School's out for summer, but these courses are enticing teachers to hit the books

For kids, the school year's done. For many teachers, however, summer is a prime stretch of time to hunker down for deeper professional learning that's tough to fit in during the year. 

Rather than curling up with a good beach read, some teachers are spending time contemplating the impact of AI on education or diving deep into different approaches to teaching literacy. 

Educators tell us about three courses running this summer that tackle these topics and aim to boost what's in teachers' toolboxes.

Spending a ton of time in schools advising student teachers during their practicum assignments, Elizabeth Saville has heard one topic come up repeatedly among educators: how do we deal with artificial intelligence?  

The UBC Okanagan instructor and PhD candidate has witnessed a range of reactions, from teachers declaring AI "useless to me in the classroom" to others who wonder: "How do we support students when we don't understand how to use it ourselves?"

It's why she created a new asynchronous online course akin to an AI 101 for teachers. "We need to help teachers develop those AI literacy skills, in order for them to be able to help their students in developing those AI literacy skills," she said from UBC Okanagan's campus in Kelowna, B.C.

Saville designed AI for Educators: Transforming Teaching and Learning to give participants a strong understanding of generative AI and explore how it can be a tool for planning and instruction, as well as to emphasize important ethical and privacy concerns teachers must be aware of.

AI isn't going away, and students are using ChatGPT whether it's allowed or not, she noted, saying it's important to teach young people about the ethics of using this new tool and the critical thinking necessary to parse what pops up. 

"Students don't just know how to think critically. Students don't necessarily know how to identify bias," Saville said. She also noted that care is needed in this arena. 

"This isn't just a Wild West, 'take it in your classroom and do whatever you want with it' [situation]... My course involves taking a critical look at the tool itself and trying to figure out what are the limitations of that tool and how can it be used for good? How can it be used for bad?"

In Ontario, Additional Qualifications (AQ) are course teachers take to dig deeper into a particular subject area or specialty. 

At Trent University, there's been a flurry of interest in the Peterborough, Ont., school's Reading AQ courses, which revolve around reviewing Ontario's revamped language arts curriculum and discussing the Science of Reading — a body of research on how children learn to read that pulls from fields such as linguistics, psychology and neuroscience. 

Teachers, vice-principals, principals and even the occasional superintendent have enrolled, eager for updates on teaching the youngest learners to read. 

The latest volley in the longstanding Reading Wars has seen the pendulum swing away from "balanced literacy," a philosophy popular since the 1990s that leans on using cues to decipher words, such as guessing based on the first letter, looking at accompanying images or reasoning out what makes sense in the sentence.