May 2025: Newsletter

At the Center, we are starting to grapple with a topic that is on many peoples’ minds right now… what is the role of AI in education? And how might AI be leveraged to support the preparation and development of our next generation of teachers, particularly their social, emotional, and cultural (SEC) competency development?  To explore these questions and examine more broadly how a whole child approach is being infused into teacher preparation, we are embarking on an exciting partnership with Notre Dame de Namur University’s (NDNU) School of Education in Belmont, California!

In the year ahead, NDNU will begin trialing this platform (GoReact), whereby candidates will upload videos of their teaching and, ideally, university supervisors will leverage AI-assisted feedback and engage with the platform to support candidates’ growth. 

A Few Questions for you to Ponder: 

• When you think of AI and its role in teacher preparation and development (and its role in education more generally), what comes up for you (e.g., a sense of resistance, openness, excitement, fear)?

  • Where do these feelings or reactions come from? What are they grounded in? 

• What can you do over the summer to learn a bit more about AI and its potential for your own work? How you might leverage or integrate it into your teaching, your work, and/or support of others?

Some Interesting AI Reads to Explore: 

• How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students into the AI Future (NY Times): After initially banning artificial intelligence chatbots, schools are embracing the tools. Miami, the third-largest U.S. school district, shows how. 

• AI in Education: What Parents and Caregivers Should Know (AI for Education): “How will AI impact our children’s lives? Does AI increase access to personalized learning, or does it simply enable students to cheat? Will it power incredible innovations that will improve the quality of our lives, or will it transform society in ways that are difficult to predict or control? Perhaps most urgently, how will AI impact our children’s education? Are we adequately preparing them for a future that may look very different from today?”

• Forget Chatbots: Research Suggests Reading Can Help Combat Loneliness and Boost the Brain (The Conversation): “A recent survey from The Queen’s Reading Room, the charity and book club of Queen Camilla, and other surveys, have found that reading fiction and other books significantly reduces feelings of loneliness and improves wellbeing.”

• AI as Normal Technology (Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University): “We articulate a vision of artificial intelligence (AI) as normal technology. To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity.”

• An Excellent, Holistic Approach To Academic Integrity In An Age Of AI (Cult of Pedagogy): “Susan Morrow and Katherine Switzer revealed a different approach to accountability: the power of relationships, transparency, and explainability to ensure the integrity of results. The following steps can help you, and your students, take action to ensure academic integrity.”

Other Interesting Resources and Things to Check Out: 

• SEL4CA Microgrants for Educators: The SEL4CA Micro-grant program directly funds educators to support student and educator social emotional learning and well-being.

• Essential Skills for the Leaders of Tomorrow In this Meet the Leader podcast episode from the World Economic Forum, Adam Grant urges for a shift toward nurturing leaders capable of individual excellence while also fostering growth and elevating others.