Brave New Learning: Sal Khan, AI Tutors, & the Future of Mindfulness Education

The educational landscape is undergoing a profound transformation through artificial intelligence, and mindfulness education stands at this exciting frontier. In this thought-provoking exploration, Amy Edelstein reviews Sal Khan's new book "Brave New Words" and unpacks the potential and challenge of AI tutors to support students' inner development, while maintaining crucial human connections.

Amy examines Khan's great success with Khan Academy and the AI Khanmigo, looking specifically at how AI tutors can personalize learning experiences, making first-class education and tools more accessible. 

AI tutors can deliver mindfulness content in students' native languages, honor cultural contexts, and support English language learners in contributing their unique perspectives despite language barriers. Imagine a classroom where students speaking Mandarin, Ukrainian, Spanish, and Vietnamese can all engage with the same wellness curriculum, then bring diverse insights to group discussions. 

With proper guardrails preventing misinformation and protecting privacy, these systems can safely guide students through their inner development journey.

Amy discusses the need for a mindfulness AI tutor that integrates contemplative practice with systems thinking, helping students see knowledge as interconnected rather than compartmentalized. By connecting well-being and self regulation concepts across neuroscience, psychology, physics, and ethics, AI can help students discover meaningful relationships with our world as a whole and enable students to feel their spheres of interest grow.  

There are valid concerns about digital overuse, however thoughtfully designed educational AI offers something fundamentally different—tools that address each student's needs while building community.

Join Amy on this journey into the possibilities of conscious technology. 

If you're interested in contributing to the development of mindfulness-based AI tutors or have feature recommendations, connect with us at innerstrengtheducation.org and help shape this next chapter in educational innovation.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Conscious Classroom Podcast
• 1:14 AI Tutors: Possibilities and Development
• 3:07 Sal Khan's Vision for Educational AI
• 6:42 Personalized Learning Pathways and Assessment
• 13:14 Language and Cultural Adaptation Benefits
• 14:38 Privacy and Data Protection Concerns
• 16:40 Preventing Misinformation with Guardrails
• 19:42 Socratic Dialogue and Interdisciplinary Learning
• 22:02 Interactive Learning with Historical Figures
• 26:20 Balancing Digital Tools with Human Connection
• 31:07 The Future of Inner Strength

Transcript

Amy: 0:10

Welcome to the Conscious Classroom podcast, where we're exploring tools and perspectives that support educators and anyone who works with teens to create more conscious, supportive and enriching learning environments. I'm your host, amy Edelstein, and I'll be sharing transformative insights and easy-to-implement classroom supports that are all drawn from mindful awareness and systems thinking. The themes we'll discuss are designed to improve your own joy and fulfillment in your work and increase your impact on the world we share. Let's get on with this next episode. Hello and welcome to the Conscious Classroom. My name is Amy Edelstein.

Amy: 0:55

Today, I want to dive into one arena of life that is changing, of life that is changing so quickly it is just hard to keep up with. Even those at the leading edge of new technology have a hard time keeping up, let alone all of us. I wanted to speak a little bit about AI tutors, what I think is possible tutors, what I think is possible and the way that I've been delving into what it would take to build an AI tutor that could really cultivate young people's sense of purpose, compassion, direction, directedness, care, inquiry, innovation and, of course, self-regulation and mental wellness. This is something that I've been thinking about for quite a while and researching for quite a while, and now have some developers who are really incredible, who I'm working with, who are really incredible, who I'm working with. This past week I've turned to someone who I feel is embodying the commitment to high quality education, tried and true pedagogical tools coupled with the commitment to make first-class education available for free to young people and older people all around the world. He's someone who has really revolutionized this possibility and successfully, has been using technology to help scale. That person, of course, is Sal Khan, and successfully, has been using technology to help scale. That person, of course, is Sal Khan, as somebody who's been experimenting with his platform for quite a while and with the AI tutor supports both for teachers and for students.

Amy: 3:00

I was intrigued to pick up his brave new words how artificial intelligence will revolutionize education and why that's a good thing. I wanted to see specifically what he would say, what concerns he would address, and I want to share them with you and my own response to many of them. Although throughout the book he offers some cautions, he is an evangelist for the potential for AI tutors to re-engage students in their own learning process, to ignite their curiosity, to really flip classroom models upside down so that the time in the classroom is spent in real human to human interaction and mentorship by the teacher to the students. It's a time for project learning and group work and dialogue together because students are being supported in so many ways prior to coming to class. I think it has tremendous potential and, as I see what the AI function for Khan Academy, khan Migo, is doing, I am very moved and impressed by the depth to which Khan and his 250 engineers and educational psychologists and curriculum developers have really been thinking about this.

Amy: 4:41

It's always tempting to want to use technology at the bleeding leading edge. I'm not sure that's necessary for educational technology. Of course we want to coming to the forefront in large scale commercial builds. I'm not sure we need that kind of automation for a learning tutor. I think chat GPT-4 with guardrails and modifications built in certainly can empower millions of young people and activate their curiosity and allow them to address their concerns in a way that can be met in a variety of subjects.

Amy: 5:45

Of course, I'm concerned with developing their sense of purpose, their life goals, their inner curiosity, their inner strength, their outer stability, their ability to think in context, to look at systems, to look at themselves as part of a living system, in their family, classroom, city nation. We're seeing more and more individualized AI tutors built on specific philosophies, and the idea of a mindfulness and systems thinking AI tutor. Mindfulness and systems thinking AI tutor, while somewhat unique, is certainly, in the field of these personalized tutors, not unique at all, and that's why I'm turning to see how we can weave in really strong guardrail developmental tools and the best of personalized learning so that we are really helping students uncover the richness and profundity that mindfulness and systems thinking thinking can reveal, as well as providing safeguards. Should students be engaging with their personalized inner strength tutor with some personal distress Because that, of course, is one of the dangers of developing a relationship with an AI tutor, because an AI tutor can't necessarily spot, with the same kind of perception that a loved one could, a youth's distress. We want to make sure that we're supporting students in a way that is transparent and really provides a safety net.

Amy: 7:51

So let's dive in and look at some of the highlights from Khan's book Brave New Words and really what he's looking for and looking at and is bitten by isitude and encouraging students to pursue their interests and their strengths more efficient. And I know from working in the classroom, when you've got 30 students, period one and three minutes before period two comes in with another 30 students, and that goes on for five periods a day and 150 kids each day. It's very difficult to have the stamina, the time and the sensitivity to do that in a way that's accurate and truly supportive. So if we can make some of the process more efficient, then we can free up our human teachers, who are even more important in this age, to really be with students and understand students and be able to talk with them and encourage them, engage them.

Amy: 9:32

Now AI can provide that personal learning pathway and that personalized assessment, and what Conmigo has done very effectively is make that transparent to parents and teachers, enable parents and teachers to track a student's progress and also feed students questions and alternative problems to solve in the moment, helping them think through the areas where they're getting tripped up without giving them the answer and without letting them just skate along. That can be a breakthrough, because usually in a class, unless your child is always at the lead of the class in every subject, generally the class is going to move on. When the time demands that, some students will be ready and some students won't, and the students who aren't will find themselves further and further behind because they never really work on those areas that were stumbling blocks when it comes to mindfulness and systems thinking. That's really important because we want students to understand the concepts of self-care, the concepts of inner exploration and the concepts of compassion for self and other, and how to see oneself in this evolutionary framework, understanding how we're conditioned by the evolutionary development of our bodies and brains and by the evolutionary development of the world. Those concepts are subtle and we want to be able to present them at a developmentally appropriate level of complexity and language. So AI personalized tutors can do that. They can take a lesson I've designed and broken up into pieces, present that lesson in multiple languages, depending on what language the student speaks.

Amy: 11:54

In my city, where we do most of our inner strength work although we are expanding nationally now one in six public school students is an English language learner. Oftentimes we go in and can't possibly translate into these different languages, because in one class you may have a student who speaks Mandarin, you have another student who speaks Cantonese, you have a student who speaks Pashtun, a student who speaks Ukrainian, a student who speaks Vietnamese and maybe one who speaks Nepali, let alone Spanish. About 25% of our students are Spanish speakers. Ai can help with that. So currently I'm creating all my lessons, both in text and audio, broken into short pieces, so that these students, once we build, will be able to get the lessons believe it or not, in their own language and ask questions in their own language.

Amy: 13:19

As we scale wellness tools around the world, we want to ensure that they're culturally appropriate, that the examples are relatable to the students and that the subtle values differences are also built into the lessons. The way a student in Hong Kong might approach ambition might be subtly different than the way a student in New York might approach ambition and goal setting. We can train our tutor to understand that and to subtly revise the language to speak to a student in their cultural context. I mean, that is amazing. Will it be perfect? No, but these models can learn from themselves and from their interactions. That's another thing that we need to take care of, which Khan Academy is doing an amazing job, which is how do we create privacy If we want the AI to learn in situ and if we want to be able to provide parents summaries to the depth that they're interested in, if we want to be able to tap a student out and connect them with a live person, should there be any indication of more serious mental distress.

Amy: 14:38

What do we want to be able to collect in terms of aggregate data? How do we protect an individual student's privacy because they're minors, and how do we protect the way that they're learning so that it doesn't become fodder for somebody else's marketing? This is where I feel that Khan Academy has just really thought these issues through with a lot of depth and subtlety, because we do need to be able to engage and partner and mentor and teach our young people as parents, teachers, mentors, guardians, psychologists and we need to protect privacy in all of those ways. So it can be done, even though mostly our data is being harvested in just an uncontrolled and unmitigated manner, which I think will likely cause quite a few issues in the future, in the short or long-term future. Whereas we're building these tools for young people, the technology exists to do it right, so it just takes the time and the will and the investment and the recognition that, for AI to work for us, we want to ensure that it shares the values and the system shares the values that we share and the system shares the values that we share.

Amy: 16:36

When we're talking about AI tutors specifically around mindfulness and the subtleties of inner development. We really need to guard against misinformation and that's something that I intend to make sure is done with our inner strength AI tutor and something that Con Amigo has shown can be done. You create very structured educational boundaries so that your AI doesn't make things up what they call hallucination. You may have experienced a chat. Gpt can generate false or misleading information, but you can prevent it from doing that by allowing it only to draw information from trusted sources that you identify and to only speak to certain questions and context. If students ask for information that goes outside those boundaries, it will simply say I'm sorry, you know I'm an AI tutor and that is something that I'm not able to do.

Amy: 17:38

This is really important with mindfulness, because we want to be sure that the AI isn't just randomly pulling from random sources with superficial understanding of the power of mindfulness-based tools in an inappropriate way. I mean there's plenty of stuff out on the internet that really it'd be great if we could clean it up, because it's not very well thought through information or tools. So at this point now, anyone looking for meditation instruction needs to be quite careful about what you're listening to and who you're listening to. But we can build that in. We can also build in age appropriate filtering, so they're not talking to a sixth grader with the same language, they're talking to a 10th grader or a 12th grader or a college student, and also they're not engaging anything else that is not appropriate for young people or for a mindfulness AI tutor to be engaging with.

Amy: 18:52

And, of course, what I'm most interested in is really helping students learn how to dialogue, how to question in a way that goes deeper, not just to get the answer, but to open up an issue, a theme, a question to explore from different perspectives and to sense new threads or emergencies in their thinking and reasoning in their thinking and reasoning. So Sal Khan and his team have done a lot to embed, to train their AI tutor on Socratic dialogue. So they don't give answers but they ask questions, so they get students to think critically and explain, and the way that the tutor engages with them is just like a good human mentor would is to keep exploring together, always opening an open door rather than an answer that ends the discussion. Now the wonderful thing about an AI tutor which of course, I do with my students is I'm always bringing in very different approaches to a similar theme. So we might look at neuroscience, we might look at physics, we might look at psychology or different schools of psychology, or we might look at physics, we might look at psychology or different schools of psychology, or we might look at ethics, or we might look at the body-mind relationship as different ways of unpacking our experience in the moment.

Amy: 20:41

Tutor with access to profiles on the great thinkers, scientists, psychologists, historians, archaeologists, geologists, cosmologists can pull in three or four different examples from radically different fields of knowledge and show the student that when we're looking at how to become strong and wise people, how to navigate difficulty, how to take care of ourselves and cultivate wellness, there are many different angles. We can approach this with many different angles we can approach this with. That keeps students thinking in this integrated way, rather than psychology being completely separate from math, being completely separate from history, being completely separate from chemistry. It doesn't have to be. Our world is a single, unified world and when knowledge is not so compartmentalized, it really helps liberate a student's capacity. They start to feel like, oh, I didn't think I was good at math, but it's only because math didn't make sense to me. But when I relate math to something I am interested in. Boy oh boy, it's really important.

Amy: 22:11

Related to this is the safe and very fantastic way that Kanmiga works with interactive learning, with conversations with historical figures, literary characters. So a student could say okay, what does the Buddha say about being kind to other people? Where does that fit on the spectrum? If we're talking about the spectrum of values, maybe I'd like to know what were the values that Martin Luther King espoused? How would he think about kindness and compassion in a relationship? Or compared to activism, or pushing against what's wrong? And what about Marie Curie? Did she have anything to say about supporting the people that she worked with as she was inventing and pursuing solutions to difficult problems?

Amy: 23:32

What I like about Conmigo is there are guardrails placed so that historical figures can only comment on things within their own time frame, on things within their own timeframe, and characters in novels can only comment and respond to things within the setting of their book. That prevents AI from making things up or hallucinating or imagining a response that we just simply don't know. One of the examples in Sal Khan's book he has an expert on Harriet Tubman engage with the AI as the historical figure and ask what she thinks about reparations for slavery and because of the guardrails. The AI comments. Well, I don't know. We weren't discussing that in my time, but in my time I always was supportive of helping the newly liberated slaves have education and have sufficient means to start their new life. So she didn't speak out of turn, she didn't give a reflection on a contemporary problem, which is very important to allow students to make their own assessments but to really understand the historical figure in their own time and in their own place and in their own context.

Amy: 25:17

Sometimes students ask me for further learning on a particular meditation or a particular example or a particular psychological approach or trauma sensitive approach and sometimes in the moment it's really hard to sift through all of the materials that I've come across and thinkers and modes of knowledge that I've investigated and think about which ones might be appropriate for a ninth grader. An AI tutor won't have that problem. They'll be able to pull from the approved set of resources and assess what are age-appropriate ones and make recommendations that are much more likely to fit and won't take me several hours of researching, because I certainly can't meet the needs of every student I touch, and especially not if we want this to grow and be available to everyone. So if you've been very frustrated and concerned about the impact of excessive digital use by young people on their growth and development and their socialization, I'm with you there. I understand that and especially, I think social media for preteens as well as for teens is quite concerning and can exacerbate all kinds of social and other anxieties.

Amy: 27:07

But when it comes to intelligently using a real learning tool to support and uplift students to make their experience of school one where they feel they're at their edge, they're not falling behind, which is a terrible feeling for young people to feel that they're not good enough or they can't catch up and that they're not held back, because there's nothing worse than a bright young mind, than feeling like they're dying of boredom, that they're not challenged, that they're getting duller every minute that passes in their classroom and grasp concepts quickly. An AI tutor can really help fill that gap in a way that just accelerating that student to dual enrollment in a community college won't do. This way, they stay with their friends and their peer groups. They can tutor and mentor and have fun and also be challenged.

Amy: 28:36

And for those students, when we relate this to mindfulness and systems thinking, who really want to look at the neuroscience, mindfulness and systems thinking. Who really want to look at the neuroscience? They really want to understand the psychology. They really want to look at multicultural approaches. They really want to figure out how they can be so smart in math and so not smart when it comes to relationships and communication. They can work at their own edge. Then when, for example, our inner strength instructors are able to be with them or their teachers are able to be with them, doing mindfulness work, exploring questions around the nature of consciousness and thought, awareness, the brain intention, motivation, care, those discussions will be even more interesting because each student will have been exploring on their own, according to their their own proclivities, their own tastes. And when they bring all of that independent exploration together, the whole classroom becomes enriched. It's filled out in multiolor. It's like when you go from having a box of eight crayons to a box of 120 colors. You can really do some fun stuff. And that's what learning can be like, especially engaging our English language learners and bringing out their own cultural understanding and their own individual understanding. Just because they may not have the language proficiency in their new country doesn't mean they don't have a ton to offer, and that also shifts relationships and creates pathways to acceptance and friendship.

Amy: 30:52

I truly believe, with thoughtfulness and care, around pedagogical best practices, around data privacy, best practices around time-saving best practices for teachers and parents, around personalized learning pathways, diverse approaches to individual questions that large language models can do on the fly, to interactive and imaginative and creative and fun interactions around maybe difficult issues, maybe students having trouble with test anxiety. And she asked the AI tutor can you create a mindfulness rap that will make me laugh and help relieve my anxiety at this moment before my chemistry test next period? And the AI tutor can do it and sing it to her. And that injecting some fun into a student's approach to their own self-knowledge and self-care can encourage them to seek the care that they need and the support that they need. Laugh, to shift their mindset from obsessing and ruminating on a problem to feeling like the solution is really near at hand.

Amy: 32:38

I encourage you all to pick up a copy or an audio book of Brave New Words how AI Will Revolutionize Education and why that's a Good Thing, by Sal Khan, and really consider freshly how we can take ownership and leadership of the way technology is being rolled out to our young people and really do it for good. And especially. Keep your eyes peeled for the inner strength, mindfulness and systems thinking AI tutor not immediately, but coming and if you have any recommendations, features that you care about, or if you're a developer and would like to contribute, feel free to get in touch. You can always find us at innerstrengtheducationorg and I look forward to our next phase in this brave new world. Let's meet the possibilities with an open heart, with love and optimism and with a great care and sense of possibility that we can, if we bring our best minds and hearts to this, really start to create a world that supports us all.

Amy: 34:24

Thanks so much. Till next time. Thank you for listening to the Conscious Classroom. I'm your host, amy Edelstein. Please check out the show notes on innerstrengthfoundationnet for links and more information and if you enjoyed this podcast, please share it with a friend and pass the love on. See you next time.