Love your writing and thinking Nick, and not sure how it’s progressed but for me a key question which you refer to is “What’s education for?” Think there’s a need for a deeper philosophical discussion now more than ever, and it links to my current mental struggle (in a good way and lots to talk about in relation to that but that’s for another time!) in making sense of what are essential/durable skills we need to all be fostering but particularly young people.
What is education for? That is the best question to ask right now. I have a feeling the answers will bifurcate around the necessary and the possible. The ed-futurist will have the big answer, the big vision, about what is necessary. Then, the educator will have to sort out what is actually possible--or rather--how we can get to what is necessary. I am hoping and praying for greater cooperation amongst the different factions in the AI x space: ed-futurists, university innovators, k-12 realists. I think we could make a lot of progress if we centered our conversation on something tangible like your concept of durable skills.
Durable skills is not my concept but have been reading it a fair bit at the moment. Personally I’m not a fan of calling them durable skills. I understand the intention but think this sounds quite mundane and are they not essential skills? And if we include attributes being durable and resilient will be amongst them?
Yes. As far as I know, teachers have wide latitude to define their “grading” system. I know exactly what I would do—I could write a book about it (I have—two of them:)—but you need to learn it from your students. I would start off with a discussion: Ask them to debate the question “Grades good for learners? Yes or no. Let them talk in pairs, write in a journal if they want, talk it over with a bot first). Invite them to ask the bot for some thoughts on 1) why adults want schools to issue report cards and 2) how do universities use these reported grades? This leads naturally to a discussion of do I find grades valuable? Would I be more comfortable without them? Would I work harder? Deeper? Do I need my teacher to give me a grade with some stakes attached (GPA)? Keeping in mind I have to grade you or I’ll lose my job, let’s negotiate. Here are the parameters: Everyone reads books. Everyone writes. I reserve the right to assign readings sometimes, though never writings though you will have due dates for deliverables which I will assess based on how hard you worked and your reflections on what you learned. Let’s negotiate a working relationship here which lets me do what they pay me to do, that is,to have the privilege and the honor to teach you. (Please quote me if you use or paraphrase this language. I plan to cut and paste it into a post. I’m talking feedback, Nick. I just gave you some damned good feedback. I expect you to write some naturalistic posts with a strong focus on the learners—narrate and quote—so others can learned from you. My mentor, David Pearson, said to me upon the occasion of my inadequacy of thanking him for his teaching me during my dissertation, “Terry, here’s how you can repay me. Pay it forward. Treat your students like you think I treated you. It was a pleasure.”
This is good, Terry. I will be sure to give credit where credit is due. Know that I consider you a mentor at this point. I hope you don't mind. I read Grading for Equity last summer and tried a version of Outcomes-Based Grading this year. I think what I liked most was the way the method pushed me to think about skills, and the method's emphasis on revision as always an option right up to the end of semester. But there are a number of things that I am not the biggest fan of... in particular, its reduction of organic experiences into discrete outcomes, and its intense focus on product for the sake of accuracy and equity. I want to do some writing over the summer on the collision course set between product-oriented outcomes-based grading and AI advancement in schools. I think it is my adherence to this form of grading that has me holding out somewhat --- holding onto a notion of a process-based outcome vs. actual feedback. But as you have probably seen in my work, I try to move pretty quickly away from ideas that aren't working.
You are doing an exquisite job in a horrible situation. I have high hopes for you leading the way. You remind me of the start of the National Writing Project in 1980 at Berkeley. There was a handful of academics who put together a PD model and it managed to change things even within the current structure. I encourage you to embrace your role as a visionary leader and remain humbled by the enormity of the responsibility. You can do great things, Nick. And yes you do move quickly. That will pass. I think setting up yourself a timeline with really practical and reasonable goals will help you regulate your impatience and reduce the stress level. Hope you like my newest post! I ask you to cite me for the negotiation of grading strategy because I’m proposing a monograph on teaching reading with AI to a commercial publisher. Might as well make a few more bucks since I’m making up for it with this forever free Substack. Don’t know if you know I do this posting for my community service obligation which did not end when I retired.
Nice work, Nick. I often wonder where this collective impulse to evaluate children and label them as they grow comes from. It could be from an innocent belief among adults that evaluation is helpful to kids. It lets them know where they stand. They get the chance to label themselves and set expectations for their future based on their gifts or lack thereof. If the basis for that theory is “feedback is helpful,” I say yes for sure, but grades and percentages are a poor substitute for nuanced and empathetic insight. Personally, I’d like to know how I can move to higher ground, and it’s a lot more work for both kids and teachers, but remove the power of the grade from the teacher and see what happens. That move in itself will separate those who teach from those who grade and open the door to professional development on the nature of feedback in pedagogy. AI doesn’t give good feedback like a really observation and knowledgeable teacher can.
I almost think putting children through twelve years plus K of grades IS the reason adults do it. It’s all they know to do. Evaluating adults vis a vis whether they can or cannot design a bridge that doesn’t collapse or cut into a human body to remove an appendix is ethically imperative, but why distort the learning of children? It’s easier?
AI is a godsend for learning. Plugging it into the “let’s get ready to be adults today” model takes the juice right out of the bot. It turns the bot into an arm of the academic police and in many ways pours gas on the nightmare. I’m not comfortable with the teach to process vs teach to product model if the idea is to mandate process and grade it. Mandating and grading reflective analysis is a bit absurd don’t you think?
The edifice of schooling is certainly challenged by AI, and the impulse of adults to double down on evaluation is predictable. Check out Bowles and Gintis (1976?) work on the social reproduction of schooling. The system has adjusted itself over the decades to do whatever it has to do to make sure the outcome reproduces adults who can take their place in the social class in which they are born.
One suggestion: Reorient your strategy from a process product axis to a craft feedback axis. Those words are more direct. Process and product are code words for “do it this way” and “I’m watching you!”.
Great feedback. I am increasingly become suspicious of my own terminology too! I like the reorientation you suggest. What I can’t shake in my own practice is the demand by my school to give a final grade. Any suggestions on how to negotiate a feedback model with that overarching structure still in place? Know that I am still thinking about your portfolio article. Maybe it is time to activate the writing project and modality.
I love that you embrace the potential to rethink the entire approach to education rather than simply plugging AI (and other tools/methods) into the existing standards.
What kind of feedback are you typically getting from students (if any)?
Speaking of using AI for brainstorming and research, I'm increasingly using Google Gemini 1.5 Pro (free with Google AI Studio) as a beta reader and brainstorming partner. I find that it's refreshingly less long-winded and sharper than GPT-4 for my needs.
I find that students are genuinely amused by this alien form of intelligence as Mollick refers to it. In my conference over the weekend, a lot of conversation centered on AI's predisposition to tell you the things you want to hear. This programming can prove to be quite a problem when it comes to using it as an editing tool for your writing or another's writing. But as you well know, we can train these AIs to perform specific functions --- to continue to wear an editor role and give reliable feedback.
Overall, I am not all the impressed with AI's efforts to explain revisions. I am impressed with the actions it takes when revising a text. I feel like I get the best results. When I ask it to revise a text and then ask it to explain why it made the changes it did. But by then, I have locked into my mind a changed version of the text, making it harder for me to do the actual cognitive labor of revising. Hope that makes some sense.
Just another way of saying the tools are quite there yet.
Agreed. Being nice to the user is a baked-in feature, but it backfires when you need honest and clearcut feedback. Circumventing this is relatively straightforward though. I find that simply saying I need honest and constructive feedback and also asking to put original versions of text in parentheses to help you track the changes. etc.
But this requires people to take the proactive steps of instructing LLMs etc. It's not intuitive for a casual user just starting out.
Really interesting insights and sharing Alejandro. Your students are fortunate to have such an adaptive teacher and learning environment.
I assume in application to other technical fields like engineering or biotech, this process-oriented approach can be adapted roughly this way too?
Project-Based Learning: Engineering students could work on designing and testing prototypes, with a focus on the iterative design process.
Lab Work: More class time could be devoted to hands-on lab work, with personalized guidance during lab sessions.
Continuous Feedback (as you are now applying): Weekly check-ins can help students refine their experimental designs and troubleshoot technical issues. I see this as the value add. A continuos iterative process especially when learning gaps arise.
Reflective Practice: Encourage students to document their engineering design choices and the rationale behind them. Then possibly - what if other choices had been made from "the choice of many paths"? What other paths could have been taken and why they were not? E.g. Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD or LCD vs Plasma or VHS vs Betamax etc
Questions about possible Fractures in Process-Oriented Practices and mostly wondering how you would consider these Alejandro e.g.
Lack of Structure and sometimes lack of willingness to adopt changes: Some students (or teachers for that matter), may struggle without clear guidelines and deadlines, leading to procrastination or disorganized work. Sadly and sometimes shockingly, not all educators are as competent or willing to adopt to obvious changes. So what ends up happening is "the student runs faster and beyond" their teaching or learning environment. Some i know adopt self-learning because the education system simply isn't fast or sharp/smart enough to handle them.
Inconsistent Feedback: Personalized instruction requires a significant time investment from the educator, which may lead to inconsistent feedback if not managed well.
Assessment Challenges: Evaluating the process rather than the product or project can be subjective and may lead to disagreements about grading criteria.
Resource Intensive: This approach requires significant resources, including time for one-on-one meetings and access to AI tools (which GPT-4o (omni) is likely to change), which may not be feasible in all educational settings, e.g. areas without access to 5G or WiFi which happens more often than not in rural areas in Asia (speaking from experience here).
Nick was responding to on one @apiad posts and reading your post also and somehow my comments came in here, with apologies sir. Now I can't find his post and am wondering what I did... my apologies. FYI, just thinking through @apiad's changes from product to process approach. I shall delete once I have taken these mental notes over
Love your writing and thinking Nick, and not sure how it’s progressed but for me a key question which you refer to is “What’s education for?” Think there’s a need for a deeper philosophical discussion now more than ever, and it links to my current mental struggle (in a good way and lots to talk about in relation to that but that’s for another time!) in making sense of what are essential/durable skills we need to all be fostering but particularly young people.
What is education for? That is the best question to ask right now. I have a feeling the answers will bifurcate around the necessary and the possible. The ed-futurist will have the big answer, the big vision, about what is necessary. Then, the educator will have to sort out what is actually possible--or rather--how we can get to what is necessary. I am hoping and praying for greater cooperation amongst the different factions in the AI x space: ed-futurists, university innovators, k-12 realists. I think we could make a lot of progress if we centered our conversation on something tangible like your concept of durable skills.
Durable skills is not my concept but have been reading it a fair bit at the moment. Personally I’m not a fan of calling them durable skills. I understand the intention but think this sounds quite mundane and are they not essential skills? And if we include attributes being durable and resilient will be amongst them?
Yes. As far as I know, teachers have wide latitude to define their “grading” system. I know exactly what I would do—I could write a book about it (I have—two of them:)—but you need to learn it from your students. I would start off with a discussion: Ask them to debate the question “Grades good for learners? Yes or no. Let them talk in pairs, write in a journal if they want, talk it over with a bot first). Invite them to ask the bot for some thoughts on 1) why adults want schools to issue report cards and 2) how do universities use these reported grades? This leads naturally to a discussion of do I find grades valuable? Would I be more comfortable without them? Would I work harder? Deeper? Do I need my teacher to give me a grade with some stakes attached (GPA)? Keeping in mind I have to grade you or I’ll lose my job, let’s negotiate. Here are the parameters: Everyone reads books. Everyone writes. I reserve the right to assign readings sometimes, though never writings though you will have due dates for deliverables which I will assess based on how hard you worked and your reflections on what you learned. Let’s negotiate a working relationship here which lets me do what they pay me to do, that is,to have the privilege and the honor to teach you. (Please quote me if you use or paraphrase this language. I plan to cut and paste it into a post. I’m talking feedback, Nick. I just gave you some damned good feedback. I expect you to write some naturalistic posts with a strong focus on the learners—narrate and quote—so others can learned from you. My mentor, David Pearson, said to me upon the occasion of my inadequacy of thanking him for his teaching me during my dissertation, “Terry, here’s how you can repay me. Pay it forward. Treat your students like you think I treated you. It was a pleasure.”
This is good, Terry. I will be sure to give credit where credit is due. Know that I consider you a mentor at this point. I hope you don't mind. I read Grading for Equity last summer and tried a version of Outcomes-Based Grading this year. I think what I liked most was the way the method pushed me to think about skills, and the method's emphasis on revision as always an option right up to the end of semester. But there are a number of things that I am not the biggest fan of... in particular, its reduction of organic experiences into discrete outcomes, and its intense focus on product for the sake of accuracy and equity. I want to do some writing over the summer on the collision course set between product-oriented outcomes-based grading and AI advancement in schools. I think it is my adherence to this form of grading that has me holding out somewhat --- holding onto a notion of a process-based outcome vs. actual feedback. But as you have probably seen in my work, I try to move pretty quickly away from ideas that aren't working.
You are doing an exquisite job in a horrible situation. I have high hopes for you leading the way. You remind me of the start of the National Writing Project in 1980 at Berkeley. There was a handful of academics who put together a PD model and it managed to change things even within the current structure. I encourage you to embrace your role as a visionary leader and remain humbled by the enormity of the responsibility. You can do great things, Nick. And yes you do move quickly. That will pass. I think setting up yourself a timeline with really practical and reasonable goals will help you regulate your impatience and reduce the stress level. Hope you like my newest post! I ask you to cite me for the negotiation of grading strategy because I’m proposing a monograph on teaching reading with AI to a commercial publisher. Might as well make a few more bucks since I’m making up for it with this forever free Substack. Don’t know if you know I do this posting for my community service obligation which did not end when I retired.
Nice work, Nick. I often wonder where this collective impulse to evaluate children and label them as they grow comes from. It could be from an innocent belief among adults that evaluation is helpful to kids. It lets them know where they stand. They get the chance to label themselves and set expectations for their future based on their gifts or lack thereof. If the basis for that theory is “feedback is helpful,” I say yes for sure, but grades and percentages are a poor substitute for nuanced and empathetic insight. Personally, I’d like to know how I can move to higher ground, and it’s a lot more work for both kids and teachers, but remove the power of the grade from the teacher and see what happens. That move in itself will separate those who teach from those who grade and open the door to professional development on the nature of feedback in pedagogy. AI doesn’t give good feedback like a really observation and knowledgeable teacher can.
I almost think putting children through twelve years plus K of grades IS the reason adults do it. It’s all they know to do. Evaluating adults vis a vis whether they can or cannot design a bridge that doesn’t collapse or cut into a human body to remove an appendix is ethically imperative, but why distort the learning of children? It’s easier?
AI is a godsend for learning. Plugging it into the “let’s get ready to be adults today” model takes the juice right out of the bot. It turns the bot into an arm of the academic police and in many ways pours gas on the nightmare. I’m not comfortable with the teach to process vs teach to product model if the idea is to mandate process and grade it. Mandating and grading reflective analysis is a bit absurd don’t you think?
The edifice of schooling is certainly challenged by AI, and the impulse of adults to double down on evaluation is predictable. Check out Bowles and Gintis (1976?) work on the social reproduction of schooling. The system has adjusted itself over the decades to do whatever it has to do to make sure the outcome reproduces adults who can take their place in the social class in which they are born.
One suggestion: Reorient your strategy from a process product axis to a craft feedback axis. Those words are more direct. Process and product are code words for “do it this way” and “I’m watching you!”.
Great feedback. I am increasingly become suspicious of my own terminology too! I like the reorientation you suggest. What I can’t shake in my own practice is the demand by my school to give a final grade. Any suggestions on how to negotiate a feedback model with that overarching structure still in place? Know that I am still thinking about your portfolio article. Maybe it is time to activate the writing project and modality.
I love that you embrace the potential to rethink the entire approach to education rather than simply plugging AI (and other tools/methods) into the existing standards.
What kind of feedback are you typically getting from students (if any)?
Speaking of using AI for brainstorming and research, I'm increasingly using Google Gemini 1.5 Pro (free with Google AI Studio) as a beta reader and brainstorming partner. I find that it's refreshingly less long-winded and sharper than GPT-4 for my needs.
I find that students are genuinely amused by this alien form of intelligence as Mollick refers to it. In my conference over the weekend, a lot of conversation centered on AI's predisposition to tell you the things you want to hear. This programming can prove to be quite a problem when it comes to using it as an editing tool for your writing or another's writing. But as you well know, we can train these AIs to perform specific functions --- to continue to wear an editor role and give reliable feedback.
Overall, I am not all the impressed with AI's efforts to explain revisions. I am impressed with the actions it takes when revising a text. I feel like I get the best results. When I ask it to revise a text and then ask it to explain why it made the changes it did. But by then, I have locked into my mind a changed version of the text, making it harder for me to do the actual cognitive labor of revising. Hope that makes some sense.
Just another way of saying the tools are quite there yet.
Agreed. Being nice to the user is a baked-in feature, but it backfires when you need honest and clearcut feedback. Circumventing this is relatively straightforward though. I find that simply saying I need honest and constructive feedback and also asking to put original versions of text in parentheses to help you track the changes. etc.
But this requires people to take the proactive steps of instructing LLMs etc. It's not intuitive for a casual user just starting out.
No worries. Feel free to use this space as a workspace. Great comments. Very on point!
Really interesting insights and sharing Alejandro. Your students are fortunate to have such an adaptive teacher and learning environment.
I assume in application to other technical fields like engineering or biotech, this process-oriented approach can be adapted roughly this way too?
Project-Based Learning: Engineering students could work on designing and testing prototypes, with a focus on the iterative design process.
Lab Work: More class time could be devoted to hands-on lab work, with personalized guidance during lab sessions.
Continuous Feedback (as you are now applying): Weekly check-ins can help students refine their experimental designs and troubleshoot technical issues. I see this as the value add. A continuos iterative process especially when learning gaps arise.
Reflective Practice: Encourage students to document their engineering design choices and the rationale behind them. Then possibly - what if other choices had been made from "the choice of many paths"? What other paths could have been taken and why they were not? E.g. Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD or LCD vs Plasma or VHS vs Betamax etc
Questions about possible Fractures in Process-Oriented Practices and mostly wondering how you would consider these Alejandro e.g.
Lack of Structure and sometimes lack of willingness to adopt changes: Some students (or teachers for that matter), may struggle without clear guidelines and deadlines, leading to procrastination or disorganized work. Sadly and sometimes shockingly, not all educators are as competent or willing to adopt to obvious changes. So what ends up happening is "the student runs faster and beyond" their teaching or learning environment. Some i know adopt self-learning because the education system simply isn't fast or sharp/smart enough to handle them.
Inconsistent Feedback: Personalized instruction requires a significant time investment from the educator, which may lead to inconsistent feedback if not managed well.
Assessment Challenges: Evaluating the process rather than the product or project can be subjective and may lead to disagreements about grading criteria.
Resource Intensive: This approach requires significant resources, including time for one-on-one meetings and access to AI tools (which GPT-4o (omni) is likely to change), which may not be feasible in all educational settings, e.g. areas without access to 5G or WiFi which happens more often than not in rural areas in Asia (speaking from experience here).
Nick was responding to on one @apiad posts and reading your post also and somehow my comments came in here, with apologies sir. Now I can't find his post and am wondering what I did... my apologies. FYI, just thinking through @apiad's changes from product to process approach. I shall delete once I have taken these mental notes over