Smart Talks with IBM: How AI Assistants Can Transform Education

Hey everyone, it's Robert and Joe here. Today we've got something a little bit different to share with you. It's a new season of the Smart Talks with IBM podcast series.

This season on Smart Talks with IBM, Malcolm Gladwell is back, and this time he's taking the show on the road. Malcolm is stepping outside the studio to explore how IBM clients are using artificial intelligence to solve real world challenges and transform the way they do business.

From accelerating scientific breakthroughs to reimagining education. It's a fresh look at innovation in action, where big ideas meet cutting edge solutions.

You'll hear from industry leaders, creative thinkers, and of course Malcolm Gladwell himself as he guides you through each story.

New episodes of Smart Talks with IBM drop every month on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more at IBM dot com slash smart Talks. This is a paid advertisement from IBM.

In the world of educational research, is a famous video of a boy named Sean. I don't mean famous in a sense that it has a million views on YouTube. I mean that in the circle of people who think about teaching and how to make teaching better. The video has been written about in journal articles and shown over and again in college classrooms. It's a ten minute clip of a third grade class somewhere in Michigan. It was filmed in January of nineteen ninety, so the video is

I would like to hear from as many people as possible, what comments you had, reactions you had to be in that meeting yesterday.

A little boy with black hair raises his hand. His name is Sean.

Hello.

I don't have anything about the meeting yesterday.

That was Sean was.

Thinking about the number six.

So I was thinking that it's a it's an idd it can be an odd number two because there could be two, two, four, six, two, three twos and two threes and add Antonisina two thinks make Italy two things.

And Sean doesn't understand what odd and even means. He thinks that just because you can break down six in an odd number of parts and an even number of parts, that six must exist in some magical middle category. And when you listen to the Sean videotape, you keep waiting for the teacher to say, oh, no, Sean, you misunderstand. But Deborah Ball doesn't do that. She never tells him he's wrong. Instead, she simply asks him to explain his thinking.

And the two things that you put together to make it were odd right?

Three and three are each old and thinks Roba so.

Two or even bald and asked the class to give their views. Other students jump up and explain their theories on the blackboard. For the next fifteen minutes, she defintely guides the class through an in depth investigation of what she calls shawn numbers until Sewn himself realizes that the real meaning of odd and even is something different than he had imagined. And now he gets it.

I've been great, Thank you for when you are in love.

I don't want to focus just on how little Sean finally made his own way to the right answer. I'm interested in what his teacher did to get him there. Deborah Ball worked magic. She never told Sean the right answer, She just led him to a place where he could discover it for himself. My name is Malcolm Glawo. This is season six of Smart Talks with IBM, where we offer our listeners a glimpse behind the curtain of the

What I think about in terms of responsiveness is more like, I think that students need to have a sense of agency in what happens in the classroom, and like authentic agency where they can be legitimized as knowers.

I spoke to a physicist at Seattle Pacific University named Amy Robertson, a longtime advocate for responsive teaching. She uses the Sean video in her classroom.

You have to trust that kids have a way of doing that and that, like heard, what she mostly did was to facilitate a conversation and to say you have to listen to them talk.

No one told him he was wrong, that's right, and then he goes, He goes. I didn't think of it that way again.

I thank you for bringing it up.

You've expanded my understanding. Thank you for bringing it up again. It's like this, I love, I love.

I Responsive teaching, as I think about it, is kind of rooted in this like Eleanor Duckworth's work around the Having of Wonderful Ideas, where she says, like, the goal of education is for students to have wonderful ideas and to have a good time having them.

But I love that. I've never heard that. What a beautiful, succinct way of summing up the purpose of education. Yes, responsive teaching is beautiful. It's rare to find a new teaching idea that everyone loves. This is one of those rare ideas. Watching the Deborah Ball classroom, all I could think was, I really really hope my daughters get to

There is one, but I don't think I can talk about it.

Unfortunately, Wait, wait, you can't tease me like that, can you wait? Disguise disguise it for me, Just give me a general.

It was about the ability to pull certain types of information out of documents that you you wouldn't think you would be able to get the model to do, and be able to do that at a very large scale.

Bissile's point was that we are well past the stage where anyone wonders whether a I can be useful. The real question now is what problems do we want to use it to solve? Where it can make the biggest difference, And Basil saw lots of opportunities in education.

I have two kids, one in middle school and one who just graduated high school, and I'm well aware of students using things like chat GPT to do their homework. And it's very easy to take tools like that and even IBM's own large language models and just take a problem, a piece of homework, something you want written, and drop it into that and have it generate the answer for you and the student. The user in that case hasn't done any work, they haven't put any real thought into it.

To Basil, that's the wrong use of AI that's technology making is dumber. What we really want is technology that makes us smarter. Basil explain to me that there are now two big tools being used for AI productivity, AI agents and AI assistants. Let's start with AI agents. AI agents can reason plan and collaborate with other AI tools to autonomously perform tasks for a user. This will gave me an example of how college freshmen might use an AI agent.

As a new student, you may not know how do I do with my health and wellness issue? So many credits are going to get for this given class. You could talk to someone and find out some of that, but maybe it's a little bit sensitive and you don't want to do that.

Bisill told me you could build an AI agent, a resource for new students that helps them navigate a new campus, register for classes, access the services they need, and even schedule appointments on their behalf, which in turn buys them more time to focus on their actual school work.

We can see patterns of how agents and assistants can help employees and customers and end users be more productive. Automate workflows are not doing certain types of repetitive work over and over again. And streamlining their lives and making data more accessible to them twenty four hours a day.

But Bissil says you can also use AI assistance in the education space. AI assistants are reactive as opposed to AI agents, which are proactive. AI assistants only performed tasks

What was the course you took, Yeah, so it was offered by Coursera. It was designed by IBM AI Foundation for everyone.

In her AI Foundation's course, Lee learned how to build an AI assistant using IBM Watson X. That course took how long to take.

It was not to know it was like fourteen weeks.

Lee's idea was to train an AI assistant on classroom data to play the role of sean A digital persona of a nine year old who likes math but doesn't always understand math, and that AI assistant she thought could be used to train preservice teachers or teachers in training who are preparing to enter one of the most challenging professions in the modern world.

So when you think about the teacher education and a major challenge that teacher education phase is that we need children to practice with. We need instructors who will give the instruction on the pedagogical skills. So when you look at the education program, we have coursework in field experience, and in those two areas there is something missing all the time.

Li says that pre service teachers often lack access to both students and experienced teachers during their education.

So what we try to resolve is that we have this virtual student for pre service teacher to work with so that they can practice their responsive teaching skills.

The first AI assistant Lee created is g Wu gi Wu, emulates the persona of a nine year old third grade girl. Then, with the help of one of her collaborators, a researcher at Canazon named Sean English, she created two more AI assistants, Gabriel and Noah, each of which have their own distinctive characteristics. So how are gabriel and Noah different from.

G Wu Gabrielle? My first one is very short answered. If you ask an open ended question, he will answer it in a close way. So I use that characteristic. And that's the problem that most teachers actually base. They're asked children who are shay, who are reserved, and who would not share much of their thoughts. So we wanted that characteristic in some characters, and we use Gabrielle to have that characteristic.

And Noah. What'snawah's personality?

How do he playful? Cheery, bright and energetic?

That's Sean English professor, Lee's fellow researcher.

And Jewu is articulated and kind of smart, but he she has her own way of thinking.

I would end up spending a lot of time with jie Wu. She's something of a character. I asked Sean about the process of creating these AI assistants. What does building the content side of the AI assistant entail? Sean?

What?

It sets up a series of actions, effectively, which are response cases. You can kind of think of them as you have a series of questions that you tie to an intent, and then that intent has reactions from the bot, and so effectively, if we were looking to say make a hello action, we would have all the different ways that people could say Hello, Hello, what's up, how you doing, and all that kind of stuff.

Sean says, the longer the list of potential responses, the better, But AI's responses don't just follow the list. The AI assistant uses those suggested responses to come up with a universe of other responses, and in that process sometimes it comes up with things that just don't make sense.

And from a technological standpoint, while AI is a fantastic tool, AI can hallucinate, which I mean, just give things that it's just straight up made up. There's a famous example of this called the three rs is where you ask a popular large language model how many RS are in strawberry, and it gives you the wrong answer, and he repeats that result repetitively. You always want to have a human interacting with the system to be able to go, hey,

That's why it's good to have someone like Sean English around to step in and get the model back on track, and over time, when the model has enough training, it's ready for the teachers in training. One of the rollouts of Jiwu, Gabriel, and Noah was with the teacher training program at the University of Missouri.

I was just kind of excited to see what the program was and what it was going to be doing.

This is Logan Hovis, a junior at Missouri on the path to becoming an elementary school teacher.

Obviously a little skeptical when he said it was so to you know, be like talking to a student. You're like, there's no way this AI thing is going to totally sound like a second grader or a third grader, Like it's going to sound like an adult, or it's going to sound like a robot that knows all the answers.

And it really didn't. It really was like talking to a child.

It was very very well developed in the way that you really sit there and you feel like you're talking to a kid.

Her point wasn't that Jiwu and her fellow avatars were equivalent to real kids. Of course not, but for someone starting out, someone who was already nervous about being plunged into a classroom of nine year olds, Jeewu was like a warm up before a baseball game.

What I can think of is like, you know how when you're at batting practice for baseball or softball, you have those automatic pitchers that throw them because you're working on your skill as the hitter. What can I do differently? What am I doing wrong? But that doesn't replace the game and what you do in a game. But this is you getting to practice your own skills to be better when you go in a game. And I think that's kind of what the AI software feels like for us.

In batting practice, the pitches don't come as hard and fast as the pitch is in a real game, but you get to stand at the plate and the pitcher throws you dozens of balls over and over again in a concentrated block that allows you to work on your swing closely and carefully.

There's a lot less stimulus going on around because the classroom is very very busy. It's wonderful, it's beautiful, but it's very very busy, so sometimes it's hard to keep you know, that focus in on the tasks that they're doing at hand, and also in the teacher setting, you're also kind of always looking around making sure that other students are doing what they're supposed to be doing, but also like if they need any help, if everything's going

I also know I'm probably not going to hurt someone's feelings right now, and that's terrifying to think I'm going to ask the wrong question and upset the child because I've done that.

We think of the typical use of AI as a tool for speeding things up. That's what we always hear that the introduction of AI to problem X gave an answer in minutes when solving problem X used to take weeks. But we shouldn't forget another use that it allows us to slow things down. Hoves, if she wanted to, could

Rutle, who are of three fourth cup of a flower to the ball thanks to the added another three six is cup. It's a total amount of flower the use greater or dan or a less than one cup? How much flower.

They can use.

That's a simulation of Giewu speaking. We pause it for a second. So Jewu is trying to solve this problem. And the first thing she does is she draws a rectangle on the screen. This is a common tactic of nine year olds try to visualize the fractions. And she divides it into four pieces. And now she's gonna color in three of the four pieces. Yes, so she's representing this is quite good. She's representing three quarters on the screen.

This is three sixes.

So now Jiwu does another rectangle with six boxes and colors in three of them.

Okay, together makes sikes going off.

So then she counts up all the colored boxes and that's her numerator, and counts up the total number of boxes and that's her denominator. Ji Wu had counted the colored boxes and landed on an answer. When you add three quarters of a cup and three sixths of a cup, you get six tenths of a cup. So, according to ji Wu, Martin has less than one cup. And she thinks she solved the problem.

Yes, okay, so it's less than one cup.

Yeah, so she says it's less than one cup. Now, oh my god, this is hard. So the question is what do I, as a teacher say to Jiwu. We were off. The rules were simple. I couldn't give ji Wu the answer or explain to her what she was doing wrong. I had to be Deborah Ball. I had to help her find the way herself. The chat box in the corner of the screen was waiting for my

Yeah, serious thing.

Yeah, that's a good question.

Jewu doesn't mess around. She answers immediately. So Ju says, the blue and red pieces are not the same sizes.

Oh so you understand now, gu knows that side differences.

She's pretty smart here.

Yeah.

Then I asked, if they are not the same size, do you think you can add them together? Jiwu answered right away. Jiwu says, I have learned that I could add any numbers in grade two. So three p three is six and four to six is ten.

Yeah, so she is using the knowledge of edge intiquers into adding fractions.

Now I'm stumped. So now I have to somehow lead her to figure out a way to get her to understand that we're dealing with a different kind of problem, a harder problem. Amy Robertson had told me that learning how to do responsive teaching properly was really hard, and now I understood why. I had to put my mind inside the mind of a nine year old. I had to internalize her knowledge base and assumptions and keep in mind, I haven't been nine for a very long time. I

So we are trying to help her to think about faction in a more conceptual way.

This time, Jiwu understood. She wrote back, three quarters is larger than one half? I wrote back, is three sixths of a cup bigger or smaller than one half? Jewu said, I'm confused.

Oh no, I've confused, gi Wu.

But it's good she's understanding. She's realizing her misconception. So she's getting confused.

She says, I'm confused. Three quarters is pretty close to one and adding three six would make it go over one.

Oh, so she's got the answer.

Yeah, But then she says, but there are six pieces out of ten, which is less than one, so I don't get it.

So she's the point that, oh this, I have something wrong here. That's a good sign.

She's getting there.

Yeah, she's getting there, but.

I still have to get her. She has to get the six pieces out of ten.

Out of her head.

Yeah, I have no idea how to do that? What he and she thinks she's confused when she has Actually she's figured out the answer. Yeah, she did, So we have advance. Even in my stumbling and bumbling, we've made some progress, and.

Very notable progress.

My conversation with jie Wu went on for some time, and eventually I got there. Jie Wu found her way to the right answer. She said, I have more than one cup of flower. The mentor chimed in. I got a little emoji that made me feel good, And when