How Well Can We Serve Gifted Students
The topic of gifted education is a frequent one in international school circles. Some schools offer a gifted programme, while others are thinking about it, and still others eschew it entirely. There are many sides to the debate of whether to include gifted programming, yet what I don’t hear often enough is a questioning of the evidence as to whether such programmes are even effective. Do they truly benefit students that qualify as ‘gifted’?
Control of Combinatorial Explosion
One of the things I appreciate deeply about impactful school communities is how we treat knowledge and knowledge structures. Roger C. Schank once wrote that, “[k]nowing what particular knowledge structure we are in while processing can help us determine how much we want to know about a given event; that is, contexts help narrow the inference process” (AI Magazine 8.4). Continuing to focus on how we, as humans, engage in the intelligent process that we call inference, he says “[m]any possible ways exist to control the combinatorics of the inference process: deciding among them and implementing them is [serious].” (63)
The Siren Song of AI
The siren song of artificial intelligence (AI) is absolutely mesmerising. Witness a recent posting in Chief Learning Officer magazine by the managing director of learning science platforms at a large publishing house, who, in a passionate plea for the place of AI in learning and development, states the following: “There has never been so much knowledge in the world. […] Content is proliferating at an astronomical rate” (23 Oct 2017, “Artificial Intelligence Comes to Learning”). At such words, heads typically nod and everyone allows for how wise this person must be, to see things so clearly.
Aggregation of Individuals?
Senior leaders looking to effect organisational change can serve as champions of that change, provided that they go system-wide and motivate people to learn and change, create the conditions for them to apply what they’ve studied, foster immediate improvements in individual and organisational effectiveness, and put in place systems that help sustain the learning. To make it work correctly, we need to acknowledge that an organisation is not simply an aggregation of individuals.
School in an Age of Autonomous Agents With Free Will
Despite the jargon-laden title of this post, the content is about a simple matter: do we, as human beings (as educators, in our case), really know ourselves as well as we think we do? As David Mattin, head of trends and insights at trendwatching.com shares in the September 2017 issue of Business Life, “contemporary science reveals [that] we know ourselves far less well than we think, and that our choices are largely dictated by unconscious brain processes.”