My own state’s Department of Elementary And Secondary Education (DESE) just released an excellent guidance document yesterday with suggestions and roadmaps for how school districts — from the top leadership levels down to the classroom teacher — should be thinking and planning on Generative AI’s impact on the educational system and on student learning, and engagement.
You can access the public document here.
I had a cursory look, and I like what I see there. The manual provides necessary frameworks for discussions and policy action on AI in education, with many resource links and discussion points for individuals and groups to consider. It also encourages work around AI Literacy with students, to ensure that topics like ethics, academic integrity, and creative use are done, if at all, in thoughtful ways.
I really appreciated, too, the push of this document is to keep humans at the center of these discussions, and to remind us all that we are the ones with agency (not the AI companies, and not all of the educational material companies now pushing AI as the great savior of education), in how we — the people, from school administrators to teachers to students to families — need to be the ones making collaborative decisions about whether or not to integrate AI in school learning and school systems, and what that could look like, and what is appropriate or not.
The quote at the top of this post is from the end of the DESE AI document, and it captures the essence of this human-centered approach in a way that makes me appreciative of the work this group did on this difficult, and always changing, topic.
Peace (keep it human, y’all),
Kevin