The Disconnect Between How AI Products Get Developed and What Teachers Need

There’s no shortage of AI-powered products and tools being developed for, and deployed in, K-12 classrooms.

But there’s much less clarity on which AI tools and practices educators need most — and how to implement them effectively.

A new partnership between two nonprofit organizations, The Learning Accelerator and Leading Educators, aims to close the disconnect between how AI products get developed, and what actually proves useful in the classroom. The project, called the School Teams AI Collaborative, kicked off last week at 19 schools in nine cities across the country, with teams of educators and school leaders beginning work on developing uses for AI tools in the classroom, testing those efforts, and documenting progress throughout the 2024-25 school year.

Leading Educators, which provides professional development to schools and districts, is supplying materials and support for educators at participating schools. The Learning Accelerator, which consults with districts on issues including technology implementation, will lead efforts to collect and analyze data that comes out of the initiative to inform the future development of AI products.

Collecting Data Key to Codifying Results

The end goal of the project is to gather feedback to develop and offer open educational resources to help districts best use AI products based on the initiative’s findings, said Beth Rabbitt, CEO of The Learning Accelerator.

There’s a need for open resources that help schools manage current, real-life uses of AI in the classroom, not potential ones, she said. (Open educational resources are typically defined as materials developed on licenses that allow them to be freely shared and modified by users.)

“There’s a lot of frothiness about what the tech industry is saying we can do, and not a ton of actual, concrete examples of the type of work we hope to be happening,” Rabbitt said.

Codifying the results is a key part of the initiative, she said, since too often, the industry points to “exemplars or proof points after the process of change has occurred,” she added, while no infrastructure has been built to sustain those successes.

The data collection will include what problems school teams are looking to solve with AI, barriers they run into, early failings, and successes. The two organizations leading the effort are looking at the initiative as a two-way road, in which they provide educators with guidance and instruction on AI projects, and educators provide critical feedback.

More than 90 school leaders and teachers are participating in the initiative.

“Oftentimes technology is just designed for educators to use. This is an opportunity for educators to also design their own tools, to interact with technologists, and to think about, ‘What does it actually look like for my kids in my classroom? What are the problems that we need to solve?’” said Chong-Hao Fu, CEO of Leading Educators.

To kick off the initiative, school teams, led by Leading Educators, last week learned about the risks and opportunities of using AI in the classroom, and what research says about it, and then delved into frameworks provided by the organizations.

The Leading Educators’ framework focuses on the value-add of technology in teaching and outlines ways technology helps teachers work more efficiently. Separately, the Learning Accelerator’s framework, “Hop, Skip, Leap,” is aimed at helping leaders think about what opportunities exist to rethink the structures in place at their schools.

Together, teams then identified problems they’re looking to solve over the school year as part of the AI Collab initiatives and mapping out a two-week coaching cycle to begin implementing it, with Leading Educators’ support throughout the process.

Throughout the school year, the School Teams AI Collaborative will include coaching sessions for participants, virtual professional learning communities to connect teams across schools, and the co-creation of a national resource hub to deliver its findings.

Real-World Connections

Some initial projects the school teams are working on include identifying ways to use AI tools to differentiate math instruction for students with different needs and offer personalize learning. Fu said teachers are also exploring ways that they could potentially use AI with students, such as a civics class that is working to build AI applications to support voter registration in the state.

Ideas like the voter registration project show how AI can be used to help students make more meaningful connections between lessons in the classroom and real-world experiences, he said.

“AI has lowered the barrier to entry to create tools and technology so students can do more authentic tasks than ever before,” Fu said.

Educators in the initiative are also exploring how to use AI to contextualize facts they’re presented in the classroom, and help them understand the importance of learning a math or science lesson.

“The answer is in the real world. We’re hearing a lot around how do we promote agency? How do we create work products that are more authentic and will therefore be more relevant and engaging for students?” Fu said.

Other schools are exploring how to use AI on a more administrative level, including how to save time collectively as a teaching team and better communicate with family and community members who speak a range of different languages.

The national narrative around using AI in education has “cast educators as either totally on board or skeptics,” said Rabbitt, of the Learning Accelerator. “The reality is most educators are in the middle, saying ‘Help me figure out how to use this in a coherent way that actually helps my students.”

One of the most important indicators of if educators will use new tools, whether ed-tech tools or new curricula, is their beliefs about whether those products will help them achieve the outcomes they want for their kids, she said.

“In this case, we’re seeing a lot of optimism, but also a lot of need to do exploration and discovery in ways that don’t feel one-off or disorganized,” she said.