Joy in Learning using AI

I watched a fabulous Ted Talk this week by Scott Bolland on Neuroscience, AI, and the Future of Education. It’s from seven years ago, so it’s nothing to do with ChatGPT or the conversations that have been happening in schools over the last 18 months. Instead, it’s about possibility. Bolland starts by sharing, “The highest concentrations of the brain’s endorphin receptors are in the learning centers of the brain. We are actually hardwired to learn and to find great joy in learning…dopamine is also released, making learning highly addictive.” He goes on to share how schools are not set up to activate those pleasure centers for individual students but instead to teach a standardized curriculum that leaves 63% of students disengaged. 

Bolland’s talk reminded me of my daughter’s first experience with a test. She was in the second or third grade, and she was learning through the Everyday Math program. At dinner that evening, she shared that she stayed in at lunch because she was taking a test. My husband and my hackles raised at the idea of her missing lunch for an assessment, so we asked, “Why’d you have to do that?” She explained that, no, she didn’t have to, she wanted to. We asked about the questions that were giving her difficulty, and, it turned out, they were optional word problems at the end of the assessment. Ok… So we asked, “What did you do when you were having trouble with the question?” and she said, “I shook my fist in the air.” We all laughed. “What did you do next?” I ventured, and her response was, “I kept thinking and trying new ways to solve it, and I did.” She grinned. 

She clearly got joy from the process of trying to solve the problem. No one asked or required her to keep working, and yet she had to, for herself. By the way, she was never a big math student. She called IXL, an online practice program for math learning, IXHell, both to us and her teachers. But give her an interesting problem to solve that happened to involve mathematical knowledge, and she is in.

The fact that this was her first time taking a “test” also meant that she had no idea that this was a summative assessment and that she would be judged by it or graded on it. At most, the feedback she received was based on a descriptive proficiency rubric.

Fast forward to the seventh grade, and that same child who had such fun solving problems was seized by anxiety about getting the right grade with the right numbers all of the time. She did things for the grade and was hyper-aware of how good she had to be to get top grades. Her joy in learning came outside of the classroom. She created a tight 10 standup comedy routine, taught herself to play guitar, and recorded and produced her first album by herself. When she wrote, or drew, or played music and put it out into the world, she was being evaluated, but not on a scale that put her value on a continuum. 

I imagine there are many parents who have similar stories of their children. There may be some parents who encourage it, thinking that competition and ranking are ways to validate both their children and themselves. I am not one of those parents. 

I have been an educator for almost 30 years and have worked to change practices and beliefs about learning and assessment for most of that time. I have seen the mighty “grade,” the reduction of learning to a number, continuously triumph. We believe that we have to put a number on learning so that, in the end, colleges and universities can evaluate these lovely children and know if they “fit” or are ready to learn more. We start grading earlier and earlier so that students know how to take tests and so that we can “empirically” show learning. 

We have decades of research showing that “every student can learn, just not on the same day and in the same way” (attributed to George Evans), and yet our schools continue to pretend that there’s value in teaching the same thing, to a whole class, in lock-step, and then picking a day when all students will show their learning (or not), and then we move on. It’s time to fix this systemic problem for our students so that they can take their time to learn, shake their fists, and find joy in the process without the weight of a grade over their heads. 

The system was built for efficiency with blocks of time with blocks of learning objectives and assessments to measure learning at the end of the blocks. And just as these blocks of efficiency dont work very well for humans in factories, they don’t work for teachers or students. We all know that there’s too much mandated curriculum shoved into these blocks, and it’s been overwhelming for teachers, with large class sizes and grading responsibilities, to be able to provide differentiated approaches for each student and staggered assessments timed for when the child has actually learned. Now that we have the possibility of AI assistants, however, this whole model can be reassessed. Teachers can create scaffolded learning for all students with a simple tool, like UnconstrainED’s differentiation app. They can create quizzes and tests on concepts and skills in seconds so that the trial of creating new assessments for students who need to take an assessment at a different time is eliminated. With this mastery learning approach, we don’t need grades to see what each child can do at the end of an arbitrary amount of time because our aim is all students proficient, or masters, on a day, not “the” day we decide to assess. 

I know this is easier said than done. I know that there will be barriers both in systems and individuals. Beliefs and habits are hard to change. I also know that I would give just about anything to keep that joy in learning, that dopamine and endorphin-inducing process, central to education. That grinning face of a child who’s accomplished something hard and is proud of themselves should be a regular sight for us all, at all ages.