Hello and welcome to Thinking Deeply about AI for Schools.

I'm James Robin and joining me, as always is Neil Almond.

Got some fascinating topics to dive into?

Absolutely.

For those just joining us, this is a podcast where we explore the rapidly evolving intersection of artificial intelligence and education.

Every month, we pose the big questions, examine what's changing in the AI and education landscape, and try to make sense of what it all means for educators, students, and the future of learning.

We're not here to give you all the answers because honestly, we're all still figuring this out together.

Instead, we want to create a space where we can think critically, question assumptions, and explore those possibilities.

Each week we will explore one topic, research article, AI update, and ask the ultimate question, what does this mean for education?

So this week we're going to explore a topic that has a lot of traction in the American media recently and that is Alpha School.

Is Alpha School the future of education or is it just experiments for the wealthy?

In this episode, we'll explore what Alpha School is, what makes it interesting, but also are there any lessons that we can learn from Alpha School?

Let's start with diving into what is Alpha school.

So Alpha positions itself as a radical alternative to conventional schooling, claiming core academics in about two hours per day, delivered via software rather than just classroom instruction for the whole day.

Now, as the Co founder Mackenzie Price puts it, quote traditional school is broken, outdated, full of busy work and often a waste of time.

End quotes.

So they present Alpha as quote a school where students focus on academics for only two hours a day, but still easily outperform their peers in traditional schools.

End Quote So beyond the academic block, Alpha says, and again, quote.

It gives students their most valuable resource back time so that the rest of the school day is spent developing life skills like leadership, teamwork, public speaking, financial literacy, entrepreneurship and socialization by doing engaging, active workshops.

End Quote They add that this system doesn't work for everyone.

We find it it works great for 80 to 90% of kids.

Now, how to say when I first heard about Alpha School and just like the premise of it, I thought it was a bit of a new idea up in the cloud thought, you know, it's a gimmick, it's not going to work.

And then the more I learnt and read and listened to McKenzie and Joe Lyman, who is also the principal of Alpha School, and you hear their passion, drive and motivation, it raised the question of not that does it work, but more that actually, is there anything we can learn from it?

And I kind of was relating it to my own kids.

And I think as as teachers, we just look at our children and our class and we say this traditional way of schooling, is this the only way of doing it?

And it kind of raised more questions than answers for me when I first heard about Alpha.

But I think I've gone through that whole journey.

What about you Neil?

What was your first kind of impression of Alpha School?

Yeah, massive skeptism as you may well imagine the facts that they're claiming that they can do sort of all this wonderful thing, just the academics and only sort of two hours.

And then and that's, you know, using sort of, you know, AI effectively to kind of help support that.

And they still get great results.

You know, massively skeptic.

I think I still, I'm a little bit sceptic about the whole thing.

I know that, you know, allegedly according to the local media, you know, they do really well in sort of assessments.

But then, you know, the assessment in America is a podcast that's, you know, for someone else to talk about because it's such a a vast topic in itself.

But you know, I think it's easy for someone, someone like me who's, you know, very much sort of what is the evidence say about learning and all of that stuff.

And it, you know, really, you know, AI potentially does a lot of the thinking for people that, you know, I would go absolutely not, you know, and get into that sort of group think.

But, you know, I think then we get in the get into a problem when that sort of go to position.

So I think we need to, you know, have a bit of an open mind about it and you know, see what happens.

But put it this way, would you say, Neil, do you want to spend $50,000 a term or a year to send your kids to the school where this is sort of the structure of it?

If I had a spare $50,000 and happened to be in America, I think my answer right now would be no.

Yeah.

And it's, but I think it goes back to that question.

It doesn't work for everyone as well.

And I look at my 3 kids and I just from the little that we know, and this is the other thing, it's quite hard to sit, sit back sometimes when we're looking at a system like this.

Would all my kids succeed in someone like that?

No, no, not at all.

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It'd be interesting for our perspective to dive into almost the pedagogy behind it because I think there will be snippets in here that would be worthwhile exploring.

And I know they've talked a lot about the science of learning and you can go out and find loads of talks and research.

In the last, I would say a couple of months, they've really done a marketing drive on it.

And even they're engineers that they employ, they're on X and they're releasing things around the science of learning or how they're doing reading or how they're doing time back.

But let's go into that two hours because is it, are they doing more learning in that less time or is it a complete shift that actually or let's let the computer do it.

And as you said, it is the two hours.

They do 4 lots of 25 minutes of the Pandora sessions.

They do 25 minutes work and then they do 5 minute break and it's like an interesting aspect.

What are your thoughts?

Because hard to comment a because obviously our like when we hear this, we go into it with our national curriculum in mind, which we know is so content heavy.

And so I'm thinking straight away, does this work in the UK?

And I'm thinking with our current curriculum, I wouldn't have thought so.

Absolutely not because of the amount of stuff that is required for us to teach within those sort of academic subjects.

I also don't know that much or they're certainly in their marketing materials.

They're very sort of, they're not forthcoming with what this software really looks like and and and does and I think it's.

It's it's.

Hard to gauge whether this is an incredible thing or not without you actually being able to have a look at what this software is doing.

You know, there are so many companies out there who are saying AI this, personalisation that, and then when you look under the hood a little bit and you go to like demos and stuff like that, you see basically it's just a real simple coded, if they don't know this, then go to that kind of course.

So not really generative AI in terms of how we might envision what that actually all is.

So yeah, massive alarm bells on on this one.

The Pomodoro method as a means of perhaps organizing the work.

You know, I've got nothing wrong with that.

I think, you know, there's every sort of teacher who's done upper key stage two, key stage 3, key stage 4 writing.

You know, when it comes to that writing lesson, if they're not writing for 60 minutes non-stop and putting it in sort of those 25 minutes of work and then, you know, don't want to say the word brain break, but that sort of 5 minutes off just to kind of recharge and rest yourself.

I generally think is a good, you know, a good thing if you're having that sustained level of of focus.

So I am very much, you know, pro.

That's what Pomodoro way of doing things.

I think that could actually be really beneficial to our work.

This 2 hour block.

I don't know.

Again, questions around what their curriculum actually looks like and conscious as well.

You know, it's a private school and so there's obviously with that connotations potentially around the prior experiences that children have had come into this year.

I can't imagine for a second, you know, teaching reception to read and the way to do that is to put them down at a computer for 25 minutes.

I don't think that's going to work at all.

You know there'll be teachers here who still struggled to get year sixes to log in effectively.

Yeah, and it's there was, there's an interesting argument here and I was listening to a few podcasts on a few long journeys and when they first started, they basically got off the shelf tools, as you say, IXL Khan and other ones read theory, but they weren't necessarily what they needed in terms of it.

And what on this podcast it was saying that, OK, they need to master an element before they can move on.

So that's where the whole personalization of one has their own device.

They learn at their own speed.

They do that mastery element.

And if a child comes in behind where they are on that curriculum, whatever their curriculum is, it may not be two hours, it may be 3 hours because you need to catch up to know those elements.

And we talk about, I think this, there's a, there's a weird thing in AI at the moment saying it can bring personalized learning.

I don't think we've seen it yet in any way, shape or form, especially with what are Victorians set up the classrooms at the moment with 30 children.

And I'm not saying this will be for everyone, but is this one to one training, support teaching in some way?

I don't know is is there a space for this in our education system?

I think in terms of right now, the intervention landscape, which we know is, you know, very difficult to find the time, very difficult to find the the people to do it tends to be speaking from the primary school perspective, the TA who hasn't been trained in insert, you know, whatever catch up scheme that you might be using or program.

And so, you know, there is definitely something around that.

You know, we used, when I was a deputy head, we used some software from complete maths called Tutor, which kind of works on the same sort of lines of it's meant to kind of work out their starting points.

And so we would have, you know, Tutor club and if a member of staff was off ill, we did kind of make the call that, well, actually that's the best thing for them.

Instead of the TA having to get their heads around subject content that they're not totally familiar with, maybe the best thing for them to do is to get individual laptops, get their headphones out and they can sort of work through Tutor.

And the TA becomes that sort of, you know, guide on the side sort of thing and is there to offer that emotional and support and, you know, a little bit of academic support where needed.

So yeah, I think there is a space for it.

I just think we need to be really careful with what it's for and not letting it get ahead of, yeah, the, the human element of school.

And also the quality.

And I think there's a really big thing here and like you, there are applications out there that will say that they're teaching the children and it could be a really poor model that's been done or they're not even thinking about breaking it down in small enough steps.

There's not enough rehearsal for the pupils.

Or it could just be so I'm personalized to that child.

It is not at the right level as well.

And there are too many favourabilities that are now alpha score probably in there.

They're in a unique situation where they could, they've got educators who know the science of learning, they've got coders.

They can actually make changes very, very quickly, more than any other.

But the question comes back into, if you look at the money spent in the Ed tech landscape at the moment, it is fast.

It is into the millions and billions, and probably the majority of those don't have the understanding of what great learning is.

They're making a tool that they think will solve a situation or a problem, but it's so unique and so specialized, it doesn't fit with everything else.

So I think the intervention space is a really interesting concept.

I think there's also an element of the independent practice if what people's are doing, and I know we've come on to motivation in a bit as well, because I think that's a that's a key underlining thing.

But what there was a really interesting quote and I don't know.

And then these are all quotes from what they're saying as well.

We can't see what they're doing.

This all anecdotal, but some people are looking for magic software at tech solution.

That is not it.

We believe that attacks only 10% of the solution 190% is having a motivated student and Mackenzie said that but on the website to run the videos.

But what I was thinking was what's 1 of the hardest things in education in a classroom that we know makes a difference, but we can't teach it personalized to all the kids and it's something that's simple.

It's like spatial repetition.

Technology is such a great tool to use that actually is that a element within the whole thing that would say, OK, let's.

We know there's evidence of it.

We know the evidence of the really positive impact.

So let's use technology for that and not have technology as a vehicle to try and put everything on to actually let's turn it on its head to say the pedagogy is the vehicle space.

Repetition is really hard to teach.

I'm not doing it effectively that how can we use technology to support that one element of it.

And again, you know, this is an AI podcast, but you know, you don't even need to have AI built within your product to do space repetition.

You know, really, really well, I'm thinking particularly, you know, Carousel, for example, from Adam Boxer, great tool, great edge tech tool for space repetition.

They had this thing called C scores, which kind of works out how often they've asked that question, whether how often they've got it right, wrong to kind of give you an idea as to when you should introduce that question again to, to pupils.

And, you know, that's a, it's a great idea.

And you can, the way that you can answer it, yes, they can do it on the platform themselves, but you can use them as a sort of like, you know, put them on the board for like whiteboard questions.

You can do that in the moment.

Check for understanding as well to see if they've even done the homework.

So, yeah, there's some really clever ideas out there with space repetition that, you know, technology is, I'm hasten to say, solved.

But it really doesn't feel like it should take that long to produce.

You know, you might be able to use AI to help speed up the development of these tools, but you certainly don't require sort of generative AI to do spaced repetition.

You know, space repetition has been around for, you know, a very long time.

You know, you've got apps like Anki who have been around for, you know, God, you know, years and years.

And but it's.

What I find though is people use them one dimensionally.

So you were you were talking there about using it for retrieval practice in the lesson.

You could use it at a whiteboard, you could do now activity, you could do an exit ticket.

You can do all of these things with it.

Would a typical teacher think that way?

I.

Mean yeah there's so there's even be able to think that way you have to know about these things in the 1st place as concept of exit ticket.

What's the purpose of that You know what I will say is I think you know there is such a benefit in collecting student data at that level automatically.

I don't want teachers to think that they need to go and, you know, lots of quizzes and like sort of, you know, QLA that until the the cows come home.

Absolutely not.

But if we can harness technology to do that and then AI, generative AI can do something with that data to say, hey, you know, here's our not even not here's the recommended thing, but you know, here are the questions.

And we know we know a little bit about little Johnny.

So we're going to personalize that in a little bit more way that may motivate little Johnny to want to do it a little bit more.

Yeah, that can only that can only be a good thing.

It's just that you know there are many different sort of parameters that need to be in place for that to happen.

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What's really important, again, Alpha School is a private school in the States.

Their main campus, Texas, conveniently, I think, right next to like a SpaceX hub.

And So what you find is that lots of these the children that go there are sons, daughters of people who are, you know, incredibly intelligent people who you might argue are sort of because of the the the home situations that they find themselves in are naturally motivated to want to go and do all these things where, you know, certainly from my experience, you know, where I've taught, that's not been the case.

And to motivate people to pick up the pen is, you know, somewhat of an accomplishment itself.

So what role then does motivation have then in this learning then, James?

Now one of the principles failed for school is pupils got to love school.

And I've always come from the perspective that if you think about the technology, I never liked the argument that technology is there for to help engage children.

I've kind of whenever I worked with technology or worked with leaders, I was like, let's get rid of the word engage because I don't like I don't like that what it enables is can pupil, can it enable pupils to have a love of learning?

So I always go back to my children and watch them.

And like, let's say my oldest came out of add lesson and he was really disappointed by the physical resource that he created.

And he wanted to really what he had in his head as an idea was far superior than what he could create in school.

So I put him on Tinkercad.

He did all the lessons Tinkercad, which is like a 3D modelling thing.

And now when he's got an idea, he can actually visualize it in a different way.

And I was like, that's great use of technology as a vehicle to do something.

And then then I was, because I'm always a bit skeptical about the coin situation.

So whenever you go on an application.

That's for homework or something else.

They get coins.

So I sat back watching him the other day, kind of use him as a little bit of my Guinea pig saying isn't that any good?

Has it got the pedagogy in it?

Has it got stuff that are worthwhile?

And a lot of things are turned off saying no, that's not good enough for XY.

So the reasons And he, it was fascinating how his brain was working.

He got so excited that he got like 30,000 points on the spelling of the word Jim, and he said there's only three letters really quickly, really easy.

But if you watched it, it was because there was a timer across the top.

He knew it, so he did it straight away, but it wasn't the most complicated one.

It wasn't all about the effort that he put in or whether he's using this phonetical understanding or anything.

It was actually quite an easy one to do.

But then when he went on times tables and he worked a lot harder, he only got 200 points or they're two different platforms.

And it's kind of like he spends more time on these trying to decorate and characterize his character.

If I let him, then he does doing the practice.

And sometimes we need to do that hard practice.

It's not meant to be easy and it's not meant to be simple.

And they just need to practice it over and over again.

So goes back to, I'm a little bit foolish, but I just bought him a drum kit because he's been doing drumming for six months.

It's electronic, luckily, but he's been driving six months.

He's put in that effort now he's got an electronic drum kit, but his practice is part of it.

You need, you can play, that's fine.

There's element of play, but there's also a part of what you need to do, your practice of these, the exercises you are doing.

This is a drum teacher as well.

And I think too often I know as an educator, I've looked back.

Well, the love of learning will just come with it all.

It's the human connection that we have with the children and it's the conversations we have in the classroom.

But I think they do, they do do respond from some sort of external coins or that.

And but I'm concerned about that as well.

I don't have an answer, but I just think they do get motivated by things that we wouldn't necessarily think is educators or parents, right?

That's important.

But in their little world, it is.

And I think we've got to be careful with that as well.

Yeah, it's a hard one.

I remember reading Peps Mcrae's motivated teaching when it came out and he specifically mentioned, you know, make sure it's all about the intrinsic, not the extrinsic.

And yeah, you know, if you teach a group of four year olds, sometimes you've got to, you've got to dangle that intrinsic extrinsic reward there, otherwise trying to manage that group.

And I think that's fine.

I think it's, I appreciate.

And there's almost like that continuum between, right?

We're going to start off where necessary with some sort of extrinsic reward.

And again, I've always kind of feel, you know, even with adults, there's the extrinsic reward of if you do well, you get your pay packet at the end of the month.

If you don't do well, you don't get your pay packet.

So, you know, we're still, I can't, don't think you can take out extrinsic motivation within adults either, because I do kind of feel that, you know, say that pay packet that enables us to live our lives and do whatever we want to do is a form of extrinsic motivation.

But going back to your point, it just does kind of feel that, particularly in the two in the example that you gave, that what it is that they are trying to motivate pupils to do is the wrong thing.

And they're not motivating them to learn, they're motivating them.

As you say, decorate the avatar, get as many points, whatever it is.

And kids are, you know, clever.

They all find the shortcuts to do it.

So, yeah, if I can get 20,000 points, whatever it was from just spelling the word gym, they're going to do that and they can go, oh, look at how wonderful it is.

I've got this skin, this, whatever it is that they want to do.

And so actually what the, what we should be thinking about is, you know, rewarding the harder stuff, which I, it seems, you know, very straightforward because that's what you would tend to do anyway, or you would think to do.

But certainly perhaps in the educational landscape, particularly with, you know, the younger Iguz, you know, we can all think of, I think, you know, two or three sort of big Ed tech tools to help with times tables, to help with spelling, etcetera, etcetera.

Where actually, you know, I'm going to give you one coin if it's something that the system knows that you've done well.

But I'll give you 10 coins if it's something that's colour coded yellow because you're not that confident on it.

I'll give you 20 coins if it's something that's colour coded in red because you very rarely get that wrong.

And so maybe we need to sort of, or, you know, Ed tech providers need to think really carefully about what it is that they are rewarding to develop that intrinsic, that X to get that extrinsic motivation.

Which then I think the adults then a big job of ours to do is to say, it's great that you've done that and it's great that you've unlocked whatever avatar it is.

But how much cooler is it now that you know what 6 * 6 is, and that's now enabled you to think about what 6 * 60 is and all of that sort of stuff?

Is it a vehicle part of it?

Is it a vehicle for that intrinsic love of learning?

And I think it has to be, there always has to be some kind of reward.

Like even, let's say music practice.

I think in my teenage years, I, I, I forced myself to be in a youth band because then I'll practice guitar for it.

And it's like, OK, what are the wins?

Am I going to do?

What are my achievements going to be?

Or am I going to put pressure on myself to perform in a situation?

So therefore, right, let's do that.

And I think the danger is that we use, let's say, spelling tests in school.

Well, we use spelling tests to get children to practice.

But actually in the, in the worst situations, it's they haven't actually taught the kids or there isn't enough practice to do that.

And it's kind of, I think this whole intrinsic extrinsic motivation is important, but also it goes back to your other point way before, which was about data, what data we collected.

And I think there was so much data out there in education.

We don't necessarily do the right things with it either or we don't know why we're collecting it.

And there's a whole danger in that.

And when they use alpha school, use a system called time back and the reason why they use it as time back, they want to give time back to children to do like this project based learning, which they do throughout the rest of the time.

And it's an interesting concept behind it, but it's they create XP.

So like in a game where you create health, they create XP and can you work towards it?

And they have some metrics of like AI check in that are the children doing 2 hours of solid work.

Actually the AI is reading the screen that they trying really hard.

Don't just reward 100% on things that could be too easy for them.

It's just like where is that struggle?

So for them.

So they do learn as well.

And I think it is a really interesting thing if you think about alpha school, is there anything that the lessons in there that we could take away or consider or think that OK, that may work in UK system if we did XY or Z?

Because what is interesting is there were a lot more online schools popping up are using the pedagogy of actually interaction and other things.

But I've also heard of online AP schools that are really successful as well.

So if you could wave a magic wand, what kind of elements have you heard from alpha school that that could potentially work if if implemented effectively?

I mean.

The first thing I'll have to do with the magic wand is obviously making sure that the sort of device inequality is is sorted out and there is no magic wand.

And you know, we're recording this right at the end of October before the budget, which you know, if rumours are to be believed, will mean that there's still not a lot of money for education.

And obviously this whole system not only relies on a 1 to 1 device, but a decent 1 to 1 device to either run these models.

If some of these models have been run locally on their software or you know, with enough power to then send everything up to the cloud.

You know, I remember having iPads, I think it must have been the first multiplication check after must have been after, after COVID, we had iPads so old that they wouldn't run the multiplication check.

And that's a very, that was a very simple program to run.

And I remember then having to send an e-mail to the whole whole trust basically being like, if you have an iPad from da da da or previous, I think it's because it couldn't get a certain update or whatever it is, then you need to think about a whole new system for running all of that.

So before we can really think about, you know, that I in terms of what can we learn from Alpha school, I think there's got to be first of all, that decision politically whether this sort of, you know, 1 to one devices is going to be the way to go.

And certainly sort of, you know, evidence is certainly mixed.

No doubt there'll be people who say, yes, it's going to be great.

But you know, I'm thinking about, you know, there was LA and granted the LA fiasco was a long time ago now, but we're seeing some of the Nordic countries, I think it was Sweden potentially who had gone again heavy in on the 1:00 to 1:00 devices and are now sort of backing up away from that.

Because they're finding that not to get sort of too nerdy about it.

But in terms of sort of MRI scans, when we hand write things particularly we create sort of better connections between what we're writing and thinking about and all of that stuff in comparison to just sort of typing.

So, you know, potentially, I would say, you know, we're as primary school teachers, perhaps we're safe and maybe we should say, no, we're quite content in keeping things did analogue until they get to 11.

And then sort of gradually, carefully introducing some of this personalized learning.

Perhaps first of all as revision tools.

Perhaps first of all, as a first instance as some sort of intervention tools so that we are confident that these things are actually doing what they say they were doing.

Before we spend, say the, you know, the royal, we as a country spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of millions of pounds on, you know, all this stuff only to be then back in the, the, the space where we were in after interactive white boards were installed and people just use them as fancy projectors.

Yeah, I'll have to echo that massively.

And the way I've seen it work really effectively is where they have that combination or they have some really good solid foundation of what good teaching learning is.

They've got the science of learning.

They use it with the analog and the digital or all those elements.

But the device isn't going to fix everything.

It may, it may not fix anything.

It may actually cause more of an issue than anything else.

And I think that's for me, that's the one thing that we've got to get right is that we've got to kind of ground all of this thinking and all the discussion and what we do around what we know and what we know is the science of learning.

So let's bet on that and let's actually use that on where can technology support, enhance or or expediate that into something really interesting.

Because if you think about the high leverage things, revision space, repetition interventions, they are things that could have a huge impact if we use technology right.

We get the right motivation side of it.

And I think that could have a huge, you know, a huge impact for all of our pupils and for our staff and, and the opportunities going forward as well.

Yeah.

And the other way to look at this as well is the opportunities that it might provide, you know, teachers.

So what if instead we're not teaching using this, this these types of software and to support pupils, but what if actually we're using it as subject knowledge enhancers for teachers, pedagogical content knowledge enhancers for teachers?

You know, there's some interesting potentially something to explore again later on because I know there's been a little some murmurings around AI and professional development through various other sort of means sort of floating around there.

So could be an interesting one to look at in another in another episode hopefully.

Yeah.

Then considering we, we kind of posed this question and this podcast as AI, we barely talked about AI.

Yeah.

And I think that it was a conversation I had with a few other leaders.

What AI has done is forced us to have conversations around education, definitely.

And I think if anything, that is than one of the unseen benefits that we've had massively.

I would agree.

And then obviously, you know, yes, it's not been massively AI focused as you say, but you know, it seems that schools are being encouraged to adopt AI.

Those are certainly the messages we're getting from the government and I going, you know, since what you said, you know, having the conversations about where we should not include AI and where our line is to say that AI shouldn't be involved or part of this system structure, whatever it might be.

I think those are also sort of, you know, some of the more important discussions rather than, you know, how should we use it.

So thank you for listening to Thinking Deeply about AI for Schools.

I'm Joe Jobin and joining me as always is Neil Almond.

So whether you see alpha as a way as a future of learning or a thought folk and experiment reminds us that reimagining education starts with asking bold questions.

Hope you enjoy the conversation.

Subscribe and join us next time as we continue thinking deeply about AI for Schools.