Dinowitz and Dr. Pate on AI training gaps and digital literacy
Dinowitz expresses confusion over conflicting testimony about whether student-facing AI is in classrooms. Dr. Pate acknowledges AI is new, describes a central AI guidance training course completed by over 8,300 staff, and mentions partnerships with UFT for teacher-facing professional development. Dinowitz counters that tools are in classrooms without full training or AI literacy curriculum in place.
HMH includes required training for use of AI in the classroom?
No.
It's not required, but there are some aspects of it that, some aspects of the program that different schools or districts are leading into.
You're asking individual schools to choose and figure out whether or not they should
Provide this PD to teachers?
No, but I mean, if any program that a principal, a superintendent, or us centrally brings in would come along with professional learning.
Related to generative AI?
It depends on the, if that is part of the instructional strategy.
What is the question behind your question?
I'm just, your testimony seems to be a lot about like what, you know, what teachers are doing in the classroom, what schools are doing.
And it just, I'm just a little confused.
Like AI is not in the class, student facing AI is not in the classroom, but also HMH has student facing AI and they get the training for these AI.
So I just, I'm just hearing a couple of different things and I'm just trying to get clarity on it.
FTC, if I could.
Chime in just for a moment.
FTC, that's a great.
I had initials like that's great.
Chair, thank you for the question.
We want to recognize very publicly that AI is new.
And in the largest school system in the country, we are taking it all in and we are navigating this evolving landscape.
To answer your question more targeted and more specifically, we have created a central-based AI guidance training for staff.
And to date, we have more than 8,300 staff members who have engaged and completed this course.
One of the positive things about this particular course on our system, we learn, is that as new information develops and evolves, we get to go in and to update that system and that training,
and it actually pings educators to...
Tap into the course again that a new module has been developed to further educate them.
I would acknowledge that there are more opportunities that need to be taken advantage of, which is why we are partnering extremely closely with our labor partners, UFT, who are doing cutting-edge
teacher-facing professional development that is deeply building their capacity around appropriate pedagogical uses of AI in the classroom.
So from my standpoint as chief academic officer, it is that we are engaging in a wraparound, rapidly evolving, capacity building
approach to what it means to educate teachers around appropriate use of AI in the classroom.
And also we are starting to deeply look at what AI literacy should look like, be like for students as they navigate what it means to be career ready,
technology facing, and also utilize AI technology.
day-to-day in the work that they do from teachers.
Is it perfect?
It is not.
But are we aggressively acknowledging that we need to continue to develop and to do that work?
We are.
The tools, I mean, you said we're taking it all in now, that it's rapidly evolving.
That's true, but while we're taking it all in, we're putting it out into the classroom without all of the trainings in place and without this digital literacy or AI literacy curriculum with any sort of evaluative tools to know whether our students are
AI literate before throwing the tools at them.
I'm going to turn it over to my co-chair, Chair De La Rosa, and also acknowledge that we've been joined by Council Member Farias, as well as Aviles on Zoom.