Mike Taubman: [00:00:00] I think it’s really important for educators and students to think of it like a car because that means it’s something humans made, that’s something we can drive, that’s something that has societal implications, et cetera.
Brett Roer: Right now, again, everyone’s jumping to like AI detectors for this false sense of security.
Brett Roer: But again, even if they’re right or wrong, more the conversation about like, well, why? Like what makes you think this?
Rebecca Bultsma: I don’t think we’ve really had to teach kids how to use cutting-edge technology in the past. Like they’re gonna figure it out. We didn’t have to teach them how to use social media. We don’t have to be teaching them these things.
Rebecca Bultsma: They already know more about it than we do.
Brett Roer: Greetings, and welcome to the AmpED to 11 Podcast. I am joined, as always, by our amazing co-host, Rebecca Bultsma. Rebecca, where in the world are you, and what have you been up to since we last connected?
Rebecca Bultsma: I’ve been all over the world. I’ve been in Tokyo, I’ve been in Arizona, and many places in between. I was telling our producer, Serena, right before we got on the call, I just got my British [00:01:00] citizenship, which will make it much easier for me to do my research overseas, I think.
Rebecca Bultsma: But more recently, I’ve been spending all of my time experimenting with Fable 5, which finally, depending on when you’re listening to this, for us, just was resurrected from the dead and has resurfaced on my computer, and I’ve been trying to use that as much as possible before they take it away again and put it on an API.
Rebecca Bultsma: So that’s, that’s all that I’ve been up to. How about you, Brett? Where you been in the world? What have you been up to?
Brett Roer: I just got back from five incredible days at ISTE. You know, I, I think I can say this with confidence that I’ve been to a lot of conferences, but this one was definitely in my, you know, top three experiences.
Brett Roer: Just getting to coach all these incredible educators, some of which, if you follow me on LinkedIn, you’ve seen I’ve written a number of stories about them, and getting to see them all present was just the best experience ever. There’s teachers and leaders coming up with some of the most innovative ways to use AI to solve the biggest challenges they’re facing, and the [00:02:00] student outcomes or the measured outcomes for supporting teachers and staff are just demonstrating that Teachers are doing really incredible things, and the goal is how do you scale it?
Brett Roer: And that’s one way is letting them speak at these Spark Talks, and then sharing the good work they’re doing on LinkedIn. So yeah, cup is very full as we head into today’s episode. So without further ado, it is our honor and privilege to introduce Mike to the world. Mike, I am going to read a small amount of your bio, but I’d love it if you can fill it in, and we’d love for our listeners to just hear your journey.
Brett Roer: So Mike currently serves as the teacher, program director, and AI innovation lead at Uncommon Schools, specifically working at North Star Academy, Washington Park High School in Newark, New Jersey. And because he won’t say it, he was also recently featured in The New York Times based on this incredible work that he’s leading.
Brett Roer: So Mike, welcome to the AmpED to 11 podcast. Let the world know a [00:03:00] little bit more about you, your journey, and how you got to this podcast today. You can start as early as you want.
Mike Taubman: It’s a pleasure to be here, and, uh, I’m coming to you from Brooklyn, and so if you hear New York City sounds outside, that’s what that is.
Mike Taubman: So let’s see. I think the, the thing to go back to here that may help us talk about some of these issues later is that I was an English major in college, and after I was an English major, I got a master’s in education, and then came to work at North Star in 2005. So it was right out of school. I got very lucky.
Mike Taubman: I feel like I’m a sort of a, a basketball fan, and I feel like I got drafted by some amazing basketball team right out of college, and got to experience championship-level play, you know, immediately in terms of the pedagogy and, and the way, uh, North Star does things. So I joined North Star as a founding English teacher for a new middle school in 2005, and then after five years there, I got to move up with some of those same students, which was amazing, to our high school, and then I taught high school English for a long time there.
Mike Taubman: And that was sort of my main journey into education, was through English, [00:04:00] through literature, through the humanities. Then about 10 years ago, I had this very fortunate opportunity to take a sabbatical, which is not the most common experience for K-12 educators. I still remain very grateful to North Star and Uncommon for making it happen.
Mike Taubman: And what I did is I had a semester to go explore other schools around the country. That was my mission, to see what else was going on out there and what we could bring back to North Star to synthesize with what we were already doing. So I visited a variety of different school sites around the country, and then I also had this amazing opportunity to audit a class, uh, with Jal Mehta at Harvard on his concept of deeper learning, and there’s a book I highly recommend to your listeners, I’m sure many of them have read it, called In Search of Deeper Learning by Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine, that has really grounded a lot of my work since.
Mike Taubman: And the concept there of deeper learning, which became kind of a frame for the whole sabbatical, is deeper learning emerges from the intersection of mastery, creativity, and identity. And so when I came back at the end of that, uh, sabbatical semester where I’d been taking a Bolt Bus up from the UN in Manhattan up to Boston to audit this class on Wednesdays and then come back down for the next [00:05:00] day, I got to school in the sort of January era heading into second semester, and got to bring all that back to North Star.
Mike Taubman: And my sort of takeaway from my sabbatical was we had done an amazing job, and still are doing an amazing job, of giving students opportunities to develop academic mastery. But then the question became: how could we improve the work we were already doing about identity and creativity? So that all led
Mike Taubman: I’ll, I’ll wrap this up. That all led to me revamping my English course to try to bring those things together, but then realizing in 2020 that it would be great to see what this looked like as a purpose development career exploration course for originally seniors. Now it’s juniors and seniors. So I launched that in 2020, and students immediately or pretty soon thereafter named it Summit, because we talk a lot about climbing the mountain to college at North Star, and here they were as seniors in high school at the summit of the mountain.
Mike Taubman: But also, there’s more mountains to come, and so it’s a verb. How to, how do you learn to summit, to [00:06:00] launch th- your life? And of course, as an English, uh, teacher, I love the sort of other meaning of summit as a gathering, the sort of group of people coming together to solve a problem. So Summit launches in 2020, and that’s now the thing I teach every day.
Mike Taubman: I work with 100 juniors and seniors every day in that program. It’s become a two-year program. And then when AI arrived, uh, via ChatGPT, and I kind of woke up, like all of us, I realized, like a lot of people, that the work I had already been doing had a new resonance in the AI era, because purpose and a sense of motivation and a sense of how careers will work and how careers are changing is even more important for students now.
Mike Taubman: And so to wrap this up, uh, this last spring, I had this opportunity to work with my friend and colleague Scott Kern to develop an AI literacy pilot that we ran at North Star Academy that was a chance to explore what all these educational ideas looked like when it came to AI. And that’s what was on The Daily and, and was in The Times, and it was so amazing to hear our students, you know, share their wisdom with the world in that way.
Brett Roer: I [00:07:00] was just sharing before we came on that, you know, we had been fortunate enough to book Mike prior to this article coming out and this podcast, and I had no idea. And I- The Daily is one of the podcasts I look at and see what the story of the day is, and I saw that and I said Interesting. And I got to learn so much, and like you said, get to listen and learn from your students, which was truly incredible.
Brett Roer: You know, Mike, to take some of the quotes from it and just let you kind of expand upon it, you know, the fact that you created this AI literacy course, I mean, we talked, I don’t even remember how many months ago about this. This was in its infancy, and now it’s become really recognized and celebrated. For our listeners who are thinking about, “I want to expand into AI literacy.
Brett Roer: I want to make sure that my students have access to the same things that, you know, your students do,” maybe walk people through what would be lessons learned and, like, the ideal way if you were starting it this upcoming school year. Like, what would be the best steps for success, and anything you’d want to call out as here’s what not to do, and, uh, lessons learned the hard way?
Brett Roer: Take it away, Mike.
Mike Taubman: I [00:08:00] think I’m, I’m happy to get into the details of how we built and are rebuilding the specific course and, and some of the pedagogical or curricular takeaways there. But I think more broadly to your question, the first step is for us as educators to get comfortable with AI. And that does not mean b- accepting AI as a fait accompli in the education system.
Mike Taubman: It doesn’t mean becoming passengers. The whole idea of our course is you’re a driver, not a passenger of this moment. And so it’s not that s- teachers need to put aside all their concerns. It’s that in order, in our minds, in order to Prepare students for this moment. We need to engage with AI enough that we can start to see how we believe, as educators, it should be brought into schools and when it shouldn’t be brought into schools.
Mike Taubman: And so I’m saying all that to say, I think the first step is don’t just read about it, use it. Like this summer, for example, is a great opportunity for people to get a one-month subscription. You know, they’re about $20, and I think for that amount of time and money, $20 for one [00:09:00] month this summer, if you try these tools in a few ways, even for personal parts of your life, I know all three of us do this as well, you start to see what they can and can’t do, and then I think your teacher instincts kind of take over, and you know your kids, you know your context, and if you’re a leader, you know your school and your district and your community, and then you can start to make decisions about what it can look like in practice in your situation.
Rebecca Bultsma: I love that you bring that up because that’s something that I’ve said for a long time as well, this idea of putting on your own oxygen mask before you can help other people. When I go to schools, they say, “Well, we need to– You need to teach us about AI, and we need to know how to teach students about AI.”
Rebecca Bultsma: Well, the very first thing is you have to, like anything, understand it really, really well yourself before you can start ever, uh, teaching about it, right? And I’ve learned, and you’ve probably learned, and I know Brett has, the only way to really get good at leveraging these tools is, like, by putting in the reps.
Rebecca Bultsma: You know, you just have to spend time experimenting, working with them, seeing what’s possible, what’s not possible, where in your specific context [00:10:00] they can be useful, and where they’re not, and there isn’t exactly shortcuts to that. You can’t really just, like, spend half an hour and master it. You have to– It has to be an ongoing kind of exploration, and I love your advice about getting a one-month subscription.
Rebecca Bultsma: For people who are brand new and who are listening to this, and they’ve probably heard, “Oh, just go experiment with some AI tools.” What would you suggest to them would be a good, like, use case? Or what do you give people for specifics? Because I don’t know about you, but I hear a lot, “Well, like, I just don’t even know where to start or what to have it do, or how to even experiment with these tools.”
Rebecca Bultsma: Where could a teacher start? Say they’re opening something up, they’re sitting in front of it right away. Where do they start?
Mike Taubman: So I’d say for teachers this summer, educators, other people who are curious, w- what I usually suggest is people try a personal and a professional use case. And again, I do think it’s worth it for at least for a month trying a, a paid subscription version to one of the models, ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, ’cause you’ll, you’ll just see more, more what they can do.[00:11:00]
Mike Taubman: And so, for example, if someone’s starting a garden this summer, or just keeping some houseplants going, like the one behind me here, one thing you can do is take photos of your garden, give some context to the system, where you are in the world, the size of your apartment or the size of the garden you’re, you’re planting, and what you’re doing with the plants, and then see what the AI suggests about how you’re doing your garden or your plant care.
Mike Taubman: And I think moments like that help people see they’re multimodal. You can upload images. Also, you can give it context, which, as you both know, is increasingly important. And so that’s kind of a, a way to experiment with AI that really catches you up pretty quickly to where the field is. You’re providing context, you’re using images, and you’re starting to ask it about something that you are seeing live, which is important.
Mike Taubman: It’s not just abstract. You’re seeing whether the plant is doing better or worse. And then for a pers- a professional use case, I think everybody in education is always spending the summers with a, a little bit of a education thought in the back of their minds. And so you just pick something in your practice.
Mike Taubman: It could be a, a course redesign you want to do, a new text you’re thinking about bringing in, a new curriculum you want to explore, a new pedagogy, [00:12:00] and just again, tell the AI as much context as you’d like about what you teach and how you try to teach and what your beliefs are as an educator or a school leader, and then ask it about the curriculum you’re curious about or the text you’re curious about or the pedagogy you’re curious about.
Mike Taubman: And really quickly there, again, you’re bringing AI into a space where you have expertise, which again puts you in the driver’s seat because you can see where it’s helpful and where it isn’t And pretty quickly, if you bring it into spaces you know well, you’ll start to see the ways in which it’s not a useful tool, which I think is as important as seeing where it could be useful.
Rebecca Bultsma: I think one of the most interesting things that I’ve been telling people as a place to start is to just have the AI interview them. It’s one of my favorite things lately is to just say, “Hey, I’m thinking about redesigning my curriculum. Interview me until you have enough context so that you can help me do this.”
Rebecca Bultsma: And then you don’t even know how– need to necessarily know about prompting or know where to start or know what context might matter or not matter. Uh, it ends up interviewing you, and it knows what it needs to give you a good [00:13:00] response, which I like. Another interesting thing, less popular, and I understand people have, uh, very specific feelings about Grok built into the Axe platform, but I, I’ve found that if you go into Grok and say, “Show me what high school English teachers are building with generative AI right now that is really interesting,” it pulls real-time data up to the day, specific examples of what other people are doing, and I find that can be super interesting as a place to start as well.
Rebecca Bultsma: So hopefully between us all, we give some, some good ideas for those people who are just starting out.
Mike Taubman: Can I throw one more thing in there-
Rebecca Bultsma: Yeah …
Mike Taubman: while we’re on the subject? It’s not, it’s not a use case. It’s more of a mindset I would recommend for people. To me, there’s four questions about AI that, and that’s just what I’d like students to be thinking about, uh, other educators I work with.
Mike Taubman: There’s what it can and can’t do, which to our, to our point here, you’ll learn pretty quickly in these various use cases, but there’s also what it should and shouldn’t do. Even if it can do it, should it do it? And I think, again, educators are– [00:14:00] we’re built to be asking those questions, but I would just encourage everyone to keep those questions in mind, too, as you’re exploring.
Rebecca Bultsma: As an AI ethicist, I fully endorse that message. Yeah. So thank you.
Brett Roer: I already like– It just made me think of, like, a plot chart, you know, like the four quadrants. Like, that actually would be such– We might come back to this question, and maybe, maybe, Mike, you could, you could share, like, an example of what each quadrant could be, or we could put Rebecca on the hot seat when it’s your time to ask questions.
Brett Roer: Um, one that I just– Today, my wife’s best friend is over, and I was just cooking lunch right before this, and I wanted to literally spice things up, and so I did something I know Rebecca has told so many educators. I like– literally was like, “Here’s the ingredients I have that are fresh. Here’s what I always usually make.
Brett Roer: How can I literally spice this up, make it more interesting?” And yeah, I just made a really, really new, delicious meal. So I still use it for even those little things like that, and my wife’s best friend said, “Oh, that’s a good use for AI.” I was like, “Yeah. It’s really easy.” [00:15:00] Mike, something that I read or listened to, I actually haven’t read your article, but your students, it was much– it was very fun for me to get to listen and learn from your students.
Brett Roer: Something that I love is this idea of, you know, you’re calling it like- Your class is where they’re gonna get their AI driver’s license. So the thing that we love to learn is, you use the term, like, write your own rules for the road. What are some really insightful rules of the road that, that students have come up with, that you, your colleagues have come with, that your school or network have come up with that, you know, listeners out there should really understand, like, these are some best practices happening in real time in, in your classroom and beyond that, uh, could really help them when they think through this process?
Mike Taubman: Yeah, I think maybe the, the way to do this is to quickly go through the four parts of that driver’s license framework so that people will see where the rules of the road live and how they, how students arrive at them. But, uh, I’d love to get into those details as well. So the first part of the idea [00:16:00] overall, as you can tell, is that AI is like a car.
Mike Taubman: And the idea here is not that AI is exactly like a car. Obviously, AI researchers would probably, uh, quibble, to say the least, with, with that analogy. But I think it’s really important for educators and students to think of it like a car, because that means it’s something humans made, that’s something we can drive, that’s something that has societal implications, et cetera.
Mike Taubman: So the first step is to choose a destination. That’s what we do in the course. And we say to students, “What’s a t- a project you want to a- accomplish? What’s something in the world you wanna change? What’s something you see yourself or your family or friends struggling with that you want to address?” And the, the premise there is that’s not about AI, that’s about them, and what they care about, what they’re passionate about, or what they’re angry about that they wanna change.
Mike Taubman: Step two is to learn to drive, how to actually use the tools, provide context, prompt, et cetera. Step three is to understand what’s under the hood. So what’s the engine powering this car? And we use a website that’s … I really recommend, called, uh, Transformer Explainer, that visualizes how transformer architecture works and how words become tokens, and then the math happens, and then out the [00:17:00] other side come probabilistic answers.
Mike Taubman: That the AI is, uh, in some ways, a math machine with a language machine on top of it, but inside is doing more math than it is language. And when students see that, that can be a very powerful realization for them. But then the fourth part is, if the first part is, what’s my personal destination, the fourth part is, what do we collectively think the rules of the road should be?
Mike Taubman: And this is, again, where the car idea can be powerful because cars, as we all know, are wrapped up in a bunch of norms and rules and laws. We have an age you can drive at. Students run into the room when they get their driver’s license. But they’re, they’re excited partly ’cause they, they were excited to drive, but they also know it means they’ve earned a responsibility.
Mike Taubman: Car companies can be liable if cars are made poorly. Individuals can be held accountable if they’re driving poorly. There’s all sorts of sort of ways in which we have taken cars and made them as safe as possible increasingly in our society, while also, i- in many ways, reshaping our physical landscape around [00:18:00] them.
Mike Taubman: So to us, that’s a very generative way of thinking about AI because it poses the question to students, to get back to your question, what should the rules of the road be if we have the cars before the laws right now?
Mike Taubman: It’s sort of like 100 years ago when the first cars came out, and, you know, now 100 years later, it’s easy to say we have all these rules and norms and licenses, but at the time, everybody was still just figuring this out. So to answer your question, one thing that was really striking to me, and this is going to the, uh, career-connected learning and purpose development program I run for juniors and seniors.
Mike Taubman: Uh, during that course, we use a lot of AI tools I’m happy to explain, but one of the things everyone does at the end of the course is give a capstone presentation, and in the presentation they share what they believe about AI. It’s one of the required parts. And what was so interesting to me was actually what they believe came out in how they made their presentations.
Mike Taubman: I showed them ahead of time how they could make AI slides. I showed them how to use Canva in this case, ’cause they all use Canva, to make AI [00:19:00] slides. I, I said, “You need to have your ideas. This is about you. This is literally about who you are and who you’re becoming. Your grandma’s gonna be here. People are gonna FaceTime in from other countries.
Mike Taubman: Your best friend misses math class to come join this for a period. It’s, it’s your moment. So the slides have to be about you, but if you’d like to have AI make them, that’s fine with me. If you’re not trying to be a graphic designer, you know, it’s okay to have AI make the slides.” The vast majority of them chose not to because that was their moment and they were not gonna let AI inhibit their authenticity.
Mike Taubman: And so what I’d say there is that’s a vote, you know, voting with your feet so to speak in the sense that they see this as a useful tool. They– Many of them described how they used it in their career research, but at the same time they were gonna draw a hard line when it came to questions of who they were and who th- what they were sharing with the world.
Brett Roer: Yeah. Um, just something that you just said that really resonated is like that would’ve– that would fall in the quadrant of like can but shouldn’t, right? Like if you’re gonna share a narrative about yourself. And, you know, [00:20:00] something that I keep hearing you say it, it’s great about this rules and letting students really explore what the rules should be in absence of like concrete rules.
Brett Roer: That’s amazing. This idea of like who’s driving who, right? Who’s steering this technology? And that’s something we’ve heard so many young people around the age of your students say like, “I don’t know where my brain ends and AI takes over or when my learning ends.” So h- like you gave– That’s a great example of where they chose, like you said, they voted with their feet.
Brett Roer: How else are you getting them to actually like feel that difference? Like that’s the end project. Like how are you getting them to even, not right or wrong, but again just like think for a second like what should or shouldn’t? Like how do you get them to map that out in their head?
Mike Taubman: I’ll give you one example from that same program, then maybe we can switch back to the AI literacy course.
Mike Taubman: In that program, I have several bots that we use here and there that are built using Playlab, this AI nonprofit that I f- was one of the first institutions to kind of help me wrap my head around this a few years ago. And so we’ll build a [00:21:00] Playlab bot where, for example, it’ll ask them to connect their dots and look at their past and say, “What moments in high school were most resonant for you inside the classroom, outside the classroom?”
Mike Taubman: And it asks a few questions. Does the interview, Rebecca, to your point of kind of interview. And then at the end, I built the bot to try to synthesize for them what that implied about their possible future. And so, for example, when I did the demo with them, I would tell the bot that I loved playing pickup basketball, and I especially loved playing defense, which was, was true in high school before my knees stopped working in my 40s.
Mike Taubman: And the bot said, “Well, if you love defense and you love reading,” which I did back then, “maybe you should get into something where you’re helping people through stories, ’cause defense is a form of protection. There’s some part of you that believes in protection.” So that’s how the bot works. So we use that in class for no more than about 10 minutes.
Mike Taubman: One of the sort of anecdotal rules we’re coming to is that there’s a 20/80 idea where AI should be no more than 20% of a given class period. Close the laptop, finish with the bot. [00:22:00] Now, before we even talk about your future and your career, was that even accurate? I just built this bot. I’ll even show you the prompt after this, but did that work?
Mike Taubman: Th- that may not have worked for you. Why or why not? Turn and talk. And that moment, if you do that regularly, you start to help students build a sort of meta-awareness of AI so they’re not just using it, they’re thinking about it afterwards.
Brett Roer: Well said. I love turning this over to Rebecca in a moment, but let’s celebrate the fact that it is our 250th birthday as a, as a young nation, and you know, something that, again, I learned was that your students wrote like an AI Declaration of Independence.
Brett Roer: I would love to know what were the biggest things that surprised you? What were the things you’re like, “Oh, this is really what, you know, this is what I was hoping students would get out of this course” that, you know, really resonated with you? And then I wanna let Rebecca ask a couple questions and really get back into the AI literacy work you, uh, you founded.
Mike Taubman: So they each wrote [00:23:00] individual declarations that were modeled, the whole thing was modeled on the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” So they first wrote, “I hold these truths to be self-evident.” And The Daily, uh, for people who haven’t listened, did a really beautiful job capturing their voices and layering them and it, it was a really, really wonderful moment to hear students’ voices that way.
Mike Taubman: So they all made individual declarations, and then we spent our last class period of the year workshopping a collective declaration. Instead of, “I hold these truths to be self-evident,” “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And three of the points that emerged there that I thought were interesting, one is that AI is a tool, not an intelligence.
Mike Taubman: Now again, there might be people out there who would disagree with that assessment. I think some of the people running the frontier labs would disagree. But I think it’s very important for young people right now as the technology currently exists to think of it that way, because that is a, a more empowering way of thinking about it that is not incorrect either.
Mike Taubman: But it’s about them having the sense that like a car, humans built this and we can make decisions about it. The second idea [00:24:00] they shared is that AI should never put convenience before growth. Now this is of course aspirational, as declarations are, and so there’s gonna be moments for all of us where we maybe make different decisions with AI.
Mike Taubman: But as a premise, as an underlying principle about AI, we thought that was really powerful. And the third one was that if AI starts to diminish various aspects of our relationships with others, or even our environment, et cetera, if it starts to have negative effects, we reserve the right to regulate it, essentially.
Mike Taubman: And we got started to talk in that class about the details of what they thought regulation should look like. But what we loved about that moment was, number one, that they were sharing these principles, but number two, we’d set it all up, and we used the declaration ’cause my, again, my colleague and friend who co-taught and co-designed this with me, Scott Kern, is a history teacher.
Mike Taubman: So he set it up really beautifully where he talked about how the declaration was a draft, a work in progress of people coming together at a very confusing historical moment, at a challenging moment, and trying to find the [00:25:00] words for what they stood for in that moment. And then, as Obama and many others have discussed, it’s a project that for 250 years we’ve been perfecting So here they are in a challenging, confusing moment, trying to find the words for what they believe, knowing it’s not gonna end when that bell rings or with that daily episode, but this is an ongoing project that we all need to take part in.
Rebecca Bultsma: I think that’s so amazing. I really love the car analogy. It just works so well on so many levels because, you know, we decide as individuals how to operate a vehicle safely and whether or not we’re going to. You know, you can advocate for change in specific elements of that. Maybe it’s rules of the road in your neighborhood or if there’s a playground zone or not, um, try and advocate, and ultimately then it has to be the people who are building the cars who have to do it safely, and then the government to create regulations that encourage people to build safe cars and safe roads.
Rebecca Bultsma: So I think that’s really great. That’s a lot of the risk that I think about and that I study in [00:26:00] the governance issues fall into those exact same categories. So I, I really appreciate the analogy. I try and talk about sometimes in terms of like, you know, firearms analogies, which are a little more divisive in terms of who’s responsible for safety, right?
Rebecca Bultsma: Parents, kids, you know, government protecting people, all of these things, but I think the car one is a little more universal and, and applicable, so I appreciate that. I wanna go back a little bit more to some of these how AI should and shouldn’t, uh, be used, because it’s, it’s so tricky, right? Like, I live in a world of gray, and, uh, there’s all this difference between even just like morals, which are individual ways of seeing the world, and ethics, which are the frameworks we use to make sense of our individual morals and try and run a just society.
Rebecca Bultsma: And I’m curious about where you stand on things like this, uh, and how maybe that differed from your students. What do you think are the shoulds [00:27:00] and shouldn’ts that we should be talking about in education? Or do we leave that up to kids? Do we let the government decide for us? I’d love to chat a little bit more about that.
Rebecca Bultsma: I realize it’s a little abstract, and I know there’s a lot around it in terms of cognitive offloading, but you’re in the space, and I think you’ve probably seen what works and what doesn’t work, so I’d love to hear.
Mike Taubman: I– The first step on a broad level to me is to realize as educators that, that our, again, our instincts and our training are really needed right now in the AI and education space.
Mike Taubman: That this is not something that other people are gonna be able to figure out for us. There’ll be lots of ideas out there, and we’re gonna need a– It’s gonna take a village to figure this out, you know, researchers and politicians and the labs themselves of course, but that we have a really important seat at that table, and so do our students and their families.
Mike Taubman: And the idea of the, of educ- AI in education being a conversation that involves families and students and educators as much as it [00:28:00] involves everybody else talking about AI in education, I think is just a first move that we need to almost mentally make. That th- there’s not somebody else out there who’s gonna find these answers for us better than we are, although we need to be in dialogue with everybody, obviously outside of education as well.
Mike Taubman: Then on a specific level, you know, I, I think that one thing I worry about, and I know I’m sure a lot of educators do, is the idea that teachers will just upload student work to AI and then use that to determine how students did. And there’s two issues with this, first of all. Obviously, number one, if teachers are uploading student work to their personal AI accounts, that, that’s a breach of various kinds.
Mike Taubman: But even if they’re using best practices, like we’re doing at Uncommon Schools where we have a Gemini Education account for all the teachers at our schools, and so we have all this sort of privacy built in there. One of the things we believe really deeply and that we’re training our teachers on is the notion that AI can be a thought partner for you, but if it replaces your judgment as a [00:29:00] teacher, and even more if it, for new teachers, makes it harder to develop that judgment, then we’re in a space where shouldn’t is the word that comes to my mind because there, there’s ways in which AI, it’d be almost silly in my mind not to at least try AI in, in some ways.
Mike Taubman: Like, let me look at student work, develop my own sense of what the trending misunderstanding is and what I need to reteach tomorrow, and then let me potentially run some student work samples through an AI system that’s safe and, and secure in terms of their information, and then spar with the AI. Maybe there’s something I hadn’t thought of.
Mike Taubman: But it needs to start with me first as the teacher and as the adult responsible for their learning. These systems are, have no ethical or legal responsibility to our students the way we do as educators.
Brett Roer: I just wanted to ask very briefly two, one– two things really stand out to me. One, I love the fact that you and your colleague are both humanities teachers because it is still [00:30:00] Just, you know, there’s a mental model, and I completely can empathize with it if you’re, if you have a sense of fear in the humanities that it’s going to dilute the quality of student work, critical thinking.
Brett Roer: Like, you know, I’m a huge proponent of not letting that happen, but recognizing we are in the age of AI. So I would love if you could share, you know, I know you’ve incubated this course, but you have colleagues that I’m sure, like you said, that were teaching them how to use it. So two things. One is, generally, like, how do you have these conversations with your peers around, like, like, a “yes, and” mentality?
Brett Roer: Yes, AI is here, and here’s how it could make our students even deeper thinkers, like you mentioned. And the second one is, if you don’t mind, the idea of how do you learn best about your students? So if you’re an English teacher, like you said, a new English teacher, and this could be one of those things where you have to try it for yourself, but, like, you don’t wanna take the human out of the lead.
Brett Roer: And if they are [00:31:00] reading 100 essays, do you recommend they try, like, read it, read it first, kinda like dictate your thoughts, and then, like, kinda ask the AI tool of choice or safety, you know, like, “Can you find more evidence to support this?” Or like, “Is this the right feedback based on this rubric?” Like, where– how are you helping people think through those things?
Brett Roer: I know that’s a lot of questions, but, you know, I’ll let you pick and choose how you wanna navigate.
Mike Taubman: To start with getting to know your students, before even the, the first assignment comes in, and I’ll, I’ll explain how I think this relates to AI. But I, one thing that I always try to do as a challenge to myself, and I make it public also to students.
Mike Taubman: Now, to be clear, I didn’t do this my first year, but I think this is something I, looking back at first-year teacher me, I would recommend trying to do, and for other teachers out there. What I say to students on the first day after, you know, the, the opening few moments of class is, “I will have all your names memorized.
Mike Taubman: I will know who you all are by Friday.” Say it’s Monday. “By Friday, I’m gonna know who you all are by [00:32:00] name, and I’m gonna go around the room and say everyone’s name in a direction you pick, so I can’t have determined it in advance.” And of course, it’s kind of a game, and teenagers are, you know, ex- there’s a whole sort of teenage angle there.
Mike Taubman: But what that’s really about underneath is, “I see you, and I’m gonna show you I see you in the first week of school.” And in my experience, and I’m sure a lot of teachers listening can relate, obviously, if you don’t know their names by the second week, there’s, you know, it, it sends another message. But I think affirming in a very public way that you know their names, doesn’t have to be that exact way, but whatever way works for you, even when they’re coming in the room by that Thursday, saying everybody’s name when they walk in, without checking your roster, just saying it.
Mike Taubman: I think that’s a way that we start showing our students that what this is all about is the relationships we have with them, individually and collectively, and that this classroom is a place where we see each other and we know each other And I’m saying that to say because if you start there, then it’s clear what AI shouldn’t do.
Mike Taubman: AI is not gonna explain who someone is to me [00:33:00] or, or explain to me when this is not their day. They had a tough morning, and this is not the day to push them publicly. I’ll go over privately and encourage them, but this is not a moment to sort of call on them when their hand is not up Once you’ve done that, I think it becomes much easier to say to students, as I did this year, “I looked at all the, your recent projects, and I’m really interested to see the effort you’re putting in, the reflection you’re doing, et cetera.
Mike Taubman: But this is a career-connected learning course, and some of you are exploring architecture and pediatrics and AI research, and I’m an English teacher. So I’m gonna use AI because it can help me give you feedback about your pediatric intervention with your simulated patient better than I can by myself.
Mike Taubman: But I’m gonna start by saying, ‘I see how hard you worked on this,’ or, ‘I see that you could push yourself harder next time.’” And so I think that’s how I, I, for any, for te- people teaching anything, I think it’s really important to start with the relationship, then be clear that you have a high bar [00:34:00] academically for them.
Mike Taubman: You’re gonna help them rise to meet it, but you’re gonna hold a high bar. And then third, here’s how AI will be part of that process, and I’m gonna tell you that. I’m not gonna do it and not tell you. I’m gonna do it and tell you so you can be in on it.
Rebecca Bultsma: I think that relational focus is the most important part.
Rebecca Bultsma: I have serious reservations about using AI for any type of grading, and I understand that’s a major pain point for educators. But again, there’s such a relational element to it, as well as that black box element where you can’t interrogate an AI as to why it gave this feedback or why it gave this kid a 70 versus a 75.
Rebecca Bultsma: And I just think that’s, until we understand more, somewhere that needs to remain untouched, unless it’s in ways that you’ve mentioned that start with the relationship at its core, make it clear the specifics of how it will be used, but still assuring students and everybody involved, likely the parents, that you will be the final decision-maker, and that you will be fully involved in the process.
Rebecca Bultsma: So I love that you brought those things up.
Brett Roer: Yeah. [00:35:00] And just to highlight something that we hear students around the country say, and we obviously recognize where it’s coming from. A lot of it is lack of guidance in the age of AI from educators on quote unquote what is cheating, right? So just shouting out, shouting out an amazing district leader.
Brett Roer: She knows who she is. She’s getting her doctorate right now, and this is what she texted me last night, just as we’re on the subject of, like, relationships. “Quiet venting. One of my professors turned back a paper saying that it’s AI. So now I’m rewriting it. I am so over this professor. I’m allowed to turn it back in a second draft, but it’s beyond the point when I know I didn’t use AI.
Brett Roer: Sorry, just needed to vent.” Now, that’s an adult as being accused of that on their way to their doctorate, so, like, obviously they can demonstrate writing. They’ve made it this far. But imagine a student, to your point, Mike, where, like, maybe they don’t like writing, and they just need someone to know, like, “I believe in you, that your effort’s there, and here’s how you’re gonna get better at writing.”
Brett Roer: Or the message is like, “I ran this through an AI detector. You definitely did it.” And now, again, let’s say they did use AI, it’s [00:36:00] still adversarial helping. If they didn’t use AI, all trust is gone. So I really applaud that you’re, you know, hopefully this is helping educators think through this nuance of, like, what I shared down at ISTE, this incredible education leader said, “The last time I was a principal,” and some of his staff was watching him, and he’s like, “You know, they’re no longer my– I don’t lead them anymore, but they’re part of my district.”
Brett Roer: He said, “For the first two weeks I told them, ‘I just want you to build relationships with students.’” And, like, I love that theory, but also as a principal and a teacher, especially in New York when you have state tests, it’s like, okay, how do you do that and hold them accountable in rigor? And with AI, I feel like this is really a time where you can do both.
Brett Roer: You can have relationships and hold students accountable to rigor and get to know them better by using the tools that are, that make that part more efficient, so you can go deeper on relationships and make sure they feel seen and heard, and hopefully they have a teacher like you that, uh, teaches them how to get that license in AI.
Brett Roer: So that’s, that’s truly incredible, Mike.
Mike Taubman: You just made me think of this. I think one of the, our jobs now as [00:37:00] educators, whether we’re in the classroom or, or leading teachers, is to– I think students are starting to quietly question if they can do it without AI. I think there’s probably lots of adults thinking that too, but certainly for the students in our classrooms, it is so important as part of the relationship building that what you’re, you’re saying this is y- I see you, and I, I see who you are, but also I see you in an academic context.
Mike Taubman: That’s my role. I’m an educator, you’re in a classroom, we’re here to learn. And I am going to show you that you can do it, and that you can reach certain bar- Even the first week, again, there’s certain bars I’m gonna set that you can hit, and if you can’t hit them, I can show you how you can hit them next time, so that you start to build a sense of confidence as a young person that you can do it without these systems.
Mike Taubman: ‘Cause one thing I worry about in the long run here is for students just growing up with this A permanent scaffold was never what education was about. [00:38:00] We build the scaffolds and then take them down, and the students walk off and live their lives. And, and we need to be very careful right now that we don’t– There’s two ways we could make this accident.
Mike Taubman: One, we could leverage AI too much in the wrong ways. But two, if we don’t engage with students about this and show them the difference between a beautiful sentence that they wrote that took a long time to find the right words, and the AI probability-generated token sequence, if they can’t see that difference when they’re with us, uh, we don’t have a guarantee they’re gonna see it later.
Brett Roer: I love it. I think you just even named an additional skill that, again, for educators out there, this goes back to that idea of like, you know, what doesn’t– if you don’t measure, you know, what doesn’t get measured, doesn’t get taught kind of thing. And it’s like you just brought up a third, like a third skill that we’re really not talking about: discernment, right?
Brett Roer: Like, can you create both? Can you tell both apart? How would you know? Like right now, again, everyone’s jumping to like AI detectors for this false sense of security. But again, even if [00:39:00] they’re right or wrong, more the conversation about like, well, why? Like, what makes you think this? And we’ve done this where we’ve interviewed students in the Bronx, and one student read this incredibly eloquent presentation he wrote, and he asked them, “Tell me which parts you think is AI.”
Brett Roer: And he brought up parts, and he’s like, “Nope, that was all me.” And he was so proud because it sounded really good. He’s like, “No, did that myself.” But this is the part it said, like it was really good. He goes– And this person happens to be like a professional rapper, like a, a teenage, like phenom. And he was like, “It gave me good advice about like ask questions to the audience after a fact,” you know?
Brett Roer: Or like ask them to like ask each other questions. And I’m like, right. Like, I didn’t know that when I was 15 or 16. Like, I could probably write this thing, but I wouldn’t know how to like make it better for the crowd, you know? So like it’s really amazing. But I really– That point is so important, Mike, so thank you for bringing that to everyone’s attention too.
Brett Roer: Are you ready for what I’ve learned being down at ISTE is our fan favorite. I didn’t know this, but this is what people are tuning in for, is Rebecca and I giving [00:40:00] reins over. They’re tired of us asking all the questions, so Mike, you know, you’re now the host of the AmpED to 11 podcast. You now get to ask us a question.
Brett Roer: You could ask one for each of us to answer. You can ask one for both of us to answer. It’s your show. Take it away.
Mike Taubman: Rebecca and Brett, thank you for joining me on AmpED to 11. It’s great to have you here. Uh, now my question is, I’ve been wrestling with the, the broader tech lash and the specific parent concerns around screen time and AI, which I know you both have, are engaging in conversations all over the country about.
Mike Taubman: And what I’m trying to, to determine for myself individually but also as a, as an educator is I believe, for all the reasons we’ve been discussing, it’s important to engage with this in schools in careful structured ways that stay true to our values as educators and our mission. There are parents out there, I’m sure you’ve talked to many of them, who would probably disagree with even that part of what I just said, and in a good faith way.
Mike Taubman: They would have strong feelings about that. So w- what are, what are you [00:41:00] seeing as the strongest arguments against AI in schools, and how do you respond to those for yourself?
Rebecca Bultsma: Brett knows I always have, like, a knee-jerk feeling about anything, so
Brett Roer: Why don’t I … I’ll take the first one, and I also want to preface for our listeners, and you know what?
Brett Roer: I’m gonna put this comment out there. Love to, love to hear the comments from, you know, the billions of fans out there. I like Rebecca’s pragmatism, and I don’t think you can really have an answer that’s not nuanced and have a podcast or call yourself an AI ethicist. Like, you might err more on the side of, uh, uh, caution and fear, but that’s because you’re doing this research.
Brett Roer: If I knew half the stuff you do, I don’t think I’d get out of bed in the morning. So kudos to you. But Mike, to answer your question, again, just to quote some really smart people at ISTE, uh, Richard Culatta, you know, he held up one of the largest school districts in the country just passed a tech- a screen ban with, like, here’s exactly how many minutes a day each grade level can do it.
Brett Roer: And, like, on the surface that makes so much sense. It’s almost like a food pyramid. You know, [00:42:00] like, yeah, you have to have a certain ratio of things. Totally on the surface get it. I think what it misses and what I ask people is, okay, so you get 20 minutes a day if you’re a third grader, let’s say What would you want kids to do on that?
Brett Roer: Like, what would be the thing that’s the most valuable use of that 20 minutes, right? I- again, this is like when we make AI policies with schools. I can’t tell you at what age you should do XYZ. That’s your community values. But I can tell you, like, okay, if you’re gonna allow them to do that, what’s the most interesting assignment or assessment you can do there?
Brett Roer: And that’s where I like to push people, because then you meet them where they are. So I’d say one thing is, great, we acknowledge that kids are on screens too much. I don’t let my children on screens at all down, at home, right? Minus, like, a life-changing sporting event. That’s really it. But if I were to, and I wanted them to learn in their school, I would ask their teachers, “What do you think it is?”
Brett Roer: I’d ask parents, “What do you think it is?” And I’d ask the kids, “When do you feel like you’re actually learning in front of a screen?” And take all that wisdom and, you know, [00:43:00] use an AI tool to synthesize it and spit that back out to the community and say, “We interviewed a statistically significant number of you.”
Brett Roer: Right? “If we’re gonna follow this 20 minutes a day, then, like, this is what we should do. And if we find these 20 minutes are impactful, let’s have a conversation about expanding those minutes.” Right? So I try to meet people where they are at, but I also completely recognize it. It’s a, it’s a scary time to be a parent.
Brett Roer: But the other thing I also find, you know, in my community, eh, especially in others, like, when we interview students, I ask them, like, “Who gave you that device?” They’re like, “My parents.” It’s like, “And who gave you the one in your classroom?” “The school.” And it’s similar to you thinking about the driver’s license.
Brett Roer: We didn’t train them. We gave them highly addictive technology that we can’t get off of, and so we’re gonna ban it for them with, again, no withdrawal symptoms, like, no plan to take it away, no plan to bring it back in with purpose. So those things are the ones that, that worry me most that I would want to have an authentic dialogue with.
Brett Roer: And usually you get people, like, I was in a school two days ago for two hours with an administrator [00:44:00] who, Rebecca, she was like, “Yeah, in the transcript you just called me Negative Nancy.” I was like, “I, I know that move.” But I said, “It’s not negative. You have valid concerns.” And by the end she was like, “Well, these are ways I think we could use it with our freshmen in bridge.”
Brett Roer: I was like, “Yeah. And if that’s all you do because that’s what you believe right now, great. But, like, let’s hear… Like, measure it, ask kids what they thought about it, and then come up with more use cases.” So that is my answer. I am also very afraid, but I would meet people where they are, mitigate fear, really ask them what matters, and then get everyone included, and then say, “This is how we use it for 20 minutes a day.
Brett Roer: This is how we’re gonna measure it, and then we’re gonna come back in X amount of time and see if, if it led to the intended outcomes. If it did, what do we do with it then? Do we expand it? Do we curb it more? Or do we change what we’re using that time for?” That’s what I got. Rebecca?
Rebecca Bultsma: I am less optimistic, and I will say most of my pessimism is usually grounded in research.
Rebecca Bultsma: I have, I have serious questions about whether or [00:45:00] not AI belongs in schools, to be honest. I think there’s decades of research about– that asks really important questions about whether technology in classrooms has been useful at all. There’s a book called Oversold and Underused, uh, that documents this very well, recognizing that there are lots of other factors as well.
Rebecca Bultsma: With that said, I struggle to figure out why we need to have this in classrooms right now. I think classrooms are where the most face time needs to happen, the most critical development of basic skills. I don’t think there’s enough evidence to say that AI or even technology is going to help develop those things.
Rebecca Bultsma: I don’t think we’ve really had to teach kids how to use cutting-edge technology in the past. Like, they’re gonna figure it out. We didn’t have to teach them how to use social media. We don’t have to be teaching them these things. They already know more about it than we do. What we do have to be teaching them is digital literacy, ethics, being good citizens, being good humans, responsible [00:46:00] use, and coming up with your own constitution and having your own guiding compass and moral values, and identifying those things about yourself without any technology involved.
Rebecca Bultsma: I think those are conversations that need to be had first. Those critical skills need to be instilled. I think those foundational learning skills need to be involved with, I would argue, like, no technology. I don’t think you need technology to do those things. In fact, I’d argue that that has hurt our ability to do those things in schools, uh, in the past.
Rebecca Bultsma: And so I, I understand where parents are coming from. I do think moving into junior, senior year, exactly what you’re doing, Mike, is perfect, uh, because once you have a foundation and you know how to write, and you know how to build logical arguments, and you understand how to do reading comprehension well, and you understand how to think critically for yourself, then it– you can start scaffolding some of that AI around that infrastructure.
Rebecca Bultsma: But I think introducing it any sooner in a formal way, kids are gonna be using it. [00:47:00] Like, they’re gonna be using it outside of the school. We know that. So I don’t think It’s necessarily our job to be spending tons of time teaching it outside of responsible use in schools. And I, I expect that’s where a lot of schools are gonna end up.
Rebecca Bultsma: I hope they do, because we’ve seen what technology is doing and how it’s hindering kids and screens, and I know enough about AI and I work with it enough to not think it’s gonna be any sort of brand-new magic bullet that’s gonna help kids learn more or better or strengthen or improve any sort of relationships in any way.
Rebecca Bultsma: So the more I learn and the more I know about that, I think my feelings have definitely shifted to where they are now. But I, I’ve been working on my research in– through something called backcasting. So it’s kind of the opposite of forecasting, like where we do anticipatory ethics and we think about the future.
Rebecca Bultsma: Backcasting is picturing like an ideal future in 30 years and then working the steps backwards of what te- would need to [00:48:00] happen now, what the milestones would be to make that true. And I, I like to think about a classroom where there is no technology, and it’s more like ancient Greece or something, where we’re sitting around and we’re discussing and we’re sharing ideas and we’re verbalizing and we’re interacting as humans.
Rebecca Bultsma: And, uh, I think, I think that is ideal. Again, that’s my perspective based on my background and everything I know and learn, and there will be people who disagree. But yeah, I think the best things that happen in classrooms aren’t things that AI can even do. So.
Brett Roer: Mike, can I, can I get another comment in here, Mike?
Brett Roer: I’m sorry. Is that okay as the host? No, no,
Mike Taubman: please. We, we, we have plenty of time. Yeah. Oh, shoot. I’ll
Brett Roer: get to my final
Mike Taubman: segment in a sec.
Brett Roer: Okay. You two, you are really good at this.
Rebecca Bultsma: You’re a pro. You’re hired.
Brett Roer: Yeah. Yeah. This is, this really has been a, a wonderful, wonderful conversation. So what’s really interesting is, again, we get asked these questions a lot and, you know, like I- I spend most, like if I ever
Brett Roer: I don’t know how Rebecca … I would [00:49:00] actually love to know one day how Rebecca answers these questions. Whenever someone really smart comes on our podcast, like especially those kids from Briarcliff or a number of people, I’m always like, “I’m not asking you to listen to this episode because of me, by any means.
Brett Roer: Like go listen to this part.” And like it’s a really nuanced conversation, ’cause if people ask me something like this, I’m like, “You know who actually said it better than me? Like instead of me paraphrasing it, just, just go listen to her if you want to.” And I always bring up with myself and Rebecca, you know, like what I really appreciate about Rebecca’s perspective is there are few people who are doing this research m- and doing it not for ult- uh, not for like nefarious reasons.
Brett Roer: Like she really is trying to get to the root of like some really big questions about humanity, society, technology. And I’m like, “That’s why you should listen to this podcast.” But the other thing that’s unique is that Rebecca, while she has served in school districts, she’s always served from a certain vantage point outside of the classroom in support of making sure communities and districts function.
Brett Roer: And whenever I get backlash about AI in [00:50:00] education, I had this gentleman who’d been like, “Yep, everyone’s making billions.” I’m like, “Sir, I’m, I’m not making billions. I’m like sitting here in this classroom with you trying to like teach 30 of you how to maybe make a gem, because I really think it will make your life better and easier.”
Brett Roer: And that’s where I struggle the most, is like I don’t want my son in front of a screen in third grade any more than he has to be. But I want his teacher to learn how to use some of these tools to be better at teaching so that she has more time when he’s not in front of a screen, like what could she be doing that’s the best use of non-screen time?
Brett Roer: So that’s where I always struggle, is like I need adults to embrace it so that kids have more time to think and wonder, and I really don’t know the answer to what age do you give it to them, and may- maybe, maybe the host has his thoughts, like when do you turn that technology over to them? But to Rebecca’s point, like, and I’ve said this before, I’d probably give my daughter, who’s gonna be six in two days, access to a lot of AI tools before I would my 74-year-old father, right?
Brett Roer: Like [00:51:00] there’s just a lot of things I think she can … If I taught her, she’d pick it up quicker, and I’d be fine with her using it once she understood how to use it, why to use it, and what’s the difference between using it and not using it. So a very limited use case obviously, but like again, it comes down to just training and, and trusting that they understand things.
Brett Roer: So great question. Mike, where, where are you gonna take us?
Rebecca Bultsma: I wanna just jump in here and say, Brett, I totally agree with you, and thanks for adding that nuance. I do think it can be very helpful in the back end for teachers, and I do think that is very, very useful. The difference that, between that back end and in front of students I think is important.
Rebecca Bultsma: Thanks for clarifying that.
Mike Taubman: I guess one way I’d put it, if I’m understanding you both correctly, and thank you seriously for those. That was really interesting to hear how you both think about this. When I go to vote or when we go to vote and there’s, there’s like ballot measures and different people on the ballot, sometimes it’s a very big election and you kind of know a lot about the policy.
Mike Taubman: Sometimes it’s a small local thing and you have to educate yourself ahead of time about what actually you’re voting about. What, what are the positions of these people or [00:52:00] these, or these ballot measures? To me N- having educators not use AI, maybe to both your points on the back end more than anywhere else, but to, if we’re not as a field engaging with this tech in a hands-on way where we actually understand what it looks like and how it works and how it, quote-unquote, thinks, even though it’s predicting, not thinking, it’s almost like voting without knowing what you’re voting for.
Mike Taubman: It, you’re, y- you know, it’s like you’re hearing about this as opposed to d- seeing it, doing the research yourself. And so I think there’s, there’s a way in which it’s almost like AI is the text, and this is a big English class, and we all have to do the reading, which is to say use it enough to understand it, and then come in and share our opinions.
Mike Taubman: Which, to both your points, is different than saying students need to use it constantly, which I don’t think is what any of us are saying.
Brett Roer: I also, just to, like, really fine point it, I think the thing that has made me … I mean, I know why. My why is, like, how do you empower educators, right? Bottom line. Nobody figured out personalization at scale pre some of the tech tools we [00:53:00] had probably had access to in the classroom pre-AI.
Brett Roer: Definitely not, you know, during the tech boom, like as Rebecca already said. I mean, that wasn’t the case. I actually was in a class, I was in a school last Thursday. For two hours, I walked into their main office, and the exact history textbook that I used 20 years ago was sitting there. And I opened it up and I said, “I literally remember, like, teaching this page,” and that was from 2005 that book was written, and it was just sitting there, and I’m like, “Okay, this definitely im-
Brett Roer: And I literally thought, right, like, I had kids from all over the world sitting in this class, and I would just be like, “Well, that’s the book.” Like, we have that book and we don’t even have enough copies of the book, but somehow I’m gonna personalize this for all these different learners? So, like, that’s where I’m like, this is
Brett Roer: If this can’t solve personalization of learning to the degree that it could be done for teachers, I’m like, I don’t know another way. And I know personalized learning isn’t the in vogue term, but I don’t know a better way to say, like, I literally would just be like, [00:54:00] “You teach that kid, because I can’t reach that kid.”
Brett Roer: That’s not personalized learning, for sure. So that’s what matters to me, like, too.
Rebecca Bultsma: And do some research, Brett, that’s called against personalized learning that you might find interesting.
Brett Roer: Yes. What is the term I’m trying to use? Is it scaffolds? I think maybe that’s the term. Like, if you don’t speak English or as you were bringing up before, like, when students do have needs that obviously can’t be met through non-traditional uses, like the use of AI is like
Brett Roer: I mean, that is, you know, an assistive tool for, to level the playing field for students. I guess that’s what I’m saying is like, if student just arrived here, me giving him the same textbook as students who’ve gone through the public school system through ninth grade, that just never felt like I was doing a good job.
Brett Roer: It was the job I could do in that moment. So I guess that’s where I, like, hope to bring the answer. Differentiation? Yeah. Is that the- Differentiation, scaffolding, meeting students where they are. Let’s use those terms Thanks.
Rebecca Bultsma: And I love the idea of AI supporting teachers in doing that instead of using an AI tool to do that for students- Yeah.
Brett Roer: Right …
Rebecca Bultsma: to be clear, right? We, I [00:55:00] think a lot of ed tech gets marketed as personalized learning, uh, through using an ed tech tool or an AI, and I have strong feelings about that. But if it’s supporting a teacher in developing resources so that they can do that better, and on a more individual basis with a human at the helm, I, I love that idea.
Mike Taubman: I appreciate both your thoughts there, and I think what, what you have me thinking about is, to me, like I was saying, there’s a 20/80 ratio of the percent of time AI should be ambient. And to your point, Rebecca, we’re talking about high school, we’re talking about older high school students, if it’s in a class at all.
Mike Taubman: But there’s also a question of, of what does it look like as part of teachers’ workflows, and that’s a whole area, I think, that as a field we need to start exploring is, we have lots of thoughts about what it looks like to grade effectively or to analyze student work or to internalize a lesson. What, what are, what does it look like for a teacher to use AI effectively in their [00:56:00] practice outside the room?
Brett Roer: Yeah. I mean, that, that is the… I guess that’s the part that, right, again Teachers pre-pandemic were starting to dwindle, right? The, the field is starting to get less and less applicants. Post-pandemic it’s been precipitous drop. So that, that is what keeps me up at night is like, who’s gonna teach my kids in 10 years?
Brett Roer: Who’s gonna teach their kids in X number of years? And What did we need to do pre-AI to make life manageable for teachers to stay in the field? And there’s just some constraints we’re not gonna be able to touch, so what, what can we use it for to make them feel like they have just more cognitive offloading and work-life balance?
Brett Roer: That’s probably still to me the thing that I’m hoping that we figure out at scale to solve this crisis.
Rebecca Bultsma: And I think t- I think teachers naturally figured it out too. We look at the internet and how teachers have adapted to be able to use the internet in wildly different [00:57:00] ways, and some still very rarely, if at all, in ways that supported them.
Rebecca Bultsma: Some felt like they needed to. Some went on to build communities to support each other or to share resources. Like, I think there’ll be a lot of different emerging ways in every field, and I think there won’t be a one-size-fits-all approach. But again, I think it just comes back to the core of what you were talking about, Mike, just that approachable AI literacy, and really I think we’ve all experienced that even the people who are– feel very strongly against this technology, all they need is that kind of entrance use case of a way that addresses one of their pain points to make their life a little bit easier.
Rebecca Bultsma: And even if it’s just one thing or one way they choose to use this technology in the background that, that helps them think deeper, differently, or maybe do some of that differentiation work, then that’s good enough for right now. I think people feel a lot of pressure that they have to master this and have it all figured out and have it be doing all of these things.
Rebecca Bultsma: Or on the other way, they think it can just do all these things, like grade all their [00:58:00] papers in 10 minutes and develop their entire curriculum for the year. And so there has to be some sort of balance, and we’ll figure it out. We always do. I always– Going back to your car analogy, right? Like in the UK, their safety strategy was someone had to walk in front of every car waving a flag to stay safe, right?
Rebecca Bultsma: And OpenAI released this as part of their– how they advocated for less regulation in the United States because it set the US– the UK so far behind because of their safety stuff. But I think we just need to find that sweet spot, right? Like of what it is, and that comes to exactly Brett’s point, which is talking and figuring out what other teachers are doing and what’s working and what’s not working.
Rebecca Bultsma: And then what you’re doing, Mike, which is starting at the ground level, and you’re influencing kids who will probably, some of them, go to school and become teachers, probably through your example and through your relationship with them, who understand how to leverage this technology responsibly, and I think that’s the best case scenario.
Brett Roer: Well, [00:59:00] as you can tell, Mike, we could let you talk about AI all day, or we can just say me and– I mean, me and Rebecca apparently don’t even need– We don’t even need a guest, and we don’t even need an audience apparently. Um, and for those listeners out there wondering if Rebecca’s already dropped the link to the book that she encourages me to read in the chat, she already has.
Brett Roer: Don’t worry. Rebecca, you wanna tell everyone what the name of this book is so that they can find it as well?
Rebecca Bultsma: It’s just a very boring research paper, one that kind of s- Talks about some of the claims about personalized learning and with why they, they may not be accurate. Challenges some of those claims, and puts an emphasis on the relational element of the teacher-student experience.
Rebecca Bultsma: It’s very boring, but if you wanna go ahead, we’ll include it in the show notes. You can drop it into NotebookLM or your favorite, uh, ChatGPT potentially, and, uh, ask it how it might apply to you in your role, and get some insights.
Brett Roer: Yeah. Well, Mike, what I’d love for us to come to a, a close is two things. One, I’d love it if you could [01:00:00] first start by, again, just giving people that maybe last words of wisdom that you haven’t had a chance to, you know, uh, really expand on yet.
Brett Roer: Maybe for a teacher who’s thinking this summer, where do they start? A leader, a parent. You know, really any words of wisdom you have for folks out there. Um, we’ll do that, and then we’re gonna take you out on some flowers. So yeah, why don’t you first start with any last words of wisdom that we didn’t somehow ask, and give you a chance to, to share.
Mike Taubman: I think it’s, it’s what we’ve been just talking about the whole time, and what you both have been saying as well, that the Seeing, trusting your teacher, your educator instincts, and trying these tools in your life or in your work in some way, and, uh, and then reflecting. You know, it’s just edu- it’s teaching, it’s education.
Mike Taubman: Try something, have a reason you tried it, see if things work the way you expected. If they didn’t, go back to the drawing board, try again. And not to say you stay on an AI loop the whole year, but if you just apply that same thing we all do as educators, where every [01:01:00] day, every school year, we are embarking on certain goals on behalf of our students, and then we’re constantly adjusting based on what’s, what’s working and what isn’t.
Mike Taubman: Just bring that mentality to this. It’s, this is not an alien spaceship that has landed and we all just have to look at from the outside until somebody comes along who has the keys This is another human creation in a long history of human creations that educators have wrestled with in their practice.
Mike Taubman: And so I think that, that mindset is the thing I just encourage everybody to, to come back to, is that you know how to deal with this. You’ve spent your whole professional life preparing for moments like this. Just trust your instincts and try things on behalf of your students, and then listen to their reactions to what happens, and listen to their families and, you know, all the things we always do.
Mike Taubman: Just do that again here.
Brett Roer: Sounds so simple, but very wise. Yes, that’s– Yeah, educators have navigated different changes in technology and society before, and done it great, but yeah, [01:02:00] hopefully this is another opportunity to, to get it right in further support of education. Mike, two last things. One, I’d love it if you can share with folks where, you know, they can learn more about the work you’re leading.
Brett Roer: Um, again, if you could even just share, like, some of the names of the articles or where the, or what the name of the daily podcast piece was. And then after that, if you could take us out with flowers. Besides you and the work you’re leading, who are some other folks out there that our listeners should just know are out there?
Brett Roer: And this could be good summer reading, good summer research, just anyone else in the space you wanna make sure folks know. And, you know, if you forget anybody, you can always add them in the chat, you know, when we, when we drop this, again, worldwide in a, in, in a short amount of time.
Mike Taubman: For the Times articles, we can, maybe we can include the links, but there was a article on the front page in February about work that Scott, again, my colleague, is doing in his history class, I’m doing in the program I mentioned, and we’re doing together in the AI literacy class.
Mike Taubman: And then, of course, there’s this, uh, daily episode, and to me the highlight, as I’m sure it was for you and many listeners, is the student voices and the [01:03:00] conversation they had at the end about AI and their reflections on it. I write about AI and education weekly on a substack called AI Waypoints that, uh, comes out every Thursday, and it’s a always free subscription because I wanna make sure educators are, you know, we’re sharing our, our practice with each other the way we always do.
Mike Taubman: Um, and then I think, again, that there’s a lot of books that have shaped me as an educator, but one of them is In Search of Deeper Learning, and I really recommend to people, you know, looking for a summer teacher book to read, that’s a good place to start, I think, especially right now. In terms of flowers, the first thing is, of course, students.
Mike Taubman: Uh, y- students are always very patient with their teachers, but it was, it particularly– I was particularly grateful this year because students were sort of all of a sudden in a classroom that was being visited more often than, than they or I were used to, and they were, they were always the such amazing young people who just by being themselves, I think made these visits worthwhile for people.
Mike Taubman: So shout out to all the students I got to work with this year and in previous years. Um- [01:04:00] And then, again, my friend Scott Kern. You know, to have somebody you’re working alongside who is trying to figure this out with you. We have another friend in Art Worrell, who’s the director of history at Uncommon, who’s joined us on this journey, and, and I wanna give flowers to them.
Mike Taubman: To our principal, Mike Mann, who’s the principal of North Star Academy Washington Park High School. I’ve worked for him since 2005. He hired me out of college, and I’ve worked for him since in various ways, and his, his vision for what a great school looks like, and the rigor, and again, that academic foundation while also being open to innovations like this.
Mike Taubman: Th- none of this would’ve been possible without his, his guidance. And then to Uncommon Schools, and, you know, the- our co-CEOs Julie Jackson and Brett Peiser, and, and their support of these efforts, and, and all the work we’re trying to do, and, and learn from inside Uncommon and elsewhere. And I’d close by thanking and giving flowers to my own teachers.
Mike Taubman: And so I had some amazing teachers growing up, and then in college I had some amazing teachers, and some of them were professors that I got to learn from, and others were people who wrote [01:05:00] books that I got to read who are no longer here in person, but they were teaching me through their writing. And I try in my own way to carry forth what they taught me and, and help bring that to the present so that our students can bring it to the future.
Mike Taubman: So them as well.
Brett Roer: Oh, that was really incredible. That was … Hey, you just, you covered the gamut, and really appreciate the work you’re doing, and, you know, we’ve had so many amazing guests, but this was, like, a truly inspiring conversation. And so I just wanna thank you, Mike, again, for all the work you’re leading.
Brett Roer: I wanna thank our listeners out there. Hope you really get these words of wisdom and are able to really take it and apply it to the work you’re leading in schools around the country and around the world. So thanks again to our AmpED to 11 listeners. Mike, one last thing. Where could they find you? Where else could they find you if they wanna keep in touch with you?
Mike Taubman: Um, I post on LinkedIn pretty regularly, and again, that Substack comes out every Thursday, and those are probably the two main ways to see where my head’s at with this on a regular basis.
Brett Roer: Okay. Well, I know what Substack I’m about to subscribe to as soon [01:06:00] as this podcast ends. And thank you again to all our AmpED to 11 listeners, and make sure you make today and every day a jumbo cannoli day.
Brett Roer: We are out.
