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A framework for K-12 education in the AI era · aiEDU Studios

• 0:00
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Hey everybody, we're here with a fully internal recording of AIEDU Studios.
• 0:10
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm Alex, co-founder, CEO.
• 0:13
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'm joined by Emma Dagenier-Gard, our chief program officer, and Kishale Narachania, our director of learning.
• 0:20
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We're going to be talking about V2 of our AI readiness framework that just released.
• 0:25
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I would only do a average job explaining it, so I figured let me actually bring the brains behind it to talk about what this document is, why it's important and how it's been guiding our own work as well as how we envision it guiding the work that educators are doing all over the country.
• 0:44
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): But why don't we just do some quick intros?
• 0:47
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): For those who don't know you, emma, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to AIEDU.
• 0:56
  Emma: Yeah, thanks, alex, it's great to be on the podcast.
• 0:57
  Emma: So I started my career as a classroom teacher.
• 1:00
  Emma: I taught eighth grade and after that I've worked at several national nonprofit and for-profit education organizations.
• 1:08
  Emma: I was at the Achievement Network for over a decade, building the program there around high-quality professional learning for educators, focus on instruction in math and literacy, high-quality assessment, design and support and thinking about district and system change.
• 1:24
  Emma: So, coming to AIEDU over a year ago, felt a very natural extension of how to support our educators and our systems in preparing all students for the age of AI.
• 1:38
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, we're very lucky to have you and we're also very lucky to have Kashali.
• 1:43
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Kashali, you're not too far from me, just across the bay just across the bay.
• 1:48
  Khushali: Um, I'm yes, I'm based out of berkeley right now.
• 1:51
  Khushali: Um, I started my career as a high school math teacher in chicago and new york and then, uh, worked at relay graduate school of education for over a decade, where we built out a teacher preparation program and I led the content instruction arm of that and into the online learning space.
• 2:10
  Khushali: How do we maintain high quality instruction in virtual spaces and reach more teachers that aren't able to go to traditional teacher prep programs?
• 2:20
  Khushali: And that has just brought me on this journey with education technology and how we can use technology tools to really amplify what teachers do best around getting to know students and supporting them in learning outcomes.
• 2:37
  Khushali: And so that's brought me here to AIADU to think about this new frontier we're on with AI readiness and supporting teachers and students in all that they need for the world ahead.
• 2:49
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And hopefully our editors are going to keep this in.
• 2:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Otherwise, viewers are going to be like why does Alex suddenly have headphones?
• 2:55
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And the answer is I forgot to put my headphones on, so we're still learning.
• 3:01
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean, we're helping teachers with their learning journey on AI and I'm on a learning journey not just on AI, but on podcast production.
• 3:09
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So we have this framework, a framework for AI readiness, or I think we call it our AI readiness framework.
• 3:16
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We released it last summer and we just released V2.
• 3:20
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Can you tell us about what the framework is?
• 3:21
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And, emma, I'll just start with you, then Gushala will let you jump in.
• 3:24
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, tell us about what the framework is and what's different about this new version that we just published.
• 3:29
  Emma: Yeah, so I think we set out originally to provide a framework to guide our work in many ways, which was creating high quality materials to build AI readiness, supporting educators in their building of capacity and supporting school systems in evolving to support all students.
• 3:52
  Emma: And then we sort of realized, well, actually this would be really useful to put out there as a tool that anyone could use essentially a model of competencies for students and for educators, and then a rubric of support for school leaders and for district leaders to define what is AI readiness and how do we take those steps to ensure all students are AI ready.
• 4:19
  Emma: So the student and the educator competencies they're intended to be across curricular areas.
• 4:24
  Emma: They're intended to really support educators in understanding what AI readiness can look like and they go beyond using AI tools.
• 4:33
  Emma: It's not just about using AI tools.
• 4:35
  Emma: It's about all of those durable skills that you need for your future.
• 4:39
  Emma: So that includes knowledge of AI and the use of the tools, but it also includes critical thinking aspects and it also includes a very important domain we call the human advantage, which is about how you leverage human skills being a lifelong learner, creativity and problem solving, that those are just as essential for the future, that those are just as essential for the future.
• 5:05
  Emma: And then, as we go to the sort of school leader and district rubrics, those are intended to be kind of a roadmap of where might you start as a district, where might you take the next step to lead the system change or the school-wide change that would support educators and students in becoming AI ready.
• 5:24
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, so, kishale, we have a new version.
• 5:26
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): What should our audience expect when they open this up, especially if they sort of were to compare the two?
• 5:34
  Khushali: Yep, so there's a lot that's changed in the last year.
• 5:37
  Khushali: There is new research out on the impacts on kind of the workforce and skills for future readiness.
• 5:44
  Khushali: There is, you know, nascent research on what LLMs and AI are doing to the brain and kind of the science of learning that goes behind using these tools, and there have been, there's just been a lot of work done in the AI literacy space in general and so we have been able to take a lot of that and really integrate that into, as Emma was, those skills, the durable skills that folks, that everybody's going to need, students, especially in the world of the future, and what that can look like in classes as a progression from K to 12.
• 6:36
  Khushali: And so that is a big change in the student competencies, along with a very clear call out of the importance of core content area skill development.
• 6:48
  Khushali: So AI readiness development doesn't happen in isolation but alongside core skills that students need to develop, and I think that's a really important thing to call out.
• 7:00
  Khushali: The other, I think, big, big changes we didn't have a school leader version of a rubric.
• 7:05
  Khushali: There was a district readiness rubric and educator competencies and school leaders are at the forefront of actually taking any district visioning and strategy and really implementing it in the school and thinking a lot about what are the instructional choices to make as a school and how do we support teachers in what the instructional pedagogy needs to be for the classes and so that in our minds like required some extra thought and care, especially on teaching and learning for the school leaders.
• 7:38
  Khushali: So those are two really big ones.
• 7:40
  Khushali: And then there's a lot of updates to the district readiness rubric to be much clearer on the criteria for success, if you will, there, as Emma was describing, the roadmap a district might take as well.
• 7:54
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, thanks, kishali, you know what you're describing.
• 7:56
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It makes a lot of sense, but I think, for our audience, this isn't the only framework that they might be aware of.
• 8:03
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): In fact, there's a lot of frameworks that either are touching on artificial intelligence and AI literacy, but then also a lot of the competencies that you described.
• 8:10
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Really durable skills is maybe one way to encapsulate them.
• 8:12
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): There are also a lot of other frameworks about that, like how does this fit in?
• 8:16
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Is it designed to kind of compete with all of those?
• 8:18
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Or you know like, if not, then you know sort of how should folks imagine it alongside those other frameworks?
• 8:24
  Khushali: Yeah, so this is not intended to compete with any of the other frameworks out there and in fact, all those other frameworks served as part of the foundational work of understanding what was out in the space, what was emphasized across all of them too.
• 8:41
  Khushali: So taking that and synthesizing a bit across all of them too.
• 8:47
  Khushali: So taking that and synthesizing a bit, and one of the things that I think the AI readiness framework from AIEDU does is really highlight the progression of learning that needs to happen across these skills so that we can see what can be happening at the elementary level, middle school level and high school level.
• 9:01
  Khushali: To, really, what does it mean to build a definition of AI over time and how nuanced does it get by high?
• 9:03
  Khushali: Really, what does it mean to build a definition of AI over time and how nuanced does it get by high school?
• 9:08
  Khushali: What does it mean to critically think about and use AI when younger kids are probably not even in the tools yet, right, and how do you still develop that critical thinking?
• 9:18
  Khushali: And so what our framework aims to do is really focus in on kind of what those student outcomes can be, and then everything else centers that.
• 9:30
  Khushali: So what are the student?
• 9:31
  Khushali: So, with those student competencies in place.
• 9:33
  Khushali: What are teacher competencies that are going to serve those?
• 9:36
  Khushali: So what do teachers need to know to be able to support students in that?
• 9:40
  Khushali: And then the district and school leader frameworks kind of set up the system to support teachers and students in achieving those.
• 9:49
  Emma: Yeah, and I just add I think every framework makes choices about what's in and what's out.
• 9:54
  Emma: We tried to make choices along a few lines.
• 9:57
  Emma: One was coherence, as Kushali was talking about, all the way up through grades, but then all the way up from students to district and the other is just practicality we didn't want this to be overwhelming and every single possible thing, but actually what are the most important things?
• 10:10
  Emma: And those are the areas that we want to continually validate from the field and from research Is this the most important thing for us to focus on?
• 10:20
  Emma: For students, educators, school leaders, district leaders?
• 10:23
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, I think the assumption for many folks is that to be AI ready, students need to be able to harness AI, and there's sort of like a logic flow from that which is okay.
• 10:37
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): The students are going to be left behind if they don't know how to use AI.
• 10:41
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Therefore, ai in education is all about how do we make sure that students have the chance to be hands-on, which then from that flows which tools do we provide students?
• 10:53
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Our framework doesn't necessarily focus on that.
• 10:59
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): In fact, I think you I would argue that you actually could see some, a lot of aspects that would inform how you do that, but there really isn't like a blueprint, for example, for here are the, here are the tools to start with.
• 11:10
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Here's sort of like um, you know how to get students hands-on and can you talk about, like, why we made that decision?
• 11:16
  Khushali: uh, the technology is rapidly changing.
• 11:19
  Khushali: Uh, what we are using now is different than what we were using a year ago, and what's going to be coming five years from now is going to be different than what we have now, and so anchoring in any particular tool shortens the longevity of what we're continue to evolve as the technology evolves and still hold true.
• 11:37
  Khushali: And so even if a school is implementing something now, that work can still hold true five years from now and it can be adaptive and flexible.
• 12:01
  Khushali: And I think if we anchor too much in very specific or prescriptive tool use or sequence of tool use, you lose that adaptability as the market keeps changing, and so we really wanted to hone in on what are those skills and what will be long lasting and still flexible as the environment changes.
• 12:26
  Emma: Yeah, I think.
• 12:26
  Emma: Additionally, you can come to a tool as a student or a teacher and you can radically misuse it, and it's not just about how you use it but about the foundational knowledge and skills you have in approaching it.
• 12:40
  Emma: There's not a lot of research, understandably, yet on the effectiveness of AI tools in classrooms because they just purely have not been around that long and our understanding of what is effective is going to evolve as that research develops, as tools are used, as we see the results for students.
• 12:58
  Emma: So, as that's progressing, I think what's most important is to focus on building that foundation so that a student educator can approach any tool with the skills and knowledge and competence to be able to use it effectively, evaluate its effectiveness, plug it in in the right place or not.
• 13:19
  Emma: Be cautious about purchasing all of those things that we want and have wanted for technology and education, you know, for many, many years.
• 13:29
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, and the case in point I remember when our team was huddling and trying to decide whether to create a, you know, specific learning series around using ChatGBG for kids, and we shied away from it, in part because, you know, when we were talking to the technologists at the time, everybody was really focusing on how do you prompt engineer?
• 13:50
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And they were like prompt engineering Bibles being not just published but sold for which is totally snake oil, I think but, um, that the idea is okay, let's teach people to become prompt engineers.
• 14:01
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And there were even folks saying like prompt engineer might be a job of the future.
• 14:05
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And then, you know, in the last eight months we've had the release of these reasoning models and if you've used Gemini or chat, gpt, you can actually click a button and see the prompting process and the model is literally prompting itself.
• 14:20
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So a lot of the things that we would have been teaching in like a prompt engineering class are now being performed by the ai and it's actually a little bit more about um, it's a little more subtle actually, the, the qualities I'm like.
• 14:35
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I want to sort of hone in on that because, you know, in the competencies for students and teachers I actually see a lot of common threads that are even relevant to organizations that are trying to think about, you know, ai transformation, and I'll put our own organization in the spotlight.
• 14:49
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean, one of the things that we've been really sort of grappling with is, you know, our team isn't just AI literate, we build AI literacy content and yet that hasn't necessarily translated to everybody, is now a power user of AI and everything is AI automated.
• 15:04
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think there's like some folks on the teams who have actually been like vibe coding and building amazing stuff, and there are others who are still more in experimentation mode.
• 15:12
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Are there any parallels in terms of like just even some of the approaches that we have internally to some of that change management that might be relevant to educators, or like system leaders who are thinking about like how do I, you know, bring my school or my district into sort of like this, like AI forward posture?
• 15:27
  Emma: Yeah, I mean, I think A lot of it's tied to what's your approach to change management and how do you think about change management in a very rapidly changing technology space.
• 15:39
  Emma: So sometimes traditional change management has been try something small, pilot it, learn lessons, roll it out to more people.
• 15:48
  Emma: I think in the age of AI, that might be insufficient because by the time you've piloted something, everything has changed.
• 15:55
  Emma: So it's not you're rolling out to a fixed endpoint.
• 15:58
  Emma: You're actually constantly understanding new and novel things.
• 16:01
  Emma: So there's more of like a design thinking, problem solving, deploying creativity.
• 16:07
  Emma: That's necessary for people to try and experiment.
• 16:10
  Emma: But in order to do that effectively, you need some basic understandings.
• 16:15
  Emma: So it's easy to play around with chat, gpt for 20 minutes and then kind of run into like a okay, that was fun, it was kind of like a good gimmick.
• 16:24
  Emma: But in order to actually transform work or transform the outcomes, you need to have some vision of okay.
• 16:33
  Emma: Let me actually critically understand where this could be helpful, what the capabilities are, how I?
• 16:38
  Emma: You know we have a competency in the framework that's called determining responsible use.
• 16:43
  Emma: It says critically assess the appropriateness of using AI for new problems and include the ethical implications.
• 16:50
  Emma: So we think about that in the context of our own work of is this the right thing to use AI for?
• 16:55
  Emma: You might think about talent management.
• 16:58
  Emma: Is it right to use AI to screen resumes or not?
• 17:01
  Emma: Why, when?
• 17:02
  Emma: How should you be doing that?
• 17:04
  Emma: So I think there's a lot more critical thought when you take AI use from just playing around and kind of a gimmick and a showy thing to actually thinking about how it might embed in an organization.
• 17:16
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean, would you say folks shouldn't be using AI to screen resumes?
• 17:23
  Emma: I don't think we do that we don't, but I think it's an interesting question, you know, like does it pick up on the right things?
• 17:29
  Emma: Is that equitable, is it fair?
• 17:30
  Emma: People are using AI to write resumes.
• 17:32
  Emma: So yeah, you know, I think those are the questions actually you need to debate as an organization.
• 17:38
  Emma: It takes a huge amount of human time to screen resumes as an example, but does AI get it right?
• 17:44
  Emma: Is that fair to candidates applying?
• 17:46
  Emma: So I think there are those kinds of debates across functions and for a school district.
• 17:51
  Emma: I mean, that's exactly what I think is coming up all over districts, which is it's not just about the classroom, it's also about the function of the district, the internal operations of a district, how you run a school.
• 18:04
  Emma: And where does AI plug in and for what purpose?
• 18:08
  Emma: It's not always to gain efficiency, sometimes it is, sometimes it's accuracy, sometimes it's combining information or data in ways that is very laborious or you can't really do in other mechanisms.
• 18:20
  Emma: So all of that is applying critical thought to its deployment and application, and that's more than just buying a tool or adopting a tool.
• 18:30
  Emma: It's actually kind of a strategy.
• 18:33
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I feel like you stonewalled a little bit.
• 18:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You know, like I don't.
• 18:36
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think this is actually like the difficulty of that question of like should we use AI and screen resumes?
• 18:43
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Comes in part with like many companies have been using not necessarily language models but machine learning to screen resumes.
• 18:50
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): In fact, if you, anybody who's like, heard the tip, like, oh, just add a bunch of words and sort of like white font to the bottom of your resume so that they can like, get picked up by, like the resume scanners.
• 19:00
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So I think what you just described is yeah, it is more complicated, but it actually is more complicated Like there's, there's a lot that you have to digest and while that isn't as neat, as it's like a neatly, as like a nicely packaged, as like single decision which is like what tool do we buy?
• 19:15
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Um, that's kind of that is the only sort of path forward, is sort of like this much more broad-based organizational change management yeah, project, and it's hard, but it has to be done and the schools that do it and start moving are going to have a huge, you know, leg up, because this is still sort of like the early, the early days.
• 19:36
  Emma: Yeah, and I think those that are moving are, you know, see it as a priority from from the top of the organization.
• 19:41
  Emma: So they're they have a champion, like there is a champion, and often they're putting in place people who whose role, at least in part of course not all all systems have a whole, you know person worth of time to put towards this, but have some leadership of like okay, this is an intentional strategy and an intentional change management project and we need to think about what are our approaches and where are the experiments happening and how do we not have really great experimenting with lots of different tools and now are finding themselves saying, oh, wait, wait, wait, a minute.
• 20:17
  Emma: Now we need to rein it in a little bit and have a strategy.
• 20:19
  Emma: And I think there are some on the other end who are so hesitant to try things they maybe haven't had enough experimentation.
• 20:25
  Emma: So it's, as a leader, so difficult to strike that balance between experimentation and rapid change and sort of strategy that is going to make sense for the sort of entity.
• 20:39
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, I mean I feel like if I was a superintendent, I probably would have had an AI ban and I probably would have gotten a lot of heat for it, but I think it's.
• 20:45
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think the schools that have actually like literally banned AI are not necessarily in a bad place.
• 20:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): The question is, you're going to have to do something next, like a ban on AI only makes sense as a to just buy yourself time to sort of set the strategy and the vision.
• 21:02
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean Kishale, just like with an eye towards you know what does it actually look like?
• 21:08
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You know you've been helping us build and grow our AI Trailblazer Fellowship, which is I'll let you describe it, you can describe it better than me.
• 21:15
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): But I'm curious.
• 21:16
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): You know we had this framework, the V1 of the framework, last year.
• 21:19
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Was it valuable at all in, you know, in the professional learning cohorts that we were running with Trailblazers?
• 21:26
  Khushali: The Trailblazers program is a wonderful program.
• 21:29
  Khushali: It's in our third year now where we bring on teachers who are in the field and kind of at the forefront of the AI work and thinking in their schools and wanting to bring AI literacy to their classrooms in particular.
• 21:43
  Khushali: And so we it is a paid fellowship.
• 21:46
  Khushali: We value our teachers time, implement our curriculum, give us great feedback on it, get us examples of what it can look like in the classroom to use some of our curricular products, like the snapshots or the explorations, which none of which require AI tools, because, again, it's anchored on what is that critical thinking or conversation or collaboration that we want to spark with students that has them then be able to apply that in other situations or develop deeper skills from there as well.
• 22:17
  Khushali: And so this fellowship has given us great feedback on what works well in classes, what teachers are looking for, what students really respond well to and helps us evolve our curricular products.
• 22:31
  Khushali: And the feedback from fellows has been so, so great and like they are so satisfied with it because it is a space for them to develop their own skill for how to have these conversations with students, to be able to then have training on the content that we're providing the curriculum we're providing like?
• 22:54
  Khushali: What does a snapshot look like?
• 22:56
  Khushali: How can you facilitate it?
• 22:57
  Khushali: What student responses should you be looking for and how does that evolve over time?
• 23:01
  Khushali: And then being able to share with one another.
• 23:04
  Khushali: They film themselves, they get to watch each other in action, and I think that's one of the most powerful ways for teachers to learn together is to be able to see in action what this content could look like and see it across the country in different school contexts, et cetera.
• 23:20
  Khushali: And so the framework has helped us be able to zero in on what specific aspects of the teacher training do we want to hone in on in developing their fluency with how to talk about the content, how to facilitate these discussions and then creating opportunities for students to be able to have these conversations as well.
• 23:41
  Khushali: And then what our curriculum should focus on, so that there are easy entries for all teachers and the ability to do a variety of activities with students and start embedding into their curriculum as well.
• 23:59
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, I mean you mentioned sort of curriculum development, which I think is such a cool aspect of Trailblazers is actually informing AIEDU's curriculum strategy.
• 24:08
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean, emma, I remember the conversation that you and I had it was months ago now, but where you were basically like, hey, based on the framework and some of the feedback that we've been getting, like I actually think there's a really specific shift that we need to make in terms of the stuff we build.
• 24:24
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Next, we just published our elementary explorations, which we're getting tons of great feedback on.
• 24:29
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, what was the shift?
• 24:32
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And sort of like, what prompted you, kind of like, making that decision?
• 24:36
  Emma: Yeah, we were getting a lot of feedback which was you know, these, these curricular pieces are great.
• 24:41
  Emma: They feel like not enough to actually build a literacy because they're kind of scattershot.
• 24:48
  Emma: So like, how do I actually use these?
• 24:51
  Emma: And we were also getting a lot of feedback from core content area teachers which was saying I don't really have like a lot of extra time to start doing AI readiness lessons, and so part of what we're doing now is thinking about, you know, core content.
• 25:08
  Emma: Teachers have a curriculum.
• 25:09
  Emma: Often they have really high quality instructional materials which is excellent.
• 25:12
  Emma: That's been built over many years, they've been trained in them, they're used to them.
• 25:16
  Emma: They're making modifications to them to fit their students.
• 25:18
  Emma: Why don't we build AI readiness right into the core areas pieces that you can kind of like embed within what you're already doing that actually highlight and build some of these skills right within a class that all students are taking.
• 25:41
  Emma: It provides more equitable access to this content.
• 25:43
  Emma: Again, it's not about using a particular tool or even having AI to do the lessons.
• 25:48
  Emma: It's about highlighting some of those key foundational skills and saying this is really necessary for how we think about the future skills you'll need in life and work and aspects of it, like that.
• 26:01
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think one of my own growths in and really with Emma and Kishali, with your like one of the things you have helped me to see is AI readiness actually is grounded in a lot of the stuff that we've already been teaching in schools, or at least the stuff that we've talked about wanting to be teaching in school.
• 26:18
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So, like, first of all, durable skills none of that is new.
• 26:21
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Maybe they were called 21st century skills or durable skills, or social, emotional skills, or digital literacy, media literacy, like remixing that and like sort of layering in the AI context.
• 26:33
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And then you know core subjects like math, english science, social studies.
• 26:38
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think teachers in those subjects are asking themselves the question of is English language arts relevant now that AI can write?
• 26:48
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's not as good at math.
• 26:49
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): So I think math teachers maybe have a little bit more time before they're feeling that what you were describing is no, actually English is more important than ever because A there's all these underlying skills that you also build in English the ability to form an argument and sort of advocate for that argument, the ability to structure your thoughts and to whether it's an essay or other written you know writing products.
• 27:15
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Are teachers surprised by that?
• 27:20
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean, do you find that teachers are often coming and assuming that what they need to learn is maybe more transformative than what we actually are prescribing?
• 27:26
  Emma: Yeah, I mean it is sort of like oh wait, a minute.
• 27:29
  Emma: Critical thinking is not something we just came up with that we thought would be a good idea.
• 27:34
  Emma: It's more like it's sort of more important than ever.
• 27:36
  Emma: Imagine coming to an essay and not being able to critically evaluate whether it's high quality.
• 27:43
  Emma: So that really puts you at a disadvantage, because now you know, although AI can write a great critical essay, you need even more so those skills of thinking, analysis, understanding that we've always wanted to build in literacy.
• 27:59
  Emma: We've always wanted to build in math.
• 28:01
  Emma: I mean, the math practice standards already articulate a lot of those kind of durable problem-solving, persistence through productive struggle type of skills.
• 28:10
  Emma: Those are critical in the age of AI and approaching AI.
• 28:15
  Emma: So I think teachers are kind of relieved like, oh wait, maybe this puts just more emphasis on some of those things that we've thought are the right things to teach.
• 28:25
  Emma: And still, you know, I'd say like we don't fully know, like I don't think anyone has a completely developed vision for what it looks like in the literacy classroom of the future to have AI tools to teach writing and critical analysis, to be strong readers.
• 28:44
  Emma: Nobody has yet the full vision of what that could look like in order to be the most relevant and the most prepared students for the future.
• 28:54
  Emma: So that's what we all need to evolve Like as an education community.
• 28:57
  Emma: That's the kind of thinking and problem solving we need to do together, but be open to.
• 29:02
  Emma: It's not sort of black and white, it's not.
• 29:04
  Emma: Oh well, ai can write now, so we don't need to teach writing.
• 29:06
  Emma: Or, you know, ai can research, so we don't need to teach research skills.
• 29:10
  Emma: I think that's far too simplistic.
• 29:14
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I think one of the most fundamental questions that everybody is probably asking or maybe they don't, you don't realize that you're asking it deep down which is it feels wrong to over-rely on the AI.
• 29:27
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Like when you use AI to write something and the example that one of our advisors, michelle Culver, I think really poignantly uses like if someone writes a birthday message for you and sends you this like really long, very kind, thoughtful birthday message and that was written by AI, you know how does that make you feel?
• 29:44
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And most people, I think, respond they're like ah, it's like doesn't feel as personal.
• 29:48
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): But then there's even more, maybe fundamental things about am I going to lose my craft and my ability to write effectively if I'm over-relying and sort of like developing this almost like crutch, because I'm curious how like the learning team has encountered this?
• 30:12
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Because you know, a lot of folks ask me like, oh, are you just using AI to write all of your curriculum now?
• 30:14
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And I'm pretty sure the answer is it could write stuff that looks like curriculum, but I mean, has it just replaced the way we go about creating curriculum?
• 30:23
  Khushali: No, not at all, because this is part of, I mean, what Emma was talking about how we're innovating within our team is thinking about where can we actually use AI effectively and how do we do that.
• 30:36
  Khushali: And initial drafts from any AI tool we've used for any curriculum have been terrible, like they're not good because it's just the initial draft right and it doesn't understand the full, like you can't get the full context and the nuances that you need in the design.
• 30:54
  Khushali: But with a lot of our expertise we can craft.
• 30:59
  Khushali: Like here are the things that we want to focus on.
• 31:01
  Khushali: Here are some of the strategies instructional strategies we want to make sure are captured in curriculum, and here's how we would want to format the timing.
• 31:11
  Khushali: Like these are things that require our designers to understand and know well, because that is not something that an AI tool is going to generate on its own, and so, but there's really really great tools that have kind of helped us be able to synthesize a lot of like headlines from major high quality instructional material, curricula of what, what are like the key concepts.
• 31:38
  Khushali: And if we read the curriculum, do we agree with that?
• 31:41
  Khushali: And if that's the case, then what does that mean for what we can build towards, and so I think there's a lot of capacity for us to like keep increasing what we're producing.
• 31:52
  Khushali: But it requires so much thinking and review and scrapping lots of things which, at the end of the day, quite frankly, if we just sat down and designed ourselves the old fashioned way, we do it a lot faster right, because we have these skills kind of embedded into the work that we do already.
• 32:13
  Khushali: But it's actually thinking about how do you create tools or use tools in ways that could then accelerate the work later for you, which requires deep expertise in the build and the way in which you interact with it and how you're reviewing any of the outputs that come out of it.
• 32:30
  Khushali: And so I think any teacher will say the same thing.
• 32:33
  Khushali: You put in a request for a lesson plan from you know ChatGPT, it'll look fine, and to somebody who doesn't know good teaching or doesn't know the standards, they'll be like oh yeah, that seems maybe plausible.
• 32:45
  Khushali: But then you get into it and you're like this is not aligned to a standard.
• 32:50
  Khushali: There is no like learning outcome at the end of this.
• 32:53
  Khushali: The practice is generic and not aligned, and I have nothing to do with any of my students that need any supports and so and that, I think, is what I keep coming back to where it's just, when you have the expertise, you're able to have that critical eye, and how do you keep honing that as the tools evolve and you like, you're able to do more with them as well?
• 33:20
  Emma: yeah, I mean I think every teacher's had the experience of googling like I need a lesson plan on this thing.
• 33:24
  Emma: I'm like 50 hits pop up now.
• 33:27
  Emma: It's just that there's like so that's so fast, much faster, and there's so much more access to that.
• 33:33
  Emma: But teachers have that critical eye.
• 33:35
  Emma: They've always been able to go look at those and be like, well, that's not going to work and like that's sort of half a lesson plan, so that's not a good like use of AI, necessarily it's you know, or at least what do you need to feed it, what context, what thinking?
• 33:51
  Emma: And I do think, like, as the models get better with their memory, with their, you know, collection of information, that will evolve too, and so we might be saying something different down the road.
• 34:02
  Emma: But I think right now the only reason we're able to look at something a tool spits out and say, well, that actually isn't aligned to the standard is because we have that knowledge and expertise ourselves.
• 34:12
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, because people ask me like, oh, like, like, have you, have you changed the way that you hire?
• 34:15
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Are you looking for people that are basically um, ai experts or ai power users?
• 34:20
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): And I mean, I think, across the board, the answer is no, it's like you, you actually you, you, the top priority is someone that really understands what good looks like, like, what is a good lesson plan.
• 34:33
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Um, because that's the hardest thing to teach.
• 34:37
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's not something you can just sort of.
• 34:38
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Well, we're not.
• 34:39
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We're not an organization that just wants to experiment and sort of experiment on kids so that people can learn on the job, and I think there's analogs to that in so many other domains, even outside, even within education, but even outside of education, which I think is heartening.
• 34:51
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): It's like, yes, the world is going to, but I think there's already so much disruption that educators don't, they're not eager for more and more disruption, like it's a disruption sort of happening to them, and so the more that we can show how this is actually connected to the things they already understand and actually center their expertise in a way that doesn't make them feel like they're sort of out of their element, which the tech community is very bad about this making everybody feel like they're outsiders and like using sort of terminology to create sort of like barriers.
• 35:22
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Anything that you would close with, so you know this is it's not too long of a document, but there's a lot in there.
• 35:27
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Um, someone might have even, while they've been listening to this, downloaded it and maybe perusing through it, um, you know, maybe speaking to a couple of different personas, whether, like, maybe it's like a district leader, or like an individual teacher, maybe a parent, you know what are the next steps once they've sort of read through the document and are trying to figure out, like, what should I be doing?
• 35:47
  Emma: Yeah, and I would say you know, just first of all, like we come to this with a humility and a mindset of like this is evolving.
• 35:52
  Emma: We are learning from practitioners who are out there trying things, figuring things out every day.
• 35:59
  Emma: So first, I would just encourage anyone who's reading or listening to have that same critical eye and openness to learn, because this is not the be all end all.
• 36:09
  Emma: I'm sure there will be a version three, there will be many more takes on what to do, what not to do, but for now I would say, certainly from a district leadership perspective, I'd go into that district rubric and sort of look at the domains and ask, you know, ask yourself the question like, oh, have we sort of taken steps in this area in our district and what have those steps looked like?
• 36:28
  Emma: And what have we learned from what we've already done?
• 36:30
  Emma: Because there are so many things that everybody's already done, so what have you learned?
• 36:34
  Emma: And then, where in here resonates is kind of a high leverage next step, and that's really what this is intended to be, which is what's my highest leverage next move here, and maybe it's that you know what I feel like we've done some great internal learning, but we haven't really galvanized our community in a way that they understand what we've done A really high leverage.
• 36:53
  Emma: Next step might be along the lines of communicating, engaging, reaching out, getting more input.
• 36:59
  Emma: So that's really how I would approach it from a district perspective.
• 37:05
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Kashal.
• 37:05
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I mean, you mentioned that we've referenced a bunch of other sort of materials.
• 37:08
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): What are some examples of, you know, like frameworks or organizations that we were looking to as we built this?
• 37:14
  Khushali: Examples of, you know, like frameworks, organizations that we were looking to as we built this.
• 37:17
  Khushali: Yeah, I mean there's so many.
• 37:17
  Khushali: I think.
• 37:18
  Khushali: Digital Promise has an AI literacy framework that came out last year.
• 37:20
  Khushali: There's the UNESCO framework as well, and then there's the AI Lit framework that just recently came out and kind of AI for K-12 that have some five big ideas that we've looked at as well.
• 37:30
  Khushali: 12 that have some five big ideas that we've looked at as well, and Common Sense Media also recently released a AI toolkit that has incredible resources as well and really like harnessing what's already out there for what districts are doing for implementing.
• 37:47
  Khushali: So those are just some of the frameworks that are out there right now, and we've had some really great reviewers of our content.
• 37:56
  Khushali: We had folks from TNTP who have such a great eye for what does it mean to have competencies and kind of building that learning, and that have reviewed this work for us in this round in particular and in our prior round, and so those are, and we've had reviewers from the other organizations look through the content as well.
• 38:20
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, I just encourage folks to go to the check out the framework for the full list of all the folks and organizations that we've been tapping, and if there are other resources out there that we missed, drop us a line.
• 38:34
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): We're you know, one of our competencies is, you know, continual learning, and we are continually learning as we do this and that's why we've been releasing it sort of in versions.
• 38:43
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): Yeah, kishali, emma, thank you so much for joining.
• 38:47
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I know it's a busy week.
• 38:48
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): I'll let you get to all the stuff you're doing, but I really appreciate you tuning in.
• 38:54
  Emma: Thanks and thanks for listening and yeah, again, just echoing Alex, drop us a line, share your feedback.
• 38:59
  Emma: We just love to hear from folks about how they're using this and what their reactions are to make it better, so appreciate it all.
• 39:04
  Khushali: There's a human behind the learning at AIEDU email, so we are eager to hear from you all.
• 39:11
  Alex Kotran (aiEDU): All right, excellent, thanks, team.