TIPS Digital Desktop

Transitioning to Inclusive Practices Support (TIPS) is a minimum 5-year project to design and test digital desktops and team-oriented communication hubs to facilitate classroom-, school-, district-, and state-wide transition to deep learning through inclusive practices. Aided by Artificial Intelligence, the core toolset of TIPS will facilitate the design of personalized student learning, monitoring of student progress, and support inter-team collaboration while automatically satisfying reporting needs at all levels of the public education system. 

Our focus is on helping each decision-maker (i.e. student, caregiver, teacher, leader) to increase the impacts of inclusive access, support, and outcomes for all students regardless of their abilities. We intend to overcome the inherent and persistent biases associated with gender, language, culture, and disability by ensuring all stakeholders can access highly effective instructional practices informed by relevant data and delivered through a next-generation learner and educator-centric platform. This innovation promises to both solve existing disparity and efficiencies while creating new pathways to improve access to and use of appropriate resources and practices that meet identified needs at school, at home, and at the district level.

There is strong interest among educators, parents, and policy makers to affect a shift in K-12 education from a School Centric to a Learner Centered paradigm.  In a school centric paradigm all components of the system are designed for efficient delivery in the context of standardized schools. In a learner centered system, all components are designed for the education experience to be adaptable to the needs and potential of each learner in support of the highest possible outcomes. TIPSS will provide information to the learner, the teacher, the parent and the encompassing school system as appropriate for decision-making by individuals at each level.

In order to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population, educators need the tools, knowledge and support to create a flexible instructional environment that will engage all students and provide a variety of learning opportunities. Research consistently supports a positive link between access to instruction in general education settings and improved outcomes for students. Further research demonstrates that the use of the principles of Universal Design for Learning has a positive impact on equity and student performance in general education. TIPSS will provide teachers with just-in-time delivery of the tools, knowledge, and support they need for inclusive practices.

At a time of increasing student needs and system change, there is a nationwide shortage of teachers. In The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction over the last Half Century, Kraft and Lyon report that the current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest level in 50 years.These findings should be a cause of serious national concern. Their research found that: 

• Interest in teaching has fallen among high school seniors and college freshman to the lowest level in the last 50 years 

• Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades. 

• These drops aren’t simply the result of pandemic stress. Most of the declines occurred steadily throughout the last decade suggesting they are a function of larger, long-standing structural issues with the profession.

Teachers express frustration over the lack of training, resources and supports available to them to do their work efficiently and effectively. The TIPPS system will provide the professional development, resources and support needed by in-service teachers. The teacher has access to a desktop that keeps basic organizational information, individual student plans, support for program planning and collaboration with other educators.   

Rather than replacing teachers, TIPS will enhance the role of teachers through the allocation of resources based on student data, teachers will garner the necessary support to enhance instructional efficacy and will reverse the exodus of creativity and talent from our nation’s schools.

The lead organization in the development of the Transition to Inclusive Practices and Support (TIPS) system collaborative is the Education Services Group, based in Tacoma, Washington. Established in 2004, the Education Services Group has developed statewide relationships with school districts, professional organizations, and parent groups offering consulting and training in school improvement, special education service models, and effective instruction with a special focus on Universal Design for Learning. Through a long-standing partnership with Learning Options, the blueprint for a web-based personalized lesson planning system evolved; one emphasizing inclusive, standards-based instruction. Called "Closing the Knowledge Equity Gap", C-KEG has been field-tested with funding assistance from NEA's Great Public Schools Fund and is now at the core of what will become TIPS. In a new partnership agreement with Pragmatic Solutions, the lesson planner will become part of a digital teacher toolbox that combines lesson tracking with a team-oriented, family-connected communication hub. In addition, the data generated will feed an AI-enhanced game-like platform that simulates human behavior, cognition, and emotion in various classroom settings, making it an ideal research and training environment for all stages of educator development. Education Services Group is in a position to create the linkages between classrooms, communities, and state-level institutions in a concerted and coordinated effort to modernize the infrastructure of education, educational research, and accountability by creating a real-time, AI-assisted support system that is engaging, effective, efficient, and equitable for both educators and the diverse populations they serve.  

We have determined that due to the comprehensive nature of the infrastructure transformation envisioned - linking students, families, teachers, schools, communities, and districts; to state-level funding, administration, and accountability systems; and beyond, to research and educator training institutions - we need to be in a position to simultaneously affect and assess change at all levels of the education system. Thus, we have determined to begin with one focus district that is dealing with rapid population growth, ethnic & racial diversity, and socio-economic disparity.  A school district that also has a well-documented track record of collaboration and engaging all stakeholders (especially teachers) in the design and implementation of new initiatives. 

We are currently in conversation with three potential pilot sites that meet these criteria to serve as an initial focus site. If successful, we are in a position to expand within Washington State, and extend similarly in both California and Texas, in a second and third phase. 

To date, the TIPS Collaborative has developed conceptual models describing the integration of three previously separate, research-based, and proven initiatives to design and deploy a multidimensional infrastructure for learning: 1) a digital teacher toolbox that combines lesson tracking with a team-oriented, family-connected communication hub; 2) a personalized lesson planning system that emphasizes inclusive instruction and collaboration to meet high standards for all students; and 3) an AI-enhanced game-like platform that simulates human behavior, cognition, and emotion in various classroom settings, making it an ideal research and training environment for all stages of educator development. 

Our focus is on helping each decision-maker (i.e. student, caregiver, teacher, leader) to increase the impacts of their decisions on improving inclusive access, support, and outcomes for all students regardless of their abilities. Two aspects of our solution stand out as innovative: 1. The different audiences of the product are viewed as unique prime actors making key decisions in a wide variety of educational contexts and 2. Natural language artificial intelligence interfaces working with other real-time data technologies can perceive and interpret the intentions and needs of each kind of user and deliver 24/7 solution ideas on mobile devices to meet them. 

For example, a student makes personal decisions about studying and working on academic tasks, a parent makes decisions that can support and encourage the student, and a teacher makes pedagogical and content decisions. We intend to overcome the inherent and persistent biases associated with gender, language, culture, and disability in education by ensuring that all stakeholders can access highly effective ideas and practices informed by relevant data delivered through a next-generation platform mediated by the integration of large language model artificial intelligence, distributed data systems, and human experts.

We view students and parents as assets to each other as well as to teachers, with inside information that is crucial to full inclusion. Teachers are assets too, to one another as well as to the larger world of knowledge about teaching and applying principles of universal design, cultural responsiveness, and inclusion in teaching. We envision a new ‘smart’ infrastructure that harvests ideas and builds knowledge from the questions, answers, and responses of users and leverages that data for more efficient flows of information into and out of systems like school, district, and state reporting processes. The dialog among teachers and others in the envisioned TIPS system illustrates our view of ‘human-in-the-loop’ artificial intelligence, which is the human shaping, validation, and correction of the collective intelligence in the system. A solution in one classroom can naturally and easily become a solution idea in another classroom, and an individualized adjustment in a learning design needed today may match a large percentage of a need that surfaces tomorrow and can be shared immediately when needed. We assume that people using technology for immediate help, can at a minimum “like” something they find, and in some cases, can add a thought or share a new idea to help a colleague. With large language models now becoming ubiquitous, these immediate reactions can join with historical knowledge to become a new kind of community asset.

The core technologies of our solution include distributed databases that are now often separated into silos created by national, statewide, and local data systems; artificial intelligence interfaces, that are quickly becoming a ubiquitous infrastructure for interacting with smart technologies and information; and human expertise, which includes the private interests and aspirations of a student, the hopes and desires of a parent, and the enthusiasm and knowledge of a teacher. These three aspects represent private, familial, and public sources of information that our team has in the past used to drive online and face-to-face engagement processes honed through years of successful systemic support of education. What has recently changed for the better, is the process of integrating data sources, messaging key stakeholders in timely and efficient ways to support decision-making, and leveraging information for timely analyses and solutions. In times past, heavy lifting and barriers dominated the data environment, but today, with one or more open-source and private large language models underpinning a technology development effort, the way is much clearer for a learner-centric solution that can serve all stakeholders at the right time, with the right information. Our team has been working successfully for years on the underlying concepts of personalization, universal design for learning, and real-time data integration into educational settings. Our knowledge and toolsets including online tools are ready to undertake today’s challenges.

Through a combination of end-user surveys, focus groups, log data, performance records, and ongoing feedback we will measure four key elements:

Engagement - We will measure the level of use and how the system is being used by students, parents, teachers, and administrators. We want it to be a tool so easy to use that it’s part of the practice - beginning, middle, and end of the day. students and parents will use the toolset daily.

Effectiveness - We will assess student learning outcomes, including social/emotional learning, and behavior.

Efficiency - We will measure the extent of reducing redundant and unnecessary reporting by surveying teachers and admins to see if the system is helping them improve efficiency by reallocating budgets to focus more on classrooms.

Equity - We will monitor whether all students have benefited equally, been culturally included, and have been protected from harm.

Combating bias in an educational setting requires ongoing vigilance by each actor accompanied by the power to explore, learn from one’s shortcomings, and be responsible for decisions, since cultural and other biases are ever-present phenomena. At the heart of our solution are the principles of Universal Design For Learning - using multiple means of engagement, representation, action, and expression. The ‘data’ concerning these key aspects comes from the grounded, real experience of the key users at each level of the system - students, parents, teachers, and school leaders - as they apply their understanding of the key ideas and notions of full inclusion in education. That grounding in real experience, when used to shape the AI, maximizes the inherent limitations and biases to best fit each local condition by giving the decision to the key actor, not the AI, which should be present to assist and serve the human in the loop. What AI brings to the table is global awareness of a massive set of existing solutions that share similarities with a user’s local situation. AI can find those similarities, suggest related solution ideas, and fill in gaps as a mentor would, by progressively watching the key actor’s decisions, while keeping in mind their background and their current task or question. This role can help each person to make decisions, learn more, and critique the potential impacts of options - all of which can update the AI’s scope of knowledge about the user and context. 

During the initial design & pilot phases, there will be 7 part-time staff:

• Project Coordinator (20% FTE)

• Partnerships & Training (20% FTE)

• AI Consultant (20% FTE)

• Chief of Product Design (25% FTE)

• Software Architect (30% FTE)

• 2 Programmers (40% FTE)

Three initiatives are being merged to create the TIPS Platform:
1.    Educational Services Group and Learning Options created Closing the Knowledge Equity Gap Instructional support system including: 1) a digital teacher toolbox that combines lesson tracking with a team-orientation; 2) a personalized lesson planning system that emphasizes inclusive instruction and collaboration to meet high standards for all students; and a personalized, portable student portfolio.
2.  simSchool is a proprietary simulation platform owned by simEd, LLC. Ownership of content modules authored on the platform is retained by simEd, LLC, but all performance data and reports produced through learner interaction with the simulations is co-owned by simSchool (in aggregate and anonymous form for research purposes) and user-identified by the institutions and organizations using the platform.
3.   An enhanced version of the Teacher Desktop will incorporate PD resources, simSchool simulations, and teacher and learner toolkits - an integration of previously developed and researched resources and coded platforms. The recognized focus of all team for 20 years plus had been to produce the highest quality, most relevant, most accessible tools to the broadest possible population of end users, always ensuring that user cognitive and physical ability, varied learner technology aptitude, and wildly diverging infrastructure do not present limitations to accessing meaningful teaching and learning experiences in a digital space.

We are currently scheduling demonstration meetings with management from the Washington Education Association, the Association of Washington School Administrators, and the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction who have responsibilities for teacher training and improved student learning to create opportunities for collaboration. In addition, we are actively engaging with school districts to determine interest in participating in the pilot.

Since the TIPS Platform is at the Concept stage, we can commit to sharing the learnings from our work publicly.  We can also say that the costs will be borne by the state and districts, plus the fact that through greater efficiencies and the reduction of duplicative reporting systems, we will enable a reallocation of existing funds. All partners in this proposal are committed to working out the IP issues; we collectively own and have the right to do so.

The Learner Meets Future Challenge seems like a nice fit with the aims/goals of the TIPS Collaborative in our efforts to create an interactive, smart online support system that can be deployed district and state-wide to simultaneously achieve greater effectiveness, efficiency, and efficacy in efforts in meeting the needs of diverse student populations. 

Our greatest needs relate to the development of a Business Model, Human Capital (board development), Product/Service Distribution, and PR.  We have the technology and knowledge of educational practices covered.