Month: December 2024

Links of Interest

4 Things to Know About the Literacy Lawsuit Targeting Lucy Calkins and Fountas & Pinnell

This is a great explainer of the landscape around the science of reading. You may be familiar with the science of reading from Sold a Story Podcast.

The article breaks down the lawsuit.

As always, be wary of the perspective, but I found the summary useful.

https://archive.md/t8JLM

Limits of Data

Educators love to talk about data. All right, some educators love to talk about data. Data is an important aspect in education right now. This is a great article on data. Specifically, this article addresses the limits of data. Humans are currently driven by data. However, data doesn’t always do what we think it does. (I’m reminded at this point of an article about how only 25% of federally funded education innovations benefit students and an article about what counts as “success” in educational research hint, researchers frequently get to decide). How about a bonus article on How Khan Academy (and others) Fudged their Reseach – throwing out 95% of the participants can be, er, helpful?

Let’s get back to the data article though. The Limits of Data covers lots of ground. Topics covered include things like contingencies of social bias, decontextualization, quantification, transparency, the politics of classification, metrics and values, and more. Here are a few quotes to get you going:

I once sat in a room with a bunch of machine learning folks who were developing creative artificial intelligence to make “good art.” I asked one researcher about the training data. How did they choose to operationalize “good art”? Their reply: they used Netflix data about engagement hours.

The problem is that engagement hours are not the same as good art….

It’s easier to justify health care decisions in terms of measurable outcomes: increased average longevity or increased numbers of lives saved in emergency room visits, for example. But there are so many important factors that are far harder to measure: happiness, community, tradition, beauty, comfort, and all the oddities that go into “quality of life.”

So here is the first principle of data: collecting data involves a trade-off. We gain portability and aggregability at the price of context-sensitivity and nuance. What’s missing from data? Data is designed to be usable and comprehensible by very different people from very different contexts and backgrounds.

A lengthy article, but well worth the read.

https://issues.org/limits-of-data-nguyen/

Quite the interesting article: Pedagogy of the Depressed.

Hello! Are you an educator who’s interested in using AI but unsure of which online “AI for educators” course to take? Not to worry, Cognitive Resonance has you covered! We’ve completed the offerings from OpenAI (in partnership with Common Sense Media), Google, and AI for Education, all of which take an eerily similar approach to explaining what AI is and why you need to be using it in your classroom.

We are now pleased to share with you this illustrated guide to what these courses cover—consider this an early holiday present!

The article makes some interesting points. There are several notes about AI “learning” (it doesn’t learn), “making decisions” (again, AI is not sentient), and “figuring out“. They also note that the trainings point out individualizing instruction without doing any individualization.

AI can do some really interesting things for the classroom teacher. However, there are tons of caution that need to go along with what AI can do.

Pedagogy of the Depressed](https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/pedagogy-of-the-depressed) was an interesting read.

I was sitting in a meeting the other day waiting for a meeting to start. A middle School principal asked me what I missed about being a principal. I didn’t have to think long.

The messiness. I miss the messiness of working with staff and students in the learning and growing process.

I miss how I messed up working with an autistic student (really could’ve helped more if I knew then what I know now). The funny thing is that the student’s mom was the sister of a friend of mine (I didn’t know the connection until toward the end of the student’s time with us). By the way, it’s not that I or we did anything really wrong, we just could’ve done a lot of things much, much better.

I miss helping a family navigate dealing with a seizure disorder. The family was going through some other trials and tribulations at the same time.

I miss working with students who were phenomenally smart but needed confidence that they could do great things. Many of our kids ended up going to college. Several went to Ivy League schools. Many went to the University of Michigan (Go Blue!), which in many cases were as far away as they were allowed to go.

I miss two parents learning from each other. In one case, we had a parent (Parent One) who also happened to be a FedEx driver with my school on his route. He was passionate about how African Americans were treated. There was an incident with another parent who was, well, let’s say a bit biased. Parent One happened to be delivering something when his child and the child of Parent Two were in a room in the office due to an issue. Parent Two arrived in the office. Generally, we wouldn’t have parents talk at this point (too many unknowns and we definitely didn’t want kids to see parents behaving badly). However, both parents wanted to chat. Parent One was extremely thoughtful, kind, and effective in clearing up many issues for Parent Two. It was a beautiful thing to watch.

Most of all, I miss the excitement and unpredictable nature of middle school. Our staff did amazing work with kids. I miss being a part of that.