As a rightful reckoning of technology begins to take hold of public education, I thought it would be worth publicly reflecting on the role of technology at Thinking Nation. From our inception, technology has been a vessel for our vision—a tool. It wasn’t built to chase student engagement or add “fun,” but rather to facilitate deep thinking in every history classroom. That purpose continues today, and a little tech history of our organization seems fitting.
Eight years ago, several teacher colleagues and myself used a grant given to our Los Angeles charter school network to solve a problem we continued to have. There was no common language for success that social studies leaders could use to collaborate, set goals, and build a vertically aligned experience for students. Like many people in 2018 who saw a need in education, we built a tech platform to solve that problem.
Fast-forward to 2020, and while the world shut down, our small nonprofit, Thinking Nation, was born. To solve our problem, we built a framework around historical thinking that could be assessed system-wide, effectively reorienting the data-driven collaboration of teachers to be about how students learned rather than what they remembered.
Students showing off their data reports in the earliest days of Thinking Nation
The bonus? We graded the assessments for teachers. We knew that historical thinking took far more time than content retention to grade, so if we were going to get whole departments to use complex assessments to reframe how they measured student success, we had to remove the time burden from the process. Building a platform to house these assessments and enable students to submit directly on it allowed us to scale that vision across districts and then, soon, across cities.
As we grew, though, the human grader could not scale with us. Human capacity was going to be the determining factor of the failure of our vision. Then, at the end of 2022, ChatGPT entered the scene. This opened up a whole new possibility for our vision to scale.
Now, we could leverage a common language for success that transformed social studies education in a way that empowered students as active thinkers, giving teachers the data necessary to push learning forward. So we did it. We embedded AI-informed grading into our platform, trained the AI model on our rubrics, and watched how AI now graded hundreds of students essays just seconds after submission. Almost instantly, teachers could now have data on student thinking attached to their writing samples.
In every iteration, emphasizing thinking practices in classrooms has been our objective. We curated and excerpted primary sources for students to analyze; we built protocols around individual historical thinking skills; and, most importantly, we built a way to assess that thinking across all areas of historical study. Growing student thinking capacity is the goal, and we’ve found that technology, and even AI, can serve as a conduit to make that goal a reality. Technology has never been more than a tool to enable widespread adoption of meaningful thinking practices. In fact, because all of our materials are printable, teachers can use more than 90% of Thinking Nation resources without access to technology, only saving the final submission for a computer to have helpful data to inform their own instruction and collaborate with their colleagues.
We believe that the pendulum has swung too far in a love affair with education technology (You can check out some of my thoughts on this by following the links in this blog post to the Center for Civic Education conversation). Honestly, we are happy that the pendulum is beginning to swing the other direction. Still, it is important to note the narrow use cases where technology supports deeper student thinking and more intentional teacher reflection. We are proud of building something that sits in that nuanced space.
We hope to continue to serve our current and future school partners with a platform that privileges the humanity of those in the classroom. One that reinforces historical thinking and complex writing for students, as well as deeper evidence-based reflections for teachers.