We are excited to announce the launch of a new Substack publication: Empathy in Bytes.

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If you are interested in the future of SEL and want to learn more about how tools such as ChatGPT can be used to enhance how we support students, this newsletter is for you.

Empathy in Bytes will focus on the intersection of new artificial intelligence tools and social-emotional learning in K-12 education. Each edition will explore promising approaches and emerging research for leveraging AI to transform how we guide, instruct, and model social-emotional skills with students.

Our goal: to build a library of best practices and actionable strategies that our community of educators can use to for a variety of tasks. (Think: generating lesson plans for in-class activities; creating assessments to measure student well-being and monitor progress; coaching students through role-playing situations.)

You can read a free preview of the first edition below. The article gives an overview of an important mindset that educators can use when learning (and using) prompt engineering techniques.

We also have a deal for the Inside SEL community: you can save 25% for a year by signing up through this link.

Thank you, as always, for reading and please don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.

—Nick Woolf
Founder, Inside SEL

What is the “genius in the room” mental model?

Exploring a foundational methodology for using AI tools.

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The “genius in the room” mental model refers to a methodology in which an AI tool (such as ChatGPT) is seen as a subject matter expert.

Imagine that you live next door to a genius. This individual is familiar with almost everything that was ever written before 2021. Although the genius can get things wrong sometimes, you can converse with them and ask them questions or for explanations. But the only way that you can do this and communicate with them is to slide a piece of paper under the door and ask for a response.

The genius does not know anything about you or the problem that you are trying to solve. The genius cannot see your face, does not know where you are, cannot read your emotions, and does not have the unique knowledge that you possess.

In other words, they have no idea what you are trying to do.

This is the essence of the “genius in the room” mental model. While the “genius” that is generative AI can leverage the vast amounts of information that models (like ChatGPT) have been trained on—which includes a large corpus of the internet text up to a certain date—it does not always understand the information in the way humans do. AI tools do not have human experiences or context beyond what’s in the text it has been trained on.

Given all that… how would you communicate with this type of genius to:

• Explain the concept of emotion regulation to middle school students?
• Create an interactive in-class activity for 2nd-grade students to learn about self-efficacy?
• Act as a coach to help a student reflect on their recent experience collaborating with peers?

… to continue reading, subscribe to Empathy in Bytes.