Without a doubt, career and technical education (CTE) is priceless for high school students wanting to get real-world, hands-on job skills before they graduate and turn their interests into career paths. Increased support for CTE programs at the federal and state levels, coupled with evolving technology and new research-led learning approaches, has placed CTE programs on center stage for 2026.
There is growing evidence that CTE functions as an early talent pipeline for employers, not just a preparation program. It is with certainty, employers value CTE experience, actively hire participants, and see partnerships with CTE programs as a way to build a skilled workforce aligned to real business needs. As a result, states and employers are increasingly integrating CTE into broader workforce and talent development strategies.
Here are six CTE trends to watch in 2026.
1. AI literacy becomes a baseline (for entry-level jobs). Practical exercises using AI tools will be essential in pathways like IT, engineering, and manufacturing, but not only those educational focuses.
2. CTE programs increasingly align with national reindustrialization. Skilled workforce/trades are viable options to improve economic viability. Plus, many high-demand and high-paying careers now prioritize specialized skills, certifications, and hands-on experience over a general academic degree.
3. Enhanced employability. Today’s companies value durable skills like critical thinking, communication, and collaboration just as much as–or even more than–technical skills. Look for more CTE programs to focus on these skills, and online learning platforms like KnoPro to sharpen these interpersonal and behavioral qualities essential for workplace success.
4. Alumni trajectories. CTE providers will see an increased value in alumni trajectory studies that track graduates’ success in careers and further education, showing they often have higher graduation rates, better wages, and smooth transitions to work or college programs.
5. Work-based learning (WBL) expansion. While fewerhiring managers think high school graduates are ready for the workforce. More states are incorporating WBL standards into their graduation requirements. Look for more students to take advantage of comprehensive job shadowing, worksite tours and internships to build skills, social capital, and informed career choices.
6. Dual enrollment and industry certifications on the rise. It’s no secret that dual enrollment is experiencing significant growth in American high schools, where students are earning college credits and industry-recognized credentials to accelerate their path to the workforce or a degree. Also, look for more students earning industry certifications to gain specialized skills, improve employability, and potentially increase wages and lower college debt.
Dirk Butler, NAF
Dirk Butler is NAF’s Chief Program Officer. NAF is a national education non-profit that brings schools and businesses together to better prepare students of all backgrounds. NAF helps students explore career options, create a plan for the future, and take part in hands-on, work-based learning unlike anything traditional public education systems can offer. NAF puts students on a path to achieving their full potential. During the 2024-25 school year, over 112,000 students attended over 600 NAF academies across 34 states and territories.
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Who among us has never copied a homework answer in a hurry? Borrowed a friend’s paragraph? Accepted a parent’s “small correction” that eventually became a full rewrite?
Long before generative AI entered the classroom, homework relied on a quiet, fragile assumption that what was submitted reflected independent understanding. In reality, homework has always been open to outside influence. While some students had parents who edited essays or tutors who guided every response, others worked entirely alone. This unevenness was tolerated for decades because it was manageable and largely invisible.
Generative AI has made that invisibility impossible.
Tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini can now draft essays, summarize readings, and solve complex problems in seconds. What once required a knowledgeable adult now requires only a prompt. AI did not invent the outsourcing of schoolwork; it simply scaled it to a level we can no longer ignore. In doing so, it has forced educators to confront a deeper, more uncomfortable question: What has homework actually been measuring–understanding or compliance?
The design problem we avoided
Homework has traditionally served as a catch-all for practice, accountability, and reinforcement. However, in many classrooms, completion gradually became a proxy for learning. Neatness signaled effort, and submission signaled responsibility. Whether the work reflected authentic reasoning was often assumed rather than examined.
AI exposes the fragility of that assumption. If a task can be successfully completed through reproduction rather than reasoning, it was always vulnerable, whether to a search engine, a sibling, or a chatbot. This is not primarily a cheating problem; it is a design problem.
From Product to Process: The Research Pivot Educational research suggests that the solution isn’t more surveillance, but a shift in what we value. Durable learning depends on metacognition, a student’s ability to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own thinking.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) identifies metacognitive and self-regulated learning strategies as among the most impactful approaches for improving student outcomes. Their research suggests these strategies are most effective when embedded directly within subject instruction rather than taught as a separate “study skills” unit. Similarly, John Hattie’s Visible Learning synthesis highlights that feedback and self-regulation have effect sizes that far exceed the gains associated with surface-level task completion.
In other words, what drives long-term achievement is not the polished output, but the visible thinking that produced it. Yet, many traditional assignments remain stubbornly product-driven:
Write a summary.
Complete the worksheet.
Submit a finished essay.
In an AI-enabled world, polished products are cheap. Reasoning is the new currency.
Levelling the field for ELL and SPED learners
This shift toward “process over product” is a matter of equity, particularly for English language learners (ELLs) and students receiving special education services.
Traditional homework often privileges surface-level fluency. An ELL student may grasp a complex scientific concept deeply but struggle to express it in perfect academic English. When grading centers on the final product, their linguistic struggle can overshadow their cognitive mastery. Similarly, many SPED students, particularly those with executive functioning or processing differences, benefit from structured reflection and chunked reasoning. A single, polished submission rarely captures the massive cognitive effort they put into the “middle” steps of a project.
By redesigning homework to focus on the “how” rather than the “what,” we begin to ask more meaningful questions:
How did the student navigate a point of confusion?
What misconceptions did they revise during the process?
How did they use available tools, including AI, to clarify their own understanding?
Draft comparisons, reflection notes, and verbal explanations reveal a landscape of learning that a perfected final draft hides. For linguistically and cognitively diverse students, this shift values growth and strategy over the “veneer” of a perfect assignment.
Redesigning for the AI era
The answer is not to ban the technology, as students will inevitably encounter it beyond the school gates. Instead, we can redesign homework to cultivate discernment. This might include:
Critique and edit: Asking students to generate an AI response and then use a rubric to identify its factual errors or lack of nuance.
Artifact collection: Requiring the submission of “thinking artifacts” such as brainstorming maps, voice notes, or early drafts that show how an idea evolved.
The “exit interview” model: Following a take-home assignment with a brief, two-minute in-class dialogue or peer-review session to verify the reasoning behind the work.
A necessary reckoning
AI did not destroy homework, but rather removed the illusion that homework was ever a pure measure of independent work. We are now in a period of necessary reckoning. We must decide if we are willing to design assignments that prioritize cognition over compliance.
In an era where text can be generated instantly, the most valuable evidence of learning is no longer the finished product sitting on a desk or in a digital inbox. It is the human reasoning behind it. For our most diverse learners, this shift away from “the polish” and toward “the process” isn’t just a reaction to technology, it’s a long-overdue move toward true equity.
Nesreen El-Baz, Bloomsbury Education Author & School Governor
Nesreen El-Baz is an ESL educator with over 20 years of experience, and is a certified bilingual teacher with a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction. El-Baz is currently based in the UK, holds a Masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Houston Christian University, and specializes in developing in innovative strategies for English Learners and Bilingual education.
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Nesreen El-Baz, Bloomsbury Education Author & School Governor
Today, a social network (I won’t name names) reminded me that 7 years ago I completed Stanford University course on cryptography. It wasn’t an easy course, I still remember the long nights trying to understand some pretty hard calculus problems, but, all in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it.
This wasn’t the only course I took from Coursera. For the next couple of years I did a deep dive in Artificial Intelligence, or Machine Learning, as it was called back then. I started from the wonderful Andrew Ng foundations module, and I went all the way up to the fascinating Generative Adversarial Networks one. I won’t put all of them here, if you’re curious you can have a peek at my LinkedIn certifications page.
Back then, artificial intelligence wasn’t spectacular. There was no ChatGPT yet, and you would just try to solve difficult problems in Jupyter notebooks, and get yourself accustomed to Matlab, or python and matrix multiplications. You would learn complicated neural networks architectures and try to find the gradient descent of a cost function. Then you would apply Adam optimizers and do regression tests.
If all of this sounds like Chinese to you, it’s on purpose. Just stay with me a little bit more.
A couple of years later, a benign chat app was released by a non-profit startup called OpenAI, under the name of ChatGPT. The world literally changed overnight. ChatGPT exploded, and now it has a staggering 800 million users every month. See, a relatively small advancement in machine learning, called transformers, made all the Chinese above instantly usable. Practical. Easy to understand.
Where am I going with this?
Well, when I started to learn artificial intelligence, 7 years ago, the field was still obscure. There was little to no practical mass adoption. People interested in this had to make significant cognitive efforts to understand what’s going on. But when the thing reached critical mass, those who started early were incredibly well positioned.
Why? Because they understood the foundations. They understood how this “magical” chat starts from optimizing a cost function to match features with outcomes. They knew how it was all optimized. And they could start performing on this field, at a very high level, instantly.
All this while still living location independent, and being blessed with a one year old child.
If you’re still here, I’ll infer you want to know more about how this worked for me, so here’s a short excerpt of my experience with continuous learning.
How To Get The Best of Continuous Learning
This doesn’t apply only to artificial intelligence. It can be applied to language learning, creativity, or any other thing that, stacked on top of the previous one learned, will eventually make you a polymath – an being a polymath is surprisingly beneficial.
Start early, start when it’s hard
If you want to be well positioned, start early. Start when the field is not yet mainstream. Start when it’s difficult. Learn the basics, and try to build on top of them, even though the results may not be spectacular first. I cannot stress this enough: the thing you’re learning will never unfold in the way you expected it to be. It will unfold in a much better way.
For example, when I started to learn Korean, I expected to get a language certification. Instead, I won a hackathon in South Korea.
Build lateral skills
By “lateral skills” I mean skills that can complement some of your already established expertise. Deep specialization is commoditized these days – AI is already an always-on source of deep knowledge. What’s missing, though, and what AI cannot easily replace, is the peculiar mix between unusual skill combinations. Pair this with real life experience, and you’ll be unstoppable.
For example, I am a coder for 35 years, but artificial intelligence is so much more than coding. So, knowing how to code definitely helps me, and, compared with your weekend vibe coder, it puts me in a much better position.
Make it a gravitational habit
Don’t try to make it a separate event. Don’t put it on your New Year’s resolutions. Don’t make vision boards with it. Instead, make continuous learning as boring as brushing your teeth every day. I call these kind of habits “gravitational habits”, because the more you do them, the more you will do them, regardless of how you feel.
Gravitation still pulls you no matter how you feel. Happy, motivated, bored, tired, a gravitational habit will always pull you towards it. If you want to know how I apply this to finances, I wrote a tiny guide called Gravitational Habits for Financial Resilience, give it a try.
Experiment, experiment, experiment
This is not a fixed term task. The name itself say it very clearly: continuous learning. That means, beyond making it a part of your lifestyle, that some of the stuff you learn will be eventually replaced by something new – and there’s nothing you can do to stop this. So, what worked yesterday may or may not work today. This reality forces an experimental mind, one that thinks in scenarios, not in frozen paths.
Keep experimenting and try to detach yourself from the result. The goal of an experiment is to learn something, not to reach a specific goal. If you do reach a goal, though, be happy, you earned it.
Where To Go From Here?
Well, literally wherever you want. Continuous learning will open new paths, many of them unthinkable with your current level of understanding.
We live in an ever-evolving world, powered by advancements across STEM fields. Today, STEM has become increasingly intertwined with how we live our daily lives–from how we learn, to how we work, to entertainment and more.
STEM innovations are a major force driving society forward, as we’ve most recently seen with the AI explosion that is generating a growing demand for STEM talent in the workforce. In fact, STEM employment is set to increase nearly 3x the rate of non-STEM employment by 2033.
As teachers, our job is to equip students to excel in our dynamic world–not only within the classroom, but to also empower them to build foundational skills that will help them to thrive when they enter the workforce.
As STEM talent continues to become vital, these skills are ones K-12 teachers must ensure we’re implementing in our classrooms, because introducing STEM education early on helps spark curiosity among students.
So, what can teachers do to fuel a passion for STEM among their students?
The power of project-based learning
Project-based learning (PBL) is proving itself to be a successful pedagogy–nearly half (46%) of K-12 Gen Z students say opportunities to engage with learning material in a hands-on way drive their interest, and about one-third most enjoy what they’re learning when they can make real-world connections.
PBL is an alternative to traditional rote learning methods. When applying PBL to STEM education, instead of having students listening passively to information, they actively engage in real-world problems that require them to use STEM concepts to solve complex problems. This hands-on approach allows students to develop a deeper sense of knowledge of the topic they’re learning about–they’re not just merely memorizing but also learning from its applications. For instance, in a PBL setting, students could identify lack of access to filtered water as a problem and then work together to design a sustainable water filtration system to address this challenge.
PBL helps students not only supplement theoretical knowledge but also provide a sense of purpose and applicability. It helps enhance the learning experience for students by making it enjoyable and allowing students to see the impact they can bring out into the world beyond the classroom.
When it comes to STEM, PBL plays a powerful role in tapping into students’ curiosity. STEM curriculums aren’t typically viewed as ones that power creativity, but by framing learning in terms of interesting questions or issues, PBL allows students to explore, experiment and learn these topics in a unique way that allows them to become innovators in the classroom. This process can be highly motivating, allowing students to become agents in their own learning process. The sense of ownership and pride that comes with successfully finishing a challenging project can ignite a lifetime interest in STEM.
Building the skills to power future STEM innovators
PBL helps enhance learning experiences for students by making the process more exciting and engaging, and it also allows them to develop and foster crucial skills that are necessary in our STEM-powered world.
By introducing PBL into the classroom, students are given the opportunity to work closely together on project work, which allows them to harness core skills like collaboration, clear communication, vital problem-solving abilities, creativity and perseverance. These skills are ones that empower students throughout their education journey–from K-12 and beyond–and are also essential for STEM career success. Encouraging skills like creativity in students’ developmental years empowers them to think outside of the box–a crucial competency for STEM professionals. Creativity drives innovation, and helping students to flex and build this muscle early on will allow them to enter the STEM workforce ready to drive change.
Figuring out how to implement PBL can feel overwhelming, especially if the existing curriculum doesn’t allow room for this approach. Luckily for teachers, there are a plethora of great programs, like the National Science Teaching Association and Toshiba’s ExploraVision, which offer support and resources to make PBL opportunities a reality, helping us spark a passion for STEM among our students.
Shaping STEM leaders in the classroom
As we’ve seen with AI’s rapid advancements, STEM fields are shaping the nation’s future. Today’s students are soon to become the future leaders of tomorrow. Teachers bear a responsibility to prepare them with the skills they need to thrive in their education–as well as in the workplace.
Project-based learning is a critical, and proven, means of providing students with hands-on, experiential learning that nurtures curiosity, skills and a sense of purpose. As we prepare our students to address the challenges and opportunities of the future, PBL is an integral and effective tool, fueling a lifelong passion for STEM and equipping students with the skills necessary to become strong STEM leaders.
Tami Brook, STEM School Highlands Ranch
Tami Brook is a second-grade teacher at STEM School Highlands Ranch. With six years of experience in problem-based learning, she’s dedicated to challenging students to apply their knowledge and explore innovative solutions to real-world problems.
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(GREENVILLE, Wis.) February 16, 2026 – School Specialty, a leading provider of learning environments, instructional solutions, and supplies for preK-12 education, is proud to celebrate outstanding educators with its 12th annual Crystal Apple Awards. Starting today, students, parents, administrators, and peers are encouraged to nominate educators who embody inspiration, leadership, and a tireless passion for teaching.
Each year, students, parents, administrators, and fellow teachers nominate teachers who, like last year’s inspiring finalists and winners, go above and beyond to touch the lives of students every day. This year, School Specialty will award 16 finalists from the nominees, five of whom will be selected as winners through a public vote.
“Entering our 12th year of the Crystal Apple Awards is a milestone that reminds us why we do what we do,” said Dr. Sue Ann Highland, National Education Strategist at School Specialty. “These awards are about more than just recognizing phenomenal educators; they are about providing dedicated teachers with the resources they need to keep inspiring the next generation of thinkers and leaders.”
Crystal Apple Finalists receive a $100 School Specialty merchandise certificate for themselves and an additional $100 certificate for their school. This year’s winners will each receive a personalized trophy and a $500 gift certificate from School Specialty for themselves, as well as a $250 School Specialty gift certificate for their school.
Public voting on nominees will be open from April 6 to 12, 2026, and the winners will be announced on April 21.
About School Specialty, LLC
With a 60-year legacy, School Specialty is a leading provider of comprehensive learning environment solutions for the preK-12 education marketplace in the U.S. and Canada. This includes essential classroom supplies, furniture and design services, educational technology, sensory spaces featuring Snoezelen, science curriculum, learning resources, professional development, and more. School Specialty believes every student can flourish in an environment where they are engaged and inspired to learn and grow. In support of this vision to transform more than classrooms, the company applies its unmatched team of education strategists and designs, manufactures, and distributes a broad assortment of name-brand and proprietary products. For more information, go toSchoolSpecialty.com.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
As a paraprofessional for over 3 years and going on my 5th year as a certified special education resource teacher, I’ve learned that no two learners are ever quite the same. Each student brings unique strengths, challenges, and ways of processing the world around them. Each student has their own learning path and rate.
That’s why differentiation is not just a teaching strategy–it’s the heart of student engagement and student success. When students feel that lessons are designed for them, they become more confident, motivated, and curious learners.
Research supports this, too. Studies show that differentiated instruction can significantly increase student engagement and achievement, especially when supported by digital tools that allow for flexibility and personalization. Thankfully, today’s technology makes it easier than ever to meet students where they are, while still aligning instruction with grade-level state curriculum.
Below are two tools that have transformed how I differentiate instruction in my classroom and help my students feel successful every day.
Personalized practice for mastery
One of my go-to resources for differentiation is IXL, a digital platform that provides personalized skill practice across multiple subject areas. I love that IXL adapts to each student’s learning level, it meets them where they are and builds from there.
For example, in math, my students might all be working on problem-solving, but IXL tailors the level of difficulty and types of problems based on their individual performance. Some may start with basic word problems, while others are ready for multi-step reasoning. The immediate feedback helps students self-correct and celebrate their progress in real time.
IXL also helps me as a teacher. The diagnostic tools identify skill gaps and strengths, giving me insight into how to group students for small-group instruction or how to adjust future lessons. It’s a win-win: Students feel empowered to grow, and I have data-driven insights that make planning more intentional.
Engaging Resources for All Learners
Another tool I rely on daily is Discovery Education Experience. This classroom companion is packed with interactive lessons, quizzes, videos, virtual field trips, activities, and so much more that make learning come alive for my students.
I use Discovery Education Experience to differentiate my instruction based on the TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) standards we’re required to teach, but with flexibility to meet each student’s needs. I can easily find numerous resources that support both teacher planning and student learning, all from one spot. For example, when teaching a reading comprehension skill, I can assign a short video for visual learners, a guided reading passage for independent practice, and an interactive quiz for students who thrive on technology.
The best part? It allows me to blend digital and print options. Some students work best completing a printed activity, while others enjoy interactive online lessons. That flexibility means every student has an entry point into the learning experience, regardless of ability level.
Insider tips for differentiating with technology
Over the years, I’ve learned that differentiation doesn’t have to be complicated–it just needs to be intentional. Here are a few tips that help make it manageable and meaningful:
Start small: Pick one lesson or one tool to differentiate and build from there.
Use data as your guide: Platforms like IXL and Discovery Education Experience make it easy to see where students need support or enrichment.
Offer choice: Let students decide how they show what they’ve learned–through writing, drawing, creating a slide, or recording a short video.
Blend print and digital: Not every student thrives on a screen; mixing modalities keeps engagement high.
Incorporate positive reinforcement: Celebrate progress often, even in small steps. Stickers, praise, raffles, and/or printable certificates can motivate students to keep working toward their goals. Recognizing effort builds confidence and encourages persistence, especially for students who may struggle emotionally and academically. I also have students track their progress in their interactive journals to motivate and celebrate their successes. A progress tracker holds the students accountable and continues to engage them to work towards their academic goals.
Differentiation is all about giving every student what they need to succeed. Teachers can create classrooms that are not only more inclusive but also more engaging and empowering.
Each day, I’m reminded that when we meet students at their level and celebrate their progress, we help them discover their own love for learning. That’s what makes teaching so rewarding, and technology can be one of our best partners in making it happen.
Emily Skinner, Cypress Fairbanks Independent School District
Emily Skinner is a Special Education Teacher at Warner Elementary School of Cypress Fairbanks Independent School District in Texas. Emily has served as a paraprofessional for over 3 years and is going on her 5th year as a certified special education resource teacher. Outside of teaching, Emily enjoys spending time outdoors, crafting, and upcycling items.
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Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, which prohibits discrimination against students and other individuals with disabilities, is far less visible than the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in school districts. Largely neglected in comparison to the IDEA, it poses growing problems and hidden costs on the general education side of the ledger. In comparison to students with IEPs under the IDEA, students eligible under only the overlapping coverage of Section 504 are the responsibility of general education.
The problems and costs start with mis-identification under Section 504’s definition of disability, which is broader than that under the IDEA. Not limited to specified classifications, such as specific learning disability, or the need for special education, the requirements for Section 504 eligibility are (1) any physical or mental impairment that limits (2) a major life activity (3) substantially. The students identified under Section 504 rather than the narrow eligibility definition of the IDEA are referred to as “504-only,” and they typically receive accommodations and services under a 504 plan as compared to an IEP.
“504-only” rates
The national rate of students with 504 plans has almost quadrupled in the past 15 years. More specifically, in school year 2009–10, which was one year after Congress expanded the interpretive standards for determining eligibility under Section 504, the national percentage, according to data collected by the U.S. Department of Education, was 1.1 percent. This percentage steadily increased, well beyond the effects of the Congressional amendments. In 2021–22, which was the most recently released data from the Department, the national percentage was 3.9 percent.
This growth is attributable in part to the increase in the identified incidence of not only ADHD, dyslexia, and anxiety but also various physical health issues, such as diabetes and food allergies. However, another major reason is the loose identification practices for “504-only” students.
Revealing not only resulting over- but also under-identification, for the most recent year of 2021–22, the rates varied at the state level from New Hampshire and Texas at almost double the national percentage to New Mexico and Mississippi at less than half that national rate. California’s rate for that year was only 2.1 percent, but its variance was wide. Its districts ranged from 0 percent to 13.9 percent, and schools ranged from 0 percent to 24.2 percent. Districts and schools at the low end are particularly vulnerable to individual child find claim. And one can only imagine what it’s like to be a general education teacher at a school for those at the high end in terms of paperwork, meetings, implementation, and resulting litigation. Thus, both over- and under-identification warrant administrative attention.
Mis-identification costs and consequences
For over-identification, the hidden costs include not only providing related services, such as counseling and transportation, but also the time of teachers and administrators for meetings, forms, and potential complaint investigations, impartial hearings, and court proceedings. Additionally, at a time of teacher shortage, high percentages of students with 504 plans contributes to current recruitment and attrition problems. Yet, unlike the IDEA, Section 504 provides no extra funding from either federal or state governments. Thus, Section 504 implementation is part of the school district’s general education budget. Moreover, along with under-identification, over-identification is a matter of social as well as legal justice, because it allocates limited school resources to students who do not really qualify and, thus, are false positives. This hurts both the true positives (i.e., accurately identified) and the false negatives (i.e., should be identified). The under-identified students pose a hidden cost of exposure to child find violations, which include attorneys’ fees and remedial orders.
Quick tips for district consideration
Make sure that your administration annually collects and examines accurate information as to the percentage of students with 504 plans for the district as a whole and for the elementary, middle, and high school levels. For percentages that are notably high or low in relation to extrapolated current national and state rates, extend the data collection and review to the identified impairments, major life activities, and the basis for the “substantial” connection between the impairment and major life activities
Under the leadership of a designated central administrator, make sure that each school has a carefully selected, officially designated, sufficiently trained, and solidly backed Section 504 coordinator In general, the principal or an assistant principal is the presumptively correct choice; yet, principals too often delegate this key role to a relatively inexperienced school counselor or other staff member who lacks appropriate expertise and authority for proper 504-only identification.
Make sure that the administration has uniform, effective, and legally defensible policies and practices that include:
Child find procedures parallel to those under the IDEA but keyed to the broader, three-part definition of disability under Section 504, which does not require educational impact or the need for special education.
Eligibility decision is by a team that meets the legal criteria of being reasonably knowledgeable about the child, evaluation data, and appropriate services/accommodations.
Regular training for the team, which includes legal updates on the identification procedures and criteria but also the longitudinal § 504-only rates for the district, school, and grade.
Invest general education resources on multi-tiered strategies and supports, differentiated instruction, and responsive accommodations for students that do not clearly qualify for either IEPs or 504 plans. The more that districts meet student needs with such practices on a reliable and reasonable basis, the less that problems of over- and under-identification tend to arise.
Perry A. Zirkel, Retired Professor of Education Law
Perry A. Zirkel is a retired professor of education law who shares his work at perryzirkel.com.
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Perry A. Zirkel, Retired Professor of Education Law
Rather than replacing student thinking, when teachers design and guide AI experiences, the technology is most often used to deepen critical thinking and strengthen instruction, according to new insights from SchoolAI.
The report analyzed more than 23,000 teacher-created SchoolAI ‘Spaces’ used during the 2024-25 school year. These Spaces span English language arts, math, science, and social studies across elementary, middle, and high school classrooms. To answer the question of AI’s impact on student learning, we must first understand how it’s being used in the classroom. This study examined what teachers built and how students were asked to think when AI was involved.
Across subjects and grade levels, the data shows that higher-order thinking appears far more often than simple recall. Seventy-three percent of lessons require conceptual understanding, while 59 percent ask students to analyze information, and 58 percent ask them to evaluate ideas or make judgments. More than 75 percent of AI-supported lessons remain grounded in core academic curriculum, showing that teachers are extending familiar instruction rather than replacing it.
“There has been a lot of speculation about what AI might do to learning,” said Caleb Hicks, founder and CEO of SchoolAI. “This research gives educators, leaders, and policymakers something far more useful: evidence of what teachers are actually doing. When teachers design the experience and set clear expectations, AI becomes a way to push students toward deeper reasoning, analysis, and judgment. It supports rigorous thinking rather than replacing it, which is why AI can be a valuable tool for classroom learning.”
The study also highlights how teachers are using AI to create interactive, engaging learning experiences at scale while maintaining academic rigor. In science classrooms, roughly 25 percent of Spaces encourage open-ended investigation, while role-play and simulation appear in 18-20 percent of reading and social studies lessons.
At the same time, teachers recognize the importance of boundaries in responsible AI use. Teachers reinforce learning instead of simply looking up answers by designing experiences that push students toward deeper reasoning, not shortcuts.
“This study was designed to look at practice, not predictions,” said Cynthia Chiong, principal research scientist at SchoolAI. “We wanted to understand the kinds of thinking teachers are intentionally asking for when AI is involved. The findings offer concrete evidence of how teacher-led design shapes meaningful and responsible use of AI in real classrooms.”
Together, the findings challenge common fears about AI undermining learning. The research shows that when teachers lead the design, AI can strengthen critical thinking, increase engagement, and support responsible instruction across classrooms.
Greenville, Wis. – February 3, 2026 – As educators look for meaningful ways to balance digital learning with hands-on experiences, School Specialty®, a leading provider of learning environments and supplies for preK-12 education, today announced the official launch of its new Childcraft Out2Grow Outdoor Furniture line. Designed to extend learning beyond the traditional classroom, the innovative collection offers a durable, sustainable and economical way for schools to create engaging, learning environments rooted in exploration, movement and real-world discovery.
As outdoor learning continues to gain traction in early childhood education, Childcraft is answering the call for equipment that supports gross motor development, social-emotional skills and hands-on STEM exploration. The new line features a variety of versatile pieces, including sand and water tables, a planter, play kitchen and collaborative benches, that enable schools to create specialized outdoor zones for science, dramatic play and group projects.
Built for the Elements, Designed for the Child
Unlike traditional wood or metal alternatives, the Childcraft outdoor line is manufactured from High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE). This premium material is 100% recyclable and engineered to withstand sun, rain, snow and daily wear and tear without rotting, cracking or fading. The products feature rust-resistant hardware, splinter-free rounded corners and a limited lifetime warranty.
Empowering Educators and Students Alike
The line provides a comprehensive solution for modern early childhood needs:
Expanded Classrooms: Offers teachers the flexibility to move learning centers outdoors, encouraging nature-based discovery and hands-on observation.
Collaborative Hubs: Creates structured spaces for group activities and social skill development, essential for PreK–2 cooperative learning.
Multi-Use Versatility: Accommodates everything from STEM projects to snack time with stain-resistant surfaces that allow for quick, easy transitions.
Holistic Wellness: Promotes physical activity and eye health while reducing stress and screen time, helping children build focus and self-regulation.
“The Childcraft Out2Grow furniture line was born from a growing number of requests from our customers seeking new ways to enhance outdoor learning spaces for young children,” said Jennifer Fernandez, Early Childhood Education Strategist at School Specialty. “Knowing the many benefits of outdoor learning—academic, health, social and emotional—I’m thrilled that School Specialty can help early childhood programs create engaging environments where PreK–2 students can truly reap those benefits.”
Whether used in traditional school districts, childcare centers or children’s clubs and museums, these products connect students to nature while supporting well-being and educational outcomes.
The Childcraft Out2Grow Outdoor Furniture line is available for order immediately. For more information on the full collection, visit http://www.schoolspecialty.com/out2grow.
About School Specialty, LLC
With a 60-year legacy, School Specialty is a leading provider of comprehensive learning environment solutions for the preK-12 education marketplace in the U.S. and Canada. This includes essential classroom supplies, furniture and design services, educational technology, sensory spaces featuring Snoezelen, science curriculum, learning resources, professional development, and more. School Specialty believes every student can flourish in an environment where they are engaged and inspired to learn and grow. In support of this vision to transform more than classrooms, the company applies its unmatched team of education strategists and designs, manufactures, and distributes a broad assortment of name-brand and proprietary products. For more information, go to SchoolSpecialty.com.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
Sixty-five percent of educators use AI to bridge resource gaps, even as platform fatigue and a lack of system integration threaten productivity, according to Jotform‘s EdTech Trends 2026 report.
Based on a survey of 50 K-12 and higher education professionals, the report reveals a resilient workforce looking for ways to combat the effects of significant budget cuts and burnout. The respondents were teachers, instructors, and professors split about equally between higher education and K-12.
While 56 percent of educators are “very concerned” over recent cuts to U.S. education infrastructure, 65 percent are now actively using AI. Of those using AI, nearly half (48 percent) use it for both student learning and administrative tasks, such as summarizing long documents and automating feedback.
“We conducted this survey to better understand the pain points educators have with technology,” says Lainie Johnson, director of enterprise marketing at Jotform. “We were surprised that our respondents like their tech tools so much. Because while the tools themselves are great, their inability to work together causes a problem.”
Key findings from the EdTech Trends 2026 report include:
The integration gap: Although 77 percent of educators say their current digital tools work well, 73 percent cite a “lack of integration between systems” as their primary difficulty. “The No. 1 thing I would like for my digital tools to do is to talk to each other,” one respondent noted. “I feel like often we have to jump from one platform to another just to get work done.”
Platform fatigue: Educators are managing an average of eight different digital tools, with 50 percent reporting they are overwhelmed by “too many platforms.”
The burden of manual tasks: Despite the many digital tools they use, educators spend an average of seven hours per week on manual tasks.
AI for productivity: Fifty-eight percent of respondents use AI most frequently as a productivity tool for research, brainstorming, and writing.
Data security and ethics: Ethical implications and data security are the top concerns for educators when implementing AI.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
Imagine trying to teach a student how to navigate the city of New York in 2026 using a map from 1950. The streets have changed names, new bridges have been built, and the traffic patterns have completely changed and are unrecognizable. The student fails not because they lack intelligence, but because the data provided is obsolete.
Sadly, that’s exactly how we teach kids about money in American high schools today.
In high schools across the country, we give students older resources like textbooks printed three years ago or PDFs from 2022, and we expect them to navigate a financial landscape that is dynamic and always changing. We teach them about 2 percent mortgage rates when they are really around 6-7 percent and talk about tax rules that haven’t been valid for years.
We are not teaching financial literacy–rather we are teaching financial history. The latency is costing the next generation their economic future. This must change.
The latency problem
The fundamental flaw in traditional edtech is that it treats finance like literature or a history class where things do not change. For example, the American revolution in 1776 is the same whether you learn it in 2001 or 2025–but in finance and money, things like interest rates, contribution limits and rules are always changing.
When the Federal Reserve changes the federal funds rate, rates on student loans or savings accounts also changes. A paper textbook can’t keep up with that, nor can a pre-recorded video module capture this change. By the time an old-fashioned curriculum is approved, printed, and distributed, things might even change again, which leads to outdated information regarding financial realities.
This delay gap creates a disconnect between the classroom and the real world. Students learn definitions for a test, but when they open a real brokerage app or apply for their first credit card, they realize what they learned in class doesn’t match what’s happening, which makes them find connecting the classroom to the real world difficult.
The Live-State solution
Some might argue that the solution is better or fancier textbooks, but I say we retire the static finance textbook completely and move to the future of money education: something called Live-State Logic. This is a big change from old, static content to systems that use live data.
With Live-State Logic, school curriculum will function like a living thing. Instead of fixed printed lessons, the educational platform will act like a bridge that connects the classroom to the real world. For example, updated financial info would feed straight to the software, so that when the IRS changes the standard deduction, the platform receives that data and automatically updates the lesson on tax filing for our young students. Also, if the Fed hints at a rate hike, the ‘Buying Your First Car’ module and the interest rate part instantly adjust the monthly payment calculations for students. I truly believe this is a necessary evolution of education, especially personal finance education for young students. We see this technology in high-frequency trading and institutional accounting, so why isn’t it in our classrooms?
From memorization to simulation
When we link real-word data with education, we unlock a very powerful pedagogical tool I call “True Simulation.” No one has been able to learn to swim by reading a book about water or without getting into the water. You must get wet. Similarly, you cannot learn to manage risk by reading a definition of “volatility”–you must experience it to really understand it.
Live-State architecture lets us build safe practice areas where students can deal with today’s reality. They can build or wreck their credit using live credit simulation. They can manage a budget against current inflation numbers and make critical decisions before they use their own money. They can even try out a sample investment portfolio against live market conditions.
This way, they see the results of their choices right away, in a safe place, before making mistakes that cost them real money later.
The equity imperative
Critics might say this technology is too complex for high schoolers. I say we have a moral duty to provide it
As a professional who also works in finance, I know wealthy families have always had access to Live-State logic–it’s called a private wealth manager or a CPA who navigates the changing rules for them. Low-income students rely entirely on the school system. If the school system gives them old info, we’re putting these students, who need high-quality financial tools the most to succeed today, at a disadvantage.
Democratizing financial intelligence means democratizing the technology that delivers it. We must stop giving our students maps from the 1950s if we want them to succeed in 2026. It’s time to build a bridge to the present and give our future leaders the tools they need in our modern, tech-driven world.
MY BIO:
Isaac Lamptey, Piggy Investors
Isaac Lamptey is an Investment Accountant and the Founder/Chief Architect of Piggy Investors, an edtech company. He holds a patent-pending status for the “Regulatory Bridge,” an AI-driven architecture designed to integrate real-time financial compliance into educational simulations for financial education for middle and high schools in the United States.
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AI has crossed a threshold. In 2026, it is no longer a pilot category or a differentiator you add on. It is part of the operating fabric of education, embedded in how learning experiences are created, how learners practice, how educators respond, and how outcomes are measured. That reality changes the product design standard.
The strategic question is not, “Do we have AI embedded in the learning product design or delivery?” It is, “Can we prove AI is improving outcomes reliably, safely, and at scale?”
That proof now matters to everyone. Education leaders face accountability pressure. Institutions balance outcomes and budgets. Publishers must defend program impact. CTE providers are tasked with career enablement that is real, not implied. This is the shift from hype to efficacy. Efficacy is not a slogan. It is a product discipline.
What the 2026 efficacy imperative actually means
Efficacy is the chain that connects intent to impact: mastery, progression, completion, and readiness. In CTE and career pathways, readiness includes demonstrated performance in authentic tasks such as troubleshooting, communication, procedural accuracy, decision-making, and safe execution, not just quiz scores.
The product design takeaway is simple. Treat efficacy as a first-class product requirement. That means clear success criteria, instrumentation, governance, and a continuous improvement loop. If you cannot answer what improved, for whom, and under what conditions, your AI strategy is not a strategy. It is a list of features.
Below is practical guidance you can apply immediately.
1. Start with outcomes, then design the AI
A common mistake is shipping capabilities in search of purpose. Chat interfaces, content generation, personalization, and automated feedback can all be useful. Utility is not efficacy.
Guidance Anchor your AI roadmap in a measurable outcome statement, then work backward.
Define the outcome you want to improve (mastery, progression, completion, readiness).
Define the measurable indicators that represent that outcome (signals and thresholds).
Design the AI intervention that can credibly move those indicators.
Instrument the experience so you can attribute lift to the intervention.
Iterate based on evidence, not excitement.
Takeaways for leaders If your roadmap is organized as “features shipped,” you will struggle to prove impact. A mature roadmap reads as “outcomes moved” with clarity on measurement, scope, and tradeoffs.
2. Make CTE and career enablement measurable and defensible
Career enablement is the clearest test of value in education. Learners want capability, educators want rigor with scalability, and employers want confidence that credentials represent real performance.
CTE makes this pressure visible. It is also where AI can either elevate programs or undermine trust if it inflates claims without evidence.
Guidance Focus AI on the moments that shape readiness.
Competency-based progression must be operational, not aspirational. Competencies should be explicit, observable, and assessable. Outcomes are not “covered.” They are verified.
Applied practice must be the center. Scenarios, simulations, troubleshooting, role plays, and procedural accuracy are where readiness is built.
Assessment credibility must be protected. Blueprint alignment, difficulty control, and human oversight are non-negotiable in high-stakes workflows.
Takeaways for leaders A defensible career enablement claim is simple. Learners show measurable improvement on authentic tasks aligned to explicit competencies with consistent evaluation. If your program cannot demonstrate that, it is vulnerable, regardless of how polished the AI appears.
3. Treat platform decisions as product strategy decisions
Many AI initiatives fail because the underlying platform cannot support consistency, governance, or measurement.
If AI is treated as a set of features, you can ship quickly and move on. If AI is a commitment to efficacy, your platform must standardize how AI is used, govern variability, and measure outcomes consistently.
Guidance Build a platform posture around three capabilities.
Standardize the AI patterns that matter. Define reusable primitives such as coaching, hinting, targeted practice, rubric based feedback, retrieval, summarization, and escalation to humans. Without standardization, quality varies, and outcomes cannot be compared.
Govern variability without slowing delivery. Put model and prompt versioning, policy constraints, content boundaries, confidence thresholds, and required human decision points in the platform layer.
Measure once and learn everywhere. Instrumentation should be consistent across experiences so you can compare cohorts, programs, and interventions without rebuilding analytics each time.
Takeaways for leaders Platform is no longer plumbing. In 2026, the platform is the mechanism that makes efficacy scalable and repeatable. If your platform cannot standardize, govern, and measure, your AI strategy will remain fragmented and hard to defend.
4. Build tech-assisted measurement into the daily operating loop
Efficacy cannot be a quarterly research exercise. It must be continuous, lightweight, and embedded without turning educators into data clerks.
Guidance Use a measurement architecture that supports decision-making.
Define a small learning event vocabulary you can trust. Examples include attempt, error type, hint usage, misconception flag, scenario completion, rubric criterion met, accommodation applied, and escalation triggered. Keep it small and consistent.
Use rubric-aligned evaluation for applied work. Rubrics are the bridge between learning intent and measurable performance. AI can assist by pre scoring against criteria, highlighting evidence, flagging uncertainty, and routing edge cases to human review.
Link micro signals to macro outcomes. Tie practice behavior to mastery, progression, completion, assessment performance, and readiness indicators so you can prioritize investments and retire weak interventions.
Enable safe experimentation. Use controlled rollouts, cohort selection, thresholds, and guardrails so teams can test responsibly and learn quickly without breaking trust.
Takeaways for leaders If you cannot attribute improvement to a specific intervention and measure it continuously, you will drift into reporting usage rather than proving impact. Usage is not efficacy.
5. Treat accessibility as part of efficacy, not compliance overhead
An AI system that works for only some learners is not effective. Accessibility is now a condition of efficacy and a driver of scale.
Guidance Bake accessibility into AI-supported experiences.
Ensure structure and semantics, keyboard support, captions, audio description, and high-quality alt text.
Validate compatibility with assistive technologies.
Measure efficacy across learner groups rather than averaging into a single headline.
Takeaways for leaders Inclusive design expands who benefits from AI-supported practice and feedback. It improves outcomes while reducing risk. Accessibility should be part of your efficacy evidence, not a separate track.
The 2026 Product Design and Strategy checklist
If you want AI to remain credible in your product and program strategy, use these questions as your executive filter:
Can we show measurable improvement in mastery, progression, completion, and readiness that is attributable to AI interventions, not just usage?
Are our CTE and career enablement claims traceable to explicit competencies and authentic performance tasks?
Is AI governed with clear boundaries, human oversight, and consistent quality controls?
Do we have platform level patterns that standardize experiences, reduce variance, and instrument outcomes?
Is measurement continuous and tech-assisted, built for learning loops rather than retrospective reporting?
Do we measure efficacy across learner groups to ensure accessibility and equity in impact?
Rishi Raj Gera, Magic Edtech
Rishi Raj Gera is Chief Solutions Officer at Magic Edtech. Rishi brings over two decades of experience in designing digital learning systems that sit at the intersection of accessibility, personalization, and emerging technology. His work is driven by a consistent focus on building educational systems that adapt to individual learner needs while maintaining ethical boundaries and equity in design. Rishi continues to advocate for learning environments that are as human-aware as they are data-smart, especially in a time when technology is shaping how students engage with knowledge and one another.
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Picture someone sitting at a kitchen table after the kids are finally in bed, laptop open, half-drunk mug of herbal tea nearby. For years, she has had a vague idea for a business–custom curriculum design for small learning pods, for example, or a micro-studio creating bespoke art for local nonprofits. She never moved on it. Too many barriers: no time to figure out incorporation, no budget for a web developer, no clue how to do marketing or bookkeeping, no appetite for the legal and tax homework.
But now she types a prompt into an AI assistant.
Within an evening, she has a draft business plan, a shortlist of ideas for company names with available domains, a first version of a logo, a one-page website, basic contract language, a starter bookkeeping system, filled-out forms and instructions for registering her business, and a rough sense of how many clients she’d need to cover her bills. None of it is perfect. But it’s enough to move from daydream to first customer.
That’s the quiet revolution we’re underestimating.
Most of the public conversation about AI and the labor market is fixated on one (very real) side of the story: which jobs disappear, which tasks get automated, which industries will “lose” the most positions.
That conversation isn’t wrong. But it’s incomplete. The same technology that allows big companies to run with far fewer people also lowers the barriers to entry for people who want to create value on their own.
AI is about to pull the labor market in two directions at once: inward, as firms need fewer employees; and outward, as more individuals gain the tools to act like firms.
The coming wave of layoffs
Inside large organizations, the logic is brutally simple. If a machine can do part of a task, fewer humans can do the same job. If a machine can coordinate multiple tasks, fewer humans are needed to manage them. AI turns out to be remarkably good at exactly the kind of work that employed millions of people: following procedures, coordinating handoffs between departments, and navigating bureaucratic complexity.
Some companies will use AI to squeeze costs out of business-as-usual: automating reporting, drafting, customer support, basic analysis, etc. Others will be challenged by newcomers who never built the bulky structures at all. A firm launched in 2026 might not need a marketing department; it has an AI system that writes, tests, and schedules campaigns. It might not need layers of middle management; coordination and monitoring can be handled by software.
Clayton Christensen wrote about “efficiency innovations“–efforts to improve profitability by letting a company do the same work with fewer resources. AI might be the ultimate efficiency innovation. Whether it’s deployed by incumbents to trim fat or by startups that never had the fat to begin with, the destination is similar: less demand for traditional employment inside firms.
We will still have multinational corporations worth billions of dollars. But they will be increasingly lean on staff compared with their 20th-century predecessors: more revenue per employee, more output per headcount, and fewer career ladders.
The personal back office
At the same time, something more hopeful is happening at the edges of the economy.
For most of history, the jump from “I have an idea” to “I have a business” required access to expertise. Lawyers to set up entities and contracts. Accountants to manage books and taxes. Designers and engineers to build products, websites, and marketing. Consultants or mentors to help you avoid rookie mistakes. You either had those skills yourself, had friends who did, or had enough capital to hire them. Many people simply didn’t.
AI breaks that bottleneck. It turns fragments of expertise into something you can “rent by the prompt.”
You still need judgment. You still need creativity. You still need taste, grit, and some tolerance for risk. But you no longer need a small army. The solo founder at the kitchen table has, for the first time in history, a kind of general-purpose back office: a system that can draft, design, summarize, translate, troubleshoot, and simulate at a level that used to require multiple professionals.
Entrepreneurship won’t suddenly become easy. Most new ventures will still fail. Markets will still be unforgiving. Competition may become even more fierce as barriers to entry fall. But the option to try becomes widely available in a way it simply wasn’t before. The barrier shifts from “I can’t even begin” to “Is the potential upside on this idea worth the risk,” which is a very different kind of problem.
The paradox young people will inherit
Put these forces together, and the picture that emerges is neither techno-utopian nor apocalyptic.
Inside firms, AI will quietly erode demand for routine cognitive work. Meanwhile, outside firms, AI will expand the frontier of what individuals can plausibly do on their own or in small teams. That’s the real tension: fewer stable slots in the big machines; more tools to build something of your own.
Whether this becomes a story of flourishing or precarity depends on lots of things–tax policy, social safety nets, and the speed of change. But one piece of the puzzle is squarely in the domain I work in: how we educate young people for the world they’re walking into.
The school of compliance in an entrepreneurial age
For more than a century, mass schooling has been the farm system for large organizations. It has been remarkably good at what it was implicitly designed to do: teach people to be reliable cogs in bureaucratic machines.
The official curriculum covers math, reading, science, history, etc. The unofficial curriculum teaches something else: how to succeed in a rule-bound institution.
You learn that:
There is always someone above you who sets the assignment.
The path to success is deciphering what that person wants.
The safest strategy is to follow instructions faithfully.
Tasks come with rubrics that specify the criteria for a good performance.
Your job is to hit those criteria as cleanly as possible.
Do that over thirteen years, and those who get good at winning in the game of school also get very good at reading institutions. They sense where the boundaries are, who has authority, and which boxes need to be checked. They become, in a word, employable–especially in environments where advancement comes from mastering the existing playbook rather than writing a new one.
There is nothing inherently wrong with those skills. For much of the 20th century, this was a rational preparation for a world in which the dominant path to a middle-class life ran through large, hierarchical employers.
But it’s almost the opposite of what today’s entrepreneurship requires.
Innovative entrepreneurship is what happens when there’s no rubric, when no one has written the assignment. When the problem itself is fuzzy, you have to decide which part of it is worth solving. It rewards people who notice friction or unmet needs, test rough solutions, and iterate under uncertainty. It punishes those who are good at execution but expect someone else to tell them what to execute. It favors those who are comfortable with ambiguity and relish innovation. It hobbles those who see their purpose as delivering reliability and efficiency on well-worn rails.
The risk we face is that we will send a generation of students into an AI-transformed economy superbly trained in the old game, just as the old game is shrinking. We’ve taught them to follow procedures, coordinate handoffs, and navigate bureaucracy–precisely the skills AI systems excel at. We’ve led them to expect that career success comes from mastering the rungs on tried-and-true institutionalized career pathways. Meanwhile, the jobs along those conventional pathways are dwindling.
A different kind of preparation
If AI really does reduce the number of people big firms need, while making it dramatically easier for individuals to create value directly, then schools have a choice.
They can double down on being pipelines into a narrowing corporate world–ever more focused on test scores, credentials, and compliance with external standards. Or they can take seriously the task of preparing young people to navigate a world in which many of the best opportunities will be ones they help invent.
That doesn’t mean abandoning core knowledge and skills. Young people will still need to know how to read and communicate with each other and with AI. They’ll still need math and science to conceptually understand how the world works. They’ll still need literature and history to engage with the narratives from the past that define the present. But it also means they’ll need repeated, meaningful practice in:
Identifying problems that no adult has pre-packaged.
Spotting unmet Jobs to Be Done where people are cobbling together workarounds.
Finding their comparative advantages rather than competing on narrow measures.
Designing and testing solutions that might fail.
Dealing with ambiguous feedback.
And exercising agency rather than just obedience.
Learning how to wrestle with problems that are complex, not just complicated.
Traditional schooling trains students to compete for scarce slots–top class rankings, starting positions on teams, and admission to selective colleges–on standardized dimensions where everyone is measured the same way. That made sense when the goal was landing one of a limited number of corporate jobs. But entrepreneurship works differently. It rewards people who identify niches that are valuable but unattractive to large companies, and who figure out where they can meaningfully differentiate rather than trying to be marginally better than everyone else at the same thing.
My prediction, then, is this:
In the coming years, AI will allow companies to do more with fewer employees. At the same time, it will quietly lower the barriers to entrepreneurship and creative self-employment in ways we are only beginning to see.
The question for education is whether we will keep treating students primarily as future employees of large systems or help them become future innovators in a landscape where powerful new tools of creation are sitting right in front of them.
For more on what the future looks like for today’s students, visit eSN’s Digital Learning hub.
Thomas Arnett, Clayton Christensen Institute
Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow for the Clayton Christensen Institute. His work focuses on using the Theory of Disruptive Innovation to study innovative instructional models and their potential to scale student-centered learning in K–12 education. He also studies demand for innovative resources and practices across the K–12 education system using the Jobs to Be Done Theory.
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Big Tech companies and upcoming startups want to use generative AI to build software and hardware for kids. A lot of those experiences are limited to text or voice, and kids might not find that captivating. Three former Google employees want to get over that hurdle with their generative AI-powered interactive app, Sparkli.
Sparkli was founded last year by Lax Poojary, Lucie Marchand, and Myn Kang. As parents, Poojary and Kang were not able to satisfy their children’s curiosity or give engaging answers to their questions.
“Kids, by definition, are very curious, and my son would ask me questions about how cars work or how it rains. My approach was to use ChatGPT or Gemini to explain these concepts to a six-year-old, but that is still a wall of text. What kids want is an interactive experience. This was our core process behind founding Sparkli,” Poojary told TechCrunch over a call.
Image Credits:Sparkli
Prior to launching Sparkli, Poojary and Kang co-founded a travel aggregator called Touring Bird and a video-focused social commerce app, Shoploop, at Google’s Area 120, the company’s internal startup incubator. Poojary later went on to work at Google and YouTube on shopping. Marchand, who is the CTO of Sparkli, was also one of the co-founders of Shoploop and later worked at Google.
“When a kid asked what Mars looks like fifty years ago, we might have shown them a picture,” said Poojary. “Ten years ago, we might have shown them a video. With Sparkli, we want kids to interact and experience what Mars is like.”
The startup said that education systems often fall behind in teaching modern concepts. Sparkli wants to teach kids about topics like skills design, financial literacy, and entrepreneurship by creating an AI-powered learning “expedition.”
The app lets users explore some predefined topics in different categories or ask their own questions to create a learning path. The app also highlights one new topic every day to let kids learn something new. Kids can either listen to the generated voice or read the text. Chapters under one topic include a mix of audio, video, images, quizzes, and games. The app also creates choose-as-you-go adventures that don’t create the pressure of getting questions right or wrong.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026
Image Credits:Sparkli
Poojary mentioned that the startup uses generative AI to create all of its media assets on the fly. The company can create a learning experience within two minutes of a user asking a question, and it is trying to reduce this time further.
The startup mentioned that while AI assistants can help children learn certain topics, their focus is not on education. It said that to make its product effective, the first two hires were a PhD holder in educational science and AI and a teacher. This was a conscious decision to ensure its content better serves children, keeping principles of pedagogy in mind.
One of the key concerns around kids using AI is safety. Companies like OpenAI and Character.ai are facing lawsuits from parents who allege that these tools encouraged their children to self-harm. Sparkli said that while certain topics like sexual content are completely banned on the app, when a child asks about topics like self-harm, the app tries to teach them about emotional intelligence and encourages them to talk to their parents.
The company is piloting its app with an institute that has a network of schools with over 100,000 students. Currently, its target audience is children aged 5-12, and it tested its product in over 20 schools last year.
Sparkli has also built a teacher module that allows teachers to track progress and assign homework to kids. The company said that it was inspired by Duolingo to make the app engaging enough that kids can learn concepts and also feel like coming back to the app frequently. The app has streaks and rewards for kids for completing lessons regularly. It also gives kids quest cards, based on the initial avatar they have set up, for learning different topics.
“We have seen a very positive response from our school pilots. Teachers often use Sparkli to create expeditions that kids can explore at the start of the class and lead them into a more discussion-based format. Some teachers also used it to create [homework] after they explain a topic to let kids explore further and get a measure of their understanding,” Poojary said.
While the startup wants to primarily work with schools globally for the next few months, it wants to open up consumer access and let parents download the app by mid-2026.
The company has raised $5 million in pre-seed funding led by Swiss venture firm Founderful. Sparkli is Founderful’s first pure-play edtech investment. The firm’s founding partner, Lukas Weder, said that the team’s technical skill and market opportunity nudged him to invest in the startup.
“As a father of two kids who are in school now, I see them learning interesting stuff, but they don’t learn topics like financial literacy or innovation in technology. I thought from a product point of view, Sparkli gets them away from video games and lets them learn stuff in an immersive way,” Weder said.
This post was first published on January 22, 2026.
Imagine students who understand how government works and who see themselves as vital contributors to their communities. That’s what happens when students are given opportunities to play a role in their school, district, and community. In my work as a teacher librarian, I have learned that even the youngest voices can be powerful, and that students embrace civic responsibility and education when history is taught in a way that’s relevant and meaningful.
Now is the moment to build momentum and move our curriculum forward. It’s time to break past classroom walls and unite schools and communities. As our nation’s 250th anniversary approaches, education leaders have a powerful opportunity to teach through action and experience like never before.
Kids want to matter. When we help them see themselves as part of the world instead of watching it pass by, they learn how to act with purpose. By practicing civic engagement, students gain the skills to contribute solutions–and often offer unique viewpoints that drive real change. In 2023, I took my students [CR1] to the National Mall. They were in awe of how history was represented in stone, how symbolism was not always obvious, and they connected with rangers from the National Park Service as well as visitors in D.C. that day.
When students returned from the Mall, they came back with a question that stuck: “Where are the women?” In 2024, we set out to answer two questions together: “Whose monuments are missing?” and “What is HER name?”
Ranger Jen at the National Mall, with whom I worked with before, introduced me to Dr. Linda Booth Sweeney, author of Monument Maker, which inspired my approach. Her book asks, “History shapes us–how will we shape history?” Motivated by this challenge, students researched key women in U.S. history and designed monuments to honor their contributions.
We partnered with the Women’s Suffrage National Monument, and some students even displayed their work at the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. Through this project, questions were asked, lessons were learned, and students discovered the power of purpose and voice. By the end of our community-wide celebration, National Mall Night, they were already asking, “What’s next?”
The experience created moments charged with importance and emotion–moments students wanted to revisit and replicate as they continue shaping history themselves.
Reflecting on this journey, I realized I often looked through a narrow lens, focusing only on what was immediately within my school. But the broader community, both local and online, is full of resources that can strengthen relationships, provide materials, and offer strategies, mentors, and experiences that extend far beyond any initial lesson plan.
Seeking partnerships is not a new idea, but it can be easily overlooked or underestimated. I’ve learned that a “no” often really means “not yet” or “not now,” and that persistence can open doors. Ford’s Theatre introduced me to Ranger Jen, who in turn introduced me to Dr. Sweeney and the Trust for the National Mall. When I needed additional resources, the Trust for the National Mall responded, connecting me with the new National Mall Gateway: a new digital platform inspired by America’s 250th that gives all students, educators and visitors access to explore and connect with history and civics through the National Mall.
When I first shared the Gateway with students, it took their breath away. They could reconnect with the National Mall–a place they were passionate about–with greater detail and depth. I now use the platform to teach about monuments and memorials, to prepare for field trips, and to debrief afterward. The platform brings value for in-person visits to the National Mall, and for virtual field trips in the classroom, where they can almost reach out and touch the marble and stone of the memorials through 360-degree video tours.
Another way to spark students’ interest in civics and history is to weave civic learning into every subject. The first step is simple but powerful: Give teachers across disciplines the means to integrate civic concepts into their lessons. This might mean collaborating with arts educators and school librarians to design mini-lessons, curate primary sources, or create research challenges that connect past and present. It can also take shape through larger, project-based initiatives that link classroom learning to real-world issues. Science classes might explore the policies behind environmental conservation, while math lessons could analyze community demographics or civic data. In language arts, students might study speeches, letters, or poetry to see how language drives change. When every subject and resource become hubs for civic exploration, students begin to see citizenship as something they live, not just study.
Students thrive when their learning has purpose and connection. They remember lessons tied to meaningful experiences and shared celebrations. For instance, one of our trips to the National Mall happened when our fourth graders were preparing for a Veterans Day program with patriotic music. Ranger Jen helped us take it a step further, building on previous partnerships and connections–she arranged for the students to sing at the World War II Memorial. As they performed “America,” Honor Flights unexpectedly arrived. The students were thrilled to sing in the nation’s capital, of course. But the true impact came from their connection with the veterans who had lived the history they were honoring.
As our nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we have an extraordinary opportunity to help students see themselves as part of the story of America’s past, present, and future.
Encourage educator leaders to consider how experiential civics can bring this milestone to life. Invite students to engage in authentic ways, whether through service-learning projects, policy discussions, or community partnerships that turn civic learning into action. Create spaces in your classes for collaboration, reflection, and application, so that students are shaping history, not just studying it. Give students more than a celebration. Give them a sense of purpose and belonging in the ongoing story of our nation.
Melaney Sánchez, Ph.D., Mt. Harmony Elementary
Dr. Melaney Sánchez is a National Board-Certified Teacher and the teacher librarian at Mt. Harmony Elementary, where she fosters a love of reading, inquiry, civics, and lifelong learning. She also teaches at Notre Dame of Maryland University and conducted research on minority student achievement. A Fulbright Scholar and NEA Global Learning Fellow, she brings a global perspective to literacy, learning, and student engagement.
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Our students are coming of age in a world that demands global competency. From economic interdependence to the accelerating effects of climate change and mass migration, students need to develop the knowledge and skills to engage and succeed in this diverse and interconnected world. Consequently, the need for global competency education is more important than ever.
“Being born into a global world does not make people global citizens,” Andreas Schleicher of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has said. “We must deliberately and systematically educate our children in global competence.”
Here at Global Cities, we regularly talk with educators eager to bring global competency into their classrooms in ways that engage and excite students to learn. Educators recognize the need, but ask a vital question: How do we teach something we can’t measure?
It’s clear that in today’s competitive and data-driven education environment, we need to expand and evaluate what students need to know to be globally competent adults. Global competency education requires evaluation tools to determine what and whether students are learning.
The good news is that two recent independent research studies found that educators can use a new tool, the Global Cities’ Codebook for Global Student Learning Outcomes, to identify what global competency learning looks like and to assess whether students are learning by examining student writing. The research successfully used the evaluation tool for global competency programs with different models and curricula and across different student populations.
Global Cities developed the Codebook to help researchers, program designers, and educators identify, teach, and measure global competency in their own classrooms. Created in partnership with Harvard Graduate School of Education’s The Open Canopy, the Codebook captures 55 observable indicators across four core global learning outcomes: Appreciation for Diversity, Cultural Understanding, Global Knowledge, and Global Engagement. The Codebook was developed using data from our own Global Scholars virtual exchange program, which since 2014 has connected more than 139,000 students in 126 cities worldwide to teach global competency.
In Global Scholars, we’ve seen firsthand the excitement of directly connecting students with their international peers and sparking meaningful discussions about culture, community, and shared challenges. We know how teachers can effectively use the Codebook and how Global Cities workshops extend the reach of this approach to a larger audience of K-12 teachers. This research was designed to determine whether the same tool could be used to assess global competency learning in other virtual exchange programs, not only Global Cities’ Global Scholars program.
These studies make clear that the Codebook can reliably identify global learning in diverse contexts and help educators see where and how their students are developing global competency skills in virtual exchange curricula. You can examine the tool (the Codebook) here. You can explore the full research findings here.
The first study looked at two AFS Intercultural Programs curricula, Global You Changemaker and Global Up Teen. The second study analyzed student work from The Open Canopy‘s Planetary Health and Remembering the Past learning journeys.
In the AFS Intercultural Programs data, researchers found clear examples of students from across the globe showing Appreciation for Diversity and Cultural Understanding. In these AFS online discussion boards, students showed evidence they were learning about their own and other cultures, expressed positive attitudes about one another’s cultures, and demonstrated tolerance for different backgrounds and points of view. Additionally, the discussion boards offered opportunities for students to interact with each other virtually, and there were many examples of students from different parts of the world listening to one another and interacting in positive and respectful ways. When the curriculum invited students to design projects addressing community or global issues, they demonstrated strong evidence of Global Engagement as well.
Students in The Open Canopy program demonstrated the three most prevalent indicators of global learning that reflect core skills essential to effective virtual exchange: listening to others and discussing issues in a respectful and unbiased way; interacting with people of different backgrounds positively and respectfully; and using digital tools to learn from and communicate with peers around the world. Many of the Remembering the Past posts were especially rich and coded for multiple indicators of global learning.
Together, these studies show that global competency can be taught–and measured. They also highlight simple, but powerful strategies educators everywhere can use:
Structured opportunities for exchange help students listen and interact respectfully with one another
Virtual exchange prompts students to share their cultures and experiences across lines of difference in positive, curious ways
Assignments that include reflection questions–why something matters, not just what it is–help students think critically about culture and global issues
Opportunities for students to give their opinion and to decide to take action, even hypothetically, builds their sense of agency in addressing global challenges
The Codebook is available free to all educators, along with hands-on professional development workshops that guide teachers in using the tool to design curriculum, teach intentionally, and assess learning. Its comprehensive set of indicators gives educators and curriculum designers a menu of options–some they might not have initially considered–that can enrich students’ global learning experiences.
Our message to educators is simple: A community of educators (Global Ed Lab), a research-supported framework, and practical tools can help you teach students global competency and evaluate their work.
The question is no longer whether we need more global competency education. We clearly do. Now with the Codebook and the Global Ed Lab, teachers can learn how to teach this subject matter effectively and use tools to assess student learning.
Marjorie B. Tiven, Global Cities, Inc.
Marjorie B. Tiven is the Founder and President of Global Cities, Inc., a program of Bloomberg Philanthropies.
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It’s truly incredible how much new technology has made its way into the classroom. Where once teaching consisted primarily of whiteboards and textbooks, you can now find tablets, smart screens, AI assistants, and a trove of learning apps designed to foster inquiry and maximize student growth.
While these new tools are certainly helpful, the flood of options means that educators can struggle to discern truly useful resources from one-time gimmicks. As a result, some of the best tools for sparking curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking often go overlooked.
Personally, I believe 3D printing is one such tool that doesn’t get nearly enough consideration for the way it transforms a classroom.
3D printing is the process of making a physical object from a three-dimensional digital model, typically by laying down many thin layers of material using a specialized printer. Using 3D printing, a teacher could make a model of a fossil to share with students, trophies for inter-class competitions, or even supplies for construction activities.
At first glance, this might not seem all that revolutionary. However, 3D printing offers three distinct educational advantages that have the potential to transform K–12 learning:
It develops success skills: 3D printing encourages students to build a variety of success skills that prepare them for challenges outside the classroom. For starters, its inclusion creates opportunities for students to practice communication, collaboration, and other social-emotional skills. The process of moving from an idea to a physical, printed prototype fosters perseverance and creativity. Meanwhile, every print–regardless of its success–builds perseverance and problem-solving confidence. This is the type of hands-on, inquiry-based learning that students remember.
It creates cross-curricular connections: 3D printing is intrinsically cross-curricular. Professional scientists, engineers, and technicians often use 3D printing to create product models or build prototypes for testing their hypotheses. This process involves documentation, symbolism, color theory, understanding of narrative, and countless other disciplines. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how these could also be beneficial to classroom learning. Students can observe for themselves how subjects connect, while teachers transform abstract concepts into tangible points of understanding.
It’s aligned with engineering and NGSS: 3D printing aligns perfectly with Next Gen Science Standards. By focusing on the engineering design process (define, imagine, plan, create, improve) students learn to think and act like real scientists to overcome obstacles. This approach also emphasizes iteration and evidence-based conclusions. What better way to facilitate student engagement, hands-on inquiry, and creative expression?
3D printing might not be the flashiest educational tool, but its potential is undeniable. This flexible resource can give students something tangible to work with while sparking wonder and pushing them to explore new horizons.
So, take a moment to familiarize yourself with the technology. Maybe try running a few experiments of your own. When used with purpose, 3D printing transforms from a common classroom tool into a launchpad for student discovery.
Jon Oosterman, Van Andel Institute for Education
Jon Oosterman is a Learning Specialist at Van Andel Institute for Education, a Michigan-based education nonprofit dedicated to creating classrooms where curiosity, creativity, and critical thinking thrive.
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Many years ago, around 2010, I attended a professional development program in Houston called Literacy Through Photography, at a time when I was searching for practical ways to strengthen comprehension, discussion, and reading fluency, particularly for students who found traditional print-based tasks challenging. As part of the program, artists visited my classroom and shared their work with students. Much of that work was abstract. There were no obvious answers and no single “correct” interpretation.
Instead, students were invited to look closely, talk together, and explain what they noticed.
What struck me was how quickly students, including those who struggled with traditional reading tasks, began to engage. They learned to slow down, describe what they saw, make inferences, and justify their thinking. They weren’t just looking at images; they were reading them. And in doing so, they were rehearsing many of the same strategies we expect when reading written texts.
At the time, this felt innovative. But it also felt deeply intuitive.
Fast forward to today.
Students are surrounded by images and videos, from photographs and diagrams to memes, screenshots, and, increasingly, AI-generated visuals. These images appear everywhere: in learning materials, on social media, and inside the tools students use daily. Many look polished, realistic, and authoritative.
At the same time, AI has made faking easier than ever.
As educators and school leaders, we now face urgent questions around misinformation, academic integrity, and critical thinking. The issue is no longer just whether students can use AI tools, but whether they can interpret, evaluate, and question what they see.
This is where visual literacy becomes a frontline defence.
Teaching students to read images critically, to see them as constructed texts rather than neutral data, strengthens the same skills we rely on for strong reading comprehension: inference, evidence-based reasoning, and metacognitive awareness.
From photography to AI: A conversation grounded in practice
Recently, I found myself returning to those early classroom experiences through ongoing professional dialogue with a former college lecturer and professional photographer, as we explored what it really means to read images in the age of AI.
A conversation that grew out of practice
Nesreen: When I shared the draft with you, you immediately focused on the language, whether I was treating images as data or as signs. Is this important?
Photographer: Yes, because signs belong to reading. Data is output. Signs are meaning. When we talk about reading media texts, we’re talking about how meaning is constructed, not just what information appears.
Nesreen: That distinction feels crucial right now. Students are surrounded by images and videos, but they’re rarely taught to read them with the same care as written texts.
Photographer: Exactly. Once students understand that photographs and AI images are made up of signs, color, framing, scale, and viewpoint, they stop treating images as neutral or factual.
Nesreen: You also asked whether the lesson would lean more towards evaluative assessment or summarizing. That made me realize the reflection mattered just as much as the image itself.
Photographer: Reflection is key. When students explain why a composition works, or what they would change next time, they’re already engaging in higher-level reading skills.
Nesreen: And whether students are analyzing a photograph, generating an AI image, or reading a paragraph, they’re practicing the same habits: slowing down, noticing, justifying, and revising their thinking.
Photographer: And once they see that connection, reading becomes less about the right answer and more about understanding how meaning is made.
Reading images is reading
One common misconception is that visual literacy sits outside “real” literacy. In practice, the opposite is true.
When students read images carefully, they:
identify what matters most
follow structure and sequence
infer meaning from clues
justify interpretations with evidence
revise first impressions
These are the habits of skilled readers.
For emerging readers, multilingual learners, and students who struggle with print, images lower the barrier to participation, without lowering the cognitive demand. Thinking comes first. Language follows.
From composition to comprehension: Mapping image reading to reading strategies
Photography offers a practical way to name what students are already doing intuitively. When teachers explicitly teach compositional elements, familiar reading strategies become visible and transferable.
What students notice in an image
What they are doing cognitively
Reading strategy practiced
Where the eye goes first
Deciding importance
Identifying main ideas
How the eye moves
Tracking structure
Understanding sequence
What is included or excluded
Considering intention
Analyzing author’s choices
Foreground and background
Sorting information
Main vs supporting details
Light and shadow
Interpreting mood
Making inferences
Symbols and colour
Reading beyond the literal
Figurative language
Scale and angle
Judging power
Perspective and viewpoint
Repetition or pattern
Spotting themes
Theme identification
Contextual clues
Using surrounding detail
Context clues
Ambiguity
Holding multiple meanings
Critical reading
Evidence from the image
Justifying interpretation
Evidence-based responses
Once students recognise these moves, teachers can say explicitly:
“You’re doing the same thing you do when you read a paragraph.”
That moment of transfer is powerful.
Making AI image generation teachable (and safe)
In my classroom work pack, students use Perchance AI to generate images. I chose this tool deliberately: It is accessible, age-appropriate, and allows students to iterate, refining prompts based on compositional choices rather than chasing novelty.
Students don’t just generate an image once. They plan, revise, and evaluate.
This shifts AI use away from shortcut behavior and toward intentional design and reflection, supporting academic integrity rather than undermining it.
The progression of a prompt: From surface to depth (WAGOLL)
One of the most effective elements of the work pack is a WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks Like) progression, which shows students how thinking improves with precision.
Simple: A photorealistic image of a dog sitting in a park.
Secure: A photorealistic image of a dog positioned using the rule of thirds, warm colour palette, soft natural lighting, blurred background.
Greater Depth: A photorealistic image of a dog positioned using the rule of thirds, framed by tree branches, low-angle view, strong contrast, sharp focus on the subject, blurred background.
Students can see and explain how photographic language turns an image from output into meaningful signs. That explanation is where literacy lives.
When classroom talk begins to change
Over time, classroom conversations shift.
Instead of “I like it” or “It looks real,” students begin to say:
“The creator wants us to notice…”
“This detail suggests…”
“At first I thought…, but now I think…”
These are reading sentences.
Because images feel accessible, more students participate. The classroom becomes slower, quieter, and more thoughtful–exactly the conditions we want for deep comprehension.
Visual literacy as a bridge, not an add-on
Visual literacy is not an extra subject competing for time. It is a bridge, especially in the age of AI.
By teaching students how to read images, schools strengthen:
reading comprehension
inference and evaluation
evidence-based reasoning
metacognitive awarenes
Most importantly, students learn that literacy is not about rushing to answers, but about noticing, questioning, and constructing meaning.
In a world saturated with AI-generated images, teaching students how to read visually is no longer optional.
It is literacy.
Author’s note: This article grew out of classroom practice and professional dialogue with a former college lecturer and professional photographer. Their contribution informed the discussion of visual composition, semiotics, and reflective image-reading, without any involvement in publication or authorship.
Nesreen El-Baz, Bloomsbury Education Author & School Governor
Nesreen El-Baz is an ESL educator with over 20 years of experience, and is a certified bilingual teacher with a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction. El-Baz is currently based in the UK, holds a Masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Houston Christian University, and specializes in developing in innovative strategies for English Learners and Bilingual education.
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Nesreen El-Baz, Bloomsbury Education Author & School Governor
When you walk into a math classroom in Charleston County School District, you can feel the difference. Students aren’t just memorizing steps–they’re reasoning through problems, explaining their thinking, and debating solutions with their peers. Teachers aren’t rushing to cover content, because their clear understanding of students’ natural learning progressions allows them to spend more time exploring the why behind the math.
This cultural shift didn’t come from adopting a new curriculum or collecting more data. Instead, we transformed math education by investing deeply in our educators through OGAP (The Ongoing Assessment Project) professional learning–an approach that has reshaped not only instruction, but the confidence and professional identity of our teachers.
Why we needed a change
Charleston County serves more than 50,000 students across more than 80 schools. For years, math achievement saw small gains, but not the leaps we hoped for. Our teachers were dedicated, and we had high-quality instructional materials, but something was missing.
The gap wasn’t our teacher’s effort. It was their insight–understanding the content they taught flexibly and deeply.
Too often, instruction focused on procedures rather than understanding. Teachers could identify whether a student got a problem right or wrong, but not always why they responded the way they did. To truly help students grow, we needed a way to uncover their thinking and guide next steps more intentionally.
What makes this professional learning different
Unlike traditional PD that delivers a set of strategies to “try on Monday,” this learning model takes educators deep into how students develop mathematical ideas over time.
Across four intensive days, teachers explore research-based learning progressions in additive, multiplicative, fractional, and proportional reasoning. They examine real student work to understand how misconceptions form and what those misconceptions reveal about a learner’s thought process. It is also focused on expanding and deepening teachers’ understanding of the content they teach so they are more flexible in their thinking. Teachers appreciate that the training isn’t abstract; it’s rooted in everyday classroom realities, making it immediately meaningful.
Instead of sorting responses into right and wrong, teachers ask a more powerful question: What does this show me about how the student is reasoning?
That shift changes everything. Teachers leave with:
A stronger grasp of content
The ability to recognize error patterns
Insight into students’ conceptual gaps
Renewed confidence in their instructional decisions
The power of understanding the “why”
Our district uses conceptual math curricula, including Eureka Math², Reveal Math, and Math Nation. These “HQIM” programs emphasize reasoning, discourse, and models–exactly the kind of instruction our students need.
But conceptual materials only work when teachers understand the purpose behind them.
Before this professional learning, teachers sometimes felt unsure about lesson sequencing and the lesson intent, including cognitive complexity. Now, they understand why lessons appear in a specific order and how models support deeper understanding. It’s common to hear teachers say: “Oh, now I get why it’s written that way!” They are also much more likely to engage deeply with the mathematical models in the programs when they understand the math education research behind the learning progressions that curriculum developers use to design the content.
That insight helps them stay committed to conceptual instruction even when students struggle, shifting the focus from “Did they get it?” to “How are they thinking about it?”
Transforming district culture
The changes go far beyond individual classrooms.
We run multiple sessions of this professional learning each year, and they fill within days. Teachers return to their PLCs energized, bringing exit tickets, student work, and new questions to analyze together.
We also invite instructional coaches and principals to attend. This builds a shared professional language and strengthens communication across the system. The consistency it creates is particularly powerful for new teachers who are still building confidence in their instructional decision-making.
The result?
Teachers now invite feedback.
Coaches feel like instructional partners, not evaluators.
Everyone is rowing in the same direction.
This shared understanding has become one of the most transformative parts of our district’s math journey.
Results we can see
In the past five years, Charleston County’s math scores have climbed roughly 10 percentage points. But the most meaningful growth is happening inside classrooms:
Students are reasoning more deeply.
Teachers demonstrate stronger content knowledge and efficacy in using math models.
PLC conversations focus on evidence of student thinking.
Instruction is more intentional and responsive.
Teachers are also the first to tell you whether PD is worth their time…and our teachers are asking for more. Many return to complete a second or third strand, and sometimes all four. We even have educators take the same strand more than once just to pick up on something they may have missed the first time. The desire to deepen their expertise shows just how impactful this learning has been. Participants also find it powerful to engage in a room where the collective experience spans multiple grade levels. This structure supports our goal of strengthening vertical alignment across the district.
Prioritizing professional learning that works
When professional learning builds teacher expertise rather than compliance, everything changes. This approach doesn’t tell teachers what to teach; it helps them understand how students learn.
And once teachers gain that insight, classrooms shift. Conversations deepen. Confidence grows. Students stop memorizing math and start truly understanding it.
Jason Aldridge, Charleston County School District
Jason Aldridge is the District Senior Math Coordinator – K-12, Charleston County School District (SC).
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For the last two years, conversations about AI in education have tended to fall into two camps: excitement about efficiency or fear of replacement. Teachers worry they’ll lose authenticity. Leaders worry about academic integrity. And across the country, schools are trying to make sense of a technology that feels both promising and overwhelming.
But there’s a quieter, more human-centered opportunity emerging–one that rarely makes the headlines: AI can actually strengthen empathy and improve the quality of our interactions with students and staff.
Not by automating relationships, but by helping us become more reflective, intentional, and attuned to the people we serve.
As a middle school assistant principal and a higher education instructor, I’ve found that AI is most valuable not as a productivity tool, but as a perspective-taking tool. When used thoughtfully, it supports the emotional labor of teaching and leadership–the part of our work that cannot be automated.
From efficiency to empathy
Schools do not thrive because we write faster emails or generate quicker lesson plans. They thrive because students feel known. Teachers feel supported. Families feel included.
AI can assist with the operational tasks, but the real potential lies in the way it can help us:
Reflect on tone before hitting “send” on a difficult email
Understand how a message may land for someone under stress
Role-play sensitive conversations with students or staff
Anticipate barriers that multilingual families might face
Rehearse a restorative response rather than reacting in the moment
These are human actions–ones that require situational awareness and empathy. AI can’t perform them for us, but it can help us practice and prepare for them.
A middle school use case: Preparing for the hard conversations
Middle school is an emotional ecosystem. Students are forming identity, navigating social pressures, and learning how to advocate for themselves. Staff are juggling instructional demands while building trust with young adolescents whose needs shift by the week.
Some days, the work feels like equal parts counselor, coach, and crisis navigator.
One of the ways I’ve leveraged AI is by simulating difficult conversations before they happen. For example:
A student is anxious about returning to class after an incident
A teacher feels unsupported and frustrated
A family is confused about a schedule change or intervention plan
By giving the AI a brief description and asking it to take on the perspective of the other person, I can rehearse responses that center calm, clarity, and compassion.
This has made me more intentional in real interactions–I’m less reactive, more prepared, and more attuned to the emotions beneath the surface.
Empathy improves when we get to “practice” it.
Supporting newcomers and multilingual learners
Schools like mine welcome dozens of newcomers each year, many with interrupted formal education. They bring extraordinary resilience–and significant emotional and linguistic needs.
AI tools can support staff in ways that deepen connection, not diminish it:
Drafting bilingual communication with a softer, more culturally responsive tone
Helping teachers anticipate trauma triggers based on student histories
Rewriting classroom expectations in family-friendly language
Generating gentle scripts for welcoming a student experiencing culture shock
The technology is not a substitute for bilingual staff or cultural competence. But it can serve as a bridge–helping educators reach families and students with more warmth, clarity, and accuracy.
When language becomes more accessible, relationships strengthen.
AI as a mirror for leadership
One unexpected benefit of AI is that it acts as a mirror. When I ask it to review the clarity of a communication, or identify potential ambiguities, it often highlights blind spots:
“This sentence may sound punitive.”
“This may be interpreted as dismissing the student’s perspective.”
“Consider acknowledging the parent’s concern earlier in the message.”
These are the kinds of insights reflective leaders try to surface–but in the rush of a school day, they are easy to miss.
AI doesn’t remove responsibility; it enhances accountability. It helps us lead with more emotional intelligence, not less.
What this looks like in teacher practice
For teachers, AI can support empathy in similarly grounded ways:
1. Building more inclusive lessons
Teachers can ask AI to scan a lesson for hidden barriers–assumptions about background knowledge, vocabulary loads, or unclear steps that could frustrate students.
2. Rewriting directions for struggling learners
A slight shift in wording can make all the difference for a student with anxiety or processing challenges.
3. Anticipating misconceptions before they happen
AI can run through multiple “student responses” so teachers can see where confusion might arise.
4. Practicing restorative language
Teachers can try out scripts for responding to behavioral issues in ways that preserve dignity and connection.
These aren’t shortcuts. They’re tools that elevate the craft.
Human connection is the point
The heart of education is human. AI doesn’t change that–in fact, it makes it more obvious.
When we reduce the cognitive load of planning, we free up space for attunement. When we rehearse hard conversations, we show up with more steadiness. When we write in more inclusive language, more families feel seen. When we reflect on our tone, we build trust.
The goal isn’t to create AI-enhanced classrooms. It’s to create relationship-centered classrooms where AI quietly supports the skills that matter most: empathy, clarity, and connection.
Schools don’t need more automation.
They need more humanity–and AI, used wisely, can help us get there.
Timothy Montalvo, Iona University & the College of Westchester
Timothy Montalvo is a middle school educator and leader passionate about leveraging technology to enhance student learning. He serves as Assistant Principal at Fox Lane Middle School in Westchester, NY, and teaches education courses as an adjunct professor at Iona University and the College of Westchester. Montalvo focuses on preparing students to be informed, active citizens in a digital world and shares insights on Twitter/X @MrMontalvoEDU or on BlueSky @montalvoedu.bsky.social.
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Timothy Montalvo, Iona University & the College of Westchester
