Getting Smart

“Learning AI is like learning to ride a bike. How do you teach somebody to balance?” asked Alex Kotran at the 2026 NewSchools Summit.  His answer: “You kind of have to feel it.” And we felt it. This gem came from a vibecoding pre-workshop led by aiEDU. While many of the attendees were familiar with using AI for typical workplace tasks like synthesis and writing support, the call to action at this year’s Summit gave us a necessary push to shift from being informed users of a tool to b

By: Shereen El Mallah, Jenny Poon, and youth authors Alex Mathew, and Adora Olise This year, Ms. Chen started using AI to provide feedback on student writing. It saved her two hours a week and ensured that the last essay in the stack received the same quality of feedback as the first. She vetted every word, but she never told her students. There was no school policy requiring disclosure, and truthfully, she couldn’t quite define where her voice ended and the algorithm’s began. 

Your feed is loaded with glowing reviews of the latest AI-powered teaching tools. They promise to save you time by assessing student work, creating customized curriculum, or writing multilingual parent newsletters. Your students have access to personalized AI tutors, automated writing and editing tools, podcast generators, research assistants, virtual labs and field trips, and multimodal textbooks. The bounty of educational technology is undeniable. There is just one problem. The workflow

By: Dr. Tovah Sheldon Naming different kinds of thinking is not new, and neither is thinking about thinking. Yet, in today’s complex and fast-changing world, the ability to think well matters! It also matters that we are intentionally working to strengthen and expand how we think. Below are eight kinds of thinking, along with brief definitions and prompts to help you reflect on and intentionally grow each one. Strategic Thinking Critical Thinking Systems & Symphonic Thinking

By: Courtney Ochi  In a recent piece by Rebecca Midles, George Philhower of Indiana’s Microschool Collaborative offered a provocation worth sitting with: “Nearly all the rules we play by in education today were made up once. None of these are laws of nature.” Most conversations about redesigning schools focus on schedules, grading, or seat time. These are real constraints-  and important ones. But there’s another set of rules that gets far less attention:

By Trey Lackey, Dr. Caleb Collier, and Dr. Tyler Thigpen from Institute for Self-Directed Learning The standard story about struggling math learners goes something like this: they don’t have enough support. Not enough teachers, not enough time, not enough resources. Fix the access problem, and you fix the learning problem. We spent the last two years testing that story at The Forest School: An Acton Academy in Atlanta, Georgia. What we found should complicate it. Our new study surveyed

By: Andy Szeto Quiet quitting entered the workplace during the pandemic as employees and leaders renegotiated expectations around workload, boundaries, and engagement. Randall S. Peterson (2025) describes leadership-level disengagement as a lack of vision, weak decision-making, and diminished trust. In schools, this pattern has real consequences: when principals disengage, instructional quality declines, staff morale erodes, and students experience inconsistent expectations and outcomes. F

This blog post is the fifth in a series documenting Norwalk Public Schools’ journey to create, implement and be formed by a living Portrait of a Graduate (PoG). Abby & Kimberly met through a PoG workshop in May of 2025, and are documenting how their intersecting work is supporting the PoG coming to life in Norwalk. Post 1: Norwalk Public Schools: Levers for Living the Portrait of a Graduate (a 7-part series) Post 2: Norwalk Public Schools: Unpacking the Levers for Deeper PoG Implement

By Danish Kurani  This article is an adapted excerpt from the book The Spaces That Make Us: Why Design Is Broken and How We Can Create a Happier, Healthier World. From the first day of kindergarten to the day students complete high school, they spend approximately fifteen thousand hours in school. The only place they might spend more time during this period is at home, which means schools are one of the most important environments for growth and development. Schools are where children

By: Dr. Tyler Thigpen Across the U.S., professional standards commissions and state agencies are revising what educators should know and be able to do. That’s encouraging. It signals seriousness about quality, learners, and the long-term health of the profession. But there is a gap hiding in plain sight: We are trying to modernize educator preparation without a shared, field-tested picture of what the future educator actually looks like in practice. Without exemplars, standards work becomes g

The forthcoming brief Prioritizing Students with Disabilities in AI Policy (EALA/New America) highlights a critical reality: 73% of students with disabilities use AI for coursework, and 57% of special educators use it to draft IEPs. Yet, 0% of AI-based interventions in a 2025 systematic review rate as “Low Risk” for algorithmic bias. Framing responsible AI as critical, the brief anchors four operational pillars, leveraging the SAFE Framework. This article proposes a framework for responsible AI

By: Misty Chandler The Real World Learning (RWL) ecosystem will come together to collaborate and learn together during the District Planning Summit, April 16. Like the RWL Conference in February, it will be about moving our collective work forward to make Market Value Asset attainment accessible for more and more students across the Kansas City region, which straddles the state line between Kansas and Missouri.  The collaboration that is a hallmark o

AI is overriding education. This technology boasts massive opportunity, allowing for powerful learning experiences (experiential and project-based) to be ungraded while still showcasing rigor, growth and capability, along with an infinite capacity for processing large swaths of data. At the same time, it also brings a suite of challenges—small stuff, like changing the value proposition of and approach to “school” as we know it.  As a result, setting learners up for success means supporti

By: Nicola Hodkowski, Ph.D. As a former upper elementary math teacher for eight years, I often felt frustrated watching my students struggle with mathematics reasoning. My students lacked the fundamental understanding needed to reason about mathematics and I felt stuck as to how to help them gain that reasoning.  I implemented many common recommendations—such as extended practice, varied manipulatives, and extra review sessions—but these were merely superficial fixes; I was simply tre

By: Alin Bennett Reality Meets Possibility On the second morning of an Education Reimagined Ecosystem Lab site visit to Colorado, our group gathered inside a small learning community called La Luz. What struck us immediately was the intentionality of the environment. The learning space was intimate, relational, and deeply connected to the identities and aspirations of the young people in the community. As we moved through learning experiences inside and beyond La Luz’s home base, we saw

Last week, we joined the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools for their latest convening right here in our backyard. The contrast was not lost on us as we were sitting just a few miles from the glass towers where engineers are busy building the software that is changing the way we work and learn. But if you walked into that room of superintendents and district teams, you wouldn’t have heard much talk about the latest disruptive software. There was no rush to find the next shiny

By: Zach Varnell In August 2021, on the West Ridge of Mount Stuart in Washington State, Kimber Cross was running out of time, water, and altitude. Off-route in 97-degree heat, her heart rate had climbed to 180 beats per minute. Her climbing partner — a trained EMT and firefighter — pressed the SOS button on their GPS tracker. What followed was a 15-hour rescue involving two teams, 20 rappels, and an airlift. Kimber made a full recovery. And the experience never left her. Not because it was

Editor’s Note: In all platform images, student and employer names have been altered to preserve privacy. While far better than nothing, work-based learning (WBL) has a credibility problem. A student completes an internship, clocks their hours, gets a line on their resume — and then what? Without rigorous, verifiable evidence of what skills were actually demonstrated on the job, work-based learning risks becoming just another box to check rather than a genuine launchpad into a career. It becom

My deepest convictions about educational assessment were shaped outside the classroom with my late wife of seven decades, Dr. Susan Gordon M.D., a pediatrician. I watched her treat a diagnosis of medical status as a starting point for understanding, never an endpoint of judgment or mere classification. Closing charts of medical status data,  she wanted to know about a child’s wider functional ecology (sleep, home stressors, supports); the relations among data points and among these data points a

Not long ago, artificial intelligence in education felt novel. It was something shiny, experimental, and, for many educators, possibly unsettling at times. When ChatGPT arrived in November 2022, the initial conversations and concerns were more focused on fear. I recall receiving emails, text messages, phone calls, and visits from educators who were concerned about cheating, plagiarism, lost skills, and what instantly felt like an overwhelming pace of change. It was something else to adjust to, n