Can artificial intelligence help teachers improve?

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A network of small New York City public high schools is exploring whether artificial intelligence can change the way teachers receive feedback on their classroom instruction.

Urban Assembly, a network of 21 schools, is working with the American Institutes for Research to develop an ai-powered tool that can help instructional coaches analyze videos of teachers delivering lessons and offer feedback, according to network leaders .

artificial intelligence is already transforming the classroom experience for many New York City students, who say chatbots like ChatGPT can help them understand difficult topics and speed up their research. But the technology has also drawn fierce opposition from some educators and officials concerned about its potential to encourage cheating and spread misinformation and bias.

After initially banning ChatGPT on school devices over concerns about academic dishonesty, the New York City Department of Education has pledged to teach students how to use the technology responsibly and plans to open an institute to study its applications in schools. schools.

The use of ai in teacher training raises similar questions. Proponents say it could save instructional coaches a lot of time and expand access to feedback that improves the quality of teaching. But some teachers said they still had questions about how accurately the technology can capture subtle classroom interactions, how useful its data will be and whether it will be skewed by bias.

Judy Cappuccio, a math teacher and instructional coach at the Urban Assembly Mathematics and Science Institute for Young Women in central Brooklyn, said she is “open” to the idea of ​​getting help from the ai ​​tool, but she has a “good amount of skepticism.”

“I would like to see it in action. It would take some verification for me to trust him at first,” she said.

Several schools in Urban Assembly's network are already part of a pilot program in which educators record themselves teaching and analyze the videos in detail with instructional coaches to improve their practice, a practice that Urban Assembly CEO , David Adams, compared it to athletes reviewing game tapes.

The problem, Adams said, is that it can take instructional trainers hours to review a single video, limiting the scale of the program. That means teachers don't get enough feedback and receive it less frequently than they should, she said.

That's where the new ai-powered tool comes into play. By the end of a two-year rollout, project leaders at the American Institutes for Research hope it will be able to measure things like how often students and teachers talk, laugh and shout, according to a proposal the researchers presented to the Urban Assembly.

The tool will initially be implemented in all 21 schools in Urban Assembly's network, although Adams hopes to expand its use over time. According to the chain, its development, testing and implementation will cost around $500,000 over two years.

The tool will also be able to use “natural language processing,” a branch of ai that seeks to understand the meaning of language, to evaluate how “positive,” “respectful,” or “insulting” the teacher's language is.

Some of the details captured by the ai ​​tool may seem small, but they can offer clues about the climate of a classroom that teachers can learn from, Adams said.

When children and teachers laugh together, for example, it can be a sign that they are “in the same emotional space” and that students are better prepared to absorb the lesson, Adams said.

Capturing and documenting those moments on video can help teachers “replicate and build on them,” added Kiri Soares, director of the Urban Assembly Mathematics and Science Institute for Young Women, one of the schools that plans to pilot the new tool.

The tool won't replace instructional coaches, but it will save them time by pointing them to relevant sections of the video, producing audio transcripts and quickly collecting data that would take humans hours to compile, Adams said.

Ultimately, the tool could expand the program and allow more teachers to benefit, Adams argued.

The tool will not be used for evaluation purposes and will not be linked to performance reviews conducted by the school principal, he added. The program is meant to provide support and highlight what teachers do well, not just what they need to improve, Adams said.

Project leaders propose using the tool to help schools expand an existing teacher feedback program called CLASS, which uses instructional coaches to evaluate educators on metrics ranging from academic content to their relationships with students. based on video recordings of their classroom lessons.

Using video instead of live observations can give a more honest view of the classroom and gives teachers a chance to see themselves in action, advocates said.

Professors interested in the ai ​​proposal but have questions

Liza Backman, a science teacher and instructional coach at Urban Assembly Young Women's Mathematics and Science Institute in central Brooklyn, said she could see the benefits of having the kind of data the intelligence tool provides at her fingertips. artificial can collect quickly.

“I think it's a recount that would be interesting,” he said.

Still, he cautioned, those data points are only useful if there is an instructional coach to help understand what they mean within the context of the classroom.

“In some of the lessons there was no laughter because we were talking about a very serious topic,” he said.

Backman also raised questions about what types of school environments would appear in the videos used to train the ai ​​and whether any bias could be generated as a result.

“If I give you videos of primarily white schools, versus primarily black and brown schools, how are you going to navigate the names?” she asked.

Adams said the tool under development for Urban Assembly schools would be trained on other Urban Assembly schools with similar demographics.

There are other possible disadvantages.

The ai-powered tool can miss significant moments from a classroom video that don't fit neatly into one of the categories it's supposed to track — moments that an instructional coach would have caught if they'd been watching, said Soares, the Assembly Institute Director. Urban.

But that's a worthwhile trade-off if you can expand the number of teachers participating in the program, he said.

“Yes, we may miss some of those moments,” he said. “But more people will get more things.”

chalk beat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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