AI Part 1: Underlooking or Overlooking

There was a brainstorm session between a group of educators in the spring of 2023. The premise was on how a student can get support using AI as a tool, and then the agenda would shift to how teachers could get a boost themselves to rapidly create quality content.   

The video that opened the conversation was this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo 
by Sal Khan from Khan Academy. Early in the video, he states the 2 Sigma Problem: essentially that tutoring creates significant growth in learners, but tutoring is not accessible to everyone. Quality one-on-one tutoring accelerates learning, but we don’t have the resources to get that to 25+ individual kids in a classroom.  
 
I am guilty of derailing the meeting agenda. I called out a blind spot in our conversation. We introduced the 2-Sigma Problem and AI as a potential solution, but then post-haste jumped to how to create content for teachers through AI. We moved away from how to help the learner to how to help the teacher. I felt we needed to stay student-centered. 
 
I was on a mission because I needed to know if we even were using our current resources to help the learner. It happens with educators, just as with any high-level creative enterprise, that we at times get so focused on the next thing - and the potential of that next thing changing everything if it was just in our grasp - that we miss what we already have right in front of us. In this case, we were looking for a tool to support personalized student agency and we already had it. 
 
Our school district had a contract with Tutor.com (I’ll leave its cost out of this). Tutor.com provides live tutors, emphasis on math and ELA. I sampled it with a few students to see the potential. It took handholding to guide them on how to use it but it proved surprisingly effective in a few test cases.   
 
At the meeting, I asked if any staff had used Tutor.com. No one had. My point was this: we are speaking in an all-too-common educator fever dream... this fever dream was that AI would make a teacher’s job easier to create learning... all the while we skip over a progressive tool that fundamentally changes student equity. We had it at our fingertips. I will say it again, we were seeking a new resource to change our world when we were overlooking a resource we already had. 
 
One of the staff members then challenged me to put my energy where my mouth was: use it more robustly before the end of the school year. That was fair... 
 
More on that in the next post... 

* Link to actual research paper addressing the 2-Sigma Problem: 
​https://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf​