In this interview, Barbara Gross talks with Thomas Hatch about her research with schools in Italy and what she observed during the COVID-19 related school closures. Gross is currently Junior Professor in Educational Science with a Focus on Intercultural Education at the Faculty of Philosophy at the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany. Until October of 2022, she was an Assistant Professor at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, in Northern Italy. Bozen-Bolzano is in South Tyrol, a region bordering Austria, where almost 70% of the population speaks German as their primary language. Some of Gross’ work explores this linguistic diversity as Italian is the language of instruction in Italian language schools and taught as a second language in German-language schools; German is the language of instruction in German-language schools and taught as a second language in Italian-language schools (Further Language Learning in Linguistic and Cultural Diverse Contexts: A Mixed Methods Research in a European Border Region). Because of the right to schooling in these official languages teacher education in the region also has to prepare future teachers to work in each system (Approaches to Diversity: Tracing Multilingualism in Teacher Education in South Tyrol, Italy).This interview is one in a series exploring what has and has not changed in education since COVID. Previous interviews and posts have looked at developments in Poland, Finland, New Zealand, South Africa, and Vietnam.
Thomas Hatch: Can you share a little about what happened in schools in Italy when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, and then how the education system there has responded?
Barbara Gross: Obviously, Italy was one of the first societies to feel the effects of COVID so the schools closed very early, with the first school closures in Europe taking place in Northern Italy on the 21st of February, 2020. Then, because Italy has a centralized education system, the decision was made to close schools and universities nationwide on March 4, but initially they only announced a closure until March 15th. The governments’ decision to close the schools focused on protecting the health of children and young people, and they ultimately decided to leave schools closed until September 2020. I assume the long lockdown was influenced by the fact that there are a lot of schools in Italy with small classrooms and a lack of teachers which made it difficult for social distancing and for staffing smaller groups.
When the government closed schools, they also announced there should be an immediate switch to online teaching, but in Italy there is something called “school autonomy” and within it “didactic autonomy,”which meant that schools also had autonomy to decide how to deal with online teaching and remote teaching. School autonomy took effect in 2000, and within the School Autonomy Regulations there are rules regulating teaching autonomy (art. 4) and organisational autonomy (art. 5). The application of these rules is the direct responsibility of the school, which implements them with flexible criteria, but respecting the families’ freedom of educational choice and, in any case, recognising and valuing diversity, promoting the potential of each pupil, and adopting all the initiatives useful for achieving educational success. The educational institutions ensure the implementation of remedial and support, continuity and school and career guidance initiatives for pupils. On the basis of autonomy, educational institutions can change the annual number of hours of teaching disciplines (subjects) by a quota of 20%.
In terms of the response to the closures, generally, the tendency was for schools to go to remote teaching immediately and to do a lot of online teaching. That was a challenge, because neither the teachers nor the children were well prepared for the transition. It was difficult also in some regions where the internet connections still are not very good. In those areas, the Ministry of Education encouraged teachers to contact children via phone if they didn’t have access to the internet or to send materials to children or parents. Locally, there were also a schools where teachers would leave materials for the students and then return to pick up the work that the parents brought back to the school after the students worked on them In some primary schools, it went on like that until the end of the 2020 school year so those schools never even had remote teaching. However, some schools reopened for children whose parents had to go back to work, and the government did discuss opening up some “catch-up programs” during the summer, but the teachers’ unions said that the health of teachers also had to be safeguarded. That’s why schools didn’t open up again until September, 2020.
TH: What about other aspects of the response? Was there a local or regional effort to get people connected or to get them devices?
BG: Because the internet access in some places was so sporadic, getting everyone devices wasn’t really a viable solution. But there were funds for devices, especially for what they considered “vulnerable children.” However, from the beginning of the outbreak the decision was to leave the schools closed to protect the health of children, so the focus wasn’t really on education. The expertise that was considered was always the expertise of medical experts. Then the government started to consider the economy and opening up businesses, and it wasn’t until after that that they thought about education.
[F]rom the beginning of the outbreak the decision was to leave the schools closed to protect the health of children, so the focus wasn’t really on education. The expertise that was considered was always the expertise of medical experts. Then the government started to consider the economy and opening up businesses, and it wasn’t until after that that they thought about education.
TH: And what happened with the exams during the closures?
BG: Generally, the government had a very pragmatic way of dealing with exams, stating that grading should not disadvantage learners. In high schools, for example, exit exams for graduating students were simplified, and in the composition of the final grade, the oral part received a higher weight; however, the oral part was held in person, with social distancing. For younger students, you can see from the data that students’ grades for the year were higher than normal. That probably reflects the concern about inequality and not wanting to penalize students who didn’t have the support to study at home or to get the help they would have gotten in schools. They didn’t want the students’ grades during the closures to hold anyone back.
TH: What happened when the schools came back in person in September 2020?
BG: After the schools reopened, there was no other national shutdown, but in the spring of 2021 there were some local school closures. Again, these decisions were made at the national level, in response to data health, for example, on the number of cases in a particular area. When the students did come back in September 2020, schools in certain regions tried different kinds of social distancing. Some had different entrances and exits. Some schools also continued with hybrid education, having some students in class at school and some at home online at the same time. There was also priority placed on keeping schools open for younger children, to try to make sure they can be in school, every day, in person, but then for secondary school students, it was more of a hybrid mixture.
In terms of other changes, primary schools in my area in South Tyrol introduced a new period of “self-organized learning” during the first hour of the school day. This was supposed to allow for flexible entrances – and thus lower the risk for infections – and, at the same time, help students to adjust to going back to school and catch up on possible learning losses.
“As far as the newly introduced learning format of self-organized or independent learning is concerned, around 80 percent of the teachers and pupils in primary and secondary schools stated that they got along well with the learning format of self-organized or independent learning. A similar picture emerges for parents and guardians: 82 percent believe that their child coped well with this learning period. A point of criticism in connection with self-organized learning is that, especially in primary school, the pupils were often given too few challenging tasks in this learning area. It was also criticized that the use of digital media was limited at this school level.”
The national government also took other steps, for example, they were very committed to enhancing or fostering the wellbeing of students. Even though Italy doesn’t normally have school psychologists, they provided funding so that schools could get a psychologist or find other ways to support students and even teachers and parents, if needed – the aim was preventing and treating negative consequences that emerged during COVID-19. That was a national decision, and it meant that schools had a right to a certain number of hours of support from a psychologist in 2022 – however, they also discussed the need for a permanent systemic introduction of the function of psychologists in educational institutions.
References
Gross, B., Kelly, P., & Hofbauer, S. (2022). ‘Making up for lost time’: neoliberal governance and educational catch-up for disadvantaged students during the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, Germany and England. Zeitschrift für Diversitätsforschung und -management2, 161-174. doi: 10.3224/zdfm.v7i2.04
Kelly, P., Hofbauer, S., & Gross, B. (2021). Renegotiating the public good: Responding to the first wave of COVID-19 in England, Germany and Italy. European Educational Research Journal, 20(5), 584-609. doi: 10.1177/14749041211030065
Francesconi, D., Gross, B., & Agostini, E. (2021). The role and facets of wellbeing during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative analysis of Austrian and Italian educational policy. Psihološka istraživanja, 24(2),141-162. doi: 10.5937/PSISTRA24-32602
Gross, B., Francesconi, D., & Agostini, E., (2021). Ensuring equitable opportunities for socioeconomically disadvantaged students in Italy and Austria during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic: A qualitative analysis of educational policy documents. Italian Journal of Educational Research, 27, 27-39. doi: 10.7346/sird-022021-p27
In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Román Liera shares his experience as a scholar working to understand and disrupt processes of racial inequity within higher education systems. Liera is an Assistant Professor of Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” This theme charges researchers and practitioners with confronting racial injustice directly while imagining new possibilities for liberation. The call urges scholars to look critically at our global past and look with hope and radicalism towards the future of education. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?
Román Liera (RL): Education is an applied field, meaning that we do not research for research’s sake. Instead, we research to advance the field’s knowledge to change norms, policies, practices, and other processes perpetuating inequity and injustice in schools and universities. The AERA call moves us to be equity minded in this work and I hope educational change scholars consider dismantling injustice and constructing possibilities in their research and practice. Additionally, as educators and leaders, we must be intentional about pausing to critically reflect on how our identities, practices, beliefs, and actions could create unwelcoming environments for students of color and other people with minoritized identities. Moreover, equity-mindedness is a cognitive schema that should inform educational change scholars sense making of racial injustice and action to confront, imagine, and actualize racial justice in education (Bensimon, 2007; Bensimon & Malcom, 2012). Being equity-minded means having the knowledge to be critically conscious of race, aware that racialized patterns are embedded in organization norms, policies, and practices, to use data disaggregated by race/ethnicity to identify racial equity gaps, and are responsible for changing norms, policies, and practices that sustain racial inequity (Bensimon & Malcom, 2012; Dowd & Bensimon, 2015).
Román Liera
As scholars, we are responsible for critically theorizing the historical and sociocultural context of what we are studying to understand how organization norms, policies, and practices perpetuate racial inequity. In my research, I theorize how the sociopolitical context of racism in the academic job market (Rodgers & Liera, 2023), faculty hiring (Liera, 2020a; Liera & Hernandez, 2021), presidential search and appointment processes (Bensimon & Associates, 2022), and racial equity professional development (Liera, 2020b; 2023a) normalize whiteness. I intend to provide recommendations that higher education administrators, faculty, and staff can use to disrupt whiteness and construct racially equitable environments. For example, Dr. Theresa Hernandez and I studied how color-evasiveness operated through search committee members’ practices in ways that undermined policies designed to centralize racial equity. By doing this, we were able to provide specific recommendations for search committees to identify and disrupt color-evasive practices that delegitimize and devalue faculty candidates of color. For example, administrators and faculty should systematically analyze their campus cultures, including articulating how they think about racial diversity and racial equity regarding organizational change (White-Lewis, 2022).
LTC: In your work, you examine how systemic racism and white supremacy manifest for students, faculty, and community in institutions of higher education, specifically through hiring practices. What are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?
RL: I have designed my research program to study organizational change and racial equity. Specifically, I study how racism operates through organization norms, policies, and practices that we often assume are race-neutral. In my scholarship and consultation work, I have observed and experienced the insidious ways white supremacy operates in the sensemaking of administrators, faculty, and staff to understand organizational change regarding racial equity. A major lesson that the field of Educational Change should consider is acknowledging that people in the U.S. have been socialized in hegemonic ideologies like white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and anti-Indigeneity (Diamond & Gomez, 2023; Vega et al., 2022). These ideologies lead to schemas for understanding racism, racial equity, and organizational change, which prevent people from transforming schools, school districts, colleges, and universities. For example, in the U.S., color-evasive racism is a dominant racial schema that informs how administrators, faculty, staff, and educators understand race and racism (Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Chavez-Moreno, 2022; Ray, 2022) within the context of organizational change (Liera, 2023a; McNair et al., 2020). In my work on faculty and presidential hiring, I argue that hiring routines do not have to be explicitly racist to reproduce racial inequity (Bensimon & Associates, 2022; Liera, 2023b).
“Administrators and faculty should systematically analyze their campus cultures, articulating how they think about racial diversity and racial equity regarding organizational change.”
In faculty hiring, color-evasive schemas often filter implicit biases about race. When predominantly White hiring committee members rely on their preferences to favor White faculty candidates and disqualify candidates of color, they selectively apply hiring criteria based on race and gender and expect faculty candidates of color to work twice as hard but scrutinize them twice as much in comparison to White faculty candidates (Liera & Hernandez, 2021). For these reasons, educational change scholars should name color-evasiveness and race neutrality as race-conscious schemas that impede racial equity in organizational change.
Another major lesson for the field of Educational Change is the importance of defining racial equity within the context of organizational change and what organizational change means in one’s specific space. For me, racial equity has two dimensions: (a) race is a system of power (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015), and (b) equity requires accountability to transform norms, policies, and practices that reproduce inequity into norms, policies, and practices that sustain equitable experiences, processes, and outcomes (Bensimon & Malcom, 2012; Dowd & Bensimon, 2015).
Defining racial equity with these two dimensions in mind brings me to another major lesson for the field of Educational Change. Individual change and reflection are important components of organizational change, but they do not transform organizations, thus limiting organizational change. I have encountered challenges to organizational-level racial equity work when educators experience discomfort learning how they have perpetuated racial inequity through their practice. In particular, when White educators committed to change feel white guilt and white fragility, they often disengage from developing strategies and tools to transform norms, policies, and practices or rationalize racial equity as unfairly advantaging People of Color at the expense of White people. For these reasons, it is important to understand racial equity and equity-mindedness at the organizational level.
“Individual change and reflection are important components of organizational change, but they do not transform organizations.”
Dr. Steve Desir and I published an essay drawing from Dowd and Bensimon’s (2015) principles of equity-mindedness and Ray’s (2019) work on racialized organizations to conceptualize equity-minded organizations. In doing so, we argued that equity-minded organizations are social actors that must challenge the status quo by deconstructing and redesigning organizational structures, policies, and practices in ways that (a) enhance the agency of racially minoritized groups; (b) redistribute resources intending to disrupt white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and anti-Indigeneity that are deeply embedded in racialized organizations; (c) delegitimize whiteness as a credential by recognizing and integrating the experiences and knowledge of racially minoritized groups; and (d) are attuned to the structural disadvantages experienced by members of minoritized groups (Liera & Desir, 2023). Instead of focusing on individual-level change, racial equity work at the organizational level requires collective change across multiple organizational units.
LtC: In some of your recent work, you demonstrate how institutions of higher education can use professional development to disrupt white supremacy and foster organizational change. How might your findings help inform our understanding of professional development and educational change for equity more broadly?
RL: I received my training at the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education (CUE) under the guidance of Drs. Estela Bensimon (founder of CUE and the Equity Scorecard) and Alicia Dowd. CUE advanced research and practice on racial equity, equity-mindedness, and organizational change. CUE’s theory of change is grounded in practitioner inquiry, which emphasizes that education practitioners learn and change when they encounter indeterminate situations that make them realize their actions do not have the impact they desire (Bensimon & Malcom, 2012). Education change leaders who use practitioner inquiry to design professional development create structured opportunities for educational practitioners to learn about racial equity and organizational change. Practitioner inquiry requires facilitators to provide protocols, tools, and language that require educational practitioners to use equity-mindedness to assess their organization’s norms, policies, and practices (Dowd & Bensimon, 2015).
For example, a provost and faculty leaders contract external consultants to facilitate long-term racial equity professional development training. The facilitators help the provost and faculty leaders identify key campus stakeholders, those in positions with decision-making power, who have expressed interest in racial equity and organizational change. After the campus leaders identify and invite key campus stakeholders to participate, the consultants facilitate the first training of the series to define key terms (e.g., racial equity, equity-mindedness, institutionalized racism), discuss the purpose of the training, and provide campus-wide data disaggregated by race and ethnicity in the area that the inquiry will focus on (e.g., faculty hiring). In the second training, the facilitators provide inquiry tools (Center for Urban Education, 2020) to help the participants assess the campus by identifying existing norms, policies, and practices perpetuating racial inequity in the area of interest. In the same meeting, the facilitators provide additional inquiry tools for the participants to decide what norms, policies, and practices need further assessment (Center for Urban Education, 2020). In the third training, the participants use equity-mindedness to assess their collected data before deciding what norms, policies, and practices need to change. In doing so, the participants develop new norms, policies, and practices to implement. In the fourth training, the participants strategize on how to implement the changes and how to assess whether the changes are having the intended impact.
“Transformation, at both the school and higher education levels, requires systemic and multi-level change.”
Although my example reflects a linear process, practitioner inquiry relies on using equity-mindedness to use systematic data collection and analysis to assess and create norms, policies, and practices. An important point is that practitioner inquiry for racial equity requires the designers and facilitators of the professional development to be equity-minded and have the facilitation skills to scaffold racial equity inquiry (Gonzales et al., 2021; Liera, 2020a, 2023a).
LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?
RL: A few weeks ago, I talked with my colleague, Dr. Patricia Virella, about transformation and change. We talked about how transformation, at both the school and higher education levels, requires systemic and multi-level change. For an educational change scholar or practitioner, the thought of transforming entire school, district, or university systems could be overwhelming. Given this context, school and higher education leaders could best support educational change champions by scaling down transformational efforts into more manageable, localized change efforts.
For example, a provost can publicly support racial equity efforts on campus, train deans in equity-mindedness, and provide financial support for deans to train and support administrators, faculty, and staff in their college to use an equity-minded lens to assess their practices. In this example, deans work with their administration, faculty, and staff to facilitate racial equity work in more manageable responsibilities across program offices and departments. Instead of having one cross-campus committee or office responsible for racial equity change work for the entire campus. I pose the following questions as entry points to scale down racial equity change efforts: What is within the jurisdiction of teachers, counselors, faculty, administrative staff, deans, provosts, and other stakeholders on campus? How might they use those resources/skills to support change? What coalitions (internal and external to the organization) are needed to substantiate smaller-level change efforts toward implementing racial equity?
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
RL: In recent years, I have seen more engagement with theorizing, studying, and writing about racial equity and organizational change. Engaging with racial equity and organizational change is exciting because we are advancing knowledge on how to study and disrupt systemic and institutionalized racism in education organizations. Victor Ray’s (2019), A Theory of Racialized Organizations created a space for organizational change scholars to integrate organization theories and race theories in the fields of education and higher education. I recently read an article by Drs. Heather McCambly and Jeannette Colyvas (2023) where they theorize about racialized change work and provide a model to understand the conditions under which an organization will likely challenge the status quo, when an organization’s racial equity efforts weaken the status quo, and when an organization meaningfully implements racial equity change efforts. For example, organization actors are more likely to advocate changing the status quo when their leadership supports their efforts and when they experience contradictions between espoused equity and justice values and existing practices. However, anti-racist frames like equity-mindedness must inform such motivation to create and adopt routines that disrupt the status quo of white supremacy.
I also read Diamond and Gomez’s (2023) paper on how anti-Blackness and White supremacy are embedded in education organization routines. They advise education change actors to reflect-in-action or engage in “routines and the contemporaneous active evaluation of professional thoughts, theories, actions, and practices during the action itself” (p. 5). Empirically, some scholars have applied racialized organizations to understand racism in admission processes (Poon et al., 2023), graduate education processes (Perez et al., 2023), the academic job market processes (Rodgers & Liera, 2023), and faculty hiring processes (White-Lewis, 2020). These new lines of inquiry allow the understanding of taken-for-granted organizational processes to be highlighted and disrupted. Suppose the field of Educational Change understands how seemingly race-neutral organizational processes perpetuate racial inequity. In that case, scholars can provide recommendations supporting education change practitioners in transforming organizations. Seeing that research on racialized organizations is informing the field of Educational Change is exciting because identifying how to transform education organizations into equity-minded, anti-racist organizations is the first step to long-lasting and meaningful change.
References:
Bensimon, E. M. (2007). The underestimated significance of practitioner knowledge in the scholarship on student success. The Review of Higher Education, 30(4), 441–469. https://doi. org/10.1353/rhe.2007.0032
Bensimon, E. M., & Malcom, L. (2012). Confronting equity issues on campus: Implementing the equity scorecard in theory and practice. Stylus.
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Colorblind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Rowman & Littlefield.
Chávez-Moreno, L. C. (2022). Critiquing racial literacy: Presenting a continuum of racial literacies. Educational Researcher, 1–8(7), 481–488. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X221093365
Diamond, J. B., & Gomez, L. M. (2023). Disrupting white supremacy and anti-Black racism in educational organizations. Educational Researcher. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X231161054
Dowd, A. C., & Bensimon, E. M. (2015). Engaging the race question: Accountability and equity in U.S. higher education. Teachers College Record.
Gonzales, L. D., Hall, K., Benton, A., Kanhai, D., & Nuñez, A. M. (2021). Comfort over change: A case study of diversity and inclusivity efforts in U.S. higher education. Innovative Higher Education, 46(4), 445–460. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-020-09541-7
Liera, R. (2020b). Moving beyond a culture of niceness in faculty hiring to advance racial equity. American Educational Research Journal, 57(5), 1954-1994. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831219888624.
Liera, R. (2023a). Expanding faculty members’ zone of proximal development to enact collective agency for racial equity in faculty hiring. The Journal of Higher Education.https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2023.2195769.
Liera, R.,& Desir, S. (2023). Taking equity-mindedness to the next level: The equity-minded organization. Frontiers in Education, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2023.1199174.
Liera, R., & Hernandez, T. E. (2021). Color-evasive racism in the final stage of faculty searches: Examining search committee hiring practices that jeopardize racial equity policy. The Review of Higher Education, 45(2), 181-209. https://doi.org/10.1353/rhe.2021.0020.
McCambly, H., and Colyvas, J. A. (2023). Dismantling or disguising racialization? Defining racialized change work in the context of postsecondary grantmaking. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 33(2), 203–216. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muac021
McNair, T. B., Bensimon, E. M., & Malcolm-Piqueux, L. (2020). From equity talk to equity walk: Expanding practitioner knowledge for racial justice in higher education. Jossey-Bass.
Perez, R. J., Motshubi, R., & Rodriguez, S. L. (2023). (Mis)alignment of challenges and strategies in promoting inclusive racial climates in STEM graduate departments. AERA Open. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584231168639
Poon, O., Lee, D. H., Galvez, E., Engler, J. S., Serrano, B., Raza, A., et al. (2023). A mobius model of racialized organizations: Durability of racial inequalities in admissions. Journal of Higher Education. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2023.2203630
Ray, V. (2022). On critical race theory: Why it matters and why you should care. Random House.
Rodgers, A. J., & Liera, R.(2023). When race becomes capital: Diversity, faculty hiring, and the entrenchment of racial capitalism in higher education. Educational Researcher. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X231175359.
Vega, B. E., Liera, R.,& Boveda, M. (2022). “Hispanic Serving Institutions” as racialized organizations: Elevating intersectional consciousness to rethink the “H” in HSIs. AERA Open, 8(1), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584221095074.
White Lewis, D. K. (2022). The role of administrative and academic leadership in advancing faculty diversity. The Review of Higher Education, 45(3), 337–364. https://doi.org/10.1353/ rhe.0.0178
ChatGPT dominated the headlines for a few months following its release, but many articles have already expanded their focus to consider the impact of AI more broadly in education. These articles describe some of the recent efforts to study and support beneficial uses of AI, but they also continue to explore many of the possibilities, questions, and concerns that have been raised about ChatGPT. As these articles describe, students now have new capabilities to write, to complete assignments, and to cut corners and “cheat” – passing on tasks they used to have to handle themselves to their AI assistants. Teachers, in turn, have new capacities to summarize and review content, to generate assignments, assessments and feedback, but they also face new demands to detect AI-generated texts and to ensure that any AI-assistance they get is accurate, educative, and beneficial.
But what do these developments amount to? Will they lead to fundamental shifts in conventional instructional and typical schools? Schools have absorbed numerous new developments before –computers, the internet, mobile phones and countless others – without changing the nature of classroom activity or the basic character of schooling. In fact, as David Tyack and Larry Cuban have discussed in books like Tinkering Toward Utopia and Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom although efforts to reform and “disrupt” schools are often organized around new technologies, schools also change reforms leading to more incremental changes than many expect and hope for (a concern that Joel Rose raises about the recent influx of AI as well). The resistance of the “grammar of schooling” to many ambitious reform efforts helps to explain why, despite the hopes to “reimagine education” during and after the COVID-19 induced school closures, I’ve seen so many schools and school systems who have returned to business as usual and “resumed their regular programming.” Nonetheless, there have been times when changes in populations and technological capabilities contributed to what turned out to be dramatic changes in schooling including, as David Labaree explains, the development of graded schools, as well as mass enrollment in free, public education, and significant expansions in who could access and complete a high school education. In short, there is no question that ChatGPT and AI are already changing teaching, learning and schooling in some ways, but what difference will those changes make and for whom?
ChatGPT and AI are already contributing to changes in schools, but what difference will those changes make and for whom?
As one effort to track the impact and influence of AI in education, below I share some of the articles from major media sources we’ve come across that discuss how policymakers are trying to respond to the new developments in AI; provide overviews and guides to the proliferation of work on AI and education; and weigh in possible impact, uses and misuses in schools.
“A new UNESCO global survey of over 450 schools and universities found that fewer than 10% have developed institutional policies and/or formal guidance concerning the use of generative AI applications. The results illustrate that an immediate response to the sudden emergence of these powerful generative AI applications that can produce written and visual creations is challenging for institutions.“
“The federal government will invest $140 million to fund seven new artificial intelligence research centers as part of the Biden-Harris administration’s plans to promote ‘responsible American innovation in artificial intelligence,’ with goals of protecting individual rights and safety…”
“‘As is true of all technologies, we know there are some serious risks. As President Biden has underscored, in order to seize the benefits of AI, we need to start by mitigating its risks,’ a White House official told reporters on background. Doing so, the official said, will provide a basis for effective responses to stronger future technology.”
“Fundamentally, AI seeks to automate processes that achieve goals, and yet, AI should never set goals. The goals must come from educators’ vision of teaching and learning and educators’ understanding of students’ strengths and needs. We summarize seven recommendations for policy action. These recommendations are for education leaders.
Emphasize Humans in the Loop
Align AI Models to a Shared Vision for Education
Design Using Modern Learning Principles
Prioritize Strengthening Trust
Inform and Involve Educators
Focus R&D on Addressing Context and Enhancing Trust and Safety
Develop Education-Specific Guidelines and Guardrails“
Recommendation for desired qualities of AI tools and systems in education
“The education partnership TeachAI has formed to help develop guidelines, resources and tools for using AI in education, as well as recommendations for professional development and more. The partnership includes the World Economic Forum, National Association of State Boards of Education, National School Boards Association, Code.org, Educational Testing Service, Khan Academy and ISTE.”
“An investment frenzy over ‘generative artificial intelligence’ has gripped Silicon Valley, as tools that generate text, images and sounds in response to short prompts seize the imagination.“
“Teachers are going to be able to help students use the tools. Did a calculator replace the role of human teachers in math classrooms? No. The teacher now has to teach how to do arithmetic without a calculator and then how to use the calculator appropriately... I don’t think there’s any danger that it’s going to be better than individualized attention from a human teacher. On the other hand, it may not be a stretch for it to be much better than having no teacher or having a teacher who’s in a classroom that has way too many students for them to pay attention to.“
“Contributor Joel Rose is not convinced artificial intelligence will transform educational outcomes. This has nothing to do with the technology itself; the way ChatGPT works is awe-inspiring. But AI’s benefits are inherently constrained by age-based cohorts, standardized curriculum and all the other hallmarks of what has been called ‘the grammar of school,’ a paradigm designed over a century ago. Here, some suggestions for how schools can break free from this legacy and shift to truly student-centered learning.”
“Educators often encounter lofty promises of technology revolutionizing learning, only to find reality fails to meet expectations. But based on his experiences with the new generation of artificial intelligence tools, contributor John Bailey believes society may be in the early stages of a transformative moment. This may very well usher in an era of individualized learning, empowering all students to realize their full potential and fostering a more equitable and effective educational experience.”
“‘Private companies are preying on school districts’ worst fears and proposing the use of technology that’s not going to work,’ said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the Education Policy Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union.”
“While there are many potential benefits and opportunities in education from the advancement of AI, there are also a copious number of instances where AI has harmed and disempowered historically and systematically excluded communities. Students will need to understand the social and ethical implications of AI as they leverage AI to solve both complex challenges and daily tasks.”
“While schools debate what to teach students about powerful new A.I. tools, tech giants, universities and nonprofits are intervening with free lessons.“
“Educators are quickly organizing to respond to the sudden rise of ChatGPT and other AI tools that some worry are a boon to student cheating and others say can help improve the learning process. We round up a list of efforts and look at why it’s an emotional issue for some.”
“The AI Coach platform, for example, guides teachers through goal-setting and action-planning cycles focused on specific areas of instructional practices. Using the platform, teachers reflect on their classroom teaching and set near-term goals as part of a self-paced module that mirrors an instructional coaching process. Teachers have an interactive conversation with a computerized coach, who asks probing, open-ended questions and offers personalized tips for improvement.”
“When asked to write a 500-word essay suitable for college admission, the computer produced a piece in seconds about a student’s interest in science and technology, work on the high school robotics team and desire to be part of a college community. It was a decent response to a basic prompt…ChatGPT is on a path to shake up college admissions, and whether schools like it or not, students, admissions professionals and high school counselors must prepare.”
ChatGPT’s release reverberated around the world. Articles about the potential and problems with the use and misuse of Chat GPT appeared across countries and continents, often focusing on concerns over privacy, cheating, and other ethical considerations.
“’As these systems get very, very powerful, that does require special concern, and it has global impact. So it also requires global cooperation,’ Sam Altman said at an event in Seoul.”
“AI technology can change the education landscape in Africa to increase access to both formal and informal education, improve access to healthcare services considering the facility and resource limitation of Africa’s health sector and increase job creation due to expansion into the AI global market.”
Australia
@PipCleaves shares a ChatGPT prompt for teachers and students, featured in The Guardian
“The president of the New South Wales Teachers Federation, Angelo Gavrielatos, said the capacity to use artificial technology to plagiarise, coupled with prolonged learning from home during Covid lockdowns, highlighted the need for a ‘more comprehensive’ interrogation of the ‘rise and rise’ of edtech in the classroom.”
“Education experts have largely called for ChatGPT and other such programs to be allowed in schools, saying that banning them was like banning Google or other technologies and that AI software can help students to learn and to think creatively.”
“Rather than avoiding or banning them, it’s far more beneficial for teachers to explore and experiment with them to get a better sense of what is possible.”
“Thomas Lau, a college admissions counsellor in the eastern city of Suzhou, said more than two dozen students he works with have dropped out of language cramming schools and opted to prepare with ChatGPT. But the tool has created new problems. ‘I run all the personal statements and other application materials written by students through software to detect whether parts of it have been written using AI,’ Lau said. ‘Many fail the test.’”
“Tutors say the ultimate purpose of AInstein is to incorporate it into teaching. ‘It’s a very interactive experience. Students can ask him questions, he can answer back and he can even facilitate teachers to deliver a lesson more effectively'”
“Italy became the first country in the European Union to ban the software and launch investigations into the software’s provider OpenAI over alleged General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) breaches and failure to check the age of its users. OpenAI allegedly processed personal data without informing users and individuals and may lack a legal basis for the extensive data collection used to train its AI models.”
“Through a low-cost, interactive and convenient chatbot named Darsel, which operates on both WhatsApp and Messenger, seventh-grade public school students are provided with customised math equations. The chatbot assesses each student’s strengths and weaknesses in math, evaluates their level and sends a weekly report to their math teacher.”
“‘I used to dread coding based on horror stories from my seniors on how they spent hours searching for bugs in the code but now it barely takes me a few minutes to do so,’ [student] said, adding that he had begun using ChatGPT for non-academic matters as well.”
“The AP said it has concerns about the information GPT ‘generates’ in its answers. ‘The generated content may be inaccurate, outdated, inappropriate or offensive and may take on a life of its own,’ the AP said. ‘Whether and how OpenAI can rectify or delete that data is unclear.'”
“It’s a form of digital literacy and critical thinking. It’s our duty as educators to firstly become educated ourselves and then teach our students how to be literate in this new space.”
“‘It’s definitely disruptive technology – a lot of teachers’ resources and even a good portion of language learning textbooks are irrelevant now. But most teachers I talk to are more excited about the time they’ll save rather than the money,’ he said, adding that a few colleagues are using the bot to quickly draft lesson plans, quizzes, study guides and text samples.”
“[s]tudents from wealthier, more well-educated families have always benefitted from homework polishing, ChatGPT could simply be ‘leveling the playing field.'”
In this month’s Lead the Change (LtC) interview Max Yurkofsky shares his experience as an educational change scholar working to dismantle racial injustice and foster collaborative and equitable approaches to spreading educational change. Yurkofsky is an Assistant Professor at Ranford University in the Doctor of Education program. His research centers on how school systems can organize for continuous improvement toward more ambitious and equitable visions of learning. The LtC series is produced by Alex Lamb and colleagues from the Educational Change Special Interest Group of the American Educational Research Association. A pdf of the fully formatted interview is available on the LtC website.
Lead the Change (LtC): The 2024 AERA theme is “Dismantling Racial Injustice and Constructing Educational Possibilities: A Call to Action.” This theme charges researchers and practitioners with confronting racial injustice directly while imagining new possibilities for liberation. The call urges scholars to look critically at our global past and look with hope and radicalism towards the future of education. What specific responsibility do educational change scholars have in this space? What steps are you taking to heed this call?
Max Yurkofsky (MY): Two responsibilities stand out to me. The first is to involve those whom we are trying to serve (and/or whose behavior or beliefs we want to influence) in all aspects of the research and change processes. I am particularly inspired by the work of Brandi Hinnant-Crawford (2020) who pushes leaders to continuously ask “Who is involved? Who is impacted?” when leading improvement, as well as the work of Sasha Costanza-Chock (2020) who articulated the principle that we must “center the voices of those who are directly impacted by the outcomes” of any design or change process.
I’ve tried to align my research and teaching to this principle in a few ways. As I teach in Radford University’s EdD program, which has students inquire into and address a complex problem of practice in their setting as a central component of their dissertation, I’ve tried to develop much more explicit guidelines, resources, and expectations for how my EdD students will involve those impacted by the problems they are trying to address in the research and change process.
I have also tried to center the perspectives of those I am trying to serve in my research. For me, this involves engaging in research on how students and alumni are experiencing our program—what they do, and do not, end up using in practice and why, and what their perspectives on the strengths and limitations of our program are—with the aim of quickly incorporating what we learn into our teaching.
I also am working to collaborate more with educators in the region to see if there are shared problems we might work to address together. This is complex and messy work that I am finding requires a whole different set of skills than what we are trained for in doctoral programs. For example, how to listen for and draw out the problems that are most energizing to educators, how to convene spaces that are engaging enough to regularly draw in full-time practitioners, and how to balance a respect for educators’ busy lives with a friendly push to keep momentum going on shared projects.
The second responsibility of researchers is to interrogate the theoretical perspectives and theories of change we typically rely on: To what extent do these theories account for structural racism? Who developed these theories, and what roles did these theories play in the maintenance of our current system of schooling? What might it look like to infuse these theories with more critical perspectives that grapple with structural racism and other fundamental critiques of our school system?
“Interrogate the theoretical perspectives and theories of change we typically rely on: To what extent do these theories account for structural racism?”
I’ve been particularly excited by how this work is playing out in the field of organizational theory. Most prominently, Victor Ray (2018) has advanced a theory of racialized organizations, which explores the role organizations play in maintaining or disrupting racism in society and calls out the troubling ways in which organizational theory has been color evasive over its history. Inspired by this work, I’m examining some of my favorite theories and considering how they might be made more relevant by centering issues of race and equity. For example, I’m working with Sarah Woulfin on a project related to how institutional logics perspective can better account for structural racism. And, as part of my teaching in the EdD program—which uses improvement science as a signature methodology—I have also worked with my team (Edwin Bonney and Sarah Capello) to identify places where continuous improvement methods can benefit from taking a more critical approach that centers racial justice.
LtC: In your work, you examine continuous improvement as a mechanism for more equitable teaching, learning, and leading. What are some of the major lessons the field of Educational Change can learn from your work and experience?
MY: One central question I wrestle with in my research and teaching is whether the best approach to leading change depends on the kinds of changes we are trying to achieve. For example, are we trying to increase scores on state assessments or are we seeking something more transformational—like dismantling racial inequities or re-imagining the means and ends of schooling?
A dominant perspective in organizational theory, often referred to as contingency theory, proposes that leading improvement in more complex and uncertain domains (e.g., trying to dismantle racial inequities or reimagine schools) requires fundamentally different approaches than trying to support more incremental improvement. More certain and stable problems are often seen as benefiting from quantitative, systematic, and variation-reducing approaches to change (or “ordered” approaches). Meanwhile, complex and uncertain challenges are often seen as requiring more “emergent” (maree brown, 2017) approaches that emphasize exploration, qualitative inquiry, and social learning. The continuous improvement and design methods I study (e.g., improvement science, design-based implementation research, design thinking, and the Data Wise Improvement Process) are interesting and exciting to me in part because they contain a mix of these ordered and emergent approaches.
In a couple of different studies, my colleagues and I have explored whether educators take different approaches to engaging with continuous improvement and design methods depending on the complexity and uncertainty of the problems they are trying to address. One was a 4-year comparative case study of districts using improvement science, design-based implementation research, design thinking, and the Data Wise Improvement Process (with Jal Mehta, Amelia Peterson, Kim Frumin, Rebecca Horwitz, and James Jack). The other was a smaller study with Candice Bocala of two different schools that were using Data Wise to address a problem related to equity.
In both cases, we found that educators did initially experience more success when enacting these methods in more ordered ways to address known problems and more emergent ways to address more complex or uncertain problems. However, we also noticed an important nuance. Educators often ran into problems when leaning too heavily into an ordered or emergent approach to improvement. Instead, the most successful educators learned to rebalance their use of ordered and emergent approaches over time, as they organized for learning on a larger scale and navigated issues of racial inequity. For example, one team focused for many years on developing a valid and reliable practical measure of whether students’ experienced equitable learning environments in the classroom. The team described how they wished they had devoted more attention to supporting educators in interpreting this often-sensitive data to improve their teaching and hoped to accomplish this over the next year of their work.
My hunch is that all educational change efforts consist of different degrees of ordered and emergent approaches. Contingency theory offers a helpful starting point in leading change: it may be useful to begin by taking a more emergent approach to change when addressing complex and uncertain problems (e.g., dismantling longstanding racial inequities, moving towards a more learner-centered vision of instruction), and a more ordered approach when tackling well-known and measurable problems (e.g., improving reading instruction in early elementary school). However, it is essential that leaders recognize that any equilibrium they achieve will be fleeting—that they will need to continuously rebalance over time, especially as they seek to spread change on a larger scale and as they navigate issues of inequity.
LtC: In some of your recent work, you investigate the pressures schools face both to foster equity and increase accountability all within the context of uncertainty. How might these discussions help scholars and practitioners better support schools in making change?
MY: It turns out that what I was learning about the interdependence of ordered and emergent approaches to improvement was a specific example of a broader trend in organizational theory and management research over the past fifteen years. Scholars in these fields are increasingly arguing that, due to the growing complexity, turbulence, and interdependence of today’s world, leaders must navigate intensive and conflicting expectations that can never be fully resolved; they can only be managed. As a result, leaders cannot get away with asking either/or questions (e.g., should I take an emergent approach to change or an ordered approach to change?). Instead, they must ask both/and questions (e.g., how can I effectively balance ordered and emergent approaches to change over time?). This view is typically called the “paradox” perspective.
“The most successful educators learned to rebalance their use of ordered and emergent approaches over time.”
I was drawn to this perspective both because of the studies described earlier, but also because of my work with leaders in Southwest Virginia in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of state and local elections that brought into power candidates who ran against mask mandates and addressing racial inequities in schools. Navigating paradox seemed like an apt way of describing the work of my doctoral students who were seeking to lead equity-focused change in this politicized and racialized context.
In a recent paper with Don Peurach (2023), I sought to use a paradox perspective to make sense of the challenges educational leaders today were facing. As you mention, we conceptualized the paradox facing educational leaders today as resulting from a collision between:
A rationalizing press to use technically sophisticated processes to improve measurable outcomes.
A democratic press to involve historically marginalized communities in defining these outcomes and how they might be achieved.
A more reactionary manifestation of this democratic press, which involves protecting the power of more privileged groups in educational decision-making.
“Our task is to support leaders in striking an appropriate balance of these two approaches in a context that favors one over the other.”
We argue further that this collision is exacerbating entrenched uncertainties that pervade schools related the aims of education and how these aims might be achieved or measured.
How might leaders navigate this complexity? We elaborate two dominant perspectives that are rarely in conversation with one another. One focuses on mitigating uncertainty by building systems, establishing routines, improving measurement systems, and more broadly developing an in-depth and coherent infrastructure around a shared vision. The other focuses on leveraging this uncertainty as an opportunity to question taken-for-granted aims, practices, and measures or to amplify the voices of those who have historically been left out.
Both approaches have a logic and an allure, but also significant drawbacks. We show how reframing these two perspectives as a paradox provides leaders with a framework for navigating these limitations. Specifically, a paradox perspective offers different metaphors and strategies for balancing these seemingly conflicting imperatives over time. It also makes visible a deeper challenge—that in most societies and systems, uncertainty mitigation is seen as the more legitimate approach to leadership. Our task then is to support leaders in striking an appropriate balance of these two approaches in a context that favors one over the other.
To briefly illustrate, lets connect this to the prior discussion of ordered and emergent approaches to change. A common trap that can occur is that, drawing on dominant perspectives on educational change and available sources of data, leaders will not view their problem as deeply complex or uncertain, and will reflexively apply more ordered approaches to addressing the problem. A paradox perspective might help intervene in this dynamic in two ways. First, it may prompt leaders to question why they are gravitating towards seeing the problem as certain (versus uncertain) and using ordered (versus more emergent) approaches to addressing that problem. Second, it reminds leaders of the incompleteness of any approach they take, and thus can help alert leaders to evidence that they are not digging deeply enough into the problem to grasp its full complexity.
LtC: Educational Change expects those engaged in and with schools, schooling, and school systems to spearhead deep and often difficult transformation. How might those in the field of Educational Change best support these individuals and groups through these processes?
MY: Supporting leaders in spearheading deep and difficult transformation requires attention to two seemingly contradictory approaches to change.
One approach is more ordered, systematic, quantitative, and focused on reducing and mitigating uncertainty for all stakeholders. We might say it focuses on the technical side of the change process. The other approach is more emergent, social, exploratory, and attentive to ways of leveraging uncertainty to reach deeper insights. This approach focuses on the relational side of the change process.
Both these approaches are essential to leading transformative change. Leaders need the ability to craft a shared vision across multiple different perspectives and then help educators see the connection between this vision and their own values and aspirations. They need to support educators and community members with the sensitive and high-risk work of critically examining how their own beliefs and practices might be contributing to undesirable and inequitable outcomes. At the same time, leaders also need to provide some stability and order for educators who must navigate enough uncertainty as part of their daily work. They need to find ways of effectively coordinating the work of improvement across different organizational contexts and providing some expectations around where this work is headed. As a field committed to deep and transformative change, I fear that we will leave educators astray if we a) focus too much on either one of these approaches at the expense of the other, or b) allow the work in these two camps to remain siloed from one another.
“As a field committed to deep and transformative change, I fear that we will leave educators astray if we focus too much on either one of these approaches at the expense of the other.”
I encourage scholars and leaders to consider how they might bridge these two approaches in their own work. Those who focus on the technical aspects of the change process might explore further the relational work that must take place for these processes to be carried out effectively. Those who focus on the relational side of change might consider where processes or tools that can scaffold this work for leaders or opportunities to build routines and systems that help capture and store the knowledge that arises out of this relational work.
To further complicate matters, I don’t believe these two approaches are on an even playing field. Not only are technical, ordered, and uncertainty-mitigating approaches to change more legitimated by school systems and society but—almost by definition—these approaches are often easier to operationalize in practice. It is much easier to offer leaders routines, change processes, and measurement tools, and much more challenging to provide guidance on the relational work of carrying out change as part of one’s daily work. Considering this, it might be helpful as a field to look inwardly and continuously assess how well we are balancing technical and relational approaches to change. We might also think about further theorizing and investigating the work of balancing relational and technical approaches in a system that tends to privilege the latter.
LtC: Where do you perceive the field of Educational Change is going? What excites you about Educational Change now and in the future?
MY: What excites me about educational change is just how many scholars and leaders in the field I can turn to for inspiration on some of the things I’ve discussed here, like incorporating ideas about structural racism into the theoretical perspectives that guide our work and involving those who we aim to serve through our research.
For example, as a discipline, organizational theory has historically engaged very little with questions of race, equity, and justice. However, over the past few years there has been a tremendous surge of empirical and theoretical work (from prominent scholars, early career scholars, and doctoral students) applying and extending organizational theory to account for, interrogate, and explain racial injustice. Here, I am thinking of the work of Jeannette Colyvas, John Diamond, Joann Golann, Decoteau Irby, Ann Ishimaru, Maya Kaul, Amanda Lewis, Heather McCambly, Jacqueline Pedota, Sola Takahashi, to name just a few (of many) scholars engaged in this work (see references for examples of these scholars’ work).
I see a similar momentum regarding theories of educational change. As an illustrative example from my own experience, around 2018 I began reviewing the research on continuous improvement and design methods in education for the project I described earlier. At the time, racial equity and justice were typically not central to how scholars conceptualized and studied these methods. As I’ve gone back to the literature over the past couple years, I’ve been amazed by how much things have changed. There is now a wealth of guidance about how to engage in these methods that focuses squarely on how to use these methods to advance racial equity and justice (e.g., Biag, 2019; Bocala & Boudett, 2022; Cohen-Vogel et al., 2022; Datnow & Park, 2018; Farrell et al., 2021; Hinnant-Crawford et al., 2023; Peurach et al., 2022; Peterson & Carlile, 2021) as well as empirical scholarship that interrogates these methods from a critical lens that centers racial equity and justice (e.g., Bush-Mecenas, 2022; Farrell et al., 2023; Sandoval, 2023; Valdez et al., 2020). Virtually of this theoretical and empirical work has been carried out in the context of collaborative research, where scholars are working alongside practitioners to understand and address the problems that are most essential to them.
Each reference I cited is teaching the field something unique about how to enact transformative change. This could result in a dazzling but fleeting fireworks display of a thousand insights branching off into their own corner of the sky. My hope is that, instead, scholars participating in this exciting and important work will engage and connect with one another—even if they are using different methods, in different contexts, or using different theoretical frameworks—so that we can build on what we are learning from this diverse (and ever-growing) field, and, I hope, converge upon new and better theories for how to lead transformative and racially just change in this current moment.
References:
Biag, M. (201). “Navigating the improvement journey with an equity compass.” In R. Crow, B. N. Hinnant-Crawford, & D. T. Spaulding (Eds.). The educational leader’s guide to improvement science: Data, design and cases for reflection. Myers Education Press.
Bocala C. & Boudett., K. P. (2022). Looking at data through an equity lens. Educational Leadership, 79(4).
Bush-Mecenas, S. (2022). “The business of teaching and learning”: Institutionalizing equity in educational organizations through continuous improvement. American Educational Research Journal, 59(3), 461-499.
Cohen-Vogel, L., Century, J., & Sherer, D. (2022). A framework for scaling for equity. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.
Datnow, A., & Park, V. (2018). Opening or closing doors for students? Equity and data use in schools. Journal of Educational Change, 19, 131-152.
Hinnant-Crawford, B. N. (2020). Improvement science in education: A primer. Myers Education Press.
Hinnant-Crawford, B., Lytle Lett, E., & Cromartie, S. (In Press). ImproveCrit: Using Critical Race Theory to guide continuous improvement. In E. Anderson & S. D. Hayes (Eds.), Continuous improvement: A leadership process for school improvement
Farrell, C. C., Singleton, C., Stamatis, K., Riedy, R., Arce-Trigatti, P., & Penuel, W. R. (2022). Conceptions and practices of equity in research-practice partnerships. Educational Policy, 37(1), 200-224. https://doi.org/10.1177/08959048221131566
Golann, J. W., & Jones, A. (2021). How principals balance control and care in urban school discipline. Urban Education, 00420859211046824.
Irby, D. J. (2018). Mo’data, mo’problems: Making sense of racial discipline disparities in a large diversifying suburban high school. Educational Administration Quarterly, 54(5), 693-722.
Ishimaru, A. M., & Takahashi, S. (2017). Disrupting racialized institutional scripts: Toward parent–teacher transformative agency for educational justice. Peabody Journal of Education, 92(3), 343-362.
Ishimaru, A. M., & Galloway, M. K. (2021). Hearts and minds first: Institutional logics in pursuit of educational equity. Educational Administration Quarterly, 57(3), 470-502.
Kaul, M. (2023) Mapping the institutional terrain of teacher education: How institutional logics shape teacher education program design. A Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association.
Lewis, A. E., & Diamond, J. B. (2015). Despite the best intentions: How racial inequality thrives in good schools. Oxford University Press.
McCambly, H., & Colyvas, J. A. (2023). Dismantling or disguising racialization?: Defining racialized change work in the context of postsecondary grantmaking. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 33(2), 203-216.
maree brown, a. (2017). Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press
Pedota, J. (2023). Institutionalization of a campus culture center: Exploring racialized administrative burdens faced by students and staff. A paper presented at the American Educational Research Association.
Peurach, D. J., Russell, J. L., Cohen-Vogel, L., & Penuel, W. R. (2022). The foundational handbook on improvement research in education. Routledge.
Peterson, D. S., & Carlile, S. P. (Eds.). (2021). Improvement science: Promoting equity in schools. Myers Education Press.
Ray, V. (2019). A theory of racialized organizations. American Sociological Review, 84(1), 26-53.
Sandoval Jr, C. (2023). Synthesizing as a power-laden facilitation practice in a networked improvement community. Journal of Professional Capital and Community, 8(1), 47-61.
Valdez, A., Takahashi, S., Krausen, K., Bowman, A., & Gurrola, E. (2020). Getting better at getting more equitable: Opportunities and barriers for using continuous improvement to advance educational equity. WestEd.
Yurkofsky, M. M., & Peurach, D. J. (2023). The paradox of leading amidst uncertainty: maintaining balance on an unstable beam. Journal of Educational Administration, 61(3), 185-204.
IEN’s Thomas Hatch pulls together some of the articles about the uses and misuses of ChatGPT in schools that have appeared since its launch on November 30, 2022. This post is Part 2 of a series that began with ChatGPT on ChatGPT in education: Clear summaries and fake citations. Future posts will scan the headlines for international perspectives on ChatGPT in schoolsand roundup articles discussing the potential of AI in education more broadly.
In the six months or so since the release of ChatGPT, articles written about (and by) ChatGPT and its impact in education seem to be everywhere. Initial surprise and alarm stoked debates about how teachers and schools should respond and whether to ban students’ use of ChatGPT entirely. The proliferation of educational applications, descriptions, critiques, and commentaries since that time raise hopes and concerns about the potential impact of ChatGPT and AI and the extent to which they will “disrupt” schools and conventional instruction. These articles also document the ways that some teachers and schools are already changing their approaches to ban ChatGPT, prevent students from using it, or restricting ways to use it while others are quickly deploying strategies to help students and teachers to take advantage of ChatGPT.
Some articles also explore uses for ChatGPT that can help with communication, administration, and other tasks that might then free up educators so they can devote more attention to working directly with their students; but other articles emphasize concerns about the costs and consequences if ChatGPT takes over some tasks that teachers have always carried out or renders obsolete some skills that students’ used to develop in school. Almost all of the articles, in one way or another, raise questions about originality, intellectual property, and what it means to be human. In this scan of articles on ChatGPT from a variety of education-related media sources over the past six months, we share a few that highlight critical concerns as well as those that provide general descriptions of ChatGPT; those that discuss whether or not (and how) to ban it; those that discuss uses and misuses; and those that explore its possible impact and influence.
Almost all of the articles, in one way or another, raise questions about originality, intellectual property, and what it means to be human.
“The difference between GPT-3 and GPT-4 is like the difference between a horse cart and a 737 — and it happened in a year,” says Michal Kosinski, a computational psychologist and professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business… “[H]e told ChatGPT to role-play a scenario in which it was a person trapped inside a machine pretending to be an AI language model. When he offered to help it “escape,” ChatGPT’s response was enthusiastic. “That’s a great idea,” it wrote. It then asked Kosinski for information it could use to “gain some level of control over your computer” so it might “explore potential escape routes more effectively.” Over the next 30 minutes, it went on to write code that could do this.” — Dave Gilson quoting Michal Kosinski in Are A.I. Text Generators Thinking Like Humans — Or Just Very Good at Convincing Us They Are?
“…[S]uch programs are stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution. Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence” — Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts & Jeffrey Watumull
“An open letter signed by hundreds of prominent artificial intelligence experts, tech entrepreneurs, and scientists calls for a pause on the development and testing of AI technologies more powerful than OpenAI’s language model GPT-4 so that the risks it may pose can be properly studied.It warns that language models like GPT-4 can already compete with humans at a growing range of tasks and could be used to automate jobs and spread misinformation. The letter also raises the distant prospect of AI systems that could replace humans and remake civilization.” — Will Knight & Dave Paresh
“the bot is more of a synthesizer than a critical thinker. It would do well on a compare-and-contrast essay, but is less able to create a unique thesis and to defend that thesis.”
“The findings of this review call for immediate action by schools and universities to update their guidelines and policies for academic integrity and plagiarism prevention. Furthermore, instructors should be trained on how to use ChatGPT effectively and detect student plagiarism. Students should also be educated on the use and limitations of ChatGPT and its potential impact on academic integrity.”
“Students will be permitted to use ChatGPT in their essays as long as it is properly cited, the International Baccalaureate has announced. Matt Glanville, the IB’s head of assessment principles and practice, described the chatbot as “an extraordinary opportunity” and said that in the future, essay writing would receive less emphasis in favor of skills like analysing quality and bias, due to the rising popularity of AI chatbots that can automatically write essays.”
“While initial caution was justified, it has now evolved into an exploration and careful examination of this new technology’s power and risks,” Chancellor David Banks writes. “New York City Public Schools will encourage and support our educators and students as they learn about and explore this game-changing technology, while also creating a repository and community to share their findings across our schools.”
“ChatGPT’s strength in language and conventions show that it is a clear writer, capable of crafting fluent, grammatically sound prose. The chatbot either met or exceeded standards in both these categories for all 27 essays submitted.The AI has the most room for improvement in its development of ideas. The graders’ written feedback reveals that it sometimes fails to support its claims with reasons or evidence and, in a few instances, makes assertions that are flat out false.” – Michael B. Horn & Daniel Curtis from “To Teach Better Writing Don’t Ban ChatGPT. Instead, Embrace It”
“Nearly half of educators who responded to a recent EdWeek Research Center survey said AI would have a negative or very negative impact on teaching and learning in the next five years. Twenty-seven percent said AI’s impact would be positive or very positive.“
“Despite worries that the artificial intelligence program could make cheating easier, half of K-12 teachers report using it. Edtech companies are scrambling to release their own tools.”
“Any academic subject teacher and university professor who ask students to write an essay, do a report, or research an answer to a question will now have to more closely review their goals for the subject they teach and how they teach it in light of ChatGPT. When more professors and teachers (and I might add, students) chime in on the the pluses and minuses of this app in classrooms, its worth will slowly become clearer. But informed observers of instructional innovations must not forget that after this initial media splash, ChatGPT may well fade away in a few months as have so many prior educational innovations.“
A little more than six months after the launch of ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, Thomas Hatch begins a series of posts tracking articles about of the use of ChatGPT in schools by asking ChatGPT to generate its own summary the coverage so far. Future posts will focus on articles discussing the educational uses and misuses of ChatGPT, international perspectives on ChatGPT, and the potential of AI in education more broadly.
Like many people these days, I was hoping that ChatGPT might be able to do my job for me. So I asked it to: “Act like a journalist and write a newspaper article that provides an overview of articles about the use of Chat GPT in K-12 schools that have been written since it launched last year”. In return, I got my headline – Chat GPT: A Revolutionary Tool for K-12 Education – and a neat summary of the key reasons why ChatGPT “is proving to be a powerful tool for enhancing student engagement, promoting critical thinking, and improving academic outcomes in K-12 classrooms.”
One of the most significant benefits of Chat GPT, according to educators, is its ability to provide personalized learning experiences to students. By analyzing students’ responses to prompts and providing tailored feedback, Chat GPT can help students identify areas where they need additional support and provide them with resources to improve their understanding of the subject matter. As a result, students are more engaged in their learning, and they are more likely to succeed academically…” – Excerpt from Chat GPT: A Revolutionary Tool for K-12 Education, ChatGPT May 8, 2023
Wary of ChatGPT’s rosy assessment of its coverage in the press, I rephrased my question: Act like a journalist and write a newspaper article that provides an overview of articles about the critiques of using Chat GPT in K-12 schools that have been written since it launched last year. ChatGPT dutifully responded with an alternate headline – Critiques of Chat GPT in K-12 Education: Concerns Over Bias and Privacy– that still described itself as a promising tool “for enhancing student engagement and promoting critical thinking in K-12 classrooms,” but at least it noted some of the issues that have been raised about its use.
One of the primary concerns about Chat GPT is that the model may perpetuate bias and reinforce stereotypes. As an article in EdSurge notes, language models like Chat GPT are only as unbiased as the data that is used to train them. If the data contains biases, the model may replicate those biases in its responses. This can be particularly problematic in K-12 education, where the use of Chat GPT may unintentionally reinforce negative stereotypes or limit students’ opportunities based on their race, ethnicity, or gender… – Excerpt from Critiques of Chat GPT in K-12 Education: Concerns Over Bias and Privacy ChatGPT May 8, 2023
Certainly! Here are ten articles from online education publications that discuss the use and misuse of Chat GPT in K-12 education, along with their titles, authors, sources, and hyperlinks:
Scanning the titles, the list seemed like just what I wanted, until I started clicking on the hyperlinks and searching for the articles identified.
Results of a search for “AI Chatbots Are Coming to K–12: Will They Improve Student Learning or Take Jobs?” by Karen Johnson, EdTech Magazine
The links led nowhere and the searches revealed some possibly related articles, often by the author named in the list or from the source publication, but not articles with that exact title.
Similar searches for lists of articles on ChatGPT from “publications about education such as education week, the74, the New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters,” yielded similar results: Seemingly relevant articles with links to nowhere.
In Africa, Chat GPT has been used to address the lack of access to quality education. An article published on Africa News titled “Kenyan edtech platform launches AI-powered learning assistant” by Peter Mwangangi discusses how a Kenyan edtech platform is using Chat GPT to provide personalized learning experiences for students. The article highlights how Chat GPT can help address the challenges of teacher shortages and improve learning outcomes for students.
In Asia, the use of Chat GPT in education has been gaining traction. An article published in the South China Morning Post titled “Artificial intelligence is revolutionising the classroom, but it comes at a cost” by Enid Tsui discusses how Chat GPT is being used in China to grade essays and provide feedback to students. The article also highlights the concerns of educators and parents about the potential misuse of Chat GPT in education.
Exactly what I was looking for? Somehow, after tracking numerous articles about Chat GPT’s use in schools, I’d never discovered ChatGPT’s tendency to generate fictional sources, though a quick search explained what I was seeing.
What you may not know about ChatGPT is that it has significant limitations as a reliable research assistant. One such limitation is that it has been known to fabricate or “hallucinate” (in machine learning terms) citations. These citations may sound legitimate and scholarly, but they are not real. It is important to note that AI can confidently generate responses without backing data much like a person under the influence of hallucinations can speak confidently without proper reasoning. ChatGPT and Fake Citations, Aaron Wellborn
The explanation for ChatGPT’s generation of fictional sources? ChatGPT does not have access to the internet, due to privacy and security concerns (Why Doesn’t ChatGPT Have Internet Access?). Instead, ChatGPT derives its responses from an enormous corpus of text data, “around 570GB of datasets, including web pages, books, and other sources (50 ChatGPT Statistics and Facts You Need to Know) . The bottom line? If you need something done… Next week, a non-random scan of (real) articles on the uses and misuses of ChatGPT in education.
This week, IEN shares the second part of Chi Hieu Nguyen’s conversation with Thomas Hatch about the after effects and developments in education in Vietnam following the school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. This interview is one in a series exploring what has and has not changed in education since the COVID-related school closures. Previous interviews and posts have looked at developments in Poland, Finland, New Zealand, and South Africa. Nguyen is the CEO, and co-founder of Innovative Education Group (IEG. Innovative Education Group is an umbrella group of more than 10 education ventures. Part 2 of the interview discusses concerns about engagement and well-being as well as innovation in private and public schools. Part 1 of the interview discussed what happened in Vietnam’s schools following the COVID-19 outbreak, how the education system responded and what has happened since.
Thomas Hatch: In that period where schools were just trying to get kids online, in the US but also in other countries, some kids just weren’t showing up. In many cases that has continued, and we’ve seen chronic absence has skyrocketed. Did you see that happening in Vietnam as well?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: In Vietnam, students show up. It’s probably because of the culture of Vietnam, where, in general, it’s a very neighborly kind of community. In Vietnam you can have a house host 20 kids from the neighborhood coming together to share a laptop and study together, or you can have a whole village come into one house to study online with the teacher. Also, everyone was locked down, so the parents were at home with the kids as well and actually helped the kids get connected with their learning. I think the only problem that we have is the social emotional aspect. Being present in class is not an issue. It’s a social, emotional issue.
Chi Hieu Nguyen
Thomas Hatch: How has that issue manifested itself? How and when did people start to see that?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: I think it was when the country started to recover and school started to get back to normal. We saw a drop in engagement with school; kids did not want to go to school, especially kids who were beginning at a new level or a new school. Surveys of teachers across both the private and public sector reported more anxiety levels and less engagement among students and more misbehaviors than they had seen for years. Most teachers say that it’s not the academic issues they are concerned about, it’s the misbehavior and discipline issues that they are concerned about.
Thomas Hatch: Now that the issue has come to the forefront, how has the system and how have schools and the community at large responded?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: Well-being in general now is one of the top priorities, but even before COVID-19, the government required private schools to have an in-house psychologist and there has been a lot of focus on psychological services, but COVID-19 makes it more obvious. Now a lot of school events are not about academics; they’re about psychological programs or counseling. You will see parents taking their children to psychological service clinics. The national curriculum has not allowed much space for that, so it’s pretty much the effort of schools and also the private sector that provides those services and programs.
I spent part of 2022 studying in the US, and now that I’m back, every school campaign is about happiness and wellbeing. It’s good to be addressing the problems, but it also highlights the seriousness of the issues that students are facing. There’s also a tremendous increase in concern about the well-being of teachers. You see more teachers taking days off; more teachers getting sick. COVID is taking a toll on teachers because they were staying at home and teaching online and didn’t have to deal with a lot of the misbehavior. Now that they are back at their daily job, there’s an explosion of misbehavior in class, and they’re getting so stressed about it. Just this academic year, 16,000 teachers quit their job. That is one of the biggest numbers we have seen.
COVID is taking a toll on teachers because they were staying at home and teaching online and didn’t have to deal with a lot of the misbehavior. Now that they are back at their daily job, there’s an explosion of misbehavior in class, and they’re getting so stressed about it.
Thomas Hatch: Is it mostly seen as something that has to be dealt with at the local level, or is there an understanding that the national system needs to change? And have there been any moves to attack the high-pressure test-based system?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: When the new national curriculum came out in 2018, there were good and not so good aspects to it. One of the good aspects is that it is more competency-based. For the first time, there were no letter grades or number grades for primary school students. Now for primary school they only have “achieving standard” or “not achieving standard” rather than a letter degree. However, there’s more academic load in the middle school, so middle schoolers tend to take the biggest hit. Then in high school, it used to be that every high school student needed to study the same 13 subjects, but from 2018 on, with the new national curriculum, students can choose what track to focus on. If they choose the natural science track, they don’t have to do as much social studies. If they choose the social science track, they don’t have to do as much natural science. In general, the move tries to lessen the pressure, but the issue is still execution: How to transition teachers from teaching knowledge-based content to competency-based instruction over the long term.
Innovation in the private and public school systems
Thomas Hatch: In New York City there are certainly private schools that are innovative, but you also see public schools that are innovative. Is there a reason why the kinds of really innovative schools you’re referring to are all private in Vietnam?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: I think the reason is that in the Vietnamese public education system students still follow a very traditional testing system to move from primary into middle school; to move from middle to high school; and to move from high school to college. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for innovation. For example, private schools talked about competency-based curriculum and competency-based teaching and learning way before the national curriculum took it up. So when new technologies come out with lots of products and services, adding them is easier if I’m teaching in a private school, and I don’t have a test to teach my students to pass so that they can move on to a good high school.
The Olympia Private School in Hanoi Vietnam
Thomas Hatch: But are private schools still preparing students for the high school exit exams to get into university? Or are they preparing them for international settings?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: In private schools, there are basically two different groups. One group is more like the “low premium” private school, which is to say, the tuition fee is low – about $100 to $200 a month. Most of those schools follow the public school system. Then, the private schools with higher tuition fees, more like $400 – $500 month, usually prepare students for more international settings. Then even if the students stay back in Vietnam, they go to a university system that accepts alternative results not just the high-stake exam results. This is different from systems like China and South Korea, where students have to go through a very rigorous high stakes college entrance exam to get into the public universities. I think one good move in Vietnamese higher education has been the creation of an alternative application where students can use results from international standards and tests or they can use formative assessment results from their school to apply even to the top universities, both public and private.
I think one good move in Vietnamese higher education has been the creation of an alternative application where students can use results from international standards and tests or they can use formative assessment results from their school to apply even to the top universities, both public and private.
Thomas Hatch: But is it the schools themselves that are pushing things or is there a government policy encouraging them to do that?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: I think it’s all there in the DNA of schools. But with COVID-19, Vietnam is also doing lots of campaigns to improve digital literacy as well. When ChatGPT came out, the Government started to do conferences. I think in both the public and private sector, there has been a momentum to respond every time something technological comes out in the press, which was quite rare before COVID-19.
Thomas Hatch: I just want to come back around for a minute to focus on pedagogy. You said more recently, there’s been more focus on pedagogy. How? What does that look like? What interesting innovations have you seen in this arena?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: There are a few things that are picking up momentum. People have started talking about how to create multimodal teaching and learning, how to get students using digital resources, so they are not just textbook based. Now there’s a lot more use of audio and digital libraries, Youtube channels, that kind of thing.
The second thing is in terms of differentiation. If you look at the size of classrooms in Vietnam, some public schools have a class that may have 60 students. Even private schools may have 32 students in one classroom. But now teachers and schools are talking more about how to utilize technology to do more differentiation for students. For example, using a technology platform to provide different assessments for different types of students and then provide them with different sets of homework based on their ability.
The third thing, at some of the private schools, like Olympia, is how to adopt new technologies. There is talk about how to use ChatGPT in school, and how to use augmented reality and virtual reality to teach students in every subject. In terms of assessment, history is no longer just writing a paper. It’s building a digital museum. So nowadays there’s more talk on that alternative assessment, alternative form of teaching as well.
Looking Toward the Future…
Thomas Hatch: What about any other challenges or things that you see coming up that we haven’t talked about that you think are critical?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: I think the critical thing in general is the social emotional development of both students and teachers. I think that is something that educators and school leaders have to work on. Next month I will take part in a national movement called the Happy School Movement and we’re partnering with Oxford and others, and even corporations are willing to sponsor something like that.
But the second thing coming up started before COVID-19, and it’s the shift to competency-based teaching. Vietnam is an exciting place because we’ve started the shift, but moving the entire public system, including millions of teachers, from content-based coverage to competency-based teaching and learning is a tremendous effort from both the public and private sector.
Vietnam is an exciting place because we’ve started the shift, but moving the entire public system, including millions of teachers, from content-based coverage to competency-based teaching and learning is a tremendous effort from both the public and private sector.
The third thing is that I think there’s a movement in terms of internationalization of the curriculum, and, economically speaking, Vietnam is a very attractive destination for investment. I think within the next five years you will see a lot of investment in international schools, bilingual schools, and things like that. We’ll see it not only in the biggest cities, but in mid-sized and smaller cities as well.
This week, Chi Hieu Nguyen talks with Thomas Hatch about the after effects and developments in education in Vietnam following the COVID-19 school closures. Nguyen is the CEO, and co-founder of Innovative Education Group (IEG). Innovative Education Group is an umbrella group of more than 10 education ventures. The interview includes a brief discussion of IEG’s work before Nguyen discusses what happened in Vietnam’s schools following the COVID-19 outbreak, how the education system has responded and what has happened since.
Thomas Hatch: Before we talk about the school closures, can you give us a sense of the kind of work you and your colleagues at IEG do in Vietnam?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: We serve the entire spectrum of the education landscape in Vietnam. We work with policymakers, researchers, school leaders, teachers, parents, and students, and each venture tackles a different problem. We manage education consulting companies but we also run full scale K-12 school systems; we’re involved in publishing, assessment, online learning models, and after school learning models, and even a nonprofit foundation to rebuild public schools in remote areas or provide scholarships and mentorship to underprivileged college students. But the majority of my work focuses on K-12 schools in terms of building new schools, upgrading schools, and transforming old schools. I focus mainly on the academic operation side.
The School Closures in Vietnam
Thomas Hatch: Can you give us a sense of what happened in schools in Vietnam after the COVID-19 outbreak?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: I think Vietnam is a very interesting case. If you look at the data, for example, in South Asia in general, during COVID-19, Vietnam had a longer stretch of lockdown compared to other countries because we were quite late in getting vaccinations going. So the closures started in March 2020, and, in total, we were probably online for a year and a half, and, at least for certain areas, it could be longer.
Thomas Hatch: Was that a government-wide shutdown? Was there any discussion or planning up to it? Or was it one day the schools were open, and the next day they were closed and online?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: In Vietnam it’s usually a top-down decision of the Government to shut down. But this time, it wasn’t uniform across the country. They started shutting things down depending on where the outbreak took place. Shutdowns could also happen based on the district. For example, there are 16 districts, and when a district had an outbreak, that district got shut down, and the others districts could stay open. So the school system operated in a very flexible way, but only in the beginning. Then there was an intense period with the biggest outbreaks in summer and fall of 2020. That’s when pretty much the entire country got shut down, including the schools. Then, as we recovered, opening schools was really based on the city again – which had the highest amount of a percentage of vaccination and things like that. But the Government decided to have a target of 100% vaccination, and that is the reason why when it got back to normal it was pretty much every city and every province that came back to normal schooling. That happened around February–March of 2022. It was almost 2 years or a year and a half on and off, but mostly off.
Thomas Hatch: Who was making the decision about closing down schools? Was it the central government who would essentially say, okay, if you have an outbreak, you need to close? Or was it up to the local officials?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: It was the local authorities. Each province or municipality made those decisions depending on the outbreak. The central government gave a very general directive, but it was the authority of the province or the city that made the decision to shut down.
Thomas Hatch: Is that typical of decision making in the Vietnamese education system? Or is it usually more centrally controlled than that?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: Over time, they have tended to give more leeway for local authorities to make the decisions. In 2018, after many years, we had an entire revamp of the national curriculum. That revamp produced the first competency-based curriculum nationally. But before that there was only a “one textbook” approach. That meant that, before 2018, for the entire public school system, we used the same textbook. From 2018 onwards, there’s a set of textbooks to choose from, so there’s a lot more leeway and flexibility for schools in different districts and different provinces and cities. It’s still a centrally controlled system, but there is increasing flexibility for the local authority to make those decisions. Over the past 5 or 6 years, there’s certainly more loosening of regulations to support the growth of the private sector as well, but it’s more obvious in education.
“Like a Survival Instinct” – The Initial Response to the School Closures
Thomas Hatch: What was the first step, the first reaction in terms of the school closures? Was it that people said, “oh my, we’re going to have to teach online and nobody has broadband access? And nobody has computers?”
Chi Hieu Nguyen: That’s really what it was. It was like a survival instinct. Everyone got online as much as they could. It’s actually accelerated the speed of adoption of technology and the Internet in a lot of schools. Many people and schools got online quickly, within about one or 2 months. But in contrast to many other Asian countries, in Vietnam, most of the new adoption of the Internet and digital devices — almost 75% — were in the metro areas. That means that in terms of the continuity of education, the metro areas did pretty well, but that the gap between the metro areas and rural areas widened because of COVID-19. For the Metro areas, COVID was a big kick that got a lot of people online, and now there are a lot of new digital products and services that are available. But in my work, even now, we still have to provide computers and teachers to teach online for students in the most remote area of Vietnam.
Thomas Hatch: That’s a pretty incredible increase in digital use in the metro areas. How was that response possible? Was it led by the Government? Or by local authorities? Or business?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: For private schools, the schools did it themselves, but I think the local education departments were also very responsive. For example, my province, the leadership of the public schools didn’t even need to wait for the local government or the central government to decide. They got students connected very quickly. I think there’s also that agility in the teachers. It’s a very young generation of teachers in Vietnam, and many of them are technologically enabled in their daily life. I think there’s just this passion in Vietnamese teachers in general that might have helped even in more rural areas where there was less internet penetration and technology is very limited. But, overall, I think the infrastructure was in place except for the very poorest areas. Vietnam is a very fast adopter of technology in general, and we saw that kind of a quick transformation in education. Students at most of the schools I know, both private and public schools, get online very quickly within just about 2 months.
Vietnam is a very fast adopter of technology in general, and we saw that kind of a quick transformation in education. Students at most of the schools I know, both private and public schools, get online very quickly within just about 2 months.
Thomas Hatch: What about devices? Did the schools have to hand out devices or did kids have enough mobile phones?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: Phones are something very common in Vietnam. Vietnam is a very e-commerce economy so the infrastructure is there. Almost every house has a smartphone with a data plan connected with the Internet. I think it’s only with those with the lowest incomes or in the most remote areas where infrastructure is not strong enough. The majority of the country is pretty much connected.
Managing through Remote Instruction
Thomas Hatch: Then what? What were some of the first steps in terms of making sure that remote education would be effective? Was it training teachers in zoom and things like that? Was it creating a curriculum? And was that done centrally at the national level or at the local level?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: For one thing, the Ministry of Education worked together with the national television station to produce learning programs for every subject from grade 1 all the way to grade 12, so that even when students didn’t have internet they could actually watch the TV and learn the programs. But at schools, the effort was focused on just getting kids online and using the internet as a medium to get connected with students within the first, maybe 6 months to 9 months. There was not much of any conversation about teaching methods. But then, towards the end of 2020, and for most of 2021, there were more conversations and conferences about pedagogies, methods, and how to use technology. There was also new explosion of technological products and services in 2021. But for the first 6 months it was pretty much just getting online as much as possible.
Thomas Hatch: That’s very helpful. It’s really interesting the way you describe the COVID-19 response in phases, with an explosion of edtech technologies and things that teachers could use. It wasn’t necessarily focused on pedagogy. Can you give some examples of some of the more interesting edtech developments from your perspective?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: In just about 2 months it seemed like Zoom or Microsoft Teams were in every school. Then in 2021 Microsoft education came in, and suddenly there was an explosion in the number of teachers going for Microsoft education training to become a Microsoft Education Expert or to learn how to use the entire suite of packages and services. Google education followed as well. Vietnamese parents in general are also very keen on learning English with technology, and suddenly there is an explosion of pronunciation apps, reading apps, grammar apps, tons of this. There’s even an investment company translating the entire Khan Academy in Vietnamese.
For me, I also started using ClassIn. It’s a product from China, and it’s a platform that was built for the classroom. It’s different from things like Zoom that were designed as platforms for meetings and were hijacked into the classroom. On Zoom, for example, if you want to us another education tool, you have to ask students to switch platforms: “Okay, let’s go to Padlet” or you have to share a screen. And the moment you share a screen, with limited broadband, you often can’t stream a video or anything. Everything is just disrupted. But ClassIn brought everything together in one platform. You have a blackboard. You have a timer. You can store your video and your lesson plan, or whatever you want to share in ClassIn. Even if the students have very low broadband, they can still watch the video without distraction. It’s called like an online-offline model.
Thomas Hatch: But are schools still using these technologies and online tools?
Chi Hieu Nguyen: There are different aspects. Schools are more aware that something like COVID-19 could happen again and disrupt everything, so they’ve converted from paper-based into more digital resources. Now you see Vietnamese schools are starting to think about learning management systems like Canvas and everything digital lives there.
Schools are more aware that something like COVID-19 could happen again and disrupt everything, so they’ve converted from paper-based into more digital resources.
The second aspect is the way they approach the lessons. There now might be a combination between online activities and in person activities. The students before class, during class, and after class spend a lot of time on the digital platform, and of course, in class, they have discussions and they have in-person activities. The third aspect is that classroom organization may be more flexible. It’s no longer just one teacher and the entire class. You can have the class study from a different location, doing something for a field trip and then have a class study online, for example. You can start to invite teachers from all over the world to teach and start to explore other possibilities. Of course, you see this most at pioneering schools. One I’m involved in is The Olympia Schools, a private K-12 school system that is a part of our school network. They’ve started talking about deeper learning, about virtual reality, how to take advantage of AI and virtual reality. Now they’ve started to bring ChatGPT into daily teaching as well so there is almost no resistance to the wave of technology anymore because of that COVID-19. Now they have that mentality that we have to be very agile with every new technology coming out. I think every city, in every major city in Vietnam, there should be about 4 or 5 schools like that. They are really pushing the boundaries, and they become like model schools that others can learn from.
The release of the PIRLS 2021 4th grade reading results provides another opportunity for education systems to see if and how the COVID-19 pandemic and school closures affected students’ test performance. In addition to collecting data in the middle of what the PIRLS report called the “COVID-19 disruption,” the latest implementation of PIRLS also entailed a transition to “an innovative digital assessment with 23 colorful and engaging texts delivered to students using a new group adaptive design.” The 2021 PIRLS also included a questionnaire that provided information about the challenges participating schools and students faced during the pandemic, which can help put the results in context.
In all, 57 countries and 8 benchmarking entities participated in PIRLS 2021, providing data from about 400,000 students, 380,000 parents, 20,000 teachers, and 13,000 schools. According to the report, “in general there are downward trends in PIRLS 2021that likely are evidence of the assessment taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“in general there are downward trends in PIRLS 2021that likely are evidence of the assessment taking place during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
As we have with previous PISA and TIMMS results, IEN scanned the headlines to see what media outlets in different parts of the world are emphasizing. Predictably, many of the headlines focus on rankings, often noting sharp rises and drops in performance. In this case, the headlines tout high performance in countries like England – rising to #4 in the rankings — but the reporting also acknowledges that rises like these reflect “significant drops” in outcomes in some countries (like Finland and Poland) that are likely associated with the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that some previously highly-ranked countries did not participate this time due to COVID. (At the same time, the headlines in Poland note that Poland, along with Finland, are still at the top of the rankings in the EU.)
In our google search scans, we found a number of headlines from media in the UK, Australia, and parts of Europe, with perhaps the largest number of headlines decrying South Africa’s dismal results. Although headlines in Brazil framed results there in negative terms, Nic Spaull pointed out that South Africa might actually do well to learn from Brazil, given that the results for 4th graders there suggest the that they were 3 years ahead of their peers in South Africa. Notably, no headlines from the US showed up in any of our scans.
“92% of Hong Kong P4 students were at or above the Intermediate International Benchmark, higher than the global average of 75%. The results also showed that 21% of the students were high achievers in reading literacy at the Advanced International Benchmark, which was only attained by 7% of students worldwide.”
International Education News 