Every time new technology enters science classrooms, it raises the question: how it will be used and whether or not it will help students understand how science works. For more than 20 years, a small, invitation-only gathering in Washington, D.C., has worked to ensure that educators, including science educators, can answer that question before changes hit our classrooms rather than after. That gathering is the National Technology Leadership Summit (NTLS), and in an age of artificial intelligence, the work of that group matters now more than ever to those of us who care deeply about accurate, evidence-based science education.
NTLS began in 2000, when the director of the U.S. Department of Education’s Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers to Use Technology Program, Tom Carroll, noticed that schools were not changing in response to the new technologies that had been implemented widely in schools. To address the issue, presidents of teacher education associations were selected to come together each year to explore issues and devise potential solutions. I’ve been involved with the group first in my role as President of the Association for Science Teacher Education (ASTE) and now as president and CEO of NCSE.
Science education has had a seat at that table since day one. ASTE, along with groups representing all content areas, teacher preparation, and education technology, are among the founding groups from that first summit. NTLS is the foundation from which the Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education (CITE) Journal was built, and CITE is still ongoing today with sponsorship from ASTE for the science education segment. The circle now is much larger, including groups that focus on engineering, special education, literacy, and instructional design/curriculum.
Today the summit brings together organizational presidents, journal editors, policymakers, foundation leaders, and representatives from industry. The group gathers at the National Education Association in Washington, D.C., and has long-standing support from the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education (SITE). As a part of the meeting each year, two panels, one of the organizational presidents and another of journal editors, share about their organizations and issues that are at the forefront of conversation. The remaining time at the summit features breakout sessions for three strands where organizations engage in critical discourse to make recommendations that will then be taken back and shared with each of the organization’s stakeholders. The aim of these strands is to help shape the use of new technologies with pedagogical implications at the forefront.
Science has always had a strong interest in technology, mainly because our work runs on instruments. Probes, cameras, simulations, datasets, and so many other tools of science are necessary to expand our understanding of the world around us. These technological tools are what allow scientists, and students, to collect evidence, seek out patterns, and test explanations against the evidence. There is even a framework for explaining the role of technology in the learning process that looks at technologies not just as tools, but as critical components of what we know as pedagogical knowledge in a specific content area. The concept of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) explores that intersection and how technology informs and is a part of learning.
I came to the NTLS as a part of my Presidential three-year term at ASTE. This year was my second year attending the summit, and after my final year in 2027 as a representative of ASTE, I will return by invitation as a representative of NCSE. The group at NTLS is dynamic. Educators of every range of experience from new to tenured come together to share their thoughts, generate questions, and collectively come up with possible solutions and pathways to support teachers. In the last two years, AI, and more specifically, generative AI, have been hot topics, both in regard to how it is used by students and how we are preparing teachers to navigate a technology that has breached the learning process in many ways. Questions were asked about ethical usage, how to teach students to prompt in ways that support learning rather than supplant it, and, in the case of NCSE, how to recognize the misconceptions and misinformation that AI can present and deepen. Blurred lines between consensus concepts and what presents as a plausible claim are especially important to consider for teachers who are already fighting misinformation about evolution and climate science from a variety of ideologically biased sources.
Some of the things I walked away with from the last two years of conversations are that we have a multi-level problem that needs to be addressed. While AI is here and there seems to be a rush to integrate it into education since many students are already using it on a daily basis in their lives, both teachers and students need support to understand how AI works, what the impacts of that usage are, and how to appropriately utilize it to support learning. For example, learning how to evaluate AI is a scientific practice and habit of mind. We must teach teachers and students how to check explanations against the data and peer-reviewed resources as a part of argumentation. Additionally, there are already content knowledge gaps among teachers when it comes to science, notably so in cases like climate change. If a teacher isn’t solid in the content, they don’t have the tools themselves to catch mistakes that AI can make. Looking at these problems through the lens of our mission immediately engaged my thinking about NCSE’s DataWISE tool and how elements of that tool can translate to evaluation and argumentation in other formats as well.
NTLS works because it puts content experts in the same room as technologists, policymakers, and journal editors before decisions are locked in. As AI reshapes how students find and judge information, science educators need that seat at the table. Our field's commitment to evidence, transparency, and self-correction is exactly what a fluent but fallible technology demands. Anyone who wants to follow this work can read the annual NTLS reports in CITE Journal. The next wave of classroom technology is already being shaped. Science educators should help shape it.
