More Human Than Human: Goalbook’s Approach to AI
And a Sneak Peek of Goalbook Toolkit with AI in 2024
SUMMARY
The equality of opportunity and full participation of students with disabilities in our public education system is a human-centered vision established by IDEA that has yet to be fully achieved. At Goalbook, using AI responsibly means to intentionally consider how to elevate, augment, and empower the essential human, relational, and communal work of teaching and learning rather than to thoughtlessly displace, automate, or shortcut it away. We want to share some of the specific ways we are using AI to contribute to a special education system that students, families, and educators will feel is becoming more and more human.
All Aboard!
Goalbook’s All Hands Meeting in June 2023 was dedicated to a single topic — AI. This was the first slide I shared with our team:
I can’t remember where I heard it, but the statement “it’s a bullet train to who knows where” perfectly captured the extreme urgency and uncertainty I was feeling about AI at the time. Was AI the next big thing or a passing fad? Would it be the end of the world or the savior of our most urgent problems? Did anyone even know how any of this stuff actually worked?
While there was a wide range of thoughts, emotions, and questions across our team about AI, we ended our All Hands meeting with a shared conviction that it was better to be on the train than to watch it pass by. If for no other reason, we felt a deep responsibility to understand, navigate, and steward this new disruptive technology on behalf of our 1,000+ school district partners and the educators, students, and communities they serve. Since then, we’ve been engaged in hands-on learning and critical evaluation of AI — experiencing excitement from its capabilities as well as caution from its limitations and flaws.
Over the course of this year, I hope to share what we’ve been learning as an organization and how we’ve been incorporating AI into our work. I also hope that Goalbook will participate in the broader dialogue our public school system is having on how AI can and should be used, including for the teaching and learning of our students with disabilities. In this piece, I want to share what using AI responsibly means for us at Goalbook as well as some of the specific ways we are working to enhance Goalbook Toolkit with AI.
Goalbook and Responsible AI
Ensuring AI safety through mitigating risks and avoiding harm is without a doubt an important part of using AI responsibly. We’ve had first hand experience with the flaws and risks of AI, such as hallucinations and bias. We’ve put into place new and enhanced security, privacy, and copyright measures around AI training and deployment and continue to test and evolve them. Due to our own encounters with racial, gender, and other cultural-identity biases as well as unsound recommendations of instructional practices and false research citations, we’ve set human review and intervention processes and in some cases have drawn strict boundaries to not use AI at all.
But Goalbook is an organization responsible for serving the institutions, administrators, educators, and communities that are responsible for the teaching and learning of students with disabilities. Given the levels of responsibility inherent in our work, thinking about “Responsible AI” at the “trust and safety” level alone feels incomplete.
Last year, Goalbook had the privilege of hosting and learning from Judy Heumann, an advocate and prominent leader of the disability rights movement which brought forth and shaped landmark legislation such as Section 504 regulations of the Rehabilitation Act (1973) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990). She helped write the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1974) which in 1990 became the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA). She later went on to serve as the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Special Education as well as author numerous books.
During her talk, I was gradually coming to the realization that all the regulations, processes, and practices of special education that I was challenged to learn and implement as a teacher, monitor and enforce as an administrator, and even now support at Goalbook, didn’t just appear out of thin air or fall from the sky. They were built from the ground up by a human movement of advocacy, work, and sacrifice — and here I was listening to one of the people who was there and helped make it happen!
After Ms. Heumann’s talk, I gave the IDEA another look and I noticed something. Before Parts A, B, C, and D and its thousands of statutes and regulations covering everything from Local Educational Agency and Least Restrictive Environment, to the processes, timelines, and components of an Individualized Educational Program, … Before all of that, I noticed that it begins with this statement,
Congress finds the following:
Disability is a natural part of the human experience and in no way diminishes the right of individuals to participate in or contribute to society. Improving educational results for children with disabilities is an essential element of our national policy of ensuring equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for individuals with disabilities.
– IDEA, 20 U.S.C. § 1400 (2020)
November 29, 2025 will mark the 50th anniversary of the IDEA. It was a monumental step forward and yet, nearly 50 years in, we are still challenged by and struggle with fully realizing its vision. As noted by Judy Heumman in her talk,
I’m sure that everyone on this call are people who are not satisfied with where we are now. That is one common thread that we have: that we want to feel at the end of the day that our work is proving beneficial to others and is valued. And that students and other teachers and families believe that we are all in this together. — Judy Heumann
For Goalbook, Responsible AI means using this new technology to elevate and empower the human community of students, families, and educators who are working together towards the equality of opportunity and full participation of our students with disabilities — to use AI in a safe and trustworthy way to progress IDEA’s human vision forward.
A Sneak Peek of Goalbook and AI in 2024
Goalbook’s vision statement is, We empower educators to transform instruction so that all students succeed. Goalbook’s impact on education solely comes from our ability to support what’s been shown again and again in research to be the most important school-based factor in student achievement — the human teacher. This fact is compounded for our students with disabilities as they often have many different educators that need to coordinate and collaborate their efforts — it’s a team sport, not a solo endeavor.
We have started to enhance Goalbook Toolkit with AI to better support the human capacity and practice of a student’s educational team in three important ways:
- Putting the “Individual” in IEP
- Driving specially-designed instruction through greater IEP coherence and alignment
- Making IEPs more understandable and accessible
Below, I’ll share a “sneak peek” into what these features could look like. However, I want to stress that these are all works in progress and will likely change and evolve as we get ready to launch them over the course of this year.
1. Putting the “Individual” in IEP
The IEP is intended to be an individualized education program — designed to address the unique strengths, needs, and attributes of a specific student. Goalbook Toolkit has always provided educators with a wide variety of starting points for designing individualized instruction across subjects, standards, skills, grade levels, and levels of support that can be further customized for their specific student.
Goalbook Toolkit with AI enables us to offer educators new and powerful ways that educators can leverage their personal knowledge and understanding of a student to adapt and design an instructional plan that is truly individualized.
Generate adapted goals specifically aligned to key student characteristics
Generate specially-designed instructional strategies aligned to a student’s learning goal and disability
2. Driving Specially-designed Instruction through Greater IEP Coherence and Alignment
One reason why IEPs can be challenging to develop is because they bring together so many distinct and interconnected components: present levels, impact of disability, goals, accommodations/modifications, services, … An IEP can most effectively drive specially-designed instruction when these components inform and build upon each other — what we refer to as the Golden Thread.
Goalbook Toolkit with AI enables powerful new ways to search, curate, and get recommendations across the wide and ever growing collection of resources available in Goalbook Toolkit. Utilizing AI-driven methods such as semantic search and LLM-reranking, Goalbook Toolkit can help educators follow the Golden Thread throughout the IEP design process.
Identifying aligned learning goals based on a student’s present levels
Educational research and best practice continues to deepen and grow: autism, dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADHD, Science of Reading … It is impossible for any individual practitioner to stay informed and translate these ever-evolving bodies of knowledge to IEPs and specially-designed instruction.
At Goalbook we are augmenting and guiding AI models with educational research and instructional best practices. This enables us to guide educators in developing IEPs that are not just individualized to their student’s unique attributes and abilities but also aligned to research-based best practices and frameworks.
IEP Copilot that guides educators step-by-step through the Golden Thread
3. Improving Accessibility and Understanding of IEPs
A well-designed IEP can be a powerful instructional tool to inform, align, and drive the specially designed instruction and support a student receives. An IEP can also be a high-stakes legal and compliance document that is reviewed and audited by multiple stakeholders. In practice, this can often make an IEP difficult to understand and access by family members, educators, and the student themself.
Goalbook Toolkit with AI has the potential to reduce many of these barriers to understanding that often blunt the instructional impact an IEP can have.
Translating key instructional content into a family’s home language
Describing a student’s learning goal in clear and concrete terms
Generating a printable single-page student summary
More Human Than Human
It’s been over 6 months since we as an organization punched our ticket for the AI bullet train and it’s lived up to the metaphor. The technology seems to be evolving daily across so many different dimensions and applications. New questions and concerns seem to arise faster than previous ones can be conclusively answered or addressed.
I’ve found that when the surrounding environment is changing so rapidly and unpredictably, being grounded in the constant fundamentals rises in importance. It’s fundamental that education will continue to remain human — human work towards human goals. It’s fundamental that Goalbook will continue to center human work and goals and will continue to learn how we can contribute to an education system that becomes more and more human.
