Education AI Fellowship Opportunity
We are building the future of teaching and learning. We seek extraordinary people to lead an agile team exploring one or more of six Ed-AI theses. As a successful candidate, you will get the resources, strategic advice, a network of experts, and support services (such as access to pilot classrooms) to invent the next generation of AI-enabled supports and tools for K-12 education. Fellows may have the opportunity to continue to pursue their idea at Teaching Lab or spin out a new venture.
What is Teaching Lab Studio?
Teaching Lab Studio is the AI R&D department of Teaching Lab, a leading provider of educator coaching and professional learning across the U.S. We created the Studio to incubate high-impact ideas made possible by the dramatic progress in generative AI. We believe that AI-enabled supports and tools can unlock the potential of both educators and learners in ways that haven't been imagined, especially for those furthest from opportunity.
Why We Exist
Many of the AI tools introduced in the last several months produce low-quality resources, ignore learning science, or fail to understand the learning environment in and out of school. Furthermore, many funders don’t provide innovators with the guidance and wrap-around supports to find out what really works in classrooms. We solve the problem by strategically supporting innovators. This way, you can create usable tools that improve instructional coherence and employ what we know about what works in teaching and learning.
What We Provide
Funding: Initial support (up to $1M per fellow) for up to 12 months of applied R&D, with potential for extensions and follow-on funding. Resources will enable innovators to focus on team formation, building, experimenting, and learning.
Connections to teachers and classrooms: Leverage Teaching Lab’s network of educators across the nation to accelerate prototyping and launch.
Strategic planning: Get world-class expert advice in areas of pedagogy, product design, machine learning, education policy and research, go-to-market strategy, fundraising, and more.
Team bonding and idea-sharing: Quarterly retreats that bring together Fellows for innovation cross-pollination.
What You’ll Do
We’re looking for up to four Fellows to pursue our theses below and invent new, AI-powered solutions. As a Fellow, you’ll design experiments to determine what innovative UX + AI features support educators to shift their classroom practice and the student experience.
You’ll determine which developments will make the greatest impact and see them through to completion. Our six thesis categories are the following:
Teacher coaching to improve practice. AI-powered tools to enable high-impact classroom practice at scale; for instance, real-time teacher guidance tools.
Adapt curriculum with rigor. Off-the-shelf curriculum is often unwieldy, ignores learning science, or is just dull. But modifying it risks losing rigor. AI can help each educator develop a personalized plan for their classroom.
Student practice. Practice that includes immediate, quality, bite-sized feedback — with an opportunity to iterate — drives learning, but few students get feedback since it is so time-consuming to create. Fixing that could transform K-12.
Learning in groups. Much of human learning happens in groups. But learning in school seldom happens in groups because it is hard to organize and make effective. New tools to solve that would promote greater learning.
Augmented tutoring. Human tutoring has variable impact and is expensive. Augmenting it with better resources, insights on student thinking, and ML could revolutionize intelligent tutoring to be responsive to student engagement and core instruction.
Make it Coherent: Tools and products that aren’t knit together will not improve instructional coherence. AI tools can improve coherence across learning management systems, curriculum products, assessment products, and other tools that teachers use.
Examples of your activities include:
Recruit the talent you need to pursue the thesis;
Identify the needs, preferences, and pain points of end-users (teachers or students) via research, interviews, or observations;
Engage in ideation, resulting in several well-formed hypotheses around improving classroom practice;
Design experiments to gather user feedback and measure learning;
Oversee the development of one or more product prototypes;
Test your prototype with teachers and/or students;
Continuously iterate your prototype based on the feedback you collect during your experiments;
Unlock follow-on capital based on your progress; and
Most importantly, gather learnings that will inform future hypotheses and the roadmap of your prototype(s).
Who You Are
You bring many ideas to improve U.S. K-12 classroom teaching and student learning;
You have a strong interest in AI;
You’re a self-starter with a track record of driving change;
You’re excited to learn from testing and can iterate quickly.
If the above sounds like you, we strongly encourage you to apply. Teaching Lab is an equal-opportunity employer committed to reflecting the diversity of the students we serve. We pursue equity as both a means and an end and enthusiastically welcome candidates of all backgrounds to apply for this role. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. Applicants must reside in the continental United States.
Commitment
Work is remote with an expectation of approximately four week-long in-person retreats per year to allow for innovation cross-pollination.
Salary
The salary range for a Fellow is $125,000-$222,351. Teaching Lab offers a comprehensive benefits package for fellows, including: 100% organizational contribution for employee costs and 50% organizational contribution for dependent (spouse and children under 26) costs for the Teaching Lab reference medical, dental, and vision plans; flexible health spending accounts; generous time off, and additional perks.
Contact
If you have any questions, please contact, Yefei Jin, Managing Director of the Coherence Innovation Studio at yefei.jin@teachinglab.org