{"id":38487,"date":"2018-07-18T16:17:05","date_gmt":"2018-07-18T20:17:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wheelock\/?post_type=profile&p=38487"},"modified":"2026-08-19T16:49:43","modified_gmt":"2026-08-19T20:49:43","slug":"thomas-mckenna","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wheelock\/profile\/thomas-mckenna\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas J. McKenna"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr. Thomas “TJ” McKenna is a clinical assistant professor of Science Education and program director for AI & Education at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development. He is also director of the Center for STEM Professional Learning at Scale<\/a> where his work reaches more than 17,000 educators across 29 states and associate director of educator engagement and impact at the AI & Education Initiative, , <\/strong>and he holds affiliated faculty status at BU’s Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing.<\/p>\n

Dr. McKenna has spent the past 20 years as a scientist, educator, on-air science communicator, and faculty member focused on what works in STEM education and how to scale it. With Sarah Michaels, he co-directs NGSX, a facilitated professional learning program that has reached more than 17,000 educators across 29 states, and he co-authored the OpenSciEd Design Specifications. He currently serves on the OpenSciEd AI Advisory Group. His current work sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence and pedagogy: he directs BU’s EdM in AI & Education<\/a> and a companion Graduate Certificate program, both launched in 2026, designing deterministic AI systems for instructional coaching, and conducting research on AI-mediated professional development.<\/p>\n

He designed and developed the NGSS AI Curriculum Coach, which runs on a deterministic knowledge-graph architecture, with no language model at runtime and full provenance for every response, and which now supports teachers in 41 states. The Phenomena Coach, used by teachers in 49 states and the District of Columbia, takes a different design path, using dialogic questioning grounded in the NRC Framework. Both deliver the knowledge infrastructure embedded in high-quality instructional materials at the moment teachers need it, in a form designed to deepen rather than bypass professional judgment, and his own experience spans the full technical stack, from content ingestion and knowledge graph construction through the coaching layer and teacher-facing interface. He is also the founder of Phenomena for NGSS<\/a>, an educational resource that has drawn more than 5.3 million views from educators and students across more than 100 countries. Dr. McKenna’s scholarly contributions include the book Making Sense of Sensemaking<\/em> (Teachers College Press & NSTA Press, 2025) and a developing theoretical framework on why the defaults of generative AI (fluency, efficiency, answer-generation) can work against the conditions that make learning possible, and what it looks like to design differently.<\/p>\n

His work has been recognized in the United States and internationally. He is an ISDDE Fellow<\/a> and a member of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI<\/a>. His international engagement includes collaborative work with researchers designing comparable systems in other national contexts, among them a team at the Center for Mathematical Modeling at the Universidad de Chile whose architecture converged independently on the same deterministic approach, alongside presentations at the ISDDE conferences in Galway and Santiago, the European Science Education Research Association conference in Copenhagen, and the University of Cambridge Workshop on Educational Dialogue in AI. He has also presented at national conferences including NARST, NSTA, and NSELA. Across two decades, his work has returned to a single question: what does it actually take to support teachers well, at scale, and over time?<\/p>\n

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