What Does ‘Smart Curriculum Tools’ Mean?
As a School Committee, much like a Company Board, we have an obligation to push the administration to take prudent, fiscally sound, and smart actions that will help the school system meets its ultimate goals. One of the areas to do this relates to teaching tools. Generally I believe we should be proactively pushing the administration to adopt technology and resources that reduce teaching load as well as enable teachers to provide more tailored support to students. In specific, there are two ideas that I think we should be embracing that fit this objective
What I Would Advocate For:
Text Book Usage. SPS made the decision to buy text books for highschool math and, to my understanding, hasn't been fully utlizing them. Either we shouldn't have purchased the text books and preserved the financial resources, or we should make use of them to support in class teaching or allow teachers to reduce their time spent on curriculum development.
Technology Forward Tools. This topic intrigues me a lot. AI is disrupting many industries, incuding education. I spent time recently with a good friend who is a visiting professor at Harvard Business School to discuss his experience and the state of education in general. Harvard is piloting some very interesting AI ideas including a fully taught class by AI. It sounds wild, but the early results show the AI taught class outperformed the human instructed class. Now, I don't think we will be adopting AI led classes at our schools anytime soon, but the notion that we could introduce AI to help deliver more tailored support to students has a lot of merit. It fundamentally allows education to be delivered at the pace that each individual student needs, which we know is indredibly important to learning outcomes.
If there are tools out there, from text books, to cutting edge tehnologies, that our school can utilize to improve educational outcomes and potentially lower costs, then it is our responsibility to proactively consider their adoption. As a School Committee member, I would be an advocate for the consideration of smart curriculum tools. On the technology front, I see the value in these tools in my own business and in so many market areas. If we want to be a top school system in the state, I believe we have to lean into these concepts. That does not mean their integration is easy or without challenges, but it does mean not giving them thoughtful and proactive consideration is likely to our own detriment.