Navigating the Fourth Industrial Revolution: ReThinking Education

Welcome to Teacher’s AIed: the newsletter about AI in the K12 Classroom.

How AI will affect K12 Classrooms is complex. Each week, we curate knowledge for educators about the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of AI and K12 education.

This week’s edition lays the groundwork for our series on why educators should begin to rethink how to move forward given AI.

In a previous life, I was a literacy coach. I worked for an organization that trained community members, namely college students and retirees, to become literacy tutors for underperforming students in neighborhood schools. One of my coachees was a lady who taught my parents’ generation how to read. So, as I was presenting on guided reading strategies, phonemes, and “the science of reading,” she asked me, “Wait, isn’t this just like a reading workshop?” Excitedly, I responded with, “Yes! It’s exactly like a reading workshop!” She dryly responded, “Ha! The publishers just repackage these concepts and make a killing on professional development and new textbooks.”

She’s right. In education, we tend to cycle through re-packaged concepts. When my parents learned to read in the 1960s, teachers employed a “look-say” method where teachers point at a word, and students must know that word by “sight.” Today, reading instructors have re-packaged this teaching approach and now call it “sight words” (P. David Pearson 2002).

As educators, we are no strangers to repackaged concepts and cycles of new information. In the age of increasing AI usage, students' changing profiles and needs, and the rapid changes we are witnessing within the broader society, this cycle feels different.

TLDR (Too Long, Didn’t Read) Summary:

This article outlines how the Fourth Industrial Revolution, marked by innovations like consumer-friendly AI tools, compares to the educational shifts during the Second Industrial Revolution.
Then, we will outline the the stakeholders–namely students and teachers. Since most educators are (or soon will be) teaching Generation Alpha, we unpack their traits, learning styles, and the skills they need to succeed.
Finally, we close with you–the educator. We outline how, over the next few weeks, we will introduce strategies, skills, and tools to help you tailor your pedagogy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution while saving yourself some time.

In the coming weeks, we will explore:

• Leveraging AI tools to create personalized lesson plans for students while also acknowledging our need to save time as educators

• Providing timely and equitable feedback to students while also helping us save time

• Offloading administrative tasks onto AI tools

• Introducing new tech tools to families to use at home, but also make your life easier

• Comparing the professional development opportunities available (free/ low cost) to increase your skills and meet others interested in this work, too.