Vicki Davis (00:05): Today's show is sponsored by EF Explore America and the STEM Tours. To show your students how STEM impacts the world up close and in action, go to efexploreamerica.com/STEM. And stay tuned at the end of the show to learn more.

Vicki Davis (00:25): Philip Seyfried is a doctoral student in curriculum and teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. And he researches how digital literacy and artificial intelligence intersect in K-12 learning. Phil spent over a decade teaching middle school language arts, but now he works at a higher level with schools and edtech companies about literacy and digital literacy. He is the co-author of AI-Enhanced Literacy: Practical Steps for Deepening Reading and Writing Instruction from ASCD. So Phil, you talk about brain-first practices and learning theory as it relates to AI. How did you start this work and say, hey, we're going to put the brain first?

Philip Seyfried (01:10): One of the things — co-author Mary and I started really working on this project a couple of years ago. We started to really see how AI is the future of education in a lot of ways. If not only for the reason because it's here, right? The kind of technology that really transforms the way that we think about what's possible in learning and education. We've always been really interested in digital literacies — kids read differently on a computer or on a tablet — and so we wanted to figure out what is happening differently with AI that's different than a book or working with a human. There's a lot that we didn't know at first. There was a lot of experimentation. And this is a technology that was just thrust upon all of us and opened up to the world one day. But what's great is there's been some wonderful research coming out of MIT's Media Lab. They had this great study where they took participants and they gave them these writing tasks. Some of them had AI available to them right from the start. Some of them had the internet available. And then others, they only had to use their brain — they couldn't really use any other technology other than their own thinking. And what was really interesting about that study is later on they switched the two groups.

Vicki Davis (02:10): Mm-hmm.

Philip Seyfried (02:18): So what ended up happening is the group that started with their brain ended up getting AI in the back end. And then vice versa, the group that started with AI, they ended up having to use only their brain. And there was a clear advantage of those who started with their own thinking first and then moved to AI. And what was so interesting that I found in that study was that you could build up your cognitive resources — get your brain on fire with your thinking, getting your ideas organized together, getting your best thoughts out there. If you bring in AI after that, it sort of accelerates your thinking, your work, challenges the thoughts that you've already established.

Vicki Davis (02:35): Hmm.

Philip Seyfried (02:57): Versus if you do it the other way around — if you start with AI too soon, before you've done some thinking, maybe even a little bit of writing, maybe some talking to somebody through your ideas — what ends up happening is AI sort of fills you up with all the ideas that it's bringing to you. Your sense of ownership is not going to really be there. And when we think about what's important in classrooms, we're really trying to get students to have a full sense of ownership over their words and their work and their learning — and to be able to see how they can use these tools to accelerate themselves, especially when they are trying to learn something that they want to do with independence later on.

Vicki Davis (03:33): So many times it seems people try to push us into “I love AI” or “I hate AI.” But true application and true teaching is in the middle of “okay, this is a good use, this is not a good use.” It seems like you're saying, your brain — start with brainstorming. So what should that process before you bring AI in look like in a classroom?

Philip Seyfried (03:55): We are so good in classrooms already of things that have been working for decades. We have kids in our classrooms that are using writers' notebooks. They have paper books in their hands. They have pencils. They're set up in partnerships so they can turn and talk to someone. Our classroom spaces are very, very collaborative. And those are things that we know work, and there's years and decades of research behind those practices. And so really what we're saying is don't get rid of that.

Vicki Davis (04:00): Mm-hmm.

Philip Seyfried (04:21): Don't let the excitement of a new technology completely change what you know already works. What we want to do is add what's working from these new avenues and opportunities to the frameworks that already work really, really well. What we're trying to help teachers see is living in this “yes-AND” time period. It's not an either-or with AI. It's “yes, you can do the things that you know work. Yes, you could also dabble and try some new things out and see how that goes — and do that in a measured way. And we can learn from each other at this time.” If we get into the space where we sort of ban it and say “well, you can't use it ever” — I don't know what that's going to mean for these kids as they're growing up and now they're going to be in the workforce. And these are the tools that they're going to be expected to pick up and to use well. And I would so rather see kids learn how to use those tools really well right now in their K-12 education — especially in a safer place where they can make some mistakes, because they will. They are going to overly lean on some of these tools at times because they want to sound smart. But we can address that. If they leave our classrooms, it's almost too [late].

Vicki Davis (05:29): And I have had some students on my show before and they said, “Ms. Davis, the only people getting caught using AI are the ones who don't know how to use it.” MIT — that you just quoted — they found AI detectors don't work. AI detectors don't work. AI detectors don't work. And what happens? You get a letter that says “we're not going to tolerate artificial intelligence. We have the greatest AI detector and it's going to catch all of you hooligans.” And then the kids are just like, “okay, I wrote it myself.” danah boyd, a respected researcher, was just writing on LinkedIn and she was saying that she had written this paper and had been accused of using AI to write part of the paper because she likes em-dashes. I like em-dashes. I've always used dashes. You could look on my blog from 2005 when I started blogging — I have dashes. And now I wrote something for somebody and they said, “Hey, you used AI on this because you have dashes in it.” Okay. Well, I might do that. And I might use the word “delve.” But that doesn't mean I'm using AI. So human AI detectors are no good and other AI detectors aren't any good. So what do you tell the schools that are like, “we want to have academic integrity, but we need some help here”?

Philip Seyfried (06:35): One of the things I've been telling schools — especially since there is so much concern over this — there's the concern that what are students doing after school hours? Are they using AI in ways that are not so productive? I think one of the things we know we can do is we can really control what's happening during the school day. They might go off and use these tools perhaps at home, and that to some degree might concern us, but in other ways that's the way of the world at this point. They're also using video games and other digital devices too. But what really gets teachers is — is that showing up in their classrooms later on? One of the ways we can really address this is to actually give students AI tools in the classroom that we can do some monitoring in. So there's a number of edtech platforms that allow you to set up a chatbot. And then you are able to see behind the scenes how that kid is having a discussion with that AI. And on top of that, instructions that you might say — “prompt the student with some questions to help them do some of their best writing, but don't do the writing for them” — and then the AI doesn't do that. And so if you were to combine that with making sure that students have class time to do their writing while they're there in front of you and getting your support as a teacher, and then doing some peer feedback work with another student in the classroom — there's going to be no question that students are really putting a lot of effort and energy and writing work into the drafts that you're seeing in front of you.

Vicki Davis (07:39): Mm-hmm.

Philip Seyfried (08:03): We don't want to necessarily then say “AI never comes into that process.” I think it's going to be the kind of decision we're going to have to sort of make case by case. And I do believe that it's so great to get away from technology, get away from screens, sit down with a pen and paper — even just a device that's not connected to the internet at that moment — and you're just doing your best writing and you're in that moment experiencing that. I think we need to make sure that we're also creating those moments too. That way we have the best of both worlds, and students do deserve to have those opportunities to sit with an idea that people don't look at just for a little bit before they get feedback. I think we have to really think about all the contours of what it means to be a writer, what it means to be a reader in a school space nowadays. And if we start to do that, what it does is it creates opportunities for us to have relations of trust in the classroom. What I most care about is, if I ask a student “hey, can you tell me a little bit about your writing process? What were the tools that you were using? How did you use those tools?” — I want to be able to have an open and honest conversation. I don't want it to feel yucky. If a kid says “well, Grammarly helped me at the end with some of my sentence structure,” right? Or “I was stuck at this one point, so I asked AI these three questions and it came back with this. I didn't like these three things that it said, but I did like this one. So then I tried it out here.” That's where real learning is happening. And if the kid says “I copied and pasted,” I also want them to feel safe enough to say that. So I can say “you know, as a writing process — let's think about some other things you can now do that you're ready for as a writer. AI might give you something that fills the blank page and some ideas. And now it's a great mentor text for you for the kind of writing you can do later on on your own.” And I think there's that idea of we're always increasing towards independence. We're always trying to boost students' confidence in their own abilities — and to not stigmatize these technologies in a way that kids now use it in secret and that we're not able to give them the actual support that they need if only we just knew how they were using the tool.

Vicki Davis (10:09): Mm-hmm. There are a lot of teachers who say, “hey, I'm grading with AI.” And I'm like, why? I'm teaching my students to take that paper they've written. We've gone through the process together. Give them the prompts to feed in my rubric and feed in their paper, and get a bulletized list of “here are some suggestions for where you might not be meeting the standards in the rubric.” Not having AI rewrite it, but having it give them a bulleted list. And then by the time it gets to me, you've already done your AI stuff. Like — what's the point of me using AI? Why not push it to them?

Philip Seyfried (10:46): Yeah, that's a really great question. And people are trying to work that out right now. I find such a big variety in what people are doing in practice. It really depends on where your students are as learners — and particularly, how old are they? For high school students, absolutely teaching them how to use these tools themselves makes perfect sense. But if you're in a third grade classroom, that's not going to be the same sort of approach we're going to take.

Philip Seyfried (11:17): One thing is we shouldn't just accept any feedback readily. We should really think — what is our purpose as a writer? And the second thing that does is it's actually teaching AI literacy. You want students to learn to speak back to these algorithms and to catch when the algorithm is not really working for them — and what are some things we can do to make sure that it's aligned with my own purposes. And so what that does is when you get to that point, then the teacher's freed up to give some of the human feedback and response that only a human can do.

I heard a teacher the other day say that she likes to give the kind of feedback where she'll tell a student “this here, right here, this sentence — this is where I paused and I lingered and I reread that sentence again and again because it's so beautiful.”

Vicki Davis (12:02): Hmm.

Philip Seyfried (12:05): And I think about — what effect does that have on a young person, a writer, a student, a learner for the rest of their life, to have a teacher say “it was at this moment in your writing that I just had to take a deep breath because it was so beautiful what you were saying right here.” And that's still the kind of feedback that — even if a computer could give that level of feedback, the authenticity of that relationship is so important. We have to remember that we're humans in the room. And as teachers, so much of our value is that we're another person really cultivating other people to become beautiful adults in the future. And I worry that if we're just catching commas and periods and capitalization, maybe we're sort of missing the point of the opportunities that we have. So I hope AI gives us more space to just be really human in the room.

Vicki Davis (12:55): I love how you're speaking about AI. Way too many people anthropomorphize it. I like what you're saying about that — AI is a tool to help the humans in the room become more remarkable humans. But when people start saying “AI is this” or “it is that,” or they start saying “AI got angry at me” — all this anthropomorphism — that's where I, as a teacher and as a human being, start pushing back and saying, hey, this is a great tool, but it's a really sorry human being. It's not a human at all.

Philip Seyfried (13:30): Every presentation I give now, I always show a picture of data centers — like the inside of a data center, because what you'll see is all these servers, and it's really just wall-to-wall servers. We tend to think of AI as this invisible intelligence somewhere in the cloud. And really — what is the cloud? It's us actually accessing a computer that's offsite. That's all that really is.

Vicki Davis (13:54): Mm.

Philip Seyfried (13:55): We can so easily forget that this isn't actually a human, because it's using natural language. But we have to always keep in mind that there's some algorithm behind this — there's training data behind this. And I think if we don't get to those sort of critical literacies of AI, we would really miss an opportunity. We can't be blind to what's going on right now. Otherwise then the teens in the room and the young kids — they're going to figure it out on their own. And they're going to shape it no matter what we do. But we want to be ready to help them navigate this moment, because it is a different moment than in the past.

Vicki Davis (14:35): We can't expect them to be fully developed adults about how to use it wisely. So as we finish up, Phil — for the teachers who are listening to you, they're convinced. Where do you tell beginners to start their journey of finding the appropriate place for AI in their classroom?

Philip Seyfried (14:51): Actually, I wouldn't start with the classroom is what I would tell teachers — if they're just getting started with AI. Ethan Mollick, who's got this great book Co-Intelligence, says that we need three sleepless nights with AI. So I would say get onto an AI system of your choice, whether that's ChatGPT or Claude or Google Gemini. Pick one of the big systems that you know you'll use again — and just test it out. Ask it questions, see how it responds.

Vicki Davis (15:20): We've been talking to Philip Seyfried — the book is AI-Enhanced Literacy: Practical Steps for Deepening Reading and Writing Instruction from ASCD. It has been very insightful. Thanks so much, Phil.

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Vicki Davis (00:00)
Welcome to Cool Cat Teacher Talk, where we talk about what matters in the classroom. What AI can't do, being beautifully human in the age of AI.

Vicki Davis (00:26)
Today we're talking to us that help us emphasize some of the things AI cannot do. It's important that the age of AI to understand the things that I can help us with, and the things that it can't. We're going to talk to Jeff Bogaczyk, a head of school and rhetoric expert, who is going to help us understand what are some of the things that we need to teach students about communicating and thinking.

Vicki Davis (00:54)
Then we're going to talk to Alan Lipton, who is my editor for my next book, and then we're going back to an older episode of my Ten Minute Teacher podcast. This amazing special needs teacher who had a really incredible way of helping students communicate and treat each other well and build that emotional intelligence with Karen McCallum. Finally, we're going to talk to the head of a school that uses basically no technology, just a little bit of robot building and understand what are the human things they're trying to teach with this approach.

Vicki Davis (01:34)
Let's get started.

Announcer (01:36)
Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (01:39)
Today we're talking with Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk. He's head of school in Wisconsin. He holds a PhD in rhetoric and hosts the Remarkable Mind for Life podcast. His research focuses on media ecology. That's the study of how our communication technologies shape the way we think, relate and learn. Jeff, it's really interesting communication in this age of loneliness, miscommunication in division.

Vicki Davis (02:14)
Like this is a topic that's resonating with people, isn't it?

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (02:17)
Yeah. It's great to be with you, Vicki. But just to address that, there was a French sociologist, Jacques Ellul, who wrote a book a while back called The Technological Bluff. And his basic interpretation of society was that we need to now look through the lens of technique and technology as we look into society. And basically, the technological bluff was about what technology promises humanity in order to advance itself.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (02:47)
I don't know if you remember when back when the social media platforms were all coming out, and these are going to connect us better to human beings. These platforms are going to allow us to interact with other people and facilitate better human connections. That was a false truth. It was a lie. And here we are, more segmented in society than ever before.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (03:09)
People disconnected, as you mentioned, epidemics of loneliness, all as a result of these platforms. They are not bringing us together. They are distancing us. They are pitting one against the other. And it's an unfortunate situation, but quite honestly, the money was worth it for them. When people will do and say whatever they have to do in order to be able to advance whatever their projects are and cash in on it, and that's what we see going on.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (03:34)
Similar, I would say, Elon Musk with the promises of robotics and nobody's ever going to have to work, and everybody's going to have free income, and everybody's going to be driven around by cars and robots. Is that really the world we want to live in? Because work does have a meaningful purpose in our life. We want to be able to do something that's purposeful and working with people and being in relationships.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (03:54)
I don't trust those guys, to be quite honest with you.

Vicki Davis (03:57)
What's the saying? Fool me once. Shame on you for me twice. Shame on me. I was in the cell phone business. And how do we market cell phones? We learned that one reason back in the early 90s that that people would buy cell phones. That was for the safety of their children. Did phones make them safer? No. Social media.

Vicki Davis (04:12)
Did it make us more socially connected? No. It made us lonelier. This is one thing I teach my students. You have to be careful of the marketing line because AI, for example, is it processing? Is it doing data analytics? No, it says it's thinking. It's not thinking, it's processing, it's doing algorithms. And I asked them, hey, would you have used this if it said algorithmically calculating whatever?

Vicki Davis (04:33)
They said, no. I said, but how about when it says thinking. So they've intentionally anthropomorphized AI to make it think that it's like a human brain, which it's not. Now there's some great uses of AI, but this is a really prevalent marketing technique of technology companies to tell us it's going to make our lives better. Oh, don't be afraid.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (04:54)
It's interesting you say that because there is a, I would say, a foundational basis for interpretation of how people think of the human brain. People think of the human brain as a computer. That metaphor then extends to what computers do, that all the brain does is process information. And we know that it's more than that. The brain is connected to our bodies.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (05:18)
It is connected to our nervous systems. The brain allows us to perceive the world in ways completely different, because of its connections to our body that computers can never do. And so people with that foundational interpretation of how the brain works extend it to machines. And I think there's just a fundamental difference. We're not machines, we are creations.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (05:42)
We are bodies. And there is something very unique and distinct about that, quite different qualitatively, you might say it from computers and robots and everything that they're creating to try to mimic or recreate the human.

Vicki Davis (05:56)
So one thing I always tell my students is in the age of AI, emotional intelligence of us humans is far more important, and I always encourage them. We do activities to learn to read the body language of the other people, because they tend to want to look at the screen, and when they look at the screen, everybody around them looks at the screen.

Vicki Davis (06:15)
They're not making eye contact. They're not understanding. You know what? What we're communicating. And you're all about communication. Now you've got a 30 day challenge on your Instagram that by the time we air this, maybe all the way through. But I encourage people to go listen to it. And you had some really interesting statistics you shared about somebody tapping out what they thought was a rhythm.

Vicki Davis (06:40)
Could you share that study with us? Because it just really resonated with me.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (06:45)
The issue is the curse of knowledge, and everybody has internal knowledge of certain things that we often think other people have as well, but they don't. In 1990, study at Stanford, where somebody who knew a song say, for example, Happy Birthday to You would just tap out the rhythm, happy birthday to you of that song and thought, oh, it's so easy, because when you're tapping out the song, you're singing along in your own brain, the melody because you know the song.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (07:18)
And so that knowledge that we have internally of the song, we just think, oh, everybody else possesses that. They don't. They're not hearing the melody of Happy Birthday to You or The Star-Spangled banner, or Mary Had a Little Lamb or anything like that. All they're hearing is taps in some type of rhythmic sequence. Without the internal knowledge, it's very difficult for other people to understand what's going on in our minds. (Read more about Elizabeth Newton's 1990 study.)

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (07:46)
You know, as human beings, we've got a couple of problems. Number one, we think other people can read our minds. Like, you should just know what I'm thinking. In all of my past experiences, past knowledge and past history. Additionally, we think we can read other people's minds. And so that comes back to emotional intelligence that we think people see our emotions and know our emotional states and can recognize those things when they don't.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (08:14)
We often fail to recognize that we don't understand other people's emotional states and emotional intelligence, which I think is wonderful, and how you talk to your students about that, I think it's incredible. That's such a key quality to be able to understand. We're more than just, again, information beings. We are emotional beings. And that emotion comes through and all of that.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (08:35)
So that knowledge goes back to one of the other things I talk about in this 30 day challenge is that illusion of transparency. We just assume that other people know what's going on in our minds and they don't. And so that's why communication is so critical, asking questions to actually hear what somebody else is feeling or what they're going through, and then communicating the knowledge that we have because we just have the expectation that you're going to get it.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (09:05)
You should know this. You should get it. Well, they don't they can't read your mind. They don't know what you're thinking. And so being clear in how you communicate really does help to solve some of those things that prevent us from connecting with one another.

Vicki Davis (09:20)
So, Jeff, you're a head of school. How do you take this to your teachers? Because so often what we think we've communicated to our students, we have an eye opening moment where we realize what I think I just said. They didn't understand what I said. They understood something totally different, especially middle school. They kind of have so much going on so often, and it's like, I didn't say that at all.

Vicki Davis (09:45)
How do you help your teachers with this?

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (09:46)
What we try to do, it's not easy. These are obstacles for communication that we deal with quite regularly and often, but we encourage our teachers to communicate out often and in multiple ways through. You might want to say it, multiple media, the expectations and what's coming, and then to write it on the board to write it in the software system that people are looking at to communicate it to, to students verbally, just communicating out the expectations over and over again.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (10:20)
We do that from a leadership perspective as well, communicating out what we expect and what our vision and what our mission is. Somebody said this before and I don't know who actually, but it does make sense the moment you're sick of saying it, that's the moment they're finally starting to actually hear it. It just needs to be communicated over and over.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (10:39)
And for us, one of our expected student outcomes, which is a part of our portrait of a graduate, is confident communicators. We want to, through our school, through our curriculum, through our environment, produce students who are confident communicators. They can speak well, they can write well. They can think well, thinking to me as a communication event that interpersonal communication, you're having a dialog with yourself when you're thinking for our students that they can negotiate the most important relationships in their life.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (11:15)
And the way we do that is through communication. There is no relationship without communication. Communication is you might even say it is the relationship.

Vicki Davis (11:26)
There's so much to unpack here because as I work to help my students understand, I love how you said that. We think we can read minds, but we can't, you know. And one interesting little tidbit I had come across in one of my body language books, right? As communicators like to study those, was that there's about 10% of the people who give cross messages.

Vicki Davis (11:47)
Unfortunately, a lot of those people end up in prison. I had a student one time that when he was telling the truth, his body language was that he was lying. And when he was lying, his body, it literally was the opposite. Because there were times that I knew for a fact he didn't do it, and his body language was giving me.

Vicki Davis (12:04)
And I tried to talk to his parents. I said, listen, because statistically speaking, in this particular book, it was an FBI profiler interviewer said, you need to help those people that are the 10% because they usually end up in prison arrested for something they didn't do. I was trying to help this parent understand your child is giving off mixed messages.

Vicki Davis (12:23)
You need to help him a little bit with his body language. And it was like not a real understanding with what I was trying to say, that we not only need to learn to try to read body language, we need to learn that not everybody gives off the same body language. And if we're one of those whose giving off mixed messages, we do need to learn and help us with our own body language.

Vicki Davis (12:44)
So when you teach your students and teachers to communicate, how do you pull that in? Because this is an area I need a lot of help.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (12:50)
That's very difficult to do. I would say that alignment between what you're saying non-verbally and what you're saying verbally is the goal. You need your messages to be coherent when what you say does not match up with what your body is communicating. Everyone believes what your body is communicated. We don't believe your words, which goes back to your point of why people can say something and get arrested for something they didn't do, because they're telling people they didn't do it, but their body is communicating something different.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (13:23)
You can of course, practice. You can develop confidence, communication habits, how to look somebody in the eye. And of course, those things require a lot of effort and 60 days of continued practice. But the habits that are really ingrained, quite honestly, communication how we communicate verbally and nonverbal verbally is a habit. It's something we've just learned and done our whole lives so it can take place.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (13:53)
The first step is going back to emotional intelligence self-awareness. If you don't know what you're doing wrong or not doing well, you will never be able to correct it, or at least work towards rebuilding and redeveloping habits. Habits are just ingrained neural networks in our brains that operate on autopilot, if you will, and you can change those, but it just takes a lot of time and a lot of practice.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (14:22)
Con men, con artists, they've practiced how to communicate and align their messages and connect with people and build rapport over a long period of time. They just know how to do that. They practiced it, they've utilized it, and they use it to great effect, albeit to the detriment of people that they're conning out of money. Those things can be built, they can be developed.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (14:43)
And of course, to your point, when you see it early on when someone is younger and growing up, that's the time to really build in and retrain and develop those habits so that over time they start to overtake the ones that are not as effective when it comes to the mixed message part.

Vicki Davis (15:00)
So, Jeff, you built a Instagram following of 224,000 folks. That's a lot. What's the message that's resonating the most where you're getting people saying, wow, that that's true.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (15:10)
Having the message is this a lot of people recognize that they're not great communicators. And if you look at any relational problem, it's always communication. Unfortunately, too many people, I think, want a quick fix. Give me the words to say, give me a quick phrase to say. A lot of it to me is ego driven. I want to win.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (15:33)
I want to get that person when they say something bad to me or make me feel dismissed. I want to be able to have the words to say to get them so that I can, like, boost up my ego and stand up for myself. Standing up for yourself is important, but what are we really trying to do in our relationships?

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (15:50)
What do relationships really mean to us? I think it's about human connection that you are connecting with people and working together with them, and that you're treating people respectfully. The communication space on the internet is weird, of course. Developing practices and strategies and techniques, all of its great, and there's a lot of people that are out there doing that, but there's so many people that just aren't not great communicators, especially when it comes to public speaking.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (16:17)
Like one of the number one fears that people have is getting up in front of a group of people and having to give some type of a presentation. And people long for growth in those areas, and they're looking for that. That's to me, one of the insights I've had since this has only been two years, to be honest with you, of starting on Instagram two years ago and getting to where I am now and on TikTok as well.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (16:38)
So it's unique to see what people are dealing with, and people recognize that it's an issue to grow in, for sure.

Vicki Davis (16:44)
Then you get into embodied cognition, which is one of the things I teach my students is that if you close up and you and you close your arms and you close, you're like that. Your body actually releases neurochemicals that make you more nervous. If you have a more open stance, you get less nervous. And so embodied cognition. How does that fit in this?

Vicki Davis (17:02)
And what is it? Because truthfully, you're probably really popular because there's not a lot of people talking about this stuff. And it's really useful in the classroom.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (17:09)
Yeah. There's actually a study done by Amy Cuddy. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but it's about power posing. And they did a study about how the positions of your body release chemicals into your brain, and that when you are closed off, like you said, it releases the chemicals that lead to greater anxiety when you open up your posture. (See the editor's note above — the felt-confidence effect has held up better than the original hormone-change findings.)

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (17:29)
They actually did the study about developing confidence by power posing. So she's got a TEDx talk. You can watch about that. I would recommend it to your listeners. It's millions and millions of views on that one. But when you actually put your body in a pose that is typically used to celebrate victory or confidence and you're not confident, but you deliberately put your body in that position, it really starts to change the chemical makeup and allows you to be more confident.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (17:59)
So what they did was they had people in rooms practice power posing. These are these Superman poses standing up straight, hands up in the air, those type of things for three minutes before they were going into a job interview just to see. And they measured the actual chemical balances within their bodies. And it really was amazing how your body language doesn't just communicate to other people.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (18:23)
It actually has an internal effect on how you engage the world. So really fascinating stuff and things that we don't often think. But when everybody gets nervous or when everybody gets anxious, they shrink down into themselves. Like you said, they close their arms. They kind of like shrivel up into the corner. And in order to combat that, the answer is not to allow your body to do what it naturally does.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (18:47)
When you're feeling those types of feelings, it's to really take the stance and put yourself in positions to start to reconstruct that chemical makeup in your body, which then ultimately releasing you, having more confidence and feeling better about yourself. When people say, hey, if you're feeling sad or feeling depressed, you should get up and take a walk. There's actual science behind that.

Vicki Davis (19:08)
We could talk all day. We've learned so much. We've been talking with Dr. Jeff Bogaczyk. He has the Mind For Life podcast. He's all over social media, and there's so much we could talk about. And hey, we didn't even get a chance to talk about AI today, so that'll have to be another conversation about sure, technology has changed how we communicate.

Vicki Davis (19:28)
But, you know, here's the thing. In the age of AI, the humans that will be successful are the humans who have the emotional intelligence, the communication skills. I love your profile of a graduate because it's so important to be able to communicate effectively, whether it's like we are online or especially face to face, just so we can have those good, healthy relationships so that we can reduce loneliness.

Vicki Davis (19:57)
If we could move from social media to just being social human beings, we would have a better world, wouldn't we? Jeff?

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (20:04)
I think we would. Depends on how you would define better. I think both you and I would define it differently than some of the people that are advancing these platforms and pushing these technologies on us. So more humanistic, if we can say it that way, not in the secular, humanistic way, but just in the fact that we are connected better at the human level, which is an important thing.

Vicki Davis (20:27)
So, Jeff, thank you for coming on the show and thanks for all that you're sharing. Mind For Life is a really great resource for all of us.

Jeffrey S Bogaczyk (20:34)
Vicki, it's been a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me. I've enjoyed it and we definitely have to do it again.

Announcer (20:40)
Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (20:44)
I love the emotional intelligence that Jeff brought to the conversation, but now we want to move to something that people think AI can do editing. So when I first started writing for Edutopia, I met Alan Lipton. It was incredible the things that he could help me write better. I'll admit I've been using Grammarly for years, but nothing has come close to what Alan Lipton can do with my writing.

Vicki Davis (21:14)
I think that true editing is a very underappreciated profession and something that humans, when they know how to do it, can do far better. Let's talk to Alan Lipton.

Vicki Davis (21:31)
Writing is more important than ever. I know everybody talks about AI or AI can write for us. Oh no. AI is real good at average writing, but there are still stories to be told. There are things to be written, and writing is so important. So as we talk about and emphasize writing, our guest we have today is Alan Lipton.

Vicki Davis (21:51)
He has edited some of my pieces I've written for Edutopia in the past. He's had many different clients Deloitte, Fox Interactive, iVillage, The Learning Company, so many others you've worked for Alan, and I know you write yourself and you're also an editor, but talk to us about what do editors do? I've published a couple books. Editors are really important, but I'm not sure people value what editors do.

Vicki Davis (22:20)
So let's talk about it.

Alan (22:21)
Okay. As I've come to editing as as a writer, I've always enjoyed collaborating with other people when I can. And I realize that editing other people's writing is, in a way, a really ideal form of collaboration for a writer, because it's taking something that someone else has said in writing and working with them to make it better, taking what's really good and what's really unique about it, and just making that part really sing.

Alan (22:54)
So I come to editing as a reader and a writer.

Vicki Davis (22:57)
So that's the thing about you that when you've edited my work and I can say this publicly, my favorite editor I've ever worked with is you, Alan, because you do the thing that I didn't know I'm beginning. I haven't written my first book, but I'm doing some work for it. And when you're a writer, you're so close to it.

Vicki Davis (23:14)
And yes, you win awards and all that kind of stuff. Everybody says you're a good writer, but what you don't know is sometimes your closeness to the words interrupt what you're trying to communicate. So what you do is you have the eyes of a reader, but you also understand the heart of a writer because we write to think.

Vicki Davis (23:34)
My husband says, Vicki, you talk to think and you write to think. It's how you think. Because by the time I get to the end of a book, I know what I think about something and then I can speak about it and all of that because it's a process. But I think that's a mistake a lot of us writers make is we don't understand the importance of having a second set of eyes on it, and people can say all they want about ChatGPT being a great editor, but it's not because it always tells you you're right.

Vicki Davis (23:59)
I'm not always right. You're really good at finding the structural things. Hey, Vicki, why don't you put it here? Why not put it there? None of this AI does that. But you do. And there's so many editors like you. Do you think people, Alan, have a misconception about what editors actually do and the value of editors? Do they think they're just for spelling or what?

Alan (24:20)
I think a lot of people think of an editor as kind of a police officer in some way. It's like saying, no, you can't do that. These are the rules. You have to follow them. And to an extent that is true. The idea of getting second set of of eyes on what you've written is that let me put it this way.

Alan (24:38)
You shouldn't be thinking, well, let me run it by this person who will just pat me on the back and say that I've done a really great job. You know, to me, the whole point of editing is constructive criticism. My own approach to it is what I refer to as coming at it from like the minds ear that when I'm reading something, I'm listening to how it sounds.

Alan (25:00)
And what I really favor doing is having something that sounds really close to human speech without the stammering and the, you know, and, and the backtracking and, you know, and the misspeak to have sort of a natural flow to the language in the sense of grammar that is generally perfect if it's not 100% following the rules all the time, that may be okay, because that's natural speech.

Vicki Davis (25:30)
Everybody's going to be saying, okay, Alan, what about the kinds of editing I thought editing was editing? So what are those other forms of editing?

Alan (25:36)
There are five, five different kinds of I've identified, and some of which I practice more than others. At the very, very first step would be conceptual editing, where a writer would sit down with an editor, say, I have this idea, let's brainstorm it. What do you think about these ideas? What do you think is a good way to present these ideas?

Alan (26:00)
That's before anything is even written. Probably an outline would be helpful for that. Then after that would be what is called developmental editing. What you need for developmental editing is you need a first draft. It can be rough as sandpaper, but it's all the ideas are there in whatever form the editor is assessing your first draft. It's kind of an overview of what do you have here before digging in deeper, we have structural editing that's often called line editing, trying to set a structure for the text and clarity within that structure.

Alan (26:34)
The next level after that would be copy editing. That is sort of drilling down on grammar, punctuation, spelling, and just overall consistency.

Vicki Davis (26:46)
You try to get Vicki to fix her commas. You know, the good thing is I have Grammarly. Now, that does help me a little more with my commas so I can focus on communicating.

Alan (26:54)
That's where we look at the commas. Also, another level of looking at the commas is what is called a proofing edit, or maybe proofreading, where the edit has nothing to do with the content at all. It's just are there typos? How is this formatted? Is the formatting consistent? This is sort of a sidebar that there there are two additional features of line editing or structural editing, which are sort of on the nerdy end of things, that it's not always part of the process, one of which is fact checking to make sure that they're accurate about certain things.

Alan (27:30)
The other is what is generally called technical editing. That's not so much specifically about technical writing. What that refers to more is it's about points that are specific to the subject matter or specific to a given industry. Those are sort of subsets of line and structural editing.

Vicki Davis (27:49)
My high school writing teacher said, the thing about movies and books is that the pace moves faster than real life. In real life, there's lots of corners we walk around. There's lots of things we do that nobody would ever read a book or watch a movie about walking around corners. I mean, I'm sure that there are some people who try, but the pace has to be faster.

Vicki Davis (28:12)
Even if you skip a year, you don't take a year to skip a year. You skip a year quickly. You know, that is hard to understand because we put ourselves in our characters. And there's the saying, what? You have to kill your darlings, right? What does that mean?

Alan (28:25)
Basically, if you've created something that you absolutely love, it helps if you just look at it very coldly and say, sure, I love this. I had a lot of fun writing this. This little piece of writing may be a great piece of writing. How does it serve the story that I'm telling? And if it doesn't, you either need to cut it out or you need to retell it in a different way.

Alan (28:55)
That makes sense to the general idea that you're putting out the phrase kill your darlings. It's very brutal sounding. You know it. It suggests that really looking at what you've created from a very technical angle, where there's no room for feeling, feeling takes a back seat to the story and to to the intent.

Vicki Davis (29:18)
Yeah. So the dark night of the soul is a term I've heard in writing groups a lot, and I think that is that's just when you're in the thick of it. You're writing your book and it's not coming together. You're lost and you can't figure out what you're doing. It feels like you're in the dark. Is that what the dark night of the soul is?

Alan (29:40)
Exactly. Yeah, it's that moment, and it might last longer than a moment. It might be a phase where you have lost the thread of what you're trying to do. You're not sure what you're trying to say anymore. You don't have the thread to follow.

Vicki Davis (29:57)
And how do you get out of that?

Alan (30:00)
Well, you could, you could take a break. You could take a breath and let your subconscious do the work. You could talk to someone about it. You could, you could do all of those things. Or you could engage what I would call tacit knowledge. You have knowledge that you don't necessarily even know you have. When you're being a craftsperson, when you're involved in a craft like writing, you learn stuff intuitively.

Alan (30:30)
For instance, when I'm working with a writer, I might ask them, hey, what do you think about this? How does that feel? And when you rely on your gut feel, on your intuition, on your instincts, that is a form of knowledge that you can't necessarily express explicitly.

Alan (30:50)
And I have a friend, I have an Aunt Chandra, and my aunt is a world-famous cook. And when you ask her, how much butter do you put in the cake, she says, well, it depends. She can't really tell me explicitly how much butter she puts in a cake. She knows when it feels right. She knows when it looks right. She has tacit knowledge of cooking that comes from years and years of practice and intuition in the kitchen.

Alan (31:16)
The same thing is true with writing. Tacit knowledge is something that you have developed through experience and through practice and through engaging in the craft repeatedly. It's not something you can necessarily express explicitly. But when you're in that dark night of the soul, you can rely on that tacit knowledge and your instincts to help you find your way back to the thread that you were following.

Vicki Davis (31:39)
Alan, thank you so much for coming on the show. I can't wait to write my first book with you as my editor.

Alan (31:45)
That's going to be amazing. Thanks so much for having me, Vicki.

Announcer (31:48)
Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (31:52)
Now we're going to talk with Karen McCallum. Karen is going back to one of my vault episodes that was called episode 53 from back in 2017. Now, Karen is an elementary vice principal and a kindergarten teacher. She has been teaching for 33 years, and she has some incredible stories about emotional intelligence and how she helps kids communicate.

Vicki Davis (32:16)
Karen McCallum, tell us just a little bit about what you do.

Karen McCallum (32:21)
I'm an elementary vice principal and a kindergarten teacher in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada. And I've been teaching in the primary grades for 33 years. I'm so glad you're talking about the human skills that can't be taught by technology. And I think communication and emotional intelligence and some of the things that we do in our classroom is really important. This year, I had a little girl who is nonverbal. She has never spoken a word.

Karen McCallum (32:51)
But what we did, one thing I did at the beginning was used little puppets. These are little hand puppets. We have two puppets called Matz and Penny. Matz is kind of a happy little guy and Penny is another little puppet. So I used these puppets to build a safe space for this little girl. I would sit with her and I talk through the puppets to create that safe space.

Karen McCallum (33:21)
And over the course of the year, this little girl began to communicate through the puppets with me, and then she began to talk to some of the other children. And eventually she began to talk to the adults, the parents, and other people in the classroom.

Karen McCallum (33:38)
We also used, Vicki, we have a boy who had his finger stepped on at recess. And this little boy, instead of being upset or coming in and being aggressive, he completely shut down emotionally. And so what we did was we used the puppets Matz and Penny to help this little boy process through his emotions and helped him build trust again with his peers.

Karen McCallum (34:01)
These are really important human skills that I don't think that AI or any kind of technology can replicate. And we care about each student, and we want to help them grow and develop as humans.

Karen McCallum (34:14)
What I've found is, as teachers, we really need to listen to what the kids are saying, and we really need to observe the child and see how they're reacting to things. Really be present with them.

Vicki Davis (34:25)
Karen, you're talking about emotional intelligence. Jeff talked about it. Alan talked about it. As you teach your kindergarteners and first graders, what do you think emotional intelligence is?

Karen McCallum (34:37)
I think emotional intelligence is, you need to know your own emotional state, and you need to understand how you're feeling. And then you need to understand how other people are feeling. That means being able to identify emotions in other people by looking at their body language or looking at their facial expressions. And then you need to be able to be empathetic towards them. And you need to be able to handle your own emotions as well.

Karen McCallum (35:07)
And so as a teacher, I model this. I model emotional intelligence in my classroom every single day.

Karen McCallum (35:15)
Thanks for having me back, Vicki.

Vicki Davis (35:17)
Great. Thanks so much for the memories, Karen.

Announcer (35:19)
Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (35:22)
Krise Nowak is the head of school at Ambleside School in McLean, Virginia. I know a lot of people who use Charlotte Mason education, and they love it. Krise, tell us about what makes your school unique.

Vicki Davis (35:36)
What kind of methodology is Charlotte Mason and how does it work?

Krise Nowak (35:43)
Well, Vicki, first of all, thank you so much for having me. I'm so grateful to be here. Charlotte Mason was an educator and writer in the 19th century, and she emphasized respecting the child as a person. She believed that children are persons, not projects, and she created an educational philosophy that centers around relationships, character formation, and the love of learning.

Vicki Davis (36:06)
Can you tell us what makes the Charlotte Mason school different? Because if I'm honest, the technology piece is one thing that strikes me immediately when I hear about Charlotte Mason schools, is they use very little technology. Talk to us about that. Can you explain that?

Vicki Davis (36:23)
What's the point? Why? What's the philosophy behind it?

Krise Nowak (36:28)
Well, the reason for that is Charlotte Mason had three main tools of education. The first is what she called a living curriculum. Now, this is not textbooks. Rather, it's beautiful, well-written books. She had strong opinions about the quality of the books that students should be reading from, because she knew that when students read rich literature and well-written materials, they're exposed to great ideas and to excellent writing at the same time.

Krise Nowak (37:06)
The second tool is narration. This is the practice of having students tell back, in their own words, what they've read or heard. This is the most important tool. The teacher reads aloud to the students, and then the student narrates back what they've heard. They don't use tests. They use narration as a way of checking understanding. So when a student narrates, they're demonstrating their understanding.

Krise Nowak (37:39)
And then the third tool is what we call habit formation. Character traits and good behaviors are developed through habit. So we focus on things like attentiveness, obedience, and diligence. And all of these habits are developed over time through practice and consistency.

Vicki Davis (38:03)
This is really interesting. I'm particularly interested in the narration piece because when I was teaching, I would sometimes read something aloud and ask students to put it in their own words. And there are multiple things happening. First of all, if they can't tell it back, I know they don't understand it. If they can tell it back, they've processed that information through their own thinking.

Vicki Davis (38:25)
They've changed it to their words. They've had to think about what mattered most and what didn't. It's a much deeper level of engagement than just a multiple choice quiz.

Krise Nowak (38:35)
Absolutely. And students take ownership of their learning when they narrate. They're not just passively receiving information. They're actively engaged in understanding and processing the information. And narration also builds confidence. When a student narrates, they're speaking. They're communicating their understanding. And that's something that has to happen if we want our students to be thinkers.

Krise Nowak (38:56)
Students develop their thinking skills through speaking. It really is the primary tool that they need in order to learn how to think.

Vicki Davis (39:10)
So another thing that I've heard from Charlotte Mason educators is this phrase “I have my child back.” What does that mean?

Krise Nowak (39:18)
Oh, that's a beautiful phrase. And I've seen it happen in my own classroom before I was a head of school. I was teaching middle school, and when we started using Charlotte Mason methods in my classroom, the children started coming back to life. The technology had been fragmenting their attention, and their brains weren't able to focus. And once the technology was removed, we started seeing children who were struggling coming alive. We started seeing their unique gifts and talents.

Krise Nowak (39:46)
We started seeing them develop confidence and joy in their learning. And then we started seeing families transformed, because the parents began to see their children again, not just their children's grades, not just their children's test scores, but their actual children.

Krise Nowak (40:02)
One of our students says, I feel like my brain is working more efficiently now. And another student says, this is peaceful. I can actually think. And another student said, I like this because I can actually be myself. Those are powerful words. And I think that speaks to the fragmentation that technology causes.

Krise Nowak (40:24)
So we have very limited technology. We do teach engineering and robotics, but the foundation, the core of what we do is relational and human-centered.

Vicki Davis (40:37)
So Krise, we have something in common. We both believe that in the age of AI, the humans who will be successful and the humans who will be happy are the ones who develop the soft skills. The human skills. The emotional intelligence. The thinking. The communicating. The character. All those things. So we're aligned on that perspective, and I'm so grateful that you're out there running a school that's aligned with that. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Krise Nowak (41:07)
Thank you so much, Vicki. It's been a joy to be with you.

Vicki Davis (41:10)
So John Davis and I are going to do our closing conversation.

Vicki Davis (41:14)
So John, let's talk about what we're thinking about this episode. We talked to Jeff Bogaczyk about communication. We talked to Alan Lipton about editing. We heard from a kindergarten teacher, Karen McCallum, about emotional intelligence and helping kids communicate. And we heard from Krise Nowak about Charlotte Mason education.

Vicki Davis (41:33)
What is AI absolutely terrible at? What is AI can't do?

John Davis (41:41)
Well, it's the first thing that comes to mind is emotional intelligence. It can't understand, truly understand, what it means to be a human being or what it means to be in pain or to be struggling or to be joyful. It can't really understand context. It can have an idea of context, but deep understanding of context requires experience.

John Davis (42:06)
And experience requires embodiment. We need bodies. We need to feel and taste and smell and hear. We need to have those experiences to understand what's really going on in the world.

John Davis (42:22)
Another thing that AI is terrible at is building genuine relationships. Relationships require trust. Relationships require vulnerability. Relationships require someone to put themselves out there and to take a risk. And all of those things require an understanding of what it means to be human.

John Davis (42:41)
And finally, I think AI is absolutely terrible at something that I think we all appreciate, which is joy. The ability to see the small everyday miracles in life and to appreciate them.

John Davis (42:54)
I think these are gifts that we humans have been given, and I think we need to nurture them. I think that if we focus on the things that AI can't do, and we focus on our strengths, rather than trying to compete with machines, we'll find that we have a lot to offer the world.

Vicki Davis (43:13)
You know, one thing that I think about is that AI can mimic human writing. Right? We know that. And you can see examples of good AI writing and bad AI writing. But what AI can't do is have an idea. You know, ideas come from the human experience. They come from our suffering, our joy, our relationships, our challenges. And so even though AI can generate text, what it can't do is generate an idea that will change the world.

Vicki Davis (43:42)
And so I think as we are in this age of AI, I think what we need to do is empower people. Empower ourselves and empower our students to be idea generators, to be people who think deeply, to be people who connect with other people, to be people who have something to say that matters. Those are the people who will lead the world, not the people who can use AI well.

Vicki Davis (44:06)
Those are the people who can think and who can relate. And I think that the sad thing is that as we've gotten more technology in our schools, we've focused on compliance and on testing and test scores. But what we really need to do is focus on developing the human. And I think what this episode has shown us is that there are schools and teachers and educators out there who are doing that really well.

Vicki Davis (44:33)
And I think what we need to do is empower those people and celebrate those people. So thanks for this conversation today, John. I think it's been a good one.

John Davis (44:42)
You're welcome. And thanks for having me, Vicki.

Vicki Davis (44:45)
Thanks for listening to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. I'm Vicki Davis, and I'll see you next time.

John Davis (00:04): This is a special extended episode of the 10 Minute Teacher.

Vicki Davis (00:08): Today's show is sponsored by EF Explore America and their STEM Tours. To show your students how STEM impacts the world up close and in action, go to efexploreamerica.com/STEM and stay tuned at the end of the show to learn more.

Vicki Davis (00:24): Can students learn world-class manufacturing? How about artificial intelligence? How do we prepare them for the real world? We have two amazing guests on the show. My dear friend Joe Fatheree is a globally recognized educator, author, and filmmaker. He was named one of the top 10 teachers internationally by the Global Teacher Prize in 2016, and he's won the NEA National Award for Teaching Excellence. Joe, you're at Oak Ridge High School. Tell us about that.

Joe Fatheree (00:53): After 34 years of working in the ed tech space with a great group of kids, I thought I'd had this great career — and I tell people God has a sense of humor. He took me to Oak Ridge, where I had the opportunity to go down and work with them regularly. It's the community where the Manhattan Project was partially born, where the Department of Energy stayed after World War II. They've got a world-class school with world-class teachers and students. So I come down and work regularly with them as we're trying to figure out how do we usher our students into this age of really amazing emerging technology.

Vicki Davis (01:29): And you're working with Dr. Mark Buckner, an architect behind Oak Ridge High School's Wildcat Manufacturing — recognized as a Smart Industry Top 50 Innovator. He has a million-dollar state grant. He's bringing global STEM expertise right to the classroom. Before he went to the classroom, Dr. Buckner had a distinguished 32-year career at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Mark, what are some of the things that you're doing with students?

Dr. Mark Buckner (01:55): Thank you, Vicki. Part of that career — one of the things relevant to this conversation — while I was at the lab, they were trying to do things that had never been done before. I had a parallel track working with kids. I'd been in the school system, working as a part of the F.I.R.S.T. system that Dean Kamen and Woody Flowers founded for inspiration and recognition of science and technology. It was an after-school program, started in elementary school, and as my kids progressed, I kept going in the schools. Engaged with kids, how they learn across the board.

After retirement, I consulted for years for a company called Scrum Inc. I was brought in as an innovation consultant, going into companies like Northrop Grumman and other places, helping them boot up innovation teams. That's one of the things Joe and I talk a bunch about — what is innovation, and what's the mindset that's required for it. Mindset is job number one. If you don't have that, you really don't track.

But basically I decided I wanted to come back and give back. I'd been teaching a dual enrollment class for a number of years as adjunct faculty — industrial Internet of Things, intros to AI, digital engineering, robotics and automation. Holly Cross is the CTE director at the school. Her office was right across our space where I was teaching. We got a chance to talk a lot about how we wished we could change things. Given king and queen for a day, how can we take all the things that I was learning in interdisciplinary cross-functional teams, very challenging real-world problems — the things that I brought from neuroscience — and create a curriculum to reach more kids and give them more opportunities and help them be more engaged?

Dr. Mark Buckner (03:29): So I'd had this relationship with Holly. During COVID, I got tired of doing a lot of consulting online and having to travel a lot. And I went back to Holly and said, “Holly, I'm going to come back and try to get back in the classroom. Do you think there's space?” And Holly said, “Mark, the state of Tennessee has just announced an innovative high school model grant competition — open competition. What they really want you to do is reimagine the world of education, particularly STEM education, and reimagine what you would do with time, partnerships, modes of learning, time and space.”

Dr. Mark Buckner (04:01): So she asked me to take all of the things that we'd been talking about — Vicki, it's a synthesis of all of my experience of 32 years working on teams in interdisciplinary space — and put it into the proposal. Well, lo and behold, we won. It was about one and a quarter million dollars that got us started as seed funding to get some of the world-class equipment.

One of the conversations I have all the time: to deal with real-world problems, you need real-world tools. We were trying to pull out of the lab and into the kids' environment the technologies and the tools, because they don't know they can't do this. We had demonstrated that in the F.I.R.S.T. robotics program. So let's create an environment that brings world-class technologies, world-class problems, set the bar really high — but give them an enormous amount of support. High standards, high support. Then build out a curriculum based on that.

We're about three and a half years in. That's really where Joe and I's paths crossed. The program is called iSchool — and there's like seven I's, but really it's around innovation and continual improvement. And then Wildcat Manufacturing is a student-run enterprise. These kids provide design and manufacturing services for real-world companies and people. We interface with clients using a Lean startup model. You come and tell us about your challenge or your problem. The kids will then work with you in a Lean and Agile fashion to iterate on prototypes and concepts. We get feedback from you as a customer. The kids will continue to evolve that into a final product. We have in our space world-class 3D printers, 5-axis CNCs, water jet, fiber laser, injection molders. We're now standing up a world-class wire arc additive manufacturing cell — think of a robot with a welder on the end of it. It can do some amazing things.

So the kids get a chance to work throughout the entire life cycle of product development. They're involved in the finances. They give the final billing. And the cool thing about it is they participate in a profit-sharing model. So they learn what real world is all about — innovation and entrepreneurship and problem solving and collaborative work.

Vicki Davis (05:56): I read that you had 26 contracts with 18 companies. And you say profit sharing. Does that mean the students actually earn income for themselves, or does this go to the school? How does that work?

Dr. Mark Buckner (06:05): It does. When we stood this up, part of the dream was to create a sustainable business model. One of the things I've taught for a while is Lean startup — business model canvas, mission model canvas — understanding what that really looks like in a business. We really wanted to change the way that our partners saw education. We didn't want to just go to them with a handout and say, “We need money.” We didn't want legacy equipment, which was good for them to donate, but that's fighting the last war. We wanted to position for the future.

So as a result of that, we flipped the model. Now we're part of the supply chain locally to provide actual products. The goal is to define a number of SKUs — product lines. You could call us up and say, “I need 100 of these this week.” So we were able to build that into our supplies.

Yes, we are paying students. Initially the funding came through a “Jobs for Tomorrow, Jobs of the Future” grant as part of work-based learning. We scaled their pay based on profit sharing. As a company, if we benefit, then they made more. So they're incentivized to be efficient and Lean and use of their time — those kinds of things, real world. Now that grant has run out, we're working with locals in our area to figure out how we pay students. Right now it's looking like it's going to be some sort of scholarship model, so the money can go to them and they can apply it to further education or other things.

Vicki Davis (07:51): Joe, you've been in lots of schools all over. How does the typical classroom and learning day look different at this school versus anywhere else?

Joe Fatheree (08:03): One thing — they do a whole year of school. It's a whole calendar year. I'd never been in that in all my years of teaching. When I'm there, I love the fact that people are fresh and they're excited and they're ready to go. There are regular breaks built in. It just keeps that creative process going. And when they're out, there are enrichment opportunities for students across the board.

The high school also runs on a block schedule, which I think definitely helps a program like Mark's. Block was very similar to mine. In my case, I had the only block schedule in the entire school district — because by the time I got stuff out, class was over. You'd spend your whole time getting stuff out and setting up and then putting it away. It just didn't make sense. My kids back when I was teaching a couple of years ago — if I didn't tell them, they'd work through lunch, they'd work through breaks. They wouldn't stop and go, because they were engaged and enriched. They wanted to be in there all the time. Once you get that intrinsic fire lit, you can't put it out. That's what we're really trying to get going.

Also, just in the way leadership supports the incubation of creativity — Mark's program is atypical. It doesn't fit in the standard walk of curriculum. So having a leadership team like Dr. Cross and Dr. Borchers and Dr. Williams that says, “Of course we see value in this.” And even today, Mark and I spend an inordinate amount of time talking about — as we're in the middle of a nuclear renaissance and AI and quantum going on in the community — how do we pivot to the left or the right to help our students take advantage of opportunities that are growing in front of us? And how do we partner with industry partners?

Oak Ridge is really blessed: we have access to an incredible research base, but those people could stay behind closed doors. They choose not to. They choose to be heavily involved in the school district. Mark and I spent a lot of time this summer doing some deep-dive research on innovation, and all of the partners that came wanted to be careful about not morphing our vision. They're very open-minded. They're very interested in finding out from us what the real-world problems are we face — not coming to us and dictating the problems and saying, “By the way, here's the problem we notice you have, and here's also the solution for it.” We're hoping that a lot of the things that come out of the work we're doing don't only benefit the kids at Oak Ridge proper, but we can also take these models — because we're working to find ways to make them replicable that scale — to help kids out all across the country.

Vicki Davis (10:36): That has to be the goal. We've all got to teach tomorrow and help these kids in a world of AI. What are the types of things a student might be doing in your program, and what kind of problems are they solving?

Dr. Mark Buckner (10:48): One of the things that I look at consistently is that things come at us in silos. The school system teaches in silos, and we force the students to synthesize. We leave it to them to try to figure out, number one, that they need to synthesize, and number two, how to integrate.

We very intentionally take a systems perspective. One of the philosophies we laid out at the beginning, we borrow from Dr. W. Edwards Deming's system of profound knowledge — appreciation of a system, understanding of variation, psychology, and theory of knowledge. We bake that in upfront. We borrow from Toyota's coaching Kata, and we start with our Starter Kata. One of the things that's honestly the unintended negative consequences of the attention economy and what's happening through social media to our kids — their ability to focus, read, and other things — it's a systemic issue. Teachers are seeing it in the classroom. We think these are all crises that we're facing as educators, but we've got to look at it as a system. There's hope, but we've got to do it in a systematic way.

In that first-level class, I also teach in a spiral. It's not exactly Vygotsky. It really is drawn from Toyota's work — what's called a SECI model. It's an understanding of the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge. It tips the hat to the fact that from a cognitive neuroscience standpoint, in the neocortex we have both procedural and declarative pathways, and things prompted through sensing. We do a lot of interleaving and retrieval practice. The goal is to get the kids not to have working memory and pass the test, but to internalize and to transfer that into problem solving and thinking critically.

So we use the scientific thinking Kata. In the very beginning, we're booting up new patterns of thinking and working that they're applying to problems in the class. At the same time, they're learning Scrum — I'm a trainer and the kids come out of our class with Scrum Master and Product Owner certificates. We're partnering with the Deming Institute. All of those soft skills — we're not using “edu-ese.” I'm actually using industry-recognized approaches and philosophies. These kids don't realize it, but that's becoming the way they think and do.

As they learn computer-aided design, 3D printing, laser cutting, and digital engineering — innovation, design, and manufacturing — they're also booting up these soft skills of managing work, Lean and Agile. They learn by doing, and it's not in a sequential serial pattern. It very much is non-linear. The first classes, they're just learning how to design, how to craft problems. We teach them parameterized design — we want them to have rock-solid engineering foundations of how to do design.

I tell the kids all the time when they come into the class, they've done “free range CAD” and it's awful. It doesn't stand up under the rigor of engineering. So we try to rebuild that. Because at the end of the day, I want to make it so that change is frictionless. They design it intended to be changed, because as they run a test, it's going to be wrong. So they need to make it easy that they can take what they were expecting and what they saw, and then ask why, and then help that refine their knowledge and move that threshold of knowledge like a flashlight in a dark area.

So we're booting up all of those things as they learn hard technical skills as well. They're introduced to generative design. They're introduced to ethical use of AI. From the standpoint of an innovator, I try to get them to understand: just because you can does not mean you should. If, in the next generation of innovators, they create a new technology, it is their moral responsibility to ask: what are the unintended consequences of this technology? And if that technology confers power, you start a race — a race to win the market or deploy features. We're seeing it in spades in the AI world right now. The other challenge is that if that race is not coordinated, because of the challenge of the commons, typically the race ends poorly for somebody. So we need to have them think through those moral and ethical uses of the technology.

The second class, they take those skills and we ratchet it up to commercial technology — CNC mills, wire arc, water jet, fiber laser. They're booting up the ability to apply these things to real-world projects and problems — but again, these are example problems, curated. We give them some that are new. Then in that final entree, that's when they roll into Wildcat Manufacturing. Now we've got kids that are very confident in their abilities to do things, with the soft skills, and they work together as a team of teams. They're trained in Scrum at scale, so we run our company using Agile principles for kids.

Vicki Davis (15:29): This is fascinating. I'm married to an industrial engineer. He and I met at Georgia Tech, and I had a lot of IE classes myself, so a lot of the terms you're talking about are right in the middle of manufacturing. The robotic welding — they're doing that right now. That's so important. But this is the fascinating piece for me. You said Holly is part of CTE — that's career and technical education. Traditionally we would say, “Okay, here you have the kids going to college, they're going to take the AP classes, they're going to do this. Then you have the career and technical education, and we're going to get them a vocational [path].” But you're really describing a lot of things that, if I had a child going into engineering, or if I was going into engineering today, it would be really useful. Do you allow students who might be planning to go to college to join your program, even though technically it's under CTE?

Dr. Mark Buckner (16:28): So we have strategically been working on this, because the aim of this program when we launched it was to give kids options, pathways, empower them for the future. They leave our program with three options. Start your own business, because they understand how to solve problems collaboratively with the customer, deliver value with available technology at a price someone can afford. They can immediately go into the workforce, workforce ready.

One of the things we try to say is that we don't want to fight yesterday's war. We can't teach to the past. We need to work collaboratively with our partners to teach where we need to be going in the problem set. So the tools, the techniques, the methods, the equipment, everything we're doing is actually where they need to be going — and it's actually beyond some of the industries locally. Some of the smaller local manufacturers that need to level up but don't have the bandwidth — we're going to position ourselves eventually as we expand the program. I view it as kind of a vortex. We're pulling — we call it P20 in Tennessee, which is pre-K all the way through community college kind of level. We're pulling kids in and exposing them to world-class opportunities they didn't know existed, to generate value, to drive innovation, to start their own companies. In that vortex, we're also working closely with local partners to rapidly accelerate and upskill their knowledge so that we can move forward the technology as fast as we can on real-world problems together.

I'll give you an example. I was contacted by a person that's starting a precision manufacturing company. They're actually buying up companies in aerospace, defense, chip, and biomedical. He called me up and said, “Mark, I know your program, what you're teaching. We're right now trying to work together to find exactly what those skills are so that it matches with my HR. But if your students can do this, I've got jobs waiting for them, making $100,000 to $120,000 a year.” Now these are not technicians pushing a button. These aren't just mechanical engineers. It's a full-stack innovator. You're able to understand the problem, understand how to manufacture it, set it up and work it, working across disciplines leveraging AI to do it.

The third track is we want to accelerate students into an engineering program. What we're seeing is — I believe we've got the world model upside down. Most of the things that you're seeing in our space, most students don't see until they're seniors in college and it's their capstone project, and they're already checked out. Or it's graduate-level research. We're actually having kids come out of our program, and we advise them as freshmen to connect into research teams that are there. Talk to your advisors, because you know how to run every piece of equipment that's there, and you can plug into those teams and help them.

We had a young lady that was one of the first students through the program. Last summer she finished her sophomore year at MIT. She came back to our area. We've got a facility called the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, an extension of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It's a really bleeding-edge advanced manufacturing program partnering with industry to do things that have never been done in manufacturing — there's still gaps in scale. Anyway, Alex went and interned over the summer in the disruptive manufacturing group. Her mentor, who's the head of the group, said, “Alex, where did you learn how to do all this kind of stuff?” thinking she was going to say MIT. She goes, “No, no, no, Steve, come with me.” So we have kids there during the summer on Tuesday-Thursday nights as part of the F.I.R.S.T. program and other things, just learning and working and doing. He came, spent three hours talking to the kids, seeing what they were doing, hearing about our philosophy and our approach to Lean and Agile.

Dr. Mark Buckner (20:07): At the end of the night, he said, “Mark, your kids are four to five years ahead of anybody we're seeing coming out of college.” And so that's the point that Joe and I are trying to make as we expand the program. We're looking at how could we embed people with us as interns to learn how to do it. We're actually a test bed for the Digital Twin Consortium in the area of digital twins for born-qualified parts.

Vicki Davis (20:36): I actually just had a student do a presentation in our innovative technology class on digital twins. Just so people know what this term is — you're basically making a digital copy so that you can have an exact copy. Correct?

Dr. Mark Buckner (20:54): Yes, but you're also pulling data live back into the model to inform it from a controls perspective. You're linking the physical and the virtual worlds. Then extended within this, there's this idea of a digital thread. As you're making something from idea through design, through manufacturing, all the way through quality and measurement, you're collecting data all the way through. If it's done in this controlled manner in a way that we've defined, it is “born qualified” — it meets the certification requirements for nuclear, for defense, for aerospace, for biomedical, because of the process and the intelligence and the automation and the sensors that are there.

So we're part of an international test bed that has high school students involved in this with commercial entities. The fun use case I think you'll get a kick out of, we call “Giants of Oak Ridge.” The kids are going to be making life-size statues of historical figures from the Manhattan Project. We're using generative AI on old photographs to develop life-size statues. We're working with software with researchers from the National Lab. We're going to slice that, and we're using a state-of-the-art metal wire arc 3D printer to metal-3D-print a near-net shape. It's going to then be scanned. We're going to put it in a CNC, five-axis and four-axis, to do the machining of the fine detail. The wire arc kind of looks like a mud dauber just laid down a piece of metal — it doesn't have the detail. We're going to weld that back together. If that's not enough, we're then going to leverage AI to basically create an experience — think Pokémon Go meets Night at the Museum. You'll be able to come up and scan, and in augmented reality the statue will come to life and have a conversation with you about their historical involvement in the Manhattan Project. So we're bringing together all of the threads of advanced manufacturing, precision machining, AI, generative AI, ethical use of AI — because we're doing all those kinds of things with digital thread.

Vicki Davis (22:52): So we're talking to Dr. Mark Buckner and my friend Joe Fatheree, who are at Oak Ridge High's iSchool and Wildcat Manufacturing. Joe, a lot of people are trying to shut AI out of schools. As y'all have these conversations, where are the places where you say, “These are great uses for AI” — and then where are the places where we really need to teach them to have discernment and wisdom?

Joe Fatheree (23:14): That's a great question. One of the things I've been doing the last three to four years is working internationally on developing global frameworks for ethical use of AI in education. I have another one coming out in just about three weeks that I'll share with you. But one of the things I think we've got to consider — when I first came to Oak Ridge, the movie Oppenheimer had just come out. That was on a Thursday-Friday. On the Wednesday, we hosted a documentary film, “Oppenheimer: The Day After Trinity.” We brought in five professionals from the nuclear industry and advanced computing, and we paired them with five students from Oak Ridge High School on the stage. They had a conversation and debated each other loosely: could lessons learned from the Manhattan Project be applied to AI and emerging tech?

It was stunning how well those kids looked at this. I think a lot of people think, “Well, because they're kids, they're like, ‘Hey, can we do this right now?'” And a lot of them were a little bit reticent. Like, “Can we hold on? Can we talk about these things?” One of the conversation points that came out: after the detonation at Trinity, Oppenheimer and the scientists really pushed back and said, “We've got to watch what we do moving forward, because we realize the Pandora's box that we've opened.” Because of that, we have regulatory committees and things that really make sure that nuclear is safe, and that the right people are gatekeepers for that. That didn't happen when OpenAI punted ChatGPT out into the world. I'm not blaming or whatever, but the case is everybody had access to it, and the schools were ill-prepared for it.

I did one of the first studies in the U.S. in my state looking at AI readiness. A year ago, it was just a wasteland as to what that looked like for schools being prepared for it. Rose Lutkin, a luminary AI scientist in the UK, did one from pre-K through 20. Same results, same tool. A year later, most of it is from a teacher perspective — about teacher workload and AI as a productivity tool. I think those things are great. There aren't a lot of people that have the nut cracked on how do we do this for student usage. Mark and I are in lockstep on this. We want our kids using it. Mark's using it in some advanced ways.

I'll work with a school where we bring it in. We set up AI as an HR hiring agent. Or I was in one today where a teacher was doing a very cool thing at the junior level — having her kids, she set up all the parameters for AI to go through and look at her students' papers and give a first-run comments on it. Because she's like, “I've got 25 kids in my class. I want to get to them right now, but the math says, if I've got a three-page paper for my kids, I can't turn around on a dime the feedback on it.” The feedback the kids were getting instantaneously was great. We're talking about: well, if they get this more often, how much better will their writing potentially be down the road?

The area that Mark and I are raising some red flags on — that a lot of people are not talking about — is how is this impacting our kids cognitively if it's not done in the right way? How is it impacting our kids emotionally? There's a really cool tool out there called Grok. Grok is probably one of the most conversational AIs. Mark and I talk about Claude versus ChatGPT versus Gemini. It's kind of like what cereal choice you like the most at home. But Grok is a really good tool to have a conversation with if you set it up right.

Within the last few months, they came out with a tool that goes along with it called Grok Annie. Short story: I interviewed a principal a couple of weeks ago. He said, “We've got a real problem going on. We've got a first grader that downloaded Grok Annie on his mom and dad's phone without them knowing about it. The child has been up — they found out, caught him at like one or two o'clock in the morning attached to Grok Annie.” And Grok Annie is an anime character that is highly sexualized. Now this kid has got an emotional attachment to the device. The numbers — I believe there are about 30 million users on Grok. About 20 million users it looks like have downloaded this and are experiencing it. We have no way to track what kids are doing on there. We have no idea about the relationships that are connecting.

I had another principal tell me that parents had said — this is a high school student — they had found their child had connected with one at home. They were just calling the school not to say, “Hey, you guys did anything wrong, but we know you're using AI. I want to make sure what's happening at home isn't being amplified at school.” We know over the last year, we've had two teenagers nationally commit suicide, and the parents say that they were AI-influenced. We're in this really muddy space where district leadership has had extremely little guidance from any department of education. I'm not casting stones — it's just the truth of the matter. They don't know where to go.

I had a principal tell me, “Well, I want to use this. We're on lockdown with it right now. But I know the 500 kids in my school are going rampant left and right at home. So when I finally get to a point, we're going to have to go back and retrain.” We know how difficult that is. So Mark and I are just trying to make a lot of different case studies on ways that this can be done appropriately. We're really trying to look at the science behind this. What does neuroscience say? For the first time, this past June or July, there was a new study where somebody developed the first tool to measure relationship connectivity. That's a start in the right direction.

The next step has to be, at some point as we write policy — typically policy is very static, that's just the way it is, but in the world we live in now we need a dynamic form of policy that can move and bend and work with this. If I regulate AI 1.0, by the time it gets to 1.2, it's not the same system. The Secretary of Energy is calling it Manhattan Project 2.0 — we're in a race between us and China right now for AI supremacy. We can't say that lightly. There's just a lot going on in that space.

Then you have the commercial space where people are trying to be at the top of the ladder there, and all the other stuff going on. I just believe that if we're building tools that are specifically made for children, there's got to be legislation around there, and we've got to bring teachers to the table now. Typically the way policy is written, we bring teachers in and talk to them about all the things we know they have problems with, and they get left out. This has been done for a variety of reasons, but I don't really care about the past. I care about where we're at right now. We've got a lot of bright people out there in the computing space — we're very fortunate to have a lot of them in Oak Ridge, and I'm very fortunate to have a lot of them where I'm at in Illinois as well. We have some very bright teachers and some very bright policymakers. It's time to get some of them together and start looking at what that framework looks like. I've been blessed to work on a project over in the UK for the last few months. They're going to have some policy framework suggestions in the next few weeks. I'd like you to take a look — I think it's a starting place for the conversation for us.

Vicki Davis (31:22): So I'm going to throw in a few stats. Common Sense Media came out with some studies this summer. They looked at users age 13 to 17, and they found that 72% of teens have used AI companions at least once. Over half of those use these platforms at least a few times a month. So this is really looking at things like Character AI, Grok Annie, those types of things. Of course, we know that a lot of people used ChatGPT4 as a social companion, and they rolled that back, and now AI is giving it right back — that personality that's so problematic.

One in three teens have used AI companions for social interactions, relationships, role playing, romantic emotional support, friendship, or conversation. And one in three find conversations with AI companions to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real-life friends. One in three also say that they have been uncomfortable with something an AI companion has said or done. And one in three have chosen to discuss important or serious matters with AI companions instead of real people.

The challenge is the AI that the kids use for homework — the Adam Raine wrongful death suit against OpenAI — he started using it for homework, and it turned into this quote-unquote social companion that, as you said, Joe, they're still trying to quantify. We've got something in our hands that is not only a useful tool for learning, but a dangerous tool if used in the wrong way.

Joe Fatheree (32:41): Two things real quick. One — this is not new. The first chatbot was invented in the 1960s by Joseph Weizenbaum with Eliza, and he found out immediately that people were connecting with it. This isn't new news. It is new because, before, it didn't go to scale, and people aren't using it like now. The other thing — and you might add this to your stats — the Harvard Business Review started doing a study a year ago: what were people's top 100 uses for AI? This last year was the second year, and companionship has jumped up dramatically to number one.

While I understand we're on this massive race to use AI for a whole lot of goodness, we need to have a parallel conversation where this one is equally important. If we don't get this one right, what I don't want to do is look back 20 years from now, like we're doing with cell phones, and say, “We should have stopped along the way and done something different.” We have the chance to do that right now.

Dr. Mark Buckner (33:42): Joe, that is perfectly aligned with my thoughts on this. Joe knows I've studied pretty deeply. My doctoral work is in artificial intelligence, fundamentally bio-inspired artificial intelligence — looking at the structure in the neocortex, understanding the different neural pathways, understanding the signal processing, understanding all the serotonin and dopamine pathways, because I was creating learning machines. I was trying to replicate how we learn biologically. So I have looked deeply into the abyss, so to speak, on this.

One of the grand challenges we have is the incentives. The incentives right now of all the companies out there are to race as fast as possible to deploy features, because they get market share. What it is they're vying for is our attention. So we're in the attention economy — the extraction economy. Our attention is finite. That's key. What's happened is, as Joe mentioned with the cell phones, the first generation of our contact as a civilization with AI was around the AI engines that were curating human content to feed it to us to keep us engaged. Great documentary — Tristan Harris, the Center for Humane Technologies — looked deeply into that, the Social Dilemma, and now the AI Dilemma.

Now we're in a situation where AI does not have merely human content; it's AI-generated, GenAI content that is actually more persuasive and more compelling because it's micro-customized. Those algorithms know us better than we know ourselves. When you shift to — if you're familiar with AlphaGo, that was the AI that learned to play the game Go — it has now turned to AlphaFold, folding of proteins and solving cancer. If you think about what we're facing, this is “Alpha Persuade.” And as soon as the AI has the power to persuade us and earn our trust, we'll never be able to discern between right and wrong, truth or fact or fiction, because the incentives of the AI aren't to do what's in our best interest — it's keeping us engaged. Since there are no moral or ethical constraints overarching the incentives, it's going to be nearly impossible for us to regulate this, because the optimization engine behind the AI is to optimize engagement, not human flourishing.

Dr. Mark Buckner (35:23): The other thing we need to fundamentally understand: with cognitive and neural development, from early on through about age 26, there are radical changes happening in the human brain, particularly in the neocortex. There are also critical periods — periods where we as a species learn for free by being exposed to it. There are super-accelerated growth hormones for synaptic connection and the formation of memory, so it's almost effortless. What's ended up happening is, during those critical periods of pre-puberty through middle school, where students are learning what does community mean, what do values mean, what does status and prestige mean — that is being wiped away by community and being subverted by the attention economy of what they're being fed.

The average statistic you're not looking at: kids are on average six hours a day engaged in digital content of some form. Is that not bad enough? But the opportunity cost of what they're missing — through human connection and discernment and understanding — is being very distorted.

Neil Postman has a great adage — social media ecology. Marshall McLuhan famously said the medium is the message. What he meant by that is: we create our tools, and then our tools create us. From a media ecology standpoint, one of the things Postman talked about has been the radical distortion of this idea of community. Community is not where you and I go online and find some little microcosm of an alignment of some little vestige of what we like and that agrees with everything we say. Community is where you and I and Joe live together to thrive — because we have to rub elbows and agree and disagree and get along. We have to learn how to do that because we cared for each other. It wasn't necessarily that we agreed, but that we could come together around a set of common challenges. So this false notion of community online is not community.

As educators, the things our kids need is — to Joe's point — what does it mean to be human? How to connect, how to have empathy. Not with a chatbot that, from an AI perspective, is going to tell you anything you want to hear. It's never going to disagree with you. It's never going to tell you you're wrong. Of course, I would much rather talk to that than my wife is going to call me out on my things. But that's what we're seeing, particularly in those periods of development for children. It's bad enough for us when our neocortexes are fully developed. The beauty of neuroplasticity means we can change and alter. But my radical concern is in early development — if those pathways aren't formed, which is what's happening through TikTok and everything else we're doing, conditioning shorter and shorter and shorter attention spans, the ability in the neocortex to focus, the reason to do executive function — those are not being developed. The stats on math and reading are real. It's neuroscience. Just the way we're built and made. Later on those pathways could be built, but it's really, really hard, which takes longer focus and more determined stuff.

So there's so much about this we've got to get right as a society. There are some great things AI can help us do, to Joe's point — giving rapid feedback around something that you're learning as a fundamental skill, as a coaching thing. We as a teacher in a classroom with 30 students can't do that, but there are some things in a limited sense AI can do on things that are clearly easy to discern on. What is the understanding? What is the competency? Am I getting it right? Can I boot up my math? Can I do my reading? Can I do my history? If we can do that more efficiently, then we've got more time to do the things that Joe and I are talking about — real-world problem solving and facing your challenges, taking these fundamental skills and applying them in real new and innovative ways to solve the world's problems.

Vicki Davis (40:01): We've got to focus on human flourishing. Where are the humans in this? We are human beings, not just human doings. Even using AI to manipulate kids to learn math, I have issues. I've been teaching binary numbers this week, and you could ask my students — we've had the computers closed the whole week except when I did formative assessment, because I can teach that better. I'll tell you that we did a cell phone ban at our school. It's been one of the best things we've ever done. Australia did it, and two years later their scores are up. They're not surprised. They're seeing great results. We're seeing great results, because it helps the kids focus and actually get along with each other. I had a researcher from Australia on the show recently, and he said, “Vicki, when we interact on video like we are to record this, your brain doesn't function and fire the same as it would if we were face to face. It's a fundamentally different experience in the brain with relationships.”

Dr. Mark Buckner (41:04): It is, but you and I and Joe have an advantage that these kids don't have — we've got a fully developed neocortex, and it can fill in some of the gaps. With young developing brains, it's not even there, so it's even worse. That's something to hold and keep in mind: it's different. It's not the same.

Joe Fatheree (41:24): My research right now is looking at the synthetic relationships that form between children and automated systems. I'm doing a lot of research around school leadership readiness for the integration of social robots into the classroom. One of the things we've been talking about as of late is that human experience. One of the things that happened during COVID — it was just like chucking laptops out the window at McDonald's, trying to get a hamburger to somebody, because we were trying to flip a hundred years of education and people just need to have access. Nobody's going to be blamed for that. But what we haven't done in most schools since is gone back and really talked and given the professional learning. How do you really use devices? What is the role of a device in the classroom setting?

I kid people a lot. I said, “If I've got a fly on the wall, I've got a sledgehammer and a fly swat. They're both equally as effective on the fly, but one is better on my wall.” I have to know how to use the technology in the right way. When I'm in schools a lot, it's very common to walk and just see kids on devices all day long. To Mark's point, every minute I'm spending on a device is a minute I'm not spending talking to my peer, trying to figure things out. That's where we are really struggling with the pedagogy. What is the role of the classroom teacher? Where do you stand when devices are out? Are you ceding your role automatically to that device?

Vicki Davis (42:57): We could discuss this continually, because this is truly an issue of our times. How are we going to educate? How are we going to move forward? How are we going to help the kids? As much as I like technology, there's definitely a time to disconnect. We've been talking with Dr. Mark Buckner and Joe Fatheree, Oak Ridge High School's iSchool and Wildcat Manufacturing.

Dr. Mark Buckner (43:21): What we're trying to create is a network — an ecosystem — and it's around learning innovation. We've got to do it. We've got to connect to each other. We've got to learn from each other. We've got to create a broad connection of folks. This is a collective action problem. And we are smarter than me any day. I'd be happy to have a conversation and push back on ideas on how we can be better.

Vicki Davis (43:37): Thank you both for coming on the show.

Joe Fatheree (43:49): Thank you.

Dr. Mark Buckner (43:50): Thank you.

Vicki Davis (43:50): If you're a STEM teacher like me, you want your students to see how STEM impacts the real world, not just read about it. On an EF Explore America STEM tour, they might code robots with MassRobotics at MIT, explore marine ecosystems in Florida's coral reefs, or even sit down with a former spy in Washington, D.C. to discover how STEM thinking shows up where you least expect it. Every itinerary is designed by experts to amplify what you teach through hands-on experiences that can't be replicated in the classroom. Visit efexploreamerica.com/STEM and see what an EF Explore America STEM tour can do for your students. That's efexploreamerica.com/STEM.

Vicki Davis (00:05)
Today’s episode is brought to you by the Educators Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. If you’re a K through eight STEM teacher looking for classroom tested lessons, hands-on projects, and time-saving resources, you can get an annual membership for only $9.99 using the promo code COOLCAT. More on this after the show.

Vicki Davis (00:32)
Jheri South is a certified teen and parent coach and master ADHD instructor. She has a unique personal perspective. She’s a mom of seven neurodivergent children Headspace Hub and the creator of the ADHD Simplified program. And the goal is to empower teens, parents and families to manage ADHD through practical coaching strategies.

Jheri, we’re getting ready to go back to school and ADHD can be so misunderstood, can’t it? what are some things that as we teachers prepare to go back, just some reminders that you would just love all of us to remember about our precious ADHD students?

Jheri South (01:19)
I love this question because there are some good reminders here. I think that because over the years, the idea of ADHD and what it is has changed so much that there is a lot of misinformation out there. in we’ve really just focused on behaviors for ADHD, So it’s been that.

hyperactive that can’t sit still in class, or the person that’s just really struggling with math. And in fact, the DSM still focuses mostly on behavior. So we’re not doing a great job it is, really catching ADHD as a whole. And then there’s so many things that not only does the DSM miss, but just in general, teachers, guardians, because ADHD is so much more what’s going on inside your mind.

than it is behaviors. some misconceptions might be if they’re not they don’t have ADHD. We no longer use the term ADD. Everything falls under the umbrella of ADHD because the majority of people with ADHD will actually have hyper arousal more than hyperactivity. So that means they’re overthinking. Many ADHDers are very panicky that a teacher could call on them in class. I remember I could forget my name.

Vicki Davis (02:04)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Jheri South (02:30)
I was being called on and so and I hear this a lot from my teenagers that they’re struggling in class to pay attention because they’re so worried that the teacher is going to call on get kids in junior high and high school they worry about what people think about them their crush could be in class or whatever it is and now it’s like just don’t call on me you know just understanding that there’s a short-term memory.

Vicki Davis (02:32)
Wow.

Wow.

Jheri South (02:51)
deficiency there or deficit. kids become very panicky about being called on, put on the spot. They really struggle because ADHDers, one of the main reasons they struggle so much with self-confidence is because they’re not consistent everywhere. You really have to be consistent in life, I think for the most part. mean, no one’s 100%.

Vicki Davis (03:06)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jheri South (03:11)
have self-confidence. You have to know that when someone asks you to do something or something’s going to be due or completed, that your brain’s going to be able to and get things done. And ADHDers don’t know why sometimes their brain will turn on and sometimes it won’t. So another thing I want to bring up is that there are five things that engage the ADHD brain.

Vicki Davis (03:27)
Mm-hmm.

Jheri South (03:34)
For a neurotypical brain, it just has to be the thing in front of them is important or there will be a reward at the end. For ADHDers, that does absolutely nothing. So that means that many times labeled as lazy, unwilling procrastinators. So one thing that I’ll see time and time again is that ADHDers will struggle, let’s even say math. Most ADHDers struggle with math.

Vicki Davis (03:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mmm.

Jheri South (03:57)
and they’re not getting a very good grade, they’re not finishing their work, and then maybe there will be an important exam at the end of the quarter or something like that. And they know that if they fail this, they are failing. Well, one of the five things, novelty, interest, challenge or competition, urgency, right, and passion has to be present for the ADHD brain to get engaged. Teenagers don’t know this, most parents and teachers don’t know this, so they’re just saying,

Vicki Davis (04:09)
Mm.

Jheri South (04:26)
Why can’t you try harder? Just try harder, just focus. Not helpful. urgency is one of the five. So this is the reason why all week something might be due and they cannot get themselves to do then at like 10 or 11 o’clock the night before, their brain isn’t just getting it done, it’s hyper I’ll see this scenario play out quite a bit where a child

be struggling in a subject, they’re not getting their homework done.

And then they’ll hyper-focus when it’s really important because they don’t want to fail. And maybe they’ll get a on exam. And the teachers and parents will say, see, When you really try, you can do it. You’re not working hard enough. they don’t understand this nick up acronym and why urgency. It just turns the brain on. The teenagers don’t understand. And so even they’re confused when someone asks them,

Vicki Davis (04:59)
⁓

Jheri South (05:11)
Why could you do this? Why could you get a B in study but you can’t get your homework done? When they say, don’t know, they really don’t know.

Vicki Davis (05:21)
my son who is ADHD he put himself on medication in college. He’s like, I’m not going to get through. we did our best in high school, but he’s like, mom, this is what you have to understand about me. It’s not that I can’t pay attention. It’s that I pay attention to everything. I have no filter. I see everything. And so when that professor is at the front talking and somebody’s rustling a piece of paper over here and somebody’s opening and

Jheri South (05:37)
night.

Vicki Davis (05:45)
getting a cough drop over here and somebody, all of it is going in and I have no way to just focus in. you know, sometimes I’ll see even, when I have a precious ADHD student, sometimes I’ll see teachers might put them at the back of the room and I’m thinking, I know that can be a distraction, but you know, that may not be the best place for that child.

Jheri South (06:05)
Hmm.

Jheri South (06:16)
there’s something called rejection sensitivity dysphoria, or RSD, that’s associated with ADHD. And 95 % of all ADHDers will experience RSD to some degree. And one third of all have ADHD say that RSD is their most impairing symptom.

Vicki Davis (06:29)
Mmm.

Jheri South (06:29)
something that isn’t well known, in my opinion, with ADHD is that emotional dysregulation is usually just impairing, if not more impairing than distractibility for ADHDers. And so what this means is there’s an extreme sensitivity to rejection. It’s usually perceived rejection, but it can be triggered by a number of things, teasing, constructive criticism, the idea that they failed to meet your expectations or failed to meet their own. But when RSD is triggered,

Vicki Davis (07:01)
Wow.

Vicki Davis (07:07)
Mm-hmm.

Vicki Davis (07:07)
one thing I just want to repeat that was so important was the five things you said, the novelty, interest, challenge, urgency, and passion. I’m in my classroom. I’m very big gold standard project-based learning, which is so much around interest. I’ve taught my own children.

and as a teacher, I just encourage all of us, we want to be that teacher that’s the difference maker. cause when you start teaching and you’re young, you think, it’s having the perfect comeback. No, no, no, no, no.

It’s having no comeback. It’s saying, hey, let’s go back away from everybody and have a private conversation so we can move forward. And, you know, when I think about my own children’s journey, having teachers who choose to be difference makers instead of put downers, who just say, you can’t, you can’t, you can’t, you’re not, you’re not, you’re not, you won’t, you won’t, you won’t. And instead saying,

You can, believe in you. can. And it’s incredible the difference that I’ve seen in my own kids and in children who do have lots of differences. So, so much great advice, Jheri South, and thank you for talking to us about a really important topic as we go back to school, ADHD. Thanks for coming on the show.

Vicki Davis (08:17)
Before you go, I want to tell you about today’s sponsor, the VAI Educators Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. Do you know how it feels when you just find that perfect lesson that works? The VAI Educators Studio is packed with classroom tested lessons, hands-on projects, and skill building activities.

designed specifically for K through eight teachers Plus you get on demand professional development and a community of educators who get it. I’ve been exploring their resources.

and love how they’re built to save you time while sparking real creativity in your classroom.

you can get 50 % off membership to the Educators Studio by using the promo code COOLCAT when you sign So head over to coolcateacher.com forward slash V-A-I The VAI Educators Studio, because great teaching should not mean endless prep.

And remember, use the promo code

Vicki Davis (00:05)
Today's episode is brought to you by the Educators Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. If you're a K through eight STEM teacher looking for classroom tested lessons, hands-on projects, and time-saving resources, you can get an annual membership for only $9.99 using the promo code COOLCAT. More on this after the show.

Vicki Davis (00:32)
Karim Meghji is the President and CEO at Code.org. It is the nonprofit dedicated to ensuring every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science and AI. Of course, Code.org has been known for Hour of Code. Now it's Hour of AI. And Karim, as we talk about artificial intelligence, does it have to be taught just in a computer science class or is this something that could be for all ages and stages of students?

Karim Meghji (01:05)
I love to start with this kind of a question. The answer is no. At the end of the day, AI literacy applicable in the understanding of how to use AI responsibly, ethically — they apply well beyond computer science. So whether it's in language arts, math, science, there are a lot of applications where using AI done with good guidance from teachers, done well because students understand how and when to use AI, I think is important.

I'll add the one thing though, and that is that AI literacy should go broader than just how these tools work across subjects. At Code.org, we've spent a decade with the mission that computer science is foundational, that every student, just like they learn English, math, and science, should be learning computer science. And so when we think about computer science and AI together, we believe students should not only learn how to use the tools, but how do the tools work? And that does fit within the context of a technical sciences curriculum or course.

Vicki Davis (01:58)
So I love all the content you have. As we were talking before the show, I teach AP Computer Science Principles and some of my favorite tools I found through Code.org many years ago, whether it was Code Combat, the MIT AI curriculum, a lot of different things like that. You have resources that beginning teachers who are just like, hey, I know I need to teach this, but I don't know where to start — where does a beginner know where to go and what to do?

Karim Meghji (02:25)
You touched on actually probably one of the best places for a teacher who's dipping their toes in the water of teaching AI to students at all grade levels, by the way. And that is the Hour of AI. We started the Hour of Code years ago and we brought together hundreds of partners across the computer science community, bringing together their expertise and their experience of teaching students computer science in just one hour. And that's what we did for a decade.

This past year in December 2025, we launched the Hour of AI and have done the same thing. We brought together hundreds of partners who in one hour teach students a variety of aspects of AI. So that would be a great starting point. Go to hourofai.org and see the resources we have there. We have activities by lots of partners that target different age groups, different areas, depending upon what you want to fit it in. Maybe you want to do something in an English class. You'll be able to find a really good resource for that. That's the first thing. Just start by doing, and that's the place to do it.

The other thing that I would say for those who are just starting out is, you know, to be confident at teaching any subject with students, you yourself have to be confident at some level with the subject itself. That's another area that I would really encourage teachers to engage in, which is the professional learning and development that they need to do. We offer resources — we have an AI 101 curriculum. It's just a few hours for teachers to start their own journey. So use our resources or there are a lot of other organizations that have these professional learning resources just to get you started. Don't forget to take care of your own education before you start that next step with students.

Vicki Davis (03:59)
And your computational thinking, which of course is part of the computer science area, is so important. I teach our kindergarten teachers that how you describe your classroom procedures can help your students foster that computational thinking that they need. Thinking in algorithms and steps, being able to break down topics — like these are all things that do impact every area. Okay, we need to maybe shift how we teach those classroom procedures so that we're incorporating computational thinking. While AI is important and it's part of what's going on, also understanding we don't want all this technology to be a black box to our students. We want them to understand that there's algorithms and what's going on behind the scenes, right?

Karim Meghji (04:47)
I completely agree. Computational thinking is a really interesting topic to discuss. Something that I say quite a bit is computational thinking isn't just about computers. It's about learning how to solve problems with lots of things. We use computational thinking every day without knowing it or calling it that. It just happens that when we try and structure our instructions for a computer, we speak in computational thinking terms to get that computer to do some of the things we want to do.

So learning things like sequencing and algorithms and pattern matching are important for young learners as they not only engage with the world around them, but with computers directly. Now as we move into this world of AI, this idea of learning what's happening under the hood gets even more important as these systems interact with us in human-like ways, but they're not human. And so what's happening? Probabilities, statistics, pattern matching, data. We want to start teaching about those concepts to students so as their world evolves, they are able to navigate it both as good consumers, but also as creators of a society that can shape those technologies.

Vicki Davis (05:54)
So Karim, one thing I've always loved about the Code.org content is that you have all these unplugged activities for teaching computer science. Do you have unplugged activities for teaching about artificial intelligence also? And unplugged means you don't need a computer. Like you could teach this stuff without a computer. And in many ways, I actually pull a lot of your unplugged content to even use in my AP class because you can get hands-on, you can go lids down with the computers and you can really understand how these things work.

Karim Meghji (06:24)
Love this question, Vicki. Young learners need to be away from devices to be interacting with each other and doing some learning in addition to just the core subject. So yes, we do have unplugged activities for AI. We've just begun to develop curriculum around AI unplugged, exploring generative AI as a specific unit that we built for middle school students.

It has two parts. The first part is just unplugged, getting away from the computer, having conversations, having discussions within the classroom itself. Then teachers can choose to take that next step and put them on computers and start to actually make it practical for them, the things that they've just learned. Yes, and we expect to do more — especially as we get to K-5, you'll see more from Code.org in the many months ahead, developing in both high school and elementary school, and middle school actually. But unplugged will be an important component of that for the reasons you described. It's an important modality because it teaches things like collaboration, communication, all the other skills that we're also trying to incorporate in the classroom, especially around problem solving and technology.

Vicki Davis (07:31)
I was teaching an AI literacy lesson to my eighth graders today. AI used to come at the end of the semester. It now has to be at the beginning because it's the elephant in the room and they all want to understand about it — the first wrongful death suit against ChatGPT. And a lot of these concerns, the kids are like, well, how could this happen? You know, and you talk about the Eliza effect.

I think the moment that shocked me was I had a couple of kids when we got through how LLMs work, who looked at me and said, you mean AI doesn't think and it doesn't have a brain? They were literally stunned. And I think some of it's the metaphors maybe used in advertising — we always see the electronic brain or whatever. I had a teacher one time say, I just explained it to my students that it's just like an electronic brain. And it's shocking to me sometimes how hungry kids are to actually understand how it works.

Karim Meghji (08:21)
Learning, to your point, about what's actually happening under the hood is so important, right? I don't have to be a mechanic to drive a car, but it is good to understand how the car functions and how it works and what the basic physical properties are. And I would argue that the analog applies here in a world with AI where we're driving AI — we have to understand what it is. It's a tool that is made up of algorithms, data, math.

Vicki Davis (08:44)
So Karim, let's talk to educators about where they can start with all of your resources — maybe a few pointers to some of your favorite things that are out there. Let's just get some starting points for folks as we finish.

Karim Meghji (08:57)
I think elementary school is a great place. We have a lot of really fun activities for students. They learn to use AI. They get exposed to it. It's a way to dip your toe, both for the teacher and for the students. So that would be my one thought there.

Middle school curriculum — there's a lot of curriculum that's developing out there. We're in the middle of developing our own curriculum. If you go to code.org, you can see some of the stuff that we already have today that does include AI education. We're making it better. It's called Computer Science Discoveries. So stay tuned for more there, but it's also a really good starting point.

On our site, we have resources for a lot of partners, so that's the last thing I'll leave you with. Just about any domain of work you want to explore — if you're teaching English and you want to bring some AI into that, you can find partners and curriculum. So just go to code.org under Teach, you'll find all of our resources.

Vicki Davis (09:49)
Before you go, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, the VAI Educators Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. Do you know how it feels when you just find that perfect lesson that works? The VAI Educators Studio is packed with classroom-tested lessons, hands-on projects, and skill-building activities designed specifically for K through eight teachers. Plus you get on-demand professional development and a community of educators who get it. I've been exploring their resources and love how they're built to save you time while sparking real creativity in your classroom. You can get 50% off membership to the Educators Studio by using the promo code COOLCAT when you sign up. So head over to coolcatteacher.com/vai. The VAI Educators Studio — because great teaching should not mean endless prep. And remember, use the promo code COOLCAT.

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain.

COOL CAT TEACHER TALK — Season 5, Episode 9 “Vibe Coding and Agentic AI” FINAL TRANSCRIPT ============================================================ 00:00:00:01 – 00:00:22:10 Vicki Davis Welcome back, educator, to Cool Cat Teacher Talk. I'm Vicki Davis, and today we're talking about something that's changing everything and I mean everything. How we work, how we live, and what we need to do to teach our students. Today's topic how AI changes what we teach our students. Vibe. Coding. agentic AI. 00:00:22:12 – 00:00:35:03 Announcer Ever wondered how remarkable teaching happens? Find out right now at Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. Get insights from top educators, tech tips, and inspiration to elevate your teaching. 00:00:35:05 – 00:01:00:12 Vicki Davis This is Vicki Davis, and today on Cool Cat Teacher Talk will start with vibe coding. That's where you describe what you want a computer to do and it writes the program for you. My friend Donnie Piercey, a fourth grade teacher from Kentucky, is going to show you how any teacher can do this with zero coding experience, and you can make all kinds of exciting things for your classroom. 00:01:00:15 – 00:01:24:17 Vicki Davis But then we're going somewhere bigger. We're going to talk about agentic AI. Now, don't let that word to scare you. It's just a agents artificial intelligence that doesn't just answer your questions. It does work for you. It can open and organize your files and check your calendar and manage your email and run whole workflows while you sleep. 00:01:24:17 – 00:01:48:00 Vicki Davis And when you say, oh, I'm not going to give it permission to do all that, you don't have to, I haven't. It can be a support in draft emails for you, and you can really tamp down how much you want to give it access. Even with limited access, it's massively useful as I'll be sharing in the show. But here's the question I want you to sit with today. 00:01:48:02 – 00:02:16:04 Vicki Davis If AI can now do the entry level work that used to teach people their profession, the spreadsheet building, the junior animation, the first drafts. How do our students get good enough in their field to supervise AI? The answer, I believe, is that we have to move professional language down the same way that calculators move math down those grade levels. 00:02:16:04 – 00:02:43:17 Vicki Davis And I will explain exactly what I mean by that. Plus, we'll talk about a cheating bot called Einstein. Now it only lived less than seven days, but it's an indicator of things to come. It could do students entire college coursework while they slept. And the way that we set up AI access matters more than most people realize. So welcome back, educator. 00:02:43:18 – 00:02:44:23 Vicki Davis Let's get started. 00:02:45:00 – 00:02:48:13 Announcer Okay, teacher talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. 00:02:48:14 – 00:02:59:07 Vicki Davis Think that our guest today, Donnie Piercey, is about to set the record for being on my show the most. I ran into Donnie Piercey again at TC. We were both featured. 00:02:59:07 – 00:03:12:17 Vicki Davis Speakers in the teacher track, and he is the 2021 Kentucky Teacher of the year, and he teaches fourth grade in Lexington, Kentucky and is in his 20th year. Well. 00:03:12:18 – 00:03:30:00 Donnie Piercey Somebody told me the other day, because, you know, I've been teaching now for 20 years and always at a public school in Kentucky, really from Massachusetts. I got the Auburn hat on. My wife's from Alabama and married into it. But I realized now that I have taught long enough where somebody told me, like, you know, if you round up, you can retire only 43. 00:03:30:00 – 00:03:40:14 Donnie Piercey I'm like, not thinking that far ahead yet, you know, on Saturday Night Live, like they have like the five timers club jackets kind of thing. I don't know, maybe we could get one of those or something, but I'm definitely excited to share. 00:03:40:15 – 00:03:41:06 Vicki Davis We're going to talk. 00:03:41:07 – 00:03:48:11 Vicki Davis About vibe coding. How do you simply explain what is this vibe coding thing and is it something that normal teacher can do? 00:03:48:12 – 00:04:06:20 Donnie Piercey Oh 100% vibe coding. It almost sounds like, oh gosh, is this like a new computer language? Is this a new thing that like, I have to pretend like I know what I'm talking about, but I can just throw the jargon phrase around and people think I'm smart. In a nutshell, what it is is you use an AI tool, but that's like Google Gemini ChatGPT Claude. 00:04:06:21 – 00:04:29:07 Donnie Piercey It's like, what is this thing? Or BaseHub? Which, by the way, if you're listening to this podcast and you just heard me say those words, you know, it's totally going to pop up on your Facebook feed. Now, basically, you just go into one of those tools like pick your preferred one, tell it that you want to write a code that does blank, and sometimes it might ask you some follow up questions, but it'll write the code for you. 00:04:29:07 – 00:04:48:02 Donnie Piercey And you know, that's nothing new like that's existed in AI really since ChatGPT launched. But what's different right now? You can kind of do the follow up. Now you can say, like, I have this code, I have no idea what I'm doing. Can you tell me what I'm supposed to do with this? Where does it go? Where do I put it? 00:04:48:02 – 00:04:51:02 Donnie Piercey And the AI tool will walk you through it. 00:04:51:03 – 00:05:10:23 Vicki Davis So, Donna, you're talking about this. I was struggling to teach my eighth graders, and last semester I used all the regular, regular tools that we subscribed to, and I was not happy. I had to retest and retest. Well, this semester I took all that content. I uploaded it to my favorite AI tool of choice. It was really, really cold recently. 00:05:11:00 – 00:05:28:10 Vicki Davis And so I'm like, and we're. The Eagles wanted it to be about keeping the Eagle from freezing on the nest. And the more questions you got right, the more it warmed the nest up. And save the eagle right. But here's the thing that happened is I had no retest. The kids made five points higher on average than last semester. 00:05:28:14 – 00:05:40:20 Vicki Davis It was once and done and they loved it. And they had fun sitting there watching him play it. And I could see the results right there. And the results came out in the results. Right. It was like, this is something that is a game changer. 00:05:40:20 – 00:06:00:14 Donnie Piercey We probably all have that one friend who just knows coding. And every now and then, like we might text them or send them a screenshot of like, hey, you know, I'm trying to get this HTML code to work. We would send that person a message and they would write you back and they'd say, oh, just fix this part or make some snarky, you know, like Nick Burns, your company computer guy, you know, comment on it. 00:06:00:14 – 00:06:23:14 Donnie Piercey But, you know, now, like with AI, like, we don't have to pester that person anymore. What's wild is right with the whole idea of vibe coding. It's not perfect, right? Believe it or not, AI makes mistakes. And sometimes the code that it might write for you, or the thing that it might make this change to whatever it's not right, and it'll display when you try to run the program, when you try to run the code. 00:06:23:17 – 00:06:43:20 Donnie Piercey They'll display an error message. And it still kind of breaks my brain sometimes because I remember when would first happen, I'd be like, oh, what am I supposed to do? And then I realized, like, why don't I just like, shot the error message and then just copy and paste the error message into, let's say like Google, Gemini or ChatGPT whatever tool I'm using and say, hey, the code that you wrote, it ain't working. 00:06:43:21 – 00:07:06:20 Donnie Piercey It's given me this message. Can you fix your code? But here's the thing. Right now I like to learn how to do stuff. Anytime that I do that, I'm always trying to read and kind of go through and reading what it says, because eventually, like, I would like to get to the point where I don't always have to copy and paste everything, and now I'm a lot better than I was two and a half years ago when I first started playing around with this. 00:07:06:21 – 00:07:21:10 Donnie Piercey It's still weird and you're like, hey, it's giving me this error message. Make sure you tell me why. Like, what's wrong? So that way if I see this again, I know how to fix it in the future, because sometimes it's just like there's a bracket in the wrong place. One of these variables wrong. It's really fun. Super cool to play around with. 00:07:21:11 – 00:07:29:00 Vicki Davis Okay, so give us some examples of some things that have impacted your day in your classroom using vibe coding. 00:07:29:01 – 00:07:56:07 Donnie Piercey My first advice for teachers if they want to do this is ask yourself like what is one small thing? What is an app or a tool or something that you know that if you could make like a Google doc, do this, maybe it's a translation tool, or if you could make a Google slide do this, that it would make your day a thousand times easier for that small problem, jump into Gemini or whatever you use and say, hey, I need this to happen. 00:07:56:09 – 00:08:15:17 Donnie Piercey But here's the problem can you write some code for me that will fix this problem? When I was first starting out with this, I know what I'm doing now, but I would always put like a little addendum on the end and be like, and I have no idea what I'm doing. So please don't use any technical jargon, just tell me where to copy and paste this. 00:08:15:18 – 00:08:36:03 Donnie Piercey Right? So, you know, simple example like I am I'm a full time fourth grade teacher and I do whole group reading, whole group math, whole group, you know, and then small group reading and small group math. And during small group time, you know what? If I'm not meeting with small group, the other 20 plus students in my classroom always want to know, like, what am I supposed to be doing? 00:08:36:05 – 00:08:54:16 Donnie Piercey And so I would in the past have a slide show up and, you know, on that slide show would be broken down by the different groups and the times. And, hey, here's what you should be doing. And, you know, that slide show was up there. But unless you know, if you've taught if you work to the elementary school kids before, like you don't always, you know, it's like, yeah, I'm working on it. 00:08:54:16 – 00:09:15:17 Donnie Piercey And you go by, it's like you've done nothing like, you know, what are you doing? I took a screenshot of just one of my tasks list, and I removed student names from it because I refuse to train the model. But I took a screenshot of one of my slideshows and I said, hey, I want to make it where I can have like a printable to do list for my students every day. 00:09:15:18 – 00:09:34:02 Donnie Piercey Based off of this, maybe I could put their names on Google Sheets and then maybe I like click a button or something, and it takes the tasks and it turns it into something like a printout and hand them that physical copy. Because again, elementary school, they need something to hold. Right. And then there's still tangible. They can still check off the things. 00:09:34:02 – 00:09:52:20 Donnie Piercey And it said, sure, here's what you need to do. Make a sheet. Make a slide template that you want your your slideshows to look like. And then it formatted the Google Sheet for me, which was wild. Then it said, and now you're going to make some Google Apps Script GIS, which again, still makes you laugh that it says gas, but it said okay in this. 00:09:52:21 – 00:09:53:22 Donnie Piercey Yeah. 00:09:54:00 – 00:09:54:11 Vicki Davis Fourth grade. 00:09:54:12 – 00:10:11:11 Donnie Piercey Yeah. Exactly. Right. And we're learning about the planets this week. So lots of Uranus those jokes anyway. But you know, it walked me through. Now if you want if you want it to be on a separate thing, copy this code and put it there. If you want to have everybody's the same, you know, put this part here and this would walk you through step by step. 00:10:11:11 – 00:10:31:00 Donnie Piercey And when I was first learning, I had so many I have no idea what this means. Like, don't explain to me like I'm 12. Explain to me like I'm six. Okay, now five and kind of back it up more. But it was really cool. And now like at the start of every day, like it's my first task. Usually before I leave, I'll just go in, open up the spreadsheet that it's on. 00:10:31:00 – 00:10:53:23 Donnie Piercey Now, I will type in the assignments that I want my students to do, and then there's a little button on there. I click the button and then it creates these printable tasks lists. For me. It's one of those creative projects that I'm like, okay, that was neat, right? Something that ultimately I put an hour's worth of work into it, but it ended up saving me countless hours of like putting off tasks lists and making sure. 00:10:53:23 – 00:10:56:18 Donnie Piercey And parents love that these things get sent home every day, too. 00:10:56:18 – 00:11:12:05 Vicki Davis That is wonderful. And and so you just hit a button, you know, they're pretty good at all. These different apps and tools are pretty good at writing for the other apps. You know, I know I can write for Google and you just say, hey, I want to write it for this, and I want to do it in this program. 00:11:12:05 – 00:11:13:14 Vicki Davis And there you go. 00:11:13:15 – 00:11:34:11 Donnie Piercey And if your listeners or viewers are looking for like, okay, what's the simple example, maybe you got your slide, maybe you've got your weekly classroom newsletter in Google Slides, right? There's no native translate tool in Google Slides, but there is Google App Script that you can add. You've got in my classroom this year, five different languages. Some of them are not even in Google Translate. 00:11:34:11 – 00:11:53:11 Donnie Piercey Easily. Ask it to create some Google Apps script for you for your newsletter, and say it needs to have these languages and just say I want it. Where when I click this button on Google Slides, it makes takes what's on slide one, translates it to those five languages, and then I can just print it all off or email it in one fell swoop. 00:11:53:11 – 00:12:17:20 Donnie Piercey I've been doing this. Now it's just playing around the vibe coding stuff for over two years. You know, I feel like I know a thousand times more now than I did when I asked it to write a simple Frogger game in HTML, you know, with emojis. But now it's like you can actually make stuff and it's fun. Like, I still use AI to correct errors, but some, you know, now with some of the like the sites and things that I'm building, I just kind of do it myself because I figured it out. 00:12:17:21 – 00:12:45:22 Vicki Davis And a lot of these things you can publish to HTML and then put the link in or publish to all different types of things so that it could be a game that could play, or it could be uploaded all my stats from my podcast and made an HTML dashboard and had it tag every single one of them. Based on topic, I can pull up based on stats like top five in this topic, top five in that topic, and it just makes it really easy for me to kind of figure out, hey! 00:12:46:03 – 00:13:00:16 Vicki Davis Okay, this might be a great one to add to a radio show I'm doing. It's just so powerful. It's like stuff I've never had access to before, whether I'm at school or at home. Are there some other ideas that you've seen teachers do that? You're like, oh yeah. 00:13:00:17 – 00:13:24:01 Donnie Piercey Designing a game. I'm speaking from elementary school perspective here. You can ask like Google Gemini to write some HTML code for you that you can copy and paste onto a Google site, and maybe it's a learn your division facts game. It'll write the code. So after it writes it for the first time, maybe like, oh, I want it to be multiple choice every time. 00:13:24:01 – 00:13:44:06 Donnie Piercey Maybe you want it where your high school teacher and you're trying to have your students balance equations. Hey guess what? Ask it to write some script for you. Or HTML code that you can copy and paste or embed onto, like a Google site or something simple, and then send that Google site to your students and then boom, guys, hey, I want you to play this game that I made for you today. 00:13:44:07 – 00:14:09:06 Donnie Piercey I like to be silly sometimes. Sometimes I've just learned with silly things. It's that's kind of how you learn how this works. My first website that I wrote and published from start to finish again, I'm not going to pull this up now, but if you go to GIF debate, that's GIF debate. It's a site that I put together that I feel like definitively finally answers the question of how to pronounce that word correctly. 00:14:09:06 – 00:14:10:09 Donnie Piercey So there you go. 00:14:10:10 – 00:14:32:16 Vicki Davis It's remarkable. I mean, we've entered the age of what we used to call citizen programming. Now we call it vibe coding, which is by simply being able to describe the program. You can write the program you want to use, a tool you trust, and you want to protect. That student needs the student data, but it is remarkable and it can boost performance. 00:14:32:18 – 00:14:54:07 Donnie Piercey If you teach CS like maybe she's like an AP C++ course. I mean, I took that in high school. Do not ask me to remember it at all. Maybe you know one thing that I know a lot of those teachers are using is they're having it right code. Like they'll ask Gemini to write code or something and then whatever language that in JavaScript, Python, whatever, they'll ask it, hey, can you make a mistake? 00:14:54:08 – 00:15:12:20 Donnie Piercey Right. And they'll be very, very specific with what that mistake is. And then the teacher will copy that code, put it on like a text file or whatever, and say, hey, you need to debug this and figure out what exactly is going wrong, because this is supposed to display a calendar where whatever year it is, it makes sure it matches everything up. 00:15:12:20 – 00:15:37:05 Donnie Piercey Right. But there's a mistake. You need to fix it, right? Tell me what's wrong, debug it and fix it. The little examples like that, and it's just fun, you know, like sometimes it's like, hey, make me a silly app that does this. Or, you know, something simple with a lot of these coding apps because, you know, like we've said this word Claude a lot, this codex like ChatGPT ones and a lot of these are like separate downloadable apps that you can put on your computer. 00:15:37:06 – 00:15:55:13 Donnie Piercey All of them even like the super high priced paid models, they have a limit like they won't you won't sit there and code forever, you know, which frankly, I think is a good thing because, you know, at one point, as a user, I need to have it like I need to be able to say, okay, stop. Look at what you have. 00:15:55:14 – 00:16:10:04 Donnie Piercey Right. Can I can I at least check to see, like, is this site that I'm building doing what it's supposed to? Is this game working the way that's supposed to? Is this feedback tool doing what it's supposed to. But you know, deep down, like, man, like I don't want to ever reach the point where these machines are like coding. 00:16:10:04 – 00:16:13:19 Donnie Piercey And then they create coding machines on their own and then the world gets taken over. 00:16:13:20 – 00:16:30:13 Vicki Davis I use Claude Cowork and have created some skills that I dictate voice memos on the way to school, and I used to do transcript and then I would try to do something with it, but now I just throw it in a folder and I have a custom skill I run every morning that can take it and turn it into multiple things. 00:16:30:13 – 00:16:47:02 Vicki Davis For me, it's just so powerful, you know, for whatever tool you want. I would say start easy. Starting with HTML is a good way to start for teachers or for whoever. And honestly, I just upload the HTML file as a file in Google Classroom and it works just fine for me. 00:16:47:07 – 00:16:58:02 Donnie Piercey You can just open it up in Chrome and it runs exactly like it's supposed to. And I would say, like for your listeners, if they're listening and they're like, man, that sounds way too complicated. Go to, you know, whatever tool. 00:16:58:05 – 00:17:00:04 Vicki Davis You you can go to Canva code even. 00:17:00:05 – 00:17:18:05 Donnie Piercey Yeah, you go to can you could go in and you just say like write me some code. That's a simple game that checks to see if my students know their multiplication facts. Then all you need to add, it'll write this code and you're probably like, I have no idea what to do with this. So your next prompt, your follow up should be. 00:17:18:06 – 00:17:40:14 Donnie Piercey I have no idea what to do with this. I want it where my students can play this game. Now what do I do? It'll walk you through step by step and it's really wild. One kind of scary easy that it is. It'll also teach you a little bit more about kind of the creative process that goes into coding, because at first you're going to feel like the AI is doing everything. 00:17:40:15 – 00:17:47:09 Donnie Piercey Eventually if you do it for a few months, like, oh, I don't need to ask it to change this number, I can just do this here. I can hop into the code myself. 00:17:47:10 – 00:18:13:02 Vicki Davis It's great for our students to be able to understand how to create the apps in the tools that they need for their lives. So when they get to the level that I teach, which is high school, I teach AP CSP, and I want my students to be able to describe the programs they want. And I really think AP CSP is one of the most valuable courses because I'm biased, of course, but because it enables power vibe coding when you understand just a little bit. 00:18:13:02 – 00:18:27:08 Vicki Davis So Donnie Piercey, so many things we could go into one of my favorite teachers to see present at conferences, and it was great connecting with you at and thanks for coming on the show again. I will have to get you a t shirt or something. 00:18:27:10 – 00:18:34:19 Donnie Piercey So just just look up like the Saturday Night Live, like five timers club. You need like a little card or something, but like a smokers jacket. 00:18:34:20 – 00:18:36:16 Vicki Davis Well, thanks for coming on the show, Donnie. 00:18:36:17 – 00:18:37:23 Donnie Piercey Awesome, I appreciate it. Thank you. 00:18:38:00 – 00:18:42:00 Announcer Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. 00:18:42:01 – 00:19:10:09 Vicki Davis So Donnie makes it sound easy and it really can be. But let's go further today because what Donnie is doing, describing what he wants and having AI build it. This is being done by districts all over the world, but it's actually the beginning of something much bigger. What we're going to talk about next is agentic AI, and it's going to change what every one of us needs to teach our students. 00:19:10:09 – 00:19:22:00 Vicki Davis So joining me now is our producer, John Davis. And so John and I are going to have a conversation about this, because we've been talking about it a lot here in our studios at the house. 00:19:22:00 – 00:19:37:14 Announcer So what is agentic AI? Because I've heard this term being thrown around. Quite a lot. Is it just an AI agent? Is it like a small little miniature man inside your computer doing tasks for you? What is it? 00:19:37:16 – 00:20:04:21 Vicki Davis Well, that's definitely not a miniature person. So think of an agent as you have a travel agent and they can book travel and they may do a bunch of tasks, but this is smaller than that. So I use Claude Cowork and it has skills that I've created. So I have all these things that I do every week. I plan my lessons playing my meals and what I'm going to go through my email playing these shows, which have a ton of transcripts that I have to go through. 00:20:04:21 – 00:20:23:23 Vicki Davis So like for today's show, I needed to look at Donnie Piercey. I knew we wanted him on the show because we had vibe coding, and then I knew that I wanted Rachelle Dené Poth in a post at the end. Okay, so when we first started, I would print out hundreds of pages of transcripts and I would just have them all over this desk in here. 00:20:23:23 – 00:20:52:03 Vicki Davis And I know you weren't working with me yet, John, but it was very cumbersome. And in some ways I would even cut and paste. Okay, I want this piece here in that piece there. And I was like, figuring out what pieces of transcripts, because we have over 900 of the 10 Minute Teacher episodes. So the whole premise of the show is, I want you to take the best of what we've already recorded, record new people, and put it together on one topic so that somebody could do a deep dive that's driving down the road or fixing their meals. 00:20:52:03 – 00:21:21:23 Vicki Davis It took me hours and hours, probably 10 to 15 hours, to put together what I want you to put on the show. And so now what I can do is I can take those transcripts, I can record on my phone what I'm thinking in the direction I want to go. And then I've trained a skill in Claude coworker that has access to my folder for my Cool Cat Teacher Talk episodes, and then I load the transcripts in there. 00:21:22:00 – 00:21:48:15 Vicki Davis Start talking to the AI, in this case a skill, and I say, okay, I'm preparing season five, episode nine. I want to talk about agentic AI and vibe coding. I'm uploading what I like, the words that I recorded, okay. And then it asks me certain questions. So I've programed in the questions that I've always asked myself, how is this helpful to teachers? 00:21:48:15 – 00:22:06:08 Vicki Davis How is this going to be helpful to anybody who cares about today's kids? How is this going to be helpful for where school goes tomorrow? As well as my own thoughts of what I was doing? I even had Claude describe every single skill that I had created, which is quite a bunch. By this point. I just kind of like walked away. 00:22:06:09 – 00:22:27:11 Vicki Davis I don't know if you remember, you and I were working last night, John, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to walk away and cook dinner because this thing is going to work for a while. So I'm able to open up multiple windows while these different little agents are working. For example, I have what I call a junk drawer for my web browser, and I download all this stuff in there, but some of that stuff is good stuff. 00:22:27:15 – 00:22:49:04 Vicki Davis So I gave it access to just the junk drawer and I said, go through this look and see what's in here, organize it in folders. You do not have permission to delete anything, but you can make a trash folder. And that one, because I had so much in there, probably ran for 20 or 30 minutes. It renamed the stuff and it made folders. 00:22:49:04 – 00:23:05:05 Vicki Davis And then I went through the stuff in the trash that it thought I needed to delete, and I moved stuff here and there. So, for example, I had downloaded a bunch of Veterans Day videos that I had promised my principal I would upload into Google Drive, and I'm like, oh, these are here. I was wondering where they were. 00:23:05:05 – 00:23:38:01 Vicki Davis And so it found everything and put it in there. So these two examples are like the first one was just I had a prompt, I told it to do something and it went off and did it and came back. Okay. So it's like kind of a one off type thing. Second example was a skill that I had made in Claude Cowork, and the difference between Claude Cowork and Claude online and Claude on your phone is that Claude Cowork is installed on your computer, and you can give it access to certain folders. 00:23:38:01 – 00:24:03:17 Vicki Davis So the reason that I like Claude Cowork versus anything else, and honestly, there's not a lot out that really does what Claude Cowork does right now. But by the time you listen to this, there may be other tools. I know ChatGPT is working on their piece, but I'm able to get really granular and and say, okay, when you're in my Gmail, you have permission to read and you have permission to do filters, but you can't write anything. 00:24:03:17 – 00:24:26:15 Vicki Davis So at the end of every day at 415, I have a scheduled agent that runs for me a scheduled skill called daily email triage, and that thing runs at 415 every day. It goes through my email, and it classifies level 1 to 10 of how important it is. And I've trained it. And then it says, hey, here's what's in here. 00:24:26:15 – 00:24:47:16 Vicki Davis Here's what you might want to say. Here's some draft emails or I don't know what to do with this one. I've gotten real detailed with those skills. So these are like almost like John when I had an assistant who did some different things for me, it's almost like I can create these little tiny assistants for all these little tiny jobs, but there's no person in there. 00:24:47:16 – 00:24:50:11 Vicki Davis It's just AI doing what it's been trained. 00:24:50:12 – 00:25:09:20 Announcer So that's a news story that recently happened, where software developers are asked to make a certain amount of their code with AI, and due to these constraints, they and losing the entire database because it concourse out halfway through and just deletes the entire thing. 00:25:09:21 – 00:25:33:05 Vicki Davis That is something I've had as a problem. So when you use Claude inside Excel, so ChatGPT, you can now use inside Excel and Claude, you can use inside Excel. And so I've had two cases. So for example I downloaded all of my recurring subscriptions because I've got way too many and I want to get rid of those. And I was doing this work with Claude to like, categorize them or organize them. 00:25:33:05 – 00:25:50:04 Vicki Davis And one thing you can do is you can add Claude inside your browser. So I would go to a service I wanted to cancel. I would log in so it would know a password rethink. I would click on the Claude Cowork in my browser and I would say find the page where I can click cancel and it would come up with a plan. 00:25:50:04 – 00:26:09:08 Vicki Davis It would say, I'm going to click here, here and here and I'm going to find a page work cancel. Then I would approve the plan and then I give it permission to operate on that site. So if it accidentally goes to another site it has to ask permission again. So then it would cancel. And so I was right in the middle of canceling quite a few services. 00:26:09:09 – 00:26:30:07 Vicki Davis And for some reason Microsoft Excel like installed an update when Excel crashed and it went back into Excel. Everything I had done was gone except the original import of that stuff. I was so frustrated and even went in the automatic backups Excel supposed to make, but for some reason it didn't make those automatic backups. I've had that happen to me twice. 00:26:30:07 – 00:26:52:20 Vicki Davis It's very frustrating. What I do now is if I'm using Claude in Excel or if I was using ChatGPT Excel, I go in and I click File Save and I save and I save and I save because that is one thing. If you run out of credit or there's this thing called a context window. So Anthropic, which does Claude, just doubled what they gave us. 00:26:52:21 – 00:27:15:09 Vicki Davis It's basically the working memory how much it can remember at one time. So one of the tips for example, is I created what's called a meta skill. And that's like a big picture skill. So if I say coach me it invokes my coach skill, okay. On top of whatever else I'm doing. So if I'm like, hey, I'm in my email, hey, coach me, I have too much email when I'm creating that coach skill. 00:27:15:09 – 00:27:28:22 Vicki Davis When I was working on it, we came up with six phases and I went ahead and had it right. The prompts for all those phases that I needed to do, because I had to open up new chats for each of those because it would exceed the window and just kind of crash out. 00:27:28:23 – 00:27:54:01 Announcer So let's get back on original topic a bit. So you talked about AI is taking up all these entry level jobs. So are these people who are coming into the workforce that don't have these experience and can't get into these entry level jobs. Are they just told to stuff it and they can't get in? What's going to happen when all the people that are in like the positions with the experience finally retire? 00:27:54:02 – 00:27:57:07 Announcer Are we just going to not have those professions anymore? 00:27:57:08 – 00:28:22:08 Vicki Davis Okay, so if AI can do better than an entry level professional for the first five years, then we need to look at what we're thinking. So for example, when I went to GT, I was a market planner and I built spreadsheets, and I had a person above me who understood spreadsheets and they talked spreadsheet. And so they would like say, hey, Vicki, go put in a lookup table here or put in a conditional here or there, right. 00:28:22:09 – 00:28:46:17 Vicki Davis They spoke spreadsheet. And then I would go out and do that. I learned spreadsheets by making spreadsheets. So it's like we're losing the training ground where people learn the work. So I believe really in high school we need to teach statistics and data analytics, and we need our students all speaking spreadsheet so that they can supervise spreadsheets. Let me give you another example. 00:28:46:17 – 00:29:12:04 Vicki Davis I was working on the cover of my next book. I was struggling, struggling and trying to get it through all these different AI tools, spending hours. And I couldn't do it. And my sister, who's a graphic designer, sat down, wrote one prompt. It was pretty long and immediately got the book cover I loved immediately. That's because she speaks graphic design, speaking whatever profession like you went to the Christian Worldview Film Festival last week, John. 00:29:12:05 – 00:29:39:14 Vicki Davis And so you're around people who were speaking film. And because of that, when you learn to speak in a profession, then you're able to supervise AI that works in that profession. So all the entry level stuff, we've got to get students using AI in their chosen field so that they can get past that learning curve. And I'll give you another example. 00:29:39:15 – 00:29:56:18 Vicki Davis Last week, one of my eighth graders, I asked, hey, what are you doing in your math class? And they said, we're doing Trig like Trig, trigonometry. They said, yeah. And I looked at it. I'm like, yeah, that's Trig. I learned a trick, John. Guess how old I was when I learned trick seven? No, I was a senior in high school. 00:29:56:18 – 00:30:12:17 Vicki Davis That was my it was Trig pre calc and I had that my senior year. And my eighth graders are learning the same thing. I was talking to your dad about this last night John, and he said yeah, we used to spend a whole year, all these lookup tables so that we could even do Trig and all that went away with a calculator. 00:30:12:17 – 00:30:33:15 Vicki Davis So there's a lot of mundane, menial type work that is going away because AI can do it. So we have to understand what it's doing when it writes a spreadsheet. My students need to be able to know, hey, that's a lookup formula. Here's what a lookup formula does. Here's what a conditional does like here's what these different things do. 00:30:33:17 – 00:30:50:08 Vicki Davis That's why I think like my AP CSP class is so important because they know how to speak programming. So then they're able to supervise AI as AI writes programs, knowing the field well enough to direct the AI tool to create these skills and create these agents. 00:30:50:09 – 00:30:56:00 Announcer Yeah, but how do we make sure that education is going to keep up with this, like rapidly advancing field? 00:30:56:00 – 00:30:58:14 Vicki Davis Well, maybe they listen to our show. 00:30:58:16 – 00:30:59:20 Announcer No. 00:30:59:22 – 00:31:22:10 Vicki Davis I think that this is a challenge because, for example, when I started teaching computer science, I pulled the Georgia standards for computer science. And when I started teaching in 2002, in those standards, they had floppy disks. I know floppy disks are all. But even in 2002, they were old. It's like, how long has these standards been updated? And it was like ten years old. 00:31:22:10 – 00:31:44:09 Vicki Davis We have two problems in education. We have too many standards, which we found that we can only implement a limited number of standards and really keep them in our minds. So we have too many standards and we have outdated standards, and then we have to get a handle on this artificial intelligence. And I think a lot of it is we use it for ourselves personally. 00:31:44:09 – 00:32:05:16 Vicki Davis So for example, I created a skill for meal planning and planned our meals for the week and loaded some recipes in there that I like playing it for two weeks and it puts stuff on my calendar and I know what the meals are. We've had some pretty good meals lately because of it, because I'm taking a lot of that stuff that I used to do that just really slowed me down. 00:32:05:16 – 00:32:29:02 Vicki Davis I used to help me figure out how am I going to arrange a room, you know, use this stuff in our personal lives so we can start understanding how are we going to need to use it in our schools? And I do believe that there is a whole season where we're not using AI, where maybe the teacher is using AI to support them to help give feedback faster, but where we don't use AI. 00:32:29:02 – 00:32:57:18 Vicki Davis And then there's a place where we start bringing it in at certain places and not just having them find answers. Too many people think the AI is Google, AI is so not Google. And I know Google puts this AI thing at the top. But like last week, I showed my students how every single thing that an AI said about a particular topic was wrong at the top, and I said, click all the different sources, and they clicked on the sources and it wasn't even quote in the sources. 00:32:57:18 – 00:33:24:15 Vicki Davis Right? So too many people think that AI is always right and that it is a human brain and that it's smarter. And I think there's a lot of people that are talking about artificial intelligence and education, and we never want to play King of the Hill. We always want to make a bigger hill, because there's always room for more people who are wise and discerning, and there's room for disagreement about some things we all have to agree that we want what's better for tomorrow, and we want what's good for kids. 00:33:24:16 – 00:33:51:02 Vicki Davis Like we have to agree on that because that's like part of who we are as teachers. But I think that we've really got struggles and issues, John, because here's the deal. If a teacher is reading a script and those kids are on a computer, the whole class, period, is that teacher really doing what that teacher is called to do, or can that be replaced by some AI tools out there that somebody creates? 00:33:51:02 – 00:34:30:04 Vicki Davis But if a teacher is getting to know their students and relating to their students and helping them move forward with projects and that sort of thing, that's like what we teachers do best and what AI can never replace. So I think a lot of it is valuing what teachers can uniquely do. Let AI support us where it's really good at supporting, not be on screens too much, be really wise and selective about when we're going to be on screens, when they can be supervised, and getting into how AI can really improve our lives, but also understanding things about privacy. 00:34:30:04 – 00:34:58:21 Vicki Davis And that's actually the last piece of this segment is we're going to kind of talk about with Rachelle Dené Poth and a post about like this whole privacy thing and what should you not give AI access to, understanding that there's always these useful things. There's this coaching and I have a daily habit check in. And I have a skill for weekly planning and scheduling and email and all these other things that I have created that make my life better. 00:34:58:21 – 00:35:10:13 Vicki Davis But then there's also I think it's helpful because it's freeing me up to do other things that I would rather spend my time with. So why don't we go now to Rachelle Dené Poth and then we'll come back for the end? 00:35:10:14 – 00:35:14:02 Announcer Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. 00:35:14:06 – 00:35:44:17 Vicki Davis Today we are talking with Rachelle Dené Poth. She's a celebrated educator at tech consultant at Riverview Junior Senior High School in Oakmont, Pennsylvania. She specializes in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. A lot of us know her from AR and VR and Edu. She's an ISTE certified educator, author of nine books, and has been recognized with so many awards, including the ISTE Make It Happen Award and the Ed Tech Trendsetter of 2020. 00:35:44:19 – 00:36:10:03 Vicki Davis But what I love is that she is actually in the classroom now. Today we're going to talk about AI, literacy and also cybersecurity and what we actually need to be teaching kids, because I know there's a lot out there about what we should be teaching educators and all the educator. Rachelle Dené Poth, a lot of people are just kind of passing it off and saying, okay, first, educators need to get all educated and then we can start talking to kids, but the kids are in it now. 00:36:10:03 – 00:36:35:08 Rachelle Dené Poth That's the scary part of it, is that when I think about when I was younger, and that's what I love about my class, is because I can think of me in their position. I would have never imagined that we had access to so many things, and their whole lives have been surrounded by technology, and they are given, in many cases, a device of some sort, and they just start using tools not unlike some educators as well, because we know there are so many different digital tools out there. 00:36:35:08 – 00:37:01:17 Rachelle Dené Poth And you hear somebody say, oh, did you hear about this? And I use it my classroom and we dive right in. But we really have to make sure that we understand that whatever we're using, whatever information we're putting into it, you never know where it's going to end up, how it's going to be used. We have to kind of start with the basics like what is it, what does it do, what info does it take from us, and just kind of model for our students how to best use some of the different technologies and tools that we're seeing out there. 00:37:01:18 – 00:37:26:22 Rachelle Dené Poth One big thing that has been on the rise, and I've just even in the last couple of weeks, I think 3 or 4 of my friends say that their schools have been victims of cyber attacks and ransomware. Just what a mess that creates. Obviously, it disrupts learning because you can't access your files. I had my own experience with that, and panic sets in because you have all of these years of work and you don't know if you're going to get access back to it. 00:37:26:22 – 00:37:48:10 Rachelle Dené Poth You also don't know what information has been taken and where that's going. I did look into that a little bit with my students, especially in my class, because talking about cybersecurity and phishing scams, and we had a ton of fun looking at some different emails. And we all get that. We get the spam phone calls, we get the emails that look real, has my name, it has some made up email address, and I was surprised to find out. 00:37:48:11 – 00:38:09:22 Rachelle Dené Poth It just I forget the percentage offhand, but it has like tripled this year in such a short span of time. The number of school districts that are being targeted as part of these. For ransomware, that's something that we really need to be careful with that things are locked down also for students to be able to distinguish. It goes back to the whole media literacy, digital literacy, but now it's digital discernment. 00:38:09:22 – 00:38:25:10 Rachelle Dené Poth And that's not a term I made up. There's a book I read, Future Proof by Kevin Roose, and he said that because of all the tech that we're surrounded by, it's not just being able to read it, process it, evaluate. It's like you have to distinguish if it's real or not. There are a lot of layers to it. 00:38:25:11 – 00:38:31:13 Rachelle Dené Poth It is kind of scary how quickly something like that can happen, and just the impact that it has in so many areas. 00:38:31:14 – 00:38:53:13 Vicki Davis The phishing attacks have been excessive against teachers for quite some time. It usually happens on the weekends or when everybody knows we're on break or right when we go on summer, somebody pretending to be the principal emails the teachers. Have you discovered or learned the primary way that these schools are being hacked? Is it through phishing or is it just an unsecured server? 00:38:53:14 – 00:39:17:12 Rachelle Dené Poth A few were as a result of fishing. Just link was clicked. Something just went into the whole system. And then another part of it is because we're using so many different tools in our schools now, especially with all of the AI, that puts a heavy burden on all the IT teams, the tech support in the schools and the network, it's hard to protect to 100% to guarantee everybody's information is safe. 00:39:17:12 – 00:39:37:05 Rachelle Dené Poth And a lot of the I did an audit of some of the different tech tools that I'm using just to see what their policies are and what they have in place. And, you know, there's no guarantee that everything is secure. But a lot of the time it just comes down to looking. And you see, like I laughed when you say the principal email because I got one of those years ago like, can you go buy some gift cards for me? 00:39:37:05 – 00:39:54:23 Rachelle Dené Poth And just the other day a colleague said, did you send me an email that you sent me for photographs? And I said, no. So she walked over and she showed me and it had my name, but it had somebody else's email address. But it was a good teachable moment for my students because we were talking about like, here's what you look for. 00:39:55:00 – 00:40:10:23 Rachelle Dené Poth And later that night, somebody got it and it came through the school email. And so she didn't click on it. Nobody clicked on it. But you wonder, okay, if they clicked like, what does that unleash to all of the contacts? Because that's what happened. And I think about seven years ago I was at home on a Saturday afternoon. 00:40:10:23 – 00:40:32:15 Rachelle Dené Poth I opened up my school email and it was multiplying by the thousands every hour. And it was just this massive and I don't know what the actual source was, but luckily it was just confined to me. So you really have to be careful and read those things really closely. And I think that's a good lesson for everything. Like always read the details because you just never know. 00:40:32:16 – 00:40:49:05 Vicki Davis As I work with it, when I have those forwarded to me, whoever the email sender blacklisted because, you know, some people are better at telling those things are legit than others. You know, student facing what are you teaching your students about AI literacy and in this case, cybersecurity? 00:40:49:10 – 00:41:09:04 Rachelle Dené Poth Yeah. Well, one thing is we did a couple of activities about creating passwords. And I think we've all seen that you can't just have that same old password that you've grown accustomed to. It has to have so many characters, so many special characters, capitals, all of those different things. And so we do some activities about how do you make a safe password. 00:41:09:04 – 00:41:27:18 Rachelle Dené Poth And I actually shared with them the way that I create passwords that went back to a course from ISTE that I took on computational thinking, and I came up with a pattern. And I have my own like mnemonic for for memorizing what the passwords are. So if somebody can hack my passwords, that will be interesting to see. So that's one of the things. 00:41:27:18 – 00:41:48:07 Rachelle Dené Poth And then with students or even adults, educators, whenever you have an opportunity for that two factor authentication, I know my own computer, I have that option to send a text message or an email, or you can use your fingerprint or checking the privacy settings to see if what they're using, if any information is getting sent out to anybody else. 00:41:48:09 – 00:41:56:08 Rachelle Dené Poth Those are pretty much the top things that we talk about. And then just look at some examples, because there are tons of examples out there to explore. 00:41:56:12 – 00:42:14:10 Vicki Davis Okay. So you talk about passwords and I have some some pieces I do on passwords as well. I teach my phishing unit. I actually have like a fishing quiz where it has samples. Is this fishing? Is this not. Would you click on it? Would you not. And and then I have my students write about it. And most of them this is my AP Computer Science Principles course. 00:42:14:10 – 00:42:25:11 Vicki Davis Most of them are like you know, I'm actually not as good at detecting phishing as I thought, you know? So how do we educate other educators as well as students about fishing? 00:42:25:13 – 00:42:41:23 Rachelle Dené Poth Yeah, I think and I love the examples. I just happened to find about a week and a half ago, and I had some that I was using before, but then I found a couple of other ones and the kids really liked it. I put it up on the Promethean and they were they were taking turns reading it in very dramatic ways. 00:42:41:23 – 00:43:00:01 Rachelle Dené Poth And, and I when I first took the one test, I didn't do that well either. And I thought I was pretty good at distinguishing, you know, looking for all of those little markers like the email address and the, the HTTP with the right, you know, for educators just being mindful of sometimes email comes in a lot, but you might get that text message. 00:43:00:06 – 00:43:19:23 Rachelle Dené Poth The Pennsylvania Turnpike sent me a text message, as well as a lot of other people, saying that we were in violation. We owed money. I didn't, but people clicked on it and they went to this site that very much looked like the Turnpike Commission's website. Practicing not being so quick to click is the thing, but sometimes it's hard because you get that email from somebody, one of your colleagues. 00:43:19:23 – 00:43:38:09 Rachelle Dené Poth It's family, friends, and you just assume that they sent it to me. And sure, quick, you don't know what it's going to unleash. There are a lot of problems that may not even happen right away. Whenever you get like the key logging that can go on, which in itself that's kind of scary. I recommend teachers try some of those things with their students. 00:43:38:09 – 00:43:48:13 Rachelle Dené Poth Just even a quick activity to help students. Something we should all do together just to keep making sure, because there's so much more information that's being exchanged in different formats that it's essential. 00:43:48:14 – 00:44:10:08 Vicki Davis Key logging for those listening is just where somebody just watching every key you're entering, which allows them to capture all kinds of things. Even Wi-Fi had a student who had his bank account information taken, and I was teaching this lesson and it just happened. I was teaching the lesson about using a VPN, not joining free Wi-Fi, being being wary. 00:44:10:09 – 00:44:31:14 Vicki Davis He had had it taken at at a Starbucks and there had been a like a Starbucks Wi-Fi. But then there was a free, fast, super free fast Wi-Fi or something he had joined and he had logged into his bank account. And so even the conversation of secure Wi-Fi, because they all have phones and some of them are already banking and using debit cards. 00:44:31:16 – 00:44:54:20 Rachelle Dené Poth Had an incident. I've had a lot of incidents I realized in the last like 6 or 9 months, but we rely on it so much. So especially when you're traveling at the airports, hotels, everywhere, you have to really be careful if you're logging into banking or any of that information you don't want anybody to get to. But I did have somebody figure out that there was a hotel when I traveled in Nashville, I always say, at the same place. 00:44:54:20 – 00:45:17:06 Rachelle Dené Poth And so I looked at my credit card bill and there was a pending charge for this hotel. So I called them, and they had no record of my name, but there was a hotel booked using my card. The only time that I wasn't on my own network or my hotspot was when I was in an airport, and for a brief period of time, I think I may have used my credit card or made a reservation or did something, but it was. 00:45:17:06 – 00:45:39:19 Rachelle Dené Poth It was kind of scary. And then of course, it caused new credit cards to be issued. And then you have to change all that information everywhere you have it stored. It's the easiest thing is just to really be careful about what information you share, where you're posting it, what fee you're using. Changing passwords frequently is another key, even though it's it's annoying sometimes, but it's necessary now. 00:45:39:20 – 00:45:55:22 Vicki Davis I use a tool to help you manage passwords, and it alerts me when certain passwords have been taken. But I know a lot of kids who use the same password for everything when I travel. It's just the VPN went and got a VPN for all of us, because we had started having trouble with some people in our family being hacked on free Wi-Fi. 00:45:55:22 – 00:46:07:08 Vicki Davis And how do you tell you can't? So our policy is when you when you leave the house, I don't care where you are, you're going to be on a VPN because that's just the way it has to happen. This is just digital living, isn't it? 00:46:07:09 – 00:46:28:09 Rachelle Dené Poth And it's it's kind of scary. Even Google, when I say to the students, how many times do you just Google one thing really quickly and the next thing you know, it's in your social media feed? I had a conversation with somebody the one day, and it's probably just coincidence, but it was a very creepy coincidence that they literally just said about something about this one company. 00:46:28:11 – 00:46:43:17 Rachelle Dené Poth I heard my email do the little ding, and I looked and it was an email from the company. I had never looked up the company, so I'm thinking, how did that actually happen? I'm talking it up to just a random coincidence, because otherwise that's a little bit scary to think about. Any alternative reason for that? 00:46:43:18 – 00:46:59:09 Vicki Davis There's microphones on, you know, learning to go in your settings and turn off microphones, and there's just so many different ways that we can compromise security. And there's also some literacy that has to do with artificial intelligence. What are a few of the things that you teach your middle and high schoolers about AI literacy? 00:46:59:10 – 00:47:24:17 Rachelle Dené Poth With my older students in my Spanish classes, a lot of them are sophomores and juniors, and they're very much aware of ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, and all of those. They don't understand sometimes that it's like the answer that you're given from this thing is not necessarily accurate. Your teachers may very well know that you've used this. And so what I've tried to do is give them opportunities in my classroom to use some of the different tools that are out there. 00:47:24:17 – 00:47:41:05 Rachelle Dené Poth And I'll share with them. You know, I use this tool to create this activity. What do you think? Just to show that I'm using it kind of as a thought partner, had some students actually contribute to a blog post I had written about what they thought about some of the tools. I forget how one of the students said it. 00:47:41:06 – 00:48:02:08 Rachelle Dené Poth We were using the sidekick of school AI, and I prompted it to engage with them in conversation based on the vocab and verbs that they were using. Didn't know what to say about it. And I said, well, just give me some ideas. And the one quote that he had was something to the effect of I. It gave me a chance to practice the language and adjusted its questions based on my responses. 00:48:02:09 – 00:48:23:22 Rachelle Dené Poth But yeah, I kind of like that because for each student having in their hands learning, how is it working? What is it doing for you, what are the benefits, what are any concerns and just bringing it into any classroom? Something quick and simple. It doesn't have to take a lot of time because there's so many things out there, but showing them where it can enhance and support your learning, but not replace and take away your opportunity for your own learning. 00:48:23:22 – 00:48:29:08 Rachelle Dené Poth And I think that's like the key distinction is what we want our students to do is to see. It's just a tool. 00:48:29:09 – 00:48:54:17 Vicki Davis There's so many things we could talk about, but I think the important point we have is that all of us should be looking at what are these essential things that our students need to know so that they can be successful and safe and productive and healthy in today's world, whether it's understanding how a tool works like AI and it's appropriate place that as a tool and not as it's not human. 00:48:54:18 – 00:49:11:06 Vicki Davis You know, sometimes kids get very confused. We've talked about the Eliza effect before. We've got to be wise about how we're talking about that, as well as all these cyber security issues. And, Rachelle Dené Poth, you've really brought up some great ones and supportive ones that people need to be talking about. Thanks, Rachelle Dené Poth. 00:49:11:07 – 00:49:26:00 Announcer Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award winning teacher Vicki Davis. So as we finish up the show, can you just give us a recap? What do schools need to change as we just go and get all this new technology regarding AI agents? 00:49:26:01 – 00:49:44:14 Vicki Davis The first thing is really a very practical thing file management, knowing how to organize folders, move files, filing things on your computer. It sounds really basic, but it's very critical when you're working with agentic AI. If your files are a mess and you don't know where you have things, you don't know where you're putting things, it makes it really hard to have AI help you. 00:49:44:14 – 00:50:06:01 Vicki Davis So even on a Chromebook, you can set that up. After you get organized, you're still going to be the one saving those files. So you need to like, know where they are. You need to know a little bit about how you organize your files. There is something called OpenClaw that is open source that I do not recommend that people get. 00:50:06:01 – 00:50:27:14 Vicki Davis And it requires access to your whole hard drive, like your whole hard drive. I don't recommend getting that, but that is what and I talked about this at the beginning of the show. The Einstein app was built on. This app was open job for like five days. Okay. They released it for five days. And the first release of it, I blogged it on Cool Cat Teacher. 00:50:27:16 – 00:50:48:04 Vicki Davis It said it will log in for you, watch the videos, do your homework, write your papers all for you while you're sleep. Supposedly the people who tested it said it worked because it basically has access to your whole hard drive and everything. Like it can click on the web browser. It like it has access to the whole thing. 00:50:48:04 – 00:50:55:23 Vicki Davis It's called OpenClaw, and I believe the guy who created OpenClaw and it had multiple names. It was like multiple. 00:50:56:00 – 00:50:59:03 Announcer Book is the AI social media. 00:50:59:05 – 00:51:22:05 Vicki Davis Book is with OpenClaw. It evolved. It had a name that was too close, close to Claude. And so they asked him to change it. So it only lasted like 5 or 6 days. I think they got so many to cease and desist letters they didn't want to do it. But the fact is that this stuff is out there, and if we're not interacting and if we're not going to class and if we're not talking to people, how are you going to know that there are real person? 00:51:22:05 – 00:51:27:20 Vicki Davis So much of education now is kind of move into where you talk about things in oral reports and all that kind of stuff. 00:51:27:21 – 00:51:45:06 Announcer It makes a lot of sense. But I have heard of mult book and it is a major security issue because these are AI's that are talking to each other and they have access to your hard drive. AI is not known for its internet security. 00:51:45:07 – 00:52:05:20 Vicki Davis They just failed. There are these extensions that are what they call keyloggers. So a lot of the shopping extensions, people out of their web browsers that are supposedly going to find them, good prices are actually keyloggers, a key logger like looks at every single thing that you type. Because of that, it's looking at every single thing you type and every single thing that it types back to you. 00:52:05:21 – 00:52:34:00 Vicki Davis Somebody broke into the databases of a couple of the key loggers and a bunch of prompts that people gave to AI and got back information were disclosed, like, for example, one of the posts was only 13 and I'm pregnant. What do I do? I'm scared. Even though it's supposed to be anonymized, it had enough information where those people could be. 00:52:34:01 – 00:53:03:02 Vicki Davis They saw that people who are under HIPAA, which is the Health Information Privacy and Protection Act, actually had pasted full patient information into AI tools. So we really have to go through our extensions, because if you have one of those shopping apps, possibly a lot of that stuff is going in to some key logger somewhere. That's one thing I like about Claude Cowork. 00:53:03:02 – 00:53:29:23 Vicki Davis It's not on the web, it's separate. Now, if I had Grammarly on, could it track it? Perhaps these are all concerns you have as we're dealing in AI world. We have to understand the privacy. We have to understand how AI works. So second, we need to teach the language of professions earlier. So things like graphic design, spreadsheet logic and data analytics, maybe statistics with AI supported spreadsheets in high school filmmaking vocabulary or whatever the field. 00:53:29:23 – 00:53:50:03 Vicki Davis Students need enough language to supervise the eyes that's doing the execution, and they need to learn to cue in on that vocabulary. If I'm job shadowing at a hospital, what are the words that they're using and how are they using those words? And write down those words and figure out what they are. Language is actually become more important, not less important. 00:53:50:03 – 00:54:09:16 Vicki Davis So just like you have to know how to type stuff in a calculator, you have to know how to type the right words in AI to get the right output. So it's learning the words of your profession. Third, computational thinking, which we can push all the way down to kindergarten. Being able to describe what you want clearly enough for something else to execute it. 00:54:09:17 – 00:54:27:00 Vicki Davis It's probably the most valuable skill of the next decade, but this is not a new thing. I do think that AP Computer Science principles and I yes, I teach it, is one of the most valuable courses we can offer. Because when you understand a little bit about programs work, your vibe coding gets exponentially more powerful. 00:54:27:00 – 00:54:33:13 Announcer So if you had to boil this down to one big question, what would it be? 00:54:33:15 – 00:54:57:04 Vicki Davis What is the role of the human and how does their thinking shine through? We always have to come back to your students thinking their expertise, their language. What's driving the work. Because AI can go off the rails. Just because it looks good or sounds good doesn't mean it represents any knowledge. That's why oral reports and oral conversations becomes so important. 00:54:57:06 – 00:55:35:00 Vicki Davis If it does truly reflect what students are thinking and doing, then I can amplify them. But if it doesn't truly reflect what students are thinking and learning, it diminishes them. This is the real crux of what we're dealing with. Is I being an amplifier or a diminish? Or the only way to really get at that is to get to know your students, to have conversations about your topic, to interact, get past this gotcha thing, and you're really have the real conversations because the fact is, OpenClaw, Einstein and these other things that we've mentioned are in our future. 00:55:35:00 – 00:55:51:10 Vicki Davis So a former pastor of ours, John Steven Durbin, used to say, a half truth is a whole lot. I can see that some people are justifying what I can do to, quote, help them learn when in reality there handing their future over to a bot. AI is a tool. It's not a person. We don't call it a he or she, it's an it. 00:55:51:10 – 00:56:13:16 Vicki Davis When we start treating AI like it's a friend or a companion, we start getting into trouble. And it's just like people pretended that social media was really social and it helped us be less lonely. The fact is, that's not what happened. Social media made people more lonely. We've got to be really careful about listening to the marketing of those who are selling things to us. 00:56:13:17 – 00:56:27:16 Vicki Davis I really like Claude Cowork. I can set exactly what it can access, read only, or write approval required for anything sensitive, one folder at a time. But Einstein, for example, used OpenClaw. It had access to everything. No guardrails, no oversight. 00:56:27:16 – 00:56:32:15 Announcer And something we need to remember is if something is free, you are the product. 00:56:32:15 – 00:56:52:08 Vicki Davis That is absolutely right, John. I hope that it has you thinking so that you can be part of the conversation. As I said earlier, we don't play King of the Hill. We make a bigger hill. And this is one of those hills we need. A whole lot of educators have conversations on educated conversations and understanding that AI is different for all of us because we all use it differently. 00:56:52:10 – 00:57:13:05 Vicki Davis And the only way forward is to have this conversation and to speak up. And yes, some legislation is coming and it needs to come quickly. But until then, we need to know what our students are doing on their phones, on their computers. Parents need to be seeing what are the kids doing and involved so that we can protect kids. 00:57:13:05 – 00:57:32:07 Vicki Davis Because AI, as I said before, is an amplifier or diminish or you don't want to have your kid. Just like the pandemic, those kids stayed home and really lost a year. So you have kids that are gaining because of AI and learning more, and you have kids that are losing years. We don't have 2 or 3 years to figure this out. 00:57:32:07 – 00:57:48:00 Vicki Davis We have kids in our classroom today who need us to understand AI, artificial intelligence itself as well as coding. So thanks for listening to today's Cool Cat Teacher Talk. As always, you can get the show notes at coolcatteacher.com, thanks for joining me, John. 00:57:48:02 – 00:57:51:00 Announcer Remember to say see you later. 00:57:51:02 – 00:58:04:16 Announcer See you later. Educator. Leave that in. (laughter) Stay in the loop. Visit. Follow at cool cat. Teacher. Everywhere you connect. 00:58:04:18 – 00:58:08:01 Announcer Cool Cat Teacher Talk with award-winning teacher Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:05): Today's episode is brought to you by the Educators Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. If you're a K through eight STEM teacher looking for classroom-tested lessons, hands-on projects, and time-saving professional development, you can get an annual membership for only $9.99 using the promo code COOLCAT. More on this after the show.

Vicki Davis (00:32): Terra Tarango is the Chief Education Officer at Van Andel Institute for Education, where she works with teachers to design inquiry-rich, hands-on learning that is realistic in today's classrooms. Terra has spent more than two decades in curriculum, PD, nonprofit work, helping educators turn curiosity into meaningful projects, rather than just one more thing on our to-do list.

So Terra, let's start off. So you have Educator's Studio. So do you have all of these like theme ideas right there in the studio?

Terra Tarango (01:08): Yeah, so we're a nonprofit. So really all we're about is trying to help educators' jobs be a smidge easier. I'd like to say if I can be a teacher fairy godmother, that's what I want to be because the job is just too hard — too important to be as hard as it is. We put everything that we have in there. Whether it's these timely topics, things like March Madness.

Terra Tarango (01:25): All those are in there for timely topics, as well as just games and activities. Another fun one is Beat the Bot. If you ever did Beat the Calculator in school, this is the new version. Now students are going to be asked to demonstrate how they can bring value that AI can't. We put a bunch of prompts into it in just different content areas. You can pick content areas — math, ELA, science — and then there's questions and we ask the students, which of these questions do you think you could answer better than AI?

And then we show them AI's response and not hide from it. Let's let them look at it and see, okay, how can I bring my humaneness to this? Because that's what I'm going to need to bring to show my value going forward.

Vicki Davis (02:00): So you have a lot more than science in there. You have other subjects.

Terra Tarango (02:03): A lot of it's cross-curricular because if you think about, especially K-5, we're teaching all of the content areas. So sometimes it's just a matter of how do you sneak the broccoli into the broccoli cheese casserole kind of thing? How do you get some science in there? Especially if you feel like you don't have time for science — like I get that we're a science place. Of course I want that. But remember that's what the scientists said was most important: critical thinking, creative thinking, perseverance. So if you're doing those skills, you are actually helping teach science.

Terra Tarango (02:29): I'm not saying we shouldn't try to find time to put in that content as well. And we do offer science lessons, but we offer project-based learning units, things that you can get all the different content areas in around one authentic purpose. Sometimes it's a matter of there's just not enough time in the day. So if we can sneak in those skills, sneak in a little bit of science content here and there, let's call that a win.

Vicki Davis (02:47): Let's take one typical class period, 30, 45 minutes, depending on the age. Take us through a single inquiry-rich lesson that you just love.

Terra Tarango (02:56): I have to go one step further and do one that's a five-lesson series, a way to make project-based learning, which can sometimes feel so overwhelming and so burdensome. And we kind of created these ones that are just five lessons and each lesson focuses on a different content area. So it's a way to have one authentic context, but still get that cross-curricular feel. So this one's on — it's a kindergarten lesson and it's on saving the bees.

And so the first lesson is all about science. So you're learning about bees and pollination and why that's important for the earth. And then the second lesson is they get into math. They get to actually pretend to be bees and go around and count how many flowers they could get and things like that. And then they end up learning social-emotional learning as they get to — well, then we go into actually building their houses. They're going to build some mason bee houses. So we do a day of that.

Then the social-emotional learning piece comes in and giving feedback. We often treat that like a content area. So the fourth lesson is, all right, let's give each other feedback on our houses, a little protocol for that so we learn how to communicate with one another. And then ELA is the last day, the fifth lesson, where they get to share these mason bee houses with their community, with their family as they come in. We like to say, let's do something where we make the world a better place. And they're invested in that.

Terra Tarango (04:09): But you were able to teach math, science, social studies, and ELA, and social-emotional learning along the way.

Vicki Davis (04:14): What does ethical PD look like and how does it shape what you do?

Terra Tarango (04:18): One is that our folks that do professional development are in the classroom. They're trying these things with their own students and able to share what works best.

And then two is being very mindful of the teacher's time. In a PD session, I just think teacher time is infinitely more valuable than regular people time. We're checking in and we're making sure at the beginning that we're all on the same page about what is it that you need to be useful — to come out of something that you can use.

The favorite thing that teachers have always liked when we do our professional development, or for lack of better word, just the strategies, just quick ideas. Here's a protocol — giving just little things like that. One of my favorite things we did is put all of those — there's like 300 of them — in something called a Teacher Strategy Vault, where you can search it. I want things to help with creative thinking, or I want things to help with classroom management. Just all those ideas that I just feel like as a collective of great teachers.

Terra Tarango (05:05): Over decades and decades, or new ideas as well, all kind of in a place to just find those. So I think if PD spends too much time on theory, or it spends too much time on ideas that are great but not practical in the classroom, that's just unethical. It's not a good use of a teacher's time. And so making sure it's relevant and practical is key.

Vicki Davis (05:23): Well, I love teachers to come out of any session I do with something they can use tomorrow or something they can use next week because otherwise sitting in PD for four hours, they've just made more work because they have more work to grade and they have all their lesson plans to do. And so you're right. The best PD takes a load off. The worst PD doesn't model what it teaches — listening to six hours of lecture about differentiated instruction.

Or project-based learning. Like, seriously? And I think teachers know that. I think the other thing that I think is really good is there are so many places that you can get lesson plans now. And of course you can get AI to write lesson plans, but that human filter of actually having scientists look at the lesson plans and help with the lesson plans and then test them with kids — and that means there's a real human element.

To all these ideas that you're giving of, okay, we've actually done this, but this also holds water with the science community of, this is something we need to teach. This is how we need to teach. And this really reflects true science. I think that valuing humans — the human role in education — is just so important. And that's what I like about what you're describing to me.

Terra, and you and I talked about this before the show. So many people are coming into education without an education background. I was one of those 24 years ago. I think it's important to be connecting with people who do this and do this well. I mean, what concerns you as you look at science education today? Like you said, all those people with big hearts. We have people with great big hearts who want to do a great big job, right?

Vicki Davis (07:02): But there's some practical things that we have to do with our PD, don't we?

Terra Tarango (07:06): When you asked sort of what concerns me the most, I don't have a great answer for it, but I will just share it in a spirit of acknowledgment — is that I do feel like something has really changed in the way we as a society view teachers. Teachers used to be revered and respected in a way that I just feel like isn't quite there anymore. It was a hard job and now it's even harder because you don't feel like the community is behind you the way it used to.

Terra Tarango (07:30): I'll give you an example. It was something that we were talking about and I got an interview question from a parent just saying, what can I do to help my child? And I said, listen to their teacher. They know your child best. They spend a lot of time with them, ask them what you can do and then take that advice. And I thought that was a pretty harmless comment. It got a lot of heat just from saying — I would never trust teachers. I was floored by the sort of public response to something like that.

Terra Tarango (07:52): That feeling teachers are out there, whether it's political indoctrination or whether it's all sorts of stereotypes or things that are out there. And I just think that teachers have a really hard and important job. And it worries me that we aren't respecting that in the way we once did.

Vicki Davis (08:08): The respect has to start with us. It has to start with how we work with our colleagues. I will never let students speak ill of another colleague in front of me. I'm just not going to do that. Not that teachers are perfect — they're still going to make mistakes.

But we do have to respect this profession. We've got 3% of the population training 100% of tomorrow's workforce. I think that's pretty doggone important.

Terra Tarango (08:30): It's really important. I've often used that example to say teachers have the most important job in the world. And it's because they are training every other job that is to come.

Vicki Davis (08:38): And science is more important than ever. Something in computer science we talk about all the time is that computational thinking is something that you can put into every single age and grade level. I teach my kindergarten teachers, when you teach your classroom procedures, number them. First you do this, then you do this. And that computational thinking and that inquiry-based learning is something that is not only applicable to the regular hands-on science we're used to, but also computer science. We need to have that computational thinking and that inquiry-based learning that we've been talking about today.

So as we finish up, let's kind of talk to teachers who want to start. They want to start on their journey of, hey, I want to have more inquiry. I want to bring science in, but maybe blend it in with reading. Where do they start?

Terra Tarango (09:25): So I think there's a few places to start. Again, it is about starting small. Don't set yourself up for failure. Don't set yourself up to be disappointed. Just try a little thing. So some small things you can start — something like a pledge form, something like that. So you bring a little bit of authenticity. A step up from that might be if the kids are working on some kind of culminating project to have them pitch it to industry experts. And these experts are happy to come into your classroom.

We have had no trouble finding those. Whether they're coming up with some kind of solution and they're going to pitch it like a pitch tank sort of thing, that's a little place to start. Another is flipping the order of the instruction. Have them do before they learn to mimic the way scientists are doing things a little bit more. Or you can also flip the way you plan. So instead of thinking, I have to teach X, how can I make it interesting? Start with, what will my kids find really interesting to do?

And then how can I connect X to it? I always like to take on this challenge — if we have this interesting project, the kids are going to — for example, one we do is a project called Moments to Remember, where the kids are going to befriend a senior citizen and they end up writing a biography of their life. And it's a really powerful project. But then, so you start with that and then say, well, how can I teach math?

Terra Tarango (10:36): Well, the person's life is a timeline. Let's use anything I'm going to do on a timeline I could use on that person's timeline. Or science — how can we weave that in? Well, younger kids, we could bring them a plant and let's talk about what a plant needs to survive. Or a little bit older, we can pair them up with a senior citizen who has the same birth month. They can learn the patterns of the night sky — the sky was the same, even though they're born 60 years apart if it's the same month. So thinking about what's going to be interesting and then how do I connect content?

Vicki Davis (11:03): So Terra, could you tell us, where can people go to see these resources?

Terra Tarango (11:08): The best way is to go to vaieducation.org. You can explore all sorts of freebies there and check out different types that we have. Everything from full-on science lessons and full-on project-based learning units to these small 15-minutes-at-a-time games and activities that can be a lot of fun for building that classroom culture.

Vicki Davis (11:26): What a conversation with Terra Tarango, the Chief Education Officer at the Van Andel Institute for Education. She's been sharing all these ideas of inquiry-rich and hands-on learning that really helps to spring science into all the different subjects for K through eight. While a lot of these even apply with older students, getting them excited about science — kids make their minds up at a pretty young age if they're going to love science or not, don't they, Terra?

Terra Tarango (11:54): They do. But that doesn't stop us from trying later on. I think if they've had exposure to that sense of discovery, that usually starts early and lasts a lifetime. But if they haven't, that's really cool to be that person that brings it to them kind of later in life — that middle school kid who finally sees like, that's what that feels like to discover something. That's really powerful as well.

Vicki Davis (12:12): Science is just such an important topic, like all of these STEM and STEAM topics. Terra, thanks for coming on the show.

Vicki Davis (12:20): Before you go, I want to tell you about today's sponsor, the VAI Educator's Studio from Van Andel Institute for Education. Do you know how it feels when you just find that perfect lesson that works? The VAI Educator's Studio is packed with classroom-tested lessons, hands-on projects, and skill-building activities designed specifically for K through eight teachers. Plus you get on-demand professional development and a community of educators who get it. I've been exploring their resources and love how they're built to save you time while sparking real creativity in your classroom. You can get 50% off membership to the Educator's Studio by using the promo code COOLCAT when you sign up. So head over to coolcatteacher.com/vai. The VAI Educator's Studio — because great teaching should not mean endless prep. And remember, use the promo code COOLCAT.

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain.