Join the Collective Shift: Human-Centered AI for Learner-Centered Learning

You’re likely sick of hearing about AI. Perhaps it makes you feel inadequate or behind the times. Perhaps it’s scary or intimidating. Perhaps it’s already your able assistant and you don’t want any more pontificating about it.

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We understand.

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Education has a bad habit of chasing after the next new fad, of which AI is the latest.

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We are a new alliance of eight education organizations whose leaders, collectively, have over a century of experience in working with young people, parents, teachers, and education leaders from the classroom to the state – to shift education to make it more human-centered.

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We’ve come together to put the human back into AI.

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So that it doesn’t become the latest thing we follow, but rather something that helps us get where we – we humans – want to go.

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We begin with questions. How might we develop and use AI to:

Help educators and communities adapt classrooms, schools, and school systems to the world we’re accelerating into?
Redesign learning with students, parents, teachers, and administrators to move it out of the creaky, cranky 19th century learning model it currently lives in?
Make everyone’s jobs more manageable and joyous by creating time and space for human caring and relationships, for curiosity and growth?

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We also have ambitions. Namely:

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How can AI help us collectively shift what 54 million young people, 4 million teachers, and 115,000 schools in the United States do, day-in and day-out, to develop and grow communities of learning?

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In short, how might a human-centered approach to AI in schools help to magnify and deepen the special capabilities that make us human?

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Our alliance is called Collective Shift (www.collective-shift.org).

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We are Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC - the project convener), Building21, Incubate Learning, Inkwire, Learner-Centered Collaborative, National Equity Project, Playlab, and reDesign.

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In partnership with educators, schools, and districts we already work with, we’re prototyping four simple no-cost AI tools that support humans in the education space.

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A coach (Ask Gabby) to help anyone with a challenge or question develop their identity as a learner with a growth mindset
A tool that helps schools build competency-based progressions and rubrics that can be used to evaluate student evidence – part of a larger set of resources and coaches (working name: the GradPortrait Activator) to help ed leaders work effectively with their teams and students to make their graduate profile come alive in kids’ everyday experience of school
A simple project builder for students and teachers looking to bring purpose, engagement, and the real world into learning

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Curious?

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We want to collaborate with you!

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The collective shift is bigger than eight organizations; it’s everyone involved in remaking public education to serve the needs of the humans in it.

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We want to collaborate with you to build, test and improve the tools so that they meet your real and unique hopes, goals and needs.

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Please try out one or more of our initial tools and send us feedback.

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Please join our mailing list to be informed about what’s going on – and to let us know what other tools and services might support your needs. The challenges we all face are bigger than what any of us, working on our own, can accomplish. We need everyone working together, at every level, to enable AI to help our schools be profoundly human-centered places.

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The initial funding for this project has generously been provided by LearnerStudio, with additional support provided through the Carnegie Corporation of NY and in-kind contributions from each of the eight partners. Please reach out to NGLC (acalkins@nextgenlearning.org) if you’re a funder interested in supporting this work – or an ed leader interested in serving as an official test-site partner.