#226 AI in Education with Zach Groshell

Craig Barton
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Episode details

Returning guest Zach Groshell, author of Just Tell Them, explains how he designs Direct Instruction maths apps for Alpha School. They cover the US school system, why most education apps fail, how atomisation and mastery work on a screen, the limits of data and motivation, and why he chose a different school for his own daughter.

Talking points

  1. Zach’s background as a fourteen-year elementary teacher in struggling US schools, and the frustration behind his book Just Tell Them: when discovery and inquiry leave children floundering, the kindest thing a teacher can do is explain clearly, step by step.
  2. How Zach uses AI as a “second brain” — running it through science-of-learning principles like retrieval, spacing and worked examples — alongside a blunt warning that offloading your thinking, or working without your own domain knowledge, just buys you echo chambers and plausible-sounding errors rather than learning.
  3. Why domain expertise is non-negotiable: early attempts to let technologists generate lessons “failed right away,” and even Zach leans on subject-matter experts, just as Engelmann did.
  4. A tour of the US school system for UK listeners — public, charter and private schools, no national curriculum, the politics of Common Core and Race to the Top, the maths wars and Jo Boaler’s influence, and why reading (helped by Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story) has moved faster than maths.
  5. Where Alpha School fits and how Zach got involved — the 2 Hour Learning model of app-based mornings and life-skills afternoons, the controversy it attracts, and the tweet about marrying the ideas of E. D. Hirsch and Siegfried Engelmann that first put him in the room.
  6. What makes most education apps bad: aligning to Common Core forces children through multiple methods for the same idea, instruction is imprecise and meandering, and “discovery learning on a worksheet” leaves behind the very children who need precision most.
  7. How the maths apps are actually built — atomisation, parallel strands woven together, the Engelmann and Project Follow Through heritage (with Wesley Becker), field-testing items to 80–100% first-time-correct, and retiring small skills once they are subsumed into bigger routines.
  8. What a child experiences at the screen: a Michaela-style launch ritual, roughly twenty-minute working chunks with brain breaks, short animated models rather than video, response demanded every few seconds, three exposures across three days, and mastery tests — with the same controlled language carried from early atoms into complex routines.
  9. The genuinely hard problems — transfer and problem solving (Zach points to the formats in Marcy Stein and colleagues’ Direct Instruction Mathematics), and Dylan Wiliam’s pushback that you can gather too much data if you start from the data rather than a hypothesis.
  10. Apps versus a well-designed scripted classroom such as Ollie Lovell’s explicit maths programme, the limits of motivating a child through a device (Dan Meyer’s line that no child wants to impress an app, and Peps Mccrea on harnessing peer culture), and why Zach chose a different school in the Alpha ecosystem for his own daughter, who would rather read, journal and draw.

Video:

Links from Zach:

  1. Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching — Zach Groshell’s book
  2. Progressively Incorrect — Zach’s podcast
  3. educationrickshaw.com — Zach’s blog
  4. Zach Groshell on X: @mrzachg
  5. Direct Instruction Mathematics — Marcy Stein, Diane Kinder, Jerry Silbert, Douglas Carnine and Kristen Rolf: link
  6. Motivated Teaching — Peps Mccrea, plus his Evidence Snacks newsletter: pepsmccrea.com
  7. Alpha School and the 2 Hour Learning model (discussed throughout): alpha.school and 2hourlearning.com(optional)
  8. Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast

New stuff I have been working on:

  1. My Tips for Teachers Guides to… series
  2. My updated mrbartonmnaths website

My usual plugs

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