A 10th grader walked into class with a primary source he’d found himself — something no textbook, sourcebook, or teacher had put in front of him — and wanted to know if it was reliable.

For nearly three years, Jacob Pinnolis has been exploring a central question in education: Can AI accelerate student learning without undermining the skills we’re trying to build? This past year, teaching a 10th grade class on modern Jewish history, he put that question to the test.

Finding genuine primary sources is normally a graduate-level skill — well beyond what a typical high schooler can do alone. So students are usually handed curated sourcebooks or teacher-selected documents. It works, but it comes at a cost: Everything they read has already been filtered by someone else’s judgment, which quietly limits not just what they see, but what they’re able to think.

This study tried something different. Students were trained to use AI as a research assistant, then asked to dig deep into a topic of their choosing within the history of the Shoah — applying real historical thinking skills like sourcing and contextualizing to analyze what they found and draw their own conclusions.

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In his talk, Pinnolis will share actual student work from the project — the sources they uncovered, the arguments they built — as a window into what becomes possible when AI removes the research bottleneck and students are trusted to think for themselves.

Pinnolis has been teaching for over 40 years, beginning as a professor of analytic philosophy at UC Berkeley, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the University of Florida before retraining as a high school teacher of Tanakh. He has taught in New York and at Gann Academy, and later moved into coaching teachers and administrative roles overseeing faculty and curriculum — while always keeping at least one class of his own, using it as a lab for new ideas and a way to bring educational research directly into the classroom.

The Walnut Street Minyan Speaker Series is delighted to host Pinnolis as our next speaker on Aug. 23 at 858 Walnut St.

Doors will open at 7 p.m. and Jacob’s presentation will begin at 7:30. After the talk, there’ll be noshes to eat and time to schmooze!

All are welcome.

Register here.

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