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

In this episode, Dr. Catlin Tucker discusses her new book, Elevating Educational Design with AI, coauthored with Dr. Katie Novak. Catlin emphasizes the importance of using AI as a design thought partner, rather than a replacement for human teaching. She outlines a framework for integrating AI into lesson planning, focusing on backwards design, universal design, and personalized learning. Catlin highlights the benefits of AI in creating flexible pathways, designing rubrics, and fostering resilience in students. She stresses the need for educators to craft effective AI prompts, evaluate AI-generated content, and maintain human connection in the classroom. Catlin also recommends tools like SchoolAI and NotebookLM for enhancing educational design.

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.

Dr. Catlin Tucker and Dr. Katie Novak, from the opening of their new book, Elevating Educational Design with AI

Resources

The following resources are available from AVID and on AVID Open Access to explore related topics in more depth:

• AI in the K–12 Classroom (article collection)
• The Promises and Perils of AI in Education, with Ken Shelton (podcast episode)
• Top 10 Ways Educators Can Use AI Tools, with Aaron Maurer (podcast episode)
• AI in the K–12 Classroom, with Eric Curts (podcast episode)
• NotebookLM, Three Powerful Updates (podcast episode)
• The A.I. Roadmap: Human Learning in the Age of Smart Machines, with Dr. John Spencer (podcast episode)
• Academic Integrity in the Age of AI (podcast episode)

Leveling Up

Effective use of AI in the lesson design process does not mean that teachers should offload all of their thinking to AI. Rather, they should use their deep knowledge of pedagogy to prompt AI to work with them as a collaborator and thought partner. This means prompting AI for more when the responses do not fully meet expectations. This back-and-forth can help teachers level up the quality of their final outputs, and it gives them access to ideas and connections that they may not have made on their own. Using this mindset, Catlin offers specific strategies and insights to help educators level up their effectiveness in the classroom. The following are a few highlights from this episode:

• About Our Guest: Dr. Catlin Tucker is an education expert, bestselling author, and international speaker, with 24 years of experience in education. Catlin has written over 10 books on innovative approaches to teaching and learning. She also hosts the popular podcast The Balance, which explores strategies to make teaching and learning more sustainable and impactful.
• Lack of Time: Catlin says, “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 [for] 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.”
• Inspiration for Her Book: Catlin wrote this latest book to make sure that AI positively impacts lesson design and learning. She says, “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.”
• Best Practices: When Catlin and Katie wrote their book, they intentionally integrated a wide range of best practices into their approach. They included concepts like backwards design, universal design for learning, flexible learning pathways, clear and authentic assessment, personalized learning, and blended learning.
• Prompting From a Place of Pedagogy: When interacting with a chatbot, it’s important for educators to draw on their expertise in pedagogy and to push the AI tool to refine responses until they’re acceptable to the teacher. Catlin points out, “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.”
• Supportive Thought Partner: Catlin says, “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.”
• REFINE Prompt Engineering: When Catlin works with teachers, she suggests using the acronym REFINE to guide the prompt engineering process. “R” is role: What role do you want the chatbot to play? “E” is for expectation: What is the expected output or task? “F” is frame: What is the context within which the response should be framed or generated? “I” stands for include: What do you specifically want AI to include in the response? “N” is for nuance, and this includes things like audience, style, and tone. The final “E” stands for evaluate. Catlin says, “No matter what that AI spits out, it is our job to look at it closely” and evaluate it for things like accuracy and relevance. “And then, if it’s missing the mark a little bit, giving it specific feedback, so it can kind of go back and try again.”
• Lesson Design Framework: Catlin and Katie have designed a framework to guide the lesson creation process. It’s shaped like an inverted pyramid, with backwards design at the top. When flipped upside down, this framework becomes the student learning process.
• Unpacking the Standards: Catlin suggests using AI to help unpack standards. She says, “They are not written to be student-friendly. They’re not teacher-friendly. . . . So we talk about how teachers can use AI to unpack the standards to develop a clear, specific, measurable, student-friendly, attainable, desired result for the unit itself that we can share with learners.”
• A Goal to Be Student-Centered: Catlin says that one of the major goals of the new book is to help teachers “make that kind of leap with AI support to get away from that whole-group, teacher-led being the only instructional model they’re using.”
• Developing Resilient Learners: Rather than including this topic as an add-on, Catlin and Katie suggest that strategies for developing resilient learners should be “integrated into the actual learning experience.” She adds, “We want to focus on getting kids to be more adaptable or persevere.”
• AI to Enhance Rubric Design: Not only can AI be used to write descriptors for a rubric, but it can also be used to reframe it with asset-based language. Rather than pointing out to students what they have not done well, the rubric can point out what the students have achieved. This reframing into asset-based language can have a very positive impact on the mindset of students, even when they have not yet reached proficiency.
• More Time With Students: Catlin reflects, “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 that, actually, when you stand in a lot of classrooms where teachers are at the front of the room, leading the mini-lesson [and] orchestrating the parts of the lesson, they don’t get that much human interaction with students. . . . 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.”
• Resilience: Catlin emphasizes that teachers should “want to teach [students] how to sit in spaces of struggle, face challenges, and believe in their ability—and to have confidence attacking things or facing things that are new, and uncomfortable, and challenging.” She talks about seeing this in her own teenage children as well as in students at school.
• Resilience-Building Activity: Catlin suggests, “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 guys to figure it out, wrestle with it, [and] 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.”
• Safety and Balance With AI: The key to using AI is making sure to keep the “teacher at the beginning [and the] teacher at the end.” Catlin says, “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?” Additionally, she reminds teachers to check local guidelines and standards for determining what AI tools can be used with students and how they are allowed to be used.
• Toolkit: Catlin adds two AI tools to our toolkit: SchoolAI and NotebookLM. With SchoolAI, she particularly likes using the Spaces feature, and with NotebookLM, she appreciates how it can package content into a podcast format almost instantly. This can give students an alternate way to access content.