9th grade AI enabled classroom, Mitaka School, Tokyo

Jefferson Fellows go back to school in Tokyo
(Tokyo, Japan)-As an old (in both senses of the word) high school teacher, I always love getting back into the classroom. The classroom we visited here in Japan this week, however, looks a lot different than the one I taught in many decades ago.

We visited Mitaka Secondary School as part of the Jefferson Fellowship program that I lead for the East-West Center. Each year, the fellowship brings together 12 regional journalists on a study and reporting tour. This year, we’re exploring AI and its impacts in Hawaii (last week), Japan, and South Korea (beginning Saturday). 

Fellow Inwook Song interviews a Mitaka student

At Mitaka, they’ve integrated AI throughout their curriculum and into classroom lessons and activities like the one we witnessed. In this 9^th grade class, the teacher introduced the lesson on WWII, inviting groups of students to discuss how it may have been prevented. Then, the students were asked to select prompts on an AI chatbot to vet their questions and solutions. The students also can create their own set of prompts (they call them menus) to challenge the chatbot, which is not a LLM but instead a closed system built just for the Metropolitan School District, where 116,000 students are using AI.

During a Q&A session after our classroom visit, we learned that the school doesn’t have any data yet about the efficacy of AI-assisted instruction. It will be interesting to compare the results from AI and non-AI classrooms.

Here in Tokyo, the fellows have also visited or had panelists from NHK (the national broadcaster); Sophia University; Asia University; TEPIA Advanced Technology Gallery; Tsukuba Super Science City; the National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience; parliamentarians from the Mirai party; Code for Japan; and the government’s Digital Agency. All explored various aspects of AI’s impact on society.

We’re headed soon to Seoul. Stay tuned for details.

Fellows Gelo Gonzales (l) and Purple Romero inquire about 
the AI lesson projected by the 9th grade teacher.