I had the good fortune to meet Elliot Washor, co-founder of Big Picture Learning, during college. He pushed me to cultivate the three Rs, Relationships, Rigor, and Relevance in my teaching, in the schools I led, and in the book I wrote: The First-Year Teacher’s Survival Guide, 5th ed. As a result, in the school communities where I worked, we centered students’ interests in our instructional strategies. We created advisory programs to make sure every student was well-known by a caring adult. We provided a day each year for teachers to shadow a community partner in an industry adjacent to their subject area. We built internships, hosted career fairs, and job interviews to give students opportunities to do real work in the real world. Those vital strategies took hours and hours to prep and implement. There is of course, a critical role for human intelligence (HI) and expertise in connecting students with relationships, rigor and relevance. When HI harnesses the power of Brisk Teaching’s AI, teachers can boost the 3Rs to new heights in a fraction of the time.
🫶 Relationships. A teacher can prompt Brisk to generate community building activities for students to get to know each other and select the ones that make the most sense based on what they know about their students.
💡 Rigor. Learning moves recursively back and forth among Webb’s Depth of Knowledge (DOK) levels. Teachers can create DOK questions about a novel study, such as The Outsiders and Boost those questions as a Pulse Check activity to check for understanding.
🌎 Relevance. To help students generate unique questions and ideas for a research project, teachers can open an article on a current event, such as the effects of climate change in their local community. They can Boost that article to students as a Brainstorm so that students can brainstorm solutions to complex challenges and refine their research question.
Those are just a few examples of what’s possible. Let me know how you recommend using AI + HI to boost the 3Rs: Relationships, Rigor, and Relevance.
P.S. Elliot Washor also encourages educators to center the 3Ms as we design learning experiences. The 3Ms are: Mattering to, Mingling with, and Muddling through, and that will undoubtedly be the subject of a future post.
