We tell students to care about their work. To try harder. To think deeper. But a new study found that motivation spikes when students create something that helps a real person — not when they’re chasing grades.

This week’s Tech Tool shows how to sharpen judgment in the AI era. This week’s research asks a harder question: are we training students to perform… or to contribute?

Happy Wednesday - you’re about to become an even better teacher in the next 8 minutes.

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TECH TOOL

The Smartphone Era of AI

Remember when phones were chaos? Android. iPhone. Blackberry. Windows Phone. Palm. No clear winner, but each excelling at their own thing. Just options everywhere.

That’s AI right now.

The Solution: Perplexity - Model Council

Launched last week, Model Council inside Perplexity lets you send one prompt to multiple AI models at the same time. Instead of guessing which chatbot to use, you see their responses side by side.

You type your question or task once and then the platform runs it through every major model (GPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini - everyone). Each answer appears in parallel. You can compare tone, structure, depth, and even how each model cites sources. It’s not just faster. It’s transparent.

Planning a lesson? Run it through several models and combine the strongest ideas. Writing an email to parents? Compare tone.

For students, it becomes a live lab in AI literacy. They can evaluate which model explains better, which one overgeneralizes, and which one provides evidence. This is literally the definition of digital literacy in the AI era.

Is This For YOUR Classroom?

If students are brand new to AI, start small. This tool shines when the goal is comparison, not shortcutting thinking.

Strategies That Work:

1. AI Comparison Lab: One prompt, multiple answers, student ranking.

2. Tone Test: Compare how models handle sensitive topics.

3. Lesson Stress Test: Merge the best parts of each response.

Using just one AI is so 2025. One AI may give answers but a council - that teaches judgment.

🚀 Noteworthy News

👉️ Unfiltered: Teachers tell the honest truth about what’s broken in public education.

👉️ Rebuilding: How we might rebuild the foundations of teaching math — and why it matters.

👉️ Community-first: A bold idea from Texas: could community schools reshape education?

BRAINY BIT

The Power of Real-World Learning

TLDR: When students use what they’re learning to create something that helps a real person, motivation and emotional growth increase. But most teachers trying this kind of “real-world learning” are doing it alone, without clear models or support. The research suggests the payoff is real - and the path works best when we start small, reflect often, and let students actually implement something meaningful.

The Study: Value Creation Pedagogy

Researchers followed twelve university courses across disciplines where students learned by creating value for real people outside their institution. 

These weren’t entrepreneurship classes. They were engineering, nursing, humanities, fine arts and more, but each used what the researchers call Value Creation Pedagogy (VCP): students apply what they know to help someone beyond the classroom.

The team conducted semi-structured interviews with 12 educators, analyzed their course designs, and compared how they involved external stakeholders, assessed students, and supported real-world implementation. 

This was a qualitative multiple case study focused on how educators actually run these experiences in practice.

The Results:

Across cases, educators consistently reported higher student motivation, stronger emotional engagement, and deeper connections between theory and practice when students created value for real people.

But here’s the catch: most educators worked alone, without institutional support or a community of practice. VCP was described as time-consuming, emotionally demanding, and harder to assess than traditional coursework.

Implementation also mattered. Only a few cases required students to actually implement solutions with stakeholders — yet educators emphasized that this is where the richest learning happened.

In YOUR Classroom:

This isn’t about turning every lesson into a startup pitch. It’s about letting students use what they learn to make something matter because emotional investment grows when the work feels real.

Here’s how to implement these results into your classroom discussions today:

Strategies That Work:

1. Start small and local: Have students create something useful for another class, staff member, or community group before aiming big.

2. Build reflection into the process: After any real-world task, ask: Who benefited? What changed? What felt hard?

3. Let students implement something: Even a tiny action (sharing findings, improving a process, presenting to a real audience) deepens learning far more than stopping at ideas.

If students only practice learning for grades, they learn to perform. If they practice learning for others, they learn to contribute.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?

We would LOVE to hear from you!

Reply to this email, or send us a message on Instagram! We’re here to walk with you in these crazy times!

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We’ll see you again on Monday 🍎

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