Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)

Sal Kahn

This is a review written by Kahn (of Kahn Academy) trying to 1) describe the current state of AI in education and 2) prognosticate about the future of AI in education. First and foremost, Kahn has a particular point of view - he is selling an AI product that has been developed by Kahn academy. The book has some useful nuggets and is pretty straight forward about how AI is affecting students right now. But even on reading it, I found it to be behind. The LLM world and educational culture is moving too fast. Or maybe more likely, the educational culture has been shifting since Covid, and we are only now, as educators, seeing the chasm between where we are and where students are (mostly I am talking about motivation and educational culture here, not student content acquisition). So Kahn's product is selling a particular point of view (highly regulated tools for motivated learners) that is simply not the reality of the current wild west of AI. 

2 stars (out of 4)

Building Equity: Policies and Practices to Empower all Learners

Dominique Smith, Ian Pumpian, Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher

This is part motivational writing to justify why equity is important in schools, and part 'how-to' for districts to assess current equity. They propose an Equity Taxonomy so you can work on different foundational problem areas, and have accompanying checklists for assessment. The book says it is for all educators, but the emphasis (most examples) are from public school districts and mostly lower schools (K-8). So while systemically this might be good for my private high school as a self assessment tool, it is not particularly useful for the individual teacher. The one exception would be the Instructional Excellence chapter that had a few good reminders on the value of explicitly establishing purpose and how to think about progression toward student centered learning.
2 stars (out of 4)

Lab Girl

Hope Jahren

A memoir telling the 20 year story of what it is like being a woman scientist. Jahren is a botanist who documents her journey through grad school and subsequent setting up of 3 separate labs as she moves from school to school to find her home. Along the way, we are invited into her life story where she details the subtleties of scientific thinking, work relationships, funding, mental illness, family, students and humanity's relationship with the planet. All of this is chronicled in a way that truly provides insight into the mind of a scientist. Jahren uses a storytelling device where each chapter is preceded by a short description of something fascinating from the world of plants that she then parallels in her own story. She clearly loves plants and the earth and the amazing life that these plants are. This is clearly communicated and gives the reader a true appreciation for both the complexity of life and the crazy adaptability of living things to make live over generations possible. This is a fabulous story. At the same time, I found it to be a story that easily walks that middle ground of books. Every time I sat down to read it, I was enthralled and educated and engaged. But is was not a thriller/page turner such that when I set it aside, it did not demand that I come back. As such, I was allowed to read this over a longer span that I normally spend on books, and maybe because of this, the appreciation set in more slowly, and more deeply.

4 stars (out of 4)

Mindset

Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D.

Subtitle: The new psychology of success: How we can learn to fulfill our potential.

Dweck is a psychologist who did a bunch of research (starting with kids) about how people learn, think about intelligence and respond to failure. She comes up with a paradigm that suggests people are either in a "Fixed Mindset" or a "Growth Mindset". Fixed being: you can't change your talent or intelligence, and Growth being: you can learn new talents and learn to be more intelligent. Sort of an "if you try you can do more". Notice that this is not you can do "it", but do "more", because she does not suggest that everyone can do anything, with effort. But talent and intelligence is something that can be developed. As with all good self-help, popular psychology books, the "findings" of the research generally come across as DUH!. But Dweck infuses her book with application suggestions, leading to perhaps the most interesting insights. She presents cases for how language used can actually push people into either a fixed mindset or growth mindset in different situations. As a teacher, a coach, a person interested in social organization and structures, I see daily how students have become "grade hounds" and fall firmly into the fixed mindset. With this, I have also noticed how my natural language pushes people that way (as most of us probably do in U.S. culture). So I suppose I was the target audience, someone who will now think about my language and my discussions, working to motivate people with development oriented, growth mindsets instead of results driven, fixed mindsets. The DUH! portion may be that this has been my goal and my interest in teaching and coaching from day one, but now I have a framework to help shape my own thinking.
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Brain Rules

John Medina

Found this book by chance on a colleagues book shelf and promptly "borrowed" it. Medina is a molecular biologist and brain scientist. His personal research and review of current leading science about the brain led to this book, which presents 12 rules for how the brain operates. What I like in particular about Medina's approach is that every rule is accompanied by practical ideas for both education and business. I also appreciate that he admits that some of his ideas are just that... untested ideas that should be investigated, tried and studied. He doesn't have the answers, but he is willing to think about them. Just a couple of teasers for education:

• Committing learning to long term memory requires repetition, both while awake and (by your brain) while sleeping. Missing the conscious and explicit repetition or the sub-conscious, repetition while sleeping will decrease the likelihood of you remembering something. How do I organize my "teaching day" to take advantage of this and help (require) students to do so.
• Activity while learning (not just adjacent to, but while) increases ability to learn. Does taking time "out of class" to do this actually make learning more efficient
• Multiple, simultaneous sensory inputs are better than single sense. Can I organize lecture/discussion away from solitary text to text+pictures, or discussion+sound, or ...

This is definitely a read and discuss for educators.

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