11:28):

I'm surprised it doesn't go to both. I mean, if you have anxiety about a subject-

Dan Schwartz (11:32):

Yeah. It was an interesting finding, but the fact that the attitude of the teacher got communicated like that, I thought was quite interesting.

Deborah Stipek (11:38):

Well, most teachers are women. And I didn't realize, there've been several studies that show that adults who interact with kids around math, their anxiety does somehow get subtly transferred to children. Not all children and not- It depends on what they're doing, it depends on a lot of things.

(11:57):

But there is a risk that if you are highly anxious, just the way you talk about math, the way you engage in it, your anxiety about getting the right answer, or about them getting the right answer? So if, for example, your niece, if the child counted wrong and she goes, "Oh, no. You missed one, that's terrible."

Denise Pope (12:16):

Or like, "Eh."

Deborah Stipek (12:17):

Yeah, yeah. I mean if you gently say, "I think you got the wrong answer. Do you want to try that again?" There are ways of communicating your anxiety. Sometimes fairly subtly.

Denise Pope (12:29):

Parent to kid, not just teacher to kid. I mean, my mom definitely had math anxiety and I mean, I am not throwing my mom under the bus, but it was sort of a gendered thing. "Oh, you want help with your math problem? You got to go to dad."

Deborah Stipek (12:43):

We did a study years ago, where we asked kids how good they were in math. We asked the parents how good their child was in math, and we asked the teachers how good this child was in math. And we followed children, kindergarten through 5th grade. And what we found is that there were no gender differences in children's rating of their math skills, until 3rd grade. And then girls started rating their math skills lower. But interestingly, their parents, typically the mother, were also rating the girls' math skills lower than they were rating the boys' math skills.

Denise Pope (13:22):

Whoa.

Deborah Stipek (13:22):

But the teachers were not. So the girls were picking up, "I'm not good at math," from home, not necessarily from school. So we know that these things can be transmitted. But I just want to be very careful that we don't conclude then, the parent shouldn't engage in math activities with their kids. Because there are lots of ways to do it in a very productive and fun way with kids.

Denise Pope (13:45):

Well, this is great for our listeners to hear. What are some ways that parents can do this, to really kind of complement what's going on at the preschool and kindergarten level?

Deborah Stipek (13:54):

Yeah. There's so many games. I mean, if you play shoots and ladders, or any game that has counting?

Denise Pope (14:00):

Like a board game, just a typical board game?

Deborah Stipek (14:02):

Board game. Board game.

Denise Pope (14:02):

Where you count, where you roll the dice and you move five spots?

Deborah Stipek (14:07):

Dominoes. You map to the five, to the five. The three to the three-

Denise Pope (14:10):

Oh.

Deborah Stipek (14:10):

... that's a great game. There are lots of card games, and one of my favorites is unfortunately called War.

Denise Pope (14:15):

Oh.

Deborah Stipek (14:15):

But basically two people play it. You've probably heard of this? Two people play it, they each have half the deck, they put a card down, each put a card down and whichever person has the highest number, gets to keep the cards. And you keep playing until one person has all the cards.

(14:31):

But one of the things I like about this is, you can make it easier or more difficult. So if your child's still working on one through five, then you take out all the cards above five.

Denise Pope (14:40):

Oh, smart.

Deborah Stipek (14:41):

So they only have to be comparing a three and a five, or a two and a four, or a one and a five. When they get better, you can put in the numbers up until 10. When they get really good, then each of you can put down two cards, so they have to add the two cards together and decide which one is more. Kids love this game.

Denise Pope (14:58):

Okay. I want to just point out, I played War, growing up. I did. I played it in this way. I think putting the two cards would've really helped, because then would've forced additions. But I played War and I still had some issues, but I think the two card thing is brilliant.

Deborah Stipek (15:12):

Yeah. Or you can do multiplication with it-

Denise Pope (15:15):

Yes.

Deborah Stipek (15:15):

... it's the kind of thing that can be- But the other thing are, there's a lot of ways to engage children in math, just in everyday routines. So when you're setting the table, say, "Can you get a fork for everyone?" Or you can engage them in conversation, "What if grandma and grandpa was coming for dinner? How many more forks would you need? How many forks would we need altogether then?"

(15:33):

Or when you go to the grocery store, "Can you count six apples into the bag?" Or, "Can you figure out which line has the fewest people?" So let's count how many are in each line. I mean, there's just so many ways you can embed math into- If you go on a walk, you can look for shapes and signs. But the important thing is to not make it school.

Denise Pope (15:57):

Yeah. To not make it feel like, "Oh, my gosh. We have to do math problems again."

Deborah Stipek (16:00):

Yeah. No, it's just a game. It's fun, it's not serious.

Denise Pope (16:04):

Love it. Hey, Dan?

Dan Schwartz (16:12):

Yes?

Denise Pope (16:13):

I have a question for you. I want you to think way back here, did you do anything special to help your son learn math, when he was little? Because you're such a math person, I can see you doing stuff. What did you do?

Dan Schwartz (16:29):

Well, yes, Denise, I did. Friday nights I buy him a pizza and put them in front of Ninja Turtles, and there were three Ninja Turtles. So that if you get a good anchoring in three, everything's set-

Denise Pope (16:42):

Wait-

Dan Schwartz (16:42):

... into the future.

Denise Pope (16:42):

... are you being serious? You weren't really trying to teach him math by putting him in front of Ninja?

Dan Schwartz (16:48):

And it was a pizza with pieces, six pieces. No, I was not. I did not.

Denise Pope (16:54):

Did you do anything? No?

Dan Schwartz (16:56):

I don't know, I'm sure I counted stuff. But I don't remember doing a lot of explicit things with him. Probably less counting, more grouping, separating things into piles perhaps. I made him do the laundry. So make three piles of clothes for me. Yeah.

Denise Pope (17:13):

That's good. Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (17:14):

And you?

Denise Pope (17:14):

I have vivid memories of Sesame Street. So not necessarily Ninja Turtles, but you know, Sesame Street has a letter of the day, they have a number of the day, they have the count who's like "one, two, three", and Cookie Monster is counting cookies. And the baker, "How many pies can the baker hold, and go down the hall?" And you are shaking your head like... Nothing? This is not bringing back any memories?

Dan Schwartz (17:38):

Zero. So my kid did not like Sesame Street.

Denise Pope (17:41):

Oh no.

Dan Schwartz (17:43):

So what do you do? We watch Ninja Turtles.

Denise Pope (17:46):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (17:46):

But you know, he did turn out as a Certified Public Accountant.

Denise Pope (17:50):

Wow.

Dan Schwartz (17:51):

So before you start hating on those cartoons, you know, look at what it did for him?

Denise Pope (17:55):

All right. I think we have a little problem with cause and effect, but still, impressive the math skills needed for a CPA. Impressive. Good job, Dan. Good job.

Dan Schwartz (18:04):

Thank you. Thank you. Deborah, so there's a big movement for a transitional kindergarten, as you know.

Denise Pope (18:14):

Do you want to say what that is, Dan? For people who don't know what that means?

Dan Schwartz (18:17):

It's for four-year-old. How's that? Your public school is providing pre-kindergarten, is that correct, Deborah?

Deborah Stipek (18:25):

It's basically California's version of Universal Pre-K. So it's providing public free preschool, to all children, but in the context of elementary school.

Denise Pope (18:37):

Awesome.

Dan Schwartz (18:38):

Yeah. So I'm trying to get my image of math in a TK classroom. Are they getting worksheets, right, is it just pure academic?

Denise Pope (18:48):

They're handing out calculators, right?

Dan Schwartz (18:50):

Or is it play-based? How do you merge?

Deborah Stipek (18:56):

It's all of the above. It's funny, because principals will talk to me or superintendents, district folks will say, "Well, what do you do with TK?" It's like it's a whole new category of children or something. And I keep saying, "They're four-year-olds. They were four-year-olds when we called it preschool, they're four-year-olds in every other state, where they call it preschool, and their four-year-olds when they're in TK." And so whatever is developmentally appropriate and good for four-year-olds, is good in TK.

(19:23):

But I think the fact that it's in an elementary school, makes people feel more pressure to be more academic, and more focused on basic skills. The other thing that feeds that, is that the teachers who are teaching TK, right now have to have a multiple subject credential. Which is basically a credential to teach elementary school. So some of the teachers who are teaching four-year-olds, had taught 5th grade the year before. And so not all of them have a lot of experience teaching little kids. And although we talk a lot about the importance of play-based programs, where kids have a lot of opportunity to engage in activities and pretend play, and interact with peers, and things like that. I do see as I'm visiting TKs, more worksheets than I'd like to see.

(20:12):

There were a lot of people who were concerned that the sort of structured teacher-directed academic approach, would filter down into TK. In fact, there were a lot of people who were against TK being in elementary schools, because they were worried about that. Some of us hoped that there'd actually be push-up instead of push-down. That we'd see more, more attention to social-emotional skills, and playful learning, and that sort of thing in kindergarten, 1st, and even 2nd grade. But honestly, I have seen more push-down than push-up.

Denise Pope (20:45):

Okay. That is really depressing and somewhat scary to me. Because I feel like if you make it sound like it's a work thing, with worksheets, and you have to do your two plus twos, and all of that, we're going to turn more kids off to math. Is that a worry of yours?

Deborah Stipek (21:03):

It's a big worry. And I think what it tells me, is that we need to provide TK teachers with a lot of support. I mean, if you think of what it means, let's just say to teach math, let alone literacy and everything else that you need to teach. You need to be able to select activities that are playful, but have a real math learning goal. And I see a lot of activities that are playful, but you're not going to learn any math doing them.

Denise Pope (21:27):

Wait, give like a quick example of that? Because I think this is a key piece that people don't understand, not all play is created equal.

Deborah Stipek (21:34):

No. Well, first of all, there's some play where you actually develop some foundational math skills, just engaging in the activity, like playing with blocks. You develop some rudimentary understanding of proportions and size and shape, and even number, because you're building things, and spatial reasoning, and things like that. But if you really want to learn... You're going to learn a lot more if the teacher is guiding the activity, and engaging you in conversation about, "How many blocks you're going to need to build a tower, the same height as that one. What if you build them with bigger blocks?" Or just engaging the child in kind of a mathematical conversation.

(22:13):

Some of it can be child-initiated play, but actually really good math teaching what we promote, and what research supports, are planned teacher-guided activities that are fun. But you can't just give the child the activity. You need to be there and engage with them, give them some guidance in how to do the activity, listen to children's thinking and build on that. Because good teaching builds on where children are, and helps them go to the next step. You need to adjust the difficulty level to be appropriate for every child, even though they're all at very different skill levels.

(22:51):

And then you need to plan further activities that are based on what you learned, about their thinking and understanding. That takes a lot of skill, and we don't really provide teachers time to develop all of those skills. So we need to provide opportunities for them to learn.

Dan Schwartz (23:12):

Has someone written like a textbook for TK teachers to teach math? Has someone done that yet?

Denise Pope (23:19):

Idea for Deborah?

Dan Schwartz (23:20):

No, I'm already up to chapter five in my head. What would [inaudible 00:23:24].

Deborah Stipek (23:24):

No. Actually, since-

Dan Schwartz (23:26):

First, second-

Deborah Stipek (23:26):

Because-

Dan Schwartz (23:26):

... third and fourth.

Deborah Stipek (23:28):

Because California's a big state, publishers are scrambling to get TK textbooks out. Some of them just take their kindergarten textbook and stamp TK on it, or they change a couple of the activities. So yes and no. We run a website called the DREME website, and we have developed many, many activities for teachers and for parents, some of which are in Spanish. That they can implement in their classrooms, in their home childcare settings, in their homes with kids.

(24:00):

They're fun, they engage children. It still takes a certain level of skill to do them effectively. And sometimes people think, "Oh, teaching preschool's easy. I mean, you're just playing with the kids." You try, I want any of you, to sit down with 12, four-year-olds, and teach them basic number concepts, and then tell me after one day, that it's easy.

Denise Pope (24:27):

So does your- I love that you're offering this on your website. It's not just giving them the activities. You're also, I'm imagining, telling them the reasoning behind it, or some of the scaffolding that they will have to do, right? Don't like just, "Okay, set up these blocks in the block corner and have different shapes, blocks," or whatever. You're giving more than that? Yeah, Deborah?

Deborah Stipek (24:46):

Tons, tons of- We have a lot of one-pagers that describe what the math trajectory is, related to particular kinds of math learning skills. One of the things we did, because math was getting more attention, we knew that the people who train or prepare preschool teachers, weren't necessarily trained to teach math themselves. Because we weren't teaching math until the last decade or so.

(25:14):

So we created a website that has a ton of resources, including lots of video clips and handouts, and things like that, for the people who teach teachers. Whether they coach them in a school district, or teach them in a pre-service program, or provide in-service support for them. To give them a little support in taking on something that they hadn't- most of them hadn't done before, very much.

Dan Schwartz (25:40):

So a lot of the work that you've done, Deborah, is part of DREME, which stands for Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education. So this was a network of researchers who work in this space. And as I understand it, you had a sort of a 10 year convening where people were talking about sort of what happened, and what they've learned. So did anything stand out, like any discoveries or whether it's about teaching early math, or about the nature of early math, or the politics of early math? Like what showed up?

Deborah Stipek (26:15):

Well, it was 10 years, not just of discussing math, it was 10 years of working. So we did meet regularly, but it was basically doing projects. Most of the materials that are on the website were developed by that network of people. It was an unusual situation where we had funding that was stable across a long period of time, and also flexible. So when things weren't working one way, we could sort of make a turn and do it a slightly different way. It's a mixture of developing materials and resources, and then taking them out into the field and testing them. And then coming back, adjusting them, before they get on the website.

(26:56):

So it was really developing resources for parents, for parent educators, for teachers, and for teacher educators, that were based on a more systematic assessment of how they actually work. Whether it's in a classroom or in a home. There's a ton of stuff on the web, lots of math activities, but these are more tested, and they've gone through a more rigorous process, because it was all researchers who were working on this.

Denise Pope (27:26):

That's awesome.

Dan Schwartz (27:27):

Oh, that's exciting.

Denise Pope (27:29):

This is just something that went through my head as, if you're a parent listening, there's a little bit of a worry here. So I want my kid to have this math literacy. They play with blocks, they play with shapes, we're doing board games, but now I'm worried, I need to also have a script that I am talking to or helping with, to guide them in the right way. Is that just for the teachers, not the parents, or help us unravel this, Deborah?

Deborah Stipek (27:56):

Well, first of all, let your child be the guide. When they're little, you want to do things that they enjoy doing. So if they want to do a board game, great. But if you say, "Hey, let's play shoots and ladders," and they say, "no," say, "okay, what else would you like to do?"

(28:11):

So you really need to be- You don't want to make this feel like work for them. So I would let your child be the guide, and engage in the kind of activities that your child seems to enjoy.

Dan Schwartz (28:21):

I don't know if you remember Deborah, that Shelley Goldman, who's a professor, she made an app for the cell phone, for kids and their parents when they're in the car. And it would say things, I don't know exactly what it did, but it would sort of make it a game, in the car while you're driving. It would be like-

Denise Pope (28:39):

For math, specifically?

Dan Schwartz (28:41):

Yeah. It would be things like, "Find a sign that's in the shape of a square," and then somebody would do it. So I thought that was really kind of an interesting, a great place to get math. And what I don't know that the kids themselves are looking at the cell phone, right? So if I were going to do early math, I'd probably make technology for four-year-olds. I'd make a computer program and everybody's going to say, "Don't do that."

Deborah Stipek (29:09):

Oh, I wouldn't say that.

Dan Schwartz (29:11):

Oh, good.

Deborah Stipek (29:12):

Oh, no. I wouldn't say that. We want to limit the screen time, and I'm well aware of the challenge of that with my grandsons. But there's some great math activity, very interactive programs that kids have access to. And they're free, many of them are free. Like PBS KIDS, my grandsons really like PBS KIDS, and they have a lot of math activities.

Denise Pope (29:37):

There's people screaming right now, as they're listening to this, like, "No, we don't want to give technology that young to kids." There are two-year-olds that know how to swipe better than I know how to swipe, truly. So there's a big debate, right, going on about technology.

(29:53):

So the fact that you're both saying, "No, I think it's okay," but in moderation, right? And certainly better than just sending a video in the backseat for the long car ride. Maybe having something more interactive as an app, might be better.

Deborah Stipek (30:09):

Also limit it. So I have these for my grandson.

Dan Schwartz (30:13):

Deborah is holding up what looks to me to be two clock faces. One says Dale, one says Henry, and there are no hands on them.

Deborah Stipek (30:20):

No, because we have an hour a day rule. Combined screen time and TV. And we fill it in as we go through the day.

Dan Schwartz (30:31):

Of course, you make it a counting task?

Denise Pope (30:34):

Oh, but I love that the-

Dan Schwartz (30:34):

Of course you do.

Denise Pope (30:34):

No, I love that, because you can lose track.

Deborah Stipek (30:37):

They also have a visual representation. Four-year-olds, when you say only 10 more minutes, they don't know what that means. But if you can see that that clock is almost filled in, then they're much more strategic about when and what they're going to do.

Denise Pope (30:49):

That is a super, practical tip for parents everywhere, as really this whole episode has been, Deborah. So I just want to have us do some quick takeaways, like number one thing that you got out of this, Dan Schwartz, is?

Dan Schwartz (31:05):

Early math is good. Kids like it, throw in a little bit like "What's first, what's second?" You know, "Is this bigger, smaller, near or far?" You know, when you play with them in the counting games, add in some language, help them... And sounds great. I sort of want to go out and do it. I want to go find somebody's kid, and start counting with them.

Denise Pope (31:26):

Deborah's got two grandchildren that would you... Are you also going to babysit, throw that in too? No, and I agree. And I also think this idea of really training the teachers, and helping the teachers get over their own anxiety, because we definitely don't want to transmit that.

(31:43):

And same with the parents. That this can be fun, this can be easy, and this can make you like math better, and that's going to make your kid like math better. So Deborah, thank you so much.

Deborah Stipek (31:54):

My pleasure.

Denise Pope (31:55):

And thank all of you for joining this episode of Schools In. Be sure to subscribe to the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (32:05):

And I'm three, two, one, Dan. Counting backwards.

Podcast

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Faculty and Research

Faculty mentioned in this article: Deborah Stipek

Jean Lythcott, beloved former �� GSE educator, dies at 86

Olivia Peterkin — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 21:22:46 +0000

Jean Lythcott, beloved former �� GSE educator, dies at 86

Olivia Peterkin Thu, 03/27/2025 - 14:22

Photo courtesy: Julie Lythcott-Haims

In Memoriam | Teaching

Lythcott was best known for her exemplary teaching, advocacy for students, and infectious love of science.

March 27, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

Jean “Jeannie” Lythcott, a former clinical professor of science education at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), died of cancer on March 1 at her home in Palo Alto. She was 86.

Lythcott, who came to �� in 2000, had a significant and enduring influence in the field of teacher education through both the students she taught and the colleagues she worked alongside.

She was best known for her love of science, her persistence and energy when advocating for students, and her commitment to excellent instruction.

“Jeannie Lythcott was a master pedagogue who taught everyone she touched, not only how to become an ever more thoughtful teacher, but how to become an ever more caring human being,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, the Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Education Emeritus at the GSE, who first worked with Lythcott at Teachers College, Columbia University, and later brought Lythcott to the �� Teacher Education Program (STEP).

“She not only taught future science teachers, but also taught her colleagues through discussions and modeling how to deeply understand teaching and the process of learning to teach,” Darling-Hammond said.

A catalyst for scientific discovery

For the entirety of her decades-long career as a science educator, Lythcott was known for evangelizing her love of science.

“Whether it was her teaching a small science lesson or doing this one demonstration where she’d karate chop a meter stick with a newspaper, she knew how to be both a showman and a sage on stage,” said Bryan Brown, the Kamalachari Professor of Science Education at the GSE, who co-taught a curriculum instruction course for science teachers with Lythcott for seven years.

“I’m always an admirer of anybody who is a teacher at heart, and she really exemplified the ethos of a person who is here to teach and educate,” he said.

As a clinical professor of science education at the GSE, she taught and mentored teacher candidates, connected STEP with schools and teachers in the community, and helped create programs that lean on those relationships. She was also the first to receive the Geballe Family Clinical Associate for Science Education in 2009.

“Jeannie’s contributions to the STEP program were vast,” said Rachel Lotan, MA '81, PhD ‘85, a professor emerita of education and former director of STEP. “She set standards about the quality of both her teaching in the classroom and how she prepared for it outside of it.”

In her work with both students and faculty, she was well-regarded for pushing the boundaries on excellence and commitment to her craft.

“In every meeting, activity, conversation and event with Jeannie, you left feeling inspired and lifted,” said Professor Ira Lit, faculty director of STEP. “You really couldn’t ask for a better colleague. She was brilliant and she asked hard questions in a way that was inviting, inclusive, and stimulated deep thought.”

A force of nature

Lythcott was born on Jan. 30, 1939, in Ryhill, a coal-mining village in Yorkshire, England.

She received her undergraduate degree in botany and chemistry from Manchester University in 1960, her PhD in science education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1987, and then taught on the faculty at Teachers College, Columbia University, in New York until 1994.

Over the course of her life as an educator, she worked with students and teachers in the United States — including co-founding Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School in Massachusetts, where she taught math and science — the United Kingdom and Ghana, in addition to spending many summers teaching for The Peace Corps around the world.

“Jeannie was so well known as an effective teacher and amazing mentor,” said Ruthann Costanza, director of clinical work at STEP. “Teachers would be more than glad to go to a meeting if Jeannie was there. It was like she held court with her background experience, and I was in awe of the work that she did.”

In notes from former STEP alums honoring her life, she’s described as a passionate and enthusiastic mentor, a stellar model of intellectual curiosity, and a “force of nature.”

“My mother knew that the capacity to excel lives within us all, and that the right teacher helps bring the student to a greater familiarity with their own talents,” said Julie Lythcott-Haims, Lythcott’s daughter, and former dean of freshman and undergraduate advising at ��.

“She was devoted to education as a tool of liberation, and science as the deepest source of understanding,” Lythcott-Haims said. “Being a science educator, she felt that her work would be life changing for every student she encountered, and she had a love affair with science that she shared with the world.”

Lythcott is survived by her children Ian Forrester and Julie Lythcott-Haims; her stepchildren, Ngina Lythcott, George Lythcott and Michael Lythcott; her sisters, Carol Snookes and Patricia Williams; eight grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

She was preceded in death by her first love, Ian Forrester (who died in 1958), and her husband, George Lythcott (who died in 1995).

Those who wish to donate in her memory can send contributions to the STEP Fellowship Fund, the League of Women Voters of Palo Alto, and the University AME Zion Church in Palo Alto.

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STEP

Faculty mentioned in this article: Ira Lit , Linda Darling-Hammond , Rachel Lotan , Bryan Brown

AI helps math teachers build better ‘scaffolds’

Carrie Spector — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 19:22:10 +0000

AI helps math teachers build better ‘scaffolds’

Carrie Spector Tue, 03/25/2025 - 12:22

A paper by �� researchers, including GSE Assistant Professor Dora Demszky (pictured), introduces the first evaluation framework for lesson scaffolding grounded in expert teachers’ processes and the first experiments that test and adapt LLMs for this task. (Photo: Trevor Tachis)

Science and Math Education | Teaching | Technology

Education researchers have evaluated the ability of large language models (LLMs) to help middle school math teachers structure tiered lessons to reach varied skill levels.

March 14, 2025

By Andrew Myers

To those outside of education, it may come as a surprise that the hardest aspect of teaching is often not what happens in the classroom, but the preparation that must happen outside it, beyond normal work hours. The toughest work is in the planning and structuring of lessons for classes with students of varying knowledge and skill levels. And, with the learning loss of the pandemic, America’s classrooms — particularly middle school classes — are more than ever filled with students of diverse skill levels.

Against that backdrop, education and computer science researchers at �� University have evaluated large language models’ ability to help middle school math teachers create tiered lessons that allow them to nurture those who might have fallen behind while simultaneously holding the interest of more advanced students. Everyone wins, the researchers say, most of all the teachers for whom the model is a tremendous thought partner surfacing ideas that they might not have considered themselves.

“Teachers spend so much time adapting curricula to their students’ needs, but no one is really asking — how can we support them in that process?” says Rizwaan Malik, a Knight-Hennessy Scholar studying education data science at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE). Malik is first author on a new study, published in the British Journal of Educational Technology, introducing the task and evaluation framework.

The paper introduces the first evaluation framework for lesson scaffolding grounded in expert teachers’ processes and the first experiments that test and adapt LLMs for this task.

"The idea of scaffolding is trying to put in supports to the curriculum that help all students, regardless of where they are, to access the content in the curriculum," says Dora Demszky, an assistant professor at the GSE and senior author of the paper. Their work was supported by the �� Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) seed grant program.

Studying teachers to train the model

Before they began experimenting with LLMs, Malik, Demszky and their colleagues analyzed teachers’ lesson planning to understand the fundamentals of scaffolding. This is perhaps the hardest part of lesson planning, says Malik, a former math teacher familiar with the vagaries and the time commitment of lesson planning.

“The premise of the project was to see what technology can do to help teachers with that process of taking a curriculum and making it classroom ready,” Malik says. “We’re not just creating a tool, but a framework that helps teachers scaffold curriculum effectively, ensuring AI-generated content aligns with real classroom needs.”

In their analysis, they identified three steps teachers go through in creating lesson plans: observation (evaluating their students’ skill levels), formulation of an instructional strategy, and implementation though a scaffolded lesson plan that meets the needs of all students.

Figure 1: Framework showing the stages of curriculum scaffolding found in the cognitive task analysis (CTA). Expert teachers described first making observations about the existing curriculum materials, then crafting strategies to address these observations, and finally implementing these strategies through adaptations or modifications at the resource level. LLMs can potentially support teachers at each of these steps.

A better warmup

The AI model was designed to generate “warmup” exercises that help students activate prior knowledge. In user evaluations, these AI-generated exercises were rated better than human-created ones in terms of accessibility, alignment with learning objectives, and teacher preference.

The highest-rated approach fed the model an additional dataset of original curriculum materials and used complex and nuanced prompts informed by an expert educator.

“Maintaining rigor while supporting students with different needs is crucial — simplifying too much only increases learning gaps,” says Demszky.

AI is not without limitations, the researchers stress. LLMs are quite good at generating text-based content — story problems and written descriptions — but they struggle with visual approaches, diagrams, graphs, and so forth, which are an essential component of math instruction. The researchers are working to address these limitations now. Their most recent paper, under review, seeks to address the specific challenges of diagram generation with the first benchmark for K-12 math diagrams.

Figure 2: For each of the 10 lessons, evaluators were shown two warmups, one created by an expert and one created in one of the model conditions. The order of expert and model were randomized each time.

Next steps

In future iterations, the research team plans to expand the dataset to include instructional scaffolds beyond warmups. To further hone the tool, they would also like to pilot it in a real classroom. Finally, they are looking into personalized scaffolding strategies tailored to specific classrooms and, perhaps, even individual students.

Despite the promising results, however, neither researcher imagines a day when AI replaces teachers as lesson planners; instead, they expect AI to serve as a valuable thought partner for educators to help them work more efficiently while improving student learning.

“The key thesis underpinning all our work is that nothing can ever replace a teacher,” Malik concludes. “AI should augment, not substitute, their expertise.”

Additional �� authors include Dorna Abdi, a graduate of the Education Data Science master’s program, and Rose Wang, a doctoral candidate in computer science, both members of the EduNLP lab.

This story was originally published by the �� Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Research Stories

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Dora Demszky

The evolution of Barnum Center

Olivia Peterkin — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 22:32:19 +0000

The evolution of Barnum Center

Olivia Peterkin Fri, 03/07/2025 - 14:32

A February image of the Barnum Center, which will be used as a classroom when it opens with the rest of the GSE later this year. (Photo: Joleen Richards)

Campus Life | Students | Teaching

The 119-year-old building was once the campus bookstore, a library, a career development center, and an office space for staff at the GSE.

March 7, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

What piece of �� University architecture is 119 years old, survived both the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and an electrical fire in 2001, and was once the campus bookstore, a career development center, and a library?

The answer is Barnum Center, a one-story structure at the intersection of Lasuen and Escondido malls — and it’s the most historic piece of the Graduate School of Education’s (GSE) new campus.

“What’s special about Barnum is that it’s been with us from the beginning, and if these walls could talk, they would have a lot to tell about how the neighborhood has completely changed,” said Sapna Marfatia, director of architecture at ��.

“In the time it’s been around, the streets have changed, the people have changed, the buildings have changed, and an earthquake has happened, but it has been there with the main quad just quietly sitting and watching the whole evolution of �� take place.”

A look into the past

Before it was known as the Barnum Family Center, the building at 505 Lasuen Mall was home to the old campus bookstore from 1906 to 1960, the Western Civilization Library until 1967, and the Career Development Center until 2001, when an electrical fire burned through most of the building’s interior, leaving it vacant for six years.

Along the way, three adjoining buildings were constructed on the east side of the building: the first in 1910, which was used as a candy store, a YMCA, and later as an extension to Barnum; the second, a two-story structure built in 1930 and used as a shoe repair shop; and the third, a one-story addition built in 1984 that was attached to the 1910 building’s east façade.

In 2007 former GSE Dean Deborah Stipek was able to restore the space, which included demolishing the 1930 and 1984 additions and adding a one-story connector, with the help of a donation from the Barnum Family. It was then used to house existing GSE programs like the �� Center on Adolescence and the John W. Gardner Center for Youth and Their Communities.

“Barnum was a center for centers,” Stipek said. “It was a place that housed mostly multidisciplinary centers of activity, and it became a much needed space for the GSE.”

A step into the future

When its doors open again with the rest of the renovated GSE campus later this year, it will be as a classroom and gathering space.

“It’s going to be a really fantastic classroom that accommodates 100 students, and doubles as an event space for smaller gatherings,” said Olivia Crawford, associate dean for finance and operations at the GSE. “Our students deserve to have a really inspiring, light-filled space with the newest technology, and I think it’s going to be really special once we’re able to move in.”

While architects and construction teams have worked to retain much of Barnum’s original appeal, including keeping 50 historic windows, alterations to the space include removing subdivisions added in the early 2000s within the building to make it one large room, adding new acoustic paneling to the walls, installing projectors and drop-down screens, and demolishing the 1910 exterior addition to make room for the GSE’s south building and restore Barnum’s status as a standalone structure.

“Barnum in its newest iteration is designed as a flexible classroom, with tables and chairs that can move and be more theater-style seating,” said Mousam Adcock, a principal at CAW Architects who has been involved in the GSE’s construction project since 2017.

“From the inside it’s a very special experience because you’re surrounded by windows high and low, giving you natural light from all parts of the room,” she said. “It’s a really beautiful, multifunctional space, and this renovation is giving it new life.”

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Learning from before and building toward more: �� GSE pilot course teaches the history of California education

Olivia Peterkin — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 21:41:44 +0000

Learning from before and building toward more: �� GSE pilot course teaches the history of California education

Olivia Peterkin Tue, 02/11/2025 - 13:41

�� GSE assistant Professor Mike Hines (center) with STEP students Emilio Luna (left) and De’Jshon Maxwell-Garcia (right), who took his pilot course on the history of education in California. (Photo: Joleen Richards)

Civics and History | Faculty and Programs | Teaching

A new course for teacher candidates, led by �� professor Michael Hines, takes a journey through the state's legacy of learning.

February 12, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

If you were to teach a course on the history of education in California, where would you start?

Would you kick things off in 1921 when the state board of education was established? Or back in 1874, when attendance became compulsory for children ages 8 to 14 in California?

More importantly, how would you convey the significance of knowing the state’s educational history in the first place?

For Michael Hines, an assistant professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE), the place to start is long before California reached statehood – going back to Indigenous traditions in education then moving through European colonization and their impact on how children were taught. It’s important for California teachers to understand the history of education in the state, he said, because it affects their work in ways they may not even realize.

“Teaching is a deeply historical act, and whenever teachers come into a classroom they carry historical narratives with them,” said Hines, who piloted a course on the history of education in California last summer through the �� Teacher Education Program (STEP), a master’s program at the GSE that also leads to a preliminary California teaching credential.

“Whether these narratives are stories about the purpose of American education or stories about the histories of the communities where they’re working, the act of becoming a teacher or going into the classroom is freighted with this historical context that often goes unacknowledged.”

Doing the homework

The pilot course was funded by a STEP mini-grant, designed to encourage GSE faculty and doctoral students to pursue innovative projects that advance the field of teacher education. The mini-grant program supports STEP’s mission to serve as a “learning laboratory,” where faculty can explore and test new initiatives, and doctoral students can deepen their knowledge and skills.

Upon being approved for the STEP mini-grant in the fall of 2023, Hines and two GSE doctoral students, Ayan Ali and Abigail Kahn, set to work on figuring out what would be covered in the course and how they would deliver it to STEP students in the allotted week of instruction.

“This just felt like a really unique opportunity to create an exciting syllabus, and to think deeply about the needs of people who were going to be entering California classrooms in the very near future,” said Ali, who studies the history of education under the GSE’s Social Sciences, Humanities, and Interdisciplinary Policy Studies (SHIPS) program.

“We spent a lot of time doing background readings on histories of education in California, trying to get a lay of the land,” she said. “I spent a couple of months familiarizing myself with the literature.”

Hines, Ali, and Kahn worked together to gather a variety of historical materials, including primary and secondary sources, and to lead class discussions.

Kahn, whose dissertation proposal focuses on schools in internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II, led a discussion for the course about this history in California, as well as ��’s involvement in creating curricula for the camps. “I gave each of the students copies of letters from December 1942 from ninth graders at the Minidoka concentration camp, introducing themselves to their teachers.”

The purpose of the exercise was to think about what the STEP students may be teaching at schools.

“School has a big hand in history, and in teaching students about race,” Kahn said.

Sharing with the class

Abigail Kahn (left) and Ayan Ali (right) are GSE PhD students who helped construct the course. (Photo: Joleen Richards)

Since the course isn’t a requirement for their degree, the STEP students all signed up on a volunteer basis to take the class for the week between their summer and fall teaching placements.

“The students who signed up were incredible throughout the entire process,” Hines said. “They came in with so much enthusiasm for the material, as well as questions, such a command of some of the issues we wanted to discuss, and with so much grace and empathy for each other and for us as an instructional team.”

“They really did help us co-construct the classroom space,” he said, “and that was one of the things that made it such a unique and positive experience for me.”

Emilio Luna, a STEP student raised in San Diego, said he enjoyed the course’s look into how different social and ethnic groups influenced education in the state.

“I learned more about the Chicano movement, including how it was often led by young people, and it helped me understand more about myself and where I stand in the history of California education,” Luna said. “I also learned more about what my role is as an educator, especially someone with my identity and how I position myself in the classroom to serve kids who have an identity similar to mine.”

For De’Jshon Maxwell-Garcia, a highlight of the class was learning about some of the local efforts people took to ensure equity in education for Black students, such as the work of Mothers for Equal Education, in East Palo Alto, who created Nairobi Day Schools to support learning opportunities for Black children.

“It surprised me how deeply rooted my efforts today are to things people have done in the past to ensure educational equity and freedom,” said Maxwell, a STEP student originally from Fresno, Calif.

“Thinking about the hurt, struggle, and pain that people have directly experienced in education makes things more real, and allows you to start thinking about things from the past and disrupt however it shows up today,” he said.

The instructional team also conducted interviews with the STEP students to gauge what they learned and felt they could apply to their teaching.

Hines and the STEP leadership team are now considering next steps for the course. An updated version, based on student feedback, is likely to happen this summer, said GSE Professor Ira Lit, faculty director of STEP.

“This course rests on an important idea that practicing teachers need to know and understand important aspects of the history of education to best serve and lead in the present,” he said. “I’m excited to see what we learn from this project and how it will help us move our work forward.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Michael Hines , Ira Lit

Education Professor Jo Boaler and �� Women’s Basketball team up for new sports data unit

Olivia Peterkin — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:42:28 +0000

Education Professor Jo Boaler and �� Women’s Basketball team up for new sports data unit

Olivia Peterkin Thu, 01/23/2025 - 16:42

Students raise their hands in a classroom in Dublin, Calif. where middle school teacher Shelby Craig is teaching the new Basketball Data Analytics Unit.

K-12 | Science and Math Education | Teaching

The online math lessons feature a series of activities to help students in grades 4 through 10 learn about data science through sports.

January 28, 2025

By Olivia Peterkin

For anyone serious about becoming a top athlete, well-known steps to success include intense conditioning, a health-conscious diet, and grueling hours of practice.

However, a unit developed by �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) Professor Jo Boaler highlights a variable often overlooked in the formula for athletic achievement: the ability to use data to identify pain points in performance and adjust accordingly.

For the new Basketball Data Analytics unit — published on youcubed, a GSE research center aimed at improving math education by creating math activities, courses and teaching resources — Boaler teamed up with ��’s Women’s Basketball team to connect love for the game with the statistics that help players improve.

“The impetus for developing this was the realization that students really need experience with data,” said Boaler, the Nomellini & Olivier Professor of Education at the GSE. “Making sense of data visuals and being able to analyze data ties in very nicely with a lot of mathematics in their school curriculum, yet for most students their experience with data is very uninspiring.”

From calculating percentages for shots taken versus shots made, to evaluating players’ heights and comparing them through the use of mean, median, and mode — Boaler says lessons included in the unit help students connect math concepts to real-world applications in new and engaging ways.

“I think it’s exciting because it’s an interactive lesson plan that exposes students to learning data science in a way that incorporates math with sports, which means getting up out of your seat,” said Mahi Jariwala, a �� freshman in Boaler’s “How to Learn Math” course, who helped work on the unit.

“As someone who loves math and played high school basketball, I know I would have loved to have something like this when I was younger,” Jariwala said.

A student in Shelby Craig's middle school math class works on an assignment in the basketball data analytics unit.

A team effort

The lessons, created for students in grades 4 through 10, allow learners to explore and make decisions with data through basketball, the end result being the formation of a dream team based on stats they’ve collected throughout the unit.

“It was cool to see the different data points each group chose to look at, whether it was height, rebounds, or 3-point shots, in determining which players they would build into their team,” said Shelby Craig, a math teacher at Fallon Middle School in Dublin, Calif., who piloted the course before its official release. “They got passionate about defending their teams and using mathematical language to explain why their team was better.”

To make it accessible for students and teachers less familiar with basketball, the unit kicks off with an introduction to the game that includes what the names of positions are, how points are scored, different moves that can be made, and the general rules of the game.

A big part of the lesson plans were videos recorded by the �� Women’s Basketball team featuring players Mary Ashley Stevenson and Nunu Agara.

“I’ll be the first to say that I’d never had a particularly great relationship with math,” said Stevenson, a forward on the team who transferred to �� from Purdue University for her sophomore year.

Her main role was explaining the key facets of the game, first to the youcubed team and then to students and teachers using the unit, through the videos attached to courses.

“Despite not identifying as a math kid from a young age, I was inspired by the idea that the game I love can be used to teach it,” Stevenson said. “If I was a sixth grader and someone gave me this unit to work on, I would’ve thought this was the best thing in the world.”

Training for a data-filled future

Beyond the classroom, Boaler says she hopes the unit will broaden the scope of what students can do with math later in life.

“We want them to get from this unit that you don’t have to be an athlete to be involved in basketball,” Boaler said. “There are lots of people who are doing sports analytics for the coaches, for the competition, for the players themselves to learn — it plays a really important role.”

Last fall, at a pre-season game at �� versus the University of California, Davis, children were invited to be sports data analysts for the day by filling out data cards with graphics to record the number of 2-pointers, 3-pointers, rebounds, blocks, and assists that happened during the game.

“It was a cool opportunity for students to come out to the basketball game and be the data keepers and statisticians by taking notes on what was going on,” said Jariwala, who, along with her classmates, distributed the data cards to children at the game.

“I mostly watched the players and recorded on my card, but I learned that they make and miss a lot of shots,” said Ruthie, 10, who attended the game with her mother and grandmother as part of a family tradition.

Boaler hopes to incorporate the data cards and other tools at future �� games.

“Having that collaboration with the team was really great, and my favorite part is seeing the activities in classrooms, and how much the teachers and students enjoy the unit,” Boaler said.

Watch a video below of a sixth grade class using the unit.

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Jo Boaler

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, �� researchers say

Carrie Spector — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 20:20:59 +0000

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, �� researchers say

Carrie Spector Wed, 01/15/2025 - 12:20

Research shows that students with disabilities such as autism and Down syndrome can learn to read independently through an approach that includes phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. (Photo: iStock)

Language and Literacy | Learning Differences | Teaching

�� education scholars Chris Lemons and Lakshmi Balasubramanian share strategies for helping students with intellectual and developmental disabilities learn to read.

January 16, 2025

By Carrie Spector

Students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) such as autism and Down syndrome are often left behind when it comes to literacy instruction – casualties of the misperception that at best, they could only read by learning to recognize common words by sight. But researchers are finding that students with IDD, like their peers without disabilities, can benefit from a more complex approach, including phonics, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

“I always get frustrated when I hear teachers say about students with intellectual disability, ‘They’ll never read higher than a second-grade level,’ ” said Chris Lemons, an associate professor at �� Graduate School of Education (GSE). “In every study I’ve ever done, there are kids who blow us out of the water and master everything we teach them. Truly, the sky is the limit with this population of students.”

Lemons and GSE lecturer Lakshmi Balasubramanian, both former special education teachers whose research focuses on instructional practices and interventions for students with disabilities, shared tips for teaching literacy to IDD learners at a recent professional learning seminar for K-12 educators organized by the GSE. The strategies can also be useful, they noted, for struggling readers who don’t have a disability but still need additional support.

GSE Associate Professor Chris Lemons

‘Science of reading’ for all

Historically, literacy instruction for students with IDD has focused on sight-word recognition, teaching students to identify words at a glance without breaking them down or sounding them out.

This approach, Lemons said, can help students function in the world but limits their ability to learn to read independently – a capacity linked to positive outcomes in school and beyond, including greater independence, employment, and quality of life.

For students across the board, research increasingly supports an instructional approach based on the “science of reading,” which focuses on five key skills: phonemic awareness (the ability to focus on and manipulate the individual sounds that make up words), phonics (the relationship between sounds and letters), fluency (the ability to read quickly and accurately), vocabulary (knowing what words mean and how to use them correctly), and comprehension (the ability to understand and interpret a written text).

Many teachers who otherwise subscribe to the science of reading don’t believe IDD students can learn these skills, Lemons said, or they’re not sure how to adjust their lessons for students who require more intense and tailored support. He co-authored a guide to help educators integrate components of the science of reading into instruction for students with IDD.

For starters, he advises keeping big-picture goals for the student in mind, not just for the year ahead but even for post-secondary life and education. At the same time, educators should set measurable short-term goals for targeted skills, based on a clear picture of the student’s present level of functioning.

Research indicates that the most effective and efficient way for students to learn these skills is through explicit, systematic instruction, Lemons said, and students with IDD are no exception. “Explicit instruction is, basically, not letting students fail,” said Lemons. “It's giving them a clear understanding of what you want them to learn, and providing a lot of guided practice and immediate corrective feedback.”

He recommends an “I do, we do, you do” approach, sometimes referred to as the gradual release of responsibility, where a teacher first demonstrates a task (“I do”), then guides a student through it with prompts and clues (“we do”) before having the student complete the task (“you do”) on their own.

GSE Lecturer Lakshmi Balasubramanian

Learning to adapt

Another step-by-step approach, known as the ADAPT framework, can help teachers tailor general education lessons to address specific learning and behavior needs. The model, detailed in the book Teaching in Inclusive Classrooms, uses the acronym ADAPT to represent each step of the process.

First, ask: What are you requiring the student to do? Then determine: What skills does the student need to complete the task you’ve just identified? Next, analyze the student’s particular strengths and struggles, to identify whether the student has the skills to complete the task or needs an adaptation. Based on that information, propose one or more adaptations in the material, activity, delivery, or content. Can you take advantage of an AI tool to adjust the reading level of material you’re asking the student to use? Would videos or other visuals help to build background knowledge? Can an individually based activity be done in small groups instead?

Finally, test to determine whether the adjustment helped the student carry out the task. “It doesn’t have to be anything fancy,” said Lemons. “You just want to see if the student benefited from the adaptation. If not, you can try the process again with different adaptations.”

Lemons emphasized the importance of increasing students’ access to general-ed curriculum content through any means, even if they’re not able to read a text independently. “We want kids to still engage with the same grade-level content as their peers,” he said. “Just because they’re still working on foundational reading skills, you don’t want them to lose access to content. It’s a balancing act.”

Keeping reading fun

Lemons suggests involving family members for added support, along with service providers such as speech pathologists. “But we caution parents from thinking they need to provide intensive, direct instruction at home,” he said. “We want to keep reading fun. I’ve had a handful of gung-ho parents in some of my studies who think, ‘If we do the reading activities six times a week, my kid will become a better reader.’ And in many of these situations, the student learns to dislike the activity.”

Teachers can also seek out low- or no-cost professional development opportunities, especially through local universities, Lemons said, where they might be able to participate in research studies or audit courses on reading development and instruction. Forming a professional learning community at a school or district is another strategy, where teachers with similar interests dedicate time on a regular basis to come together and discuss books, articles, videos, or course modules to improve their practice.

Most important, said Lemons, is for educators to understand that students with IDD are fully capable of becoming independent readers.

“For this population of learners,” he said, “we can increase their reading skills beyond what we might ever imagine.”

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Faculty mentioned in this article: Christopher J. Lemons

The AI Tinkery: A sandbox for educators

Olivia Peterkin — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 19:52:07 +0000

The AI Tinkery: A sandbox for educators Olivia Peterkin Mon, 12/02/2024 - 11:52

Innovation | Teaching | Technology

On this episode, GSE Senior Lecturer Karin Forssell talks about AI in education and how �� is helping students navigate the tool.

December 5, 2024

By Olivia Peterkin

As educators continue to navigate best practices for generative AI in classrooms, the tool’s potential use for cultivating creativity and hands-on learning have come into question.

A recent approach by �� Graduate School of Education (GSE) includes the launch of the new AI Tinkery, a digital makerspace for educators inside and outside of the GSE community, at the �� Accelerator for Learning.

“One of the differences between this space and others, just like our physical makerspace, is that it is focused on education, K–12 and beyond, probably more beyond because we're including higher education as well,” said Karin Forssell, senior lecturer at the GSE, and director of its Learning Design and Technology (LDT) master’s program.

“It's trying to get at that sense of creativity, competence, communication and collaboration — all things that we do in makerspaces — and bringing it into this realm of AI tools, specifically generative AI tools,” she said.

At the AI Tinkery, guests can learn how to use AI chatbots, ask ethics questions, and explore AI’s different uses in the classroom.

“You can come into this space and you can go ahead and play with stuff, try something out, come and find out what all the fuss is about if you haven't had any experience before,” Forssell said.

Forssell joins hosts GSE Dean Dan Schwartz and Senior Lecturer Denise Pope on School’s In as they discuss how AI can be used to create classroom tools and lesson plans, guardrails for future iterations of AI that will protect students, and how to create a successful makerspace, among other topics.

In addition to leading the GSE’s LDT master’s program, Forssell directs the GSE’s Makery, a traditional physical makerspace with a 3D printer, woodshop, and other tools for problem solving and creation, along with the AI Tinkery, which she hopes will fill needs to help improve learning through creation.

“With AI, I think we're going to find that we use these tools as helpers to get students to the place where they can recognize good work and they can go further, faster and level up,” she said.

Never miss an episode! Subscribe to School’s In on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Transcript

Karin Forssell (00:00):

It's trying to get at that sort of sense of creativity and competence and communication and collaboration, all those things that we do in makerspaces, and bringing it into this realm of AI tools.

Dan Schwartz (00:16):

Today, we're exploring how creativity, tinkering and hands-on learning supports education. And can AI expand the possibilities for cultivating creativity in the classroom for learning and teaching?

Denise Pope (00:28):

It's super exciting, Dan. I know makerspaces are all the rage. Places that really give students the freedom to explore and to imagine and to design and experiment and bring their ideas to life. I'm really excited about this episode.

Dan Schwartz (00:43):

Well, we're lucky to have a guest with us who's at the forefront of creating the kinds of spaces that support this new kind of learning.

Denise Pope (00:52):

Yay. This is going to be a fun one. Let's start tinkering.

(00:59):

Welcome to School's In, your go-to podcast for cutting-edge insights and learning. Each episode, we dive into the latest trends, innovations, and challenges facing learners.

(01:09):

I'm Denise Pope, Senior Lecturer at �� Graduate School of Education and co-founder of Challenge Success. And I'm with my co-host, Dan Schwartz, Dean of �� GSE, and Faculty Director of the �� Accelerator for Learning.

Dan Schwartz (01:26):

I want to introduce Karin Forssell. She is the Director of the Learning Design and Technology Master's Program, which is a very, very successful master's program. Congratulations, Karin. And a Senior Lecturer here at the Graduate School of Education.

(01:40):

In addition to that, she directs the GSE Makery, which is a makerspace where students and faculty can explore how making things helps people learn. And maybe helps them learn something even beyond what they're trying to make. And now, she's been charged with making an artificial intelligence makerspace where you use generative AI and people come in and make poems for retirees, among other things. Welcome, Karin, it's good to have you here.

Karin Forssell (02:08):

Thank you. Good to be here.

Dan Schwartz (02:10):

Let me ask you, you were charged with making the AI makerspace, let's say of the AI. You made a very successful makerspace, it's on the first floor of our main building right now. There's always people in there. It's always noisy as hell.

Denise Pope (02:25):

That's a good sign.

Dan Schwartz (02:26):

Good or bad, I'm not sure. What did you do to make it successful?

Karin Forssell (02:30):

Well, it wasn't me alone, let's be clear about that. But we explored a variety of different things to try and get people in the door. We actually borrowed from museum education, the idea of threshold fear, and thought about what it would take for people to feel comfortable just coming in the door.

(02:49):

First thing we did was put in a doorstop, that didn't exist before, so the door is open. And then makery autocorrects to bakery, so we had cookies. And then we started to think about, "What are the other signals and ways that people can come in?" It's everything from that we have a video online to show people around the space if they want to check it out before they come. We have workshops, we have classes, we have open office hours, we have a manager who's there to answer your questions. A lot of students actually, we hire several students to provide extended hours and just to be liaisons to different programs and invite their friends to come. And then we basically say yes to whatever they want to make.

Dan Schwartz (03:27):

Denise is a novice. She hears the commotion and she walks into the makerspace for the first time. What happens to her? Do they say, "Here's a saw, go cut stuff"?

Karin Forssell (03:41):

The saw is in the back. Actually, what's up front and what a lot of people actually come in for is some of them come in because they want to fix something. Glue and sewing are actually top of the list. And then they get some ideas, there's lots of examples of different projects. And it's like, "Oh, I want to make one of those." And then there's some people who come in because they heard about us and they're in programs where it's like, "Oh, I heard you had another 3D printer. Can we use yours, because there's such a line at the other space?" We work a lot with the other makerspaces and we get a lot of referrals.

(04:12):

The first thing that happens though is you see the sign that says, "Welcome, please sign in in the book." And it's a bunch of different stamps, you get to stamp and put your name. And then somebody's going to come and say, "Hi," and, "How are you, and who are you, and what would you like to do here?" It's very personable.

Denise Pope (04:28):

Can I ask what a listener might be thinking right now? Why does a Graduate School of Education at �� University have a place for people to use glue and yarn and make stuff?

Karin Forssell (04:39):

That's a great question. There are lots of good reasons for this, and one is because they're big in K12 education. More and more schools are using a classroom to have 3D printers and laser cutters and vinyl cutters and a lot of robotic stuff. And have it all in one space with various curricula so that kids can explore the creativity that comes with making something by yourself.

(05:03):

Now, traditionally, that's happened in art, it's happened in industrial tech or shop classes. It's happening in cooking or family and consumer sciences, I think is their new name. It's happened in a lot of places. This is sort of a place where all of it comes together with a lot of computer facilitated making as well.

Dan Schwartz (05:20):

Denise?

Denise Pope (05:21):

Yeah?

Dan Schwartz (05:21):

Can you think of an activity where you make something and then it helps you do better on a school test or is making its own special track? You go to the makerspace to have fun making and maybe you learn a little persistence or you learn trial-and-error. Any way to squeeze science out of it?

Denise Pope (05:40):

Yeah, totally. Modeling, right? The first thing that comes to my mind would be modeling, or understanding geometry, which was very hard for me because it's flat on a page with numbers and stuff, but if I could see it, maybe. I also just remember, a long time ago, I made the planets. Probably everybody did that, right? With the styrofoam and the glitter or whatever. And to show how far away they are from one another. I think I could see all that. Yeah? Am I being too basic?

Dan Schwartz (06:12):

Karin? What do you think? What are the learning outcomes besides learning how to make the very specific thing you're making?

Denise Pope (06:17):

Or try something new and overcome and persist and problem solve, because those are good.

Karin Forssell (06:22):

Right, right, right. Well, my head was going in a slightly different direction, which is there are lots of benefits from teachers actually coming in and learning to make tools to help their kids learn because then they actually have to engage more with what kinds of maybe manipulatives, maybe other kinds of tools that they could help with a kid who has a real, maybe it's a common misconception or something that they're really struggling with and they could illustrate it or make some more tangible interaction.

(06:47):

You could do that peer-to-peer as well. You could have kids designing some kind of learning tool for younger kids or for peers or somebody in another class that would help them, by trying to teach another kid, they would actually be engaging more deeply in what is it that this is. And we've had all sorts of fun things built like a subject spinner for and English class. It's like, "Okay, you've got to do a story, so I'm going to make this little spinner tool and it's going to make you choose this actor and this mood and this situation," or whatever.

Dan Schwartz (07:20):

That's fun.

Karin Forssell (07:20):

Yeah, right? One thing is to get in deeper into the subject area. Another is to just sort of fuel the general idea of that learning is purposeful. In some sense, every subject is a making subject and that we are trying to have a particular set of tools to be able to create in the world, create arguments, create experiments, create solutions, whatever it is. And so getting into that sort of mindset of that we're here to solve problems.

Dan Schwartz (07:51):

That's interesting.

Karin Forssell (07:52):

I think would be transformable.

Denise Pope (07:53):

Okay. You just said something really that just went, "What?" to me, which is create arguments, which is right now in today's world, we've got a lot of problems with people speaking civilly to one another and to figure out ways to compromise and all that.

Karin Forssell (08:08):

Yeah, I don't mean arguments like create conflict. I mean laying out a set of facts in a way that leads to a particular conclusion. Thinking thoughtfully about what supports do you need to persuade somebody in a particular direction.

Denise Pope (08:26):

Give a super quick example of a makerspace thing that did that.

Karin Forssell (08:30):

You could create something on the laser cutter where you have all these different pieces and you had to slot them together as though they were a puzzle. And you look at how does this flow and does this actually lead you to a particular conclusion, or do you need to rearrange it in order to make this? Making an essay or something in the sentence level or the paragraph level, you could actually copy and paste. You can move things around physically and discuss what that means collaboratively, much easier than you can when it's on a Google Doc or something like that.

Denise Pope (09:00):

Super cool. Super cool.

Dan Schwartz (09:02):

I asked about the outcomes. I just want to say, not everything has to be justified in terms of outcomes. It's okay to listen to music and get to enjoy music just because it's music. It doesn't have to be justified for increasing the STEM workforce.

Denise Pope (09:16):

Okay, this is a crazy moment in School's In right now. I'm just telling you this because usually you are all about, "Why are we doing this?" And I can't imagine that parents out there are going to be super happy if their kids went to school just to listen to music or make some fun things in the makery. I feel like we've switched roles here, Dan.

Dan Schwartz (09:39):

I don't know if I want eight hours a day of kids making chess pieces with a lathe and glue and colored pieces of wood. I agree with that, but I just want to say some things are sort of their own justification. And so you don't always need outcomes. I think there is a place for beauty in the world, Denise, even if it doesn't make anything better.

Denise Pope (09:59):

My gosh, who are you and what have you done?

Karin Forssell (10:01):

All the art teachers are going to be happy to hear that.

Denise Pope (10:03):

Who are you and what have you done with Dan Schwartz from the previous episodes? Oh, my gosh.

(10:11):

Dan Schwartz, do you have a hobby?

Dan Schwartz (10:15):

Most of my hobbies turn into chores.

Denise Pope (10:19):

Like what?

Dan Schwartz (10:21):

I have a peach tree. I plant it. I fertilize it, and then pretty soon, I have to put a bird's net on it. And then I get all these peaches and I have to freeze it, and I sort of don't want to do it anymore.

Denise Pope (10:35):

Oh.

Dan Schwartz (10:35):

I have a short attention span.

Denise Pope (10:37):

I would call you a reluctant peach tree hobbyist.

Dan Schwartz (10:42):

That's very specific, Denise. Thank you. How about you?

Denise Pope (10:47):

I was thinking about this because I knew that we were going to be talking about hobbies. I feel like I'm sort of a boring person. I love to hike and be out in nature. That doesn't seem like a hobby to me. And I love to read also. I don't know. Is that a hobby? I have no idea. I like to cook, but I don't knit or collect stamps. When I think of a hobby, I think of things, and that's not in my world.

Dan Schwartz (11:17):

Okay. So you and I may need some empirical research to find out why hobbyists do what they do.

Denise Pope (11:22):

Yeah, yeah. But you've done some studying of hobbyists, yeah?

Dan Schwartz (11:26):

I have. And I don't promote my book very often, ever, but I'm going to read something from it.

Denise Pope (11:34):

Oh, boy.

Dan Schwartz (11:35):

We did a study where we asked all different types of hobbyists, like gardeners, people who brew beer, motorcycle racers, all sorts of hobbyists. We gave them a list of 25 possible things that would motivate them. To be liked, you might do a hobby to be part of a group, to feel a sense of control. Classic motivations. The number one is to see the fruits of your labor.

Denise Pope (12:04):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (12:04):

Hobbyists like to create stuff. They make stuff, like "I brew beer and I've made this and I want to see how it turns out because I made it."

Denise Pope (12:15):

Okay, but how does that work with the motorcycle racer?

Dan Schwartz (12:18):

Oh, they're so tricked out. Have you seen how much gear they have?

Denise Pope (12:21):

Oh, so part of that is just showing off your thing?

Dan Schwartz (12:25):

Showing off is pejorative. Sharing.

Denise Pope (12:28):

With you, it would be to have someone taste the peaches from your tree? Yes?

Dan Schwartz (12:37):

Yes. I want to see how those peaches taste.

Denise Pope (12:41):

Right.

Dan Schwartz (12:42):

Right? And that's very literal to the fruits of your labor, so I like that.

(12:52):

Karin, you and I are going to have to do a little bit of work helping people's imaginations of what you can do, in case they haven't had opportunity to go to a makerspace to discover this. The Graduate School of Education is going to make an AI makerspace, but we're not allowed to use the word makerspace because everybody else on campus who has a makerspace, like engineering has lots of makerspaces, they disapprove because they think making has to be tangible. I look at them like Blockbuster, where they used to think watching videos had to be done with brick and mortar cassettes.

Denise Pope (13:25):

Oh, you're calling people old.

Dan Schwartz (13:27):

No, I'm just saying they've got to move with the times.

Denise Pope (13:30):

Okay.

Dan Schwartz (13:31):

But that's okay.

Karin Forssell (13:32):

This is more digital making, yes.

Dan Schwartz (13:34):

Yeah. My whole life's digital. Why does it have to be tangible?

(13:38):

Anyway, Karin, tell us what is it we're doing?

Karin Forssell (13:41):

Yes.

Dan Schwartz (13:41):

What are we doing now?

Karin Forssell (13:43):

We are starting the AI Tinkery, a sandbox for educators.

Denise Pope (13:47):

Very cute.

Karin Forssell (13:48):

Right. One of the differences between this space and others, just like our physical makerspace, is that it is focused on education, K12 and beyond, probably more beyond because we're including higher education as well. And it's trying to get at that sort of sense of creativity and competence and communication and collaboration, all those things that we do in makerspaces, and bringing it into this realm of AI tools, specifically generative AI tools.

(14:18):

You can come into this space and you can go ahead and play with stuff, try something out, come and find out what all the fuss is about if you haven't had any experience before. Maybe you come in for the candy and you stay for watching a video about a chatbot, and then you try out making your own. Or maybe you are going to go a little bit further and you have this question about, "How can I use this for this particular problem I have in the classroom?" Or, "I'm really scared about the ethics. How can I think about this and can you give me some examples of AI policies and what do we know from research?" A place to sort of aggregate all of that, and let people just explore, tinker with it.

Denise Pope (14:59):

I think it sounds awesome.

Dan Schwartz (15:00):

We had a session at a very large event where some of our cracker jack team presented how to make AI chatbots to teachers. And it was incredibly well attended. People would start by sort of saying, "Nah, this isn't for me." And at the end, they come running up to the teachers showing what they've made. It is the classic making thing where you really want to share and you're proud. I can imagine coming in and saying, "I want to create a lesson to help students compose pictures." How's the gen AI? What does the generative AI do for me there?

Karin Forssell (15:40):

Well, for one thing, you can quickly generate lots of examples. You could set them up and you could say, "What are you thinking about these different compositions? Which ones do you feel are more effective? Which ones are not?" One of the things that gen AI does for us is loads of examples really fast.

Dan Schwartz (15:58):

I would say, "Give me an example of a Malamute Labrador mix." And then I'd say, "Give me a different example." Something like that?

Karin Forssell (16:08):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (16:08):

Or I'd say, "Give me an example of a little girl who's lost in a friendly forest and meets a grizzly bear"?

Karin Forssell (16:14):

Yeah, absolutely.

Dan Schwartz (16:16):

"That has cheese and is playing a flute at the same time." And it can do that?

Karin Forssell (16:21):

"And it's purple." Yes. "And it's set on the moon." And it doesn't have to be realistic. It can generate these pictures in all sorts of different ways.

(16:32):

And by the way, you can also say, "In the style of so-and-so," Salvador Dali or something. You can get really specific. And one of my favorite examples of somebody who has done this is one of our colleagues with a three-year-old daughter. And they wrote a story together and the child can tell a story. And by the way, through natural language processing, she can just talk it and the computer will then transcribe it and then generate pictures to go with it. And then you print it out on a color printer and you've got a storybook authored by a three-year-old. That's really cool.

Denise Pope (17:06):

Okay, you got me there because I know not everything has to have outcomes, but the outcome there is potentially getting a kid very excited about literacy and about reading and about creating and understanding the connection between pictures and words. I came in dubious. I am leaving with a greater appreciation now of that.

(17:29):

And also something you said, Karin, that really struck me is this idea of learning how to collaborate and create and think through problems. Those are incredibly important skills. It's not just we're going in and we're making some sticker books. And it's not just actually, Dan, we're going in and listening to music. We're actually doing things to teach skills that kids need in the future, for sure.

Dan Schwartz (17:53):

Can I defend myself, Denise?

Denise Pope (17:54):

Defend. Defend away.

Dan Schwartz (17:57):

The great thing about the gen AI is that people really like to make stuff. Now, the challenge is can we have it so they get to make stuff that they really like to make, and it forwards their learning as well on things that don't necessarily always involve using gen AI?

(18:14):

A simple example is I learned to write by co-authoring with someone who was a better writer than I was. I would write at night and then he would take it and just completely rewrite it in the morning. Because he learned that editing is too slow. And then I would do again at night and I'd see all the moves he made. I can kind of do this with a computer now. And the hypothesis is that I'm going to be a better writer when I see how good it is at saying, "There are three points that we're covering." You can imagine someone who English isn't their first language and they get a chance to work with these tools and play with language. The trick is how can you make this sort of creative generation cash out in domain knowledge and skills?

Denise Pope (18:57):

I think there's another trick, which is how do you make sure you're teaching them skills for good and not skills for evil? Because I'm seeing a lot of the potential for deepfakes right? And for people who don't know what that is, creating pictures of a girl in your class without her top on. And so are you building in any safeguards at the AI Tinkery?

Karin Forssell (19:19):

Guardrails?

Denise Pope (19:20):

Yeah.

Karin Forssell (19:21):

I don't know exactly where we will wind up with this because we're sort of evolving as it becomes real. But I do think that educators are always going to be very interested in discussing the ethics. Obviously, there are lots of interest in the bias that comes from the training set being biased to start with. What kinds of issues might there be if students put in a prompt and get something that's totally inappropriate, disruptive, but also misleading? We definitely are going to see more tools, this is my prediction, over time. We're very early days right now. This is gold rush time. We're going to see more competent, more evolved tools over the next few years. And I think one of the things that we're going to see is more safe spaces for education that are not trained on everything on the internet, but on quality over quantity for what kinds of answers the AI can give.

(20:13):

We're going to see what kinds of limits it provides, but I think that in schools, we're likely going to have very targeted use of AI tools that help you to do particular things really well. Like compare and evaluate. I sort of suspect that our curriculum, it's sort of like when we got the calculators, remember when all the debates we had about letting people use calculators in school or on tests? Oh, my goodness. And now you're expected to because who does grocery store math in their head anymore? My mother did, yeah.

Denise Pope (20:47):

I think Dan Schwartz probably does.

Karin Forssell (20:48):

All right. With AI, I think we're going to find that we use these tools as helpers to get students to the place where they can recognize good work and they can go further, faster and level up with what kinds of writing they're producing. That's my hope.

Dan Schwartz (21:09):

I think we could have a very long discussion on policy. We don't want to make the same mistake we did with social media. But the theory of the AI Thinkery, colon...

Denise Pope (21:21):

Wait, it's a Tinkery?

Karin Forssell (21:21):

It's the Tinkery. Tinkery.

Denise Pope (21:21):

I kind of like AI Thinkery too though.

Karin Forssell (21:21):

That would be cool.

Denise Pope (21:21):

I know.

Karin Forssell (21:24):

Yeah. No, it's the Tinkery.

Dan Schwartz (21:32):

One of the hypotheses behind the AI Tinkery is that we need to get these teachers in there to see what these tools can do.

Denise Pope (21:39):

Yeah.

Dan Schwartz (21:40):

And to create a set of policies or things that students should learn, like personal policies or social policies. If you haven't experienced this and thought about how to use it, it's going to be too abstract. But I do think we don't want to make the same mistake we made with social media. We sort of want to-

Denise Pope (21:59):

Yeah.

Karin Forssell (21:59):

What would be really cool would be if all the teachers are the ones producing these new tools, because with AI, you can code like nobody's business. It's so much easier. And if we could get qualified teachers designing the new tools for schools, that would be amazing.

Dan Schwartz (22:18):

I like that, teachers aren't just using AI, but they're actually creating the tools that work best for their classrooms.

Denise Pope (22:25):

It makes so much sense, right? When teachers are the ones shaping the technology, they can make sure it's practical and impactful for learning. And it's a chance to avoid the pitfalls we saw with social media. If we bring teachers into the conversation early, we can set thoughtful guidelines and make AI a real benefit in schools.

Dan Schwartz (22:44):

I like the idea of both teachers and students using the same makerspace where they're both trying to learn how to use these tools. Maybe the students teach the teachers something about how to be a maker and vice versa. And so they get a chance to see what it can do, fire up their imagination, not worry about the outcomes, Denise. And there's a lot of potential here.

Denise Pope (23:06):

No, I love that. I love not worrying about the outcomes, you know that, Dan. I think it's really exciting stuff for the future of education, teachers, students, tinkering together. Very exciting.

(23:17):

Thank you so much, Karin, for such a great conversation. And thank you all for joining us on this episode of School's In. Remember to subscribe to our show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you tune in. I'm Denise Pope.

Dan Schwartz (23:30):

And I'm David Schwartz. Sorry, I'm just tinkering with my first name.

Denise Pope (23:34):

Oh, my God.

Dan Schwartz (23:35):

I thought I'd try it out in a safe space.

Podcast

split

Faculty mentioned in this article: Dan Schwartz , Denise Pope , Karin Forssell

Teaching

The future of educational technology (from The Future of Everything)

Digital literacy in the AI era (Part 2)

Preschool counts: Building a strong foundation in math

Jean Lythcott, beloved former ������������ GSE educator, dies at 86

A catalyst for scientific discovery

A force of nature

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Studying teachers to train the model

A better warmup

Next steps

The evolution of Barnum Center

A look into the past

A step into the future

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Doing the homework

Sharing with the class

Education Professor Jo Boaler and ������������ Women’s Basketball team up for new sports data unit

A team effort

Training for a data-filled future

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, ������������ researchers say

The AI Tinkery: A sandbox for educators

Jean Lythcott, beloved former �� GSE educator, dies at 86

Learning from before and building toward more: �� GSE pilot course teaches the history of California education

Education Professor Jo Boaler and �� Women’s Basketball team up for new sports data unit

Learners with disabilities benefit from more complex reading instruction, �� researchers say