These four dietitians are on a Mission for Nutrition

The Limitless Classroom — Uncovering The Benefits Of Virtual Education

Your browser is not supportedjsonline.Com

jsonline.Com wants to ensure the best experience for all of our readers, so we built our site to take advantage of the latest technology, making it faster and easier to use.

Unfortunately, your browser is not supported. Please download one of these browsers for the best experience on jsonline.Com

ISTELive 24: 8 Innovative Ideas To Transform K-12 Education

Eight educators from different institutions and organizations presented their ideas for K-12 innovation Tuesday at the International Society for Technology in Education's annual conference in Denver.

Each limited to eight minutes, their suggestions ran the gamut from to AI training practices to makerspaces, design principles and effective social media use. But perhaps the most common refrain — the undercurrent for all these presenters who had assessed the terrain and tried to make useful statements about the future — was being open to change.

LEAVE 'GOOD ENOUGH' BEHIND To drive meaningful change in education in the juvenile justice system, specifically, Kaylah Holland, director of instructional technology and blended learning for the nonprofit BreakFree Education, listed seven foundations: making lessons relevant to students, challenging them to create engaging products, connecting those products to real audiences, including creative and performing arts, connecting lessons to the community, acknowledging achievement, and forging meaningful relationships.

Personally, Holland said, she tried to dispense with the "good enough" mentality by getting a grant to help 10 facilities bring virtual-reality headsets into their classrooms. She called it "a game-changer" for those students.

"Technology is very difficult to get into juvenile justice facilities, and we at BreakFree said 'We are going to drive meaningful change. We need virtual-reality headsets, because they can do science experiments, they can take field trips, they can get on the Magic School Bus like Ms. Frizzle and really get outside their confined facility,'" she said.

AI USE CASES According to its head of research and innovation Jody Britten, the digital-equity focused nonprofit Team4Tech is listening to the needs and implementation stories of educators and creating a community of global ed-tech developers to build effective tools, such as an offline LLM that runs on a Raspberri Pi (minicomputer). She said they're also developing AI training programs, prompt-writing guides, rubrics to help educators, and systems that prioritize data privacy and intellectual property.

Among the many free tools and training resources curated by Team4Tech were a tool called LUDIA for coaching, CoGrader and Benetech for collaborative problem-solving, RAG models and Searchie.Io for building training libraries, and tools called Trackosaurus and Eidu for student support.

"Some of it is scary, some of it is exciting, but what we're seeing overall is that when those tools really have an opportunity for global impact, they have what we're referring to as the DNA of AI in education," Britten said. "When these elements are present, when they're connected, and when they're visible in the AI products that we're deploying globally, we see some great things happen."

TIPS FOR EFFECTIVE MAKERSPACES Scott Sieke, head of curriculum design for a science education program at the University of Colorado-Boulder, shared tricks he's learned to effective group work in makerspaces. He named three core people-problems that tend to arise in those situations: learners who work independently, those who struggle with ideation or coming up with ideas, and those who feel like they don't belong. Therefore, he said, a successful makerspace lesson requires that everyone feel welcome and know what's going on.

Sieke singled out four design principles for group work: universal design so it's welcoming and approachable, empathetic design so it centers what skills the educator is trying to get across, having ideation as a goal, and being practical and flexible for students. Specifically, he recommended starting with an introduction to let students know there will be group work later, then explaining what it means to be a maker in a makerspace, then moving into circuits and hand tools, then a design session, and finally, group work in the afternoon in which students design something for a specific kind of client.

DON'T BE AFRAID TO FLIP THE SCRIPT Shokry Eldaly, a faculty member at the Bank Street College of Education in New York, framed AI as a technology tool that could emancipate old-fashioned models of education from outdated thinking. He recommended using AI to obtain bespoke suggestions for personal questions, engaging in design thinking challenges, and most of all to help create a system in which students get instructional materials outside of class and do most of their cognitive work during class, instead of the other way around. He said implementing this idea will require access to technology; policies that set aside time, training and support for teachers to do it well; and a shift in values to diminish people's natural fear of change.THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA Claudine James, an award-winning English teacher from Malverne Middle School in Arkansas, has become something of a social media sensation since launching a Tik Tok account in 2020. She said she launched her career focusing on project-based learning before the COVID-19 pandemic, but the realities of remote learning, and the subsequent shift in student expectations, led her to explore other avenues of reaching students who weren't watching her educational videos. Within six weeks of her launch on Tik Tok, she had 100,000 followers.

"One of the things I learned through this whole experience is, as educators, we have to be ready to modify and adjust. On my new platform — and I call that my classroom without walls — out of my 5.7 million followers, 1.2 million of those followers are from the Philippines," she said. "As educators, we have a huge platform, and I encourage you to be ready to modify and adjust, no matter what comes your way. Am I telling you to become social media creators and content creators? No. But what I am telling you to do is not to let circumstances that seem bleak dictate to you what you need to do in order to be successful in your classroom."

INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE Jason Trinh, coordinator of STEM and IT competencies for the Toronto District School Board, said he partnered with Minecraft Education, an educational iteration of a popular video game, so his students could virtually explore the history of Toronto. He said they learned about past and present land uses, and considered how they might reimagine former school sites to serve human and animal communities now and into the future.

"The power of this project was not that we used Minecraft in this cool way," he said. "The power of this project was that students, especially non-indigenous students, engaged with indigenous teachings, learning with the land, and were able to communicate their thinking."

REIMAGINING SEAT TIME Echoing proponents of competency-based education and the movement to throw out the old one-size-fits-all approach to public school, Sharon Matthews, instructional coordinator at the Northeastern Regional Information Center in New York, said modern education needs to be reimagined from the ground up. She derided what she called the "sit-and-get" model of education as dated and in need of a reboot. She mentioned infusing AI into lectures, discussions, activities and even the grading process. Perhaps most fervently, she emphasized the importance of teacher preparation as the beginning of a cascading effect: Well-prepared teachers create well-prepared students who can lead their eventual employers and society into the future.RESPOND TO CHANGE, RATHER THAN REACT Carly Ghantous, an educator and a representative of the ed-tech nonprofit Learn21, likened the necessary evolution of education to a dancer adjusting her rhythm and moves to the music. She boiled it down to what she called the "PIVOT method": pause, invite, values, options, tweak.

"If we take a little bit of time to pause, to feel the music, invite others in to experience that ensemble collaboration, focus on our core values, jazz up our teaching with the options that we have available to us, and remember to always participate in that iterative process of tweaking and refining, I think we'll be able to approach change in a healthy and positive way," she said.

The Power Of Music Ed

When Amy Richter was a little girl, her father often traveled for work. He often came home bearing gifts of music and record albums. They bonded while poring over all that vinyl, she recalls, exploring the world of music from classical and rock to bluegrass.

Richter's love of music only grew as she got older, and she studied voice and piano. Diagnosed with dyslexia, she also found that music helped her cope with her learning disability. It helped her gain focus and confidence. That's why she studied music therapy in college. She knows the power of music to supercharge our brains.

"Music really became the guiding force in my education and helped me to connect with other people, helping build confidence through performance, also helping with my mental health," said Richter, who founded Music Workshop, a free music curriculum designed to cultivate a love of music from a young age, that can help schools beef up their arts offerings on the cheap. Schools across the country, including hundreds in California, from Yuba City to San Diego, now use her program. "It really became a tool in my life to better myself."

To be sure, aficionados of the arts have long argued that art transforms us, but in recent years, neuroscience has shown just how music can shape the architecture of the brain. This cognitive research illuminates the connection between music and learning and gives heft to longstanding arguments for the power of music education that are newly relevant in the wake of California's Proposition 28, which sets aside money for arts education in schools.

"The K-12 grades are the years in which brain function is most rapidly evolving and information from all different types of learning and subjects is being processed and absorbed, including connections across what we might think of as different school subjects, but they are all connected in our developing brains," said Giuliana Conti, director of education and equity for Music Workshop, which is particularly popular at schools that often tap substitute teachers in an era of high teacher absences.

"Music education provides physical and auditory experiences that work like bridges for brain structures. As the brain processes musical sounds and body movements, neural pathways across different regions of the brain grow and strengthen. The more those pathways are activated, the more usable they become across time and other skill sets or learning experiences."

Amid the ongoing crises in literacy and numeracy plaguing our schools, and the enduring sting of pandemic learning loss, many arts advocates are pointing to music education as a way to boost executive functioning in the brain. This enhanced cognitive function, often coupled with a surge in well-being, may be the secret sauce that makes music education such an academic powerhouse, research suggests. Music may prime the brain to learn.

"Music is this wonderful, holistic way of engaging almost everything that is important for education," said Nina Kraus, a noted neuroscientist at Northwestern University who studies the biology of auditory learning, in a webinar. "First of all, we know that the ingredients that are important in making music and the ones that are important for reading and literacy are the same ingredients. So when you're strengthening your brain by making music, you're strengthening your brain for language."

Kraus, who grew up listening to her mother play the piano, is passionate about the impact of sound, ranging from the distracting to the sublime, from noise pollution to Puccini, on the brain. The gist of much of her research is how thoroughly sound shapes cognition. Music training, for example, sets up children's brains to become better learners by enhancing the sound processing that underpins language, she says.

While we live in a visually oriented world, our brains are fundamentally wired for sound, she argues. Reading, for example, is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, while listening keenly for a sound, say a predator, is a primal impulse deeply embedded in the brain. Put simply, what we hear shapes who we are.

"Music really is the jackpot," as Kraus, author of "Of Sound Mind," puts it. She has conducted extensive research showing that music education helps boost test scores for low-income children.

Music also helps us manage stress. Perhaps that's one reason that offering more music and arts classes is also associated with lower chronic absenteeism rates and higher attendance, research suggests. Think of music education as lifting weights with your brain. It makes the whole apparatus stronger and healthier.

"Music is therapeutic because it helps us to regulate our emotions," said Richter, who adds that a culturally relevant music curriculum can help engage a diverse student body. "It helps us to lower our cortisol levels. It helps promote relaxation. It helps us with focus and concentration. It also helps us with connection. Now more than ever, we know how important connection is, especially among our youth."

In the post-pandemic era, these insights may well fuel the uptake of music classes in a state struggling with low test scores, but the implications for brain health actually go far beyond academic prowess and social-emotional well-being in childhood.

Indeed, early musical experiences may impart a lifelong neuroplasticity, Kraus has documented. Studies suggest that a 65-year-old musician has the neural activity of a 25-year-old non-musician. A 65-year-old who played music as a child but hasn't touched an instrument in ages still has neural responses faster than a peer who never played music, although slower than those of a die-hard musician.

"What I would say to everyone who thinks about picking up an instrument: It's never too late," said Richter. "Even just practicing scales can help with cell regeneration. So I encourage adults to continue to learn music along the way, whether that's picking up an instrument or listening to music, it's always really important for brain development."

Music pricks up our hearts and minds, as well as our ears. Children must persevere to master a piece of music and collaborate to perform it in the spotlight. They must learn focus, patience and grace under pressure. That kind of electrifying shared experience, working as a community, is something new to many of them, experts say.

"When music is more regularly incorporated as part of children's everyday lives," said Conti, "it can move the needle in their learning and development more effectively across many different parts of their lives: socially, emotionally, musically and academically."

It's the intangible effects of music education, the elements that can't be reduced to data points and parameters, that strike Kraus as the most profound. Music builds a feeling of joy, a sense of belonging between musicians, and their listeners, that little else in our age of digital background noise can.

"Music connects us, and it connects us in a way that hardly anything I know does, so it's very, very important," said Kraus. "We live in a very disconnected world. Depression, anxiety, alienation, the inability to focus, all of that is on the rise. Intolerance is on the rise. Music is a way to bring us together."

What questions do you have about Southern California?

Ask a Question

EdSource is an independent nonprofit organization that provides analysis on key education issues facing California and the nation. LAist republishes articles from EdSource with permission.

---