Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
Week in EdTech 9/10/25: Apple Integrates OpenAI & Gemini to Siri, NAEP Scores Show Continued Learning Loss, EdTech Funding Slows, Alpha Schools’ 2-hour AI Model Sparks Debate, and More! Feat. Chris Walsh of PBLWorks
Join hosts Alex Sarlin and guest co-hosts Matt Tower of Whiteboard Advisors, & Kate Eberle Walker, CEO of Presence Learning as they break down the latest headlines in education technology and from Big Tech’s AI push to the evolving future of school models.
✨ Episode Highlights:
[00:00:00] Kate Eberle Walker on parents’ concerns about AI chatbots and student mental health
[00:03:20] Apple integrates OpenAI and Gemini into Siri, reshaping the AI race
[00:04:15] Global AI shake-up: Microsoft shifts to Anthropic, Baidu gains ground, Google antitrust update
[00:14:45] Edtech funding slowdown and investor focus on regulated markets like special education
[00:18:07] OpenAI launches certifications for frontline workers; Google gamifies AI literacy with Stanford
[00:27:43] First NAEP results post-pandemic show continued learning loss and lack of political focus on academics
[00:39:01] Accountability challenges in education: attendance, wellness, and equity in public vs. private models
[00:43:46] Debate on Alpha Schools’ “two hours of AI per day” model and its implications for learning
Plus, special guest:
[00:50:17] Chris Walsh, Chief Product and Technology Officer of PBLWorks on scaling project-based learning
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[00:00:00] Kate Eberle Walker: Parents are rightfully very worried about not knowing exactly to what extent their children might be engaging with AI chatbots. And now with all of this news coming out and all of this scrutiny on meta in particular, really questioning, Hey, what exactly are these? Chat bots telling my child or guiding my child to do so, it's a huge area.
It ties into questions that I get and contemplate often around student mental health, student therapy. You know, what do I think about this concept of an AI therapist and. For all of the pros of, of really having a safe space with anonymity for someone to open up to their AI therapist, there's this other risk of, you know, hey, this is not actually a clinically trained human and.
It can be really dangerous when they're reading cues and in leading a child in the wrong direction.
[00:01:01] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar, and to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben.
Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
Welcome to this week in EdTech from EdTech Insiders. We have some very special guest. Hosts with us today. You all know Matt Tower from Whiteboard Advisors. He's a frequent and very, very knowledgeable guest host. I always love talking to you, Matt, and we also have a special guest host. We're here with Kate Eberly Walker, CEO of Presence Learning, and a ed tech veteran, Kate and Matt, welcome to the show.
Thank you for having us.
[00:02:05] Kate Eberle Walker: Thanks for having us.
[00:02:07] Alex Sarlin: It's great to have you both here. So there is a ton happening in the EdTech space. We, what we usually do in week at EdTech. Let's briefly talk about some of the upcoming episodes. This week we're publishing an episode with the Common Sense Privacy Seal Award winners.
That's MagicSchool, that's Prodigy Games, all sorts of amazing folks there. Uh, ClassDojo. We're talking to Ivan Crewkov. He has a, uh, company called Buddy.ai that's doing really interesting learning companions and we're about to publish an episode next week with CT Turner, who's the head of the GED, and they're talking about all the future of what the GED is going to be in the age of AI and all this career change and change in education.
So really interesting stuff. After that is Andrew Grauer from Learneo Amazing interviews. Stay tuned here. And in this episode we're talking to Chris Walsh. She's the Chief Product and Technology officer of PBLWorks. They just released a product to help schools do project-based learning in really, really innovative ways.
Anyway, incredible stuff, and it's all great. Let's talk about the news. So Matt, why don't we kick it off with a little bit of around the world about some of the things happening in the AI world, and then we can deep dive on a couple of them as they come up. What stood out to you this week in the AI world?
Lots of news always happening.
[00:03:20] Matt Tower: I mean, I think the big news of the week is Apple released their new iPhones and the phones are cool. I think there's often a lot under the hood that is more interesting from a strategy perspective. So one of the headlines is that they are very interested slash putting in OpenAI and Gemini models for Siri.
I think that's sort of loosely held news. Maybe not official from Apple yet, but we know it's coming. We know Siri has been sort of a early leader that has sort of dropped in the AI race and, and now Apple is trying to figure out what do we do within the phones and what models kind make the most sense.
There's also the like Google antitrust angle.
[00:04:00] Alex Sarlin: Yep.
[00:04:00] Matt Tower: Apple pays Google $20 billion a year to have Google be the preferred search provider. I think both from a search perspective and antitrust perspective, but also from an AI perspective. It'll be interesting to see how that relationship evolves over the next few years.
[00:04:15] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, there's definitely like a, a Game of Thrones kind of angle to, to what's happening in big tech right now. You have these sort of giants all over the world and they're, they're all interweaving in different ways. They're putting technology in. We saw Baidu stock rise this week because Baidu has been in very fierce competition with Google and OpenAI and Anthropic and Alibaba, and their new model's doing really well.
So they're sort of up and coming. We've seen Apple and Google their relationship and meanwhile we saw Microsoft, which has been very close to OpenAI, been a major investor in OpenAI, announced that they're gonna start buying AI from Anthropic, which is like this huge change. And it's obviously. All these big companies are figuring out exactly what their strategies are and they're all really in tight competition with each other.
It makes it very interesting. And then, yes, the Google antitrust angle is really interesting as well. Everybody, you know, the consensus in the tech world is that Google avoided the big penalty, which is having to sell off the Chrome web browser, the exact, the browser you're, you know, you're talking about there, Matt.
So people are saying they basically dodged a bullet here. There are penalties, but they're basically dodge a bullet. And I think we're in an interesting mode for that. And then of course the other big tech company that we haven't talked about here is meta. And Meta has been getting in some interesting trouble about their AI strategy and I think their reputation is getting a little sully there.
So Kate, I'm curious how you see, you come from an angle where you're thinking about student privacy a lot. You think about safety, you think about how uh, tech can work in schools. What do you think about what's happening with meta as well as the parental controls that open AI just added to make sure that their chatbots aren't being considered, you know, a menace to teenagers?
[00:05:48] Kate Eberle Walker: Yeah, I mean, starting from the parent perspective, right? Parents are rightfully very worried about not knowing exactly to what extent their children might be engaging with AI chatbots. And now with all of this news coming out and all of this scrutiny on meta in particular, really questioning, Hey, what exactly are these?
Chat bots telling my child or guiding my child to do. So, it's a huge area. It ties into questions that I get and contemplate often around student mental health, student therapy. You know, what do I think about this concept of an AI therapist? And for all of the pros of, of really having a safe space with anonymity for someone to open up to their AI therapist, there's this other risk of, you know, hey, this is not actually a clinically trained human and it can be really dangerous when they're reading cues and, and leading a child in the wrong direction.
So I think honestly, this news has really, has really reinforced for me a lot of the importance of what I'm doing at presence and, and, you know, thinking about how to really keep looking to AI to support human therapists rather than, than trying to jump all the way and. On the parent controls. I, I actually was talking to Tammy windup, the CEO at securely about this.
She is way more of an expert than I am on, on this particular topic and thinks about it constantly. And she said something that I found very wise, which was that the important thing is not so much giving parents controls, but giving them transparency and giving them the ability to see what their children are doing and using and in the content that's being surfaced for them through ai.
And I really liked that perspective. So I thought I'd pass it along to you guys.
[00:07:42] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's a great
[00:07:42] Matt Tower: point. I think it's also, sorry, I, I think it's also the key news was that Meta actively decided, allegedly, of course, not to heed some of the warnings that their researchers were giving them about how the tools could be used.
Mm-hmm. And it's sort of like. A decision that may feel low stakes to somebody in a certain role at a certain company. Yeah. Has this crazy knock on effect. Yes. That it's just a reminder of it. It is still a very human process of, you know, that person may not have thought that hard about the decision, may not have understood the implications.
Yeah.
[00:08:19] Kate Eberle Walker: Yeah. And recognizing all, yeah. All around these things that are happening with AI are, are human decisions. Yeah. That are,
[00:08:25] Alex Sarlin: yeah. I mean, I think there's also less buffer zone here. So, you know, you, you think about robot or sonar health and other, uh, AI therapy for schools. Ed tech tools that are designed specifically for use with teenagers have to be by sort of by definition, have to be think worst case scenarios, have to think about escalations, have to worry and, and really take very seriously the sort of what could happen.
I think the big tech companies are used to having this buffer, right? I mean, you think about a Google that's doing search results well, they're doing search results. If you go to a particular link in Google, Google doesn't exactly get responsibility. And of course we, the famous 1996 court decision that basically allowed social media to not be responsible for the user-generated content that's on it.
So somebody can post hate speech or bullying or all sorts of things on Instagram and Facebook is not held responsible. None of that is actually true yet of ai, right? There is not that buffer. If you ask a chat bot about something and it gives you advice that is really scary or problematic or that can be tracked back.
There's no buffer there. There's no third party, there's no user generated content in there. There's no third party running a website that came directly from OpenAI or Anthropic. And I think we're starting to get our head around that. And I think the big tech companies are coming to that a little slowly, actually, because I think they're used to thinking that there's a little bit of deniability and give between what their product does and what the results of it would be, especially for, you know, a bullied teen or something like that.
That's not really true in the AI era, and I think that transparency you're talking about Kate, is incredibly important because there's so much that could go wrong. And I'm a, you know, I'm a huge AI fan. I think the things that could go wrong are small compared to what could go right here. I'm very optimistic about ai.
At the same time, I think tech companies maybe have to get their head around this in a different way. The liability is very different if Claude says something to a kid than if, you know, a user puts something on a social media platform that, uh, makes a kid, you know, do something. It's just different. And I don't, I don't think the tech world is fully there yet.
[00:10:27] Kate Eberle Walker: Well, it's, it's getting us into this area of child protection laws and why we have them, and it's starting to blend in some of these examples to where, yeah, it's no longer just a social media engagement or chat, right? You're talking about things that might be at least perceived as clinical service or an expert advisor.
And it's a reminder for all of the room that we want for creativity and innovation. Child protection laws exist for a reason.
[00:11:01] Alex Sarlin: Yes, and, and you know, for a company like presence, you are so aware of exactly what has to be in place for any kind of relationship between a professional human provider and a student.
As we move to these AI providers that sort of play all these different roles, it's just an unprecedented type of relationship. I think we just don't know what it means yet. I should say you are calling in from the HO on IQ Back to School Summit in New York. I am having a little bit of fomo. I am not there right now, but is this some of the topic of conversation on the floor here?
What are people talking about there? I'm curious for both of you think.
[00:11:34] Kate Eberle Walker: Well, you should have fomo because there's a lot going on here. Yeah. I mean, even just our, our walk over to this room, right? Leaving through the crowd, seeing lots of big thinkers and ideas being exchanged. I was reading an article this morning where a leader was giving a tidbit of advice that he believes that you should start your day with a microscope on one eye and a telescope on the other, and that you should think about your approach.
You know, meaning you should think about your approach to running your business as don't miss the little stuff and make sure it's being taken care of, but also remind yourself to look up at the big picture. So I think of coming to a place like call an IQ as my telescope. Kind of a day and a good reminder to pick up and do a little more of the big thinking and ask the more strategic questions.
So I feel like that's what's happening today. I'm actually doing a panel later this afternoon on AI and student wellbeing, so very, very much on the topic we were just discussing. Yeah, and I think, well, what do you think? I think there's lots of good conversations like that that are gonna happen.
[00:12:38] Matt Tower: Totally.
Yeah. The venue is sort of very, a very fun one in that it's pretty tight and pretty compact, so it's, you know, it's a walk through. The hall can take hours for all the fun folks around. I think what I'm trying to figure out earnestly is it's been a pretty tough funding environment for two years and change and hold on.
IQ just did their update on, I think through at least the first half of the year venture funding. And it's bleak. It is, it is like a steep, steep decline from particularly 2022, which was sort of that peak of EdTech funding, at least in in recent years. And I think what I'm trying to suss out over the next couple of days is one where, if any the money is currently sitting, do any investors have new capital to deploy or are they on the path to new capital?
And two, what are the sort of most interesting thesis that are coming together? I was talking to an investor this morning about, I don't think it's clear yet, where the moats for AI will live and where in the value chain moats will live. I think one interesting hypothesis is that it will live at the sort of regulatory services layer, and the folks that are best able to understand and operate in conjunction with policy will have the most defensible moats.
Right? So, you know, if you think about the application layer, Claude versus chat GT versus co-pilot versus Gemini, the switching costs are basically zero. And I think that companies are trying to figure out how to solve that. I'm interested to see if there becomes a flight to regulated industries among investors to say like, look, you know, presence.
Mm-hmm. Figured out how to operate safely and in compliance with either the local or, or national regulations for this thing. Like that's actually something we want in our portfolio as everything else goes up for grabs, you know, in traditional enterprise SaaS and, and whatnot. So that, that's a thesis.
It's one of a couple interesting thesis I've already heard, but I'm hoping to learn more over the next couple of days.
[00:14:45] Alex Sarlin: It's a great thesis and I mean you could potentially even expand it out a little. There's the highly regulated and compliance pieces of this, like special education, like mental health within schools or medical health within a school environment.
But there's a sort of a gray area because education itself is such a regulated industry. There are certain ed tech. Ideas that have to sort of by definition be compliant with different types of education policy. They have to have the professional development all baked in and ready to go. They have to have student privacy all baked in and ready to go.
There's like a lot of different pieces of working within a school environment or even higher ed to a lesser extent that certain ed tech companies may be able to do that. Honestly, we have not yet seen, even with these huge deals, I mean we saw OpenAI announced this week that Greece is gonna become an OpenAI customer, the country of Greece.
Right? Right. It's like, I mean these guys are, are swashbuckling around the world and they're doing a lot in universities, but when you come down to the K 12 space, there's a lot of barriers to entry, which we all know in ed tech, and I wonder if the highly regulated parts of this are the highest barriers to entry, but there's a sort of tiers of barrier to entry of different ways to get into the school environment.
You have to be standards aligned. You have to you, we could all list them and list them and list them, and it feels like that there might be something really interesting there. I think that thesis is interest. Kate, what do you think? What do you think about that? Do you in the investment landscape? What does it look like right now, and how might people keep the investment flowing in this weird moment?
[00:16:10] Kate Eberle Walker: Yeah, I mean, I, I think, you know, well, first of all, I feel glad that we raised in late 2021, right? And so we haven't been needing to be, be out there in market because I certainly hear from others that it's a more challenging environment than it was a few years ago. I think I like your thesis on highly regulated.
Segments. I think I will say I feel from where I'm sitting in special education, I feel there is still just generally a lot of investor interest and appetite and I think it's not only the sort of moat that you might create when you build for something that's highly regulated. I think it's just that there's clarity, there's more clarity in some of these segments or subsegments right now.
You know, within K 12 where there are a lot of questions about where a fund's gonna move and how might regulations change. I think through it all, I've experienced, well there's, there's very little question and a lot of clarity still about what needs to be done for special education within K 12. So I think that there's certainly something to be said for operating within that clarity.
I have felt that a service like ours has just has had a steadier path through some of that volatility in the past year, and I think that it strikes me that the investor community might be looking for things that might have less of that volatility. Yeah. It's
[00:17:42] Matt Tower: like where are the moats? I think, yeah. You know, we see these crazy stories of companies doing $200 million of revenue in eight months.
It's like. We literally don't have the data to know whether that's gonna be sticky.
[00:17:55] Kate Eberle Walker: Right? Yeah. You
[00:17:55] Matt Tower: know, 200 today could be 80. Tomorrow it could be 400 tomorrow. We just don't know. Mm-hmm. And to me, that feels like I would be searching for those places where there is more certainty. Yeah. But still room for growth.
[00:18:07] Alex Sarlin: It's also an environment. I think this is sort of implied in what you're saying as well, about the hesitation from some of the investors. An environment where you have literally the biggest companies in the world sort of thrashing around in the space, trying all these things. So, you know, two headlines that caught our eyes this week was that OpenAI is offering certification to frontline workers, and Walmart is one of their customers.
They're offering customized AI training to Walmart. Well, that was something that the Guilds of the world were doing a couple years ago. That's something that the Coursera's of the world were doing a couple years ago. The idea of certification for technical skills for frontline workers, that's a whole space that EdTech has been trying to crack for a while, and now open AI is in it.
Google just put out these learning games, really beautiful learning games with the Stanford Accelerator for learning to learn AI skills. It's AI literacy, it's gamified, that's space that's usually ed tech. So it's like when you have companies like Open AI and Google and Anthropic with all of its stuff it's doing with coding education, it's like it.
Nobody knows where you wanna put your bet down. That won't just get sort of swept off the board by a big tech company. And I think that's probably part of the hesitation as well. But I like your point, Kate, so much about the special education world. It is less volatile in a way, even though it is by nature is quite complex.
It is a clear need, it's a growing need. And some of the headlines we saw this week that I'd love to get your take on, you know, we saw that there's been all this worry about federal grants for special education, but as of right now, most of them seem like they're gonna come through. It's not gonna be this huge starvation of the special ed world, but at the same time we're seeing an increase in complaints around special ed.
You have so many parents who, and advocates and people who are absolutely really, really, you know, care so, so deeply about exactly how to deliver services to special education. It's a loaded field. It does have its own sort of volatility. And I'm curious what you think about what's going on right now in the special ed world.
[00:19:54] Kate Eberle Walker: Well, we've got two challenging dynamics in ultimately getting students served and keeping parents satisfied that that's happening Right to and, and when we don't have that, we see the complaints come up. There's just a growing need and there are more and more children who are needing evaluation for one or more areas of learning need coming out of the pandemic.
And then are needing supports and services going forward. So you've got that growing need and then you have really, really critical shortages of Yes. The types of professionals that deliver these services. So with all of that combined, it certainly is good news to continue to see the signals from the federal government that there are no plans to cut IDEA funding, for example, or to reduce funds.
But, you know, we'd really like to see growth, right. We'd like, we'd like to see IDEA become fully funded.
[00:20:54] Matt Tower: Right. You
[00:20:55] Kate Eberle Walker: know, because the needs are deep and extensive. So I think that they're sort of on the one side. Yep. Things are no worse than they were in terms of funding signals and regulatory signals. But there's still a lot of need to address, and I think that's gonna continue to be the big question and the pressure point.
And I think it's about to get a lot more complex with school choice movements, more vouchers, ESA programs coming in. All of that is going to, you know, expand optionality and, and access to those options for families with that. We gotta remember that we're gonna have to help all of those alternative models of education be able to provide these supports for special education when those families are shifting.
And I think we're gonna just see that be a big topic in the coming cycles is how do we do this well and not risk leaving the needs unmet? 'cause there's just a lot of growing demand for it.
[00:22:00] Matt Tower: And I think what's complicated, sort of honestly overwhelming for me as somebody who is passionate about the space but like doesn't have a good answer on how to fix it, is like you've got rising rates of kids needing special ed support.
Mm-hmm. You've got declining NAP scores, you've got Yeah. School choice, which is, you know, I think on an individual basis, the optionality is great. Mm-hmm. On a macro basis, it gets really hard to manage, particularly like your physical plant as a public school provider. And so you've got, it feels like we're sort of plugging all the holes in the dam with our fingers.
Right. And I wish it was like, obviously you'd vote. 33% special ed, 33% to like choice, 33% to literacy and math. But like, it's not so simple and it's so specific to the individual school districts. I, it honestly, it feels sort of overwhelming to me. I don't, it's not a question. Yeah.
[00:22:55] Kate Eberle Walker: I think there is an answer in, in the answer is leverage technology.
Yeah. Leverage ai. Like, you know, it can't just be stretching resources more broadly or differently Yeah. To try to plug the holes, as you say, it's pushing on. I look a lot at it saying, okay, we have this sort of precious resource in our therapist network. We know there are not enough of them. We need to do more than simply.
Make them available through our technology, we have to figure out all of the ways to reduce their time spent on paperwork and those administrative elements so that they can spend more time with students, meaning they can see more students. We have to look at, you know, identifying beneficial grouping so that, you know, could you have three students working together with that therapist simultaneously instead of one?
Yeah. And you can do that, you know, remotely better because you can connect students working on the same need who might be in different rural districts, right? Yeah. There's like a pooling of all the needs creates more efficiency, and I think the tech, particularly with AI elements, can help you do it. In a way that improves the quality.
Yeah. You know, so I think it's a really, obviously I think it's a really interesting area. Yeah, of course. Because I work in it, but I, I, I think there really is a path through, but it takes a lot of willingness to innovate with the tech and openness to, I think, aggregating and, and pulling the needs.
[00:24:23] Alex Sarlin: Yeah.
It's also, as you say, it's e even though it's a complicated field with, with staff shortages and, you know, growing numbers of students needing supports and IEP, either just the IEP world changing, like people are trying to figure out Exactly. There's different, not the laws change, but the approaches keep changing in, in terms of how it's gonna work.
It's very localized. It's a complicated field, but it's a field with very specific needs and to. Your point earlier, Matt, highly regulated. Not something that you're, you're not gonna see a big tech company just say, okay, you know, we're gonna go, come in and try to solve special ed. We're open AI and we're solving special education now.
They just would not touch it with a 20 foot pole for lots of reasons. And I mean, they're already just on the rear guard action just from this one issue with this one teenager already is creating changes. If they're trying to work with thousands and thousands and thousands of special education students with all different needs, it's just not something they would ever touch.
So that's, to your point, bad about regulation. But I think to your point, Kate, you know, of all of the different things that are coming, the school choice sort of agenda, the school choice world, the ESAs and, and vouchers that are obviously on the rise, nobody knows what that's gonna engender. And we, we do have EdTech companies, we've talked to KPO and Preda, you know, we do have ed tech companies that are trying to step into that and say, we can really make a big difference here.
But it's a, it's an unknown unknown. Problems in special ed. It's a known unknown, right? There's been special ed shortages for a long time. They've been growing, you know, growing diagnostics for a long time. I think there's a little bit more of a, the trajectory continues in a way that we know, but things like AI literacy or learning loss from the pandemic, which is continues to be horrific.
Nobody's ever dealt with that stuff before. So there's, there's a lot of, probably investor hesitation, but even just hesitation among ed tech founders about products saying, we could delve into this, we could try to solve this particular thing, but maybe it's gonna change in a year. Maybe Google's gonna come in and do it.
Maybe somebody else is gonna, you know, something will change in the law that will make this not our solution, not even work. It's a tricky moment. Let's talk about the NAP score a little bit more actually. 'cause I'd love to hear both of you. One of the articles about the NAP score from the Great New York Times education columnist, Dana Goldstein, she pointed out something in there that I thought was really interesting and I'd love both of your takes on it, which is that this is basically the first 12th grade NAP scores of the students who were in, they were in eighth grade when the pandemic hit.
And, you know, we've talked on this podcast ad nauseum about learning loss from the pandemic and, and frankly, about how the ed tech world sort of come in and, and save the day. Not that I'm blaming it, but there was maybe a little bit of a missed opportunity there. But here we are many years later or five years later and the scores are still so low.
And one of the things she points out that I thought was really interesting is that there's this political polarization and almost no politicians at this moment are talking about learning, like actual learning as their sort of core platform, right? The right talks about school choice and talks about deinstitutionalize and no brainwashing and all, you know, and then the left talks about health and wellness and whole child, and let's do surround, you know, wraparound services and these things are, are meaningful, but neither of them are really directly related to reading scores or or math scores.
I thought that was a really interesting insight and something that I think is really relevant to EdTech. I'm curious what both of you think, Matt, it sounds like you have thoughts.
[00:27:43] Matt Tower: Yeah, so it is sort of adjacent to this. Something I read from Chad Alman earlier this week was that there's a linear effect to absenteeism from school.
So like, you know mm-hmm. When you're absent from school, one day it has X effect. Mm-hmm. If you're absent from school 10 days, it has 10 x effect. Right, right. And so I think it's the exponential basically are, or more. Right. Well, it's actually, it's linear, right. It's not, it's linear. Right. I get it. But it's multiple, multiple, I get it.
Anyway, keep going. But I think there's this. You know, COVID was an entire year of disrupted learning. Right. And I think since then there, I don't know if it's casualness or just there's less passion around going to school. And you feel that from the politicians and, and the sort of learning adjacent topics that they're focused on, rather than improving learning.
You feel that at the family level and, and the lack of interest in going to college, right. Which we read about in, in other articles. So I think there's just this lack of passion about. Just the core principle of going to school to learn. Yeah, and I think we see that in the NAP scores and I don't have like a simple fix.
I think it is really indicative that we've gone through an entire high school cycle since COVID, and it's not like anything has really improved. We threw a lot of money at it. The money alone was not the fix. And like frankly, I would love to attach my wagon to somebody who has an interesting holistic thesis that includes health and wellness just as much as it includes math.
But we don't, as far as I know, really have that champion right now at the macro level.
[00:29:21] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. Less reverence for school as an institution. I mean, it used to be 20 years ago talking about education in a political speech. It was like, well, you know, everybody loves education. And that's like period. And that's, I don't think that's true anymore, which is like amazing.
Uh, Kate, what do you think?
[00:29:35] Kate Eberle Walker: Well, I think the NA scores like coming, I think they were shocking. However, we might all have been thinking or hypothesizing the school performance was gonna look. I, I think just seeing the consistent across the board declines was so jarring that I think it's gonna be a wake up call.
And maybe point back to some of what you're calling out, Alex, of are we paying enough attention in all of this discussion of education and education models to the results? I think perhaps one thing that everyone could all align on is a common goal. I think no matter what side perspectives are coming from, everyone wants students in this country to achieve and to exceed benchmarks.
And I think this, but that's not happening. I take these especially personally because I, I actually have a 12th grader, my daughter's in 12th grade, and you know, and I, and I've thought a lot about this trajectory over these post pandemic years and what it means and how is it being addressed. And I think that it's, it's understatement to say it's complicated and it requires parent engagement and school engagement and government engagement.
And I think that the headlines we've been reading over the past day are gonna, I, I think, I hope, like provoke a little more like, okay, well we gotta stop talking and start getting to some action.
[00:31:03] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. One of the things that I've found very confusing about this time, and then Matt, I'm gonna pass this to you 'cause I know you think a lot about this, is that there's been this push, I think a relatively universal push at this point to make school more relevant.
And you know, I think part of the push back against traditional education, especially qua 12 education, is, well, we're still teaching a lot of the same things we've been teaching for a long time. And even if we're doing, you know, science of reading, which is proving to be effective, like the relationship between K 12 school and like life success.
Is very nebulous. It's not as clear as it once was. I think what there once was this very sort of core, almost religious belief in, oh, this is the path to mobility and economic mobility in the United States. You do great in K 12, you go to college, you do great in college. Then you go and you get a great job and you go and I feel like that's been like broken down and attacked at so many levels.
There's so much confusion. You know, recent graduates are not getting hired. Been some big reports about that. People are not sure about. The college for all movement has really been decimated and charter schools are, are starting to not be seen as having the same kind of pathway as they were, even the really good ones.
It's just like, I think there has not been yet a vision for what is the pathway that education is supposed to take you on. In the US it used to be very fixed. It used to be very obvious, everybody shared it. It was like 96% of parents wanted their kids to go to college or something, uh, even though only 40% ever went, but like everybody wanted that there was this very clear vision of what education was supposed to do for you.
And now I just think it's very up in the air and, and, and there's a lot of uncertainty. And this Walmart announcement, this open AI certification for Walmart is one canary, I think in the coal mine of something that we've talked about a lot here, which is the role of. Employers or companies or non-traditional educational institutions in sort of playing a role in that trajectory.
And Matt, I know you think a lot about it, so I'd love to hear your thoughts. Like, do you feel like that might be part of the solution that Kate is saying? Like, if we really wanna take learning outcomes seriously, is it just about better math like the Gates Foundation says, or is it about let's rethink what education does for us?
[00:33:15] Matt Tower: I think better. Math is certainly part of it. I think the Gates Foundation shift towards math, I think the very least is good to have a target versus trying to do thing. So, so I get that. And to maybe bookend our, our AI conversation, there's been this tension for a long time about do you improve access or do you improve outcomes?
Right. And historically we've spent a lot of time focusing on access. And that was noble, right? It was important to have a secondary, and I would argue a tertiary education to be successful in the modern economy. But it was almost always a trade off where you can spend a dollar on access or you can spend a dollar on outcomes.
And during COVID, we actually spent quite a lot on outcomes via targeted tutoring to unclear effects.
[00:34:02] Alex Sarlin: Oh, pretty un Pretty clear non effects so far. Yeah.
[00:34:06] Matt Tower: At the macro level, yes. I hope, just so I can sleep at night, that there were some individual effects from all the tutoring and all the money spent there.
But I think there's been this tension, right, where it was like you could spend on access or you could spend on outcomes. And Alpha School has been in the news a lot recently. I think to me, they're not an AI company so much as they are a new modality that uns shackles, the academic components of education from the social emotional components, right?
And yes, the two hours, the quote unquote AI is the academic component. But what's actually important about them as a company is this ability to. Have academics and social emotional happening separately, and of course you guys are focused on the social emotional part and mm-hmm. I think AI gives us an opportunity to have those happening in conjunction, but not necessarily on a linear path that you could only advance a grade at a time no matter where your academic or social emotional development stood.
That to me is like the most interesting, yeah. Adaptation that I, I hope comes out of like probably the school choice movement is you have more ability to experiment along that axis. It's still a little bit of a nebulous goal, admittedly, but I think being able to separate those two and invest in both access and outcomes is something we haven't been able to do until recently.
So I don't know. I don't know if that resonated.
[00:35:36] Kate Eberle Walker: Yeah. Yeah. I know it, I mean, I mean, I do think we're seeing more and more of these models emerge and, and it comes from a place of like, this is not working. I'm gonna build a better way. This is not working. I'm, I'm, I'm gonna try this way of educating, I'm gonna try this model, this model, that model.
I think that that can turn out to be great, right? Like experimentation and ability to do that is great as long as there is some common goal, which like, I would propose that, that be the NA scores. Sure. And, you know, if everyone is aligned, that achievement on those scores is the outcome. Like, that's the purpose to education, that's success.
Then let's try all these models and measure them. But, you know, it's, I think it's a classic, like we gotta, we've gotta have a common measure of success. Yeah. Um, and I, and without it, I just worry. That, you know, you just have more proliferation of variability.
[00:36:30] Alex Sarlin: If I had my druthers, I would pair the NA scores and, and a, a traditional academic test like that with something that is meant specifically to represent career readiness or life skills, or, I'm not exact.
I, you know, there's a million different terms for this, but something that is future facing, lemme put it that way. It was interesting talking to the GED because they've been thinking about this for a long time. You know that you think about the role of the GED, right? It's meant to mark that you have a high school equivalency, but it's not a backwards look.
It's not like, oh, do you know the Emancipation Proclamation? Do you know the Pythagorean Theorem? You know, or, or it's actually trying to design a test that it combines. Do you have what you needed from high school and are you ready to go to the next piece of life? And I feel like that is still missing when you think about the NAP or, or some of our standard measures.
And I'm hoping that we can take that seriously as a culture. 'cause I think that might to both of your points, it might even out a little bit the goals here. And it might allow people who care about math and science education and all the things that are core to K 12 that's valuable and relevant for outcomes.
But it also will allow people who are trying to do different models like the alpha schools. I, I, I'm not sure how I feel about Alpha School personally, but like, we should talk a little bit more about it though. It's really interesting. But like Alpha schools, any other model that's sort of a reformist model, but that's trying to focus on things other than core academics at the heart of school.
Like I don't think that that's necessarily bad, but if we have a standardized benchmark, to your point, Kate, and if it again, if it in combined academics and different types of skills and, and sort of career orientation or career readiness. Then suddenly you have a sort of a really rich ed tech environment because you can do different types of school reforms, you can do different types of school models.
You can also have different types of education delivery coming from all sorts of different providers, like big tech, like ed tech, like traditional publishers. But everybody's sort of focusing on the same thing. But I mean, when you get NAPPE scores like this, yes, we've had a pandemic. So it's a little bit like maybe this entire era will be an outlier when you look at the history of education.
But I don't know. It's one of these things where nobody takes, you know, the old Steve Jobs quote right about you need one neck to ring if something goes wrong. Like, don't you think that's part of the problem here? Like when, when something goes wrong at this scale, you have a whole generation who's doing really badly on the, on the tests.
Who's neck do you ring? Right? Is it state departments? Is it teachers? Is it ed tech? The buck doesn't stop with anybody. It's this huge, complicated system. And do you feel like that's part of the problem? I certainly do.
[00:39:01] Kate Eberle Walker: Yeah, I think it's, I think that's a really good point is it's that, I mean, there actually does need to be shared accountability in education, but it, it makes it harder when something's not working.
I mean, you know, another part of this is recognizing, and it's likely a big part of why we're seeing the scores we're seeing right now, that there are some baseline things that you just have to always remember are necessary for any kind of success in education, which is. Attendance, which you call that, right?
We know attendance
was quite low during recent years. This is where you would also put some of these other categories around wellness, health, access to food, right? That's probably the important other element of this that needs to be a baseline across all of these models, you know, is recognizing that there's probably as as much accountability that we need to look to there as well.
[00:39:57] Alex Sarlin: Well, alpha School, with the tuition they're paying, I'm sure they'll get great food. Nobody's going hungry in those schools, so, but go ahead Matt. Please
[00:40:05] Kate Eberle Walker: probably have great attendance too, right? Yeah, too. Yeah. Great
[00:40:08] Alex Sarlin: point.
[00:40:09] Kate Eberle Walker: Yeah, and you know, maybe you measure to measure outcomes of every model based on some of those parameters.
[00:40:16] Alex Sarlin: That's always the trick, right? Because things that work in a, in a private school model, in a, in a selective school model, don't work for everyone. And, and then suddenly the people left manning the public school system are getting less and less funding and less and less support. Please, Matt, I'd love to hear your thoughts on any of this.
It's, there's so much unpack here.
[00:40:34] Matt Tower: Yeah. I mean, I think to me what it comes down to is like there shouldn't be students who are bored to fail in the classroom from like academic challenges. There shouldn't be students who are like not ever going to succeed 'cause the academics are out of reach for them.
And our current model incentivizes exactly that, right? It's teach to the middle. And I think we made that decision in a different age and it made sense at the time. I think we now have the tools available that can feed a student the right academic content at the right time, but the model spits that out.
The current model, there's almost no way to do it. Right. And I think it takes somebody operating outside of the current system to show what it could look like and say like instead of using six hours a day for kind of academic stuff, but not really, like, we know that you're not learning six hours a day.
We know it's actually closer to two and saying, okay, let's split up academics from social, emotional and put you on different paths for each. That to me just feels like a much more satisfying, intuitive model for learning. Yeah, I have no idea how I would fund that within the current system. Like I, I just like,
[00:41:48] Alex Sarlin: well, let me do my, my quick rant on Alpha Schools.
It's really quick, but I'd love to hear your take on it. I'm not sure if this will resonate with either of you, but like, you know, we, we interviewed Mackenzie Price from Alpha Schools on the podcast, and I thought she was great and I, you know, we interviewed her as she was releasing her two hour learning product, which is sort of the productized version of Alpha Schools.
It's used in alpha schools, but it can also be used by other schools or home schools. I agree with you completely that you need outsiders or, you know, people with bold visions to sort of paint, especially in a moment of great change. Like we're in to say, let's take nothing for granted, right? Let's not just assume we have to do things 90% the way they've always been done and look for change around the edges.
Maybe we can change things in a pretty fundamental way. Really admire that and I admire their marketing. I mean, I, I've had so many people ask me about Alpha Schools because they've heard about it in X, Y, Z and in certain type of, uh, you know, there's Big New York Times article about them, or they're making news, um, they're opening one in New York and a lot of my New York, you guys, I'm sure this is a, a topic of discussion at Holland iq, but like in the alpha schools in New York, it's gonna be a really, it's gonna be a really interesting experiment.
And yet I get very worried when you have anybody sort of running away with the mantle of a certain type of learning. And I also think it's kind of interesting that the way they frame it is oh, two hours of sort of academic work. And it'll happen through ai and we're gonna build our own AI to do it. And we're, we have our own product and, you know, we had to get insiders.
We have over 500, we're about to release a new update of our map, over 500 different tools in AI and education around the world. So there's something very. Arrogant about being like, we're gonna do two hours of AI based learning. And rather than looking at the entire burgeoning field of ai, including the frontier models, but also literally hundreds of ed tech companies being like, well obviously we're gonna have to build this ourselves 'cause nobody's doing it.
And I'm like, no. Yeah, everybody's doing it actually. So there's something really weird about that. To me,
[00:43:46] Matt Tower: I think my point is actually like. I could frankly care less about the AI component of it. I think it's the modality that makes it compelling, and I think the gives the AI component
[00:43:55] Alex Sarlin: is the academics.
So they, they're outsource like all the academics to this AI thing. Then the, the AI is very important. But I, I hear what you're saying. I, I, I, and I admire the model. I agree with you. The new modality of splitting social, emotional, and academics in a very distinct way and adding more time to the collaborative learning.
I, I think it's a great idea. I just worry that they're doing it and there's this sort of, these broad hand wavy brushstrokes, oh, it'll be two hours of ai. And I'm like, but that's the whole ball game. If you can't do the two hours of ai, well, if you can't get the scores up, if you can't get kids to, to love learning in those two hours, then what are you doing?
And, and I, I'm curious about how that happens. Kate, what do you think?
[00:44:32] Kate Eberle Walker: I mean, I'm just inherently skeptical of models, at least at this point, that they could take the teachers out completely, the experts out completely, the humans out completely, and create with children enough engagement to optimize learning.
Uh, I think not just in the work I do now around therapy and special education, but in my years running tutor.com, Princeton Review. I just saw again and again the evidence points of what a difference en engagement from an adult helper, teacher expert made in the learning path, in the engagement of a child.
So I, I think maybe the technology gets there someday, but I, I, I don't personally think so. I, I think that there is something to that human connection and that children need, need it to learn and grow.
[00:45:26] Alex Sarlin: That's fair. And, and we've seen this, I feel like we've seen episodes of this show before where people try to take the humans out of certain parts of the day and, and put them in other parts of the day and put the technology front and center to try to personalize.
This was the school of one model, this was the summit model. You know, we've seen it again and again and it gets headlines because it's interesting. It's an interesting and new approach, and I respect that. At the same time, we are in a ama. I mean, we're in an amazing moment. You all know I'm like the biggest advocate of AI and education.
I think there is. I'm, I'm, I'm among them. And yet the idea of being like two hours of AI education a day is what will be school. It just doesn't resonate. We don't have any proof for it that that's gonna work. And there's this huge competitive Cambrian explosion we call it, of different AI tools. And it's not settled yet.
We don't know what is working. We don't know what kids love, we don't know what it, it aligns to anything we just don't know yet. So the idea of being like, let's change the whole school model. Anyway, I won't rant anymore about it. You, you're here where I'm going with that. But that said, I'd love to see a whole set of new school models in the wake of Alpha schools.
I'd love to have people all over the ed tech space specifically saying, oh, alpha Schools has a product and a whole school model around it. I'm gonna do that too. I'm brisk teaching. I'm school ai. I'm gonna do that too. I'm gonna start school AI schools and they will have this really interesting model and they'll be less.
Teacher agnostic or you know, then this model. I think that would be great. It would be really cool. And I think that you could see some amazing results and some very rapid innovation.
[00:46:55] Kate Eberle Walker: I think I just like, we've gotta watch out for a lot of those models will self-select, they'll pull a certain type of student, a certain type of family, likely with family supports around them.
And you could call something successful and it might not address a lot of other types of children and students and families in our public system with needs.
[00:47:24] Alex Sarlin: Great point. And you, we, I think a great asterisk on all of this is you cannot consider any school reform model of success if it only works among selected, engaged families.
Families of means, families with lot, I mean, no question about it. And that's also,
[00:47:42] Kate Eberle Walker: that's what I wanted to that, to that conversation. No
[00:47:46] Alex Sarlin: question. 150%. And, and, and that's, and that's the other thing about office schools. You put a $40,000 a year price tag on anything. It just completely changes everything about it.
I mean, it was just period. And it, it means it's gonna be very hard to generalize out the results, even if they're incredible elsewhere. You go to the, the office schools website right now, and they talk about these great MAP scores and, and you say Yes. And that's the same way that, you know, Harvard students have great SAT scores like.
Hmm. It's not, it's not how it works, right? Self-selection changes things a lot anyway. Our GRE scores or however you wanna do it. Anyway, this has been fascinating. I know we're at time. Matt, I'd love to give you the last word here. You're writing pieces for all of your different channels that your newsletter.
What is top of mind for you when you think about EdTech right now and what is should everybody should be looking at that they may not have noticed?
[00:48:34] Matt Tower: I, I mean, top of mind is, is certainly funding, I think on every level that that can be federal funding obviously has been the story of the year. Investor funding is downstream of that.
We just heard Jeff Silber talk about the state of the ed tech public markets. We'll hear from a number of investors about the private markets. Yeah, I think everybody's waiting to see where the moats are to go back to our moats conversation and whether or not they're regulatory or not, I-I-T-B-D, but I think the reason there's been a dearth of EdTech investment is, you know, if OpenAI is raising 20, 30, $40 billion at a clip, how am I supposed to compete with that and why would I invest in, in something that OpenAI could then just obliterate?
So I think there's a lot of hesitancy in the market, and I don't know that that gets clarified immediately, but I think that is what is top of mind for most folks is where do I invest when you have these giants battling above it.
[00:49:30] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, we saw last week Google Translate announced that they were doing some gamified learning and it immediately affected Duolingo stock price.
And it's like Exactly. There you go. Exactly. That's, it's, it's all in a nutshell Exactly. The public market issue. This has been a blast. Kate, you are welcome back anytime as a guest host of a Week in EdTech, it is always amazing to hear your perspective, and I think it's very nuanced, very thoughtful, always.
Great.
[00:49:54] Kate Eberle Walker: Thanks for letting me crash your group and co-host with you.
[00:49:57] Alex Sarlin: Oh, no, it's a, a pleasure is all, all ours. For sure. And Matt, as always, we really appreciate you Matt Towers with Whiteboard Advisors. If you're not subscribed to his newsletter and his funding reports, you absolutely should be. And as always, if it happens in EdTech, you'll hear about it here on EdTech Insiders, thanks so much for being here with us.
[00:50:15] Matt Tower: Thanks, Alex. Thank you.
[00:50:17] Alex Sarlin: For our deep dive this week. On this Week in EdTech, we are talking to Chris Walsh. He's an experienced educator, a product leader, and an entrepreneur who's passionate about using digital tools to bring large scale innovations to teaching and learning. In his role as Chief Product and Technology officer for PBLWorks, he leads a collaborative effort to bring to life new digital products and services.
Chris Walsh, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:50:43] Chris Walsh: Hey, Alex, great to be here.
[00:50:45] Alex Sarlin: It is great to see you again. We have had some great conversations over the years about project-based learning. You are a seasoned entrepreneur. You've thought about this for a long time. Start by telling us about PBLWorks. What makes project-based learning such a powerful approach for preparing students with real world skills?
And why is it gaining momentum right now?
[00:51:04] Chris Walsh: Well, PBLWorks has been around a long time, over 30 years, and in that time, PBLWorks has become the leader in helping teachers facilitate, implement, design, incredible learning experiences for students all across the country and increasingly across the world.
And so people turn to us as really the trusted expert in project-based learning and in, in terms of why it's gaining momentum. I mean, PB L'S been around a long time. You could talk to career and technical education folks and art teachers, right, who've been doing PBL for, they may not have called it PBL, but been doing things like that for decades and decades and decades.
I think what we've seen in the last 25 years, especially maybe the last 15 years, is just a growing realization that we have to go beyond standardized tests to understand what kids really can know and do. And 25 years ago we said, we call it 21st century skills, right? Students have to have all these communication, collaboration, creativity, you know, skills, critical thinking.
And in recent years, a lot of districts have adopted things like the portrait of a Graduate, which spell these out in even greater detail and more importantly. Hold their schools and their communities accountable for actually seeing what this looks like. And I think with that momentum, people are continuing to say, what is it that we need our students to be able to know and do to be successful in the world?
And it, and it maps to the real world, right? Yes. We live in a project-based world, you and I. Always do projects every single day. True. And I thinks adults realize that. Parents realize that they go to work, they do projects. And so I think it just makes sense. It's just intuitive, easy for people to understand, and that's why there's a lot of momentum around it.
[00:52:48] Alex Sarlin: That's incredibly exciting. And project-based learning is incredibly powerful. And as you mentioned, it's been around a long time, but it's really having a moment. I think people are really appreciating the relevance that it brings, the authenticity that it brings to school. So, as you mentioned, it is intuitive.
I think a lot of teachers and parents really embrace the idea of project-based learning, but they get a little nervous about implementing it in the school environment. They say, what are we gonna have to change? What are we gonna have to train on? How do we have to treat our time differently to be able to implement project-based learning?
And you have, you know, certain schools or certain types of schools that have done this for a while and others are still on the fence about it. How does PBLWorks? Help schools and educators get over that hump and actually really leap into project-based learning instead of sort of saying, sounds great, but I'm not sure I can do it myself.
[00:53:34] Chris Walsh: Yeah, I mean, I think you named a lot of 'em, Alex, which it can be scary for a number of people to jump into project-based learning because it takes a lot of time to do it. Well, teachers don't have a lot of time in their day to write curriculum, to imagine new curriculum, to be experts at assessment, to assess things properly with project-based learning.
And all of that leads to sort of, I think, a myth that this is really challenging. This is really hard. And yet we know that with proper support, and that is training as well as resources, that teachers can effectively implement high quality project-based learning across this country. And so I think the first thing that we try to do is we just try to spread the message that you can do it.
Yeah. That everybody can do it. This isn't rocket science. This isn't magic. And that we can give you the tools and resources and support to do that. And I think that is probably the most important thing that we try to do is just give teachers the confidence that they can do it in terms of actually implementing it.
One of the things that teachers have to quickly practice is being more of the guide on the side. We talk about that all the time, but in project-based learning, you know, you really want students to drive the learning through inquiry-based learning. And in order to do that, you have to teach a little differently.
And that's probably the biggest thing that takes the most practice. But it's not something you do instantly. It's not something you do overnight. It's something you build on and you get better and better at over time. And so. PBLWorks. That's what we do. We, we provide that training, that coaching, et cetera.
And now we have a product that actually helps teachers dive into that directly by giving them all the ready to use resources they need to be great at project based learning.
[00:55:15] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. So let's talk about that product. You're the chief product and technology officer at PBLWorks and one of your products teach recently won a Best of Isti Live 25 award.
Tell us about what Teach does and how, how it does exactly what you just named. How does it make project-based learning attainable, easy to use? How does it use technology to pull all the pieces together and how is it helping expand access to high quality project-based learning?
[00:55:39] Chris Walsh: Yeah, we're super excited about Teach.
You can see we got really creative with the name, but actually the reason we picked such a simple name is because we don't think that PBLWorks teaches just about project-based learning. It's about great teaching. Mm. It's about great learning experiences for students. And what we've done is we've tried to really give teachers everything they need to get started with high quality PBL right now.
And that's all teachers. We recognize that in most schools. We have a young teaching force or teachers who haven't taught for many years and they're struggling with a lot of just first time teacher experiences. And so for us to come in and say, look, we've got everything you need in one package, we have all the lessons that you need, all the details for those lessons, all the resources, all the handouts, all the lesson slide decks.
All the assessments, all the rubrics. All the samples of student work. Yeah. Plus, plus we have all of the support that you need as a teacher to grow as a teacher. So we have pro tips in there. We have all the scaffolding so they can understand exactly what we mean by project-based learning. We have videos of classroom practices.
We have coaching videos where they can get expert coaching in the actual lesson that they're doing today where they can see this is how an expert would teach this piece. So we have all that scaffolding and embedded professional learning in the product itself so that a teacher really can just jump in, dive in, and start going really quickly without hours and hours of training, without going to five days of workshops.
Of course, we will support teachers with all those workshops if they want that, but it really has everything to just get going right now and that, and that's really, really the key.
[00:57:20] Alex Sarlin: That's huge. And you know, as I hear you name some of the elements there, that is exactly the kind of thing that is daunting to people.
You know, what is this actually supposed to look like in a classroom? Well, you have videos for it. How do you make a rubric that actually is gonna work to assess properly? You have the rubrics, you have samples of student work, which is a very important part of the rubrics in, in project-based learning.
You have all of the different pieces and then of course all of the training really organized. That's incredibly powerful and I, I feel, I really feel like project-based learning is finally having its day. I've been a project based learning fan for a very long time, and one of the projects that I did back in my days at Coursera was create these project based learning courses.
We actually trained all of these professors to create project based learning courses where they, instead of being the sage on the stage, they were actually guiding students through series of steps to build an Android app, for example, or to build a comic book or to build something, a public artifact, a meaningful artifact that they were gonna put out in the world.
I think this approach is so, so powerful. Tell us about how you think about when you have this great set of resources and you're putting it all into one really powerful product. How do you measuring success? How are you measuring whether teach is actually having the effect, especially in terms of the quality of teaching that is coming out of the teachers that you're training?
[00:58:35] Chris Walsh: It's a great question, and it can be particularly challenging when you think about a product that is focused on teachers. We don't have tools that go directly to students. Right. We work with the teacher to facilitate the project, who then does it with students. Exactly. But I think a great presentation of learning is really key for students to.
Increase the quality of their work. When you have an expert who's an engineer sitting in the audience who's gonna give you feedback on whether or not your product meets professional standards, you automatically raise the bar. And so all of our projects are mapped to presentations of learning. We help teachers actually reach out to experts.
We give them templates, wow. To go out and find experts. We help them understand how to prepare those experts for those presentations of learning. And so we really see that at the end, what students can present is really the highest form of understanding whether or not they've succeeded. And so that combined with the high quality validated rubrics that we provide, teachers don't have to create their own rubrics.
We've done all the hard work of designing those and making sure that they're valid. That raises the bar of the work and that that is really the standard that we're after. And so when we see that work, that's how we'll know that we succeeded. Right? It's great that teachers will come back and tell us, this project was easy to do, that your resources were great, that I was able to successfully do this, right?
But really, it's the student work that we're really after. Now that said, we can't be all about the student work and forget about the things that teachers are held accountable to. So teachers are held accountable in a lot of different ways, but in particular with standardized tests. That's why all of our projects.
Are mapped completely to standards. Wow. National standards like Common Core NGSS and so on. And so a teacher can have confidence that as they're doing our projects, that they are meeting those standards because these are not what we call dessert projects. These are main course projects. You do these as a replacement for something that you would normally teach.
You don't do it after you teach those things and go, oh, this is fun kids. This is actually the curriculum that you need to make sure that they're meeting those standards and they have the success skills they need to succeed in the real world. That's
[01:00:50] Alex Sarlin: huge. I love that philosophy of, you know, you measure success.
One of the main measures of success is the student work and whether the student work is meeting the quality bar that you actually expect. I mean, talk about going all the way to the end result and the outcomes. And yes, within that it's also important to find out if the teachers are enjoying the project, if they are understanding the training.
But looking to the end goal is really key. And the mapping to the standards and making sure that this is something that can be fit into an actual curriculum is also huge. And I'm sure that's something your schools and teachers really, really value. So one of the things that, uh, I wanted to ask you about is the idea that project-based learning, part of the reason I think it's so exciting to people.
It has always been, but it's especially exciting right now. It's authentic, it's relevant, and it's really trying to help students look. Not just to the end of this unit or to the end of this class, but to their future after the class. What are you actually gonna do with the learnings that you're taking in this class in your life next year when you go to college, when you go into a career, if you go directly to an apprenticeship or an internship, it's a very future facing type of pedagogy.
And I guess my question is, as you're designing these projects into PBLWorks and creating the rubrics and creating the training, how are you thinking about this evolving workforce moment, this time of great change and making projects that are really helping students launch into this time of uncertainty but excitement?
[01:02:10] Chris Walsh: Yeah, it's one of the great things about project-based learning is that it's so dynamic. It's always changing. And even if you have a great project today that leverages whatever tools are available, new tools evolve and you can then update that project to incorporate those tools. Right? So back in the day, I did a, a project where students did a a video newscast, right?
Well, today we do a podcast, and so you can always adapt new technologies to some great core concept. I think in this case, obviously we live in an age where everybody wants to talk about generative AI and how is that being used in the classroom. And I've been around a long enough to know that these tools will evolve, they will continue to get better, they will be interwoven into just the daily fabric of what we do.
And in the, you know, in the end, we won't talk about them isolated the way that that we do today. Right. But I do think that it is important that we continue to always bring in whatever those tools are into our projects. And so for generative ai, for example, that's a very powerful tool that we want to encourage students and teachers to be using on an ongoing basis.
When appropriate, and that's really key. Teachers are really good judges of when something is useful for students and when something is going to be a challenge to their learning or hold them back or actually be a deficit. And so weaving in generative AI tools into our projects is something that will continue to do.
We think that there's a a right place for many of these things, and also ways that they can help students deepen their learning. For example, we have a, a project called Belonging where the students are creating a video documentary. Well, for years, many, many years, we've had students go find great imagery, stock imagery, et cetera, to put into documentaries.
Professionals do that all the time. Yep. And so there's no reason that you, that we shouldn't be using some of these great tools to be able to put into those documentaries. At the same time, if you could click a button and that would create the documentary for the student, and the student didn't have to write a script, didn't have to narrate it, didn't have to think through the storylines they wanted to do, that wouldn't be a good use of AI technology.
Right. Just like the, these are the things that Hollywood's grappling with right now in the real world. Yep. So we need to continue to encourage teachers to understand what are the capabilities, what are the affordances of the technologies that are out there, and how to properly use it and have students properly use it as well.
[01:04:32] Alex Sarlin: A hundred percent. I, I think that's such a good example of if getting stock imagery for a documentary is part of a project. Well, historically, that could be getting photos out of a catalog in a library. Then it becomes internet search. Exactly. Then it becomes generate your own images through nano banana or SOA or something like that.
But what's key is that you're not outsourcing, you're not taking away the learning opportunities from the students. You're allowing them to use real modern tools and keeping it dynamic to your point. Yeah. But the students are actually still doing the critical work. Exactly.
Fascinating conversation. As always, Chris Walsh is the Chief Product and Technology Officer for PBLWorks, leading a collaborative effort to bring to life new digital products and services focusing on project-based learning. Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insider.
[01:07:27] Chris Walsh: Thanks, Alex. It was a great convo.
It's good talking to you again.
[01:07:30] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community. For those who want even more, EdTech Insider, subscribe to the Free EdTech Insiders Newsletter on substack.
