Top stories from April
Educators weigh in on AI executive order
State testing could see changes
Can cognitive science boost student learning?
Head Start faces funding crisis, potential elimination
Effective school scheduling tips for administrators
Top trend
April continued to be a month of surprises and concerns for educators as the Trump administration made more cuts and unveiled various executive orders. The topic that spanned many of our education briefs was the executive order mandating a task force to put K-12 AI education into action.
Unfortunately, recent and ongoing federal budget, department and staffing cuts left educators scratching their heads, wondering how, exactly, the AI plans are supposed to happen. The Education Department researchers and staffers who were working on AI had just been fired, and an entire Education Department tech resource was taken offline.
Educators’ concerns
- Some teachers aren’t interested in even dipping their toes into AI, but the majority who are say they’re not getting enough training in how to use it or teach it -- and teacher training on everything has been woefully underfunded for years.
- AI is new to everyone, and it’s not intuitive. So much needs to be explained: what it can do, how it can do it and how to best use it. (One topic we’ve seen a lot about is helping students refine their ability to feed AI the type of prompts that get the best answers; it’s an important critical-thinking skill.)
- Of course, educators also are worried about bias in AI (dealing with it and teaching how to avoid it), the potential for cheating (with plenty of articles about how to tweak instruction and assignments to focus on critical thinking more than on right/wrong answers), and student privacy.
ASCD (daily), EdTech (daily) and ISTE_SN (Tuesdays) are probably your best regular reads for staying abreast of this, but don’t hesitate to dive into specific briefs (ELA, Mathed, ACTE, etc.) for more niche views geared toward specific clients’ products. Skimming the past two or three weeks’ worth of newsletters can arm you with more details for richer and more productive conversations with a partner, advertiser or custom content client.
Pro tip: Let the internet help you. I just plugged “smartbrief math AI” into Google, and several SmartBrief Originals on AI and math popped up. Keep an eye on our SB Education website; look for vendor names in the author bios or articles. We don’t publish Education Originals every day, so if you plug a quick peek into your daily calendar, it won’t take you any time at all. Slack also has the #sb-originals-feed, which alerts you whenever an Original is published and gives you the title and subtitle.
Opportunities include:
- Professional development (and pre-service programs, aka colleges’ teacher training): How, what, why, how much? How to know if you’re getting the right AI PD?
- The many ways AI can be embedded in education: for school admin, teacher admin, learning about AI from a computer/tech standpoint, learning how to use AI to get more about a subject or problem. Who has AI that offers truly unique solutions for educators? Poke around to see other vendors’ websites to see what they are doing to give you more talking points.
- Budgeting: PD isn’t cheap, and school budgets are getting wiped out due to various federal cuts, including many that trickle down to states. Who has cost-effective, multitasking solutions? Whose programs include teacher training at no additional cost? Who has proven, evidence-based programs that will keep schools from wasting money on something that doesn’t work?
Additional trends/headlines
General
- We’re seeing a lot of research that is revealing ways to improve student learning (see “Can cognitive science boost student learning” and “three cueing” in top headlines above)
- An early education crisis that will have wide-ranging, long-term effects on student performance (See “Head Start” above)
- Budget cuts -- especially related to federal education research -- that may change the way states do annual assessments (see “state testing” above).
