Michelle Zimmerman:
Director of Innovative Teaching and Learning Sciences, Renton Prep
How do we cultivate the human learning ability in the AI era? These are all really great points, and it actually matches both viewers, Jonathan and Laurie’s, on a learning science perspective.
Looking at everything from the zone of proximal development to constructivistic thinking, to just even child development in general, we’ve been working with early childhood all the way through high school, and a lot of these things are matching up with what Lori and Jonathan mentioned, where things that were too time intensive or human intensive on the teacher’s end to support around some of those human development components were just right out of our reach, and Lori developed this one to line up with our core knowledge sequence.
Then to look at even just this one section of sayings and phrases when we want to develop some of the human linguistic capacity, and not just what is this phrase: “It’s raining cats and dogs,” but then how do we get emotions surrounding that? How do they transfer learning from one domain to another? How does it become something that’s culturally relevant? And then, how do you capture that human side of this?
And so, just this piece that really helped support and helped Lori on the ed tech side of supporting teachers to make sure they’re covering content, it took the cognitive load off the teacher to be able to then focus on what do I want to do and how in depth do I want to go with this.
And there are two examples of how their inquiry around this phrase, “What does it mean, raining cats and dogs?” became something much bigger, where they used generative AI to first imagine their own drawings of what raining cats and dogs looks like. Then use generative AI to try and develop these images, and then ask, does this match what I imagined? If not, do we alter the prompt? What do we do differently?
And that part in there creates a type of scaffold to somewhat structure and support some of the elements that Jonathan was mentioning that we would go through as adults because we had to do the hard way, but by prompting some of these questions to go through that kind of gritty space of how do I address this, how do I understand it, how do my classmates understand it, etc.
Then you could take it into embodied movement (part of what I did at University of Washington, crossing multiple domains with dance education and cross-age mentoring), to see that come live on stage, to bring in digital references and their own video interviews around the backdrop of the theatre.
Parents could see this interaction and the human movement on stage, all coming from organizing and coming up with these concepts of what Lori had here to try and define which things do we as teachers care about, and what is really catching their attention., how do we develop that out further?
Lori, did you want to mention anything else more about that design in that space?
Lori Nichols:
Educator and Leadership Team, Renton Prep
I just found it. I mean, it was great, and I know Michelle brought this in the whole concept of teacher as researcher, and so the only way I was able to compile the videos of the students and things was because the teacher was documenting the student use, actually recording them, putting in the prompt.
The key part of is that what you were picturing, and to actually hear students say ‘no’ when they got the results of the image of raining cats and dogs, because it was just raining on top of on top of cats and dogs. When the student themself did have that image of “no, I thought the cats and dogs would be falling from the sky.”
And so that whole process is how do we redefine our prompt? And I just thought that was really powerful. I mean, these are kindergarteners, and they’re not just taking the first output, and I think that’s also what we want for our teachers in their learning design.
Most of our teachers have said, “I use generative AI as a brainstorming partner, thinking partner, but I still have these ideas.” It’s just a matter of doing some of the heavy lifting and building it out or differentiating it, but we have to take those pauses to have those critical reflection points, either out loud or internally, on “does this match?” And there’s been several cases through the school year where this doesn’t quite match what I was thinking, so I’m gonna keep going, I’m going to do another iteration, or we would even have conversations where what is being suggested doesn’t really match our learning design, where we want students to be, you know, learning in interdisciplinary, project-based ways. It was kind of going backwards, and so we had to know the difference so that we could, you know, maintain that culture and our mission and vision again.
