Brisk in New White Paper on AI's Instructional Impact

AI is in the midst of a massive hype cycle. You know. I know it. Any person you stop on the street knows it. That doesn’t mean AI is all hype — far from it. It just means that, especially in a field like education, we shouldn’t treat every use of AI as equally valuable.

As with any tool, technology, or technique, our ability to scale the benefits of AI will hinge on how effectively we quantify AI-supported practices in the classroom. To that end, we recently commissioned a white paper from Whiteboard Advisors, “From Efficiency to Efficacy: Measuring AI’s Instructional Impact,” that explores a new way to approach this measurement.

The white paper details the need for a well-defined framework for connecting AI use to the learning science principles that research tells us drive student outcomes. It highlights the newest metric that school and district leaders will see in their Brisk dashboards this year, Quality Instructional Moments, as a strong example of how educators can draw these connections.

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AI helps teachers do more of what they know works

There are decades upon decades of peer-reviewed research on the kinds of instructional practices that promote student achievement. The biggest obstacle to effective teaching isn’t knowing what to do, but finding the bandwidth to do it. As the white paper states:

We know that students learn better when they receive frequent, specific feedback rather than waiting weeks for a test grade. We know that students learn more when they’re working at the edge of their ability, challenged but not overwhelmed. And we know that the practices most likely to move students — responsive instruction, meaningful relationships, timely feedback and intervention — are also the ones most likely to get crowded out by everything else educators are asked to do.

Minimizing this “crowding out” is where AI has the greatest potential in education. AI isn’t a replacement for great teaching; it’s the infrastructure that makes it possible to implement proven practices with greater frequency, fidelity, and consistency.

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Moving from higher productivity to increased teaching capacity

To reiterate: AI’s true value is not just that it enables teachers to do more, but that it enables them to do more of what really works.

Which is not to say that productivity and efficiency boosts are meaningless. For a long time, Brisk measured our impact in terms of hours saved on tasks like grading, resource writing, and administrative work. We all want to save time wherever we can — no harm in that. But as school and district leaders repeatedly asked, “How does Brisk actually support student learning?”, we realized we needed to take a more comprehensive view of what happens in the classroom.

What really matters is what teachers do with the time they save. When they reinvest the time in implementing proven instructional practices — differentiating instruction for every student, using data to drive decisions, intentional planning — that’s when student outcomes tend to improve.

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Using Quality Instructional Moments as a leading indicator of learning

You might be wondering, “How do you track if and when any of this is happening?” It’s a good question.

Traditional success metrics like standardized test scores and graduation rates paint part of the picture, but they lag years behind the instructional actions that shaped them. In an effort to provide leaders with a leading indicator of effective instruction, we landed on Quality Instructional Moments.

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As we define it, an instructional moment is a discrete, observable student interaction that:

1. Is grounded in learning science;
2. A teacher wouldn’t have been able to facilitate on a regular basis without the increased capacity carved out by AI.

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Think: A teacher uses Brisk to provide every student with personalized, rubric-aligned feedback on the same day students turn in their essays. Or, a teacher uses Brisk to generate multiple versions of an activity to ensure each student’s assignments are challenging enough to promote growth but scaffolded enough to remain achievable.

These are the kinds of instructional moments that drive results. They’re also the kinds of moments that school and district leaders can now track in Brisk. (We get that every district has different priorities, so districts are able to customize how they measure instructional moments in Brisk based on their unique pedagogical approach.)

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Get the full story

Whiteboard Advisors’ white paper does a great job of unpacking all the considerations that go into tracking AI’s impact in the classroom. It covers the entire spectrum of research-backed instructional practices that ground instructional moments, the five questions every district leader should ask when evaluating AI solutions, and a whole lot more.

It’s a quick and, for those of us who are interested in these things, incredibly compelling read. I’d encourage you to check it out.

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– Arman Jaffer, Founder, Brisk Teaching