What should kids study? How should AI help? Khan Academy's learning chief on productive struggle
Future Around & Find Out
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What parents should ask schools
Kristen recommends asking about AI policy, tool goals, and evaluation plans for classroom tech.
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So what the heck should kids be studying today!?
That's my opening question to Khan Academy's Chief Learning Officer, Kristen DiCerbo, a learning and AI expert who is back for her second appearance on the show.
We discuss:
- Kristen's advice for what to study today: fundamentals, AI literacy, and critical thinking
- How helpful should AI be?
- Why the productive struggle is critical to learning, but also why we shouldn't "fetishize" struggle
- When should AI be Socratic — "and why do you think that?" — and when should it just give you the answer?
- The "5% problem" — why edtech that's proven to work still barely gets used
- How Khan Academy overhauled its classroom platform and evolved Khanmigo from a standalone chatbot into something woven into the whole learning experience
- Personalization that actually works
- How Khan Academy uses LLMs as judges to evaluate 20,000 student interactions a day
- The scenario planning report that imagines deepfakes of school principals and AI going underground in schools
- What parents should be asking their kids' schools about AI right now
- What it looks like when a school implements AI well — and what it looks like when they don't
Chapters:
- (01:44) - What the heck should kids be studying right now?
- (03:55) - Teaching critical thinking in the age of AI
- (06:37) - What successful schools are doing differently
- (08:37) - The real risk: not that kids use AI too much, but that they don't use it enough
- (10:52) - My 13-year-old has to check five apps just to find his homework
- (11:52) - "Beyond the AI inflection point" — three scenarios, none of them great
- (16:30) - Should we just make every school a trade school?
- (19:41) - What should parents be asking their kids' schools?
- (22:27) - Khan Academy's Winchester Mystery House problem
- (26:28) - Personalized learning — what works and what surprisingly doesn't
- (29:32) - Kids are bad at asking questions and that's actually the point
- (32:01) - "I DON'T KNOW" in all capital letters — the Socratic method's breaking point
- (34:26) - Should an AI tutor give tough love?
- (37:01) - Why Khanmigo is fundamentally different from ChatGPT
- (40:11) - Don't fetishize struggle — but your kid still needs it
- (42:39) - Khan Academy's productive struggle: building evals from scratch
- (45:41) - What gives Kristen optimism
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Music by Jonathan Zalben
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