KIC S3E3 "Empowering Educators: AI, Well-Being, and Diverse Learning Needs" Featuring Phillip Hochman Round 2

In this episode of Karten's Inclusion Conversations, Toby welcomes back Phil Hochman, who has a diverse background in education, including health and physical education, AI, and well-being for educators and students. The conversation delves into the transformative potential of AI in education, emphasizing how it can ease teachers' workloads by automating routine tasks and personalizing student learning. Phil discusses the importance of balance in using technology, ensuring it complements physical activity and holistic well-being. The dialogue also covers the significance of diverse assessment methods, particularly for students with exceptionalities, and stresses the need for educators to stay informed about new tools to best support their students. Ethical considerations in AI use and the evolving nature of education with technology are key themes, highlighting the ongoing shift towards more individualized and adaptive learning environments.

Article:  How to Maslow Before Bloom, All Day Long

https://www.edutopia.org/article/how-maslow-bloom-all-day-long/

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Transcript

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Welcome, everybody, to Karten's Inclusion Conversations KIC. And I have the honor of speaking to a guest who was on KIC before, Phil Hochman. And he's also someone who's very involved with the launching of this podcast and the maintenance of it. So you have diversified backgrounds in the field of education in different branches, everything from AI, artificial intelligence, which I don't really know if it's artificial anymore. Maybe you could speak about that in the way that it has become natural for some teachers to turn to. You're also an expert on well-being and thinking about the well-being of educators taking care of ourselves and also the social and emotional learning of the students that we work with. You are a strength trainer and I think you're a strength trainer in many ways, strengthening minds and bodies. So I think that might be a little bit of an intro, but Phil, could you tell our listeners a little bit more about who you are and why education has to be? It is your passion. I know that. All right. Well, thank you for having me back, first off. I appreciate that. If you're listening to this, you're like, who is this guy? Who's getting all this hype about? So let me give you a little context of my background. I'm a classically trained health and physical education teacher. I've been teaching in the Central Bucks School District for the last 20 plus years. I have taught before that in the Philadelphia School District at Olney High School. Then I got a job out in Central Bucks, Bucks County, Central Bucks East and West, taught at Hollycock Middle. I've been at three different alimentaries, so I've literally taught K through grad school. In the grad school experience, I've taught for a bunch of different colleges, universities on a bunch of different topics, including, as mentioned, artificial intelligence, a bunch of technology courses I designed from scratch, worked on a whole bunch of stuff when it comes to health wellness. That is the duality where we're working with students, improving their health and wellness, obviously, for my primary job, and also teaching other classroom teachers how to improve your students' health and wellness and their own. So that's kind of the background for me. I've been doing graduate work at the graduate level for almost 18 years now. I've taught over 200 plus graduate classes for a bunch of different colleges, taught some undergrad as well. So yeah, I've done a lot of teaching. Yes, teaching is my passion. There's a lot of stuff. It's so enthusiastic. You mentioned AI and it being very pervasive is the word I like to use, how it's everywhere. People didn't realize how much AI they're already using. If you got fed to this podcast through a search engine, whether it's Google or it got recommended to you, congratulations, you're already using AI. If you use GPS today, you used AI, you use some kind of digital payment center or just with your social media feed and got fed stuff, you used AI today. So it is everywhere. It has a scary connotation because there's a lot of unknowns, which is a realistic fear to have because we don't know where it's all going. But I try to pull out the positives. How can we as teachers make our lives easier and less stressful by using the power of AI to do a lot of the common tasks as teachers often get caught up doing, wasting a lot of our time, we can have a little chat bot or a little generative AI tool to do it better for us. Right. And this podcast all about inclusion and I think AI has some good possibilities for students with different exceptionalities if the teachers co-regulate how they use them. Did I phrase that correctly or do you want to add something on your take for how it affects special populations and how maybe we could help it to help students who might be considered exceptional and AI might open an avenue that wasn't open a year ago? Yes. Previously mentioned in the prior podcast. Make sure you check that one out as I am the KIC producer as well. If you didn't know. Ah, yes. Our listeners might've realized and recognize that voice that introduces the podcast. Absolutely. So the word I would use is transformative. So the big transformative part of AI. And as I mentioned in the previous podcast, AI can be used as supplementation to the teacher or as an assistant to the teacher. And it can personalize education for each individual student and create all kinds of tasks, assessments, assignments that are tailored to each individual student's interest. Before that would take hours. It'd be unwieldy. The amount of work it would take to individualize every single piece of instruction. Now it's just a couple of clicks and if you're really good, you can do some voice to text. So you don't have to type anything, create some well-crafted prompts and use these, it's called artificial narrow intelligence tools that can do one thing really well and create these kinds of assistance for you to help aid your students. And so it kind of takes some work off your plate. If the student is able to, they can interact with the chat bot with guard rails in place. They're not searching or being given incorrect or inappropriate information. And as all these tools develop, there's a lot of AI platforms that already do this for you, have these guard rails built in. So if they ask an inappropriate question, how to do something that's bad or somehow inappropriate for school, it would say, we can't give you that answer. And that's just the guard rail built in. So we have to be wary of this as we go through, making sure we vet the tools, test it out as if we're our worst possible student to make sure that the tools that we use are appropriate for our students. Because we can always think about what can go wrong here. Think about that. Try it out with the tool first. And of course, I always use my magic marker theory. I think I may have mentioned this before. There's a reason why if you use magic marker in your classroom, there's not magic markers all over your walls, your chairs, your face, the kids, each other. Because at some point somebody taught those kids how to use a magic marker. Magic marker can be used to be very destructive. But if you teach them how to use it properly, it can be used to make something beautiful as well. So a tool is only as good as how well the students are trained on it. I love that. And how the students are trained on it. And then I know you're also involved in professional development. How we get teachers to bite into it and not think this is one more thing I need to learn or do. But maybe this is a different way for us to approach education. And it's not the only answer. I mean, when you think about your background, right, you're a phys ed teacher. You believe in movement and health. Is AI healthy? That's a good question there. So I would say that there needs to be a balance. And like anything else in life, I don't know if there's exactly a balance. Balance is kind of a tough term too, because the more I've learned, there's never really a balance. It's more like, is this okay in this given situation? Am I allowed to give up this in order to gain this? Having a work-life balance isn't really a thing. It's like, can I have at least a work-life acceptance? Can I be at a place where maybe this week my work is taking over a little more, and then next week I can help out a little bit more around the house? And it's not really the balance piece. Just work-life success would be a better way I would phrase that. So we're talking about how do we incorporate movement education into the classroom? And then how do we incorporate AI? Once again, you have to figure out where does it fit best? I know that if I sit for too long in the classroom, no matter how exciting the presentation is, no matter how engaging the AI tool is, my brain is going to shut down. I have melatonin building up in my brain, forcing me to try to go to sleep. I have blood pooling in my lower extremities, taking away from my brain. So at some point I'm going to have to get my students up and moving if I'm doing some sort of rigorous academic or computer-based work. It just has to happen. And I know that the brain encodes information differently when I move. I can put information stored in different parts of the brain, like the occipital, cerebellum, instead of just the frontal lobe when I actually get them up and moving. I can use movement education to have deeper encoding, deeper connections for their own neural networks. So yes, there has to be a balance there of some kind, and that always comes back to the art of being an educator. Where do things fit best for my student population in front of me for this given time? I like that answer, you know, kind of the yin and the yang of using AI and balance figuratively and literally, like I know as an educator myself, whether I'm in a class of preschool or college students, grad students, when they get that glazed look in their eyes, you know, it's kind of like a sponge. We could keep pouring and pouring more information, but it can only hold yay amount, right? And I think about AI and it kind of makes me happy to think about, you know, some tools that had it before it was officially called AI, like text summarizers for some kids, but you know what I always recommended it. I don't know. What do you think of this idea is that they would look at an online summarizer and then I would say, well, hold a highlighter and the actual text. And could you mirror what that is and do you agree with it? What do you think of that? Well, one of the more common strategies now that being AI is actually being used with the K to 12 population is they have the students generate the prompts, they have students create this, and then, okay, AI wrote this, now I want you to rewrite it in your own words, make it yours. So now they're doing a lot more of the higher level analysis of a passage. So you're not starting out with the basic knowledge and understanding levels of Bloom's Exotomy. Now you're moving up to, you know, the analysis, the creation piece. It just moves the starting line of what you're capable of doing from the very beginning. It's another shift, just like the internet was scared everybody. Yes. Right. And education is kind of like a slow moving whale. And what I think education needs to be is kind of like a school of fish that can change direction quickly and it's never going to do that. And when you're presented with such a transformative, disruptive tool like artificial intelligence, I think back to when the internet came out. If you're an old enough listener like myself, where you can remember when internet first came out, everybody was scared, all the kids are going to cheat. What are we going to teach now that they can have all the information and click? This is the same kind of disruptive tool where students are going to have access to write a five paragraph essay without thinking about it. So now they can do that. Is it good? Is it bad? Can they analyze it? Now that they created it, what can they do now that that's the starting point? And that used to be the finishing point. So it's going to redesign our formative to summative assessment. Most of my teaching career was focused on the summative assessment. We are going to keep working formatively, formatively, but we can only grade them when it's showtime, the summit of it, the big picture thing. Now they can create the summit of assessment. Oh, now we've got to start creating an informative. Do they know what they're doing? Do they know the process? What does their process look like? So this is going to shift at the opposite direction again, but once again, it's going to shift it further down the line of higher order thinking skills. So ultimately it's going to progress where we start and where we end up. It's just going to have to shift our mindset of how we, how are we going to assess students? How are we going to keep them academically honest? And what are you going to create? How are we going to assess them? It's all going to have to shift in order to meet the demands of the new tool out. Yeah. You know, you're connecting bodies and minds with diversity and respecting that diversity in the same way, what I'm hearing from you. And you mentioned some things that cross over to another thing that you were talking about in wellness and even character education and traits like honesty, ethics, code of ethics, right? Yeah. Ethics, whether you're talking to your peer or using AI or rotating and in a volleyball class, you know, and passing the ball to a teammate. And I think that a lot of these principles are at the core of the education in the sense of deciding that not one tool, be it an AI tool, be it a stretching exercise, or be it any other type of engagement that the students are doing that negates who they are and what they need and how we see what they need. And you mentioned something else, which is really important is assessment because sometimes a lot of people are good at putting the giggles in the instruction. And then they give like multiple choice tests and kids with executive function issues, kids with ADHD, they don't do well in autism, they don't do well on those kinds of tests. So what you're bringing out here, which I kind of like, and I hope our listeners could expand on it as well, is that it's a starting point. We're in an exciting time, like a launching pad, and it does indicate all other teaching practices. Phil, add more sprinkles and cherries to what I just said, please. All right. Plenty of sprinkles and cherries. So what I'm hearing is that we're talking about knowing what tool to use at what time. And as a professional, we need to be able to pull out the tools. But if you're not even aware the tool exists, you can't use it. So we're talking about exceptionalities for all kinds of learning differences. There is going to be a tool that's going to meet the need of the student where they're at. And so knowing what the tool is, how to use it appropriately is kind of the gist of what we're trying to get now. Until we get to the point where AI has artificial general intelligence, which means it has the same executive functioning as a fully formed adult who's went through school and can answer all the questions in any given dynamic situation, we're going to be the ones that are going to have to figure out, okay, what is a tool that best meets this kid's need at this time? Now we're talking about the assessment side of it. Obviously, if you know anything about the universal design for learning, we're talking about UDL and the three principles as multiple means of assessment. So no one assessment tool fits every single student. I always think about the classic cartoon, where they have a bunch of different animals at the bottom of a tree. There's like a monkey, an elephant, and a fish in a fishbowl. And the teacher says, okay, here's a test. Everyone's got to climb that tree. And they're all looking at each other. Obviously, if you're the monkey, that's a great test. I got this. No problem. But if you're the fish in a fishbowl, you're like, how am I going to do well on this test? So as we always generate tests, you can't have a one size fits all. So one of the biggest knock on standardized testing is that obviously people who have test taking issues, whether it's anxiety or just cognitive issues or there's a whole variety of things that would impact your final score, is that the end all be all. The problem I have with standardized testing is not that we do it. I think it has a place in value in seeing if students met a certain level of understanding. But when you tie it to financial incentives, tie it to financial penalties, then that's where it becomes a big problem. I have no problem with scoring. But if you're grading, tying to funding, then that becomes a much bigger problem. So I think that's where the no child left behind push, which we're still in, we're still smack in the middle of the era of standardized testing, really fall short at meeting the needs of all students. You know, I know I've been on that curve of assessment, it used to be that kids with disabilities were allowed to take in New Jersey, they had this two grade levels below what they were. But if they keep doing that, and that whole premise behind inclusion, pull them out of the class because they don't they're not where they need to be kind of thing, then we're not valuing diversity in our world. And if we're just marking for the grade, are we also marking for progress? So you know, I always use that example, even if a student fails a test and gets 60% correct, maybe he, she or they started at at at 20%. And the learning was effective. So it's preparation for life. And AI and knowing how to use it properly is a great thing for, I think, professionals and professionals, not only using it for their instruction, but teaching students, especially your your kiddos on the secondary level, it's a lifelong skill that could go on a resume that could go in an office that could go on the job. These are real life skills in our day and age. I don't know if you know that video, you probably do being in technology, the greatest technology things of the 20th century. And they're like ancient history today. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot to unpack there. So you mentioned a lot of different things about, I would say, least respective environment. Every kid should be included until it's not the least restrictive environment for that. That's pretty much the way the law is written. So you're basically violating federal law if you don't put it in the least restrictive environment. It's never defined. Appropriate is a vague word in the law. I know. And that gives a little discretion to everybody involved. But once again, when it comes to leadership environment, there are going to be gains and you said it necessarily doesn't need to be academic. They've made growth in some way, shape or form. Are they ever going to be the same as other students? We don't know unless we put them in there and try it out. Wait a minute. Do they have to be the same? No, but when it comes to meeting a requisite amount of skills in order to become a productive member of society, there is going to be you do a skill based curriculum and they don't meet those skills in that base. There's the big debate. That's where it all falls into. If you're talking about testing, no, obviously testing, like I said, we already talked about that not being a valid measurement of everyone's understanding of curriculum. But if you move more to a skills based here, the skills that we're going to try to make sure every single student knows by the end of their academic career, have they met those skills to whatever degree we identify it as, then it's a pretty you can create multiple ways to assess if they met the skill or not. And that could be a more valid way to assess students when it comes to differentiating using AI. The benefit there is now I have a tutor for that kid in that area to talk them through the problem, to help them work on individual things. We find in all the research, the students that we found that were labeled as cognitively disabled, as soon as they get past that block, the one thing like stuck, they often run ahead and we often perceive them when it comes to testing as being advanced or academically gifted because they got stuck on a premise. And as if I'm doing this one size fits all model, which is basically what the American education system is, I have a teacher up front, I'm presenting stuff, I'm going to show you stuff, I'm coming up to the board, you fill out stuff, and then I'm going to walk around and try to guess what you're thinking. It's just an inefficient way to deliver information in any other field. They're given all kinds of data and information on where the students are stuck. I've been in technology. We can have them if they get stuck in a problem, I can see where the red flag will pop up on my screen. Sally now has a problem. They've been on the same question for 10 minutes. Now I can go over or I can send another one of Sally's classmates who understands that concept to go help them. Or I can have an AI chatbot, walk them through the process, send them to a video link that can reteach them at their own pace where they can stop, rewind, replay. There are so many different levels to how we can now individualize and personalize education for every single student, which weren't even a dream, not even 10, 15 years ago. So we're at that precipice where the next big shift is, hey, can I get an individualized AI chatbot that can tutor every single student safely with the right guardrails, right tutorial? And I don't want them giving them the answer. I want them to prompt them, hey, do you think about looking at this way? Hey, watch this video. Come back. What were your thoughts on that process? It would do exactly what a highly qualified teacher would do in that situation and free up the teacher time to structure the fun activities, to structure the building, the destroying, the beautiful presentations, the modeling, the physical activity and let the nuts and bolts kind of blocking and tackling education, getting understand the fundamentals done with AI. And now that we have those fundamentals, now let's create. Let's move way up the hierarchy. Let's have them to build beautiful things, create design, because this is a personal side. America is not really good at anything besides growing corn and cattle. What we dominate the world in is ideas and we are the best generator of ideas when it comes to the greatest ideas that have come out in the world, the vast majority of them come out of the United States. And we have to facilitate our students being creative, not being robots, studying all day, regurgitating facts, crushing standardized testing. We're always compared unfairly to other countries because they spend so much time just cramming for tests. Yes, they are really good at taking tests. You know what they're not good at? Thinking for themselves, problem solving, communicating, cooperating with each other. So those are the skills, I think, that American education values and unfortunately is trying to almost run out because we're so worried about scoring better on tests that we don't value the right thing, the thing that we're really good at. And obviously there has to be some things we have to be proficient at in order to have a baseline of content knowledge. But when we undervalue the social emotional piece or the cooperation piece or the just creativity piece, where I think that's where the United States really thrives. Thank you so much for those insights. I just read an article you reminded me of when you were speaking and maybe we'll put it in the links. I'm telling you, because you're the one that's going to put it in the links, but it's entitled Maslow before Bloom. Not that we devaluing cognitive thought. It's huge, but cognitive thought without the affect and what you're describing and everything you said was like in the narrative of an IEP, the functional level of performance, what kids could do, learning to take responsibility. And I love that part of learning how to learn. I think we call that inclusion fail. Yes, absolutely. And that also sparked a memory in my head. So I teach a graduate class when it comes to movement education and it connects back to my undergraduates. I have a B.S. in kinesiology from Westchester University. Go Golden Rams. And when I am teaching other teachers how to create this lesson objectives, they always have the cognitive piece down. Students will they have their behavioral verb and then we work on them creating a measurable task. We get that. Then I'm like, OK, what about the other two? They're like, what are you talking about? Well, you have to have your affective and psychomotor as well. So I always have in my lesson plans affective. What I want the students to think, feel, do. We often forget about that is just as valuable. If I don't have an emotional connection to information, I won't remember it. Our our brains stamp every single experience we have with an emotion, it's a positive emotion. We're more likely to do it again in the future. If I had a great experience in math throughout my school years, I'm going to like math. If I had a bad teacher one year, it could ruin it for everything. If I had a negative experience where I got stuck and no one gave me any tools to help me, I could hate math forever. And that's something that it connects with every other negative memory you have in that same subject area. So the more fun we can make learning, the more affective and good times to think about that. Sometimes learning isn't fun. So you think about how can I make this a little bit more palatable or tolerable for my students because of the affective piece? And then there's the psychomotor. How are we using movement to teach things? We got to get people up and moving and tying this back to the earlier conversation. If I'm not getting them up and moving in some way, shape or form, I'm just missing parts of the brain that could be encoding information. I am just hurting their ability to recall it when they need it. So when I say cap your lessons, I'm talking about have your cognitive objective, but you also need your affective and your psychomotor as well. Beautifully stated, beautifully stated and not over jargon, because I think every listener could relate to that. And you can even take yourself back to that time you were a student and a lot of educators knew they wanted to be teachers when they were young because of that great experience of learning and then having it in your blood and wanting to share with others, which you just lose that. And I thank you for coming on for a second round and for doing all you do behind the scenes of KIC as well. Phil, you have any closing remarks you'd like to say? Well, thank you very much. You make this the time fly by. Hopefully the listeners appreciate the hard work that you put into creating these wonderful inclusion related conversations with a bunch of professionals, parents, families, community members. So you do such a nice job. And I want to say to you on record, thank you for having me on. My pleasure. Have a great day, everyone. Copyright 2024, Karten's Inclusive Conversations. Thank you for listening. Check out other episodes on all major platforms.