Tag Archives: education

Teaching with AI Book Coming Soon! PRE-ORDER NOW at JHUPbooks

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https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/53869/teaching-ai

I am doing my new AI workshop from coast to coast this fall and there is a new book on the way too: Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning that I am doing with C. Edward Watson. (We also co-wrote Teaching Naked Techniques together.)

With everything being written about AI, this is coming together quickly and it will be out from Johns Hopkins University Press in early 2024. It will be SHORT and PRACTICAL, but also hopefully relatively comprehensive (AI for research, AI at work, AI assignments, cheating, writing a policy etc.)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has is revolutionizing the way we learn, work and think. Its integration into classrooms and workplaces is already underway, impacting and challenging ideas about creativity, authorship, and education. We are hoping to help teachers discover how to harness and manage AI as a powerful teaching tool.  More to come.

Pre-Order Teaching Change

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My new book, Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers Using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection, is on its way! You can now find out more (and pre-order) at Johns Hopkins University Press, or preorder at Amazon.

An exploration of the difficulty of human learning, especially the ability to change your mind. Teaching Change makes a powerful argument as to how a new 3Rs of relationships, resilience and reflection can better prepare graduates for an uncertain future. Elegant and gripping explanations of recent and wide-ranging research from biology, economics, education, and neuroscience are paired with hundreds of practical suggestions for individual teachers. 

From Professor to Cognitive Coach

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The next of my commentaries on education on WYPR

Learning is a bit like fitness. The person who does the work gets the benefit. 

So the best teacher is not necessarily the one who knows the most, in the same way that the best fitness coach is not the one who can DO the most push-ups. Watching someone else do push-ups, even intellectual push-ups, is not nearly as useful as doing push-ups yourself. 

While it is tempting to think that the best gym is the one with all the latest technology and the coach with the largest muscles, like knowledge, exercise equipment is only beneficial if you use it. You need to be motivated to get on and pedal faster. 

So a good fitness coach or teacher starts by asking: why are you here? Understanding what motivates you and what you already know (or fear) about a subject is essential. (If I don’t know you are afraid of water, my swim lessons will be much less effective.) 

A good fitness coach adds value because she understands YOU and can get YOU to do more push-ups. It is a design problem. Classes work the same way. If I can design structures and assignments that you find more motivating and engaging and you do more work, you will learn more. The role of the teacher as “professor” (with a focus on “professing” and conveying content) needs to be reimagined as more of a cognitive coach (with a focus on the process that will both inspire the student to do the work).

[This shift from more content to more process and how we can design better learning environments and schools is the subject of the new book I am working on this year:A New 3Rs: Using Behavioral Science to Prepare Students for a New Learning Economy due from Johns Hopkins University Press in 2020.]

It’s not really a “smart” phone

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I’ve been doing a series of commentaries for WYPR, the NPR station in Baltimore. You can read the first post below, or listen here 

Technology is only one of the many factors that has changed the starting point for educators. Technology has changed our relationship with knowledge, but has also created a new learning economy where most of the information you need for the jobs of the future is unknown. 

Education has always been about critical thinking, but now that most of the content we are teaching is also available online for free, and much of what students need to learn is still being discovered, we need to shift the balance between process and content. In this new learning economy, graduates who are truly self-regulated learners will have a huge advantage. Good teaching has always been about making yourself obsolete, but new technology makes it clear that the best schools and teachers are the ones whose students can learn new things on their own. 

We are confused about what it means to be smart, we are so confused, we call it a “smart” phone. But despite its access to so much content, your phone isn’t smart. Smart is not about how much you know, but how much you can learn. Smart is the ability to change your mind. In a new economy, where new jobs are being invented every day, requiring new skills, and using new knowledge, we need more self-regulated learners—college graduates who are able to learn new things, reflect and change their minds to adapt to new situations and new information. Learn to change your mind.