Testing AI’s Pluses and Minuses in Afterschool Programming

Source: www.unsplash.com

By Guest Blogger Brian Rinker, Youth Today. This blog was originally published on the Youth Today website.

Angel Toscano

When Angel Toscano asked ChatGPT for 10 Halloween-themed activities related to science, technology, engineering, arts and math — STEAM, for short — that could be done with minimum supplies, the popular artificial intelligence bot instantaneously spat out several ideas: Spider web geometry. Pumpkin catapults. Ghost rockets. 

Searching for those ideas offline “would have taken the whole morning,” Toscano said, of that Halloween project in 2023, when he was a family engagement specialist at Austin Independent School District. 

Making them required string, yard, baking soda, vinegar and other readily available household products that, as Toscano wanted, were budget-friendly and kid-safe.  

One of 180 million worldwide users of that AI program, viewed as a time-saver and problem-solver, Toscano, now a tutoring supervisor for that Texas district, started testing AI ChatGPT by having it craft emails for him. He moved on to developing after-school program curricula and activities. Toscano is one side of an educational divide over the arguable merits and dangers of using ChatGPT and other AI bots to teach. While some applaud AI’s seeming efficiencies and its potential to prepare students to navigate an increasingly more AI-dependent world, others are concerned about whether AI adequately protects private information it gathers about students and students’ potential to, for example, use AI to plagiarize their academic papers.  

As the debate rages, however, some technology-focused leaders of after-school initiatives say AI is making things easier for what often are cash-strapped, short-staffed after-school efforts. A relative handful of tech-forward afterschool programs are beginning to fully embrace AI, integrating activities such as AI-assisted tutoring, creating chatbots and using AI for everything from the arts to robotics. Yet, many families who are interested in such programs are hard-pressed to find ones that are low-cost or free programs. 

“The barriers are significant” for introducing AI into afterschool, said Shawn Petty, a Westat researcher who advises Texas Education Agency’s 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program.

After-school educators find themselves in this unsure area, Petty added. They acknowledge the potential of AI, yet harbor concerns over privacy due to the technology’s capacity to record and store vast amounts of information. Plus, many educators lack the technical know-how to use AI and fear their jobs are at risk.

MANY POORER SCHOOLS HAVE LESS AI ACCESS

The Mark Cuban Foundation has offered after-school AI boot camps for high schoolers in several states since it was founded in 2019, before ChatGPT even existed. 

But free, ongoing programs for elementary school-aged Alabamans are uncommon, said Anh Nguyen, an Auburn University computer science professor. He started a free AI after-school club for elementary students in the 2022-23 school year. 

Nguyen’s on-campus AI club offers weekly hands-on learning for 20 to 30 children from kindergarten to sixth grade who get one-on-one instruction from high school and college student instructors. Kids get the opportunity to code robots to race and navigate mazes. Kids develop their own chatbots. Using robots and iPads, students, incrementally, are ramping up the complexity of activities such as face recognition and training AI to play games by itself. 

Nguyen has made available online the model for his National Science Foundation-funded program, hoping it will inspire similar efforts to launch elsewhere.

UNEQUAL AI ACCESS ALSO MAY STOKE FUTURE JOB DISPARITIES

Westat researcher Petty said schools that lack AI education risk widening disparities between, for example, those with and without the skills to land better-paying tech jobs in the future. 

Just as the Industrial Revolutions of prior centuries reshaped labor and employment, Artificial intelligence likely will alter such white-collar jobs as those in banking, writing and publishing, marketing, coding, customer service and sales, said Eliza Du, CEO of Integem, which runs after-school technology camps in California.

AI already is eliminating certain jobs. Recognizing the need to adjust to the changes AI is unleashing, Du said families are increasingly enrolling their children in her AI summer camps. 

It doesn’t matter which side of the AI debate a person falls on, the technology h is never going to go away, said Du, whose camps enroll students as young as kindergarten.  

“AI is here,” she said, “whether you are scared of it or not.” 

MORE ABOUT...

Brian Rinker is a Pennsylvania-based journalist who covers public health, child welfare, digital health, startups and venture capital.

We recently sponsored a webinar on this topic entitled, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Afterschool Programs. To view the webinar recording, click here.

Closing the Communication Gap and Finding Time

Katie Brackenridge

Katie Brackenridge is the vice president for programs for the Partnership for Children and Youth (PCY) and a leading member of the Expanded Learning 360°/365 project. At PCY, she oversees initiatives to improve the quality of and access to after-school, summer and community schools efforts in California. She also makes recommendations and advises decision-makers about policies related to the expanded learning field.

Katie is very active in promoting social emotional learning in classroom, afterschool, and summer learning settings. Below are two articles that she has published around these issues. 

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Closing the Communication Gap Between School‑day and After‑school Teams

By Katie Brackenridge, originally published by Youth Today 

As a 23-year-old after-school worker in Brooklyn, New York, my “teacher” role was deeply intertwined with the personalities and interests of my kids. I wanted to know everything about what sparked the interests of each child in my room — what was funny, irritating, intriguing, intimidating.

I weaved this knowledge into the content of units and lessons, adapting as quickly as possible when they let me know that the activities were boring, easy or stupid. I used my relationships to understand when kids weren’t doing what I hoped they’d do.

Rather than enforcing what might have seemed like arbitrary rules, I circled back constantly to talk about how the rules did or did not support their needs or the needs of the group to get work done or to have fun. These practices were instinctual as a young adult with energy and optimism about the intrinsic ability of every child, and these practices were embedded in the youth development trainings I received.

Unfortunately, when teachers at the school saw my class in action, they often had concerns: Why are the children lying on the floor? Who will clean up this mess? What’s all this noise? These interactions intimidated me because I didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what I was doing. I couldn’t affirm confidently that by creating a safe space, listening to students’ voices, offering authentic learning opportunities, I was helping them self-manage, be socially aware, have self-efficacy. In short, I couldn’t translate the youth development practices into school-day language.

READ MORE.

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Photo Credit: Edutopia

Finding Time: Leveraging After School And Summer Programs’ Social And Emotional Expertise

By Katie Brackenridge, originally published by Transforming Education

Because they understand the importance of out-of-school activities, families with resources pay for classes, sports, and camps so their children continue to advance in the 80 percent of time they are not in school. They know the exposure, skills, and experiences are essential for their children’s academic, social and emotional development. In fact, over the last 40 years, upper-income parents have increased the amount they spend on their children’s enrichment activities, like tutoring and extracurricular programs, by 10 times the amount of their lower-income peers. Students from low-income families have increasingly less access to engaging activities, new experiences, and caring adults outside their families, and fewer opportunities to build social and emotional skills. This unequal access has contributed to a widening opportunity gap, with immediate consequences for academic achievement and long-term consequences for success in work and life.

Fortunately, there is a resource—though often overlooked—to address this opportunity gap. Free or low-cost expanded learning programs (that take place after school and in the summer) can offer an additional 690 hours (or 115 days) of learning time.

READ MORE.

SEL Drive in Schools Is Opportunity for Youth Developers

By Katie Brackenridge 

Originally Published in Youth Today

Katie Brackenridge

Schools are finally noticing what youth programs have known for decades. The way kids feel about themselves and how they connect with other people really matters. It matters narrowly for how they do in school and more importantly for their long-term choices and opportunities for a happy, productive, fulfilling life.

What we call youth development, the school day has started to focus on as social-emotional learning (SEL). Schools’ interest in SEL is a pendulum swing away from the No Child Left Behind focus on standards and standardized tests. This is exciting news for youth developers because we have expertise in this work. It allows us to partner authentically — not about homework help and test scores — but around the deep work of self-awareness, social connections, confidence and perseverance.

The drive for schools to embrace SEL is coming from a variety of national movements. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires states to define “nonacademic” indicators, giving examples like student engagement, school culture and climate, and staff engagement. This won’t feel different for many districts that have already noted the symbiotic relationship between SEL and Common Core-style teaching, both of which require and support collaboration, communication and critical thinking.

Photo Credit:
Rodel Foundation of Delaware

The shift is also driven by an extensive body of research showing that a foundational set of skills, beyond those traditionally identified as academic, are needed for students to really be prepared for the demands of higher education and the workplace. These skills, labeled SEL (or 21st Century Skills or noncognitive or soft skills), are ones that the education system had long taken for granted. When we look at them, they make perfect sense — the ability to control one’s emotions and behaviors, build relationships, feel confident in one’s ability — are skills that teachers and employers alike want to see in young people and adults.

Youth development programs — whether school- or community-based — offer an amazing resource for schools around SEL, but we need to be able to clearly communicate our value. The first and most obvious value is time. While schools last, on average, six hours per day and nine months of the year, kids are playing, learning and growing all day and all year. After-school and summer learning programs can offer an additional 690 hours (or 115 days) of learning time.

Another key asset is expertise in SEL. With deep roots in youth development, expanded learning programs help young people understand their potential and reach for it. Staff are deeply committed to creating safe spaces, giving kids the opportunity to learn and practice skills, encouraging their ideas and actions, and teaching them about their impact on each other and the world. The essence of youth worker skill is captured in the many after-school quality standards that many states including California have adopted.

In California, the Partnership for Children and Youth (PCY) has gathered best thinking from partners and stakeholders across the state to be as clear and concrete as possible about what expanded learning has to offer. A foundational document — Student Success Comes Full Circle — explicitly maps California’s quality standards and practices to defined SEL outcomes. Finding Common Ground clarifies how SEL is already embedded in many existing initiatives and practices — from youth development to Positive Behavior Intervention Systems to restorative justice. These reports may be helpful messaging tools in your community.

Beyond the reports, PCY has been running a learning community for nine districts and their after-school programs for the past three years. They are working together to plan and implement concrete strategies for better coordination and better programming in both the school day and expanded learning. The work is not easy, but districts and their partners have succeeded in creating joint staff development, shared meeting and planning time, assessments to measure and improve quality, and most importantly, a deeper understanding of the value and potential of each other’s work. Ultimately, we expect these steps will result in kids having a consistently positive SEL experience from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. and throughout the year.

As SEL momentum grows across the country, we must seize the opportunity to communicate the value of after-school and summer learning, and become authentic partners with the school day. This work will stretch our own SEL skills, as well as our students’, as we find new ways to collaborate, communicate, think critically and be creative. The time is ripe for expanded learning programs and the school day to leverage each other’s expertise, resources and time so every child succeeds.


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Katie Brackenridge is the vice president for programs for the Partnership for Children and Youth. She oversees initiatives to improve the quality of and access to after-school, summer and community schools efforts in California. She also makes recommendations and advises decision-makers about policies related to the expanded learning field, and is a member of the Expanded Learning 360°/365 project. 

In STEM, Content is Not Enough

By Sam Piha

The post below is a reprint of my Op-Ed that was published in Youth Today on May 5, 2014. 

In STEM, Content is Not Enough

There has been an explosion of interest in providing young people with learning opportunities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Many have argued correctly that afterschool and summer programs are perfectly situated to respond to this interest.  After all, the out-of-school (OST) environment provides the teacher and learner with a flexibility not found in school – the freedom to choose interesting topics, the ability to extend the learning activities across time (days or even weeks), the advantage of working in smaller groups, and use of the larger community and their surroundings as a classroom. However, the rush to offer STEM-related activities has not necessarily resulted in quality programming.

Many OST managers figured that STEM activities meant a focus on content, without an eye on what makes for a good learning experience. But successful STEM activities are more than content. They are designed to ignite young people’s imagination and involve them in ways that excite them as learners. Those responsible for providing STEM activities need to provide staff training using a framework for learning and engagement. 

Research on learning and engagement suggest several principles to guide the design and implementation of activities. To begin, learning activities must be active. They must be collaborative and meaningful to the participant. They should support mastery and they should expand the horizons of participants. These principles have become influential in how the state of California now defines quality OST learning programs.

According to Carol Tang, former Director of the Coalition for Science After School, these principles are relevant when applied to STEM.  She says, “A lot of young people are turned off because they had bad experiences learning about science.  If you look at these learning principles, I think it’s a way to really look at science education, and take a step back and say it is really about doing science.  If you think about what scientists do, they are active and hands on, they make things and break things, they talk to their peers, they learn from their mistakes, and they get better with time. If we don’t get kids excited about science then they can learn as many facts and figures that their brains can hold, but that’s not really going to help us.” (You could also view an interview with Carol Tang by clicking here.)

SRI International recently published the first part of a 5-year National Science Foundation funded research project, the Afterschool Science Networks study. In this important report, SRI presented case studies of science activities in California afterschool programs and identified “staff capacity” as one of several limitations. Many of the issues in staff capacity involved the failure to engage and can be addressed through staff development on how to engage young people as learners. Part of this is allowing young people to learn in a hands-on fashion and facilitating questions instead of giving answers.

Dr. Ann House,
SRI International

According to Dr. Ann House, leader of the SRI study, “We believe that the learning principles developed by the Learning in Afterschool & Summer project are very well aligned with inquiry science activities. For example, conducting investigations, collecting data, and designing solutions make learning activities active, meaningful, and support mastery. Engaging in scientific reasoning and argument deepens the meaningfulness of activities and often involves collaboration. Finally, investigating science phenomena and designing solutions broadens youth’s horizons. Their horizons can also be broadened as they learn more about STEM-related careers and how STEM skills and knowledge can help them become more informed citizens.” (To view our interview with Dr. Ann House, click here.)

The growing number of afterschool programs focused on STEM is an exciting development. But if children are to develop a growing interest in STEM topics, we need to think about how children learn when we design the activities and prepare adult staff to facilitate them. This can be accomplished through training and materials that offer a framework for learning and engagement.