Dear friends, I missed writing on Pi Day, but don’t worry, it just goes on and on… Alright, forgive my very old joke, but the truth is that math, like Pi, is constant, mind-stretching and at times baffling. You see it everywhere; in nature, in the human body, in sports and in architecture. Pi is beautiful in its ability to provide an answer and also in the infinite possibilities it suggests about our very human understanding of the abstract world. Pi makes me think about what is possible in math, as does artificial intelligence (AI), something that has also dominated the news over the last few months. What an amazing product of mathematics and engineering! Educators have a new tool—and are flocking to different sites to better understand it. This isn’t surprising. If you consider how creative they are teaching Pi (check out a few examples here), AI’s promise cannot be underestimated. From the reading I have done, it holds the potential to empower teachers and students toward new, better ways to structure classrooms and implement innovations that can lead to greater personalization, feedback and applications in the real world. As Bill Gates suggests in his most recent Gates Notes, AI will be most effective, I suspect, if we remain clear-eyed about its strengths, dangers and limits. To be a force for good, it must be available and address the needs of all students, regardless of race or class. And this is a human problem: We cannot bake our biases into its algorithms. Like everything in education, AI must be built on what we understand about how students learn—or don’t. As AI use cases are developed, I find myself looking at articles that describe theories of learning, research like Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction. Written several years ago, this is a critical resource for teachers seeking to infuse strong cognitive science in their classrooms. I believe part of the answer remains in linking this new technology, and the possibilities it creates, to the very real, research-based understandings of teachers’ and students’ needs—perhaps the biggest piece of the Pi. In partnership,
Bob Hughes
Director, K-12 Education
Quick Takes
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What We're Reading
The 74 on the role of calculus
Why connecting tutoring to curriculum could make it more effective
AccelerateED has shown us we can innovate #EdPathways