BOSTON — Following a presentation on reforming education to embrace artificial intelligence, build more flexibility into the school day, and fundamentally rethink how and where students learn, the state’s K-12 education commissioner agreed that Massachusetts “needs to be willing to embrace change.”

The Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy released an action plan for education reform on Tuesday, calling for the state to modernize schools and take advantage of new opportunities presented by technology.

“There has been widespread adoption of smartphones, Wi-Fi connected devices and modern appliances that have transformed everything in our daily lives from family dynamics to household responsibility. The world has changed, but classrooms and schools look pretty much the same,” said Rennie Center Executive Director Chad d’Entremont.

Interest in teaching as a profession has fallen among high school seniors and college freshmen to the lowest level in the last 50 years and teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, according to a Brown University study.

To make teaching a more desirable job, amidst a teacher shortage and turnover rates that have caused turmoil in schools, the center is recommending “moving away from a rigid one-teacher, one-classroom model.”

“Reevaluate the rigidity of school schedules,” said Alexis Lian, director of policy at the Rennie Center. “This could include rearranging classes to support a rotating staff model, where schools continue to operate on a five day schedule, but individual teachers may only be in a classroom for four days. This could optimize time for collaboration, shared planning and professional development opportunities.”

Lian also recommended establishing a “flexible team teaching” strategy, instead of having one teacher in charge of a class, where multiple educators with different areas of expertises are responsible for a larger cohort of students, or an entire grade.

D’Entremont said these models would give teachers more flexibility in their schedules, as their peers in other industries are able to work from home or set their own schedules around child care or other priorities outside of work.

Asked for his opinion on some of the proposals, Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Jeffrey Riley said there have been some early attempts to make teachers’ schedules less rigid.

“I had the opportunity recently to meet the people at Timely, which is a machine learning scheduling company that helps you schedule,” Riley said. “One of the examples I was given is they saved the high school something like 40 positions, because they were able to schedule better, and that allowed them to recoup that money and then use it in different ways.”

Those saved dollars were used for things like allowing teachers more paid planning time and carving out time in the schedule for teachers who had to come in later or leave earlier to drop off and pick up kids, he said.

“There’s an efficiency boom that’s coming that we need to react to. I feel like the rest of the world in business has moved to a model where we have more flexibility. It’s trickier with kids, because kids have to be supervised, but I think we can find a way to manage a process where you can give flexibility to teachers,” Riley said.

Technology

The Rennie Center also recommended more ways to integrate technology into education.

“Rather than using technology to replicate schools as they are, we should instead think about how to use technology to deepen and expand the types of learning experiences that could be,” their action plan says.

This could mean using tech to transcend geographical boundaries, by leveraging online platforms and virtual classrooms, according to the center. For example, students in rural or underserved areas could use computers as a tool to access new learning materials, virtual courses or work opportunities like internships.

“To facilitate these connections, policymakers should invest in a state learning management system or other digital platform to share resources and materials among districts and schools,” it says.

These strategies would likely need to go hand-in-hand with investment in making computers and the internet more accessible, they add.

Riley, again, seemed open to some of The Rennie Center’s ideas around integrating technology in schools when asked on Tuesday.

“We don’t need to think about the traditional brick and mortar system the same way,” Riley said. “COVID was disastrous for this country, but it actually showed us that kids — and I want to be very clear about this, I believe more likely in the middle and high schools than elementary school — can function on Zoom.”

He said he could imagine a setting where, similar to how colleges offer virtual night classes, “perhaps kids could do internships, or more enrichment during the day, and also be able to have some of their classes after typical school hours, with a teacher that needs that flexibility.”

Riley added that there was no stopping the infiltration of artificial intelligence, or AI, into the schools.

“When knowledge and information is only a click away, segregating resources and opportunities according to district borders and school assignment zones seems archaic,” d’Entremont said. “How do we rethink the stubborn assumption that learning should happen in the same way at the same time for all students?”