Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry: Can AI Help?, with Maurie Beasley

Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry: Can AI Help?, with Maurie Beasley

 Educators are juggling more than ever, from administrative overload to emotional demands, and finding time for new innovations feels impossible. In this episode, we sit down with Maurie Beasley, an educator, counselor, tech administrator, and author, to explore the crucial question: Can AI actually help?

 Drawing from her new book, Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry! Tales from K12 Education: How AI Might Help…or Maybe Not, Maurie shares honest and heartfelt stories from the classroom. Together, we explore how AI is showing up as a helpful tool and also, depending on the situation, sometimes an unfit substitute. Tune in to hear how AI is giving teachers time back—and where it still falls short in meeting the deeply human needs of students and educators alike. Visit AVID Open Access to learn more.

Transcript

Maurie Beasley 0:00 As you're out there and as you are struggling and as you are frying these fish, you need to remember that there is a kid that you are their reason. You have the opportunity, as a teacher, to change lives. And don't forget that.

Winston Benjamin 0:18 The topic for today's podcast is "Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry: Can AI Help?" with Maurie Beasley. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes in seeing the potential of every student. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:41 Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education.

Rena Clark 0:50 I'm Rena Clark,

Paul Beckermann 0:52 I'm Paul Beckermann

Winston Benjamin 0:53 and I'm Winston Benjamin. We are educators, and

Paul Beckermann 0:57 we're here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena's Children 1:01 Education is our passport to the future.

Winston Benjamin 1:06 Our quote from today is from an article published on Medium titled, "What Fills the Gaps: The Human Role in a Machine-Filled World." It is written by our guest, Maurie Beasley. In talking about the role of humans, she writes, "We are the parts that flow through everything AI touches. We are the context, the purpose, the ethics, the why?" Thinking about that quote, how does that hit you all, Rena or Paul?

Rena Clark 1:41 Well, I was thinking about, you know, I use AI as well. And we keep talking about how it helps speed up tasks. It's an idea generator, but it never can replace that human connection, those relational capacity pieces. And how do we really make learning meaningful? So I think about our role as educators, and we've talked about this before, where I just never think educators will be replaced by machines, and that's because of those in-between spaces, the collaboration, the empathy that we have, the really knowing our students, our purpose, and we can create joy. And you know, AI can support that, but it can't do that for us. And that's kind of what I was thinking about.

Paul Beckermann 2:21 Yeah, I kind of feel the same way, Rena. It's important that we don't forget the human element, because teaching is essentially human engagement, right? We have to filter whatever comes in and goes out through AI, through this human filter of some kind. It's easy to just let AI do all the work, but that's not the way to go, because our students deserve a lot more than that. They deserve the insights and empathy that come from professional educators. That human piece, so human at the core.

Winston Benjamin 2:51 Interpersonal relationships, and the ability to do that is a very important human skill. As we transition into our conversation, we are excited to welcome our guest, Maurie Beasley, to the podcast today. She is an author of a newly released book, Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry: Tales from the K through 12 Education, How AI Might Help or Maybe Not.

Winston Benjamin 3:23 She's a former teacher, counselor, assistant principal, and turned into a tech educator. Thank you so much for your time, Ms. Maurie. We appreciate you. Welcome to our podcast. Thank you for having me. Thank you for choosing to be here. Before we really get into a conversation, can you give our listeners a little bit about yourself, your journey in education, and why you value tech education or AI education?

Maurie Beasley 3:51 Absolutely. So I'd like to start by saying that I have, you know, been on this planet for quite some time, so you know, my journey is long. I grew up in a really small town, maybe 300 people, red dirt roads, 55 miles per hour the whole way through town. We only had an elementary campus, and then had to bus about 30 miles to go to junior high and high school. So rural education is very important to me. That's one of my big passions. Because, even moving, when I moved from the small town and I moved into Llano, Texas, which is a small town, even though, from a girl coming from a population of 300, I saw a red light and was like, "Mom, Dad, what's that shiny red thing hanging from that pole?" You know, because I'd never really seen a red light before. And so, you know, I moved to Llano, Texas, and we have a population of about 9,000 people in our county. School population of a little over 2,000 students. So I'm still in rural America. I went from that small town, went to Llano, graduated from Llano High School, met my now husband while in high school. We, you know, moved to the big city and entered the tech industry back in, you know, early 90s, when the tech boom was happening. He was really determined to get an engineering degree. So he has a degree in computer engineering, and I just kind of like, went along for the ride, never really had an identity. I just kind of, you know, worked in the tech industry along with him, you know, repaired Macintosh computers, so forth, so on. Then in 2004, I'm sitting here with 120 hours of college, because I kept going back and forth to school with no degree. And I'm like, "What am I going to do with 120 hours with no degree?" and teaching was presented to me because my mom was a teacher, my older sister was a teacher. And so I entered the classroom, of course, entered it in a technology capacity, because that's where I'd been working in the private sector for so long. And then, after spending about, oh, I don't know, 10, 11, 12 years in the classroom, I decided to become a counselor because I was one of those kids that, you know, my counselor in the past had told me that I was probably going to drop out of college or drop out of school, or, you know, I was a problem child. I will admit that. And, yeah, one—we laugh about it. I actually met my husband in in-school suspension. So I like to say, you know, I was in there for too many tardies, and he was in there for a different reason. But, yeah, I was one of those kids. I was lost. I mean, I had gone from this really small town to a town that I considered big. I did not fit in, I did not make those connections. And so I was lost. So I became a counselor, because I had empathy for those kids, those kids that thought they were different. And then after being a counselor for a few years, my principal convinced me to get my principal certification so I could become her AP. Did that for a while during COVID, which, if anyone was an AP or during COVID, that was tons of fun. And yes, that is called sarcasm, right there. And then our Technology Network Administrator left our district, and no one applied for the job, none—no applicants. Because, again, I'm in a small town, so we don't have the resources. So my husband, who is the technology director, came to me and said, "Maurie, you've done technology. You know what you're doing. You're qualified for this position. Can you please come over? Otherwise, I'm going to quit my job, and we can go live in a cardboard box because I can't do this on my own." So I was like, "Absolutely, I'll come over there." And so I'm now the network system administrator at the district. So I really enjoy it, because I have the ability to see education from all these different angles that most people don't have the privilege of being able to do that. Yeah, absolutely, yes.

Paul Beckermann 8:11 You know, I'm curious, because you have seen education from so many different angles, which is really unique. I really like that you have that perspective. Let's talk about AI, which is part of the topic of your new book. How have you seen AI impacting teachers and reshaping K-12 classrooms from those different perspectives that you've been in?

Maurie Beasley 8:31 Well, the first thing that AI has done for teachers is it's helped them with what I call efficiency AI. Okay? Now, from my counselor lens, I have to look at it and go, okay, the fear is real, so you have to address the fear, because people are still fearful, and I think a lot of that has to do with lack of education. So I go out and I train them, and I talk to them, and I show them some of the things it can do. But right now, I would say that 90% of the teachers that are currently utilizing AI is utilizing it for efficiency. So that's one of the ways that it's reshaping K-12 classrooms. We had a pilot program last year where I adopted six classrooms, and basically we have access to all of the major large language models on a token basis, so it doesn't cost our district hardly any money to give these teachers access to large language models. And I trained them. I said, "Okay, this is the language model you're going to use if you want to generate an image. This is the one you're going to use if you just want it to help you with lesson plans." And those six teachers used it almost every single day last school year. One of their husbands caught me at the grocery store one evening to tell me thank you, because he said his wife was getting home by five o'clock in the afternoons now, whereas in the past, she wasn't, especially when it came time like Fridays for the lesson plans to be done for the following week. So I think the number one way that it is really reshaping our K-12 classrooms is by just giving teachers back a little bit of sanity because of all the administrative tasks that they have to do on top of making those human connections.

Rena Clark 10:15 I think it's that answer. I know recently we keep adding more and more on. What are we taking away? And this is a little bit to that, like making the efficiency piece, like we're finally taking something off, which you never hear about, ever.

Maurie Beasley 10:28 Right, right? It's when we decided not to teach cursive there for a while, or we decided, or we decided not to teach analog clocks. You know, after a while, the brain just gets to capacity, and you absolutely have to take something away to be able to continue to be effective in your job. Yeah, and

Rena Clark 10:48 you talked about all your different experiences, so let's talk about experiences where we're talking about engaging with potentially disruptive changes, like we're seeing with AI. So maybe going beyond efficiency.

Maurie Beasley 11:02 So the difference in efficiency AI versus opportunity AI and those disruptive changes, that's when you use the AI for something you wouldn't normally do, right? So, like before artificial intelligence, I would have never thought about writing a 368-page book, right? So did I use AI to write the book? No. Did I use AI to help me draft and outline and and come up with, like, brainstorm ideas on how I could, like, put it together, even to the extent of, "Okay, you should really put the reflection pages after the story, and not after what AI could do for you," because that's where it more logically goes. So AI brought that opportunity to me. The disruptive part of AI, I think you're going to have two different sides of a coin. You're going to have this side of the coin to where it can disrupt for good, and then you have this side of the coin to where it could disrupt for bad, because you always have bad actors. Anytime you have a new technology, you're going to have a bad actor. So we could go in and we could talk about AI being used for deepfakes and for, you know, terrorizing kids online. And, you know, there's all—there's always the bad side. But I think if we continue to look for the good, and we continue to do AI literacy and show kids and teachers and parents how to be, you know, question it and how to question everything that you're getting from it, and vet your sources, I think that it could do a lot more good than it's going to do bad.

Winston Benjamin 12:45 That's a great answer, because I think it really allows for the user to find ways to be engaging with the thing, right? It's not like the tool is bad, it's how you use the tool. So I really, I really appreciate the way you frame that as like action steps of the user, and also it takes away the fear, because that's been my, one of my biggest thing about AI is, like, the fear of how individuals might use it back.

Maurie Beasley 13:13 Right? One of the things that that happens with us a lot of times, whenever we go out and do trainings and stuff, is everyone's always want to know about data privacy. Data privacy, you know, what about all this data? And I'm like, "Look, guys, educators have been trained on data privacy from the time we walk in the classroom. You don't talk about a student in the grocery store, you don't do a parent-teacher conference in the parking lot." You know, it's just we know not to talk about students because of that privacy factor. So there's absolutely no difference. Whenever you're a teacher using AI, you don't put the kid's name in there, you don't put a social security number in there. You know, you're smart about it, right? Okay? And, and when I hear people talk about teachers and how, you know, it's actually a little bit insulting to the profession, because we know better, at least we should. You know, if you don't know better then your administrators aren't training you very well on data privacy, you know, so absolutely train them [on] data privacy. Don't put the names in there. You just don't put information in there that you don't want it to have.

Winston Benjamin 14:23 So this gives us a good way to transition into the book conversation now, because one of the things that, as you you were just saying, like, is it going to be good? Is it going to be bad? And similar to the title of the book, Teachers Have Bigger Fish to Fry. Could you give us a just a general sense of what's the book about and what inspired you to like put it out there, because, again, sometimes we don't share our knowledge. So I just wanted to know what inspired that. So

Maurie Beasley 14:53 when artificial intelligence, large language models—AI has been around since like 1951 or whatever. So when large language models hit the scene November of 2022, my husband had early access, and he literally woke me up at 4:30 in the morning one morning, and he's like, "You've got to see this. This is going to change the world." Okay? And so he was so obsessed with it—still is, actually—that he decided that we needed to tell our admin about it immediately. So in like, January of 2023, we went to an admin meeting, and we told them all about it, and then they were like, "Okay, let's do some teacher training." And so we went and did some teacher training, and one of the teachers that we talked to was a technology teacher. And so we thought, okay, she's gonna love this. Well, then about two weeks later, I was in her classroom, and I was like, "Hey, have you had a chance to look at the AI thing that we told you all about?" And she was like, "Well, you know, just, I just kind of added it to the stack, because I just really haven't had a chance to look at it because, you know, I just got another section added, and I have four preps, and I have—" and so then I listened, I was like, "You know what? These teachers have so much on their plates that they are not even looking at the technology that is literally as easy to use as a pencil." Okay? You literally open it up and you start conversing with it. That's all it takes. You don't have to watch any videos, you don't have to read a training manual. You don't have to go earn badge one, badge two, and badge three. So put on the outside of your door, right? I mean, come on, that's what you do. You just, you just open up ChatGPT and you say, "Hey, I want to have a conversation. How do you think I should arrange my room when I have two kids that are disruptive?" You know, it's as easy as that, right? And here she was adding it to the pile because she didn't think she had time. So I was like, "You know what? There is a lot of stuff that goes on in classrooms that these tech bros don't know about," right? So true. And so the first thing I thought was, all right, I'm gonna call this book, Teachers Are Up to Their [Noses] in Alligators, because that's the first thing that came to mind for me, because we used to say that all the time. Remember the old saying, "When you're up to, you know what, in alligators, you can't worry about draining the swamp," kind of thing, you know? We

Rena Clark 17:19 must be saying, I don't know that thing at all.

Maurie Beasley 17:23 It's a Texas thing. My father-in-law had it hanging on his shop wall when he was an auto mechanic. And so that's what I was going to name it at first. And I I started just collecting stories. I mean, I had some of my own because I'd been in the classroom for a long time. I had some of my own because I was an assistant principal. And had to, like, you know, use the plunger that I kept under my desk to go unplug the toilet in the kindergarten hallway because I knew maintenance wouldn't get there for a few days, you know, I had to take the broom and the scoop and go get the snake off the teacher's desk because it had dropped from the air conditioning vent in the classroom, you know. So there was some of these—so many of these stories that happen every single day to teachers. And then here we're asking them to teach these 26 kids in their classroom, you know, all the stuff they need to know to go out and be productive members of society. So I was like, "Okay, I want to just start telling these stories, and I'm going to ask other teachers to start sending me their stories," just so we can kind of start feeling heard, you know? And so then every time I get a story, my husband would say, "I wonder if AI could help with that. I wonder if AI could help with that." So I was like, "You know what? I'll ask it." So I started taking all these stories I'd been getting and I started literally putting them into an AI and saying, "All right, AI, what would you do to help with this problem?" And then quite often, it came back with something that was pretty amazing, you know. And occasionally, it came back with what I thought was just like, you know, "No, that that that would never work." And so that's why I wrote the book, and that's why I said, you know, "How could AI help? Maybe it's not going to help." So that's—and then I'm a counselor. So of course, I had to add coloring pages, because I still think that sitting there and coloring or doodling can be the best therapy. So every single story has an image that I generated using an AI that's a coloring page. And then every single story has a couple of reflection questions, so that you can, just like, reflect and be in the moment and make your notes as to how it is that you handled this. And then the next is, could AI have helped with this? 

Paul Beckermann 20:21 Well, I love the structure of the book, and teachers love to tell stories. They love to hear stories, and you've kind of packed them in. That's that's so human, you know, of everything. And I like also that you're not saying AI is going to be the magic solution for all of these things, you know, you kind of going into each story with an open mind. So let's just kind of dive into a story. Let's pick a story from the book that that you really like that stands out to you where AI was the answer.

Maurie Beasley 20:51 Oh, wow. Okay, so I've got the book right here, so let's look here. Um, how was AI the answer? There was a lot of things like, "Okay, here's one." There was a teacher that sent me a picture of like a tech work order, and her rabbit, her classroom pet, had gotten out of its cage during recess and had chewed all the network cables to her computer. And she was like, "I don't know what to do with this." And so, you know, the rabbit ate the cables. Now you ask, "How could AI help with that?" Well, AI, because of the prompt I gave it, did a really great student responsibility contract, because it was a student who let the rabbit out of the cage. Okay, it did a really great student responsibility contract for them to sign, knowing the rules about having a rabbit in the classroom, so that that was one less little thing. There's other stories in here about disciplinary situations, like I had a student in kindergarten that was so on the spectrum that I could not get them to do anything except run around constantly. If I would have had an AI at the time that I was teaching kindergarten, the first thing I would have done is I would have said, "Hey, give me a plan. Give me some ideas on what I can do for the student who is so sensory overloaded that they cannot function in my classroom." And so I put that in here about that student. And it did. It gave me like, "Here's the top five research-based things that you can do as a kindergarten teacher for a student who is having sensory overload." And it's not very often that you have a teacher that has that type of a knowledge base, right? And that's what AI is, is this huge knowledge base. And so those are the types of stories that are in there that, yes, absolutely, AI is going to be able to help you with this problem, absolutely.

Rena Clark 23:01 I guess then let's think of the flip side of the coin. Can you give an example where AI was definitely not the answer?

Maurie Beasley 23:14 The snake dropping from the ceiling, you know, the the kindergarten toilet that that backed up every week. You know, those types of things. AI can't do that. That does take a human to go down and use the plunger to unclog the toilet. The very, very last story that I put in this book is, I titled it "The Student Who Disappeared," and this happened to me the very first year that I taught. I had a student that had some issues at home, and I knew it. I mean, they, they were malnourished, they, they came to school, you know, dirty, so forth, so on. And I'm a first-year student, and I didn't really know how to handle this. And so I went to the counselor, and I got the counselor to kind of help me, you know, "How do I look for the signs? What can I do?" And basically, what I put in here in the story, I'll read you a little section of it. Okay, it was my first year of teaching. I was older than most first-year teachers, and I really had no idea what to expect. I was assigned to a fourth-grade classroom, and among my students was one who  was always hungry. Most mornings he arrived too late to eat breakfast in the cafeteria, so I started keeping snacks in my classroom. But it wasn't just hunger, it was something deeper, something I couldn't reach. I tried. I talked to the counselor, I talked to the principal. I knew something was wrong at home. I knew. And once you know, you act. Then came the moment every teacher dreads: the first time I had to make a call to Child Protective Services. We train for this. We know the signs. We sit through mandatory reporting training every year. But when it's real, when it's your student, it's different. It's sickening. It's helplessness wrapped in bureaucracy. I made the call, I filed the report, I did everything I was supposed to do, and then he didn't come to school the next day, or the next. A week passed, and then a request came through the office. His school records were being transferred, another district, another town. That's when I realized this wasn't the first time. The pattern was clear. He had only ever stayed in one place for about a year at a time. The family was running. They knew the system. They knew that when the first visit happened, when CPS started asking questions, it was time to go. And so they left. Another school, another teacher, another round of someone else, starting from scratch, piecing together the puzzle that would never be whole. Tell me, how can artificial intelligence help with that? So that's how I ended the book. But then I went ahead and said that the reason I ended it here was because, you know, we are required and so forth and so on to do all the reporting. And then I went ahead and used AI to say, "These are the signs that you can look for. These are the different locations that you can report to." You know, that type of thing. But there are those stories that happen to every single teacher that artificial intelligence will never be able to hug that kid, right?

Winston Benjamin 26:42 Oh, man, you about to have me cry out here. And the reason why is because, like, I have my own—it's like, I have my own, right? Like, like you said, like, we all have our students, and we all have, the first year how you couldn't do it, right? The second year, you did something different. The fourth time it happened, you tried to make the moves a little better from the last time you learned. So, like, the universality of the experience is the part that's like, you're right, like, there's no machine. There's no machine that can put that together. There's no machine [that] can say, "Let me put a little snack over there," right? There's no machine that's gonna say, "Let me give you a little extra shirt," because I know you're gonna be made fun of. So, like, I appreciate the honesty about that. That's that is, it validates our work, right? The humanity in the work. So, and it goes back to your earlier quote, like, what's the purpose, right? So now that we've gotten the it's work, it doesn't work. Let's go to your hyphenated—I love, I love, I actually love that piece. Um,

Maurie Beasley 27:59 You know, a lot of those are things like, it might not help in the moment, but it might help in the future, you know. So, you know, here's the story. This happened. AI is not going to come clean up the mess. AI is not going to, you know, help with that, but maybe it can help me for next year. Maybe it can help me think of it a different way next time. Maybe it can give me some more tools in my toolbox. One of my notes, I hear I put, "Drink coffee, don't cry." So that's like a teacher note that they sent me. "I'm gonna just drink coffee. I'm not gonna cry." So we are all—we are all very frustrated with our jobs right now, right? And so that's what I—that's why I wrote this book. I wrote it as a a little piece of counseling so that everyone knows that you're not alone. So I'm

Paul Beckermann 30:08 going to leave you with, uh, kind of a final question here, and it's pretty open-ended. Okay, what are you pondering? What are you wondering these days, kind of an in the perspective of education and the realm that we, you know, that we live in in schools, but what are you thinking about?

Maurie Beasley 30:26 Yeah, honestly, okay, and I will be, I hate being honest about this one, but I'm, I'm going to be. Thank you. I'm wondering when our leadership is going to take this seriously. I just did a great training for a district outside of Austin where I went in and trained their leadership group, not their teachers, but their leadership group. And that's because their superintendent is very forward-thinking, and she understands that change on this level with this potential has to come from the top down. You can have your grassroots changes that are happening with your teachers that are like, we call it shadow AI, where they're using it at home, even though their districts are telling them they can't use it at the district? You know, Shadow IT is what you call it in the tech industry. So we know teachers are using it, just like we know students are using it. So I am pondering, when is leadership going to start saying, "Hey, we gotta get the teachers all on the same page, all on the same page." I had someone at a district—a school board member came to me and she was like, "Maurie, I have a kid in high school, and they are in an English classroom that their English teacher does not allow the use of AI at all whatsoever. You know, has the stuff on the wall, banned, you know, 'can't use it, can't use it, can't use it.'" The same subject, the same grade level. The teacher across the hall allows them to use it under certain conditions, certain parameters, you know. And so you have these two kids that are in, you know, 12th grade that are going to go out into the real world, and one of them is going to be at a huge disadvantage because they didn't have a teacher that was willing to teach them how to use it responsibly. So that's what I'm pondering. I'm pondering, when are teachers gonna be asked to come sit at the table to help make some of these tough decisions that have to be made? And not the big EdTech companies, but actually people who have been up to their, you know what, in alligators, have been frying these bigger fish for a long time? That's my ponder. That's the biggest one.

Rena Clark 33:02 It's a big one.

Paul Beckermann 33:04 It's a big alligator.

Maurie Beasley 33:05 Yeah, it's a big one. I think

Rena Clark 33:08 it's an alligator we're fighting all over the country. So, yeah, it is. Let's get into our toolkit and think about maybe some tools that might help with this.

Transition Music with Rena's Children 33:17 Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What's in the toolkit?

Rena Clark 33:26 Check it out. So who would like to start off today?

Maurie Beasley 33:31 I will

Paul Beckermann 33:33 You want to go first.

Maurie Beasley 33:34 I want to go first.

Paul Beckermann 33:36 You go first, Maurie.

Maurie Beasley 33:37 There's a lot of really great tools out there, and there's a lot of really great EdTech companies that are giving you all these different tools to use. I have had a situation before to where I used an awesome tool for two years. Had every one of my lesson plans in that tool. Came to school one day and the company had gone away, gone away, shut their doors. Website, 404, error, no longer exists, right? Took our tech director about six weeks to get in contact with them and get all of our information off of their servers. My suggestion to anyone out there trying to use a tool is absolutely play with all these tools. Consider it your training wheels. But if you really want to start using AI, you need to have a subscription to one of the big guys. You need to either pick Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, which still, to me, ChatGPT is still the most powerful one out there for the generalities of what teachers do. Claude for programming, you know, so and so on. Get a free subscription if you need to, but you've got to learn how to prompt yourself. You've got to learn how to use the LLM yourself, because one day you might walk in and go over to use your tool that you've been using, and it's not there anymore, and all of a sudden you're floundering like a fish, and all of a sudden you got even more fish you're trying to fry.

Rena Clark 34:55 I love it. So. Yep,

Paul Beckermann 35:01 that's great. Mine's a little different, because I think sometimes schools, even if they do address it within the walls of their building, they have the parents in the periphery, and they don't know how to address AI with the community. So recently, Common Sense Media and day of AI co-created something called the AI Literacy Toolkit for Families. It's pretty cool. It's got a nice video that the families can watch, like, three minutes. It's really quick. And then it's got an implementation guide for the schools on how they can maybe get it out there. There's a guardian and parent instruction kind of a piece that's got these activities they can do with their kids to foster the conversation. This is kind of a neat place to start. And if you're interested, you can either go to common sense education, or you can go to dayofai.org, and it's free.

Maurie Beasley 35:54 When I first started teaching a technology lab, I used Common Sense Media a lot. They have a lot of really good stuff out there.

Paul Beckermann 36:01 They're good. Yeah,

Winston Benjamin 36:04 I'm gonna jump in with my toolkit. And I think it's about the—Ms. Beasley, you said, like, training the leadership. And I would like to say, send people to AVID Open Access, where we have several episodes, conversations about AI. We have a lesson plan. So I think maybe if our leadership are interested, they could use some of our past episodes as a way to develop a professional development to help our teachers get an understanding of the tool and how it could be used to help them. So I think that's your point about the top-down being the way we really push to get this system interacted with in a way that's successful.

Maurie Beasley 36:50 Right. Start. It definitely starts

Rena Clark 36:52 at the top. And I'm gonna just kind of extend what Paul said. There's another nonprofit called—it's in, kind of in the area where I live, Seattle area—but it's called Foundry 10, and they put together a workshop called "AI Together," an interactive AI workshop specifically for middle schoolers and their parents and their families. So you can go into there, and they have all kinds of great research. What I like about Foundry 10 especially is like research is like very now, and they're applying it now. It's not super like old research that we're applying, so especially with the speed of AI. So they have some really great resources as well that you could check out.

Maurie Beasley 37:28 Awesome. I'm currently working on—I just did a presentation with 13 different activities called "AI Unplugged," and basically it's how to teach from pre-K through fifth grade, not using any technology at all, about artificial intelligence. And so it's hands-on activities and kits and stuff, yeah, and so I think it's very important that we start the AI literacy. You mentioned middle school. That's when you have to really start worrying about the deepfakes and the videos and all of the misinformation. But we have to start pre-K up. "This is what pattern recognition is. This is how you train an AI. This is, you know, this is a picture of a cat, and the AI was trained to look at this picture and say, 'This is a cat.'" And how do we introduce bias or, you know, so it's important to start early.

Paul Beckermann 38:21 All right. We got one more section left today, and that's our one thing. It's time for that one thing.

Paul Beckermann 38:35 It's that one thing. All right, one thing time. What are you still hanging on? What are you thinking about? Which final takeaway today? Rena, Winston will start with one of you, and we're gonna give Maurie the last say today.

Rena Clark 38:50 I still—that line is and it really applies to all the different elements we talked about. But it's, "once you know, you act." It's kind of like once you know better, you do better. You can't go backwards once that box has been open.

Winston Benjamin 39:07 Winston, I'm still thinking about the missing kid, right? Like how we do the work. But for me, the benefit of that is I actually see more use of AI now, because AI allows my mind to actually spend more time doing the human thing, like if I could eliminate some of the non-human things out of my day so I can focus my energy on reaching a child who I know needs that human love. I think it's a great tool. So it's really cherish.

Rena Clark 39:38 So you can fry the bigger fish.

Winston Benjamin 39:40 Exactly, get the little things out the way so I can fry the bigger one.

Maurie Beasley 39:49 So my one thing, the one thing that I would like to leave everyone with is that there is a reason for why. You are a teacher. Okay? I taught kindergarten for one year, and I did not want to teach kindergarten. I was put there because I was the only teacher on our—in our district, at that campus that was certified to teach it. They put me in kindergarten, and I absolutely did not want to be there. I had a really bad attitude. It was horrible, right? And then one day, my principal came to my door and told me that one of my students had been in an auto accident and he was not doing very well, and she would keep me informed and yada yada yada. And then about 30 minutes later, my cell phone rings, and it was that student's mom, and so I answered it immediately, and the student's mom tells me, she says, "Miss Beasley, I have got—" I won't say his name on the phone, "—and they are about to put him on a helicopter and Star Flight him to Dell Children's Hospital, but he is crying and insists on talking to you before that he will get on this helicopter." And I said, "Absolutely." So the little boy got on the phone, and he was like, just sobbing. He was like, "Miss Beasley, I'm not going to be at school today, and I don't want you to worry about me." Oh, boy. And I realized right then that I had been placed in that classroom for a reason. So my one thing is, as you're out there and as you are struggling and as you are frying these fish, you need to remember that there is a kid that you are their reason.

Paul Beckermann 41:38 Kind of like what you said before, no machine is going to hug that kid.

Winston Benjamin 41:42 That's like, a mic drop, yo, right? Like the T-shirt right there. We always talk about, we have T-shirt—that's like, that's a that's a sweater, right? That's just the, you know what? I mean, that good, warm feeling that, like, put it on when you know you need to be comfy and get some like—

Maurie Beasley 42:00 That student graduated high school last year and and he's doing great, and he's—every time he sees me, he gives me a hug. You know he's getting ready to go to college. So, you know, you have the opportunity, as a teacher, to change lives. And don't forget that.

Winston Benjamin 42:16 Ms. Beasley, thank you so much for your time, your conversation, your opportunity to help us think through a couple of things, and I'm gonna just—your, your last part of our discussion really brings us back to the the start of our discussion with is your, which is your quote? "We are the part that flows through everything AI touches. We are the context, the purpose, the ethics and the why." Thank you so much for reinvigorating us and helping us recognize how to use this tool as a way to make the connections that we need to do as educators. So thank you so much for your time.

Maurie Beasley 42:55 Yes, thank you all for having me. I appreciate it.

Rena Clark 42:58 Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 43:02 We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org where you can discover resources to support student agency and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 43:15 We'll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education,

Rena Clark 43:19 and remember, "Go forth and be awesome."

Winston Benjamin 43:23 Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 43:26 You make a difference.