Insights - About

INSiGHTS is an infrastructure for developing pedagogical knowledge emerging from educational practice. The platform is grounded in the understanding that the most meaningful knowledge about teaching and learning is found not only in formal research or written curricula, but also — and perhaps primarily — in stories from educational practice that express knowledge derived from experience. However, such knowledge often remains local, context-dependent, and difficult to share and transfer. INSiGHTS was designed to bridge this gap.

How Do Local Stories Become Broader Knowledge?

In INSiGHTS, knowledge is not collected as isolated cases; rather, it is constructed as a knowledge map of reasoned connections between stories from practice and pedagogical principles. These principles are grounded in research in the learning sciences and education and are formulated in a concise and accessible manner that enables connections between research-based knowledge and concrete situations from practice.

Knowledge as an Encounter Between Perspectives

The knowledge developed within INSiGHTS emerges through encounters among diverse perspectives-including those of teachers, school leaders, educational researchers, scientists, and additional partners in educational practice. This integration enables stories to be interpreted from multiple viewpoints and supports deeper understanding.

Scaling Educational Innovation

When knowledge is constructed as a network of connections, it can evolve and expand over time. INSiGHTS supports the scaling of educational innovation and the expansion of the community of participants who build upon existing knowledge.

Grassroots of the approach

The INSiGHTS approach and platform emerged from our work at the Taking Citizen Science to School (TCSS) network of research practice partnerships (RPPs). We found that valuable insights are generated within individual RPPs but tend not to circulate or scale across the broader network. INSiGHTS was developed to address this and foster network-wide learning within networks of RPPs.
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Development and Research

INSiGHTS was developed within the research group of Yael Kali through a grant from the Israel Science Foundation (ISF). The platform continues to evolve through ongoing collaboration with educational communities in Israel and around the world.

Storytelling with Artificial Intelligence

Storytelling with artificial intelligence is designed to support the transformation of educational experience into a story that can be shared, examined, and learned from. Through guided dialogue and focused questions, AI helps users reconstruct concrete events, identify the key participants and actions, and focus on meaningful moments within the story.

The aim is not to write the story on behalf of the users, but to support a process in which personal and professional knowledge is articulated in a clear and structured form. The AI is not intended to add details that were not provided, and the story remains grounded in the voice, perspective, and experience of the person who lived through the events. In this sense, AI serves a role similar to that of an interviewer or facilitator: helping to clarify, focus, and organize knowledge that emerges from experience.

Connecting Pedagogical Principles to a story with Artificial Intelligence

Once the story has been written, artificial intelligence supports its examination in relation to the pedagogical principles accumulated in the INSiGHTS repository. It identifies possible connections between actions and moments described in the story and broader pedagogical ideas, and presents these connections to users as a basis for examination and discussion.

The suggested connections are not final determinations or automatic labels. Rather, they are intended to serve as a starting point for shared interpretation: users can confirm a connection, refine it, reject it, or suggest additional connections that were not identified. In this way, knowledge emerging from educational practice can be connected with the pedagogical and conceptual knowledge accumulating in the repository.

Together, these two processes support complementary stages in the creation of knowledge in INSiGHTS. The first helps transform professional experience into knowledge that can be shared and examined; the second helps situate that knowledge within a broader pedagogical framework. Artificial intelligence does not replace human interpretation or judgment, but serves as a tool for supporting reflection, clarification, and the creation of connections among knowledge, experience, and different perspectives.