If you do nothing else this week I encourage you to take some time to watch this interview between Ezra Klein and Rebecca Winthrop on Educating Kids in the Age of AI. Rebecca is co-author of a book published earlier this year titled “The Disengaged Teen” which has had a significant impact on my thinking and helped me align the work I have been doing around learner agency with the challenges of educating students in an increasingly digital world. Here, Winthrop and Klein explore the changing landscape of education due to advancements in A.I.
In their interview Klein questions Winthrop about the ideas in her book, providing an opportunity for a deep dive into many of the things that the book covers – in particular, the relationship between learner engagement and agency which is something I’ve referenced a lot in my work this year since first hearing Rebecca speak of it during an online interview about the book.
The Rebecca and her colleague, Jenny Anderson, used their research to create the grid above to illustrate four broad ‘types’ of student that we’re likely to encounter in our classrooms, each ‘type’ being characterised by the level of engagement and agency they experience. I won’t go into detail here as it’s explained well in the book and in the video below.
In the video interview with Klein, Rebecca explores further the impact of AI on the lives of young people, on their learning and on our school system as a whole – and concludes that we need a ‘new plan’ if we’re to address their needs into the future. In her introduction she explains that approximately a third of our students in school are deeply engaged in their learning (the achievers), but that two thirds are not, She argues that we need to design and create learning experiences that motivate students to ‘dig in’ and be engaged and be excited to learn.
To address how we do this, Rebecca describes three parts to the answer:
- What is the purpose of education – why do we want our kids educated? This is particularly important now that we have AI that can do many (most?) of the things we’ve traditionally required of our students.
- We need to consider how students learn and re-shape and re-design their learning experiences accordingly
- What should they learn? What is the content and what are the skills they will require to live, and flourish in their future lives?
These questions get to the nub of what I consider to be the critical things we need to be engaging with in our current education discourse. For example, current debates about the purpose of education, which I addressed in my previous post, highlight the range of views that exist. Rebecca’s contribution here would certainly challenge the idea of regarding our view of the purpose of education too narrowly. Then there’s the issue of how students learn. While we now understand so much more about how we learn and how our brain stores and uses information for example, the responses we’re seeing being taken to how we address the concerns about declining motivation, engagement and achievement levels appear to be grounded in models of what’s worked in the past. Thirdly, the issue of content raises questions about the nature and structure of our curriculum – again, questioning the usefulness of trying to ‘package’ human knowledge based on assumed hierarchies of importance (economically, culturally, socially etc.) to be delivered to learners.
That’s just the taster in the introduction – the rest is for you to watch below…
