Seven weeks ago, Turnitin launched its preview for its AI writing detection tool. As of May 14, the company has processed at least 38.5 million submissions for AI writing, and, to no surprise, they’re uncovering AI-written text, according to a recent blog post from Turnitin’s Chief Product Officer Annie Chechitelli.

According to the data, 9.6% of their total submissions contain over 20% of AI writing and 3.5% contained between 80% and 100%.

“It’s important to consider that these statistics also include assignments in which educators may have authorized or assigned the use of AI tools, but we do not distinguish that in these numbers,” Chechitelli wrote. “We are not ready to editorialize these metrics as ‘good’ or ‘bad’; the data is the data.”

She also stresses that the data is imperfect. Like with any plagiarism or AI detector, there’s a chance that they’ll mistakenly flag a student’s assignment.

“As a result of this additional testing, we’ve determined that in cases where we detect less than 20% of AI writing in a document, there is a higher incidence of false positives,” she wrote. “This is inconsistent behavior, and we will continue to test to understand the root cause.”

Such mistakes could also leave educators puzzled about how to resolve the issue of suspected cheating by students. Based on feedback from teachers using Turnitin’s AI detector, Chechitelli notes that many simply don’t know how to react and approach students after their assignments are flagged for AI-written text.

Fortunately, the company has published several resources educators and district leaders should take advantage of when considering AI’s capabilities for enhancing student learning—when used ethically—in the classroom. Here’s a look at all five:

• How to approach a student misusing AI: This guide helps educators learn about how to approach this conversation with a student, starting with collecting “clear and definitive documentation.”
• Discussion starters for tough conversations about AI: Discussions surrounding the issue should support honest, open dialogue. Start with addressing the students’ strengths demonstrated in the assignment, their weaknesses and then their apparent misuse of AI.
• How to handle false positive flags: While false positive rates are small, it’s important that educators know how to begin the conversation when it occurs.
• Handling false positives as a student: Before submitting assignments, students should make sure they know the rules regarding AI use and what is and isn’t acceptable.
• Ethical AI use checklist for students: Educators encouraging the use of AI in and out of the classroom should take steps to ensure students are upholding academic integrity by following these guidelines.

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A March report from EdResearch For Recovery and the Tennessee Education Research Alliance outlines best practices and guidelines for district leaders using data collection to measure and assess their summer programs. Separated into four key focus areas, the report addresses what data schools should be collecting and research-based recommendations to support schools that seek to make the most of their data collection.

Demographics of Summer Enrollment

Questions to ask:

• “Are the students who are enrolling in the program the ones who would benefit the most from the additional academic support and school engagement opportunities?”
• “Which students should we target for additional recruiting efforts?”

Schools should maintain a list for each program or site of every student who signs up, including those who never attend. Then, link enrollment data to the district’s Student Information System (SIS) to ensure enrollment is connected to student-level characteristics.

“Analyzing enrollment, apart from attendance, can help identify barriers in the participation pipeline,” the report reads. “Capturing this year-over-year and tracking no-show rates provides a clearer picture of the percentage of students who enroll in the program and the share of those students who actually attend.”

Summer Attendance Patterns

Questions to ask:

• “What are the broad attendance trends over the course of the program?”
• “Which groups of students are attending more regularly and attending more days?”
• “Which students are not attending regularly and might benefit from support plans?”

Schools must document the programs or sites students attended, including their dates. Similarly, begin linking that data to your SIS.

“Attendance is strongest when programs communicate the benefits of high attendance during recruiting, establish an enrollment deadline, follow-up with reminders about the program, provide transportation, and create an engaging site climate with positive adult-student relationships,” according to the report.

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Teacher, Student and Family  Experiences

Questions ask:

• “Did students have positive experiences in the program?”
• “Do students report higher levels of non-academic outcomes (self-efficacy, connection etc.) at the end of the program?”
• “How do teachers and parents view the quality of the program?”
• “What do parents and teachers see as strengths and areas for growth for the program?”

Using student, teacher and family surveys, schools should administer these before and after the programs to assess changes over time, gain retrospective insight and gather feedback on teachers’ and families’ experiences.

Academic Outcomes

Questions to ask:

• “Did students attending the program improve on targeted academic skills?”
• “Did students who attended the program longer see more academic achievement?”
• “Did summer program participants perform better on benchmark exams compared with non-participants?”

Leveraging available achievement data, including benchmark exams, will help educators better understand how to design programs that provide the most academic benefit for students.

“Ultimately, collecting and examining this data can give school and district leaders a measuring stick with which to assess their progress toward their goals,” the report reads. “It can help ensure that their summer programs are always improving and providing the best possible outcomes for students.”

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The food truck will, of course, be a big part of Lincoln Public Schools’ culinary CTE program. But getting the truck going will require the skills and participation of students studying graphic design, automotive repair, business and law, among other subjects. “This food truck is a mobile classroom that is cross-curricular,” says Filippelli, Rhode Island’s 2023 Superintendent of the Year.

Lincoln Public Schools bought the five-year-old food truck from a restaurant with $125,000 worth of help from the Rhode Island Department of Education. Three graphic design students, including one who is special needs, have designed the wrap to cover the exterior of the truck, now dubbed the “Lion’s Mane” after the district’s mascot. Business and law students will review state regulations to ensure the truck has all the appropriate licenses.

The CTE focus jibes with the “vision of a graduate” framework Filippelli and his team are now finalizing after three years of work. “That’s the curriculum driver for everything we want our little Lions to be when they come to preschool and what we want our seniors to exit as when they graduate,” he says.

That vision, however, goes nowhere without the facilities to support i. Lincoln Public Schools, a suburban district of about 3,200 students, recently completed a $60 million renovation of its high school and is now building a $9 million physical education center. In the fall, voters will be asked to approve a $25 million bond to fund new gymnasiums, makerspaces, STEM spaces and reimagined cafeterias at the district’s elementary schools, where the media centers are also being renovated and updated.

“We’ve got a lot of infrastructure to support the curriculum,” Filippelli explains. “By the time we’re done, we’re probably going to spend close to $100M in renovations. That is really exciting.”

Why you need a second therapy dog

Meeting the social-emotional needs of students and adults presents one of the biggest issues that Filippelli says he and his team are facing as the school year winds down. “Last school year, we were coming out of COVID and we came out pretty strong but this year, getting back into those routines and putting COVID in the rear-view mirror, that really has been a challenge,” he says. “There have been some behaviors that we’ve had to address that just leave you scratching your head.”

The district has used ESSER funds to hire extra social workers and psychologists and ramped up professional development on trauma-informed practices. The district is also now home to a therapy dog, a Labradoodle named Willow. “She has made an incredible difference when it comes time for state testing and finals exams,” Filippelli says. “We’re considering getting a second one because it has made a huge impact to have a therapy dog here.”

Lincoln has not struggled to hire teachers as much as it has in filling administrative vacancies. The district has received about half the applications that it normally gets for an open position.

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Filippelli is seeing both lower enrollments in college administrative training programs and fewer teachers excited about moving to central office. The pay for a beginning administrator—such as an assistant principal—is not that much higher than for an experienced teacher who also earns a stipend for additional instructional duties. Some educators may not consider the pay increase worth the tilt in work-life balance for an administrator who is obligated to attend school events multiple nights a week, among other duties.

Can schools provide everything?

Filippelli is deeply involved in state and regional school safety efforts, including with SENTRY, a Northeastern University-based think tank that is backed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and is looking into the role artificial intelligence can play in K12 security, among other research. The organization has also analyzed Lincoln’s lockdown drills.

He is also an adjuct instructor in the principal development program at Providence College and often works with state legislators on laws that will impact education, both positively and negatively. He is concerned about a bill that, at a cost of $15 million, would provide universal free meals to all students and the financial strain that could place on the state’s education system.

“Ever since we became mobile hospitals during COVID, parents have this expectation that schools just need to provide everything,” he concludes. “As you provide more, responsibility gets pulled away from parents, and when people have responsibilities pulled away from them, you get used to that really quickly.”

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Firstly, teachers should not wait until the first day of school to begin getting to know their students. The summer slide can be greatly reduced by teachers who develop an understanding of their incoming students’ strengths and weaknesses before summer vacation, Hattie said in a seminar for Curriculum Associates.

The best way to do this is to talk to their previous teachers. “The summer effect is a teacher effect,” Hattie explains. “If you want an accelerated start to the new year, get to know those students, what their performance was like in the past year … so you don’t waste the first two to three weeks of the year getting to know your students—and wasting their time whilst you work out what you could’ve done.”

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This information will inform a key mindset needed to get off to a strong start. “When you walk into the classroom next year, I want you to say my job is to evaluate my impact,” he continued. “Your job is not merely to get through the curriculum,” he pointed out. “It’s every day, you’re constantly nosy: How I am doing? What am I having an effect on? What am I not having an effect on? Who am I having an effect on? Who am I not, and how big is that effect?”

Here are some of the steps Hattie says are crucial to student success on both the first day of school and throughout the first semester:

1. Work together to evaluate impact: Administrators can provide teachers with time to meet with students’ previous teachers to share assessments of each learner. Important information includes how students respond to mistakes and how they demonstrated growth.
2. Work backward: Educators can start now setting goals for the progress they want students to have made by the end of the first 12 weeks of the school year.
3. Have high expectations: These first-semester goals should be driven by high expectations. Teachers who have ambitious—but not overly ambitious—expectations have a “dramatically higher” impact on student achievement, Hattie attests.
4. Share expectations with students: When the skills embedded in the expectations are transparent, students feel like they are part of the equation and part of the acceleration.
5. Use the ‘Goldilocks’ principle: Success criteria should be “not too hard, not too easy and not too boring.” The concept of productive struggle should be a guiding light.
6. Maximize the effect of feedback: The most impactful feedback focuses on “where to next?” Students want to know how and where they can improve. “Teachers give an incredible amount of feedback but it’s variable and one-third of it is negative,” Hattie asserts.
7. Understand students’ mindsets: Before the first day of school, teachers should have a grasp of their incoming students’ sense of confidence and enjoyment and their concepts of success. Key questions educators should ask are: “Do you invite students to think aloud? How many times do teachers think aloud?”
8. Attend to the climate and cult of classrooms: Students want to know classrooms are fair and safe, and that it is OK to make errors. They also want assurance the teachers are going to help them make progress.
9. Development assessment-capable students: Students need guidance in understanding assessment results, where they stand academically and setting goals for themselves. Then, they can select tools to guide their own learning. “I want students to be their own teachers,” Hattie concluded.

The post How the end of this school year can help jumpstart next year appeared first on District Administration.

In light of this and the relatively large influx of students into our small district, we began building out our career and technical education (CTE) pathways. We are currently implementing 14 of the 16 pathways and even finding paid opportunities for many of our students along the way. Here’s what it looks like.

Launching CTE pathways

We hired a CTE coordinator in April of 2022, and she has made it her focus to look into all the courses. She also pulls together licenses, looks into who could teach what, ensures alignment with state requirements and standards, and provides curricula for teachers. Through her work, she helps expand our community partnerships so that local business leaders can visit as guest speakers and hire our students. There has been a lot on her plate in this first year!

Nevertheless, she managed to pull together a career fair that brought 72 people representing 32 local businesses. They spent four hours on our campus, offering 15-minute presentations, chatting with students about the jobs they offer and even accepting applications from some students.

We also launched an automotive program in the 2022-2023 school year that has partnered with a car dealership in nearby Alamogordo. We helped the head mechanic become certified to teach through the community college, and now he’s teaching on our campus for two hours each evening, Monday through Thursday. The owner of the dealership has encouraged students to apply for jobs, so they have an opportunity to get paid while they’re learning a skill set and figuring out what jobs are interesting to them.

Agriculture, construction, and healthcare are priorities for us as well because those sectors represent a lot of careers in our area. We also have a civic pathway that allows students to shadow police officers and have other experiences that give them insights into public service and law.

We’ve hired some students who are working on pathways for careers such as electrician or plumbing to do maintenance work within the district. Others who are working on a technology pathway have become an in-district “Geek Squad,” helping teachers and other students when they have trouble with their computers, printers or other technology. We’re grateful for the opportunity to pay these students as they learn, and they also play an important role in the operation of our school.

Those are a lot of programs to launch in a short time. One of the reasons it was possible at all was that we converted our existing elective classes into our new CTE pathways. It was still a big job that required working with the Bureau of College and Career Readiness at the New Mexico Public Education Department. They helped us understand the pathways, look at our existing classes and bring them into alignment. They also clarified what our teachers could teach and what additional licenses they would need.

Earning teachers’ buy-in

One of the challenges was helping teachers understand why things needed to change. For the most part, it was just getting them licensed, changing the codes on the class names, and making some tweaks to what was taught or how.

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Fortunately, they were mostly able to continue teaching the same stuff, and once they saw the benefits, they were actually excited. Changing the codes on the class names to CTE codes means that additional funding is available for those classes, and we were able to bring in approximately $1 million to purchase new furniture and technology such as smartboards, teacher computers, and student laptops. Elective teachers don’t often see that kind of investment in their programs because most schools give that money to the core subjects, so they did come to see the value in making some changes.

They still get to be elective teachers in one sense, but now their students can follow the pathway that allows them to pick up some certifications and experience to make themselves more marketable to employers.

Computer science for everyone

Our computer science program is a good example of how our CTE expansion has worked. We adopted Ellipsis Education’s curriculum because our teachers felt comfortable that they could implement it and were confident that it would be effective with students. In lower grades, we wanted to use a year-long process for computer science, while in high school we wanted to go with a semester schedule, and Ellipsis was flexible enough to be used for both.

At our intermediate school, which is grades 3-6, nearly 300 students use Ellipsis in a specials rotation. At our high school, we had a retired technology teacher who was working as an educational aid overseeing a credit-recovery program. When we launched our computer science CTE program, he said that he’d like to work full-time to help students develop those skills, and he has been phenomenal in that role.

One of the biggest challenges that we’ve encountered with computer science is that every student wants to jump right into game development. Everyone wants to build the blockbuster game that’s going to set them up for life, so we have to slow them down and make sure they follow the pathway correctly and gain some exposure to the various job opportunities in computer science. It includes game development, but it also includes fixing and troubleshooting computers, securing data and so many other possibilities.

Computer science students get paid

Our students have really taken to computer science as well. In their first year competing in an IT services competition, they came in eighth out of 24 teams in a regional competition. Shortly after we implemented our computer science curriculum, we were offered tech initiative funding to set up a help desk program run by our students. Because our students already had some computer science experience, we were able to get it off the ground in two weeks. Now they receive calls from state facilities all over New Mexico and help adults troubleshoot their technology for $15 an hour. They even have a repair depot to fix hardware. Some other schools have joined, but our students have been the only ones ready to get to work so far.

We also have a community partnership that allows students to earn money for their computer science knowledge. Tularosa Communications has provided spots for students to do cybersecurity work as well as maintenance work on their telecommunication lines.

We’re looking for more opportunities for students to earn money in computer science. We have about 10 of them currently working on the state helpline, and once students saw that they could earn money down the line, many began signing up for the initial courses that build towards that opportunity. For our students, ensuring that there’s money available at the end of the line has proven to be a huge motivator. If that money isn’t available through community partners, we’ll find a way to pay for it through the school or district. Money is always going to talk to kids, especially in poor, rural areas like ours.

I spent 13 years in high school classrooms and career-focused education was always very poorly funded. This is a really exciting time to be in education because those attitudes are changing. Not all kids have to go to a four-year college, and the world is desperately in need of the kinds of skills they can develop in CTE programs. There’s tons of funding available for it these days and we get to use it to develop these kids and see them bloom. And that’s what education is all about, right?

The post How new CTE pathways are inspiring students to learn—and earn appeared first on District Administration.

“We try to offer a very wide breadth of programming—extracurricular and academic—that outmatches our size,” says Smith, who after seven years leading the Point Pleasant Beach School District was named New Jersey’s 2023 Superintendent of the Year.

What Smith is most excited about right now is the expansion of what his district calls “Gull Flight School”—which is not an aeronautics program. Rather, it gives students a chance to soar academically with more than 40 dual-enrollment courses in conjunction with nearby Ocean County College, Smith explains.

“We’re seeing more and more students get so many credits in high school, they’re entering college with a full year under their belts,” he continues. “And our parents and community members are now understanding how much of a tuition savings that is.”

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The expansion of Gull Flight School is a natural outgrowth of one of the district’s most distinctive achievements. Point Pleasant Beach schools often have among the highest percentage of students taking AP classes in New Jersey. “Sometimes it’s hard for little schools to stand out because we can’t do as much,” Smith explains. “Our conversations are about access, and equity through access and how do you get all students to work at the level they’re capable of—and we believe in that work and we’ve made great strides.”

The other big initiative that has Smith fired up is Point Pleasant Beach schools’ “gamified” staff wellness program. The district offers free yoga and gym workouts and dozens of other events and activities in which teachers and other staff can win rewards. “Our tagline is ‘A healthy staff room is a healthy classroom,'” Smith says. “We believe that by attending to the social-emotional needs of our staff members, we get better performance out of everybody.”

How Point Pleasant Beach schools tackle challenges

Keeping Smith up at night is enrollment in his district. The community sustained heavy damage in Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and many older houses have been demolished and replaced by more expensive homes. This has made it harder for young families to settle in Point Pleasant Beach. The district has about 100 tuition-paying students, and its wide range of projects is a key selling point.

For instance, Smith and the school board found a way to maintain AP language programs even though only a handful of students were enrolled in the courses. Computer science and engineering classes were added when the district converted the high school media center into an “innovation collaboratory.” And when students asked for business classes for two years, the district launched a business program.

“We build what needs to be built,” Smith says. “We try to be responsive to what the needs are and we try to read the tea leaves for what’s going to position our students best for their post-secondary outcomes and dreams.”

One key to all these efforts is maintaining a strong working relationship with the school board and its president, in particular. That means Smith and his team try to be transparent when explaining the rationale behind their decisions to board members. It’s also important to remain flexible in adapting to the styles of communication and leadership of each school board member. Finally, establishing boundaries between the roles of district staff and elected officials also fosters productive working relationships.

“It’s not always rainbows and unicorns, but it’s an open line of communication,” Smith concludes. “If you continually remind everyone we have to be doing what’s in the best interest of kids—that’s what’s going to drive our programming, that’s where our budget’s going to go, that’s what every move is about—it helps you keep some of the ancillary challenges at bay.”

The post How this superintendent is amping up the power of his small N.J. district appeared first on District Administration.

Enabling new forms of interaction between educators and students, and more effectively personalizing learning are among the potential benefits of AI, the agency says in its new report, “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations.” But the risks include a range of safety and privacy concerns and algorithmic bias.

Educators and policymakers should collaborate on the following principles:

1. Emphasize humans-in-the-loop: Educators and students can remain firmly at the center of AI if users treat edtech like an electric bike rather than a robot vacuum. On an electric bike, humans are fully aware and fully in control, and their efforts are multiplied by technological enhancement. Robot vacuums complete their tasks with little human involvement or oversight beyond activating the device.
2. Align AI models to a shared vision for education: The educational needs of students should be at the forefront of AI policies. “We especially call upon leaders to avoid romancing the magic of AI or only focusing on promising applications or outcomes, but instead to interrogate with a critical eye how AI-enabled systems and tools function in the educational environment,” the Department of Education says.
3. Design AI using modern learning principles: The first wave of adaptive edtech incorporated important principles such as sequencing instruction and giving students feedback. However, these systems were often deficit-based, focusing on the student’s weakest areas. “We must harness AI’s ability to sense and build upon learner strengths,” the Department of Education asserts.
4. Prioritize strengthening trust: There are concerns that AI will replace—rather than assist—teachers. Educators, students and their families need to be supported as they build trust in edtech. Otherwise, lingering distrust of AI could distract from innovation in tech-enabled teaching and learning.
5. Inform and involve educators: Another concern is that AI will lead to a loss of respect for educators and their skills just as the nation is experiencing teacher shortages and declining interest in the profession. To convince teachers they are valued, they must be involved in designing, developing, testing, improving, adopting, and managing AI-enabled edtech.
6. Focus R&D on addressing context and enhancing trust and safety: Edtech developers should focus design efforts on “the long tail of learning variability” to ensure large populations of students will benefit from AI’s ability to customize learning.
7. Develop education-specific guidelines and guardrails: Data privacy laws such as the Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act (FERPA), the Children’s Internet Privacy Act (CIPA), and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) should be reviewed and updated in the context of advancing educational technology. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) could also be reevaluated as new accessibility technologies emerge.

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Pre-pandemic (2018-19), Guilford County Schools in North Carolina made gains in all tested subject areas among all student groups for the first time ever. Superintendent Whitney Oakley attributes this success to elevating leaders and supporting them in their efforts to guide their students.

“At the time, we were well-positioned for principals to truly serve as instructional leaders,” she says. “Our board of education had made it a priority to focus on investing in high-quality instructional resources that were aligned to state standards and kind of eliminated the wild west of Googling what you were going to teach the next day. That was kind of early! Other districts are just now starting to think about the implementation of those high-quality instructional resources.”

These solutions didn’t happen by chance, either. Their message as a district is, “We know how to do this,” she says. “We know how to make gains.”

Their preparation helped them to establish momentum, one that would carry on to this day.

“As the third-largest district in the state and the 50th-largest in our country, we’ve got to stay the course,” she explains. “We can’t do this ‘chase the shiny intervention program,’ of which there are thousands now.”

Using this framework, the district set its sights on three areas crucial for the success of her students post-pandemic: expanding learning, high-intensity tutoring and acceleration—not remediation—by teaching kids grade-level content.”

“We focused a great deal on those three things,” she says. However, she notes that the district’s implementation of effective, high-dosage tutoring has found the most success among all of its learning recovery strategies.

“I want to keep going until every student who needs a tutor has a tutor,” she explains. But there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to personalized instruction. Every student has a different set of needs, which only exacerbates the effectiveness of individual, high-dosage tutoring.

“We can’t just blanket hope,” she says. “We have to be specific, targeted and focused and use data.”

From a leadership perspective, she says there’s power in giving your team a voice, especially when it comes to meeting specific goals. When it came time to assess initiatives in her district, it was up to school leaders to be “vulnerable” in their expression of what is and isn’t working for their students.

“Sometimes we don’t do that until it’s too late,” she says. “When you think about change management and process improvement, I think we have to model that. We have 126 schools, and just the 68 elementary principals alone have a whole lot to say about how early literacy tutoring is going in their building. We should listen to them.”

As their efforts to strengthen personalized tutoring continued, they eventually established an entire tutoring department to keep up with the initiative’s growing traction.

“We had to centralize a whole department to be able to make sure that we are training tutors appropriately, we’re hiring them effectively, we’re placing them at the schools correctly and they’re tracking data to make sure that we know if the help is helping, not just in a formal program evaluation way, but really in a systems-level way,” she explains.

What sets this initiative apart is that it’s been designed from the ground up within the district itself. There are no third-party tutoring interventions, which ensures that students receive instruction specific to what’s being taught in their classrooms.

“We don’t want a tutoring program where they’re going to use their curriculum,” she says. “We want our tutors to be trained on our instructional resources before they meet with the student for the very first time.”

They also require robust training for their new tutors, including a two- to three-hour introductory training session for math tutors and an additional four hours for literacy tutors.

“They learn how to use our instructional resources,” she says. “They get access to them, and even receive legal and ethics training.”

She also describes how they select students for tutoring based on their specific needs.

“At the beginning, we used an algorithm to determine which students we would prioritize,” she says. “Those were students who had two or more risk factors for not graduating, including those who are English learners, students with a history of chronic absenteeism and students who were not proficient on one or more end-of-grade or end-of-course tests.”

By expanding their leadership within the tutoring department and using data to target specific needs, they’ve been able to double their tutoring hours compared to 2021-22. Those efforts included adding four additional positions to the department to reduce workloads, hiring their own high school students looking to fulfill service hours and contracting with local universities to pay for graduate student tutors. This year, they’ve been able to tutor nearly 8,000 students totaling more than 137,000 hours.

“We do have the largest HBCU in the country here, so we have Black and Brown engineering majors tutoring high school kids that look like them, and that’s huge,” she says. “It’s also a pipeline strategy because some of them say, ‘I like this! I think I want to get an education degree,’ and we’re like, ‘Yes!'”

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As a district, she says they’ve also learned just how impactful the teacher-tutor relationship is. It’s incredibly easy to default to homework help, “which is not tutoring,” she notes. To strengthen this bond, the district compensates its tutors for attending a weekly 30-minute meeting with classroom teachers.

“You identify the misconceptions and you think about what the skill gap was from the exit ticket the week before,” she explains. “There is meaningful, targeted skill-based conversation.”

As a result of these innovations, students not only benefit academically, but teachers lives become easier. Even the tutors regularly speak of the profound impact the department has had on their development, according to Oakley.

“They now have requested their own PLCs,” she says. “Our tutors log on twice a month and have a topic that they discuss. They want to grow professionally too. They say, ‘I need tips on making this engaging or I’ve seen this bubble up three or four times and I need a new strategy.’ It happened organically.”

All in all, successful, high-dosage tutoring relies on numerous engagement and strategies from a variety of stakeholders. But at its core, as evident in Guilford County Schools, it’s about listening, individualizing instruction, and allowing your leaders to do what they do best: lead.

The post How this superintendent incorporated high-dosage tutoring that produces results appeared first on District Administration.

The department’s Office for Civil Rights stepped in when participants at school board meeting complained that the district’s library book screening process was discriminatory based on sex, race, color, and national origin. Investigators found that Forsyth County Schools’ response was not sufficient to “ameliorate any resultant racially and sexually hostile environment,” the department said in announcing a resolution of the complaint.

“Communications at board meetings conveyed the impression that books were being screened to exclude diverse authors and characters, including people who are LGBTQI+ and authors who are not white, leading to increased fears and possibly harassment,” the Office for Civil Rights found. “Indeed, one student commented at a district school board meeting about the school environment becoming more harsh in the aftermath of the book removals and his fear about going to school.”
students expressing similar views.

In January 2022, Forsyth County Schools removed eight books from its media centers due to “sexually explicit content.” The titles included The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson, Looking for Alaska by John Green, Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez and Me Earl and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews, the Forsyth County News reported.

That removal process began when a parent complained about content in the books, according to the Forsyth County News.

The Office for Civil Rights acknowledged that the district’s review committee “rejected suggestions to handle challenged books in ways that it believed would target certain groups of students.” The district also posted statements on its media center websites that the resources provided in its libraries should reflect the students in each school community.

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The committee also asked families to talk to their children about not checking out books that do not match their values or beliefs.

The resolution of the civil rights complaint now requires Forsyth County Schools to issue a statement to students explaining the library book removal process and to offer support to students who have been impacted. This includes explaining that the removal of the eight books in January 2022 was based solely on “sexually explicit content” and that future screenings will consider whether books “promote diversity by including materials about and by authors and illustrators of all cultures.”

Each Forsyth County middle and high school will also conduct a climate to determine whether additional steps need to be taken to ensure students do not feel discriminated against when books are challenged and reviewed.

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The announcement came Thursday in an op-ed from Chancellor of New York City Public Schools David Banks on Chalkbeat. While their initial decision to ban the technology was justified, he writes, “It has now evolved into an exploration and careful examination of this new technology’s power and risks.”

“Naturally, our best-laid plans are sometimes disrupted by the advance of technology and innovation,” he notes.

Now, the school system is encouraging its educators and students to learn and explore this “game-changing technology” and share those experiences across their schools. In addition, they’re supporting teachers by giving them resources and real-life case studies of AI implementation in schools to “improve administrative tasks, communication and teaching,” the op-ed reads.

“We will also offer a toolkit of resources for educators to use as they initiate discussions and lessons about AI in their classrooms. We’ll continue to gather information from experts in our schools and the field of AI to further assist all our schools in using AI tools effectively.”

Other school districts, however, remain locked in on their decision to ban the chatbot. Seattle Public Schools made its decision in December to encourage “original thought and original work” among students, SPS Spokesperson Tim Robinson told Axios. But some see such restrictions as a losing battle.

“Banning ChatGPT is like using a piece of paper to block this flood that is coming,” University of Washington Professor Jason Yip told The Seattle Times. Although students don’t have access to it on district-owned devices or its network, they have unlimited access at home, which they can leverage to email themselves the answers, The Seattle Times adds.

Similar to NYC’s approach, SPS leaders anticipate that they will revisit the issue in the coming months.

“This is all so new that the digital team at the district is talking about it constantly,” Robinson told The Seattle Times. “There is nothing set in stone. I think the directive will be modulated here in the future.”

More from DA: What happens to librarians providing ‘obscene’ books? For some, jail time

Other districts have already embraced it, and they have been for some time. Manor Independent School District in Texas is helping students understand how to leverage generative AI for learning.

“Our energy doesn’t need to be focused in trying to stay ahead of what the kids can find on their own devices anyway or at home anyway,” Manor New Tech High School Teacher Samantha Miller told KVUE. She said the district isn’t worried about cheating because of their teaching methods.

“You have to present things [using] oral communication, [showing] your ability to speak clearly and concisely in an engaging manner,” she said. “That’s not something ChatGPT can do for you.”

In Ohio, Alliance City School District Superintendent told The Repository in April the district’s plans to incorporate ChatGPT in its classrooms.

“We can’t stop the hands of time. It’s going to be here,” he said. “Our students are going to use it in the workplace someday. Why not teach them how to use it?”

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