#392 – AI Trust You, with Michael Morrison

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:

• What is generative AI?
• What are the AI use policies and guidelines at your school?
• How would you describe the current usage of AI by students and staff at your school?
• Is there trust between students and staff with regard to the use of AI on assignments?
• What is AI Trust You, and how can it be accessed?
• How might you use AI to strengthen human relationships?
• What is one action step that you would like to pursue based on content from this episode?

• AI Trust You (Laguna Beach Unified School District)
• LBUSD Introduces AI Trust You (Laguna Beach Unified School District)
• Napkin (official website)
• Ideogram (official website)
• Celebration of Our Learning COOL Overview (Laguna Beach Unified School District)
• Board Update on Unit Design (Laguna Beach Unified School District)
• California District Gets Rocket Ready (Michael Morrison in Tech & Learning)
• An Invitation to Inspiring Learning Spaces (Michael Morrison in Tech & Learning)
• Reimagining Professional Development (Michael Morrison and Lauren Anderson in Tech & Learning)
• Implementing Authentic Exploratory Research (AER) Into Teaching (Michael Morrison and Jun Shen in Tech & Learning)
• CETPA Conference: Pioneers New Strand for Women’s Leadership (Michael Morrison in Tech & Learning)

#392 AI Trust You, with Michael Morrison

AVID Open Access
35 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.

Michael Morrison 0:00 It is one of the best tools to create trust and transparency that’s out there, and it’s so simple. This showed us that kids just want to have an opportunity to show integrity, and we just haven’t given them that.

Paul Beckermann 0:15 The topic of today’s podcast is “AI Trust You” with Mike Morrison. Unpacking Education is brought to you by AVID. If you’re looking for fresh ideas, meaningful connections, and impactful strategies, check out the AVID Summer Institute, a professional learning experience where good teachers can become great teachers. Registration is open now to learn more; visit avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:40 Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:51 I’m Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:53 I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann 0:56 And we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 1:02 Education is our passport to the future.

Paul Beckermann 1:06 Our quote today is from our guest Chief Technology Officer, Michael Morrison, from the Laguna Beach Unified School District, in the press release for their new AI add-on, AI Trust You. He says, “New tech can feel risky, especially when there aren’t clear guidelines”. “Some students told us that they felt guilty using AI even when they weren’t breaking any rules”. “Teachers felt like they were stuck trying to catch students doing something wrong, which created the conditions for a negative classroom culture”. “AI Trust You helps everyone understand what’s okay, what’s not, and how to use AI in ways that support learning”. All right, what do you think about that? Winston, why don’t you go ahead and go first?

Winston Benjamin 1:46 Guidelines, guidelines, guidelines, guidelines, right? I can run a mile if I know that I don’t have to be a champion at it, right? I have my guidelines; I have my rules of how I’m going to engage with it to the best of my ability, right?

And now, without any guidelines, students say they are afraid that they are doing something wrong when it could be useful for them to engage in the tools. So, without guidelines, people, with proper guidelines and guardrails, it could really help people move faster safely, right? And without that, I think a lot of things could go wrong, as we heard in this quote. So I’m really stuck on this idea of guidelines.

Paul Beckermann 2:27 And knowing what they are, right, and having that clear understanding. Yeah, Rena, how about you?

Rena Clark 2:33 So what stands out for me is really the shifting of a culture of policing, which y’all know I’ve been talking about, as I’ve been working with high school and teachers all year, to more of a culture of trust and clarity. So I like this idea that AI Trust You is a call to action. It reminds us that when we give students and educators, as Winston pointed out, guidelines, and they’re clear, we actually empower them to use AI as a learning partner instead of a source of confusion and gotcha policing tool. And my favorite word is they’re just cheating. So this is really helpful to create a different culture.

Paul Beckermann 3:17 Yeah, we’re excited to dig into this conversation with Mike today. So we’d like to welcome our guest, Michael Morrison. Mike is the Chief Technology Officer from the Laguna Beach Unified School District. Welcome, Mike.

Michael Morrison 3:28 Thank you. Appreciate it, great to be here.

Paul Beckermann 3:32 You want to tell our listeners just a little bit more about yourself and maybe your school district?

Michael Morrison 3:38 Yeah, so I was a former teacher for eight years, and then I got into the Ed Tech and IT side, and I’ve been doing that for about 25 years. In Laguna, we have four schools. We have about 2,300 kids, and it’s a beautiful town, and I think you should come visit if you get a chance.

Paul Beckermann 3:55 Sounds good.

Winston Benjamin 3:56 Good sell. I’m glad that you’re here, because a lot of us, I work in a small school district, a medium-sized school district, and I know there’s a lot of teachers and school districts trying to figure out this AI thing. Your district developed a Google add-on called AI Trust You. Before we get into the why and how it’s developed, can you describe the add-on? What is it, and what was the experience like for both students and teachers in coming up with this thing that we’ll get to talk about a little more?

Michael Morrison 4:31 Yeah, let me just describe to you the functionality first, and then we can talk about the why later. But basically, it builds a statement of trust from the student, and on the teacher side, it builds some guidelines for the assignment.

So I’ll kind of walk you through the steps that you go through when you use it. You would install it as an extension in Google, and it works in Google Docs, so that’s where it resides. Kids, the first thing it’s going to ask you is if you’re a student or a teacher. Then we purposely put in a question, “Did you use AI on this assignment,” because some teachers wanted all their students to have the trust statement, even if they didn’t use it. So that allows the teacher to say, “Everybody’s going to use it no matter what, even if you didn’t use AI,” so she knows which kids didn’t.

So if you use AI on the assignment, then it’s going to ask you what service you used: ChatGPT, whatever the services are that you chose. And there’s a place to specify “other,” because there are new ones coming all the time.

So once you pick your service or services that you used on the assignment, the student’s going to tell us what percentage of the work did AI help them with. So, for example, maybe it’s 20%. It’s very subjective, but it gives the teacher kind of an idea of what the student thinks as far as how it helped them.

Then, this is where the meat of it and the most important part is, and that is the technique that the student used in the assignment. So we have it broken down into four categories: writing, reading, research, and audio/visual. And within those categories, I’ll just give you a few of the items that are in there so you get an idea.

But, for the writing, you would have things like: generate ideas, make a draft, an outline, the student-friendly term of “get unstuck,” which is sometimes what happens when you’re trying to write. On the reading side, it might be to simplify or translate or summarize. On the research side, it might be to make AI become a persona, and you actually get to indicate what persona you had AI become, a famous person from history. So there are some good practices in here as well for students. And then the audio/visual side, you’d have generating an image or a song or a video or building a presentation.

So once they pick the ways in which they used it, the methods, then it says, “Generate a trust statement,” and the statement would include all that information in kind of a nice little formatted little box. It’s a citation, but it’s not, because citations don’t tell you much about how kids used AI. MLA and APA are doing a thing right now where they have students put in every prompt that they used, which is kind of a daunting thing for a teacher, because that’s a lot to read through, especially if you use 20 or 30 prompts to try to refine what you’re looking for. So I think this is better, because it’s really the technique the teacher wants to know anyway.

And basically, they can take that, copy it to their clipboard, paste it into a Google Doc, and submit it with their assignment. And that’s the student side. The teacher side’s very similar as far as the way it works, but you’re building an assignment guideline. So you go in, you pick that you’re a teacher. You are going to allow students to use AI on this assignment and what services you want them to use, ChatGPT or whatever, so similar to the student side.

And then you’re going to define the techniques they’re allowed to use. So are they allowed to use it to generate ideas? Maybe they are, and so you could select that and then create that statement. Maybe you want them to do research. And you create that statement, which is the assignment guideline, essentially. But we also provide in the statement a few best practices. When they select research, it says, “Hey, if you do research, you’re going to need to find another source, because AI isn’t always the best for sourcing something”. So the teacher could paste that into their assignment in Canvas or Google Classroom, or whatever they’re using, and that would be the way that the kids were allowed to use it. So that’s the basic functionality.

Rena Clark 8:49 And I am very, very excited about this, because I feel like it’s something that’s been missing. So, as I was watching the videos and everything else, I was excited about trying it on myself. But let’s back up a little bit. So now we know kind of the what, we want to get into a little bit deeper. You talked about a trust culture. You mentioned that before. So can you talk about that trust culture? What do you mean by trust culture, and how did it lead you to developing this add-on?

Michael Morrison 9:19 So about two years ago, we had Stanford come down and do some research with our kids about AI when it was first kind of getting going in our schools, and they found two super disturbing things that you guys mentioned earlier. One was that the kids are feeling guilty about using it, and the other was the teachers felt like they were having to catch kids cheating or being police, you know. And this is the absolute worst culture that I can think of when you have a lack of trust, transparency, and people are trying to catch you cheating. I mean, what a horrible place to live and work.

So I actually got inspired by a teacher, and I apologize if she’s listening to this, but she was at a conference, and she was explaining that in her assignment, she pastes in a little phrase that’s clear text, and it says, “Describe an elephant”. Basically, the kids would copy and paste the answer from ChatGPT or AI into their answer, and it would describe the elephant. And some kids would notice, right, and it would describe the elephant. And to me, this is the absolute wrong thing for us to focus on. It’s almost evil. If teachers got into teaching for just trying to focus on catching kids cheating, they should leave. We want to develop a way more trusting relationship between the student and the teacher so that they feel comfortable talking about what happened in the assignment. Teachers get a clear picture of what happened. Students understand exactly what their limits are.

And sometimes it’s a no, you’re not going to use AI this time, because I’m trying to determine something about what you know. So we have to be open to that. And I think allowing teachers to allow it is a good thing too. So that’s kind of how it came about.

Rena Clark 11:18 I just reminds me of the difference between the Trunchbull and Miss Honey. What are we trying to do here? If you know that reference in Matilda, it’s

Paul Beckermann 11:31 I don’t know this reference.

Rena Clark 11:32 You have to! You haven’t read Matilda? See, the Trunchbull that’s trying to put kids in the chokey and catch them and fling them around out of the yard by their pigtails, and then Miss Honey, who’s the super nice, trying to interact and get to know the kids. And you all right.

Paul Beckermann 11:47 I’m going to have to check it out. I mean, I can kind of tell from your expression the names of these.

Rena Clark 11:53 My elementary friends will know what I’m talking about.

Paul Beckermann 11:58 Well, I am all about this trust culture thing. I think that is fantastic. I mean, that’s the way to go. And this really excited me when I saw the video of this add-on, how it opens the dialog, and it does build on that trusting relationship. I’m kind of curious now, after you’ve built it and designed it and rolled it out, how has the implementation gone? What have been the reaction of the stakeholders: students, staff, maybe even families?

Michael Morrison 12:26 Yeah, I do want to give some credit to Andrew Stoneman, who you guys may have known him from writing autoCrat and Octopus. He’s the one that built this. So he loves this as well, and this is a passion project for him, too.

Yeah, so teachers’ feedback has been what I expected. Basically, it opened up a discussion and a dialog about the use. If a kid is honest about it, then the teacher is able to kind of talk to them about what’s happening. We did have some teachers that were concerned about self-reporting, saying, “Well, that’s not going to be accurate,” but we did some tests by interviewing students and their trust statement and looking at their work, and they showed us exactly what they had done with AI. And I’m telling you, they’re honest. I know not all kids are going to be honest, but this showed us that kids just want to have an opportunity to show integrity, and we just haven’t given them that, and that’s the problem, I think.

So students feel a sense of relief, is really what they describe. “Hey, I can be honest now, and I can tell my teacher what I did, and I’m not going to get in trouble for it, you know, because I’m being honest”. Now, a teacher might have a conversation about, “Well, maybe you used it too much here, you know, let’s tone it down on the next one”. But that’s a good conversation, right? I think that’s healthy. And the families have been supportive of it. I’ve talked to several, and they like the idea. They think it’s good. They know that kids are using it because they see them using it at home. So it’s been well received.

Winston Benjamin 14:08 I love that. So now we got our listeners who are, “Oh, this sounds really, really good”. You got family members, students, staff that are listening to this being, “Oh, that’s great”. Is this add-on available beyond your school district?

Michael Morrison 14:27 Yes, yes, yes. So we’re in over 40 districts right now. We have about 400 teachers using it, and you can use it for free for the base, you know, what it does. But if you want the statistics or custom menus, then we’re going to probably start charging. We haven’t charged anybody yet, to be honest, but there is some setup time involved with stats that we would need to charge for, a minimal fee. But yes, we want everybody to use it. We think it is the best site. I don’t even call it a citation tool, but it is one of the best tools to create trust and transparency that’s out there, and it’s so simple. And it’s almost a glorified Google form, which makes me kind of laugh, because it’s so simple, but it’s so powerful, you know.

Paul Beckermann 15:16 So how do people get this if they are interested?

Michael Morrison 15:20 I can give you the URL for them to sign up, and we can put that in the show notes, I’m assuming.

Paul Beckermann 15:25 Yes.

Michael Morrison 15:27 tinyurl.com/aitrustyou.

Rena Clark 15:33 So we know your district’s doing more than just with AI than just rolling out this add-on. So, at the Laguna Beach Unified School District, which is, I think you were the fifth district in the nation, the K-12, that actually allowed full access to Open AI for the entire staff. So can you talk a little bit about that? What does that mean, and why do you feel that it was important to take that step to really allow access?

Michael Morrison 16:04 Yes, so it allows us to have what’s called a walled garden, which means, essentially, that the data that we put in it is only for us. So that’s a really important thing if you’re working with student data or things like that. And Open AI has signed our student data privacy agreement, so that’s really helpful to feel confident that the data that we have in there is not going out to the larger language model. We wouldn’t want that to happen.

Also, it allows us to create GPTs internally that are shared internally with staff. And I think it’s a really powerful way to give teachers and staff experiences with AI that are really focused. So I’ll give you an example of one thing we’ve done. It’s a teacher goal-building GPT. So we loaded into that the form that we usually fill in. And then we loaded in some scores from iReady and different places with the teacher’s name and the scores of their students. We added in our learner profile or portrait of a grad. And then the teachers would log in, and they’d say their name, and they’d say, “I’m looking to write some goals,” and it might ask them a few questions, and it created these really beautiful goals.

The principals told me that used it that they were the best goals they’d seen. Really good goals that have outcomes and are really eloquent and, I think, related to the student data that was from their class, but also focused in our portrait of a grad, which is really important to us. So that’s just one example of using a GPT.

And then also, it connects us with the first five districts that are on board with this, and we have meetings with them and talk to them about the use of AI and training. And it’s really shaped my thinking as far as training, plus there’s a discount if you go as a district. And we feel like we’ve been successful. We have about 7,000 interactions a week, and we’re a small district, and that’s about 50 interactions per staff member per week. That’s pretty successful.

Winston Benjamin 18:15 I have a follow-up question. Did you have to come up with your own privacy, student privacy contract, or was that something that was already pre-developed? Because, again, a lot of districts don’t have the capacity or the wherewithal to how to do or what to say. Was that something that was done in-house, or was that done with support of Open AI?

Michael Morrison 18:40 So we developed, well, we didn’t actually develop that. The STPA is an organization that creates guidelines, and our state organization for IT, called CITE, they have a group that helps us get the signatures from our vendors. So essentially, it’s the same agreement that we make all vendors share with us and sign. And it’s a really, really good agreement. It has all of the FERPA and every kind of rule that you need for California, and the federal government is in there. It even contains some things about the destruction of data. And obviously, things about kids, not kids data not being shared for advertising. So it’s really a complete STPA, and I think it’s available for other states as well, but California has its own specific one.

Paul Beckermann 19:38 So I really love that you went district-wide. You provided these opportunities to your staff and your students. Providing something is one thing, and empowering people and encouraging people to actually use it is another thing. So how did you actually get your staff to kind of buy in, become empowered, become users, and kind of move past just having access?

Michael Morrison 20:02 I noticed most districts were starting with rules, like they were guidelines, but they were really rules about using AI, and their teams were focused on that. And we did have that. We did go through that process and change some things in our AP, but we focused on something a little different. And one of the things that I think is good about what we did is that we started with play.

So we said, “Hey, look, you’re going to use AI a little bit to play as we start to teach you about it”. And that means, yeah, maybe they use it for building a recipe, or taking a picture of their fridge and telling me what I could prepare tonight with these items, or a variety of things for travel, or whatever they’re concerned and interested in. And we wanted that to be the very start of the process. So we did a lot of playing with AI in the beginning.

We have a team of AI empowered teachers. We call them an AI empowered classified staff that are the core kind of experimenters. And every administrative meeting we have 10 minutes of AI. So that means that our leadership team is getting kept up to speed in tiny chunks instead of big, long trainings. We also provide lunch and learns for our team so that they come to lunch. We don’t pay them, but they get food, and they learn about oftentimes, AI.

And then we have “on your own” learning opportunities which are similar to this. This may become one, this podcast, but we have podcasts that we create that teachers can actually get paid to drive their car, because if they listen to the podcast and reflect, they get credit for that, and they can get paid for that. So those are some of the techniques we’ve used. Orange County Department of Ed has helped us a lot as a thought leader in training.

But the core was play first and then efficiency. And then we said, “We want teachers to use it during class, modeling the correct use, and we wanted to allow students to use AI”. So we have other tools that we purchase that allow for monitored use for students, like School AI and Magic School and Snorkel. Those are tools that are really good to help monitor that use.

And I’ll give you an example of one use, just so you get a feeling for what a third-grade class did with image generation. They basically said, “Oh, well, I’m studying adaptation, so I have to study three of them, and then I’m going to create a new animal with all three of these adaptations”. So they created these really crazy, cool-looking animals with an AI image generator. And what they found is that the kid didn’t like the first one that came out of the AI tool. So they had to write the prompt again and again, “Well, it’s not blue”. “Well, you didn’t tell it to be blue,” you know? All of these language arts skills are being developed as these third graders are developing their animal. So the animals were awesome. And so this year, to put a twist on it, we’re taking those animals that they create and we’re animating them with Runway ML. And so the kids will get an animation of their animal they created, which really kind of puts the icing on the cake for that project, I think.

Winston Benjamin 23:27 Oh, man, that sounds fun. I want to do it.

Paul Beckermann 23:29 And I want to see the animal you create.

Winston Benjamin 23:37 The dreams in my mind, if I could do that, that would be so much fun.

Rena Clark 23:41 I was thinking, jellyfish, dinosaur. Anyways, go ahead.

Winston Benjamin 23:45 No, that is so awesome because, again, it brings the joy of learning into the into school. That’s so yeah.

Michael Morrison 23:57 Absolutely. And I can share those animals with you guys, if you want a link to them.

Winston Benjamin 24:01 I actually have a question to continue to bounce into that one. And you can share this. You’re talking about all the ways that you’re using AI to support student engagement, student learning. Are there any other areas that you’re doing in terms of in the school, any other areas that you think would be valuable for people to think about?

Michael Morrison 24:23 Several things, actually. One is, we’re exploring the idea as we introduce AI of how we can be more connected as humans. So one of the things that we use in our district is the 36 questions from Berkeley that help you be more close to somebody. Have you guys heard of them? I will put a link in for you guys. I’ll give you the link so you can share it.

But it’s essentially questions that goes through three sets of questions, and they are questions that they have proven that if you and I sat down and we asked these questions of each other, we would be more close. They’ve tested this with gay and straight people, with different races and ethnicities. They’ve tested it in Hungary with the Romas and the non-Romas.

And after all of these studies, it always shows that there’s a higher level of empathy for the people that you sat down with, and there’s more of an understanding and more of a caring and more of a relationship that gets started. So we use those often.

So we decided, well, if we’re teaching people AI, let’s use the AI tools with those questions. So I’ll give you an example. One of the questions is to describe your perfect day, right? That’s and so we use to create a song about your perfect day. What is your perfect day? Then what we do is we swap songs with people, and you listen to other people’s songs, and it really creates an image in your mind of what that person is like.

The one I listened to of Megan, she wakes up with a breakfast burrito, she goes to the beach and sits on the sand and reads a book, and the sand, you know, between her toes. And I just, I picture this image of her now, and it makes me understand her and what she likes and what she cares about, and I’ll never get that image out of my head. It’s a great tool, music does more than just words to create those images in our head, I think.

Another thing that is in the questions is describe friendship. What friendship means to you? So we use Napkin AI, which is a tool to make infographics, and it’s an amazing tool. And they map out in their teams what friendship means to them, and then they bring it back to the bigger group. And we kind of talk about why that’s important to them, and what are the differences, what are the unique parts that we see.

Another thing is to kind of be reflective on your past and be grateful for your present, and what are you hoping for in the future? And we do that with AI image generation. And sometimes, honestly, it will bring tears to people’s eyes, because the images are so accurate in their past of an important experience they had, and then they get to describe that to the person next to them. And there’s this real feeling of, I still remember these pictures that they shared with me. They’re beautiful images of their childhood or something that happened that was important to them. And there’s something about this tool that can help us be more human and more connected.

So that’s kind of how we approached training with AI a little bit. In the near future, though, we are starting a project that we’re identifying nine problems or challenges our district has, with teaching and learning. And our goal this summer is to have an AI workshop, where we call it PD with a purpose, where they’re using AI to study that problem, deep research, and then they’re going to use AI to create learning materials that also the user would experience AI with and have options for learning. And so we’ll have nine modules for learning for our teachers next year that are AI generated. And then when you use them, they would have AI in them, things like building a podcast with Notebook LM, but also maybe things like interactive experiences with School AI, where you can go in and have a GPT or something that helps you understand something. So that’s one of the things we’re working on.

I feel there’s this opportunity for us to be more connected and be more human, and AI is kind of pushing us a little bit to define what it is to be human and what it means to be connected. And that’s where it really has made me rethink what’s important.

Rena Clark 29:07 I love it, and now I know what questions I’ll be talking about my next date night. I just looked them up. I just love the connection, the human element that you’re talking about. I thank you for sharing so many ideas to make it more human. I love that. So now I’m going to ask you, what haven’t we asked you that you’d like to add, if anything?

Michael Morrison 29:38 I’m really excited about, obviously, AI Trust You, and I just hope that people take a look at it and kind of give it a good thinking through. And maybe if they don’t use it, develop something like it that they use, because it’s really changing the culture of our classrooms, and we’re heading down a bad path, to be honest. So it kind of pulls you out of the mud and gets you back on the right path. So that’s the one thing I would love people to take away from today.

Rena Clark 30:08 All right, I feel like we’ve been given so many tools. This one might actually be hard.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 30:13 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit, what is in the toolkit, or what’s in the toolkit. Check it out.

Rena Clark 30:25 What’s in our toolkit, or maybe we can reiterate something that’s already been said. So what do we have to put in the toolkit today, fellas?

Winston Benjamin 30:32 So I’ll jump in. I’m going to go with AVID Open Access. Check out our podcast, because we have a lot of examples about how to integrate AI into the classroom. You’ll also hear this great episode, right? So just continue to check out how do you do this work, because the work’s not going away. It’s going to be here for the near future.

Paul Beckermann 30:52 I am just percolating on the AI Trust You add-on and just how it facilitates open communication. I think my toolkit item really is that: it’s that having communication channels that you can use, and if something AI Trust You helps facilitate that, that’s a powerful thing, because we need shared understanding and expectations. We need transparency. We don’t want this game of “gotcha” going on. The more that we can open those channels of communication, and if this is a tool that can do that, I think it’s super powerful.

Rena Clark 31:26 And I was thinking, I literally was texting my director during this episode to tell him about these things. And one of the things is, I work in a rather large school district. It’s that whole idea of calibration and systems-level thinking. So how do we support people? I’m just thinking about how do we calibrate people? So how do we make sure we calibrate, because that’s lovely, even in the sense of, if I use AI Trust You in my class, but then next door, they’re doing something different, and in another period, that gets really confusing for kids and staff. So how are we going to calibrate and change some of those system levels things? And so I appreciate people Michael, doing that great work.

Michael Morrison 32:10 Thank you. Sure.

Paul Beckermann 32:12 You have an opportunity to drop something in our toolkit too, Mike, if you would like to.

Michael Morrison 32:17 I really love Runway and Sora. Just to explore what it means to tell stories with AI, and I think there’s a huge opportunity for untold stories. I was thinking about grandparents that didn’t have movie equipment, and they could describe some of their childhood. And maybe we could create a movie that really captures the essence of that childhood and what that was like, and things they experienced that were important to them. Also, other nations or people that don’t have access to film equipment or anything like that, to tell these stories. Opening up the door to having these really unique stories being told through through movies is just going to be amazing, in my opinion. So I’m excited about it. I’m playing with it. It’s very much not there yet, as far as the way I interact with it now, but the potential is definitely there. And I think that’s where I’m kind of thinking is the next big thing.

Winston Benjamin 33:24 That is so fire, because I can imagine the amount of stories my parents didn’t tell that, if they could say it. I’m so excited for that one. That’s so dope. Because, my nieces and nephews, they grew up in America. They have no understanding of what my parents lived in Jamaica. So to have them be able to imagine, see, that would be so dope. All right, now that we have been given one more thing to be excited about, it’s time for this segment. What’s that one thing?

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 34:03 It’s time for that one thing. Time for that one thing, that one thing.

Winston Benjamin 34:14 What’s the one thing that’s still bouncing around in your brain that you’re still, “Oh, that’s a great idea,” or just something that you’re still thinking through? Paul, what are you thinking? What’s your one thing?

Paul Beckermann 34:26 I’m still kind of hooked on the whole trust culture piece. I just think that’s transformational in a school.

Winston Benjamin 34:33 I hear that. Rena?

Rena Clark 34:36 Well, that really resonates with me. But even in the last little bit of this podcast, as we’ve been talking, I just think about that shift to be more centered on humanity. So it’s about our collaboration. And I love this idea of sharing stories, getting to know people better, being able to share our thinking, especially for neuro-diverse learners. If we can’t, I know I struggle with words sometimes, because I might think more in pictures. And this idea that I could somehow transcribe what’s going on into an image for you all is just, I think that can be where it’s transformational.

Winston Benjamin 35:15 True, true. For me, I think I’m going similar to you, Paul, about the idea of trust. It’s don’t assume that students are doing wrong, because you will see them doing wrong, right?

Rena Clark 35:30 It’s that bias you’re saying? Exactly. Only watch you and no one else, so of course, I’m going to catch you doing it wrong.

Winston Benjamin 35:38 They’re going to cheat. ChatGPT, first of all. If it wasn’t for Cliff Notes, I don’t know if I would have gotten through Moby Dick, because it’s a long book. So again, it’s a whale of a book. So it’s just, we got to remember that we were kids as well, right? And to recognize, if we give kids the right pathways, or how to use it, they’ll do it well. Mike, what’s on your mind? What’s something that you still, “Oh, I wish I could got that out earlier”?

Michael Morrison 36:10 Well, I heard of some of the colleges up in the Bay Area trying to, they’re thinking about making integrity an outcome. And I thought, what a great outcome that is in a classroom. You grade people, you grade kids on a lot of things, but if one of your goals is to have integrity, and you can prove that by being honest, that’s pretty powerful. So I feel that’s something that I want to pursue, is, could integrity become an outcome?

Rena Clark 36:41 I love that.

Paul Beckermann 36:43 That could be world transformational, right there. That’s great. Thank you so much for being with us today, Mike, and sharing all the great things that you’re doing at Laguna Beach Unified.

Michael Morrison 36:55 Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. I look forward to being a colleague of yours in the future. I’ll be listening to your podcast from now on, so.

Paul Beckermann 37:03 Awesome. And we’ll make sure we get links to the resources that you talked about in the show notes. And you can get a shortcut to the document at

Michael Morrison 37:13 It’s tinyurl/aitrustyou.

Paul Beckermann 37:20 Perfect. So head over to that, and you will have access to an opportunity to try this out yourself. Thanks for sharing, Mike.

Michael Morrison 37:29 You’re welcome. Thank you.

Rena Clark 37:29 Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 37:34 We invite you to visit us at AVID Open Access.org where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity, to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 37:47 We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education.

Rena Clark 37:52 And remember, go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 37:55 Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 37:58 You make a difference.