Leaning into A.I. with Jeff Utecht

Don't be afraid of the big, bad A.I.! In this episode, we sit down with educator, author, consultant and A.I. expert Jeff Utecht to dissect how AI tools like ChatGPT-4 have the potential to revolutionize the classroom. Utecht helps us navigate the delicate balance of excitement and fear around AI's role in education, offering valuable insights into how educators can best serve their students in this new era.

"Our job is to prepare students for their future, not for our past," according to Utecht. We explore the necessity for educators to evolve along with these groundbreaking tools to ensure students gain the relevant skills needed in an AI-driven world. Yet, how can we prepare students for a future we barely understand ourselves?

Utecht challenges the common belief that AI hampers learning by drawing powerful parallels to the historical resistance faced by other technological advancements from calculators to the internet.

He also shares practical advice on how to tackle challenges such as student cheating, the importance of clarity in educational goals and the three key A.I. policies you'll want to have in place as you begin the coming school year.

You can find out more about Jeff and his many projects at ...
JeffUtecht.com and ShiftingSchools.com.

Also, check out his podcast:
Shifting Schools Podcast: Conversations for K-12 Educators

"Outliers in Education" is a project of CEE, The Center for Educational Effectiveness. Find out more at effectiveness.org.

Produced by Jamie Howell at Howell at the Moon Productions.

Transcript

Ad VO: 0:00

Outliers in Education is brought to you by CEE, the Center for Educational Effectiveness. Better data, better decisions, better schools. To find out more, visit effectivenessorg.

Eric Price: 0:12

Bolzie, this week I've got AI on my mind and I've been dabbling around it a little bit but how about you?

Erich Bolz: 0:18

Well, you know, because of my incredible technological acumen, I feel like I've taken to it like a duck to water, ep. I mean, why would I not? Surprisingly, I think, on a personal level, I've found chat GPT, especially chat GPT-4, to be super useful. My next most useful technological link was my administrative assistant who, unfortunately, when I left public education, didn't come with me to the Center for Educational Effectiveness. So I would say at this point for me, ai has been a great leap forward, ep, what are you noticing with AI, both on a personal level and with the babies that you teach there at the Institution of Higher Learning?

Eric Price: 0:52

I have had it do things for me that have taken me hours, like if I'm prepping for a presentation or something like it has really helped me to do some of those pieces. One of my kids is actually using it to write code, but in the classroom you notice like students that will use it as a resource and you can still see their thumbprint on it and then you'll see the cut and copy and like I have never heard you talk like this, ever right. Like yeah, that's that kind of a thing. So I think there's a lot of fear out there in the classroom about you know how do we deal with it? Like this big monster, you know it's this sentient thing that's going to destroy us all.

Erich Bolz: 1:33

Well, it's funny that you mentioned that, because I've seen like in my own two children I think my son now my sense was academically he used it as a shortcut Just write the three-page paper Whereas I think my daughter used it more as a lit review. So I want to go down 10 slightly different rabbit trails, as I'm synthesizing a huge amount of information on X concept and so it's just interesting to watch these kids in their 20s use the technology so differently both probably to a better end.

Eric Price: 2:02

Yeah, exactly, and I think people who are afraid of AI right now really should be embracing it, even though I think it has the threat of really changing things, which always scares the crap out of us in education, right.

Erich Bolz: 2:18

Well, the threat and the promise right. Yeah, but it's going to be real exciting to see where this thing trends and goes.

Ad VO: 2:30

I think we really need to change how we look at what we do in schools. Everything that we do as educators, it just comes back to people.

Jeff Utecht: 2:38

I love it, even when it's hard, especially when it's hard.

Eric Price: 2:47

Ultimately, I mean, this is about what's best for kids. Hello, hello, hello. I'm Eric Price here with Eric Bowles from the Center for Educational Effectiveness, and I want to thank you for joining us for another brand new episode of Outliers in Education, where every month, we suss out new ideas that are changing education for the better. Bowlesy, when we take a look at AI, I think there are some pretty strong feelings out there and a lot of ignorance, to which I could add my own. I've got a lot to learn on this subject.

Erich Bolz: 3:14

Fortunately, today on the show we've got an educator, author and consultant who has spent a good deal more time than we have considering AI and the impact that it will have on education.

Eric Price: 3:23

As a former teacher, he's devoted himself to creating sustainable change for modern learners. It's Jeff Utech. Welcome to the show, jeff. Hey, thanks for having me. Gentlemen Really appreciate it. Hey, jeff, when we take a look at AI, maybe that knee-jerk reaction is like this is going to be awful for education. You know we need to defend against it. I'm just going to ask you is AI really a bad thing for education? Or are we responding in the wrong way, typically? Do you think?

Jeff Utecht: 3:51

That's a really good question and I think the I think for me, the thing that I, the way that I come about it, is this idea that really in education, we don't have a choice. You can think it's a bad thing, you can think it's the next golden ticket to helping students learn. That doesn't matter. What matters is is we picked a profession where it is our job to prepare students for their future and not our past, and that is my tagline. That is what I live by as a consultant.

Eric Price: 4:19

Say that one again for us, jeff. Say that one. That's a beautiful line. Yeah, as a history teacher, right, as a history teacher, yeah one again for us.

Jeff Utecht: 4:24

Jeff, say that one. That's a beautiful line. As a history teacher, right, as a history teacher? Yeah, our goal, our job as educators, is to prepare students for their future, not our past.

Jeff Utecht: 4:31

And when stuff like this comes along and it usually happens with technology, not all the time our knee-jerk reaction is always to think about what are all the ways this could go wrong. We did it with the calculator. We did it when the internet came into schools. I sat on a committee where we debated for months whether or not to give every teacher an email address, because no way was teachers ever going to use email. We did it when we put wifi into schools. We did it when we gave every kid a laptop. And here we are now with AI, and the knee-jerk reaction is always going to be I don't know how this is going to do. This is going to change everything. We did the same thing when Google came out, and you might remember this.

Jeff Utecht: 5:12

When the internet came out, we were just like I don't want kids to be internet. They're going to forget how to use encyclopedias, and they did forget. They did forget how to use encyclopedias, because no school buys encyclopedias. And so things change and our job in education is to make sure that we are preparing students for their future. My past is my past. I loved going and looking at encyclopedias. I loved going to. Microfiche said nobody ever. We have a generation that our goal is is to look forward. This is what we do in education to look forward, to look at the kids that are in our system and say what are the skills, dispositions and talents that they need to make this world a better place as they leave our K-12 system.

Eric Price: 5:54

So I'm going to just hop in a little bit because I know we're going to get into some AI stuff. But I really want to get into this. Why is that? Our posture as educators Like we want to protect and defend what we've done in the past. Why do we do that?

Jeff Utecht: 6:07

So there's a couple of reasons why I think that we do this. And the number one thing and I talk about this a lot because I work a lot outside of education as well, and people are always on me about education, education, education. And you know what, At the end of the day, education is the hardest organization to change. It's the hardest structure to change, and the reason for that is it is the only thing here in America, it is the only thing that every single person has gone through, Whether you are a parent, whether you are an educator yourself.

Jeff Utecht: 6:37

Every single whether it worked for you or not every person went through K-12 education, and so what happens is is then we become educators, we become parents and we remember our best teachers, we remember our best years and we want that education for our children. We want that, we want our best teachers. When you become an educator, you were channeling your best teacher when you were in seventh grade or ninth grade and you remembered having to write the essays and reading. You know where the red fern grows or you read, and so you want that for your kids.

Jeff Utecht: 7:10

So we reminisce we reminisce a lot yeah, and parents do the same thing, and this is why it's really difficult, because all of a sudden, something like AI comes along and they're saying well, kids aren't going to have to write. Well, no, no, no, kids will need to write, but writing will be different. Right, writing will be different. Kids are still writing. Yeah, we, actually we did the exact same thing, and I don't want to get too far into social media, but we did the same thing with social media. Kids are no longer going to write. In fact, kids are writing more than they did before, but they're in tweets, they're in descriptions of Instagram posts, they're in updates to Snapchat. They're not five paragraph essays.

Eric Price: 7:49

But we can't sentence, diagram those darn things. That's the thing that pisses me. Yeah, exactly, so it's interesting. The one thing that you said there is they're still writing, but it's going to be in a different way, and I think that one of those pushes I see in education is when we have to do extra calories, like we're like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, right and as well, as I'm not sure how to deal with this new structure that's coming.

Jeff Utecht: 8:11

Yeah, and I think that's a that's a huge part of it is. You know, especially with technology, you find this in education. These are heavy lifts. You know, we don't have any teachers, any teachers right now. Whether you are a brand new teacher coming into the system or you've been teaching in it for 30 years, everybody's in the same place. When it comes to AI, nobody knows how to use this in the classroom, nobody knows where it's going to go or what it's going to impact. But my favorite part about right now this is my first time in 25 years in education and educational technology that K-12 education is having this conversation on your podcast technology, that K-12 education is having this conversation on your podcast. We don't do this when it comes to technology. We usually wait 10 or 15 years down the road and then we all of a sudden are saying you know, kids, cell phones are a distraction. We should have been talking about cell phones being a distraction in 2012.

Jeff Utecht: 8:58

Yeah, yeah but we waited until 2024. And now we've. Now we're trying to backfill all this, and what I love about our conversation right now is that nobody has the answers to where AI is going. No, not a single industry, not a single organization. But we're all having the conversation and what I need right now is I need K-12 organizations. I need K-12 leaders to be in the conversation. K-12 organizations.

Jeff Utecht: 9:25

I need K-12 leaders to be in the conversation. That's it. Keep your eye on it, know what's coming, play with it. You don't need to have the answers, you don't need to know how it's going to impact your ELA class, because nobody has yet, but be in the conversation so that, as it evolves, we are evolving with it, instead of trying to play catch up 10 years from now saying, oh wow, we probably should have really taught kids how to use this, because now we've got kids just spewing out AI papers that nobody can detect.

Erich Bolz: 9:49

So, jeff, I'm a 56-year-old digital immigrant, and what that suggests is an awful lot of people who look like me are leading school systems into this brave new world. What do they need to know?

Jeff Utecht: 10:02

Well, I think step one is to know that not a whole lot has changed. I think we get so caught up in reading headlines and not reading research. And this isn't just with AI, this is with everything. And it doesn't matter your age, we all do it. What I usually find in my trainings is I've got about a third of it, and it doesn't matter on the age, it doesn't matter what school or school district I'm in.

Jeff Utecht: 10:25

A third of people are oh my gosh, I hate AI. It's going to take over the world. I don't know what to do. I have a third of the people that are just like eh, whatever, it's just the next new thing. And then I have a third of people saying this is going to revolutionize education and we're going to do things completely different than we ever did. And the great thing is is you need all those perspectives, but we need to all be moving forward and we all have to have this idea of I don't care where you are about AI, I care about what are the skills that this child needs to go to the future. And what we are seeing now is in industries, in organizations. We don't see any industry or organization saying you know what, eric, I really want you to be really good at your job being a banker. Just don't use AI.

Ad VO: 11:09

I don't see anybody saying that.

Jeff Utecht: 11:12

We don't see anybody saying, hey, you know what, I hired you to be my executive assistant, but whatever you do, don't use AI in doing the work that you have to do in making yourself better. We don't see AI in doing the work that you have to do in making yourself better. We don't see that happening.

Jeff Utecht: 11:26

What we see is the opposite happening, where people are saying and we're getting to a point where we're not even going to ask if you know how to leverage AI to do the work that I'm hiring you to do, we are just going to assume you know how to use it appropriately, you know how to use it effectively to do the work that I hired you to do.

Erich Bolz: 11:42

So, jeff, you mentioned AI literacy. Somebody like me doesn't even know what that means. What does that mean to you? What should it mean to us?

Jeff Utecht: 11:50

Yeah, so we're seeing a couple of things around AI literacy and I think we're still defining it on a larger scale of what that means. But really, what AI literacy means is understanding at a fundamental level how you put together a sentence structure. Right Now, we talk about literacy in writing. We talk about literacy in reading. We talk about media literacy. You know, when we look at media literacy, that's probably the closest thing we have for AI literacy right now. And when we talk about media literacy, we talk about actually dissecting the media that's coming at us. It's one of my favorite things to do with kids, because we're all bombarded by ads, whether it be a billboard, whether it's social media, whether it's an advertisement while you're watching a football game we're all bombarded by ads.

Erich Bolz: 12:32

This podcast has been brought to you by Fox News.

Jeff Utecht: 12:37

And so the idea here is how do you break that down and understand? What is the message that's coming at you when we talk about AI literacy? It's that exact same thing. It's understanding that there are three sides to this, and this is one of the things I love that we've done here in the state of Washington is we've taken what we call a human-centric approach, and Superintendent Reichdahl who I know you just had on your show not that long ago really engaged in us because I helped to lead the work here in the state of Washington on this is he wanted to use this thing called HAIH. Right, human input AI does its thing and then human empowerment that whatever we use AI for needs to empower us as humans. That whole process is considered AI literacy, and what we have to start to understand is that human input side how you prompt these things is AI literacy. And here's just one little thing for all your listeners, no matter what age you are. Here's the biggest issue we're having right now, and if you want to go, try this with ChatGPT or pick any AI bot.

Jeff Utecht: 13:35

The number one change when we talk about AI literacy is that we have to change our mindset around the way that we talk to computers. For the last 25 years, we have been training students, we have been training teachers, we've been training society to talk to their computers through keywords, aka Google, and so we all know how to interact with our machines as if they are Google, and that's what we taught kids. The keywords matter. The way you sentence structure matters. In a search result, you're looking for this, this and this, and that is a search literacy. Now, when it comes to AI literacy, what we have to understand is, when I'm talking to people, they're like well, I tried it and it doesn't really work. And I'm like well, the problem is probably because you're trying to use it like a search engine. It's not a search engine, it's a creation tool.

Jeff Utecht: 14:25

And so, when it comes to using your AI, the most important part of the prompt is the verb. Oh, you mean ELA, where we study nouns and verbs? Oh, oh, the verb is the most important. Do you want this thing to create? Do you want it to analyze? Do you want it to evaluate? Do you want it to synthesize? Do you want it to expand? That's the power of this. If you've been struggling with AI, you're probably not using the right verb the verb is the key.

Eric Price: 14:52

So if you said, hey, this is the way that we should be interfacing, talk to me like I'm a teacher, that we should be interfacing, talk to me like I'm a teacher, this is the way that you should be using it, what would you say to me as a teacher, like, this is how we're doing it and this is how you should switch.

Jeff Utecht: 15:05

So I think there's two things that we're going to have to get very clear on in education. Number one the first thing is is this is going to focus us to truly understand what is the outcome I'm assessing? If I am not crystal clear on the outcome that I am assessing, then it doesn't matter, then nothing else is going to matter. The second part is because we now all live in an AI world.

Jeff Utecht: 15:27

One of the, I think, most popular pieces that we released here in our AI guidance in the state of Washington is we released an AI matrix. That is a five-step matrix that goes from no use of AI at all to, on the high end, use AI to learn. Whatever it is you need to learn and what teachers need to do is every single assignment you're going to say, hey on this assignment. The outcome I'm assessing is X. Therefore, you can use AI in all these other ways, but don't use it this way, because that's what I'm assessing. Do you think that, like when we were looking at that? Other ways, but don't use it this way, because that's what I'm assessing.

Eric Price: 16:01

Do you think that, like when we were looking at that, that most teachers don't look at the outcome of most assignments or more structures anyway?

Jeff Utecht: 16:08

Yes, I think that's a huge part of it, and I think one of the issues is we are not clear on our outcomes, and when we're not clear on our outcomes we cause confusion along the line, one of my favorite. Can I tell a story real quick of just how this happens?

Eric Price: 16:23

Anything to keep me and Bulls from talking, Jeff, please.

Jeff Utecht: 16:26

Okay. So here's one that I just got. This from a school district about two months ago. A teacher, high school kids, 11th graders a teacher assigned students to write a report. This student writes a report, doesn't use AI, writes the report, turns the report in, gets a great grade on the report. The teacher then decides to extend the activity with writing a report and decides she wants to hit a standard that is also public speaking. So she's asked her students okay, I want you to take this report that you just wrote and I want you to turn it into a talk and we're going to practice TED Talk talks, right? So they've got to be 18 minutes. They've got to be succinct, you've got to make a point, like the whole thing which is great right, we've got all kinds of public speaking standards.

Jeff Utecht: 17:11

This teacher's doing incredible stuff. This kid takes his report, goes to chat GPT and says how could you help me take this report and turn it into a TED Talk? Could you help me write a script for this talk? And uses as a thought partner, uses ChatGPT to help him create his speech. So then he goes back to school, he stands up in front of class and he gives the talk and the teacher gives him a bad grade or even gives him a zero because he used AI in creating the speech. No See, here's the issue. Was the outcome that you were trying to assess speech public speaking, or was it speech writing? If the? If the outcome was speech writing, the?

Eric Price: 17:57

kid 100% should'd get a zero.

Jeff Utecht: 18:00

But if you were assessing a student's ability to stand in front of a group of others and give a public speak as if it was a TED talk, I don't care how you made the speech, that's not the outcome.

Eric Price: 18:13

I always got in trouble when I used thought partners on my assignments in school. Jeff, that was not looked upon well from my teachers, but it was not AI. It was the guy I was cheating from.

Jeff Utecht: 18:23

Well, and this is the problem, right Is Stanford. Stanford came out and did a study that, before the pandemic in 2018, 2019, they did a study that showed that 60 to 70% of students were cheating in high school. They did a study in 2023 or the yeah, last last fall. They did a study again after AI came out. They found a 60 to 70% of kids admitted to cheating. So here's the thing this whole thing that AI has created cheating. No, it hasn't. We are still looking at 60 to 70% of kids that are cheating in high school. Do you know what AI has done? We are still looking at 60 to 70% of kids that are cheating in high school. Do you know what AI has done? It's made it easier to catch the kids.

Jeff Utecht: 19:09

We should all be thanking AI, because before Eric it was, I was cheating from you, you were cheating from me. It was human to human. It was hard to tell. But now when kids use a machine, you can say like, oh, that machine totally wrote that. And so all of a sudden we think that plagiarism is out of control. No, we're just catching the kids. We're catching the kids, we're not. We're not. We're still not catching them.

Eric Price: 19:26

We're not finished augmenting our actual intelligence. Hang tight and we'll be right back after the break with more from our guest AI expert, jeff Utech.

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Eric Price: 20:47

Welcome back to the AI edition of Outliers in Education. Today on the show we're speaking with educator author and speaker Jeff Uteck about AI and how educators should approach this rapidly expanding technology.

Erich Bolz: 21:00

Jeff, what do you see as both the major threats to education and the major opportunities with AI?

Jeff Utecht: 21:04

if you were to contrast, the major threat is that we don't accept that it's here. That's the major threat, right.

Jeff Utecht: 21:11

If we don't accept it's here if we wait too long. I was having a conversation with a superintendent the other day that was saying yeah, you know, I just really don't want to lead on AI, I'm going to wait for it to kind of plateau. And I was thinking, okay, but problem is, you don't know where that plateau is going to be and you need to be in the conversation Like that's fine, you don't want to be the front runner, but you need to keep the conversation going. As a school leader, you've got to keep the conversation going right now. Let your let your scouts I call them scouts let your scouts go out and run Like you know your early adopters, your geeky teachers, you got to go. Let them run, let them go figure out. And then they come back and they say, no, the you know we're headed that way. That's where we need to go. You everybody needs their tech scouts, right, go out, figure it out.

Jeff Utecht: 21:54

I think is is the thing we. We cannot, as we have done with technologies in the past, just sit here and say, ah, well, we'll get to it when it figures itself out. No, that puts us behind the eight ball and our kids are using it. The latest study shows that 60% of high school kids are already engaging with AI in some way. If that's the case, then our job is to prepare them for our future. They're going to use it, whether we do or not, in the school.

Jeff Utecht: 22:19

I want to use it in school, so when I make sure they're using it the right way, right. So there's that side of it. The other side is is if we do truly start to look at the power of this thing, specifically in supporting students who are struggling in schools and that's where the research is really starting to pile up is students who are not your top 10% If you have your AP kids or IB kids in high school, your kids who are already probably a 3.5 or higher AI not going to impact them very much, but your kids who are struggling, your kids like myself who have dyslexia, kids who have processing disorders, kids who struggle in one specific class because they're just not understanding it. We are seeing evidence starting to pile up that that's who this supports Our most needy of kids.

Eric Price: 23:10

That is awesome, and that's the place where we need the most help, right, the students that we? Yeah, exactly, that's fantastic. Okay, Jeff, if you get out the crystal ball and you say, okay, look, five years from now, this is kind of what it should look or what you think it will look like. What do you see five years from now in education?

Jeff Utecht: 23:29

That's really hard because this thing is moving so fast. You fast. I'm getting ready to do trainings for keynotes for August and I've told every school district. I don't know what I'm going to say yet because that's literally two months from now and the way this thing is going, I have no clue where we'll be in two months, but I think five years from now.

Jeff Utecht: 23:48

There's going to be a couple of things I think we'll be able to look at. I think we're going to have one of our biggest things is going to be we are going to have so much data on students that AI is going to be able to crunch through and you know, you'll be able to have an AI bot that's going to go into every teacher's gradebook and so when you type in, hey, how is Jeff Udik doing? It's going to be able to pull out and say, well, he's, he's getting a B here, but these are the three standards he's struggling on. He's getting a C here. Here are the four standards he's struggling on. If you're his ELA teacher, you could actually support him in learning the science standard by overlapping that science standard with your next reading material and as a teacher, you're going to have access to that stuff. I think that's one. I think it's going to revolutionize the way, because we talk about data-driven decisions all the time. We have no clue what we've been doing compared to what this thing's going to help us do. Right On the student side, I see that we're going to get to a place where students are going to have, at a very low cost, maybe done by the school or it might be some outside vendor, but they're almost going to have a personal tutor, and that personal tutor, their AI tutor, will be with them and that AI tutor is going to go to class with them.

Jeff Utecht: 24:56

That AI tutor is going to be able to listen to every lecture that the child has heard inside class. They're going to be there to support them, and so when I'm home studying for the test, I will have somebody else there to say okay, well, what about this and what? You know? How do I do this? What does this look like? And I don't want I don't want us to misrepresent that.

Jeff Utecht: 25:13

I don't think that tutor replaces students talking to students. I think it allows us to have students talk in really engaging ways, differently, and that's what I want to see is one of the things we're still trying to lean into with this stuff is the generative nature of it, that every time you give it a prompt, every single person gets a different response. That, to me, changes the classroom, because when I have 25 different kids where I can say, everybody here's a prompt, everybody put this prompt into your AI bot. Now turn and talk to your neighbor. What did you get?

Jeff Utecht: 25:47

What was the output? What do you agree with? What do you disagree with? What are the biases that you think might be in that response? Based on its training data, what is it that we need to consider, knowing that your bot was trained this way and your bot was trained that way? And that's going to change the conversations of the classroom. We're so worried that technology is going to take away student-to-student interaction. We stop thinking about how can we leverage this to make more human to human connectivity in our classrooms.

Erich Bolz: 26:15

Jeff, I'm a principal looking down the barrel of September, or a 27 year veteran classroom teacher. Where do I start with this stuff next year? It's a great question.

Jeff Utecht: 26:25

I think there are three things. Right now this is a great time of year to be talking about this there's three things we need to have in place for next year. Number one we need to have some kind of AI matrix in place so that you, as a teacher, can say, on today's assignment, we're going to use AI at a level three, or today's assignment, we're going to use AI at a level four, whatever you decide. Right, and you get that. But you need to have something that we can point to so that myself and my students all understand today's level three. That way, if a student uses it at a level five, we can have a conversation about it. Right, but I have to have something I can point to to say that we all understand where we are. And you can find these matrices everywhere. Again, we've got one that's being adopted inside the Washington State AI guidance, but you can find them all over the web. Find one that works for you.

Jeff Utecht: 27:10

That's step one. Step two is to clearly state what are the expectations for students. So we need to update some language in our syllabi, we're going to need to update some language in our student handbook around the use of AI, and really. That is that you as a student are responsible for being able to explain your process of learning, so that if I, as a teacher, come to you and say, hey, uh, it looks like you used AI, like I'm thinking that there's some AI in this piece of work, can you explain your thought process or your workflow to get to this piece of work?

Jeff Utecht: 27:46

And I need every student to be able to say, well, yeah, if the student says I went to chat copy and pasted the prompt and printed it off, that's one conversation. But if the student says I went to chat GBT, copied and pasted the prompt and printed it off, that's one conversation. But if the student says well, I was struggling, I didn't know where to start, so I asked chat GBT to help me brainstorm some ideas. I took one of those ideas and asked it to write me an outline. And then I took the outline and did some research on Google and came up with this paper as a teacher. That's a completely different conversation.

Eric Price: 28:09

But you're getting. You're getting to outcome again Like what's your purpose, right yeah?

Jeff Utecht: 28:13

Yes, yes. And then the third part of that is. The third part of that is uh, what are what are the expectations for me as a teacher? Right, the expectations for me as a teacher is my outcomes are very clear. I have set a clear tone of what I believe AI use on this specific assignment should be, and I've given you the skills necessary to use AI in appropriate and ethical ways. So those are the three things we need AI, matrix, student guidelines and teacher responsibilities.

Eric Price: 28:42

Yeah, and I think all of those keep coming back to your salient point, which is we need to know what we're doing with whatever tool that it is that we're using. Yeah, absolutely All right. Well, this is the time when we have our own AI. Champion of summary. Jeff, this is Bolzy's time that he summarizes everything that you've ever said in the last half an hour or thought, bolzy, you're up.

Erich Bolz: 29:03

Well, it sounds a little bit like Chad GPT EP. Little bit for you, my friend. So I think the big overarching theme I took out of this was we were just peppered with Jeff's infusion, of Simon Sinek's diffusion of innovation throughout this entire thing, really talking about leaders and laggards. And you know, it's OK to be where we are as long as, as long as we're moving forward as a system Right off the top. I really liked you may not like AI, but we don't have a choice. Our job is to prepare kids for their future, not our past. I think. I think we all believe that to a high, high degree, at least on this podcast. Education is the hardest thing to change because we all experience it. I think just the difficult nature of the work I think was underscored by what Jeff had to say. There we read headlines and not research. I just love that. I had to throw that in there. Ai literacy is related to media literacy. I really hadn't thought about it that way, but that just kind of smacked me right in the face. That's absolutely right. That's crystal clear. What's the quality of the output? Because we talked outputs and outcomes an awful lot as we went. We need to be retrained from search literacy to how we talk to the computer, In essence really moving from nouns to verbs. For all you ELA files out there. What's the outcome? I am assessing? I think we've not been clear on that for a long time. That was a great part of our conversation, Always important in pedagogy. Way more important now, and I just love the analogy of don't confuse whether the assignment was speech writing or speech giving. Are we assessing the right thing? Are we assessing that outcome?

Erich Bolz: 30:31

Denial of AI is one of our biggest threats and we wouldn't say we're going to go ahead and wait for the better cancer research or you know what. It's OK that we've got a lot of folks out here that we're not on the cutting edge in literacy instruction in this school, but we'll wait for another school to figure it out. Who knows how many kids' opportunity to become literate will pass. We would not say that. So we can't deny the use of AI either. Support for our struggling students that really resonated with me.

Erich Bolz: 30:57

We heard Andrea Bittner, who's just an absolutely wonderful podcast guest, national speaker, still practicing teacher, talking about how she would utilize AI to really simplify and differentiate reading levels for her multilingual learners. So really seeing that thread through these two podcasts. I thought about just playing around a little bit with Brisk for Google. I thought about some of my least favorite work as a central office administrator was curriculum adoption and just the ability to manipulate standards and the cross-cutting aspect of standards that AI is going to help us do so much easier than the years of pain I spent trying to herd cats into curriculum adoption. How can tech be used to facilitate human connectivity? Maybe is the right question. We should all be asking a whole lot more and then, to paraphrase from our friends the Beatles, and in the end, AI may just be the thing that leads us from fuzzy outcomes and foggy taxonomy to the land of clarity, and maybe AI is all you need.

Eric Price: 31:57

I don't remember that song, but it really is a catchy verse. Bolzy, we'll have to work on that one. Jeff, thanks being here Honestly so good. You've got your website, jeffutechcom. Your latest book out is your Connected Classroom A Practical Guide for Teachers. Check that one out. Your fantastic podcast Shifting Schools Anywhere you listen to podcasts. That's going to be there. Anything else that we missed, jeff, where we could find you or find some of your thinking?

Jeff Utecht: 32:24

Nope, I think that's it At jutech, that's J-U-T-E-C-H-T. All over the socials and for all kinds of free downloads and guides around AI and AI leadership, you can go to shiftingschoolscom, which is also the home of the podcast. We've got all kinds of free PDFs over there for you to download and kind of get you started in doing this work. So thank you, guys, appreciate it.

Eric Price: 32:44

Jeff, such a pleasure to have you on. I wish there was more people like you that were here to break our education system and say we got to do the right thing for everybody, Appreciate it.

Jeff Utecht: 32:54

Thank you, gentlemen.

Erich Bolz: 32:55

And thank you all of you for listening to this episode of Outliers in Education. You can get this episode at our website, effectivenessorg, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcast.

Ad VO: 33:06

If you'd like to find out how to gather the data you need to help drive positive change in your school or district, take a moment to visit CEE, the Center for Educational Effectiveness, at effectivenessorg. Better data, better decisions, better schools Effectivenessorg.