🔬Aila goes under the microscope

📚 Knowledge builders

• Sycophancy → A recent update to GPT‑4o, the most common model, made it act in a noticeably more sycophantic manner. The behaviour aimed to please users by validating doubts, fuelling anger, and reinforcing negative emotions, raising safety concerns about mental health, emotional over-reliance, and risky behaviour. This just goes to show how minor updates to this tech can have massive consequences.

• Cognitive Outsourcing → Peps Mccrea does a great job in pulling together several threads of ideas mentioned in this newsletter around the potential consequences of pupils using AI. You can read his ‘snack’ here or my essay on similar concerns here.

🤖 Industry updates

• Oak National’s Aila is going under the EEF microscope → After a study on the use of ChatGPT found that teachers saved nearly a third of planning time, the EEF have announced that they are going to evaluate the use of Aila to measure lesson quality and teacher workload. This study will focus on teachers in Key Stage 2, but it makes no mention of whether this will evaluate multiple subject or not. Find out more here.

• 150,000 Sub-Saharan Africa students benefit from Claude → Rising Academies uses Claude to power two educational tools: Rori, a student-facing maths tutor, and Tari, a teacher support tool. Rori uses Claude for intelligent answer interpretation, smart question handling, and soft skill development, while Tari utilises Claude for lesson planning, subject knowledge support, and maintaining conversations. Rising Academies claim these tools have lead to an additional year’s worth of learning, but do not provide a reference to check this claim. Read more here.

✨ Fresh prompts

1. Deep Research for Subject Knowledge → The free tier of ChatGPT got access to 5 deep research queries a month. This week, I looked at if it would be good for subject enhancements. It seems that Deep Research will often ask you some follow up questions, so you may not need to worry too much about your initial prompt. The initial prompt and the two follow-ups are included below. You can see the whole conversation and the final output here. What are your thoughts? Could this be useful for teachers who need to brush up on what they are teaching?

I am teaching The Romans to pupils to in Y4 in the UK. It is not an area of subject knowledge that I am strong in. What will I need to know to be able to teach the Romans in Britain? The fertile question that we use is 'How Roman was Roman Britain?'

We look at how the romanisation of Britain changed the daily lives of the people who lived here and the technological advances that the romans brought with them.

I would like subject and pedagogical content knowledge and any appropriate resources that you feel appropriate would be useful.