Full Transcript for Ai, Unscripted - Teaching the Teachers: Preparing Pre-Service Educators for an AI Future

And it's a wider amount of content to get to into their heads in the same amount of time as you had before. 00;06;18;11 - 00;06;45;12 Kris McGee Yeah. So it's more about me, right? It's unlearning some of my traditional ways and rethinking and reframing how I'm approaching, putting together my instruction and again, training my brain to think about, oh gosh, how could I incorporate AI to help tighten this lesson or expand this lesson, or differentiate this lesson for all of my students? I have to train myself to do that because I don't just naturally think in those terms. 00;06;45;15 - 00;07;08;13 Kris McGee But for our student, it's not an unlearning situation for them at all. Because they're learning how to write the lesson, but they're just part of the process. Now it's like, oh, okay, so when I think about my standard and I write my objective, I think about my assessment. I'm ready to write my procedures. Part of the way they're going to start thinking about writing their procedures is to incorporate AI to support them and help them. 00;07;08;13 - 00;07;31;10 Kris McGee They're just thinking of it as like, oh, this is part of the process. It's for someone who's, I'm going to call myself a veteran or a vinyl classic teacher who's been around for a minute, longer than the internet has been in existence. You know, it's just like I had to train myself to think in terms of how do I incorporate any kind of technology in my lesson. 00;07;31;10 - 00;07;35;09 Kris McGee This is just the next layer of technology that we're looking at. 00;07;35;11 - 00;07;43;02 Ron Hansen So what conversations are you having about developmentally appropriate AI use across different grade levels. 00;07;43;09 - 00;08;14;14 Kris McGee I, I want to put a disclaimer out there. I and these are just my humble pieces of my opinion. It's not research-based. It's just practice-based. Yeah. As a practitioner, tried and true. To me, AI should be something that if you use it in a classroom with very young learners, it should always be teacher forward. And it's something that you can have as like in your classroom. 00;08;14;14 - 00;08;47;01 Kris McGee I've seen people have Google and they'll say, oh, I want to know what type of dinosaur that is. And they might say, well, let's ask Google and or Siri, whatever they have, and together they'll model how to do that. But the students would not do that alone. I would not ever really encourage my pre-service teachers to have their littles their four, their five or 6 or 7 year olds using AI to help them without the teacher being a part of that activity. 00;08;47;04 - 00;09;06;02 Kris McGee And so I think that's a very slippery slope, and I think parents absolutely would need to be aware that you are using AI as a tool to be a partner, but that you would have them understand that you would never have the children use it without your supervision. 00;09;06;05 - 00;09;18;01 Mary Crowley-Farrell How do you handle resistance to the notion that you're using AI, maybe for an environmental reason? And, and they've got objections. 00;09;18;03 - 00;09;57;21 Kris McGee Yes. So making sure that our pre-service teachers understand the impact on the environment, making sure they do understand the ethical use of AI, never having anything about any of the children being put into that tool. All of that has to be very clear to the pre-service teacher. If a parent would not want a child to be using an AI tool, then I would respect that and ask the teachers that I'm working with to respect a parent's position or a caregiver's position as to what they feel they want for their child, and I think they'll respect that. 00;09;57;24 - 00;10;16;29 Ron Hansen Okay, we got a good sense of how are you using this to help with course design and also helping your pre-service teachers teach with AI in the classroom. So let's look at the other part of the job. What administrative and planning tasks are you exploring with AI to help your future teachers manage their workload sustainably? 00;10;17;01 - 00;10;37;14 Kris McGee To me, it's important that the idea comes from the teacher, and you know, it's usually born out of either a standard or it's born out of a scripted program that they have to use. But that idea, that concept is there, and then they have to design it or rework it to make it meet the needs of their children, to meet them where they are. 00;10;37;14 - 00;11;06;00 Kris McGee So sometimes the demand of us, of a standard is, you know, too far away. It's not there. Their students aren't there yet. So AI can help them break it down and make it more palatable and walk toward that standard in a way that makes sense to students. And another another thing that I see sometimes when they want to teach something, they might have it in their head like, oh, I'm going to deliver the information this way. 00;11;06;00 - 00;11;35;07 Kris McGee They think it's great, and it it probably is, but it doesn't land the way that you want it to. So it doesn't make sense to a six year old. But as a new teacher and a veteran, sometimes you don't know what what other way can I approach this? Well, hello AI, here's what I did. It didn't work. Can you give me another way or a couple of different ways that I could try to teach this same concept to a six year old? 00;11;35;10 - 00;11;54;02 Kris McGee It's it didn't land and and then what I have found is AI gives me 5 or 6 different ideas. And then my job is to again think about my students, think about what I've already done and decide, oh, I might try this, or I might fuze together two of the ideas that AI is giving me, and I like it. 00;11;54;02 - 00;12;16;06 Kris McGee And I might put it together into one bigger idea. So again, it's AI to me. And when I try to get my pre-service teachers to to think about is when you're planning your lessons or you're rethinking something that was an epic fail, AI literally is by my side 24-7. It's on my phone. It's on my computer. 00;12;16;08 -

00;12;34;05 Kris McGee I can ask it any time of the night. I'm not, quote unquote bothering it. Right? It's a tool, something that can help you just rethink or reframe. I've had I've asked it before like, hey, AI, tell me how to do this like I'm a five year old, and it does. I'm not afraid to ask at that. 00;12;34;07 - 00;12;42;16 Mary Crowley-Farrell Well, how do we get walls around the I use when at this point we're still learning how to build walls. 00;12;42;18 - 00;13;35;07 Kris McGee I would say, and what I say to my students in general is you just this is a very powerful tool. And left unattended things could happen that you're going to be responsible for as the teacher. It's just like when you're on the playground, if you aren't paying attention to the students, something could potentially happen that is bad. And I feel like just like with this AI tool or any technology, it's there's that possibility if it's left unattended, the more we can reveal and make it less of a hidden piece and just make it this embraced tool that we use, then it takes away that, I don't know, that little piece in them, that they want 00;13;35;07 - 00;13;38;25 Kris McGee to go and find it, because it's maybe a bad thing to do. 00;13;38;27 - 00;13;55;17 Ron Hansen In the context of you preparing the next generation of teachers. What keeps you up at night about AI and K-12 education? What gives you hope and and how are your students? Where is their enthusiasm, where are their hesitations? 00;13;55;20 - 00;14;32;04 Kris McGee We are all afraid that AI will replace us because it's accessible at all hours of the day, all days of the week, all times of the year. It doesn't have to be closed for snow day, right? Like it's still available. So we're afraid as teachers, not everybody sees or values, which is the human side of a teaching position, because AI isn't going to say to you, you know, oh my gosh, you look so sad today. 00;14;32;07 - 00;15;02;23 Kris McGee Your cat was sick yesterday. Is everything okay? And that matters. That matters. That AI tool cannot give you the empathy or the compassion or even, you know, share that experience with you the way another human can. And I always say to my students, don't give away your voice to this tool. Like, don't be a reason for something like this to come to fruition. 00;15;02;25 - 00;15;32;01 Kris McGee Like you've got we've got to stand our ground and show that, yes, we can work together with the tool, but when it comes, when push comes to shove, we are the voice of the classroom. But to your question at the very beginning about, you know, what was the great thing about AI for me and that that realization and that epiphany of like, oh, the amount of time that you can get back, that it can take my hard work and make it pretty like I've never been the person to make my lessons pretty. 00;15;32;06 - 00;15;46;10 Kris McGee I don't I just I'm like the meat and potatoes, like, I want to get this, but now I can give work to AI and

say, can you put this into a beautiful infographic for me? Like, I don't have time to do that, but can you do that? And in 0.2 seconds, it gives me three different versions to pick from. 00;15;46;10 - 00;15;59;04 Kris McGee And I love that. But it's still my voice, my words, my ideas in a beautiful thing that it designed. And really, at the end of the day, what people are going to remember, hopefully, are the words and not really the design. 00;15;59;06 - 00;16;12;14 Mary Crowley-Farrell What are a couple of uses in the higher ed arena for faculty that you would recommend they use AI for? I'm thinking, what are you going to say about syllabus, for example? 00;16;12;17 - 00;16;53;27 Kris McGee Haha. You know, that's interesting because that's where I started with my use of AI. I wanted to make sure that my syllabus didn't have any hidden biases in it that maybe I didn't realize because of my seat, my privilege, my position, my lens that I was not really thinking about. And so I vetted it to make sure. And so it came back and offered some ideas of ways to open up my policies that made it more of a community instead of, it didn't say that I was a dictator, but it was like, okay, you're pushing this out. 00;16;53;27 - 00;17;11;10 Kris McGee Kris is like, this is this is your policy. This is your rule, and this is the way it's going to be. And from what I was describing in my prompt, I was saying to it, you know, this is a community I want to develop, a learning environment where, you know, I'm not seen as the end all, be all, because I'm not. 00;17;11;13 - 00;17;47;12 Kris McGee And so they're like, okay, you might want to might want to rethink how you write some of your policies then, you know, it can help schedule meetings with students. So for advising students, I can actually have AI be in charge of looking at my calendar and helping my students find open slots. I know I answer the same questions over and over for students, and so I've created a question and answer sheet, and I thought, you know, this would be great if I put it into a bot, created a, a bot, and it had this, all these basic questions that everybody tends to ask because they want to know how long it is. 00;17;47;12 - 00;18;07;24 Kris McGee When does it start? What's your grade point average? What do I need to, you know, all of the basic things that the bot could answer for them so that they can vet my program and see if it's a match before they even get to me, because the amount of people that I will meet, I only probably bring in half of the ones that I actually meet with. 00;18;07;24 - 00;18;31;12 Kris McGee And I mean, but I'm meeting with them for anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, and that's time that I'm not going to get back. And if the bot could save me that time and let them see that, oh, okay, this doesn't really match maybe financially or doesn't match with the the fact that I have to be on campus, it's an in-person program, or I have to do, minimum of 100 days in a placement, because that's what the state of Maryland requires. 00;18;31;14 - 00;18;50;07 Kris McGee Those kinds of things can be things that folks can go, okay, I don't need to I don't need to meet with Dr. McGee because this is just it's not a match, so it doesn't waste their time. And and it doesn't in turn, waste mine. So I think those kinds of things are also ways that AI can help professors. 00;18;50;09 - 00;19;19;27 Kris McGee You know, I'm a fan of NotebookLM, like, you know that. And so I, I think when I am looking at my online classes that are fully online, giving some variety to students for how they want to access information is always a win. I love giving students choice. So I would say to my colleagues, while you might feel comfortable always delivering information with a PowerPoint, that's great, love it. 00;19;19;29 - 00;19;40;26 Kris McGee But what you could do is you could take that PowerPoint, drop it into NotebookLM for free. They could have this on as an audio, either in their car or on their phone while they're sitting in the stands cheering their child on. But they can still be listening to the material. And so it just, it opens up all of these other opportunities. 00;19;40;29 - 00;20;06;21 Kris McGee And as the professor, you already did the hard work you planned and you prepared the presentation, now you can just let AI do the heavy lifting of putting it into different modalities so that people have choices. I think some people are afraid not not doing their job. And I it's not I've I've done the work. I'm just asking AI again to make it fancy. 00;20;06;24 - 00;20;15;02 Kris McGee Air quotes because I don't want to make it fancy. I just want to do the work and then let AI judge it up, make it look pretty. 00;20;15;04 - 00;20;23;29 Ron Hansen What advice do you have for colleagues in the colleges of Ed who are still hesitant about integrating AI into teacher prep programs? 00;20;24;02 - 00;20;56;05 Kris McGee I think having a hard conversation with people and and asking them, truly, what's your fear? What are you afraid of? Is it because you're like, I'm only going to be here another year? I don't want to put this much time in. I would I would respect that for someone. But what I would also say is then you need to invite somebody into your classroom as a guest speaker who will talk to your students about this AI movement and helping them, because as a teacher, you've we've all seen it over our careers. 00;20;56;05 - 00;21;14;18 Kris McGee We've seen how technology has grown and changed and helped all of us and how we were afraid of it at first and how we thought some of it would come and go. And it it didn't. And I think it would be, it just wouldn't be the right thing to do, to say no to it all together. 00;21;14;20 - 00;21;50;28 Kris McGee Like it's our responsibility to prepare teachers for tomorrow, not for yesterday. And it's not about my comfort level. And so we have to kind of get out of our own way to say, I have to do right by my students. And what would that look like? And if it means that I'm not ready to do it, then it's my responsibility to collaborate with someone who could come in and talk to my students about it so that they get the information they deserve, and that technically is my responsibility to make sure that they are receiving. 00;21;51;00 - 00;22;02;08 Mary Crowley-Farrell That's powerful advice. It's also the end of our time. I want to thank you, Kris, for being with us. Thank you for helping us with your with your advice and your experiences. 00;22;02;13 - 00;22;05;08 Ron Hansen Thank you. Yeah. It was it was a pleasure. It was fun. 00;22;05;10 - 00;22;07;22 Kris McGee Thank you. It was fun. 00;22;07;25 - 00;22;37;09 Mary Crowley-Farrell As we've heard, there's no single script for exploring new uses of AI in our classrooms. Each educational context presents unique opportunities and challenges, and we're all learning as we go along. If you have questions or want to share your own experiences with generative AI in teaching and learning, we'd love to hear from you. Please email us at AIunscripted@usmd.edu. 00;22;37;11 - 00;23;07;28 Ron Hansen This limited series is brought to you through the collaboration of the University of Maryland, Baltimore, the US and Kerwin Center for Academic Innovation, the USM Council of University System faculty, and MarylandOnline. Join us next time when co-host Jennifer Potter and Sam Collins will be exploring AI and ethics. Until next time, keep experimenting and stay unscripted. 00;23;08;00 - 00;23;21;17 Scott Riley Thank you for joining us today on Moving the Needle. Visit us at umaryland.edu/fctl to hear additional episodes, leave us feedback or suggest future topics. We'd love to hear from you.