#376 – Elevating Educational Design With AI, with Dr. Catlin Tucker

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

• How have you used AI as a thought partner in lesson design?
• How can AI help teachers level up?
• Why is it important that teachers have a strong understanding of pedagogy when interacting with an AI chatbot to design lessons?
• How can AI be used to help design rubrics?
• How might AI save teachers time?
• What is an AI strategy that you’d like to try?

• Dr. Catlin Tucker (official website)
• Novak Education (official website)

#376 Elevating Educational Design With AI, with Dr. Catlin Tucker

AVID Open Access
43 min

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Introduction

Dr. Catlin Tucker (0:00): Even educators who are like, “Okay, some of this isn’t working. I want to reimagine it. I’m open to doing things differently.” A lot of the barrier to change is just time and a lack of time.

Rena Clark (0:13): The topic of today’s podcast is elevating educational design with AI, with Dr. Catlin Tucker. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes that every learner can develop student agency. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann (0:45): I’m Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin (0:47): And I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann (0:51): And we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Opening Quote

Rena Clark (0:55): Education is our passport to the future. Our quote for today is from Dr. Caitlin Tucker and Dr. Katie Novak in the opening of their new book, Elevating Educational Design with AI. They write:

“To all the brilliant educators out there, don’t fear the robots. Together, we can use AI to level up, but the heart of teaching will always be human.”

I just love that quote. So I’m wondering what our responses will be today. Winston or Paul?

Winston Benjamin (1:30): I’ll jump in. I’m not even going to touch the “brilliant educators” part, because I agree—all of us are brilliant. I mean, I agree with that. But the part that I really want to speak to is the “always be human.”

When I first started learning about teaching, it was always called an art and a science. And I love the fact that it’s a science—there is data that we can use to make decisions, to do a lot of things. But there is an art form to the human connection, the humanity of the work. Just the pieces of this stroke, this particular splash, makes it just unique in itself.

So for me, I think it really captures the idea of this being an art. Yes, you can master the idea and study, but you have to be your individual human self. And that is why we’re brilliant—because we’re individual humans, and that makes us brilliant. So that’s how I see this quote.

Paul Beckermann (2:30): Well, somehow I knew you were going to touch on the human part, Winston, so I’ll take the other part—the AI part—and it’s the leveling up. Because as educators, aren’t we always trying to level up? We’re always trying to do a better job, and we use whatever we can to make that happen.

And right now, the new tool in the toolbox happens to be AI. And it can be scary because it’s a little disruptive. It’s the new thing. There’s a little bit of unknown. But almost every change is disruptive in some way, and I think we need to embrace the opportunity that it can give us to level up while staying human.

Rena Clark (3:09): And the one thing that’s never going to change is that there’s always going to be change.

Dr. Catlin Tucker (3:16): Only confident.

Rena Clark (3:17): Yes. And so I know that our whole team is very excited to welcome back Dr. Catlin Tucker. So excited for you to join us yet again.

Catlin is an educational expert, a bestselling author, international speaker, with more than 24 years of experience in education. Catlin has written over 10 books on innovative approaches to teaching and learning, and then she also hosts her own podcast, the popular podcast called The Balance, which explores strategies to make teaching and learning more sustainable and impactful. So after you listen to us, head over there and check it out.

Just welcome back, Catlin. We’re so glad for you to join us.

Dr. Catlin Tucker (4:04): Yeah, thank you for inviting me. It’s always great to come and get to chat with you.

The Book: Elevating Educational Design with AI

Rena Clark (4:09): I know I’m really excited to dig in and talk about your new book that just recently came out that you co-wrote with Dr. Katie Novak called Elevating Educational Design with AI. So if you could just give our audience a very brief overview of the book—who it’s written for, what audience, anything you’d like to share, maybe some of the inspiration behind it?

Dr. Catlin Tucker (4:32): Yes. Well, I’ll start with the inspiration. I work with so many educators who are well aware that some of the traditional approaches to designing and facilitating learning really aren’t working for their students, and they’re really not yielding the results that they, quite frankly, want in their classrooms.

And yet, even educators who are like, “Okay, some of this isn’t working. I want to reimagine it. I’m open to doing things differently”—a lot of the barrier to change is just time, a lack of time, and maybe a little bit of a lack of confidence around designing with new instructional models that happen to leverage technology strategically.

So when AI exploded on the scene, I started seeing a lot of little reels on Instagram and TikTok and messages on Twitter and stuff. And I got a little nervous, because really what I was seeing was educators saying things like, “Oh my gosh, I found this crazy tool. All you have to do is put in a standard or copy and paste a learning objective and it spits out a lesson. Or you can even have it create an entire unit for you in seconds.”

And I was like, “Oh, I don’t know if I like this.” I don’t want to shift the thinking and the creativity—to Winston’s point, this is part science, it’s part art. I don’t want AI taking the reins to design lessons that, quite frankly, are the same kind of lessons that a lot of us have been using for our entire careers: that one-size-fits-all, teacher-led lesson that we had no hand in designing.

So I was really wrestling with, “How do I position AI in relation to my work?” I didn’t want to just start sharing about a bunch of tools, because I remember early days in the ed tech explosion going to ISTE, and the most popular session was like “50 tools in 50 minutes.” And I was like, “Okay, but how do I use these? And why would I use these? And what’s the pedagogical foundation for the use of this particular tool?”

And so that’s where I came up with the concept for this book. I really wanted to help create a resource that would guide teachers, curriculum designers, school leaders, thinking through the process of: How do we take AI so that we can design with a higher level of intentionality to better serve the growing diversity in our classrooms?

So that was really where it started. And then, as always, it’s an early morning text to Katie, and she’s always so game to jump on board and work with me, which is a gift.

The Role of Pedagogical Principles

Paul Beckermann (7:13): I love that you talked about not wanting to just pump out the same thing that we’ve always had—a one-size-fits-all—and that you just don’t put in a prompt and blindly take what comes back at you. That being said, there is a role for using generative AI in lesson planning.

But can you talk about how having that first deep understanding of pedagogical principles is such an important part of that interaction? And how does that play together when you’re working with a chatbot in that way?

Dr. Catlin Tucker (7:46): Yeah. So really, what Katie and I did was we pulled together some of the totally established design approaches. We have backward design by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins, and so really starting from that higher-level view of, “Hey, let’s start with the end in mind. Let’s articulate a clear destination or desired result for the learning, and then let’s immediately design an assessment that’s going to help us measure progress toward that.”

And since we’re talking about me and Katie, of course, it’s going to be an assessment that offers multiple pathways for students to express and demonstrate and communicate their learning.

And then the next tier is, once we have that overview of “This is where the unit is headed. This is the destination for the learners. This is the clear assessment strategy that we’re going to use that offers flexible pathways,” now we’re going to get into universally designing the lessons themselves—really trying to proactively remove barriers, using data strategically, giving students agency, differentiating based on pre-assessment data.

But Katie and I work with teachers all the time who go through that process, and you still never know how it’s going to land for kids. Some kids are going to make really incredible progress and need additional challenge, and some kids are going to stall and they’re going to struggle and they’re going to need more.

So then the next layer under that is, “How are we being responsive to student needs?” Really getting into personalized learning and responding to what we’re seeing as they make progress toward learning objectives.

And the final part was really, “Are we also thinking about, as we work with learners, how we’re helping them build resilience? Are they adaptable? Are they persevering? And how do you build that into the design of lessons itself?”

So we pulled from backward design. We pulled from Universal Design. We pulled from CASEL social-emotional learning to really give teachers a more comprehensive approach to designing learning experiences.

Paul Beckermann (9:52): So I want to ask a follow-up question about that, because when I was reading your book, you definitely framed your questions around those concepts. And you asked for those things to be included, but it seemed like you were never satisfied with the first, second, third, fourth iteration of it. So how does knowledge of those things change the interaction with the chatbot in that way?

Dr. Catlin Tucker (10:16): Yeah, so part of it is just learning how to craft your prompts. A lot of teachers that I work with, even now, still don’t have a ton of experience working with a chatbot to really design learning experiences.

So when you put in a prompt, even when you tell the chatbot, “Hey, I want you to assume the role of a curriculum designer, and this is exactly what I want you to do, or the question I want you to answer. And this is my student population, my grade level, my subject area,” it might spit something out that you’re like, “Hmm.”

And this is where your expertise as the educator becomes incredibly important. Is this actually targeting the standard, the skill, the concept that you asked it to target? Because sometimes it’s a little off, and you need to nudge it to go again, to take a different direction.

So it’s really about our ability to evaluate the product, given what we know about our subject area, given what we know about our student population, and then giving the chatbot feedback, saying, “Hey, I like this, but I don’t like this over here,” or “Hey, I’ve got kids who are really artistic. Can I get an artistic option?”

And so there is a lot of back and forth. But what I tell educators is, the most exciting thing about treating AI as a design thought partner is it never gets mad. It never gets frustrated. You just keep asking it to generate more or something different or going in another direction, and it does.

Crafting Effective Prompts

Winston Benjamin (11:45): Looking at it, reviewing the lessons—that all makes sense to me. That’s in my practice. I’m going to ask you a question that may help some people think a little bit differently.

How do you craft the questions? What are some of the key things that, as a beginner or intermediate, I may need to think about as I’m asking AI to do a second iteration, third iteration? How do I think about crafting the questions or the prompts for AI to help me enhance lessons to support student engagement, all of the things that I know that are valuable in education? How do I think through designing and implementing those prompts that could help me design that lesson? If that makes sense.

Dr. Catlin Tucker (12:34): That’s a great question. So in the book, we do model and share some of the—we have to strike an interesting balance, because we didn’t want the whole book to be us interacting with a chatbot. So we try to model and we include some examples of prompts.

But when I work with teachers, and we’re talking about “How do you approach engineering an AI prompt? What should they be thinking about?” I tend to use the acronym REFINE, but that’s not in the book. That’s just something I use when I work with teachers to give them something clear.

• R is for Role: Can you give the AI a role? What role do you want it to play? So maybe in this context, it’s the role of a curriculum designer, or maybe I’m taking a lesson from an adopted curriculum and I’m thinking, “I don’t know if this lesson is going to serve my students, so I really want to focus on differentiating this particular lesson.” Maybe the role of the AI is “Act as a curriculum designer with expertise in differentiation.” So now I’ve given it a very specific focus.
• E is for Expectation: What is the expectation? What is the task you’re asking AI to do? We want to be really clear and explicit. Or, what is the question you’re asking it to answer?
• F is for Frame: What is the frame? What is the context? Can we provide really specific, relevant details—subject, grade level, specific standard, student needs, or learning preferences that we might want to include?
• I is what specifically do you want it to Include or specify in the response? And even maybe, “How do you want it to respond? Do you want it to respond in bullets or a table?” What would that look like?
• N is for Nuance: Things like audience, style, tone. So if the product you’re looking for it to spit out is going to be student-facing, we want the style to be a little different than we would if it is a resource for an adult audience.
• E is Evaluate: No matter what that AI spits out, it is our job to look at it closely and think about things like bias, accuracy, relevance. And then if it’s missing the mark a little bit, giving it specific feedback so it can go back and try again.

Winston Benjamin (15:00): Hmm. Thank you. That really helps. That really helps setting my stage for thinking.

Dr. Catlin Tucker (15:06): Absolutely.

The Lesson Design Framework

Rena Clark (15:07): Yeah, I’ve heard several different acronyms out there, but they all center around that same idea. And I really appreciate that last one—I think it’s missing from several of them, that whole idea of evaluate. And we talk about being human-centered. It should start with the human and end with the human, as you say. So no matter what it spits out, you are the one evaluating it.

And as you and Katie designed this, you described the lesson design framework that you developed. Can you talk about that framework a little bit and explain how AI fits into using that particular framework?

Dr. Catlin Tucker (15:52): You mean the funnel of where we start? Yeah, so at the top is the backward design. It’s the—I think of it as the 50-foot view of the unit. And for me, where AI really comes into play in that first step in the design framework is standards are dense. I mean, they are not written to be student-friendly. They’re not teacher-friendly.

So when we’re trying to figure out, “Okay, how do I craft a clear, measurable, specific, student-friendly, desired result for this unit, something I can share with my kids so we are all marching in the same direction? We know where we’re headed.” That can be really tricky to do.

So we talk about how teachers can use AI to:

1. Unpack the standards
2. Develop a clear, specific, measurable, student-friendly, attainable desired result for the unit itself that we can share with learners
3. Articulate, “Okay, what is an assessment strategy we might use?”

And one of the things I love about AI is once we have a desired result and we tell it, “Hey, this is our grade level, this is our subject area, these are the target standards that inform this desired result. Can you help me to generate some ways in which I might measure student progress toward the desired result?”

Now AI is kicking out several ideas, and the idea of creating flexible pathways to allow students multiple ways to demonstrate what they’ve learned, what they know, is so much easier to do. And I think we even highlight how teachers can lean on AI to take some of the most cumbersome but important tasks—like designing rubrics—and make them easier to do. Instead of taking an hour to create a really thoughtful rubric with language describing what the learning looks like at each level, we can do that in a matter of minutes now.

So that’s that first step in the design pathway.

The second one is really our work trying to help educators think about that transition from designing the whole group, teacher-led, teacher-paced lesson to “What does it look like to universally design and lean on these different blended learning models?” Whether it’s station rotation, whether it’s self-pacing through a choice board so the teacher can pull individual or small groups of learners for instruction at different levels of rigor and complexity, or a playlist. So it’s really—we’re trying to help them make that leap with AI support to get away from that whole group teacher-led being the only instructional model they’re using.

And then in that third layer—that personalizing and being responsive—is “How and when are we collecting data? How can we lean on AI to help us create pre-assessment and formative assessment strategies for collecting informal data so that we can continually adjust our approaches, pulling individuals and small groups to meet their needs, to make sure everybody is making progress toward these firm, standard-aligned goals?”

And that last piece is really about, “What elements—how do we help cultivate these resilient learners? And what does that look like, not as an add-on, but as integrated into the actual learning experience?”

So if we have a lesson, but we want to focus on getting kids to be more adaptable or persevere, what are elements using AI support that we can actually feed into the lessons that we’re creating to help weave that into the general work that they’re doing?

So that’s the design pathway. And one of the things I love about—and talk about in the book—is if you invert it, then we talk about it as a learning pathway, which is like students are really starting from—and their focus should be on—creating that profile of a resilient learner, and then accessing that personalized support from teachers so that they can get through these universally designed lessons and achieve the desired results of whatever the learning is.

So we kind of highlight that inversion as being from the student perspective, really what we’re trying to support in terms of their progress.

AI-Enhanced Rubric Design

Paul Beckermann (20:13): I really love how you flip that upside down from the teacher to the learner. That was pretty insightful, actually, for me to just see that on the page. That’s pretty cool.

I do have a question about something you mentioned a little earlier. You’re talking about rubric design and using AI for that. In the book, you talk about something called the AI-enhanced rubric design process. Do you want to just break that down and talk through that with us, that piece of it?

Dr. Catlin Tucker (20:41): Well, I think what’s really interesting—I’ll share with you—when I was writing the book with Katie, I was sharing with her that I coach teachers in all different subject areas. I am not the expert in these subject areas. And so the process is always kind of the same when I work with a teacher, which is, “Okay, what are the criteria?”

And let’s focus on like three or four. Let’s get away from these rubrics that have 10 to 12 items on them that are totally overwhelming for teachers and learners. And then I was creating these mastery-based rubrics. So I would work with a teacher and say, “Okay, what are the skills or the conceptual knowledge that you want to assess or measure progress toward?” And they should be directly aligned with those desired results that we talked about.

And so the teacher and I would come up with three, and then we would have this four-point scale of like beginning, developing, proficient, mastery. And usually I would have the teacher—so I was working, for example, with a dance teacher. And so she was walking me through the criteria she was assessing for this performance. And I said, “I just want you to describe what mastery looks like for each of these criteria.”

And so I actually fed it into an AI chatbot, just her description, and then basically gave it the instruction of “This is what mastery looks like for this particular criteria. Can you help me craft the language for what beginning, developing, proficient would be?”

And what’s fascinating is you always had to tweak, and we changed some things, adjusted the language, added some detail. But for the most part, it was incredible how accurate it was and took such little time.

So then I’m working with Katie, and she had been working with Shelley Moore, and Shelley had been talking about asset-based rubrics. And I have never, as a teacher, I had never used asset-based rubrics. So shifting from that deficit-based language, which is all I’d ever used—like “These are the things missing at this level, and these are the things that are lacking or underdeveloped,” and as they move toward mastery, you get less of that language.

Whereas the asset-based rubric, which we also talk about in the book, it’s all about acknowledging what is there and where the room is for continued improvement. And so going into ChatGPT with one of my traditional rubrics, my four-point mastery-based, and then asking it, saying, “I want to reimagine this rubric from an asset-based perspective, eliminating all language that points out what’s missing, what’s lacking, etc., and really reframe it in this positive light.”

And watching it just spin up this beautiful asset-based rubric—it definitely was like this moment of, “I don’t know that I will go back to the old form of rubric.” When I really started to think about what message is that sending students? “This is missing. This is absent. This is lacking.” Whereas the asset-based was like, “Here’s where this is and the potential for next steps, and here’s what’s really done well at this level.”

It was just really exciting. But I think I would have been daunted even now as a professor, having to reimagine those rubrics from scratch. Whereas now I have this resource that can do it in moments.

Paul Beckermann (24:05): That’s cool. So the AI helped you level up.

Dr. Catlin Tucker (24:09): Exactly.

Developing Resilient Learners

Winston Benjamin (24:13): Paul, you’re good. Here’s a question. And I love that you went to students. We took away this—we stripped this down from going back to the humanity of the work we’re doing, to the original quote.

You mentioned student resiliency, learners, how do you develop their assets? So what I want to ask is, and this might be in the trees, but if you could help me think about the trees and the forest at the same time: What are some qualities that make up a resilient learner? And how can we use AI to help us help students develop those important assets?

As a teacher, what are some of the key things that students are showing me—these resilient learners—and how can they develop or use AI to help those students identify themselves and then either improve those assets to help see themselves growing? So taking it more down to the human-centered, I guess.

Dr. Catlin Tucker (25:22): Yeah. And I will say one of the things about the initial quote you were talking about that I always think of is the more we lean on technology to design more student-centered learning experiences where teachers are free to actually engage with individuals and small groups to meet their needs, then they get that human connection.

When you stand in a lot of classrooms where teachers are at the front of the room leading the mini-lesson, orchestrating the parts of the lesson, they don’t get that much human interaction with students, individual one-on-one. So for me, when I hear that quote, I think about that too. Let’s level up our design so that in the classroom, we’re actually engaging directly with these humans who need very different things from us.

But to your point, the resilience piece—let’s just take one example, like students. We want to teach them how to persevere. We want to teach them how to sit in spaces of struggle, face challenges, and believe in their ability and have confidence attacking things or facing things that are new and uncomfortable and challenging.

I think one of the things that I find frustrating even sometimes in dealing with my two teenagers is this tendency to hit something they don’t know how to do. And they’re like, “Shut down. I don’t know how to do that.” I’m like, “You’re literally a couple years from leaving this house and going out into the world, and do you know how much stuff you are not going to know how to do? And ‘I don’t know how to do it’ isn’t an excuse. You’re going to have to figure it out.”

And so how do we start to cultivate that in the work that we do with kids?

So when we think about, “How do we teach them to persevere or wrestle with things?” Even when we design a small group instructional strategy, one of the ones I love to use with teachers is, if you’re running a small group, maybe instead of starting with the instruction, you actually start by presenting them with something totally new—a new problem, unfamiliar question, a task you haven’t taught them to do—and you say, “Okay, with a partner in two small pods, I want you to figure it out. Wrestling with it, see what you can do. What questions would you ask? What strategies would you use?”

Let them sit in spaces of productive struggle, where they have to think critically, they have to lean on their peers and talk and collaborate and be creative problem solvers. That way, when we actually get to the instruction, they care.

Because I think it’s hilarious that so many times I’ll work with teachers and they’re like, “I’m so frustrated. Kids aren’t into the instruction.” And I’m like, “Yeah, there are few things that are worse than being in a classroom and realizing you’re the only one who cares.”

But if you think about it from their perspective, most students spend all day getting answers to questions they’ve never asked and solutions to problems they’ve never encountered. Why should they be that interested? And so when we use a strategy like that, now we help them build up those four C’s of 21st-century learning. We help them develop a little stamina and confidence when they’re facing something new.

So that’s an instructional strategy we can use to help them develop some of that perseverance in the face of struggle. But it’s also—and coming up with those hooks, by the way, those unfamiliar, interesting challenges, was a lot harder to do pre-AI. Now I can say, “Hey, this is what I’m teaching in small group. This is the composition of my group. Can you help me brainstorm some hooks or challenges that might be interesting for this group to lead into my instruction?”

So there’s things like that, and then there’s things like, “Hey, we can even teach students how to think about their work over time and start to reflect on and appreciate their growth, comparing two similar types of work over a span of time.” And if we’re comfortable letting them use AI to get involved in that process, AI can really help to highlight the ways in which they have really grown and developed, and their skills have evolved, and fuel that reflective process, fuel that appreciation of, “Wow, I didn’t really recognize in the day-to-day of the school life that I live, that I’ve actually really developed as a reader, as a writer, as a problem solver, or whatever the situation may be.”

So what I really want to do is embed this right into the fabric of the lessons we’re creating, so that resilience, or the characteristics of resilience—adaptability or perseverance—they’re not just like, “Oh, we should do this totally disconnected activity to get kids being more adaptable.” It’s like, “No, let’s figure out how to weave that into the lessons so that we’re cultivating those learners all the time.”

Rena Clark (30:34): I love that, and I love the idea that as you use AI, as Paul’s saying, to level up, you can actually level up even more. And so if you’re using it, let’s say, to give yourself more opportunity to have those one-on-one or small groups, you’re going to get to know your students better, which is going to give you better information to then feed into the AI, which is going to give you better prompts to connect with your students, because you’re going to know more about their strengths. And it’s just a perpetual cycle. So I love that.

But AI has changed very, very quickly, and it continues to evolve and grow. And I do have a lot of educators I work with who are very nervous, especially around just security, safety. So I know you talk about this a little bit, but if you could just talk to our audience a little bit around, as we move ahead, what are the things that we really need to consider as we continue to use AI to be responsible and also be balanced? We’ve talked a little bit about that human aspect, but really to stay responsible and balanced as we continue to use AI in our work.

Responsible and Balanced Use of AI

Dr. Catlin Tucker (31:50): Yeah, I think at a teacher level, the responsibility is kind of what you already said, which is teacher at the beginning, teacher at the end. We want to be involved in the process of designing with AI, even utilizing AI tools.

I mean, in the book, our goal was not to highlight all of the AI tools that are popping up. That would have been crazy to even try to do. And just like with the ed tech boom, they’re going to pop up, they’re going to disappear. Certain ones do certain things really well. Other ones do other things really well. And I have a ton of teachers using tools like Magic School AI, which is great. There’s a lot of tools in—I mean, there’s more tools than I can even basically count in that particular offering.

But it’s, in my opinion, not great at differentiating lessons. It spits out that “I do, we do, you do” version of the whole group lesson. And so I think it’s important as users of AI to be actively involved in the process, but to also understand, if you’re going to be using AI tools, what are their strengths? What do they do well? And what are their limitations? Because they all definitely have them.

And at a teacher level, yeah, safety is always a concern. But most of those decisions around compliance and safety are happening at a district level by somebody else. So just making sure that we’re informed. What is it? What’s okay to use? I mean, as a professor working with graduate students, I’m still like, “Hey, remember when you’re interacting with a chatbot? Here are things you want to avoid doing,” like feeding in personal information or just being smart about the way we use these tools. But they are changing very, very quickly.

What’s in Your Toolkit?

Winston Benjamin (33:43): Appreciate that, but I have to say it’s time to ask a very specific question. What’s in your toolkit?

[Transition music]

Winston Benjamin (34:05): What’s in your toolkit? What are you taking away and bringing with you in your tool bag from this conversation? I’m going to ask Rena, Paul, and then Catlin, we’ll ask you to jump in. Rena, Paul, what’s in your toolkit?

Rena Clark (34:21): I’m going to pick the obvious one, and I’m going to say I really have appreciated using Catlin and Katie’s book. So if you have the opportunity to pick that up or you do a book study with it, it’s a really great choice. Elevating Educational Design with AI: Making Learning Accessible, Inclusive and Equitable. And you can find that very easily all over the place. So go ahead and pick that up as a great tool to utilize. And a lot of people like having a book, so you can have a physical book, and you can also look at the digital and so forth. So check out the book.

Paul Beckermann (34:57): I agree. It’s a great book. I had a chance to look at it last week. It was fantastic. And I am just going to reiterate the strategy that Catlin was talking about when you’re interacting with the chatbot. The pedagogy should drive those interactions. Think about what you know about best practices and follow up with the responses you get from those chatbots to make sure that those best practices are actually happening and that, like you said, Rena, it ends with the human evaluation. Do you agree that those are excellent results and keep yourself in that loop?

Winston Benjamin (35:37): I like both of yours. Sometimes I think people like to have a framework to engage with new tech, new information. Check out our episodes on Unpacking Education. We have a lot of episodes on AI. We have some past episodes with Catlin as well that’ll help you really frame your understanding and thinking of just the process.

But now that we got an expert in the room other than the three of us—you know what I mean? I’m going to throw one to you. Hey, Catlin, what’s a tool that you’d like us to think about or walk away with in our tool bag to just continue to deepen our understanding of AI and just this context in general?

Dr. Catlin Tucker (36:14): Okay, I’m going to do two, just because I’m the guest and I can do it.

First, I really love School.ai. I’ve been exploring with teachers the use of the spaces to really create these guardrails around a personalized learning experience where students really can drive the conversation and frame it based on their interests, and also really be able to get that real-time feedback. It’s been a really exciting tool to use, whether it’s self-directed learning in a station, part of a playlist. I just really am enjoying the versatility of it.

Second is definitely NotebookLM. The fact that now I can say—before, when Katie and I would talk to educators about providing multiple means of representation, it’s like, “If you’re going to read or you’re going to listen to something, maybe choose a podcast.” And teachers would look at me like, “You’re adorable. It’s not easy to find a podcast on every single topic.” To which I was like, “You are correct, but there are great podcasts out there.”

But now that I can take a text or online resources, throw them into NotebookLM, and actually get a podcast based on that information to remove those barriers for learners where engaging with the text isn’t going to be as effective—that is so incredibly exciting to me.

One Thing

Paul Beckermann (37:46): All right, with that, let’s hop into our one thing.

[Transition music]

Paul Beckermann (38:00): What are you thinking about? What’s still on your mind, or a final thought that you’d like to leave our listeners with today? Rena, Winston, we’ll start with you and Catlin, you’ll get the final say here today.

Winston Benjamin (38:13): I’ve loved everything you said, Catlin. I’ve been digging all of it. But I am still stuck on your first reasoning and why you wrote the book—this idea of the danger of if we just use AI, it’s going to pump out the same thing and the same lessons that we’ve been getting, just in a new guise, and it’s not going to serve our kids at all.

I appreciate you framing that engagement and why I need to learn about AI. Because I don’t want my kids to go through the same experience. So I’ve been thinking and sitting with that this whole conversation. So I want to say thank you for the “why” in this work.

Rena Clark (39:02): And mine is very similar, and it’s that idea—as I serve and coach and work with teachers, because there is such growing diversity and need—that I love AI as a design thought partner. But there needs to be knowledge, because knowledge changes your interaction and the way you interact with it, which is essentially what Winston said. But that is my big one thing: that you need to have the knowledge so you can change your interactions and your evaluation, so that you can really utilize it for yourself so it can be a true thought partner.

Paul Beckermann (39:40): And I’m going to go back a little bit to the quote again, and the idea of leveling up, and that we need to push AI in ways that do actually help us level up and improve what we’re doing. Not just repackage it like you both said, but improve it. And I think part of that improvement is using it to help find ways to bring out the human in the lesson. Maybe it’s that differentiation that makes it human for a student, but also, how can we free up some of that time so now we have more opportunities in our classroom to have that one-to-one human interaction, because we can leverage those things? So that whole leveling up, I think we really need to think about what that means for us.

Dr. Catlin Tucker (40:24): Yeah, and I think to complement everything you have said, one of the things I just want educators thinking about in a really cognizant, intentional way, is that the diversity of skills and needs and language proficiencies and interests and learning preferences—this isn’t a threat. It’s not a problem. It is just a reality, and it’s a reality we have to design for.

And now, with AI, we have a robust design thought partner that can help us to meet that beautiful diversity of need and see it as a true asset in our classrooms. And I think that’s really exciting.

Rena Clark (41:09): I love that. And again, we’re so thankful. It’s always such a pleasure to have Dr. Catlin Tucker with us. And we really appreciate your thoughts, so we hope you’ll come back and join us again, after the next book, the next adventure.

Dr. Catlin Tucker (41:28): I just keep writing them, so…

Rena Clark (41:31): Well, we keep reading them and learning, so we keep—the need is real. So we appreciate you so much, and we look forward to speaking with you again.

Dr. Catlin Tucker (41:41): Thank you for inviting me.

Closing

Rena Clark (41:44): Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin (41:47): We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org, where you can discover resources to support student agency, equity, and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann (42:00): We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark (42:06): And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin (42:09): Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann (42:11): You make a difference.