#424 – Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry: Can AI Help?, with Maurie Beasley

Educators are juggling more than ever, from administrative overload to emotional demands, and finding time for new innovations feels impossible. In this episode, we sit down with Maurie Beasley, an educator, counselor, tech administrator, and author, to explore the crucial question: Can AI actually help?

Drawing from her new book, Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry! Tales from K12 Education: How AI Might Help…or Maybe Not, Maurie shares honest and heartfelt stories from the classroom. Together, we explore how AI is showing up as a helpful tool and also, depending on the situation, sometimes an unfit substitute. Tune in to hear how AI is giving teachers time back—and where it still falls short in meeting the deeply human needs of students and educators alike.

We are the part that flows through everything AI touches. We are the context. The purpose. The ethics. The why.

Maurie Beasley, MEd, from her Medium article, What Fills the Gaps? The Human Role in a Machine-Filled World

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)
• An AI Literacy Framework (podcast episode)
• AI Trust You (podcast episode)
• SchoolAI, with Kevin Morrill (podcast episode)
• The A.I. Roadmap: Human Learning in the Age of Smart Machines, with Dr. John Spencer (podcast episode)
• The AI Infused Classroom, with Holly Clark (podcast episode)
• Academic Integrity in the Age of AI (podcast episode)

Yes, No, and Maybe

Sometimes, AI can be the answer. Other times? Not even close. That nuanced space, somewhere between “yes,” “no,” and “maybe,” is where this episode lives. Through stories filled with real-life classroom challenges, Maurie Beasley illustrates how AI is transforming some parts of a teacher’s day—like lesson planning or crafting student responsibility contracts—while leaving others, like hugging a child through trauma, wholly untouched.

AI’s true value, Maurie suggests, is as a tool that gives teachers back their time, so they can pour more energy into the human work of education. But she also calls for leadership and consistency, noting that without top-down guidance, AI implementation risks becoming a patchwork of inequity. She sums it up, saying, “There is a reason for why you are a teacher. . . . You have the opportunity, as a teacher, to change lives.” AI might assist, but it’s the teacher who makes the difference. The following are a few highlights from this episode.

• About Our Guest: Maurie Beasley is the author of Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry! Tales from K12 Education: How AI Might Help…or Maybe Not. She’s worked in the technology industry and has been a teacher, counselor, assistant principal, and now a technology network administrator.
• Small-Town Beginnings: Maurie grew up in a small town of about 300 people. She says, “Rural education is very important to me. That’s one of my big passions.”
• From Empathy: Maurie recalls, “I became a counselor because I had empathy for those kids—those kids that thought they were different.”
• Unique Perspective: Because of her many roles in school, Maurie has gained a well-rounded and unique perspective of students and schools. She says, “I have the ability to see education from all these different angles that most people don’t have the privilege of being able to.”
• Teachers and AI: “The first thing that AI has done for teachers is it’s helped them with what I call efficiency,” Maurie says. They are using it largely for lesson plans and administrative tasks that have consumed so much of their time. She adds that AI is “giving teachers back a little bit of sanity” and providing them with more time to make human connections.
• Efficiency Versus Opportunity: While much of the AI use is focused on making teaching tasks more efficient, there are also cases where AI opens up new opportunities. Maurie describes this use as more “disruptive,” with a focus on using AI in new ways, rather than to streamline old processes. In fact, she shares how AI helped her in organizing the sections of her book.
• Two Sides of the Disruption Coin: Maurie talks about the potential impact of AI, saying, “I think you’re going to have two different sides of a coin. You’re going to have this side of the coin to where it can disrupt for good, and then you have this side of the coin to where it could disrupt for bad because you always have bad actors.” She adds that if we approach it proactively, “I think that it could do a lot more good than it’s going to do bad.”
• Easy Entry Point: Using generative AI doesn’t need to be complicated. Maurie suggests, “You literally open it up, and you start conversing with it. That’s all it takes. You don’t have to watch any videos. You don’t have to read a training manual. You don’t have to go earn badge one, badge two, and badge three.”
• Bigger Fish to Fry: Maurie titled her book Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry! Tales from K12 Education: How AI Might Help…or Maybe Not to call out the reality that because teachers are so busy, they often don’t have time for another new innovation. That’s why she took an approach to the book that honored teacher stories and then applied AI to those situations that were at the center of a teacher’s experience. Sometimes, AI can help; other times, it won’t.
• When AI Can Help: Maurie shares a story about using AI to help draft a student responsibility contract as a way to respond to the mishandling of a classroom pet.
• Knowledge Base: Generative AI can serve as a massive knowledge base for teachers, allowing them to get answers to their questions based on this large pool of content and examples.
• AI Not Always the Answer: Challenges at school sometimes require a human interaction to show compassion and humanity. Maurie shares a heartbreaking story of when she had to act on behalf of a student who was being neglected at home. AI might be able to identify signs to look for, but it took her, as a human, to respond. Maurie says, “There are those stories that happen to every single teacher—that artificial intelligence will never be able to hug that kid.”
• Sometimes, It’s Maybe: The role of AI in problem-solving can be less clear at times. For instance, it might help in the long term but not in the moment.
• A Need for Leadership and Consistency: Maurie hopes that leadership takes AI seriously. School leaders need to step up and call out the importance of training staff on consistent skills and practices. She says, “We gotta get the teachers all on the same page.” She shares a story of two 12th grade teachers: one who taught students how to use AI responsibly and another who banned it. She says, “And so, you have these two kids that are in 12th grade that are going to go out into the real world, and one of them is going to be at a huge disadvantage because they didn’t have a teacher that was willing to teach them how to use it responsibly.”
• Toolkit: For her toolkit item, Maurie encourages teachers to choose one of the main generative AI chatbots to be their core AI tool because smaller, niche tools often go out of business and disappear without notice. Specifically, she says, “You need to either pick Claude, Gemini, [or] ChatGPT.” She adds, “To me, ChatGPT is still the most powerful one out there for the generalities of what teachers do.”
• One Thing: Maurie leaves us with this: “There is a reason for why you are a teacher. . . . As you’re out there, and as you are struggling, and as you are frying these fish, you need to remember that there is a kid that you are their reason. . . . You have the opportunity, as a teacher, to change lives. And don’t forget that.”