The Grading Podcast

125 – 5 steps for redesign with AI

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Sharona: Your time with your students is the most valuable time you have.

Boz: Absolutely.

Sharona: It is the time where you bring who you are as a person. Because one of the dangers, in my opinion, of AI is that it’s gonna strip the human relationships out of education. And we already know there’s a tremendous amount of isolation on our students.

One of the things that they say that keeps students in college, they’ve done some research on this, is if at least one person at the university cares whether the student is there or not. And it can be a coach, it can be an advisor, it can be a teacher, but you only need one to dramatically improve retention.

Boz: Okay. We did not talk about this ahead of time, but with you saying that, you know what the number one factor that can keep a at risk student in high school and being successful in high school? Having one person on campus that they feel cares.

Welcome to the grading podcast, where we’ll take a critical lens to the methods of assessing students’ learning. From traditional grading to alternative methods of grading. We’ll look at how grades impact our classrooms and our student success. I’m Robert Bosley, a high school math teacher, instructional coach, intervention specialist and instructional designer in the Los Angeles Unified School District and with Cal State LA.

Sharona: And I’m Sharona Krinsky, a math instructor at Cal State Los Angeles, faculty coach and instructional designer.

Whether you work in higher ed or K 12, whatever your discipline is, whether you are a teacher, a coach, or an administrator, this podcast is for you. Each week you will get the practical, detailed information you need to be able to actually implement effective grading practices in your class and at your institution.

Boz: Hello and welcome back to the Grading podcast. I’m Robert Bosley, one of your two co-hosts, and with me as always, Sharona Krinsky. How you doing today, Sharona?

Sharona: I’m really good. I’m also very tired. We are recording this a few days after Thanksgiving, and I had an amazing trip to New York, but I got very little sleep this week. So if I am rambling a bit, I apologize. How about you?

Boz: I’m doing really well. Like you said, this is a few days after Thanksgiving. I successfully fried a Turkey again without blowing anything up or burning myself.

Sharona: I was thinking about you ’cause I saw on one of the people that I watched on social media who was talking about they’re an ER doctor and they’re like please do not try to fry a frozen Turkey. And I know you know better, but I just was thinking of you.

Boz: So with this being right after Thanksgiving I think there’s a big thanks that you and I both want to send out to our listeners. So we hit another milestone just a few days ago. What milestone did we hit?

Sharona: We hit 30,000 downloads lifetime for this podcast.

Boz: Which is still just, I know we’re nowhere near any of the big podcasts and I don’t care about that.

But just the idea that 30,000 times one of our episodes of just us, with this podcast really is just us talking about some of the things that we’re dealing with and thinking about, occasionally having, a fellow educator on. This podcast is not some big fancy thing.

And the idea that 30,000 different times one of these episodes has been downloaded is just mind boggling to me.

Sharona: It really is. And even weekly, we get several hundred downloads a week, and to think that a couple of hundred people are willing to listen to us and go on this journey every week, that’s bigger than any class I’ve ever taught. I’ve never taught in a large lecture class.

Boz: Yeah, me neither.

Sharona: And I know that some of our people are like, yeah, whatever. I teach a thousand students. I’m like, power to you. But I don’t have that. So it’s just neat and fun and something that we love to do. I know that being a teacher is a huge part of both of our identities. And so I, yes, I am so grateful that we’re still doing this a couple of years in and yeah, it’s just incredible.

Boz: All right. So a big thank you to our audience. We hope to continue doing this and continue having you guys listen to us every week. But let’s go ahead and let’s start getting into our episode.

So something happened right before we went on Thanksgiving break. I was on this really interesting meeting with an old boss of mine, actually two old bosses of mine. But they were talking about this new software or new program, new platform called Think Verse. I know this isn’t a sales episode for Think verse.

Sharona: They haven’t paid us dang it.

Boz: But no, it was just really interesting. And what this was is basically a AI generated individualized student tutoring platform that’s designed specifically to go with a few books. One of them being the book that my school and a good part of my district uses for their math curriculum.

So I just thought that was interesting, but that got me really thinking about AI and how things in our world of education really is changing. And I know you have been thinking about AI a lot. Where are you with your AI journey and your AI exploration?

Sharona: I have a million different thoughts about AI and I was looking, as I was researching for this episode on where the current thinking of AI and education is. And I’m seeing a lot of things that we’ve talked about before on the podcast and some really exciting things. I myself am using AI to try to personalize some of my students’ learning experiences through individualized assessments, or I’m using AI to come up with content that is more authentic and worth students spending their time with.

But there’s something missing. This is where I’m hoping to take this conversation today. Okay. Something that’s been very much bothering me as I look at a couple things. First of all, as I look at going back into the classroom with a course I haven’t taught in almost a decade, which is pre-calculus. And a course that is struggling. Like nationally, pre-calculus is still one of the biggest gatekeeping courses, and it’s a course that has been hard to crack from a math education standpoint. But also speaking to my sons who are both in college, they’re both graduating this year, one of them hopefully in about a month, and their friends and even the teenagers that I work with at the theater.

And there’s a whole swirl of questions going on about whether or not higher education is even worth it in an age of AI. And I’m hearing some pretty negative things from people in my son’s sort of,

Boz: friend zone or,

Sharona: group of friend zone group that, that generational group of the late teens, early twenties, not in a sort of political way, but just a very practical way of how meaningless so many of their courses seem to be.

And so in prepping for this episode I was thinking about what should instructors be asking themselves in an age of AI, in an age of artificial intelligence and its impact, that maybe they’re not asking themselves. Including myself. So that’s where I wanted to take this conversation if people are willing to go on the journey with me.

Boz: But yeah, that’s interesting that you bring up that relevance question. I really wanna explore that in this episode. ’cause I do think there’s a lot there to talk about. So I don’t know if you were planning on spending a lot on that, but I would definitely like to go down that at least for a little bit.

Sharona: Absolutely. And this is definitely coming out of, is college worth it? This question is very big, like in the news media. Is college worth it? Especially as we look at things like student loans and the cost of college and also is what students are actually learning in college worth the price they’re paying to be there.

Boz: Yeah. ’cause that’s another question that has been in higher ed for a while, but it is definitely resurfacing and it seems to even be a bigger one, is that gap between leaving college and actually being work ready and how much a company has to invest in somebody to get them from, okay, yes, you’ve got the degree in this, so you should be ready to, okay, this is how we actually do it.

Sharona: There’s some research that has been coming out about employment declines for early career professionals. Because they’re finding that AI is having a significant and disproportionate impact on early career professionals because so many of those early career jobs are actually pretty much grunt work.

Yeah. Like a lot of, for example, in law, a lot of first and second year lawyers, even though they’re lawyers, they’re not paralegals, they’re lawyers, are usually doing grunt work that is now being replaced by AI. So there’s a article that came out just this week from CNBC, why AI may Kill Career Advancement for so many young workers, because that’s where it’s impacting everything.

And when you don’t get those entry level jobs, you don’t have an opportunity to develop the specialized skills that your industry needs.

Boz: Exactly.

Sharona: So this is really bothering me because, I have two kids graduating college, we’ve spent a lot of money. I’m hoping that we’ve done the right things, but when I talk to my kids, they’re like, yeah, we’re getting the degree because you told us we had to and we’ve learned something. But honestly, most of it’s been a waste of our time. And this is my own children. Yeah. That are telling me this.

Boz: Children of two generation of educators.

Sharona: Oh more than that. I mean my great aunt was also an educator, but two generations of college professors specifically. Yeah. ’cause my mom was a college professor, as am I. So if my own children are not seeing the value in higher education? Then how is anybody else gonna see it?

Boz: Yeah. My oldest daughter is just a little bit younger than yours. And instead of ending her college career, she’s about to start it. And she’s got several friends that are currently in college in those entry level classes.

And it’s weird because most of them are from different demographics than you are or your sons are. They’re not questioning it, but I’m looking at what they’re doing and I’m questioning it. For example, I had one of my daughter’s friends, I won’t say her name or the school she’s at, but she’s doing a statistics course and she was struggling.

So my daughter was like. Hey, dummy. My dad teaches statistics at college. Bring your stuff over. Let him help you. He’s pretty good teacher. So she did, she brought it over and I’m helping her calculate Pearson correlation coefficients by hand on like a 15 point data set. And not only that, anyone that knows how to do this by hand, there’s a couple of different ways that you can do it.

The other shortcut methods of how you can do it. I was showing her the way that I would do it by hand, even though I don’t require my students to do it by hand anymore. And she was like, yeah, I can’t do it that way. I have to do it the exact way my professor showed me. I have to do this method. And that’s what we’re talking about, right?

These kind of outdated mechanical procedural things that, quite frankly, I think have been outdated for 30 years. But now in the day of AI, really is outdated.

Sharona: And this is where my thoughts on this really came to fruition is I’m trying to redesign, even for myself, this pre-calculus course, because so much of what’s in it, I would also argue the skills are outdated. And at the same time, I’m also aware that I’m coming from a perspective of knowing these skills. So I say they’re outdated, but I’m a little bit concerned that maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m just so good at some of these skills that I don’t realize how they’re impacting my ability to do the higher level stuff.

So I feel like there’s a push pull here that I wanna think about. Yeah. And this led me to, I have basically five things, or we have five things, that I think instructors should be really doing right away to look at their courses and to critically think about their courses for today. As in, I know that course redesign, it can take a year, it can take two years to get a course, truly through a higher education system of we have these processes we have to use to change course catalogs and things.

I don’t think we can wait three years to redesign some of this stuff. I think some of this stuff has to happen right away.

Boz: Yeah. Some of this stuff should have happened yesterday. Let’s be honest.

Sharona: But for me. I’m at the cutting edge of this, right? So I have been doing this kind of redesign for 10 years. I’m feeling under pressure to do it by the time my course starts in January. Yeah. So I wanna put out there these five things that we’re gonna talk about that I think people should really sit down and think about right now.

And part of this is informed by our course redesign cycle that we’ve shared before. We’ll share it in the show notes, but I’m actually gonna go back and really challenge faculty and instructors to say, what is the purpose of your course? What is the purpose of the content? And I’m gonna reframe that a little bit to ask in particular what head knowledge, so things that students should have between their ears without relying on any external source of data, and or skills should a student be leaving the class with?

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: Because I can argue, oh they need to know in the case of pre-calculus what a function is and all of these characteristics about functions. And we spend an inordinate amount of time teaching them on paper to analyze an equation and to say this equation has this characteristic and this thing, and it therefore belongs to this family of functions.

I’m not sure that’s the first skill that a student needs to have. Because out in the world when you’re trying to do anything, like for me, redesign a course is one of the big skills that I do or design a course calendar or work with instructors. I never start with an equation. That’s not a starting point. That’s a point I have to get to.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: So with pre-calculus in particular, if the purpose of this course is to provide a set of skills that will enable a student to pursue a STEM degree, which is the purpose of pre-calculus, it is to get them ready for calculus, but also get them ready for a bunch of other courses that are gonna build on some very specific technical skills that they’re gonna need to model real life situations to understand how pre-calculus and calculus explains the world around us in a mathematical way that allows for prediction.

To me, that’s where we’re going with all of this. If that is my purpose, and I have AI, a lot of times I can put something into AI. And I can say, here’s a data set, or here’s a phenomenon. And I just tried this. For example, I said to chat GPT, how do I produce a musical? Because again, this went to a different world in my life, but I can literally put something that simple in. How do I predict a satellite’s motion? How do I figure out how to program a drone?

You can put these very grandiose, big questions in, and it does a pretty good job of giving you an outline of some steps you can take. But then when it gives you this outline, you are like, okay, why? Why are these the steps? Are these good steps? Are they bad steps? Are they the right steps? Do I have to do them in order? Do they do ’em in a cycle? So many more questions come up for me. So I’m really grappling with the purpose of these courses, of these individual courses.

Boz: Yeah. And when we talk about redesigning a course, this is the first, really the first step we tell people to start with anyways. Because everything in your grading architecture is really built off your learning outcomes, but your learning outcomes really need to be based on the purpose of a course, where it sits in a sequence, all that things. We’ve talked a lot about that in several episodes, but you’re right. If everything really starts, the heart and soul of this, starts at the purpose of your course, then yeah. I think you’re right. I would rather, if it’s mathematics, if it’s stem, any course whatsoever right now should be looking at what is the purpose of their course and how is that purpose affected, changed or strengthened by AI.

Sharona: And the good news is you don’t have to come up with them from scratch. I’m gonna give one specific direction that I think every discipline can go to. Okay. Which is you need to go to your accepted practice standards from your major education organizations in your discipline. So in math, we have the standards of mathematical practices. In science and engineering, you have the next generation science and engineering practices standards. In English, you’ve got the standards, core, what are they called?

Boz: Anchor standards.

Sharona: The anchor standards. History also has the anchor standards or power standards. In every single discipline somebody, some group of very smart people, has done this work.

Boz: Or for every discipline there is, especially in K 12, there is some sort of national education organization for that. Like NCTM for mathematics. But national based organizations that are focused on your specific discipline. So if you can’t find those standards, like the eight mathematical practices or the next gen, go to those organizations, start there.

Sharona: And what I am thinking that I’m gonna do is I’m gonna shift my focus. And one of the things we talk a lot about in this podcast is what you put in your grading architecture tells students what you value.

Boz: Yes.

Sharona: The ways that your grade, if you are using a grade, the things you put in there tells students what matters. And so for me, I’m gonna shift the amount of evidence that I’m trying to gather for my final grade, however I construct it, whether collaboratively with the students or however you do it, I’m gonna shift it heavily towards these practice standards.

So to give you an idea in math, it’s things like make sense of problems and persevere in solving them. It’s reasoning abstractly and quantitatively. It’s constructing viable arguments and critiquing the reasoning of others. This is the content that, although an AI can do a lot of these things, they’re not gonna do it the same way an individual student’s gonna do it because there’s multiple ways to do all of these.

Boz: Yeah. And that student perseverance. That’s a huge one. We did a whole episode on that back in episode 66. I think that is probably, at least in my experience in a K 12 world in mathematics, we’d have one of our eight practices is student perseverance. It’s probably one of the most underutilized of the eight standard practices. And I know some people will say, oh anything we make them do, especially if we make them do it by hand and do it showing every single step that’s building students’ perseverance. I don’t think, no, that’s not.

Sharona: No. What we mean by perseverance is their own willingness to keep trying different ways, different things. Keep tackling a problem. So that they don’t just throw their hands up and say, I can’t do it. Yeah. Or they don’t throw their hands up and say, I’m gonna do what someone else tells me to do. We have big challenges in this world that we’re trying to solve, and they don’t get solved if people throw their hands up and say, I’m gonna let someone else tell me how to solve it. And I like it also, like in the science, I just, real quick on the science standards, one of their science and engineering practices is asking questions and defining problems. That’s something you can’t have the AI do for you if you don’t know what question to ask the AI to do.

Boz: Yeah. Absolutely.

Sharona: If you don’t know what problem you’re trying to solve, you can’t ask the AI to solve it for you.

Boz: Yeah. Absolutely. One of the other science ones is modeling. Again, you can go to AI and if you have a problem that you can define and a way you wanna model it, you can have the AI and it will do a pretty dagum good job. But you have to have already had that question and you have to already had the way you want it modeled. So I think both of those next gen science and engineering practices are incredibly crucial for what students really should know coming out of, any kind of science class.

But we do have five of these, so I don’t wanna spend the entire hour on this first one. The second big question, which is highly related to revisiting the purpose, is revisiting the learning outcomes. Like after we really l looked at the purpose, if your purpose has gotten any kind of changes then immediately your next step is we gotta re-look at those learning outcomes.

Sharona: And for me, the rubric I’m gonna use for myself, the proficiency scale of whether or not this is a learning outcome I wanna keep is, can the AI demonstrate proficiency in that learning outcome? And if so, does a student need to have that knowledge in their head or is there a higher level skill?

Now I wanna be very clear here. Sometimes I absolutely think that just because the AI can do it, I think the student has to be able to do it also. And this came up for me recently, I was reading some Twitter, ’cause that’s what I call it, commentary. There’s a couple of people I still follow on there.

There’s a big debate about math facts fluency in the early grades. Yeah. And there’s always this false dichotomy between those of us who say give them calculators or whatever. They’re like you’re saying that students don’t need math facts and they shouldn’t have to memorize their math facts. And that’s not true.

I actually do think that there should be some level of, in your head fluency with single digit, For sure, maybe even lower double digit math facts. Where I disagree with what people wanna do is that they then wanna go to three and four digit numbers and precise paper and pencil addition and grouping and doing these skills over and over, and I’m like, no, I want a student to be able to look at 3,481 plus 2,592 and go that’s somewhere around 6,000.

Yeah, exactly. And understand that it’s not 60,000 and it’s not 600. Just because the AI can do this thing doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a student do it. But if the AI can, then ask the second question, should a student be able to do this in their head really fast? Yeah.

And if not, maybe that’s not a good learning outcome. What do you think? Do you agree with me? Disagree?

Boz: I absolutely agree. But yeah, I, looking at I like the way you set that up as your rubric for yourself on your learning outcomes. But I also agree that our learning outcomes in any course, but because we’re both mathematicians thinking of this, from a lens of a math teacher, if they’re really procedural based, I would, again, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have any. But I would think long and hard about those.

Sharona: So let me give you a common example.

Boz: Okay.

Sharona: Because I think this illustrates what I’m thinking. Oftentimes, when we’re dealing with sort of some very simple modeling, one of the common ones we do is what we call a quadratic equation. And that’s basically a parabolic picture, a model, throwing a baseball, launching erotic, any rocketing those things.

And I’m explaining it for our audience, but those kinds of things. And quite often we gather the evidence of, we’ll say, okay, here’s a situation. Here’s the equation that goes with it. Find the point, the highest point, at what time does it hit its highest point? And you need a pretty simple formula for that.

It can be re derived, but a lot of people are like that’s a really good paper and pencil test question. We’re gonna make sure they know that formula. I am not convinced that formula is the most important thing you can take out of that model. I am convinced that understanding that every point along that path is a time that goes with a height is really important.

And so one way that to flip the script on the AI thing is I would absolutely use AI to consider revisiting my learning outcomes around this whole quadratic modeling thing and say to the AI, what are some maybe higher level learning outcomes I could ask? And then what are some assessment questions?

So maybe it’s not, you’re always looking for the peak. The reason we look for the peak is we always have this very simple formula to find the highest amount, but maybe that’s not what we want. Maybe we wanna find where all of the points where it’s above a certain level, something like that.

So I think that there’s ways to really rethink what we would actually use this model for.

Boz: I would even go a little bit further than that. Even though I’ve not taught algebra two in a few years, I’ve taught algebra two more than I’ve taught anything else. If you look at the amount of. I’ve taught it multiple times in a year. I have by far taught that more than anything else. And quadratics is a big part of that. And because I’ve always been someone that tries to focus on when are we actually gonna use this stuff? Doing projectile motion and stuff like that has always been a big part of my quadratic units.

It took me several years to realize though, that most students didn’t understand why or where parts of that formula came from. And if you ask me, especially if you’re thinking back to what we were just talking about, modeling, that’s really important. Knowing that negative coefficient at the beginning, whether you’re using metric or standard that’s the pull of gravity.

And that second coefficient is the initial velocity of whatever object you’re throwing. That’s really important, or I think it’s really important. So looking at how you are rephrasing and redoing those learning outcomes to focus more on that kind of thing. ’cause again, modeling is one of the eight practices in mathematics.

It’s one of the big ones in science. It’s one of those things that AI can’t do for us unless we know how to tell it to do it.

Sharona: Well and then there’s even something built in there. Why is gravity negative? That’s a choice. That’s a directional choice. And when you introduce it in algebra two, you haven’t yet gotten to some of the math where the sign is directional as opposed to subtraction. The sort of that basic addition, subtraction, view of the negative sign. When we get into pre-calculus and calculus, we have this opportunity to revisit the fact that gravity is negative and ask is it really? Yeah. Or is it directional? So there’s opportunities here where we could be really going deeper and more creative than just the same equation that they see all the time.

And they’re like, why am I doing this again? I’ve done it for two or three years now.

Boz: Yep.

Sharona: So I think there’s real opportunities there. So speaking though of paper and pencil testing, I’d like to go on to our third thing that I think that people should be looking at, and that is really critically thinking about your assessment structures.

And again, why? A lot of us are very concerned, including me, as we talked about a couple weeks ago on our teacher assessment identity, on feeling that the evidence that I’m gathering is authentically the students and not their use of AI or other tools or other people, like with Chegg, before AI really hit the scene.

And so is a paper and pencil, or even if it’s typed, proctored assessment, the best way to gather evidence because what is it gathering? It is gathering head knowledge.

Boz: Yeah.

Sharona: And is it gathering the right head knowledge? Or is it just gathering some facts that the students manage to retain in short-term memory for a short period of time?

Boz: Yeah, we’ve all done, especially people our age, we’ve all done the, cram for 24 hours before a test, take the test do fairly well on it, and two weeks later you couldn’t say crap about it. But yeah. Is that and we’re not saying it should never be, ’cause like we were just saying, some of these learning outcomes, yes that head knowledge might be an important piece and that might be something that the students really need. We’re not saying don’t do it. We’re saying revisit and think about it and make that conscious decision.

Sharona: And I am very much a testing assessment identity person. Like I rely on proctored testing. It’s just, you’ve got to be very careful in your assessment design, even in a proctored. I think that I can write a good proctored assessment that would test higher level skills, but I’m gonna have to train my students in what I’m looking for.

So I had an idea, for example, that I could do. We’ve talked in the past about there’s better assessment questions like error correction.

Boz: Yeah, error analysis.

Sharona: And one of the things I could see myself using AI for is giving the AI a problem, having them generate a correct work, and then one or two incorrect. Say, Hey, make some mistakes because I want to do this type of assessment. And it’ll do that if you tell it that’s what you want.

It’s a little bit resistant to intentionally making mistakes because it’s been programmed that way. But if you tell it, I’m trying to generate an assessment question that has errors so students can correct it, it’ll do it. But it might be nice because if I put these two things in front of a student and have them compare and contrast and find things and explain what’s wrong, that can get me to their skillset in that area of critiquing the work of others, which is one of the practice standards as well.

So I’ve always been a big fan. I think error analysis questions are some of the best insights to what students actually know and can and explain and use than pretty much any other question type other than full blown projects.

Sharona: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that we used to grapple with when we did those assessment PDs is it’s hard. We were at the time relying on our head knowledge or we would Google things and try to find resources and a lot of ’em weren’t directly on point. We’re like how much time can I afford to spend on creating an open middle question, creating an error correction question?

But now AI can do that work for us. At least a first draft.

Boz: Yeah. Which, let’s put a pin in that. ’cause that is directly tied to the fifth thing on our list. And we’ve got one more before that, but yeah, let’s put a pin in that. But that is a great example of you utilizing AI as an educator.

Sharona: Yes. So we have one more before we get to that fifth thing of how can we use it. So we started with purpose. We’re doing, basically we’re walking through the backwards design, right? Purpose to learning outcomes, to assessment structures, which we also mean then looking at assessments. Now I’m gonna go, let’s revisit the in-class activities.

And this is a big one for me because I wanna ask myself, and ask everyone out there to ask themselves, what is the purpose of your time with the students? So you have a certain number of hours where you are in front of the students. The students are with you. What’s the purpose of that time?

Boz: And this is interesting because when I was getting my undergrad degree from University of Central Oklahoma, which anyone that’s listening, if you’re anywhere in the western part of the south or the Midwest, my opinion, that is one of the best schools you can go for a teaching certificated program.

It was amazing. I got my master’s in education and basically did nothing new that I hadn’t done in that program. When I was student teaching, I was student teaching with people from other programs and I was so much further past them. But back then, one of their big messages that they were trying to instill in us was that educators today, this was 20 years ago, need to stop being the sage on the stage, instead be the guide by the side.

Now if you look at AI and you look at what role it’s done, in fact, anyone that’s listening to this can google it right now and I will bet you donuts to dollars, one of the things that will come up, if you Google how is AI changing education, is that it’s changing the role of the teacher and that the teacher needs to become more of a coach that can, focus on individual supports rather than the main delivery of information.

Which is a fancy way of saying stop being the sage on the stage and be the guide on the side.

Sharona: And your time with your students is the most valuable time you have.

temp: Absolutely.

Sharona: It is the time where you bring who you are as a person. Because one of the dangers, in my opinion of AI is that it’s gonna strip the human relationships out of education.

And we already know there’s a tremendous amount of isolation on our students. One of the things that they say that keeps students in college, they’ve done some research on this, is if at least one person at the university cares whether the student is there or not. And it can be a coach, it can be an advisor, it can be a teacher, but you only need one to dramatically improve retention.

Boz: Okay. We did not talk about this ahead of time, but with you saying that, you know what the number one factor that can keep a at risk student in high school and being successful at high school? Having one person on campus that they feel cares.

Sharona: Yes.

Boz: We didn’t talk about that at all before we’re doing that. I have never seen that in the higher ed. I’ve never looked, but I have never seen that. But you could look it up right now. For students at risk, which the populations that I teach, the schools I work at, majority of my students are considered students at risk. The number one thing that can keep a student engaged can keep them going to school and can help them be successful having one person on campus that they feel cares about.

Sharona: And that’s where I’m excited for what we’re gonna do in the fifth part of this is, if teachers can offload some of the higher cognitive load tasks that we need to address AI in our classrooms, we have the mental capacity to build more of these personalized relationships with our students. Yeah. ‘Cause that’s been one of the holdbacks for me, is I just only have so much bandwidth.

Boz: Yeah. But going back to that, what are we doing in the classrooms and looking at how we spend our time and how we build those relationships with our students, this is why we, you and I, both really gravitated to Dr. Robert Talbert and his flipped classroom. And I’ve told this story before, but I got involved with all of you guys and the first grading conference, which was called something different then, because of him. But that book flipped classroom, it started there with just, let’s take the initial learning out of the time that teachers spend with students so we can spend more time on deeper things.

And now with things like that ThinkVerse that I was talking about earlier, there’s even more ways to do that initial learning, either not with the teacher or out even outside the classroom, which allows you to really spend high quality time and really pushing your students into that higher level thinking.

If you’re planning for it. This doesn’t just happen. You really gotta think about and plan and how are you, but there’s an opportunity there to really change that teacher student relationship in very positive ways, which is still goes back to that idea of guide on the side instead of sage on the stage.

Sharona: And in addition to that, I would align, for myself, those in class activities because yes, that is the personal relationship, but I actually mean, so what is the student doing minute by minute when they’re sitting in the classroom with me? And for me, I want them working on problems. 97% of the time. I want them, either by themselves or talking to their peers, with a paper and a pencil and a computer grappling with a problem.

Because they’re not learning. When I’m talking, unless they’ve hit a roadblock and I’m directly addressing that roadblock.

Boz: But they’ve gotta be traveling down the road before they know where that roadblock is.

Sharona: Exactly. So that’s why I use the team-based inquiry learning materials. And I don’t care how big my class is, my class is probably gonna be 30, but I would do this if I had 200. And I have done this, you’ve seen me do this. We used to do these field trips with the SLAM program and we’d have six or seven high school classes in a classroom, so it’d be 150, 200 students. And I would run an active learning lesson. With dice. In a class of 200. And that’s, it can be done. It takes planning, it takes help, but it can be done.

So I would definitely ask yourself, what is the minute by minute? So yes, we wanna build relationships with our students, but what are they doing? With their brains and their hands? For the 50, 75, 90 minutes you might have them.

Boz: And quite honestly, for me as an educator, this is the funnest part out of all, looking at how to redesign. And this is where I get excited about it because now I really get to explore how I want to be as a teacher. This is the fun part. ’cause if I’m not having to be up at my board lecturing about, okay, here’s how solve a quadratic equation, you can factor, you can do this. This gives me the ability to be more creative with how I’m having students interact with concepts and problems, how students are interacting with each other, how I’m interacting with the students as a group or as individuals. Like this is really where I get to be creative. As we talk about these five things, the first three are really important and must be done, but this fourth one that gets me excited, like that’s the fun part of this.

Sharona: And I’m really gonna encourage people to sit down and take it deeper. Even if you’re someone who’s, I’ve done I have all these active learning activities and I have all this stuff, I’m really gonna challenge you to revisit them nonetheless. Because I know that for myself, three years ago, I still felt the need, and maybe I was right, maybe I was wrong, to get so much of this content into my students’ heads. Because looking it up was actually very hard.

Looking it up pre AI, looking up math to get help was difficult. A lot of times I would tell my students, go look at Wikipedia, because Wikipedia actually was some of the best resources pre AI and they were shocked because their writing teachers were always like, never use Wikipedia as a resource. I have found that AI is much better at explaining some of this stuff, so I’m gonna challenge people to go back and do it one more time.

Boz: Yeah and we’ve talked about this several times and pretty much every episode that we’ve brought up AI is, this is going to be the catalyst, the tool that changes our profession more than anything else has since really the mass availability of the internet itself. This is going to change our landscape more than anything else.

So yeah, if you’ve not revisited this in like the last year. And even then, the last six months, there’s been so many, like this is changing so rapidly that it’s almost, if you haven’t done it recently, like really recently, you probably need to think about it again.

Sharona: Okay. So how do we incorporate AI then. Because we’ve gone through the course redesign steps where these are where you should look at. But what about incorporating AI itself? Where do we see that?

Boz: And that really is the last of the five topics that we wanted to bring up. And, we’ve talked about this before. We’ve had a few whole episodes on this before, but one of the things that we said, and for people that question, how do you do all this alternative grading stuff? It sounds like so much work. One of the things that we’ve said, and I would say this is true regardless if you use traditional or alternative grading, maybe just more important with alternative grading, but it is utilizing the tools that are available to you as efficiently and as effectively as possible folks.

AI is a tool. AI is a very powerful tool that if we can learn how to incorporate that into our classes instead of fighting against, it can be a very powerful tool. And I know you’ve mentioned a few things that you have used, ways that you have used this. One of those is really getting more creative with your assessment problems and really trying to bring that cultural and linguistic relevance into your problems.

Sharona: I will tell you that as I go to do these four steps that we’ve already talked about, my first thing I will do is to dump this question into AI. Like I literally did it while we were recording. I said, what’s the purpose of pre-calculus? And I dumped it into AI, and there’s some fabulous stuff in there.

Now, I’m not gonna use what it gave me verbatim. But it really jumpstarted my own critical thinking. I’m gonna read you my prompt. My prompt said, what is the purpose of precalculus? I gave it no guidance.

Now one thing, and I’m not even logged in right now to my account, so it doesn’t even know it’s me, because once it knows it’s me, it’s gonna get even better. It gave me, at the very end, it gave me a bunch of stuff, and then it gave me one sentence. And it said, “pre-calculus ensures that you have the mathematical language concepts and problem solving skills needed to understand the ideas of calculus and succeed in any math heavy field.” That’s pretty darn good starting point.

Boz: That’s basically what you said earlier with a little bit more detail, but yeah, that’s, if you wanna sum it up right.

Sharona: So the first place I’m gonna incorporate AI is I’m going to use it heavily to do these four steps. To revisit my purpose, to revisit my learning outcomes. I’m going to ask it for suggestions on the weight that I should give to different of the practice standards. Like what would lean into the intrinsic motivation of my students to get this stuff. Looking at the assessment structures, the in-class activities, I can do so much personalization. I can do so much work. So I am going to use it every step of the way to kickstart my own thinking.

Boz: Yeah. And, but I know you’ve talked about this a lot, especially when, if we’re looking at that revisiting assessment structure, not just the structure, I’ve seen you dozens of times take the question that you have, that you want, dump it into an AI and say, rewrite this to make it more appealing to this age group, or, to do something specific for engineering or for architecture.

And you’ve gotten some great questions that would’ve taken you forever, to come up with either, because you just wouldn’t have put that mathematical concept with that skill or area, like using it with drones or just to come up with that many different versions, that many different applications.

That takes a while. Even if you’re really good at your content and knowing how that content is played in the real world. That’s.

Sharona: And then putting in some of the authentic assessment pieces where I can tell it I need something that’s a little more open-ended. I need something that has multiple paths to right solutions.

I need something that is a career relevant skill. So it’ll adjust it to say, here’s a math problem, and you need to write a persuasive paper to present it to your boss. And it’ll come up with those kinds of things, which are amazing too.

Boz: Yeah. So it really does, when we’re looking at how we incorporate this, instead of looking at how do we shield our students from AI, or cheating, how do we incorporate it in two levels? How do we incorporate as a time saving device for us, the educator? ’cause God knows time is our most precious commodity. So anything that can save us time is worth its weight in gold. But also how do we incorporate our students’ use of it instead of fighting against it?

And this is one of those things, especially with in education environments that I’m usually teaching in. ‘Cause I’ve always, with the exception of my student teaching, I’ve always taught at high needs areas, looking at even calculator use. Looking at, the use of the TI 84 calculator. Most popular school calculator there is. Has been for 30 years. But looking at how that was frowned upon and how that was almost, we had to shield our students from doing that. ’cause they’ve gotta learn these basic skills first. At too many schools of environments like mine compared to environments of high privilege where no, that’s a required element that they have to purchase going into the sixth grade.

Sharona: They have to, it’s a reason I give a TI 84 as a bar mitzvah present.

Boz: Yeah. It, and it really, it’s the same thing here now. It’s, oh no, we’ve got to completely shield away. No. we can find ways to do both. Get some of those procedural head knowledge things that are important, but also incorporate it to get those deeper student knowledge.

Sharona: I would say one of the things that we’re seeing an increase in is individualized learning assistance.

Boz: Yeah. That’s that think verse that I brought up at the beginning. Yeah.

Sharona: And that’s a huge place because sometimes faculty are grappling with, I’m not sure what the student’s needs are here. Whereas the AI might be faster at figuring out, because it can ask a very good series of leading questions to the students, explain this, do this. And it can calibrate pretty quickly where the student’s actual knowledge is based on the answers to those questions. And it can adapt and then bring in the relevant thinking. Or it will be able.

To, and that is, when you look at the most recent papers and articles coming out, that individualized learning is a huge piece of where AI and education is going right now. Oh, yeah. So I would love for us to be working to teach our students to use that.

Boz: Yeah. And we’ll link, we didn’t mention a lot of these articles by name, but we’ll link them. But yeah, you are right. You brought up a few articles from your research. Three or four. I found a couple of more, and you’re right. Pretty much every single one of them that’s the big change is the ability to truly give individualized differentiation in the classroom. Which again, differentiation is not a new thing for K 12 educators.

That was one of the other big topics. That’s why you had to be the guide on the side instead of the sage on the stages. ’cause you had to be able to give that differentiation. Now we have a way to not only do small group, but truly do individualized differentiation. We just gotta use it.

We gotta be not afraid to use it. But if we’re gonna use it, we’re probably gonna need to go and reevaluate and rethink about our course and go through this redesign process that we’ve been talking about.

Sharona: So now that we’ve given everyone listening to this podcast a huge amount of things to do over their winter break, I’m so sorry.

I’m gonna be with you the whole way in doing it. I just wanna thank everyone because getting to do this work and getting to do this thinking has been pushing me in ways that I enjoy to grow as an instructor and to grow as someone who’s adapting to the current environment.

Boz: I’m jealous of you right now ’cause you’re getting to do that and.

Sharona: Oh, what you think you’re not gonna be a part of this process the next four weeks? Come on.

Boz: I know that, I know I’ll be a sounding board for you, but still it’s been a while since I’ve had the opportunity to really take a class. It’s really been since the last time I did the slam program at a high school that I really got to play around and. Look at how to redesign things, and that was definitely pre AI. So.

Sharona: Yeah, I think you are deluding yourself if you think you’re just a sounding board, just saying fair warning, you might not get to be in the classroom. But other than that, I think you’re a full partner in this next one.

Boz: All right hope you had a great Thanksgiving. If you are listening to us in America, had a great Thanksgiving and for all of the holidays that are coming up in the next few weeks.

Hope everyone has a great holiday season. You’ve been listening to the Grading podcast with Boz and Sharona, and we’ll see you next week.

Sharona: Please share your thoughts and comments about this episode by commenting on this episode’s page on our website, http://www.thegradingpod.com. Or you can share with us publicly on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

If you would like to suggest a future topic for the show or would like to be considered as a potential guest for the show, please use the Contact us form on our website. The Grading podcast is created and produced by Robert Bosley and Sharona Krinsky. The full transcript of this episode is available on our website.

Boz: The views expressed here are those of the host and our guest. These views are not necessarily endorsed by the Cal State System or by the Los Angeles Unified School District.