AI in Education: Tools vs Mindset Shift

In this episode of The Edge podcast, hosts Georgia Terlaje and Jessica Pack engage with Dr. Michael Harvey, discussing the integration of artificial intelligence in education, the importance of relationships in learning, and the need for a shift in assessment practices. Dr. Harvey shares insights from his experience in New Zealand, emphasizing the significance of teacher training, student agency, and the ethical considerations surrounding AI in the classroom.

Transcript

Georgia Terlaje (00:06)

It's time for The Edge, a podcast from ITSTY and ASCD community leaders. If you're an educator, administrator, or anyone in the field of education, this is a podcast for you. Over the next few episodes, you will hear stories of people who are doing the rewarding and at times hard work in education. And these stories will be brought to you by ITSTY and ASCD community leaders. Coming up today, we're again at the Edge of Learning in San Antonio, Texas at ITSTY ASCD live annual conference.

community leader host, Chirlahi. I'm an educator of 36 years and I'm here with my favorite partner in crime, Jessica Pack. Thank you, Georgia. I'm Jessica Pack, a middle school teacher and an ISTE author. I am really excited for today's episode because we are here recording at ground zero of tech innovation and powerful pedagogy. We are joined for this episode by our fellow ISTE community leader, Dr. Michael Harvey, who is the director of innovative learning at Mulborough Boys

College in New Zealand. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you and Kia ora.

So we're so glad to have you back, I remember the last time it was a lot of navigating time zones, because it was on Zoom. There was an algorithm involved. And I'm glad to have you in person. So appreciate that. So we always like to start out with your origin story with ISTE and the ISTE Community Leader Program. How did you come to be involved? Yeah, I actually got involved through my first trip to San Antonio in the 2019 version of ISTE, where I got to connect with global educators here. at ISTE and they said hey would you like to join the program and here I am all those years later again. That's perfect. ⁓ What is your...passion, your platform, your message that you're kind of sharing with others as you have those important hallway conversations or presentations at this year's conference? Yeah, you might not be aware, but there's something called artificial intelligence, ⁓ which is permeating the corridors. And I guess my story is I'd like to incorporate more human-centric aspects of education ⁓ when tackling the issues involved with artificial intelligence.

So I when we had you on last time we talked a little bit about AI in New Zealand and we had a couple other guests from around the world.

In just the last year or like 18 months, how have things changed for you around AI and accessibility in your context? Still in our context, ⁓ so Marlborough Boys College, be fooled by the name. ⁓ It's basically a middle-desyle school in terms of socioeconomics. So we have really rich kids from the wine region. Also, we have really poor kids from the gang communities. So there's still issues around digital equity and that's the same issue as well with other parts of the country. Apoteke College, which is originally where I'm from on the east coast of the North Island, has about 700 students at that school and they've only got eight Chromebooks. So there's still an issue around digital equity a year on.

So how is AI impacting teaching and learning in that environment where you're sharing so few devices among so many? Exactly. Student use of AI is still not paramount in the country. ⁓ And even teachers are still hesitant. A lot of that is a lack of professional development around it. So it's still a moving ⁓ project. I'm involved in a working group with the New Zealand government at the moment through the AI Forum trying to make that change. ⁓slow progress involving government. yeah, slow steps.

Well, that's, know, everything has to be slow, go slow to go fast ⁓ at some point. So what are some cool things that you're doing at your school in your context around AI, whether it's with staff or with students, what's been happening in the last couple months? Yeah, so from my perspective, I'm trying to train my staff on how to use agents in particular and small language models because a lot of the PD I've noticed globally is around focusing on tools and I don't think that's the most effective way of doing it. I think if we really want to transform education, we have to be changing the teacher's mindset of how we're the tools and actually building tools.

Could you just say a little bit more about that, like the comparison? Yeah, so basically it's either I teach them how to, or here's a tool, say brisk teaching, this is how you use a tool in the classroom. As opposed to I'm getting the teachers to go onto the back end, consider how to develop these small language models, how to developing their prompts, what information they're using, the ethics involved with it, in terms of student privacy. So you're making them think deeper onto it, so that way we're actually moving the dial in terms of education from not just maintaining the status quo. quote with, here's a lesson plan to actually how are we integrating pedagogy into our lessons with the facilitation of AI. So it's not using it as a translational tool where it's like build a lesson plan. It's actually a relationship. it's basically, so what do you think of this? that might not work. OK, what about this idea? So it's kind of bouncing back and forth with your agents. It really follows the work of ⁓ Dr. Sabakwedwai, who I met at FETC in December. So I read a book, obviously. designing schools and I've kind of taken some of those ideas on board going back to New Zealand. It sounds like a really a systemic approach and it's nice that you're able to kind of like onboard everyone at your staff.

because it's kind of like hit or miss in our experience, in our area, in our district. It's like people are very siloed. So everyone's taking their own approach to AI and kind of like picking their own tools that do cool things. And they're not really looking at the underpinning of how to use it appropriately and what it's actually doing. So ⁓ where do you think others could start when they're trying to kind of onboard a staff to using AI effectively? I think really the...

The beginning conversation is like what do you want to get out of your classroom?

So that's one of the things I've, in terms of my role, I'm very big on relationships. So I'm sitting down with the teachers one-on-one to guide them through the process. Because usually PD seems to be ⁓ one and done, whereas you can't do that. You've got to give that extra support to guide teachers through the process so then they become the leaders. And that's why I kind of see leadership. Rather than me leading from the front, I'm actually creating the leaders to drive forward the change I want.

Which is brilliant, right? Because you need those people, boots on the ground, that are kind of maybe ahead of some that are reluctant to do things. ⁓ So that's good on you for having that foresight to think that through. ⁓ What's something cool that maybe one of your staff or more are doing that you ⁓ really want to kind of push to the forefront that you think they're doing it well around AI? Yeah, ⁓ a lot of the space initially with the use of AI was around assessment. and assessment marking, but I...

firm of the idea that the educator has to be at the heart of assessment because the research is clear in terms of student engagement that students want to hear the voice of the teacher. So one of the cool things we've been working on is how to integrate literacy especially. So I've been helping the Literacy English department specialist basically to co-construct a small language model that then other teachers can potentially use to integrate literacy into their lessons and that can be in any context. So again, it's basically a thought partner by the side who's helping you design your lessons.

It's like a super needed area too because we're still experiencing that COVID gap. ⁓ I don't know if you're still seeing that as well, but I'm at the middle school level. So we have students who missed a lot of foundational skills during the pandemic. And it seems like at secondary, we're always scrambling to help them catch up on those foundational skills and be using their literacy skills to like learn content instead of just reading to learn or learning to read. We're reading to learn, right? Yeah. The idea of the cognitive skills, I guess, thing with the COVID was the social emotional learning aspect and how we're still dealing with that. So if you're focusing on AI and having a computer screen teaching the students, that's not really going to be effective. You need to really have the teacher being at the heart of the relationship between the student and the teacher.

What is something you'd like to share with our audience? Because I imagine most of our audience is like Western-based, like in the States, about just education in New Zealand. I know some things are similar, some things are vastly different. What are some things maybe we should understand about? education in New Zealand. It's actually an interesting sea change at the moment. ⁓ Like most of the world we're having issues with teacher retainment and also staffing. So we have a number of teachers from other cultural backgrounds and they struggle ⁓ because at the heart of New Zealand's education system is the concept of relational learning.

Especially teaching with boys. The boys actually have to have a relationship with you before they actually start learning. And so that's one aspect I think in New Zealand that we undersell. I think we're very good at it and we need to really push that out, especially in the world of AI because it isn't the AI that's actually going to be driving the learning, it's those relationships. So that's I think one aspect.

That's super smart. ⁓ Relational capacity isn't always something that we take time to foster for sure. think, again, my experience comes from secondary schools, and we tend to be a little less focused on the whole child and a little more focused on our specific content areas. ⁓ What are some ideas you have for how educators could kind of prioritize the relationship building over content? Yeah, I think, at least in the New Zealand context as well, it's getting to know the family as well. making them have agency and also giving the students agency in their choices because we are a universal design for learning school. That's our core pedagogy. ⁓ So it's about maintaining student voice and also maintaining whanau or family voice as well. They're actually co-constructing the learning experience with their student and with the school.

Which makes all the difference. When you have agency, you want to be a part of it. And I'm sure for educators too, like in your school, if they have some agency, they feel more passionate about what they're doing. Yeah, and that's one of the advantages of using a small language model rather than a tool. Because if you're just using a tool, it's dropping out something. Whereas you're co-constructing that agent with a mind of what you want. So it's actually enhancing the agency of the educator.

And I know you were talking about ⁓ getting away from doing assessments like that and assignments, and know Jessica and I have talked to lot of people around AI about, we really believe teachers around the world, have to...figure out a different way to deliver assignments in some cases in the age of AI. For some people that's super exciting to have to re-figure things out and for other people that's horrifying. But I think that's really the lens we have to look through is it's not going away and we need to figure out how to harness it and create assignments and assessments that... ⁓show what kids know and it's not going to be paper, pencil, fill in the bubble anymore.

Yeah, I that was one of the interesting conversations we had in terms of the marking I mentioned earlier in the podcast. ⁓ So we had certain departments who wanted the AI to basically outsource the marking because we didn't necessarily have specialists in particular roles. So if you outsource the marking, the specialist doesn't have to be involved in the process. But ⁓ that's not an effective way to be teaching because one of the advantages of actually getting to mark is that you see what weaknesses you have in your own teaching, which then you can reflect on, which you don't get that process. And it could have become potentially perverse of a student creating AI learning, the AI marking it, giving it as excellence. And there'd be no human who have actually seen the assignment. So that was, again, a conversation. And that's, the conversation at the start, underpinning the ethics and why we're doing something, the logic of the process of assessment. I do think we have to move on with assessment.

we tend to focus on recall a lot with our assessments. ⁓ And we need to move on the assessment to metacognition. So for example, an AI could generate three responses, and then the student has to critique that response and select which one is the best out of these three responses and potentially ⁓ why. The obsession still is that we're obsessing about catching students with AI, but we're not ⁓ saying, well, how can we actually show learning with AI?

really like that take on it with introducing sort of that reflective component and really analyzing the output of what AI has given you. ⁓ Before we let you go today, where can listeners connect with you to continue the conversation, to follow your work as you continue to amplify? ⁓ human-centered use of AI? Yeah, think probably ⁓ Dr. Michael Harvey on LinkedIn. I think it's MJ Harvey as ⁓ the moniker at the top. That's probably the most easy way. And any other social, it's Dr. Underscore Harves on Insta or on X and on Blue Sky.

Thank you. Well that wraps up this episode of the edge podcast brought to you by ISTE and ASCD community leaders We hope you had a great time My name is Jessica and you can find me at pack woman to zero weight on X and Instagram And I'm Georgia true lahi and you can find me at Georgia true lahi on X and blue sky and both of us at storytelling saves the world calm

On behalf of everyone at ISTE and ASCD's The Edge podcast, remember to keep exploring your passion, fostering your creativity, and continue taking risks. All things that can bring you to the edge.