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Join the Collective Shift: Human-Centered AI for Learner-Centered Learning
The Partners of Collective Shift
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Educators often take advantage of educational technologies as they make the shifts in instruction, teacher roles, and learning experiences that next gen learning requires. Technology should not lead the design of learning, but when educators use it to personalize and enrich learning, it has the potential to accelerate mastery of critical content and skills by all students.
Can AI help us collectively shift what young people, teachers, and schools do to deepen the capabilities that make us human? Collective Shift wants to find out if the answer is yes.
You’re likely sick of hearing about AI. Perhaps it makes you feel inadequate or behind the times. Perhaps it’s scary or intimidating. Perhaps it’s already your able assistant and you don’t want any more pontificating about it.
We understand.
Education has a bad habit of chasing after the next new fad, of which Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the latest.
We are a new alliance of eight education organizations whose leaders, collectively, have over a century of experience in working with young people, parents, teachers, and education leaders from the classroom to the state—to shift education to make it more human-centered.
We’ve come together to put the human back into AI.
So that it doesn’t become the latest thing we follow, but rather something that helps us get where we—we humans—want to go.
We begin with questions. How might we develop and use AI to:
- Help educators and communities adapt classrooms, schools, and school systems to the world we’re accelerating into?
- Redesign learning with students, parents, teachers, and administrators to move it out of the creaky, cranky 19th century learning model it currently lives in?
- Make everyone’s jobs more manageable and joyous by creating time and space for human caring and relationships, for curiosity and growth?
We also have ambitions. Namely:
- How can AI help us productively and collectively shift what 54 million young people, 4 million teachers, and 115,000 schools in the United States do, day-in and day-out, to develop and grow communities of learning?
In short, how might a human-centered approach to AI in schools help to magnify and deepen the special capabilities that make us human?
Our alliance is called Collective Shift (www.collective-shift.org).
We are Next Generation Learning Challenges (NGLC - the project convener), Building21, Incubate Learning, Inkwire, Learner-Centered Collaborative, National Equity Project, Playlab, and reDesign.
In partnership with educators, schools, and districts we already work with, we’re prototyping simple, no-cost AI tools that support humans in the education space.
- A coach (Ask Gabby) to help anyone with a learning challenge or question develop their identity as a learner with a growth mindset
- A tool (working name: The GradPortrait Activator) that helps schools build competency-based progressions and rubrics that can be used to evaluate student evidence—part of a larger set of resources and coaches to help ed leaders work effectively with their teams and students to make their graduate profile come alive in kids’ everyday experience of school
- A simple project builder for students and teachers looking to bring purpose, engagement, and the real world into learning
Curious?
We want to collaborate with you!
The collective shift is bigger than eight organizations; it’s everyone involved in remaking public education to serve the needs of the humans in it.
We want to collaborate with you to build, test, and improve the tools so that they meet your real and unique hopes, goals, and needs.
Please try out one or more of our initial tools and send us feedback.
Please join our mailing list to be informed about what’s going on—and to let us know what other tools and services might support your needs. The challenges we all face are bigger than what any of us, working on our own, can accomplish. We need everyone working together, at every level, to enable AI to help our schools be profoundly human-centered places.
The initial funding for this project has generously been provided by LearnerStudio, with additional support provided through the Carnegie Corporation of NY and in-kind contributions from each of the eight partners. Please reach out to NGLC (acalkins@nextgenlearning.org) if you’re a funder interested in supporting this work or an ed leader interested in serving as an official test-site partner.
Photo at top: Students hang photos on a sculpture they created as part of a project that blends STEM and art. By Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages, CC BY-NC 4.0
The Partners of Collective Shift
Collective Shift is an alliance of eight education organizations whose leaders, collectively, have over a century of experience in working with young people, parents, teachers, and education leaders from the classroom to the state—to shift education to make it more human-centered: NGLC, Building21, Incubate Learning, Inkwire, Learner-Centered Collaborative, National Equity Project, Playlab, and reDesign.
