Welcome back to Teachers in America, where we connect with real educators and ed leaders to provide practical instructional tips and talk about the latest teaching trends to help you stay on the forefront of what’s new in education.
On today's minisode, host Kailey Rhodes is joined by Andrew Goldman, founder of Writable and the EVP of HMH Labs, an incubation team within HMH focused on the development and customer experience of emerging technologies. Together, Kailey and Andrew further explore the 2024 Educator Confidence Report (ECR) and share what educators really think about AI use in schools.
A conversation about the future of AI in education with Andrew Goldman
A full transcript of the episode appears below; it has been edited for clarity.
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The views expressed in this podcast are those of the guest and do not necessarily represent those of HMH.
Kailey Rhodes: Hi, I’m Kailey Rhodes, and this is Teachers in America. Welcome to our minisode on AI in education. Andrew, I’m going to introduce you really formally in just a second, but I’m just so excited that you’re here to talk about AI in education. Welcome.
Andrew Goldman: Kailey, it’s great to join you. Excited to talk with you and all of our listeners out there about what’s happening with generative AI.
Kailey: I mean, yeah, this is a hot topic. So, you are in the hot seat today, Andrew. You ready for it?
Andrew: It is indeed a hot topic.
Kailey: Well, in our last minisode, we broke down HMH’s new survey of educators, which revealed their top concerns, how they view the profession, and what can make it better. Definitely check that one out if you haven’t already. The link is in the show notes. And today we’re going to dig deeper into that same survey to share what educators really think about AI use in schools. Before we do that, let’s just cover the basics: generative AI. Oh my gosh, Andrew, am I going to make a fool of myself saying all the stuff that you’re an expert in?
Andrew: Not at all.
Kailey: Okay. Generative AI is ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot. A lot of our teachers already know about that. And it quickly creates content based on prompts, and prompts are what you feed it. Prompts are how you talk to it. For instance, a teacher might ask for a list of research project ideas for high school students on the topic of women’s basketball, and get ten ideas in a matter of seconds instead of having to sit there and figure it out themselves.
Students, meanwhile, can use Gen AI to help them develop an outline for an essay that then of course they go write themselves! And principals might ask it to design a survey for parents or students that gauges their satisfaction with the school’s teaching methods. So here to weigh in on educators’ use of AI in the classroom and the survey results is Andrew Goldman.
Andrew, EVP of HMH Labs, which is an incubation team within HMH focused on the development and customer experience of emerging technologies, including generative AI for the classroom. So Andrew, before we get into it, can you tell us a little bit about HMH Labs? What exactly incubation means and what is it you do here and how AI informs the work that you guys are up to?
Andrew: All right. Well, a lot to share in there. This is super exciting stuff. First off, incubation is the idea that we’re experimenting with these new technologies to find ways to apply them in ways that help teachers in the classroom. And Labs was set up as an environment where we could bring together all the different components of the teacher experience.
Customer success sits right with the engineering team and the curriculum designers sit with engineering teams. It’s a completely interdisciplinary group that is set up to be able to rapidly explore new ideas and then try them in small laboratory type environments with real classrooms, and find what works and, inevitably, unfortunately, what doesn’t work.
But the goal is to try things quickly and build on what we see as resonating and helpful to educators.
Kailey: And on our HMH survey that we administer to educators, we see that a lot of them are curious about generative AI, and they’re trying it out.
But maybe they’re still a little wary or a little cautious about it. And the survey shows that educators’ use of AI has increased five-fold, five times in the past year. How does that strike you? Does that surprise you?
Andrew: It doesn’t surprise me at all. When this round of AI came out, there was an initial bit of fear, I think, in teachers, but they quickly became comfortable with it and saw what an assistance it could be. When we were talking about essay feedback, the opportunity to get your students writing more is so significant when you use AI to help provide feedback, that it’s essential that teachers embrace the opportunity there.
Kailey: Yeah. And it’s essential that we provide ways of using AI that really help them see that we’re not trying to dumb down the work. We’re trying to streamline the work so that we can get really even more intentional and even more one on one with maybe our 150 students and . . .
Andrew: And that is the opportunity. Oops. Sorry.
Kailey: No, are you kidding me? You’re my guest. You talk over me whenever you want, Andrew.
Andrew: I think that is the opportunity with AI is that if you have so many students, it can quickly become overwhelming, and it’s very hard to have a personal connection with them. When the AI is able to look at it and understand, "Okay, this was what the student had in their last revision of writing. These are the changes that they made. And wow! They really addressed the feedback that you gave them." That’s a level of personal connection that a teacher unassisted never could get with the numbers of students they have. It’s like making a teacher be able to have a tutor relationship with their whole classroom.
Kailey: That’s so important for teachers to hear, that AI isn’t coming in between. It’s not like we’re robbing that personal one-on-one, human-to-human connection. We’re not taking that away. AI is actually pouring something back into your cup. You can’t pour from an empty cup, teachers. Now that you have just a little bit of assistance, those conversations, those moments that you do have one on one with those kids can be even more valuable because you didn’t stay up till 2 a. m. not reading their essays. I’m tattling on myself a little bit.
Andrew: Hundred percent agree. The opportunity is, bizarrely, that AI, artificial intelligence, could make teaching more human. Because it makes the history of what the student has done much more accessible to the teacher and allows them to interact in a way that is far more specific than they could do if they didn’t have that assistance.
Kailey: That’s right. And the survey actually shows that 76 percent of educators say generative AI is somewhat valuable to their work. Over three fourths are saying that AI is . . . at least they’re curious about it. That shows me that their little ears have perked up. And 73 percent say that it saves them time, with 38 percent already—this is like comparatively new technology—38 percent are reporting that it saves them very much or a great deal of time. And we also learned that among educators who are currently using AI, 72 percent plan to use it even more in the next school year, especially as they see even more ways that it can be useful, because we have to learn this technology too.
I want to read the top seven ways educators say generative AI can be useful. But listeners, what I want you to listen for, as I read this list, is that the one thing that teachers need, every profession needs more in their day is time, and when teachers have more time, they are able to directly translate that into impacting students.
So, in these top seven ways that AI is helping teachers save time and being useful is number one, creating study guides. What have we learned? How can I distill it into a quick list of what my kids need to study for their upcoming assessments? Two, designing worksheets. You know, worksheets are not something that teachers . . . one of the best lessons I got as a new teacher is do not spend two hours on something that your students are going to spend 10 minutes on. This is helping first-year teacher Kailey. Number three, developing lesson plans. Number four, delivering personalized instruction for students. That’s really helping teachers do what keeps them up at night. What keeps us up at night is not being able to have enough time to differentiate for all of the various learners in our room. AI can help with that. Number five, helping with administrative or repetitive tasks. Teachers, we do not need to be doing things that are taking so much time and not impacting instruction whatsoever. Number six, generating writing prompts. And number seven, this one’s pretty useful and pretty interesting, producing useful learning analytics. So, Andrew, any of those seven in particular you want to chat further about?
Andrew: Well, a bunch of them. They’re all interesting in different ways. Number six is actually where we stepped into this generation of AI with Writable.
Kailey: And so for our listeners who may not know, can you just tell us a little bit about Writable?
Andrew: Sure. Writable has been around for about eight years. It really formed out of the idea that teachers want to bring more writing into their classroom.
Kailey: Yes, we do.
Andrew: But it just quickly can overwhelm a teacher. So, if a teacher has 150 students, if they have a one-minute interaction with every student, they've spent two and a half hours there.
Kailey: Oh my gosh, yes.
Andrew: It just doesn't scale. So, eight years ago, we started Writable with this idea that we could help teachers optimize the workflow and offload some of the feedback needs in writing to the students through peer review and self-review in limited use of AI. And that led us to about a 30 percent optimization in the amount of time. But really three and four tie together into the ones that got us so excited about joining HMH.
Kailey: Let me restate those really quick, that’s number three, developing lesson plans, and number four, delivering personalized instruction. So you’re really hitting the instructional ones.
Andrew: Yes. The idea that AI can help in developing lesson plans and personalizing them to a classroom is incredibly appealing. And doing that inside HMH is a whole different opportunity. There’s so much focus out there on high-quality materials, and giving educators materials that are research backed.
Kailey: Yes.
Andrew: And one of the risks in generative AI in the wild is that we could see a repeat of the Google DIY curriculum materials where quality went down for the sake of convenience.
Kailey: Are you talking to me? Are you looking at me? Gosh, leave me alone. No, I completely hear you. I completely hear you. The DIY does kind of correlate with forsaking some of the rigor that we really need to see reintroduced to our curriculum.
Andrew: Yes. And that was what was so exciting about developing generative AI inside of HMH was that we can actually take the framework of our high-quality materials that are research backed and meticulously crafted, but then we can apply a remix using generative AI to make it fit a particular classroom. So that may be replacing examples with student work with new examples that are relevant to the students in the class. And in writing, we’ll take the lesson plan and cite student work in place of using a generic lesson that comes from outside.
Kailey: That’s so cool!
Andrew: Yeah, it’s magical what you can do and how you can take the framework and use it as scaffolding to build something that retains the research and the quality and delivers it in a way that is customized for that classroom.
Kailey: It’s customization and it’s streamlining. And, where we start getting into the woods with where this becomes a little intimidating for educators is the lack of professional development around AI and maybe what students are going to do with it. So, we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about educators’ concern over the lack of professional development around AI, because educators like me, we crave and want guidance on how to use Gen AI safely and effectively.
In fact, in the survey, 76 percent of educators said there needs to be professional development and coaching around AI. That’s up from 18 percent last year. So, it’s clear that our districts and our schools must prioritize training and establish clear policies for using AI tools, not only professionally among teachers, but also in what we communicate with our students.
Andrew: Absolutely. It’s so important that schools and districts lay down their views on what academic integrity is going to mean in this new age. And there will be places where students using Gen AI is completely appropriate. But there are other places where there really is the risk that they can rob themselves of the opportunity to do the learning that they’re supposed to be doing. And so it’s very important that schools and teachers are explicit on how you can use these tools so that they make sure that they retain the integrity of their instructional plan.
Kailey: Yeah, and as AI gets more popular in high schools and middle schools and elementary schools, I’m sure that we’ll be hearing from educators on the guardrails that they’re putting in place for students.
I’m sure that there’s stuff that we haven’t even thought of yet that’s going to get really creative. But I think that it’s important to emphasize that I think that the value that AI can bring it an environment where we’re really making sure that we are working as a united front as educators to make sure that we provide the kind of support that we provide with phones and with just the Internet period, I think that we’re going to see that it really yields a lot of rich work and support. Whether we’re providing support to parents on how to support students or whether we’re giving teachers that time back or whether we’re just helping students kind of minimize the busy work and get to the meat of whatever we’re having them learn.
You know, Andrew, I’m curious about when you picture AI in the hands of students, when you picture them using it in a way that really enriches their school and doesn’t infringe on their actual learning, what would you want for, say, your kids? What would you picture? What would you want the guardrails to be in place for them?
Andrew: It’s an interesting question. And I’m lifting this from someone, so I don’t know where this is coming from, but I heard someone say that AI should be a dessert or an appetizer, but it shouldn’t be a whole meal. And it can be used in part to help start or to finish the work that you’re doing. And I think that applies for both teachers and students and is really what we should look forward to as the key skills that we need to build in students as they are educated for this AI age that’s in front of them. And what we’ve said, I wrestled with this a lot, what I came to is that what’s really important is that we teach students that the behavior we’re after is that you will sit down to anything that you’re given and you’ll work at making it better. And that’s the mindset that I think we need to approach in this age where we often will have a starting point that is well beyond the blank page that we used to have to begin from.
Kailey: Yeah, and it’s so intimidating to students, and I love what you said about maybe it’s just a starting place. It’s kind of like, I don’t think I’m going to put pressure on myself to bake a cake the way that they did in medieval times, but just because I use some tools doesn’t mean I didn’t do the work to make the cake.
Andrew: Yes. And it was your cake decorated your way.
Kailey: Well, Andrew, I want to read a quote to you from Francie Alexander, who is HMH’s SVP of Research. And it stresses the importance of providing teachers with the training to make the most of AI tools. Francie says, “We must ensure teachers have the tools, technology, and professional learning support they need to help every student get a quality education. At HMH, we help educators put the curriculum, assessment data, and professional development pieces together to accelerate student success. We know that AI means there’s a lot more data coming in. A well-trained coach can partner with teachers to help them make the most of that data.”
Andrew, how do you respond to what Francie’s saying here? Because, I mean, when we started out defining generative AI in terms of ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, which teachers can use to build lessons, and they can certainly benefit from PD on how to use those effectively. But HMH is developing all these new AI-powered tools that can support teachers too. So what’s the difference, and how do we ensure teachers can make the most and feel supported during their access of those tools that we’re building.
Andrew: It’s a great point there. What I would say is that a lot of times with data, we present it to teachers in a way that sort of treats them like data scientists.
Kailey: Right?
Andrew: That’s not their profession. And what we’ve found is that dashboards can be data rich and insight poor.
This back to school, one of our focuses was taking the dashboards that we provide with all of the data on what your students have done and producing brief narratives using generative AI. So, we’re no longer looking to the teacher to interpret the data from just numbers. We’re giving them the insights that we take away from it based on the data and the curriculum that is driving the reading and the writing instruction. So, it’s really the opportunity with generative AI is to make the data much more actionable for teachers and deliver it to them in a way that is much easier to digest.
Kailey: Yeah. Teachers are storytellers and you’re using AI to help tell the story so that they can get what they need to know quickly and get back to teaching.
Andrew: Yes, exactly.
Kailey: I want to share just a quick little story for the listeners that hopefully brings AI into even more of a positive space for them. I recently was a math teacher. I needed to teach a lesson for Pi Day and I wanted to do something with various circumferences of circular objects. You know the common pizza or a bicycle wheel. And I needed a lot of them because I wanted to assign them individually to students and then they would work together in groups. I couldn’t go around before my lesson and measure . . . Go get a bicycle wheel and go order a pizza and I didn’t have access to a regulation frisbee.
I needed all these things and so I asked ChatGPT to generate a list of circumferences of common objects. And it did it in, you know, two seconds. And I had that time back to make my lesson really shine. Whereas if I had wanted to follow through my lesson by having to do it manually, I would have lost all that time. I was immediately given time back and it was especially transformative.
Andrew: That’s wonderful. That’s magic that AI should bring to teachers across the country.
Kailey: Yeah. And it’s not very hard, you know, but some of my colleagues don’t know that they could just ask that.
Andrew: Yeah. It’s incredible, and that’s why for years we’ve been making promises of what EdTech could do for teachers, but now it’s really just happening. It’s there. Teachers will need to be careful with it because like I said, there is that risk of generating low-quality materials, but the opportunity to enable teachers is off the charts right now. Exciting time in teaching and EdTech.
Kailey: Just like when we saw phones enter the classroom or the Internet, enter our daily life, there are of course concerns. And we want to respect those not only as the teachers are navigating them, but also as they’re trying to set an example and set guardrails for our students and how they use them.
So, while our educators do have concerns about AI, especially the lack of training and maybe how their students are using it, we’ve never encountered a problem that we haven’t managed to solve together in the education space, and I’m so excited to be a part of HMH’s solution. Our overall response in that survey shows cautious optimism. They see emerging technology as a tool for battling burnout and giving us much needed time back, which we then used to build meaningful relationships with students.
So, we’re going to be keeping an eye and a pulse on this space and how it all plays out. We’re so glad that you’re in that space with us, Andrew, hoping that generative AI can live up to its promise. And I feel really confident about that because I know we’re in good hands. Thank you so much for joining us today, Andrew.
Andrew: Thank you. This has been incredible. Great conversation.
Jenn Corujo: If you or some you know, would like to be a guest on the Teachers in America podcast, please email us at shaped@hmhco.com. Be the first to hear new episodes of Teachers in America by subscribing on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed today’s show, please rate, review, and share it with your network. You can find the transcript of this episode on our Shaped blog by visiting hmhco.com/shaped. The link is in the show notes.
The Teachers in America podcast is a production of HMH. Thank you to the production team of Christine Condon, Tim Lee, Jennifer Corujo, Mio Frye, Thomas Velazquez. and Matt Howell. Thanks again for listening.
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