Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ What Teachers Pay Teachers Is Learning From Bad Lessons and Upset Teachers

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

As Slate stated bluntly last summer, "lesson plans platforms for teachers have a racism problem." It's not new, and has been widely discussed. This article picks up from that and looks at measures Teachers Pay Teachers has taken to address the problem. Specifically, "the site now uses AI to identify lessons that include certain keywords, especially ones relating to social studies and historical events, and subjects them to manual review." What's missing from the EdSurge article is any information about whether the response has been effective. It's hard to reconcile the "tiny percentage of the site's total" that the company found with the 30 percent of the site's bestsellers found to have "posed potential harm to students, particularly to students with marginalized identities." And it's worrying that between the time of its founding in 2006 and some time last summer the site's owners were content with allowing this problem to fester.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 18, 2024 9:30 p.m.

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