How can AI and ML help K-12 students prepare for the future of work and learning?

Educators already use some adaptive instructional software, and AI/ML should quickly make this a more universal feature of K12 learning designs. An effective example is Scholastics reading and literacy intervention software. But intervention settings also show how different students can have different outcomes based on the factors that are impacting or hindering their learning to begin with. With IPhones and social media we are already seeing increased youth isolation, distraction, and depression. Deeper learning and social emotional growth is complex, constructivist, and integrated and I’m skeptical of making simplistic equations between the powerful “features” of a software and positive learning outcomes.

These are all features of well designed project learning (already) independent of AI. And just as many educators lack the commitment and vision needed to deliver this instructional model and fully invest in equipping teachers to achieve it now, I don’t think AI will change that. Other understandings and reforms are badly needed.

It seems that increased interaction with machines and digital screens and platforms is making it harder for children to develop social and relational experiences, confidence, joy, and self awareness. AI is no silver bullet. Ultimately it is a brick or a book or a hammer, or an explosive, and the good it delivers will depend on human designs and constructs.

I hear teachers inventing ways to prevent students from using AI to complete tasks. I find this so short sighted it’s sublimely comical. We now see very dramatically the inflection point. We need to stop seeing education as a form of knowledge continuity - a handing down of past knowledge- and see it as a preparation for adaptive change and accelerating future discontinuity from rapid innovation and start studying possible and hopefully better futures before it’s too late and stop clinging to our personal notions of school and out of context fact learning and memorizing what was rather than stepping out into what’s coming. The rigid , codified common core had good intentions but the model clearly does not provide the agility schools need.