TeachLab with Justin Reich

One of the best parts of doing research on education is talking with students. Not only do we learn a great deal about what is happenign in schools, it's often inspiring. Betsy Burris agrees. She is a retired teacher educator and a psychotherapist who hosts Teaching Through Emotions, a podcast that focuses on relationships within the learning core. Betsy interviewed Jesse Dukes about the Homework...

Teachers are aware that AI is present in schools and learning environments, whether we like it or not. And many feel pressure, internally and externally, to learn and teach some form of "AI literacy". Justin has cautioned that it's too early for us to really understand what AI literacy is, and that just guessing at what might constitute AI literacy might do harm. Teachers and schooleaders apprecia...

Over the last two years, teachers and schools have felt immense pressure to incorporate AI literacy into their curricula. In the fall of 2024, California became the first state to pass a law mandating AI literacy instruction in schools, and several others have since followed suit. In the summer of 2025, the Department of Education released the "AI Action Plan for Education," which stated in part:...

We’re pleased to share powerful reporting from our friends at the show Click Here, from Recorded Future News and PRX. They tell true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. Over the past year, they’ve been documenting the digital – and cultural – erasure of Uyghurs in China. As part of that series, they follow one man who set out to preserve his culture the old fashioned wa...

The timing of the arrival of AI has been bad for many schools and teachers. In the Fall of 2022, schools were just emerging from the extraordinary challenges brought by the pandemic. Teacher morale and turnover are at historic lows. Some school districts are on a good footing, and have the resources and stability to adapt, and even experiment with using AI to support learning, but many teachers te...

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We keep saying that most ed tech is invited into schools, but generative AI crashed the party. But the truth in, some teachers have invited AI into schools. Some think it’s been great, and others see opportunities as well as challenges. We visit four classrooms where students and teachers are using AI in ways they say are innovative, fulfilling, and effective: a student in Oregon who worked with h...

Education technology companies have been falling over themselves to provide AI powered tools for schools, and to convince schools to buy their product. The array of AI powered products is dizzying, and while some can likely be put to good use, it can be hard for school leaders to gauge which are worth adopting. One school system in Iowa, Winterset Community School District has gone all in on gener...

We’re halfway through “The Homework Machine” series, and as our production team works to finish the final episodes, we check in with Teaching Systems Lab director Justin Reich, who is returning to the classroom after a full year of sabbatical. Justin has been nervous, since some of the assignments he’s relied on in the past are not “AI-proof”. He tells us how he plans to adapt, We want to share A...

We’re about halfway through The Homework Machine min-series, and we have more episodes coming. We're taking a break this week, which gives us the opportunity to share an episode of one of our favorite education podcasts with you. Mindshift from KQED features in depth interviews and reports from classroom about education and educators. We particularly enjoy this episode about a shift to teach conte...

Students tell us that they know learning in schools is important. But sometimes, turning to ChatGPT to get their work done feels like the best option. AI might help with what they perceive as busy work, or they might be confused about what counts as a legitimate use, and what counts as cheating. And sometimes, students tell us, they know they’re crossing a line. When that happens, it’s usually bec...

Teachers have all sorts of opinions about AI. Some are optimistic, some are pessimistic. But the most common topic that came up in our interviews was cheating. While students have always taken shortcuts to complete their work, ChatGPT and other generative AI have a historically unique power to quickly, convincingly and comprehensively do a students’ assignment. This is proving a powerful temptatio...

ChatGPT is the most well known of the Large Language Models (LLMs) but what is an LLM? We go deep into how this remarkable new technology is built, and why their performance is inconsistent — or jagged — across similar tasks. We dive into the techniques AI engineers use to align these tools’ behavior with our values, and explain why they don’t always work, and sometimes we get hallucinations or bi...

In late November of 2022, ChatGPT was released to the public as a free research preview. Students quickly realized ChatGPT was pretty good at doing their homework for them. Schools scrambled to figure out what to do:  Ban it? Embrace it? Teachers and students found themselves adapting to a new reality.  Buckle Up, Here it Comes kicks off “The Homework Machine” a mini series in the Teachlab podcast...

Generative AI is not like other education technologies, which schools often invite into the classroom. This one crashed the party. And then, it started re-arranging the furniture. We wanted to learn more, so in a little over a year, the Teaching Systems Lab has talked to over 90 teachers and 30 students about the impact of Generative AI.  Some are excited about AI's potential to transform educatio...

School leaders, education researchers, and others often point to a study conducted by Stanford researchers that suggested the arrival of generative AI in K-12 school has not meaningfully increased the percentage of students who acknowledge some kind of academic dishonesty. Sometimes , school leaders or experts suggest it means there’s “nothing to see here” when it comes to tools like ChatGPT and w...

Justin Reich and researcher and producer Jesse Dukes argue that AI in requires a new theoretical framework. Generative AI, unlike many teaching technologies, is an "arrival" technology, meaning it will be present in school environments regardless of what choices school leaders make about whether to adopt it. Their new preprint Toward a New Theory of Arrival Technologies: The Case of ChatGPT and th...

Jesse Dukes reports from a two day training one school district offered its teachers, all to help them adapt to the arrival of generative AI in schools. That training proved helpful to teachers, but it’s not clear how much professional development most American teachers are getting, and it appears many are getting little or none.    Episode produced by Jesse Dukes Research by Chris Bagg, Andrew Me...

We've just wrapped up a school year, so our team researching the arrival of generative AI in classrooms shares  some fun and inspiring moments of teachers adapting to the new reality. We hear from teachers who role modeled the use of as a tool or resource for students, or to generate amusing and weird curricula.  This episode was produced by Andrew Meriwether and Jesse Dukes, and features research...

The Arrival of AI powered tools like ChatGPT (now GPT4) in schools has generated concerns that students would use the tool to bypass cognition, or, “cheat” as we colloquially call it. And, it appears many students are doing just that. Early on in our research project about generative AI’s arrival in schools, it seems that English, ELL, and Social Studies at upper levels are particularly likely to...

Justin spoke at the Connecticut Association of Boards of Education in November of 2023. You can see his graphics and outline . tsl.mit.edu/AI/ has more generative AI related resources, including our SURVEY for educators , school leaders, students, and parents. Jesse Dukes is leading our current project about the experiences of teachers and students with generative AI this school year. 

Today we share another great episode from our friends at Upper MiddleBrow. As students, parents, and teachers happily (or wrenchingly) returned to school, Upper MiddleBrow invited TeachLab host Justin Reich to talk about stories with teachers. They identify many examples of bad teachers and bad teaching in fiction, and while film and TV often present sympathetic teacher protagonists, they wonder i...

Civics 101 is a podcast refresher course on the basics of how the U.S. government works, born from the brain trust at New Hampshire Public Radio and hosted by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice. This is the second part in their series about the state of civic education in the US.  In this episode, TeachLab host Justin Reich joins the Civics 101 team  to talk about how teachers choose what to teach,...

Civics 101 is a podcast refresher course on the basics of how the U.S. government works, born from the brain trust at New Hampshire Public Radio and hosted by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice. Today is the first part in their series about the state of civic education in the US.  In this episode, the Civics 101 team gauges how we're doing civics-wise and then delve into the perpetually controversi...

In our final episode in our Iterate series, we are joined by one of our favorite collaborators here at the Teaching Systems Lab: artist, creative professional and graphic recorder, Haley McDevitt. Haley is a master of listening, synthesizing, and creating visuals that support big ideas. And, Haley is the  illustrator of our host Justin Reich’s new book, Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools...