Education is About Growth Mindset

The first classroom I remember being in as a student, my first-grade teacher, Mrs. Hurst, would draw five lines on the board using this: 

The first classroom I used as a teacher had a green chalkboard with the lines already drawn on it: 

In my first four years of teaching, I evolved to using an overhead projector: 

When I was a high school principal, e-mail was just starting to evolve as a way for families to communicate with teachers. In the same building, every teacher asked their students to first send their papers to turnitin.com to check for authentic writing. Students would then print their papers and physically hand them in to their teachers. 

The last time I taught a class, it was entirely virtual. We met online. I taught online. I graded papers and projects on the university's platform. It was a far cry from Mrs. Hurst in 1981. 

Education, by its nature, is about evolution. It's about growing and changing to meet the needs of the students as they grow and change over time. That includes advances in technology, acceptable societal norms, and educational research. 

Under Tim Munoz's leadership, the Policy Committee has started discussing artificial intelligence parameters. This is a brand-new experience for all of us. We've never had to ask questions about content that can be created by Claude AI or Chat GPT. We will rely on the experiences of our teachers and students to shape our expectations. 

Artificial intelligence is just the next chapter of how education will grow into the future. We know that we won't teach our students of tomorrow the way we learned ourselves or, to take it a step further, how we teach our students today. That is our commitment as educators. 

The challenge will be for us as adults. When we were students, we didn't learn that way. When we were taught how to teach, we were not taught that way. If we must grapple with this as educators, we will need our community to grapple with us. It won't be how we all learned when we were in school, but it will be what our future students expect of us. Of all of us. 

We are breathing new life into the buildings in East Greenwich over the next five years. We must make the same promise about how we teach. The students of tomorrow are waiting.