RBERNing Questions

AI Tools for Success in the ESL Grammar Classroom w/ Dr. Katya Goussakova & Dr. Nicole Hammond

• Yasmeen Coaxum • Season 3 • Episode 14

Share episode

Episode Summary:

In this episode of the RBERNing Questions podcast, host Yasmeen Coaxum continues the TESOL 2025 Presenters’ Series from the TESOL Convention 2025 with Dr. Katya Goussakova and Dr. Nicole Hammond from Seminole State College of Florida. They discuss their presentation titled 'AI Tools for ESL Grammar Teachers,' their backgrounds in English language teaching, and their innovative methods for integrating AI, specifically Chat GPT, into grammar instruction. Tune in to hear their insights on creating engaging grammar activities using AI, the future of AI in education, and the importance of personalization in teaching. If you LOVE grammar instruction and are looking for fun, new ways to use AI to engage with your students, this episode is for you! 

RBERNing Questions for this Episode:

1-  Why did you decide to focus on Chat GPT’s use in grammar instruction, and how did you decide on which grammar points to focus on? 

2- What was your process for creating prompts that yield effective results? 

3- How do you see AI affecting grammar instruction going forward? 

Guest BIOS:

Dr. Goussakova has been teaching, developing materials, presenting, teacher training, editing, and publishing in the field for over 25 years. Her interests include corpus linguistics, writing, grammar, OER, & AI. 

Dr. Hammond is an Associate Professor for Seminole State College’s Center for English Language Studies where she teaches EAP, ESOL, and ELI courses. She received her Ph.D. in Education (TESOL Track) from UCF. She has taught ESL/EFL classes for over 20 years, with 18 years of experience teaching international students at a college setting. Her first teaching experience was as a volunteer through Americorps in Apopka. She has also conducted teacher training conferences and workshops in Ecuador, Japan, Brazil, and Costa Rica and has presented at several national and international conferences.

Resources:

Websites/Social Media:

https://www.seminolestate.edu/els

To find out more about Mid-State RBERN at OCM BOCES' services, listen to season 1 of the show with host Collette Farone-Goodwin, or to receive CTLE credit for listening to episodes, click here: https://midstaterbern.org/


Yasmeen:

Okay, hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the RBERNing Questions podcast. And today we are continuing with our TESOL presenters series from the TESOL Convention 2025, and we have two wonderful doctors here today, Dr. Katya Goussakova and Dr. Nicole Hammond, joining us from the Center for English Language Studies at Seminole State College of Florida. Did I say the name of your college properly? I hope so.

Nicole:

Seminole State.

Yasmeen:

Oh, Seminole State. Okay, so from Seminole State College of Florida. I met them of course, when I was at the TESOL Convention, and I attended their really amazing presentation titled AI Tools for ESL Grammar Teachers. Now, this was really a packed presentation, both in attendance people were sitting on the floor, gathering in the doorways, and also in the information that you provided really packed full of information, so that is what we are going to discuss for the majority of this episode today. Welcome to our RBERNing questions, a professional learning podcast where we answer your most compelling questions about teaching, serving, and supporting multilingual learners. I'm your host, Yasmeen Coaxum, and through our talks, I look forward to bringing the methods, philosophies, and stories behind teaching multilingual learners to light. Let's get into the show. First I would like each of you to just tell our audience about your current role in education at this time, so we can go ahead and start with you, Dr. Goussakova.

Katya:

All right. Hello everyone. My name is Katya. Some people call me Dr. G, but that's rare. So I, currently teach, I'm a professor of EAP, which is English for Academic Purposes at Seminole State College, but I also teach in ESOL Department, we have two programs in addition to EAP, which is ESOL and Language Institute. This semester I'm teaching EAP and ESOL, and I've been with the college now for about 17 years.

Yasmeen:

Okay, excellent. And Dr. Hammond.

Nicole:

Yes. My name is Nicole Hammond. I teach with Katya at the same institute. We have three programs, as she mentioned. Right now I am teaching mostly for the Language Institute, but that varies on any given semester. So it's a nice thing that we have the three programs because we could teach for any of those three, kind of provides a variety. So we have, as Dr. Goussakova said, EAP classes, ESOL classes, and the English Language Institute, which is primarily serving adults.

Yasmeen:

Okay. So I'm going to take the audience back, as I usually do, and really discuss what inspired you to enter this field of English language teaching to begin with. So this time we can start with you, Nicole.

Nicole:

Sure. So I had no idea this field existed when I was growing up, but I knew that I wanted to do something, international. I liked traveling, I liked learning languages. I had taken Spanish in high school and that was the extent of it. But I did a little bit of traveling and I learned about the profession actually through AmeriCorps. So I'm not sure if you're familiar with AmeriCorps. It's the organization that's operating in the United States that's basically similar to Peace Corps, and it sends American volunteers to various states. You don't necessarily get to pick the state that you want to go to, and it gives you an opportunity to volunteer in the community with the needs that community has. And one of the needs was teaching ESL classes. And so I learned about the field through that volunteer experience, which I did for a couple years, early two thousands and I fell in love with it. After teaching for two years in that capacity, I decided to get my Master's in TESOL'cause I did not have teaching as my undergraduate degree, and the rest is history. And I've been teaching at colleges and institutes since then, working with adults in their English language needs.

Yasmeen:

Okay, so you talked about this international vibe you were on, and so I know that you have taken your leadership skills to the international scene in terms of conducting teacher training

Nicole:

A little bit, yes..

Yasmeen:

in Ecuador, Japan,

Nicole:

Mm-hmm.

Yasmeen:

Brazil and Costa Rica in each of those places. Okay.

Nicole:

Yes.

Yasmeen:

Great. All right. And so Katya, what drew you to this particular profession?

Katya:

I, I never in a million years imagined that I would be teaching English in the States. I'm originally from Russia and I graduated from Moscow Pedagogical University in the previous millennia. So I was planning to be an interpreter, and even though I was getting trained, unlike Nikki, I was getting trained to be a teacher, but hoping to actually not be in the classroom. But then, and it's kind of strange, but then, I thought that in addition to all the, I was learning several languages at the same time at the university, so it was English and then French and Italian, and I thought to myself, what better way of improving English proficiency than actually going and getting a degree in the country where English is the language of instruction. That's how I ended up in the United States and got my second master's from UCF. And then, as part of my graduate studies, I was offered a TAship, so I was a Teaching Assistant or GTA Graduate Teaching Assistant at the Center for Multilingual Multicultural Studies at UCF. And after I graduated, I was offered a job and I taught there as part-time faculty and then full-time faculty. And then, in'08, I joined Seminole State as a full-time faculty and the rest is history.

Yasmeen:

Okay, so I'm really ready to go ahead and dive right into your presentation, which was a compilation of 10 prompts for Chat GPT to create engaging exercises for grammar class. So you not only provided the prompts, but also the results for each prompt in terms of what Chat GPT gave us or gave you when you entered the prompts. The grammar points that were covered were verb tenses, gerunds and infinitives articles, noun clauses and adjective clauses. So I really love this presentation because grammar is absolutely my favorite subject to teach, and

Nicole:

Same.

Yasmeen:

you

Nicole:

Hmm.

Yasmeen:

artfully combined it with my other favorite, which is tech, and so, you did so really efficiently as you were describing the ways to use AI to enhance our grammar class prep and our class time. So my first question is, why did you decide to focus on Chat GPT's use in grammar instruction, and how did you decide on which grammar points to actually focus on? So, uh, either of you can start with that question.

Nicole:

I can start. So, I mean, especially since last year, going to conferences and learning more about AI and knowing that it's being used and that I probably should start using it in my own classes, but didn't jump on the bandwagon yet. And so last year I started looking into a little bit more, went to the TESOL International Conference in Tampa and attended several sessions on AI. And I got some ideas just by attending these sessions how I could apply this to a grammar class'cause a lot of the sessions I attended were related to using AI in a variety of different skills. So a lot of them were focused on speaking or listening, others were focused on writing, and there were a couple sessions that did focus a little bit on grammar, but not particular grammar points, and I thought this could apply. And they were talking about, hey, you can make a quick quiz in five minutes for a writing class or whatever, and I said, well, couldn't you do that for grammar? And so I just started playing around with a little bit more last year, getting more comfortable with Chat GPT, which was the one that most people were talking about, although there are others that we use now, and I thought, that's usually what students go to, so let's see how I can use it for my classes. And I started out really with the article quiz. It was just a quick quiz that I said, okay, I need a quiz for my class. My class is starting in five minutes. I don't have a quiz prepared. I want something really fast, and so I just put the students' names into the Chat GPT, I said, hey, just the first name of these students, and give me a quiz, 10 question real fast, and it was great. It worked out really well.

Yasmeen:

Okay. Katya, would you like to add to that?

Katya:

Yeah, sure. I think Nikki and I, we both have certain passions in language learning, just like you we love grammar. Her focus through her doctoral research is mostly pronunciation and speech. Mine is more writing, but grammar is everything, right? Grammar and vocabulary. So we always look for fun things to incorporate into our classes, and, my path to AI was a little bit different than Nikki's'cause obviously, everybody's heard the, it's the buzzword now. Grammar has always been the buzzword for us in the field, right? So if you present at a conference, you were putting a proposal together, if you put the word grammar in practice, you're sort of almost guaranteed to see a bunch of people come because people love it. Like we are practitioners. That's what we do. And I actually went to two conferences that were focusing on teaching and learning with AI, and both were hosted at the University of Central Florida. So they do it now on an annual basis, that's an amazing opportunity. I learned a lot from not just inner workings of AI, but all kinds of things like ethics and just different variety of topics, and I was like, it makes sense to use it in our classes. Right? So we started brainstorming and for the conference we were thinking like, which topics? And right away we were sitting across from, each other at the table and I'm like, okay, I'm teaching this semester. I'm like, and I'm teaching Gerunds and Infinitives and I'm teaching articles. So all those 10 things popped in very naturally. It was a very organic experience'cause I teach advanced grammar. I teach actually three grammar classes this semester. I teach two ESOL classes that are level five and six grammar and also EAP level six grammar class level five, because that's our most advanced. It was just a natural thing. We were doing something that would be useful for the classroom and to share with the colleagues, so the best of both worlds.

Nicole:

Yes. And just to add real quickly for like why we chose those topics, so it wasn't really any like Katya said, it wasn't really in particular, it was just what we were using at that time in our classes maybe, or I know for articles they're helpful in writing class as well, so I just thought that might be a relevant topic. And we thought of giving two per grammar point because we had promised 10, 10 activities or assessments because we wanted to show, okay, this is one way you could assess it or you could practice it. And then here's another way. So for a lot of the grammar points, we intentionally chose one activity and the other would be more of an assessment of the grammar point.

Yasmeen:

Okay, so in particular, the bingo game that you had Chat GPT generate for irregular past participant verb practice really looked super fun. So can you share how that activity is implemented from the information from your presentation and maybe some student feedback and outcomes after you facilitated this particular exercise in class?

Nicole:

Sure. So this exercise I actually have not implemented in class. I've used something similar. I've done bingo boards for pronunciation, and that has been very effective. I'll create the board with different phonemes being practiced, so it could be they're practicing the different front vowel sounds inside of words and when they hear the word, they get to put a little M M chip on the bingo board. So it makes it fun, and they get a little treat after the activity is done. They have a lot of fun with it. My students have had great feedback on the activity, so I thought, well.

Yasmeen:

A little treat?

Nicole:

They, well, the M M, the chips, right?

Yasmeen:

They eat the M&Ms that they put on the bingo cards, or?

Nicole:

Precisely. The basic rule that I give them when we start is, number one rule, don't eat your chips yet. So they have to first see if they can get a bingo. If they yell out, bingo, then that person gets the right to have their bingo chips, which I use just little mini M&Ms, but it's fun and before I was creating them on my own, these bingo boards, and it just was very time consuming, and I said, let me, see if Chat GPT can do this, right? So I tried it for several different phonemes and it worked. Then I thought, why not try this with grammar? And I've done similar activities where they're given a list of just the base form of the verb that they then have to ask, for example, I think this was practicing Present Perfect. So have you ever been to this place or have you ever bought this? So practicing kind of those irregular past participle forms. And I thought, they could do bingo with this. They could do the same kind of thing where they have to walk around, ask students the question, and then if they ask the right question, they could put a chip on their bingo board.

Yasmeen:

And so can you maybe share two more of the activities from your presentation for some of our listeners who were not able to attend the packed session, so that they could come away with something that they might be able to implement themselves?

Katya:

Do you want me, do you want me to talk about maybe Gerunds and Infinitives or...

Nicole:

Yeah, sure.

Katya:

So, I teach advanced grammar and Gerunds and Infinitives, one of the topics in my level six ESOL class, and, I thought that the rules are pretty straightforward, but, so I thought why not give Chat GPT an opportunity to generate the top five? I believe I chose top five rules, so this was the first request for Chat GPT was to generate the rules when Gerunds are used, right? So it's...

Yasmeen:

Yes, I remember this one,'cause actually I'm teaching Gerunds and Infinitives now, so I referred to your presentation to see what your suggestions were for this. Okay, go ahead please.

Katya:

Yeah. Yeah. So, and, it's slightly different than just application,'cause the idea is that some of the materials and the assessments and the activities that we are creating, they're not necessarily to just introduce the topic, but they may be used at different phases, right? So for scaffolding and for just reinforcement and just having fun and all of that. So Chat GPT kindly generated five rules, let's put it that way, right? And then I asked Chat GPT to give me multiple choice questions where the answers, so the stem would be the sentence where a Gerund was used, for example, driving. Driving in Florida is no fun. And then, so in that case, driving is a subject, right? And that's a use of one of the uses of the Gerund, but then, the choices, it was multiple choice, assessment or practice or whichever way you wanna use it. The options were, so the Gerund in this is used as, and it would be object, subject, object of a preposition or whatever. So various rules, various various ways, right? So and students were choosing like more cognitive, like higher thinking skills rather than just fill in the blanks. So that's what we're all about, application and make them think a little bit.

Yasmeen:

I was actually just gonna say that this sounds like very metacognitive in terms of

Katya:

Absolutely.

Yasmeen:

the process of, what's the purpose and the function of what I'm using instead of just as you said, like just a basic fill in the blank. Now, I wanna address something in terms of the prompt that I saw for this. You started with the word,"greetings," so in the Gerunds and Infinitives prompt, you greeted the AI, and now when you were just talking about it, you said Chat GPT kindly generated these examples of rules. And I think maybe you mentioned something about like why this was done in terms of personifying, or like being nice to the AI. So can you tell our audience the reasoning behind this, or I think you mentioned something about students' thoughts on when they're prompting AI in this fashion?

Katya:

I think it's not really so much about AI. It's about us as humans interacting with AI right? So we're not doing it, and if you think about ethical, every word you put in, you are using water resources because they're cooling the systems and all that. So I'm very cautious, but if I were talking to a person and I look at AI as my helper, like my assistant. So if I were talking to my assistant, I wouldn't say"do this." I would say, could you, would you be so kind? Hello?

Nicole:

Yes. Please, I use please a lot. Please generate a list, right? I don't know why, but it just feels right.

Katya:

Please and thank you. And I also have talked to AI in other languages. I've spoken to it in Russian and sometimes depends on the level of formality because I once interacted with AI in Russian, and we started off in a very informal way, and then I asked AI, I think it was, it wasn't Chat GPT, it was, it must have been Copilot or something like that. I was like, why are you being so informal with me? And then AI right away self-corrected, and said, oops, sorry, I'm gonna be a little bit more, little bit more formal. I'm like, oh, that sounds amazing. So I think it's more of a nature of human interaction rather than respect.

Yasmeen:

Right, right. I just brought this up because so many times there's a lot of discussion around AI as a partner, using it as a partner, and there's this discussion just around personification and like how human-like is AI? So I think it's

Nicole:

Mm-hmm.

Yasmeen:

really interesting because I do the same thing, and then I had to maybe try to stop myself from doing that'cause I was like, why am I saying, can you and please, and all of this? But yeah, I just think that's where our minds are going in terms of interacting with AI. Uh, the next thing that I would like to know is your process for creating these prompts in terms of yielding such effective results. Now, Katya, you mentioned that you went to a few workshops through a few conferences, and you learned about AI. Was that specifically in terms of prompting? I'm wondering, and then Nicole, you said something about you just got started with these prompts because you only had a few minutes before class. So because they are quite detailed, very well thought out, what was the process for you creating these prompts?

Katya:

I'll speak a little bit and then I'll let Nikki kind of join in because she has more things to say, and I've been talking too much, as I always do. So in my case, you asked about the trainings. There were some sessions on prompt engineering that I attended, and there are many different techniques that people use, and some say, every WH word, what, where, when, so you have to be super specific. I'm sure you've all heard, if you're working with AI, you've heard the garbage in, garbage out, the favorite, kind of expression. But also, often the prompts, they should have four parts to it, right? So what you want and the audience, and then the level perhaps, and then, the length of the output. So you should always specify that. And then Nikki can, can add maybe as an example of how we had to tweak some of the input to AI to get to where we really wanted to go.

Yasmeen:

Yes.

Nicole:

Yes, I, exactly. So I've learned about the prompt engineering and just gone to sessions on that as well. And what is the best way to get what you want, right? To have the best response that you want, but even if you don't necessarily start with a great prompt, you can get to it because after you put the prompt in there, you can say, okay, let's adjust the level a little bit. This is too high or this is too low. And to not feel like you have to have the perfect prompt, I intentionally went in and just created like the absolutely very little prompt at all, just said,"Hey, give me some activities, fun activities," I think I said, just very basic, give me fun activities to practice our adjective clauses. And so I wanted to show also to the teachers that, hey, you can just use it if you're running out of ideas, right? You're trying to make the class engaging, you're trying to get them doing activities that are fun and not just having them work directly from the book, so here's how you can do it. Here's just one way quickly asking it for some fun activities, and then from there, you can adjust based on what you see is happening with the output. And so for some of the quizzes that we got, maybe this is what Katy was mentioning about how we had to adjust, a lot of times if you ask Chat GPT or I guess some of these other AI generators about a quiz, a multiple choice, a lot of times the answer choice is going to be A and B. I found that, and maybe that's, it's changing every week, but I've noticed that's what it's been recently when I've asked for any kind of multiple choice quiz. The answer's almost always A or B. If you have four answer choices, you gotta definitely tell Chat GPT, make sure you vary your answer choices so it's not only A and B, and even so it sometimes doesn't always do it correctly. So there is a little bit of after you first initiate the prompt, you can always adjust and make it more personalized to what you really want.

Yasmeen:

So I think that this is very important for educators to realize, maybe, some of the educators that are trepidatious about jumping into AI it might be about prompting, right, and just, feeling like they really don't have the tools to understand how to prompt it exactly to do what their desired outcome is. So I really liked that you said, you don't have to have the perfect prompt, you can get to it, but what I particularly liked about your presentation was that you gave us the prompts, basically. They were very well laid out, and so this, I feel, takes away some of the anxiety about being able to produce prompts that are going to give you the types of exercises that you are really looking for. Now back on this topic of grammar, so many instructors see Chat GPT and similar generative AI models as disruptors in education, but they usually focus on writing skills when they're talking about this disruption, right? So how do you see AI affecting grammar instruction going forward?

Katya:

I don't see it as disruption. I just see it as, as a new, it's evolution almost so it's a new phase. Somebody the other day said, when TVs were invented, people were saying that was gonna be the end of movies and or something, right? So there's always doom and gloom scenarios, but I think AI is here to stay for sure. And, people that are going to learn to be efficient communicators with AI, they will be productive. So, I think for us as educators, I don't see a problem with grammar per se, and I'm teaching now my students how to use AI to help them with their writing, not just through outlining and generating of ideas, but if they have written something, you can feed it through AI and ask AI to analyze it and provide feedback. So it's almost like you have a faculty member at their disposal at any time, and when they write, it may take me several days to return their writing depending on how much corrective feedback we are providing. But this way it's right there. So they typed it, it's right there. And, but again, it's what you are asking for. So I had to teach them the prompt. So you want to focus on grammar, you want the format, you want all those ideas where AI tells you how you could potentially improve your writing, Nikki.

Nicole:

Yes. So I think also, I mean, I've tried that as well, where you get feedback from AI, and I think AI it's trying to give you feedback. So I, what I'll do with my students, I'll have them put a little short writing prompt that they had responded to, into AI with specific guidelines of what they should be looking for. We were practicing for TOEFL iBT, just to give an example, and so I said, okay, use the rubric, or I first asked, give me the rubric that is used with the TOEFL iBT, and wanted to cross reference to see if it was accurate, right? So gimme the rubric and then, please analyze, give me some feedback on this writing sample based on this prompt and all these things. So I helped them with that, but I also did the task myself'cause I wanted to see how Chat GPT would analyze a native speaker of English, in her writing, right? And it will never give you a perfect score, at least not yet. I haven't received a perfect score from Chat GPT. Always gives me feedback'cause it's instructed to give you feedback, right? So it needs to find something, right? And so my students have started to learn,'cause we did this several times, what Chat GPT likes to hear, right? So they know that certain transitions are better than others in Chat GPT, and so it was a lesson for me as well to see, okay, well students are doing this already, so now let me see how it's analyzing. What is it doing when it analyzes their writing? And I'm really hoping it can eventually be done with speaking. I was asking at the conference lots, I went to lots of sessions to see if they could give feedback on speaking, and there's not much that's besides transcript that I've seen out there yet, but I'm sure that's gonna change hopefully very soon. You cannot upload an audio file, maybe with the paid versions you can to get feedback on speaking, but you can upload a transcript of audio file, so little by little.

Yasmeen:

Your next presentation, that's what you're going to be informing us about.

Nicole:

That, could be our next presentation. Precisely, yes.

Yasmeen:

I really love that idea. You're either in the camp where it's a disruptor and you see it negatively, or you're in the camp where, okay, it's time to embrace and it's time to understand how we can make our students part of the conversation of what we are doing with AI. So I wanted to highlight a couple of other things that both of you are engaged in at this moment, right? So, you are not only doing these fabulous presentations at TESOL, but actually a Katya, one thing that I did not know and I was amazed to find out is that you co-authored the workbook for Keys to Teaching Grammar to English Language Learners, the second edition of that, and I used that textbook, actually I was doing a little bit, very briefly, some teacher training at Touro College, back in 2022, and that is the book that I used.

Nicole:

Oh wow. Oh.

Yasmeen:

That was very interesting.

Katya:

Oh my goodness. Small world.

Yasmeen:

Yeah, I was kinda like, wow. She co-authored the workbook for this. This is great. And also, I think you're currently on the Sunshine State or you were on the Sunshine State TESOL editorial board as one of the reviewers.

Katya:

I.

Yasmeen:

Yes?

Katya:

I am on the board. I'm on the editorial board for the journal, but I've been on the board for many years. Yeah, as kind of like what Nikki is doing now, so she is a bigger, more shining star right now in that.

Yasmeen:

Yeah, because, you are currently

Nicole:

Currently the vice President of the Sunshine State TESOL Board.

Yasmeen:

The first vice president. Yeah. Alright, so leadership, right? So you've gotten

Nicole:

Mm-hmm.

Yasmeen:

into leadership and gotten involved in a multi-tiered way. Alright, how can the audience find out more information about your work? Do you have any upcoming projects or publications that you'd like to make the audience aware of at this time?

Nicole:

I can speak to Sunshine State TESOL since we were just talking about that. We have our fall conference. We have an annual conference every year, and the wonderful news is that we're finally offering this in person. It's been offered online since Covid, so this is our first non-virtual. We're gonna be in person at the beautiful campus of University of Tampa. So if you all wanna get away from the cold weather and come down to Florida, November 15th and 16th, that is the weekend we are hosting the conference, and there's information on our website, which I can get you later.

Yasmeen:

Okay, fantastic. And Katya, news, any upcoming projects, any upcoming presentations?

Katya:

Actually Nick and I, we, TESOL in Long Beach wasn't even over, and we already thought of three more proposals for TESOL Long Beach. So we are gonna be submitting those and then one very special one to Sunshine State TESOL'cause both of our kids are in middle school and we realized that our language learners are also learning jargon of middle school, which we as mothers were not aware of. I'm even less so as a non-native speaker of English, so we're gonna look into that. That's a fun linguistic project that Nikki and I will be working on.

Yasmeen:

Wait a minute. Jargon like AI jargon. What?

Katya:

Oh, as in jargon of middle schoolers, like middle, it was

Nicole:

they're using now in middle school and even high school.

Yasmeen:

Oh.

Nicole:

Their language.

Katya:

Oh yeah.

Nicole:

Their abbreviations and all these words they're using now.

Yasmeen:

Oh yeah. Okay.

Nicole:

Yeah.

Katya:

And then Nikki and I have also been working on something for a long time. When we were, a part of our doctoral studies, we put together a proposal, and it's an article that we've been writing on for a while. I hope that this year we'll actually finish and publish it. It's the uh, lived experiences of women in PhD studies. So that might be something like that coming up, and um, if anyone's interested, look up, it's easy to find the Conference for Teaching and Learning at the University of Central Florida. I believe it is at the end of May, or maybe beginning of June. I don't remember the dates right now.

Nicole:

The AI conference, is that right?

Katya:

Yes, the AI Conference.

Nicole:

End of May, I wanna say May 28th through the 30th, but I could have those dates wrong.

Katya:

I got them 28th through 30th, so 28th, May 28th through 30th, so 2025.

Yasmeen:

Okay, fantastic. Now there was something else that I did wanna ask you, Nicole. So I know that you were on last school year's Curriculum Committee, right? For for your college, and if you are at liberty to say, what impact, if any, has AI had on curriculum planning at your school?

Nicole:

I wasn't on the committee for the college, but I was on a TELL. It's a technology Enhanced Learning Committee that we offer here. And I can just say that what we're looking at is, and the college has not finalized this, but we are looking to get an AI policy college board. Right now it's just on the kind of individual departmental level. So we're trying to get something established at the college, but it's a process and we're still, kind of initiating conversations and getting the right people at the table to have the discussion for this.

Yasmeen:

Okay. And do you think that, in your opinion, in either of your, opinions, do you think that, there will be significant impact to curriculums everywhere in terms of AI, when we're talking about designing the curriculum.

Katya:

I, I think there will be, and it's already happening, and I think like in Florida, I know that the consortium, the AI consortium has been formed and, Seminole State is part of it. And, it's an ongoing conversation,'cause policies, we may have implemented little things now with syllabi, but we definitely are looking for more guidance and more kind of overarching approach to AI, and just the other day we were having this conversation with, some colleagues, and in response to your question, I think that, and what they were saying is that it's possible that we may not see asynchronous online instruction, especially in writing classes as a result of AI because

Yasmeen:

Mm-hmm.

Katya:

Um, current advances, right? So in all this, like we used to rely on let's say Turn It In, which we now cannot, and, so even checkers of AI are not so reliable because you have humanizers and you have technologies advancing so quickly. So, um, and we also actually, as a matter of fact, I just attended a meeting. Both Nikki and I serve as Seminole State representatives on the EAP consortium for the state of Florida. So there was a very active discussion on what to do and how to change kind of the way we do things in both assessment and just everyday instruction with AI, and so lots of interesting ideas bubbling up to the surface for sure.

Yasmeen:

Okay, now I'm going to wrap things up by asking the final question that I ask all of the guests who come onto the podcast, which is what RBERNing question should today's educators consider in order to improve their service to the ELL and ML Community?

Nicole:

I think one, I mean it's not really a question, it's more of just considering individual students and trying to incorporate them more into your lessons, so you're personalizing the lesson a lot more instead of just taking the book and working purely from the book. This is more, I think, common sense, but I think it's hard for us. A lot of teachers tend to fall on the textbook or rely on the textbook, so I would say just consider your students. Get to know them in the beginning. It's gonna help you both in terms of identifying whether or not they are using AI, but also to be able to incorporate some of those AI activities into your lesson so that the students see their names pop up in activities and games and things like that. So really a question, more of just a consideration, I'd say related to

Yasmeen:

Right, but I could turn that into a question,

Nicole:

Perfect. I'll let you reword it.

Yasmeen:

which would be, how am I personalizing my lessons?

Nicole:

There you go.

Yasmeen:

Okay. And Katya, what is your burning question?

Katya:

Um, I just, if I were asked that, I think like existential fundamental, role, like what is my role in the classroom right now and how is that changing with AI? What am I doing to better serve my students at this day and age? And, also, just, yeah, definitely Nikki, it's all about knowing who you serve and how to reach them better and help them better, and, also a lot of that,'cause I have, right now students that are as young as 18 and as mature as 75. And then for the young generation, I think that the thinking, the critical thinking is a really important thing because they're relying on AI so much that this autonomy and the thinking process, they're just not learning how to think for themselves. And so I feel like it's my responsibility to make sure that there's a little bit of that incorporated in every class that I teach, regardless of the content.

Yasmeen:

Excellent considerations, and I wanna thank both of you, Katya Goussakova and Nicole Hammond. Thank you so much for joining us today on the RBERNing Questions podcast. It was a pleasure.

Nicole:

Thank you Yasmeen.

Katya:

Thank you so much, Yasmeen.

Yasmeen:

Thank you for tuning in to RBERNing Questions, produced by Mid-State RBERN at OCM BOCES. If you would like to learn more about today's guest or any of the resources we discussed, please visit Mid-State RBERN's webpage at ocmboces.org. That's OCM boces.org. Join us next time where we hope to answer more of your burning questions.