And today's episode of the educational duct tape podcast. Adam Sparks is back to continue our conversation about writing instruction. In the age of AI, we're diving into even more actionable strategies from using tools like short answer, to embedding, more writing across the curriculum to help students recover those lost writing reps.
Plus we tackle big picture topics like teaching students who use AI effectively leveraging AI in scoring state level assessments and being intentional about making, learning relevant and stick around for updates. Dates from Pear Deck, MagicSchool, and Screencastify Submit. This episode is packed with ideas to empower your teaching. No matter what subject you teach. I've got a confession to make. I'm a bit of an out-loud thinker.
You know, the type I have to talk through ideas to make sense of them. My wife. Well, let's just say she's a very patient listener. But even the most supportive spouses probably have a limit. Right. That's why I was so excited when I discovered MirrorTalk.ai, a new tool from today's sponsor, swivl.
It's designed for people like me and maybe you too, who need to reflect out loud, whether you're brainstorming, assessing your work or helping others grow mirror talk makes reflection smarter and easier. And here's the thing. It's not just for people like me. Teachers can use it to help students build reflective and metacognitive skills, which are game changers for deep learning students. Simply talk through their thoughts and mirror talk provides instant.
AI powered feedback on how they're thinking. And how they can improve curious head over to bit.ly/mirrortalkjake that's bit.ly/mirrortalkjake to learn more and start reflecting better today. Welcome in duct tapers. I hope that you are doing well and that you and yours are safe right now. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to point out that this is part two of a two episode series, featuring an interview with Adam Sparks.
If you haven't listened to the first, I recommend going back and tuning into that one. I will be right here waiting for you. You jump right back in and hear the second half of the interview here. For those of you who have already listened to that one. I know that, you know, I know that, you know, I know that, you know, do they know that we know that they know, I know that you know, that you are in for some goodness today. I so enjoyed the conversation with Adam.
I know that you know, that we know that I know that it was a good episode and I know, you know, that it was good and you're in for something special today. I learned so much from last time. Um, he brought up a lot of ideas that really started me thinking I hope he did for you too. And that continues in today's episode. I'm so eager for you to hear it. speaking of our conversation, there was one point in the previous episode where Adam, who was a Nebraska corn Huskers fan.
Teased me about my favorite college football team. The yeah, the Ohio state university Buckeyes. Uh, at the time of the interview, Buckeye fans like myself, we're reeling from our loss to Michigan, but by the time I aired the first part of the interview, we were celebrating our wins against Tennessee and Oregon. And now I'm recording this introduction just hours, actually, maybe minutes before the national championship game against Notre Dame.
And hopefully you will be listening to this episode in a world in which the Buckeyes are national champions. Always. We'll see what happens. I'm I'm eager. I'm excited. I can't wait. I'm excited about the steam. I'm also excited about this episode. Uh, I should point out this episode is coming out a week later than I had hoped. This is a pattern with me. Uh, but this time I really thought I was gonna get an out, but, uh, FETC in Orlando, Florida kept me.
Really busy last week, but it also was amazing. It was such a blast being at the future of educational technology conference. If you've never been, I'd recommend putting it on your to-do list. It's a great, great conference. I had such a great time presenting and more importantly, meeting new educators and reconnecting with old friends. And actually I even got to see today's guest Adam at his booth for short answer.
Recently I was visiting a third grade classroom where students were having a publishing party to celebrate the completion of a new writing piece. The assignment was to write an opinion piece about whether or not they'd like to be an astronaut. As I was walking around different children, read excerpts of their work for me, it was really fun. Uh, I was surprised to find though, how many of them weren't interested in traveling to space? One worried about needing to wear a diaper.
Uh, another was concerned about swallowing toothpaste, but the one that really got me really made me laugh said, did you know that it takes years to get ready to go to space? What a waste of time. Uh, it made me laugh, but that didn't hit me. Whether the effort inconvenience and time spent on such a mission is worthwhile or not. Really depends entirely on how much you value the goal. And this kid clearly did not value the goal of going to space.
More than six decades ago, president John F. Kennedy clearly saw the mission of space travel as worth that effort, that toothpaste. That inconvenience, those diapers and that time. His famous speech at rice university showed just how important it was to him. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things. Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.
Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept. One we are unwilling to postpone. And one we intend to win. Well, those third graders would surely postpone that challenge. Kennedy was unwilling. Kennedy's mission to the moon. Wasn't just about space. It was about tackling the hard things that shape our future. Today in education, we're facing many challenges that I'm sure many of you see as about as pleasurable as those third graders see space travel.
Challenges that you may be eager to postpone. The biggest of those challenges, in my opinion, is artificial intelligence. I know, you know that because I've talked about it quite a bit lately. The difference here is a third grader can choose whether or not to be an astronaut. You unfortunately cannot choose whether or not AI will modify the landscape of education. It's going to happen. It is happening.
Getting American astronauts to the moon required a team of people with a shared goal, each doing their part to make it a success. It wasn't just Kennedy. It wasn't just Neil Armstrong. It was a whole big group of people each with one shared goal, all working together, doing their parts. The challenge of responding to the challenges of AI and education also requires teamwork. And our classroom teachers have a key role in that team.
In recent episodes of this podcast, we've talked about facing the AI storm, head-on setting guardrails and policies, controlling what we can and adapting to what we can't. We've explored how to think, like scientists curious and open-minded. While harnessing AI power as our own. And we've tackled the tough topic of AI detection tools and why they could do more harm than good. And that's a lot to process. I know. But if anybody's up to the task, it's teachers.
Look at what you've done in the last five years. And like Kennedy's moonshot. This is a challenge we cannot put off. The choices we make today. Will ripple across classrooms and careers for decades to come. We cannot afford to sit back. So here we are standing on the edge of a new frontier. Artificial intelligence is here. And it's already changing the world around us. We have the opportunity. Right now. To shape how our students engage with it. And how we integrate it into our classrooms.
Not because it's easy. But because it's necessary. This is the challenge. We are unwilling to postpone. Today's guest is, once again, Adam Sparks. Adam taught for seven years before recently finishing his master's in learning design and technology at Stanford. While at Stanford, Adam designed a writing tool called ShortAnswer that he now builds full time. As a part of his work with ShortAnswer, Adam leads PD with schools across the country on adjusting writing instruction in the wake of AI.
You could reach Adam on email at Adam at my Short Answer. com on their website at my Short Answer. com or on Twitter slash X at Mr. Sparks tweets. Or if you're like me and you've transitioned over to blue sky, you can find them at Adam sparks. Dot B S K Y dot social. So, Adam, picking up where we left off, how should teachers teach and assess writing? In the age of AI.
So now that our landscape has totally shifted because of AI, I think the classroom that's most impacted by it is the writing classroom. They're all impacted by it. We can't stick our heads in the sand. We have to, we have to embrace it in a way, because it's part of our world. So we have to admit it's there. So what do we do when we're teaching writing? How do we change how we teach? So point one is like, gotta have clear classroom policies and conversations with kids.
But then point two is just more short formative targeted in class writing instruction and really getting kids to think critically about writing skills. and that's specifically why we're building Short Answer is. It is for that in class, short form, meaningful conversations and social interaction around writing instruction. please do tell us about Short Answer.
I, I know that it feels awkward because you're, you, you don't wanna feel like you're selling here, but I think people need to hear about it. Pe everybody comes on this show and talks about tools that they love. Short Answer is a tool that I, I love. It's a tool that you love, you love it for extra reasons, , but tell us about it. Go for it. Yeah. The fastest way to get it across is just think like Kahoot for writing like kids sign in with a code.
You send out writing prompts to students or questions. And Students respond. It's all constructed response. They can type their text or attach pictures. They rate their confidence in their submission, which I think is an important point and submit it. And then once the teachers got all those responses, they push him back to the class. The really important part of this is, it's all based around peer to peer interaction and creating social experiences for kids.
I think that's really important and I want to come back to it. But so teacher pushes responses back to the class, and then in a variety of gamified activities, the kids will see each other's responses, and essentially they award points to each other based on the different success criteria. So, for example, here's two of your classmates' anonymous responses. Of the two in front of you. Which one has a more clear topic sentence? Oh, you click that one. Oh, I get some points. Hooray.
Explain to me why you felt like that had a clear topic sentence. Okay, great. Here's two more. So the kids go through that process and then we average it all out to kick out sort of like a hooray. Here's the top responses. That's kind of like the gamification element, but then we're also kicking out individual feedback reports to the kids as well. that's the, that's the basic gist of it.
So it is all sort of short form in class writing that's ideally centered around an authentic audience for student work where students are creating something, they're sharing it with other people, and they're seeing how those other people react to it. And I think when I think about that, Sort of a central challenge in this new age of AI of, like, how are we going to motivate kids to want to learn how to write in a world where they can now use AI to write for them?
That's, that's where my mind goes is you have to create experiences that, where, we're not just telling them writing is important, but where they can actually experience the importance of writing. And for me, that's creating social experiences where they can see like, oh, this is writing is how I communicate with the world. If I'm unable to write effectively, I cannot effectively communicate who I am and what I what I think to the world.
So I think that authentic audience piece is really the core engagement loop for Short Answer, sharing your writing and seeing how people react to it. And it is short form writing, but I don't want to give the impression that you can't drill down on specific writing skills that might be specific to like longer form writing. So if you're doing like an 11th or 12th grade. You know, like a composition class where we're doing a five to ten page, you know, gnarly research paper.
What I've seen teachers do is like, all right, I want you to copy paste in, you know, your first body paragraph. And we're going to specifically key in on what are the high quality aspects of a body paragraph and provide feedback to each other in that way, using this tool.
So It's not, I know it is a short form writing tool, but you can use it to sort of chunk longer form writing it and have meaningful in class conversations about that, such that, like, even if the kids went home and said, Hey, ChatGPT write my 10 page research paper on whatever we're working on. We can still bring it in and have a meaningful conversation about like. Is this effective writing or not? You know, what does this look like? So, that's the basic gist of it.
I'm happy to go into any more detail in any of that. But, but if you look at our theory of change back to the Dylan William work, it is all based around actualizing he and Paul Black's framework for what effective formative assessment is. I'm happy to talk more about that, but I, I feel lucky that Dylan is on our advisory board and I get to meet with him like on a quarterly basis. And those conversations are surreal. he's he's on my, um, he's on my education Mount Rushmore for sure.
Yeah. I saw him present once and I was like, this dude is amazing.. And unfortunately I was at a conference where I was a featured speaker and he was keynoting and I was only able to stay for part of it because I had to be like ready in my room for like 10 minutes after he finished to talk. And I'm like, I can't believe I have to talk like to somebody who just listened to Dylan William. Now I have to talk. Um, But I didn't even get to see his whole speech, and so I was really fascinated by it.
Um, I don't know if you could see me while you were talking, shaking my head. I was not shaking my head like, this is horrible. I was shaking my head like, he is saying all of the things that I care about in education with this, with this tool. Which is really cool. So if I was shaking my head, people can't see me saying this to you right now. But if you saw me, don't be offended, Adam. I have one question that I have some, some thoughts to share on that.
it's interesting because I told Adam before the show that I don't have a certain time limit. It's just, it's just, as long as it's interesting. And Adam, I'm interested right now. So we're going to keep going because this is fascinating. Um, I, so one question I have, so you said, you mentioned how it doesn't have to be just short form writing, it could be potentially pieces of a longer piece.
So there's the ability to assign them Short Answer created prompts, and there's also the ability to assign your own prompts to them, correct? exactly. So I could say like, share your second paragraph of the essay that you're working on right now. And that's what everybody's sharing is just a piece of their actual essay they're working on, right? Exactly. So they really, this really could be the pieces of a larger thing. So it's short form, but then it all gets strung together as a longer thing.
And the second piece is when they're giving feedback, when they're looking at each other's, uh, anonymous or, or do they Yeah, definitely. Anonymous needs to be, you know, for obvious reasons, I think for teachers, but the research is pretty clear on that, too. If you want kids to provide effective peer feedback, anonymity is going to be your friend. Yeah, I think we want to get classrooms to the point where a learner can go, Man, something's not feeling right about this essay or this paragraph.
Um, I really want to get somebody else's eyes on it. And they go to a student, not anonymously, and say, Could you look at this for me? I'm struggling with this. that's what makes us successful as adults in the workspace, right? You're able to go to Dylan William and go like, am I designing this platform, right? You know, and get some feedback from, and you're not doing that anonymously. You're just going to them in the interest of improving your work. And we want learners to do that too.
But I think they, and teachers will tell you, it's hard to do peer feedback because of the social issues there. but if we're doing it anonymously and we start to value the potential of feedback, I think. It could, we can then get learners to the point where they're comfortable seeking feedback from people in a non anonymous way. Do you agree with that? Uh, yeah, totally. And another thing I should add that I didn't, in the description is you also need to scaffold that peer feedback effectively.
And for us, the scaffold is very simple. It's comparative judgment is just here's two things. Of these two things student, which one do you think is better? Oh, you think it's that one? Tell me why. Very simple scaffold, but the research base we grew out of shows kids can do that at a high level. And when you average all of those comparisons, the feedback reports we can kick out are comparable to an expert teacher.
So that adaptive comparative judgment research base is an important part of Short Answer to that. I didn't mention. Yeah, so maybe you're not asking them to assess a piece of writing on a rubric that includes seven different descriptors with four different levels of each descriptor and give some general feedback at the end. You're really just saying, compare these two pieces and then explain what your logic was.
And then you're using kind of the law of large numbers where you're like, okay, now this has been done by 20 other students. So now We've, kind of averaged out any irrelevant responses or, or maybe not accurate responses out of there. That's exactly right. Cause if, if you did the first thing you described, what you would get is 25 different scores for 25 different pieces, right?
Like, you know, kids struggle with that, but they're really good at just of these two, which one's stronger, than they're more reliable and consistent. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. a couple of things. I just want to like, give a little finger clicks for here. like I'm in a jet, like I'm in a jazz club here talking to you.
the first is that by making it a game set up, you're tapping into extrinsic motivation, which we know extrinsic motivation is not the best form of motivation, you know, intrinsic is, um, but we also know that extrinsic motivation does work particularly with kids and over short terms. So, um, Especially when they don't want to do the thing and don't see it as important. So it's going to get kids who maybe aren't that excited to write into the writing because of that gamification that's happening.
And that's cool. The next part is that the way that you're doing this is focusing them in on a skill. on growing their skill as a writer. So we know that when we look at motivation, we know that the things that motivate kids more are mastery oriented motivation, not performance oriented motivation. So not looking at, I got 90 percent of my multiplication problems right, but looking at, I'm growing my skill as a writer or in these specific areas of writing.
So this all focuses on, The quality of the writing and it's focused on the skill and those kinds of things are what tend to shift us from extrinsic motivated to intrinsic motivation because now we're working on developing a skill and that's internal and we might just naturally then care more about growing that skill. Um, Yeah, and then the so the social part of this is so cool. and then the next thing I want to point to actually another. Another one, two, one, two more, six more.
I was 19 more things. I want to say, Adam, next, the authentic audience is huge. We know that when we're writing for an authentic audience, other than just our teacher, number one, it makes us understand why writing is important, but number two, it's a motivator. And then the last one I really want to zero in is that confidence piece, because you're really asking kids to be metacognitive, and reflect on the quality of their work.
So they're, they're effectively self assessing their work before submitting it. Then they're getting peer assessed. And so by putting in their confidence, level, they are doing a self assessment and being metacognitive about their writing skill without even really thinking about it. You're almost like tricking them into doing that by saying, how confident are you in this?
So then, and then at the end they can rate their confidence again and the the teacher can see was their difference because that's a meaningful conversation regardless of if you became more confident or less like, tell me why. And those, I think those conversations can be super meaningful for kids. Yeah. Super.
Super. There's some work that I was just re reading about recently, which is the Assessment Capable Learners work, which was Nancy Frey, Douglas Fisher, and John Hattie, and they talk about, I don't love the name Assessment Capable Learners, but they talk about how, a successful learner can do a few different things, and they're, they're motivated, They make choices about how they're going to go through their learning.
They set goals, and they, they progress monitor and they're looking at growth over time. And there's some other pieces to it, but the studies have shown that that piece that you're talking about there of kind of reflecting on and being metacognitive of yourself as a learner is great. So that's really, really cool.
So. Yeah. So zooming out from Short Answer a little bit, even though I, that, that was really exciting and I'm glad we took that detour, zooming out from Short Answer, you're saying it's one way, a very good way that we could bring more short formative targeted in class writing into, into class. And really, let me see if I'm understanding this correctly. The, what's really important here, the kids are writing in class.
They're writing in short bursts and it's being viewed as kind of a formative assessment and a self assessment too, in the process, would you agree with that? That's right. Yeah. And that not only avoids the AI issue, but it puts the focus on the right thing, which is the growth of the writing skill That's you. You said it better than I than I could. I don't think I did. I just, I just synthesized it. So, yeah, some of the things we've talked about.
So, you know, we've got clear classroom policies. We're going to do more short form targeted in class writing. the third piece would be just, we need more writing across the curriculum. It can't just fall on the English teacher anymore. we, we're going to need to make up for what I think are going to be lost reps at writing practice. So there's tremendous learning benefits to AI. I don't, I'm not, I'm not a hater. So to speak, but, there are also some downsides that I think we need to recognize.
And one of them is AI is going and already is embedded in every platform that kids use every day. It's, it's, it's already in Snapchat. It's going to be in the iPhone. You know, if you get the new one, it's going to be a layer in the iPhone. It's already in Google search, you know, it's, it's going to be writing stuff across all the platforms that kids use. And I think that that's going to add up to kids getting a heck of a lot less. Writing reps basically in their day to day life.
And so we're going to need to make up for those lost reps. and so it can't just fall on the English teacher anymore. Like it needs to be in social studies and math and science and the electives. And again, to your point, you brought up earlier, it's easy to say that, but we already don't give teachers enough time to do their jobs. And now here we are asking them to do even more. And so my answer, you know, to that challenge is like, just find ways to teach your content.
You know, whatever your standards are. I'm not, I'm not asking the science teacher to do subject verb agreement lessons. I'm just saying, find a way to teach your content through writing across the curriculum. And I'm not, this is nothing, you know, revolutionary here. Writing across the curriculum has been advocated for for decades. There's an entire organization.
If you just type in whack to your Google search bar, like, that, that this is their goal is to promote writing across the curriculum because research shows it's one of the best ways Initiatives you can do to improve literacy across, you know, K 12 school district. but I just think it's just more relevant now more than ever. So that's point 3 of the plan is writing across the curriculum needs to be reemphasized. I think.
Yeah. And I think another thing to point out, you pointed out, we don't want the science teacher, for example, to, to reinvent everything they do. Yeah. and start teaching the writing skills. We're really just asking to get kids writing in those classrooms. And I also want to point out, two things about that. One is You don't have to grade every piece of writing a kid does. Sometimes the writing is for the writing.
It's not for the assessing with that said, as much as I love formative assessment tools that are multiple choice questions that I could really look at and get auto graded and get really quick grades on them as much as I love those kinds of formative assessment tools, the best formative assessment is formative assessment where I could really peek into a kid's brain and understand their thinking. And that's if a kid can write well, which some kids can't, and that's an issue.
But if a kid can write well, I could do some really rich formative assessment on that. So I don't have to assess it all the time as a science teacher, for example. but when I do, I'm going to really understand. That kid's level of understanding of something better than can they answer this multiple choice D O K one vocabulary question about this thing. So that writing is not that those things don't have a place in learning. Like there is like, we do need the D O K one level.
but we need this writing to see inside their, their thinking. So there's lots of benefit for it. And I'm sure WAC will tell us all about it. yeah, exactly. And to your point, like, you don't have to read all of it. Like, I can imagine, like, common strategy I've seen is, you know, here's your, Weekly journal and every Friday for a bell ringer, we're gonna take the first 15 minutes of math class, let's say, and for 15 minutes, I just want you to write a reflection on would you learn this week?
What was challenging? What was not? we're gonna do that every week. And then at the end of the month, you're gonna start the one you want me to read, and that'll be the one every week. So I'm like, you're, you're writing every week in my math class, but I'm not, you know, sitting down and grading essays every Sunday night. You know, it's like, so there's meaningful ways to do this in ways that I hope don't increase the workload for teachers across the curriculum.
And that's a, that's a beneficial move, even if it does, even if it does increase the workload a little bit. I think the return on investment is really high there to get kids to be metacognitive about their thinking. So you're not just saying, write an essay response to a question. Um, you're saying reflect, write about your learning. Um, it forces them to be honest about maybe the use of AI, but it also forced them to be metacognitive, which is a huge, huge thing.
Huge benefit. Actually, I mentioned Hattie earlier, one of Hattie's biggest effect sizes, maybe his biggest is students, thoughtfully reporting on their learning. that he found in one of the meta analysis to, to nearly quadruple the rate of learning when students metacognitively thoughtfully report on their learning. And so that's what you're asking me to do. And it's getting them writing more and then you're looking at some of them. That's it's worth the extra time. So Bravo to that one.
Okay. So that that's number three, that's number three, Creating clear policies. We are doing more short in class targeted writing, and now we're writing across the curriculum as well. Okay. What's number four. Earlier I mentioned how I am out loud thinker. It's a habit that works for me, but let's be real. My wife doesn't need to hear every single one of my half formed ideas. That's where today's sponsor Swivl and their tool MirrorTalk.ai really shines.
It's not just for people like me, who love talking things through it's perfect for teachers and students to here's how it works. Students talk through their learning objectives, ideas or goals and mirror talk uses AI to guide their reflections. It provides instant. Personalized feedback to help students think more critically and improve their understanding. For teachers, it's a game changer. It helps you gain insights into how your students are thinking and growing.
And it can even support your own professional development. Whether you're trying to grow your learner's metacognitive powers or working on yourself, mirror talk makes reflection smarter and easier for everyone. Intrigued head over to bit.ly/mirrortalkjake that's bit.ly/mirrortalkjake and discover how it can transform the way you and your students think, learn and grow. All right, back to our interview with Adam Sparks. number four. We could talk about for the next six hours. Um, Oh, good.
I want to. it's, it's, we gotta, we gotta be intentional about teaching kids. If you're going to use AI in your writing, how do we use that effectively? So it's embedding AI. Instruction in in the writing classroom. And obviously that is a huge topic. you know, OpenAI actually recently just put out a blog post in which they lay out, like, here's how students can use AI for writing. And it's, you know, I tend to be pretty skeptical of the stuff OpenAI puts out, but it was a pretty good blog post.
I actually just shared my BlueSky this morning. and so, you know, if you're looking for inspiration, that might be a good place.
But this is a huge topic, but just AI can be a pretty darn good, You know, resource to help you brainstorm and to research, and to format your writing or to cite your sources or to, you know, get feedback on sort of six traits of writing type of stuff, or, you know, as like a debate partner that challenges you on whatever your thesis is, or, so there are any number of use cases that I think are really effective. It's then it becomes like, how do we do this?
In a targeted specific focus way where kids are actually like, you know, where the A. I. Is in the loop, but the teacher is in charge, so to speak. and a tool that I really love for this. And I have no problem plugging is SchoolAi, schoolAI is like the tool that I use the most with it is you can create custom chat bots that do very specific tasks. And then you share those out with the join code and the kids can sign in.
and so you can monitor the students use in real time and that chat bots doing maybe one specific thing that you want to sort of model for your kids on how they might use a I effectively in the writing. So I'm imagining like the brainstorming partner, for example, like maybe we're doing a 10th grade creative writing project. And, you know, I, I've created this bot that's going to help you brainstorm what your characters are going to be for your story or whatever.
But I can monitor that in real time using SchoolAI. and if I don't like the way your interaction is going with the chat bot, I can pause it. And now you and I can go and have a conversation on the side while everybody else is, you know, still doing their own thing. So that's a tool that I look to a lot for that. specifically around teaching kids to use AI effectively in their writing. There are many others that I'm sure we could talk about.
And again, this is a topic that we could again spend the next like the You know, the whole day talking about, but, but I do think that we need to be intentional, especially maybe not so much at the elementary level, but definitely at the middle and high school level about teaching kids how they might use AI effectively in their writing.
Yeah. and the way you're talking about it too, is it going back to that thing I said earlier, where, if we're sometimes on the red light and sometimes on the yellow light, and sometimes on the green light, when we're on the red light, the kid is likely to understand that we're being intentional about why, and that we also allow them to use it at times. And so saying like, you're going to use school AI to debate this topic with you as you brainstorm or whatever.
You're saying I have a clear purpose for why we're using it. I think it's going to benefit you. and I'm being more permissive of the use of AI in this way. And, they're good tools for in the classroom school AI, especially because you could see the interaction between the student and the, and the bot.
But I think from a, almost like a classroom culture and a trust perspective between you and the student and a being very clear about objectives and strategies being used, I think there's a lot of strength in what you're suggesting here is that we're, we're not saying like, Because AI is in the world, just go ahead and use it freely in my class. Yeah, exactly. We're saying we're going to be really deliberate.
We're going to model why we use AI for certain things and why we don't use it for other things. and where we need it to be just you and not the AI and where AI can be a support without taking away from the skills that we're trying to develop in you. And going back to the thing we talked about earlier of being clear about what skills are we trying to grow. This is a skill we're trying to grow, which is the effective use of AI as a, as a learner. And as someday as a, you know, workforce member.
exactly. Because it is something they're going to use in their day to day lives. So I don't, I don't, I think we're doing kids. And I have caught a lot of heat for saying this on Twitter. I think we're doing kids a disservice if we don't make an attempt to AI effectively in their writing. because they're going to use it whether we want them to or not. So let's be intentional about showing them how to do that effectively.
Yeah. And back in number one, you were clear with them about your policy and your logic, behind that policy. So you're not only teaching them how to use it effectively, you're teaching them how to use it within that policy. And to your point earlier about academic integrity, you're teaching them how to do it with academic integrity. And not with academic dishonesty or, or whatever the opposite of integrity is, I don't know, exactly. Like what does it mean to cite a conversation with a chatbot?
How do I stuff like that? That is just really practical blocking and tacking, tackling sort of stuff. But, So that was a very quick overview, but I do think point four of like, we need to be effectively like teaching kids how to use this stuff effectively in their writing. and so the final piece then is, and this is kind of like Adam's wishlist, I guess. I don't know how practical this is for a classroom teacher, for a district.
but I, We just need more urgency around We need more urgency around literacy. And that's going to be some of your listeners are gonna be like more urgency around literacy. Like, are you following the science of reading movement? Yes, I am. I'm following it very closely. And if you look at the state initiatives around the country that have been passed because of the science of reading, which I, for the record, I think is a great thing. It's 100 percent focused on reading.
And like early childhood reading. That's great. But literacy is the ability to read and write. And the and write part has gotten more or less completely lost. And so what I think that looks like is we need to put more writing on state tests. I'm not I'm not here to sing the virtues of like how great state tests are, but for better or for worse, like what is on the state test, there tends to be a lot of urgency around that in what school districts focus on. And you can see that.
So the state of Texas very recently put, writing across the curriculum, essentially like short form writing, on the star test, which is their state exam. And the data came back terrible. Kids can't write. And there's a, so now there's a ton of urgency in the state of Texas around writing. Okay. Um, I would love to see that urgency in other states.
and I, and I think this is actually an area where AI can really help us because historically, I think part of the reason that writing was left off of state tests is because it's a logistical nightmare to score all that writing. Like great. Now I got to train and bring in and pay like all the English teachers from across the state to score these essays or score these short constructed responses or whatever. but AI is increasingly really good.
at scoring student writing, especially on like a standardized task, like a state test. and, and actually Texas is using AI in part to score their state writing exam. So I think AI can unlock and make it a lot more practical to put writing on the state test. And I think we should, because I think that'll create more urgency around writing instruction that we really need because again, our kids already can't write. Frankly, and now we're introducing AI.
That's going to write for them across every platform that they're using every day. I'm worried about what that means for student writing ability moving forward. and so I think we need to get ahead of it with some urgency, and hopefully, you know, putting more writing on a state test would create that urgency. That's just kind of Adam waving his wand in the air and, you know, sort of Adam. If, if I had a magic wand, this is what we'll do.
I'm not expecting states or, or, or the, the, the federal, department of education to go along with me on this, but like, ideally that would be a next step as well. Uh, yeah, you gave me some cognitive dissonance on there on a couple different things, Adam. The first is like, I, the last thing I want is more things in the state assessment. So maybe we could replace things, but I do think there's some validity to the famous quote, what gets measured gets done.
and so I think that's, that's a key point to just be like, I don't like that. That's the case, That is part of the case. I think the other thing too, is What i'm making this one up as a paraphrase, but what gets measured communicates what you care about. So I think that's another thing too. So by measuring it, we say we care about it, which is part of the problem of state assessments now, to be honest, is by measuring that we're saying that's what we care about.
But if we measure writing skill more, yeah, so I, so I get that. I love the point that the movement in literacy, which has been generally positive, I think, has been, has been focused on the reading, not on the writing. And that, that could be a whole episode as well to, the reading part as well as the writing part.
but I think the one thing that really gave me pause that you said there was leveraging AI to score the assessments because I'm like, isn't this the guy that an hour ago when we started this really long interview that I'm thoroughly enjoying told us not to use AI detection tools because they're not effective, but you're, you're right.
But then I thought about it and I said, I thought, well, actually he's not saying the same thing here, because he's not saying use AI to determine if AI was used, you're just saying, use AI to assess, which is different. And I think, especially on a state assessment, oftentimes those, from what I've heard, those are graded by essentially like temp workers, right. Or people that, that are not teachers necessarily.
it definitely depends, but you know, like, for example, I taught AP US history, the way AP has done it historically is. They train you as an AP grader and they fly you into a central location and like 500 AP U. S. history teachers sit in a gym and manually grade AP U. S. history short answer responses. I think the days of that are rapidly nearing their end.
Um, because when you have all of that data, you're going to be able to basically fine tune a model to score this stuff relatively accurately. And I'm not talking out of pocket here. So part of the reason I'm comfortable saying this is there's a couple of studies that literally just came out.
so if your listeners want to type into their Google search bar, if they have a computer in front of them, just like computers and education journal, just, just this month, there's a study called can AI provide useful holistic essay scoring? Steve Graham is on that study who for my money is like again, like one of the godfathers of best practices in K 12 writing instruction and the short answer of that, you know, to short circuit a very long and an important research study.
yes, AI can can provide useful holistic essay scoring and not long before that, there was a study that came out called comparing the quality of human and chat GPT feedback on students writing and what they found was that there's really not that big of a difference between, human feedback and Ai. Feedback. and they suggest that A. I. Scoring for, you know, low stakes formative in class stuff is useful and potentially can be useful for higher stakes stuff like a state test.
So I think the technology is increasingly there. Mm hmm. And I think maybe the reason that I'm coming off is playing both sides here is because I'm very much down the middle when it comes to AI in school, I think there are like. When we lead our AI writing workshops with schools, I, I always lead with this AI enthusiasm spectrum. And on the one end, there's like the rainbow crowd that thinks AI is going to solve the world's problems.
And, you know, the greatest thing since sliced bread on the other end, I literally put up the grim reaper and it's like, AI is going to destroy critical thinking and, you know, intellectual property. And it's, It's the devil. That's just here to suck up the oceans and make capitalists a bunch of money. I'm very much in the middle.
Like, I think, I think if you live too much on one end of fairy tales and rainbows, like you, you risk ignoring the flaws as there are tremendous flaws, but if you live too much on the sort of like, It's going to destroy the world Terminator two type of stuff. You, you risk ignoring some of the potential. And so I think some of the potential is, these studies that I'm talking about.
Like it might unlock the ability to like really meaningful writing assessment at scale in ways that have not been possible before. So I don't see the value in ignoring that. I think there's tremendous potential. Yeah, I'd agree, yeah. Wow. Yeah, I will link those two articles into the, into the show notes for people that are might be in their car or on the treadmill and to try to Google those things while you were talking.
So I'll put in the show notes that they went once you're off the treadmill and thank you. Like, first of all, I'm proud of you for being on the treadmill right now. Good job. Go you. but once you're off the treadmill, you can click the link and check out those, those articles. I think it makes, it makes a whole lot of sense to me. and so the last thing I'd like to talk about to Adam, before I let you not take up your entire day for this amazing conversation, is.
Okay, so the main reason that people care about Thinking about writing instruction in the age of AI is because they're worried about cheating. I'm guessing that, but I'm pretty confident in that guess, that that's the main reason we care about it or people are worried about it. and similarly, your, mention of, it'll mean in the end of critical thinking and things like that. Like if, if AI could do it for us, why would we do it? And so it goes into a lot of different things. to me.
The reason a student would cheat on writing is because all they're trying to do is finish the writing. Oh, and or get the grade and or not get in trouble and or please their teacher or please their parent or not get in trouble with their parent or get into a college or get into a prep school or whatever they're trying to achieve some extrinsic thing that is finishing the work, getting the reward, avoiding the punishment, We're getting the praise, whatever it might be.
And that's why we cheat on things. For example, I'm going to come right out and say this here in Ohio. We have to do these online modules about, some specific safety things. and there's one particular module that really doesn't impact my job. And so when I do it, I Google the answers while I'm doing it, because all I'm trying to do is finish it. So my HR director knows that I finished it.
And so if I, as a person who cares deeply about education and talks about it in my free time and records a podcast about it, I'm willing to, to quote unquote, cheat on this, on this assessment to get this task done. I hope I don't get fired for saying this in a podcast, you do you cheat on your bloodborne pathogen test? I will tell you off the air, which one it is that I'm cheating on.
Uh, um, but if I'm willing to do that, that shows you that there's a reason that I'm willing to do that, which is that I have assessed that there really is no use for this particular piece of value in my job, and I don't feel the need to have it for myself. And so I'm willing to just do it. Go ahead and look up the answers to it.
And that also then is the reason that a learner is likely to use AI to write a paper for them is because all they care about is finishing that writing and maybe getting some kind of extrinsic reward. So how do we fix that part of it? That's a really big question, but what's like, what's your, what's your, piece of guidance for how, how do we make it so that they care? Well, the first thing I just want to acknowledge, it's a legitimate question that you're gonna get from kids.
It's like, why should I learn how to do this skill? Is it relevant anymore? It's, it's, it's Dylan William, John, we keep referencing these researchers and I'm glad, but Dylan, William, John Hattie and Arran Hamilton have this paper called like, it's called like 13 challenges that AI creates for education and like how we can solve them or something. I can, we can link it, but they talk about this of like, it's the same logic.
That's like, why should I. Yeah. Learn how to why should I memorize the roads? If I have GPS now, like, I don't need to memorize the roads like GPS tells me exactly where I need to go. And it can factor it can do all these things. I couldn't do can factor in traffic patterns and blah, blah, blah. Like, so legitimately, why do I need to learn the roads anymore? And I think so. We need to take kids seriously if and when they challenge us on like, why is this important anymore?
And my answer to them would be into your question would be literacy is one of the most important predictors of your health and well being as you go throughout your life. Like, yeah.
The research is crystal clear on that, um, your ability to communicate effectively with the world is going to influence your ability to be successful, regardless of what you want to do with your life, whether you want to be a welder and, you know, join a trade or whether you want to be the president United States, like you need to be an effective communicator. And writing is going to influence that.
Now, we can tell kids, you know, we can cite research and tell them writing is important all we want. But I think as teachers, we know telling a kid is not going to be enough. We have to be intentional about creating experiences where they can actually experience the benefit and the value of writing. So for me again, I would go back to creating meaningful experiences in your classroom where kids are writing something, sharing it with the world and seeing how the world reacts to that.
You could use the tool we're building, but you don't have to, I can think back on like when I was in high school, my English teacher had us do a letter to the editor where we just like wrote an opinion piece and sent it in. I put no thought into it. I was like a moody high school, you know, 11th grader and mine got published. And I was complaining about how.
Our school is small town really into sports and things and our sports team wasn't very good and like, like I was complaining about how people care too much about winning in our small town thing and it created a kerfuffle. People were like, did you read that Adam Sparks piece? Like what's going on with the culture? What's going on with the culture of the sports team at listville high school? What's why? Why is the football team?
Like, why is the football team writing into the paper about and yeah, Like I, I'm 33 years old. I still remember that. Like, Like, that, that was so shout out to miss Paula Holman, who was my high school English teacher for creating that experience. Like, I still remember how important that that that demonstrated to me like, Oh, wow. Writing is how you communicate with the world and actually can have profound consequences for, for you.
Yeah. So just being intentional about creating experiences like that, which, so again, for me, it's, it's creating an authentic audience, you know, for other teachers, it might be something different, but you have to create experiences for them so they can actually experience the value of it. You can't just tell them it's important and that really goes for just about any content. Not just writing. Yeah. those are some really good points.
So, so number one, the importance of just being able to communicate, number two is that, what a predictor of health and wellbeing it is. Number three, bringing the authenticity of why writing is impactful. And number four, and you said this in the first part is just being really intentional to kids about why it's relevant.
To them why they should be learning being really intentional about saying that like we know anytime we could state the objectives of a lesson and tell them why those objectives should be important to them are going to be, it's going to be more impactful that way. And I will say, in my early years of teaching, sometimes I would find it hard to explain to kids why they need to know what scientific notation is. And for example, I'm just picking a thing in math class that I used to teach.
And it's really hard to figure out a reason. And I was really kind of faking it when I explained it to him. But nowadays I can go to AI and say, why is this important to them? Help me. My kids really care about these things. They're really into these things. What are some examples of why this would be important and relevant in their life? and then generate that list. And then, maybe I'll have more ideas for what to share there, but I think that's a really good point. And so.
Those are things that my original thing was They're likely to cheat at writing if they only see writing as something that they have to do or a means to a certain goal but if they see the development of the skill of writing and being a good writer as being something that has some kind of Benefit to them and something that they value Then they're less likely to cheat, right? Would you agree with that? I would totally agree with that.
Yeah And there's been, you know, for those that are worried about cheating, there's been studies done. So Denise, Dr. Denise Pope and Victor Lee, who are two researchers out of Stanford, Denise Pope specifically has been studying student cheating patterns for the last 20 years. And cheating has not demonstrably increased since the release of chat GPT. Like their research has been pretty clear on that.
Now, part of that is because baseline cheating was already high, but baseline cheating was already high because of what you're describing kids just viewing. schoolwork is like a grade that they have to get or a box they have to check rather than something that is intrinsically valuable that has, that will influence your, your life, you know, so, no, I, I agree with everything you just said.
yeah, and if we think that, kids, potentially cheating on work and not valuing schoolwork and not being really invested in it in 2024, a few years after chat GPT and stuff like that hit the scene, uh, if we think it's problematic now. Like just, just wait. Like, I don't, I don't have a crystal ball to tell you what's coming, but I think, I think, yeah, yeah, we need, we need to start shifting now to, to focusing on the skills rather than focusing on completing tasks and getting grades.
because we're almost encouraging things like cheating being done. Wow. Adam, this was such a good conversation. I'm, I apologize for taking up so much of your day. We started, Adam was finishing his breakfast when we started and he's now, he, dinner is about to be put on the table and his house. Yeah. love these types of conversations. And, so no, I've loved it. This has been super fun. Yeah, great. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Like I said, I'm going to put your contact information in the show notes. I'm going to put a link to Short Answer in the show notes, a link to all of the awesome studies and articles and things like that you referenced and a reminder to folks that you could find Adam, at ISTE at a lot of different conferences. And if he's not at the conference that you're going to, Maybe talk to him.
I don't know if his family will accept how often he's allowed to leave the house to go to these conferences, but hopefully he can make it work. And I think the other thing too, that I recently signed up for Adam is the, the mailing list on myShortAnswer.Com because it's, it's not just. It's not just updates about the tool, which as you could tell from earlier, I'm very excited about the tool.
it's also about some of these, these webinars that you guys have been doing, which we mentioned a few of them. So, are there, are there more coming up soon? Yeah, we try to do a webinar about quarterly. So we've done a couple of this this semester, and we're hoping to do a couple in the spring. So, yeah, we try to be very intentional about the emails we send because we know teachers are busy. So we To be value in those emails. So yeah, join the mailing list. That'd be great. yeah, for sure.
I'll put that link in the show notes too. thank you so much Adam. This was amazing. I really appreciate your time. Yeah. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Okay, can you see now why? I was so excited about that interview with Adam? When we started talking, I was like, Hey, so Adam, I normally do like 30 to 45 minutes, but I like to know just in case. Do you have a hard stop time, you know? And he did not.
And boy was, I glad he did not because we just kept going and he told I would off air kind of in parts. You couldn't hear, say like, is it okay if we go a little bit longer? Uh, because he was just hearing such good stuff. I'm super excited about his wisdom. About as advice and about short answer. And I'm relieved that we have folks like him helping us steer the pedagogical ship through the days of AI.
Um, before we steer our ships out of this episode, let's take a look at some education news that has caught my attention. So three things first, some news from pear deck. Uh, paradigm has long been one of my favorite tools. And when I talk about it, uh, and I talked to Nearpod users about the two tools, because they're so similar, they're both fantastic tools. I am a paradoc fan, mostly because the school I was teaching at used paradox. And so I was more familiar with it.
Um, when I talked to Nearpod users there they're often pointing out the parodic does an auto grade and they're right. Well, they were right, because now it does. That's right. They now offer auto graded questions for choice. And number slides, you can even assign point values. So I have a question, be a one or two or three or four points. However many you want, by the way you notice, I said, choice slides in there. There are now two different options is another change they made.
So now there are choice slides. Those are multiple choice kind of slides. They are auto-graded. There's all also pull slides. Those are good for when you don't want to grade it. So they're essentially like a survey question. So choice site. Choice slides or poll slides. And then, uh, the choice slides are auto-graded and the number slides are auto graded as well. Second update.
I'm also a big fan of magic school, but one thing that has bothered me with magic school is that there wasn't as much customization as on a full large language model, like chat GPT. So I was often recommending the teachers. Start with magic school. See what's potential with AI, kind of identify the limitations and magic school. It's a great, great tool because it, it shows the teachers what's possible from AI.
And then when you see what you would also like to get from it, Then turn to chat GPT or Claude or Gemini or whatever, and use that. Um, because you couldn't customize and magical, you just did what they gave you essentially. But now magic school allows you to make custom tools. So whether it's a lesson plan and a certain format or.
Uh, quiz and just the right way you like it set up or a feedback tool that you want created, you can tweak what magic school does, just the way you want and then save it to use again. And again, and again, I'm curious, what would you customize to make your teaching life easier? I'd love to hear about it. Uh, reach out on social media at Jake Miller EDU with the hashtag EDU duct tape to tell me about it. And one more update is a bit of a pattern today. We're talking about tools that I love.
Adding features that I've always thought they were missing. Along those same lines. I like Screencastify submit a lot. Um, but it was always just a video submission tool so that the student submitted a video to the teacher. The teacher could see it and assess based on it, but nobody else was seeing it. And so I felt like those were missing well, they just added tools to boost student engagement and streamline that teacher feedback.
So now students can comment on each other's Screencastify submit videos. Teachers can give timestamped feedback. And you could use pre-made templates. You could really feel here. That this was probably part of their map in the first place, but this is really well timed with Flipgrid or flip going away except for, for Microsoft users. So now if you're trying to fill that gap, Screencastify submit now is a little bit better at filling that gap than it used to be.
Um, plus screencast by submit now lets you set recording limits. So a certain amount of time. Also let's use tag standards in your assignments too. Which feature are you excited about? The most? I'm curious for me. It is that student commenting option and the teacher feedback option, I guess I can't choose. So I'm curious of these three updates. One from paradoc one from magic school and one from Screencastify summit, which are you most excited about?
I would love for you to reach out on social media. The one I'm most excited about right now is blue sky, but anywhere. Use the hashtag EDU duct tape. And let me know which of these three new updates you are most excited about. I have to tell you, I feel like this episode went really well. I wonder if everyone liked it. Oops. There I go again, reflecting and processing out loud.
I think instead of doing this on the podcast, though, I should probably use MirrorTalk.ai from today's sponsor, Swivl to do my reflection. MirrorTalk, lets you talk through your ideas and get instant AI powered feedback on how you're thinking and where you can improve. Whether you're a teacher, helping students develop metacognitive skills. Someone who loves a good self-reflection or a podcast or reflecting on how their recent podcast episode went.
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