983: AI in the Classroom: How a Top Elementary School Is Doing It Right, with Principal Traci Walker Griffith

26:29And so we have like student versus AI and we've created, we've used, so magic school is another opportunity for us to continue to use other systems and magic school because it's part of our suite in the Boston public schools. And so teachers in the ELA humanities team work together to create this, I call it complicated because I think it was, I was not understanding it until my fifth grade friend was Principal Tracy, here's how it works. He's got like four tabs open on his computer. they've uploaded these practice you know like short pieces of text there's the extended response which is the writing responses that we've really you know like year over year from like 2007 it has been a problem of practice for our students to be able to explain their thinking clearly in writing so this critical thinking and analytical writing and so there's open response there's multiple choice.

27:31And then there's the notebook is next to the computer. And the kids are doing what they call chunking. So they're writing down what they're reading and chunking it. Then they're answering a question in magic school. And I said to the student, I said, so well, how is AI even helping you? And he said, well, let me tell you, I'm writing my response. then I'm letting AI write a response. And then I'm comparing the two to see who's better. And then I have to explain if I think mine is better or if I think the AI is better. So the idea of reflection right here is, I mean, that's mission critical to thinking about thinking and accelerating outcomes.

28:14And then in addition to that, I said, well, what about the multiple choice? So he's like, oh, I got this one wrong. And I said, well, why do you think he got it wrong? And he said, why do you think you got it wrong? He goes, well this was the almost right answer but this was the right answer and I said okay so what do you do with that information he said well actually it goes right into this tracker so Miss Duggan my teacher can see what you know if there's a pattern that might emerge and I'm like a pattern that might emerge what does that mean I mean I just the conversation so I'm I'm with the CAO she's looking at me, I'm looking at her and I'm saying, this is fifth grade.

28:55So in four years, this child will be in high school. And this, this opportunity for this child to take this learning, this, there's a hundred kids in fifth grade, all having the same experience with this interface with magic school, which was teacher created and collaborated on. And now the student is having an opportunity that this is not the first opportunity that the student is working with AI. This is like a culmination. And that's why we're talking about a repertoire. This student is driving his learning. Another student is getting feedback based on what they need. And it's personalized, but it's related to, we're not lowering the bar.

29:40We're raising the bar. AI raised the floor. Teachers are raising the ceiling. What's better than that?

29:49Jon Krohn:That is sensational. I love how the older kids are able to figure out their own way based on the way that they learn, based on the places that they feel like they need work or the AI system says they need work. They figure out their own way to be working between these different applications, Gemini, Magic School, a notebook. And so what is Magic School exactly? That is, it actually, it came up in our research as well, but I didn't dig into it very much. So it's another platform and it's built for, you know, education to be school safe. And as I said, we try to stay platform informed, not platform loyal.

30:32Right. We we want to make sure that like PlayLab, which is another amazing, you know, that's powered by Claude in the back end. We're using PlayLab personally. I've done it with some principals. I created a budget tool for PlayLab that Magic School allows teachers to prompt and control that interface. So we didn't just start with Magic School. I want to be clear because I think right out of the box doesn't help the learning that teachers need to do and the AI literacy for both the adult learners and the student learners. That's at the foundation. We need to know what we don't know and give students opportunities to think about AI and AI ethicality and create.

31:23You know, our students are critical consumers of everything in their world. Like AI is like number one. We need to make sure from the youngest age, we're thinking about AI literacy.

31:33Jon Krohn:I love this. This is really exciting. For people who are trying to figure out what they should be doing with their kids at home, or maybe hopefully you have other educators listening to today's episode and figuring out what they can be doing in their schools. Is it the consensus of the research out there, as well as your maybe personal experience, that this bifurcation of having younger kids not be working directly with the AI because maybe they anthropomorphize too much, whereas the older kids do get that direct access, that bifurcation, that's basically like, that would be a recommendation that you have for everyone at this time, right?

32:12Well, so that's, that's a really interesting question. It's similar to the question, you know, should three-year-olds be in school all day? We believe yes, right? So So if this is where we are, right, thinking about it in our timeline, that I see two-year-olds with iPhones in their hand. So they are actually interfacing with AI, whether we want to think about that. I think in schools, we need to be thinking about the ways we talk about AI. and I mean 19 years ago I mean I didn't even have an iPhone right about 19 years ago I had my I had my little Blackberry so that we know that the world is shifting at such a at such a breakneck speed we need to create critical consumers for our families and what's the family education look like at Elliott is we're still building that out right so even that old it's not old but it's like the social dilemma, and it's now showing up on a streaming service.

33:18And one of our eighth grade teachers was like, should we show that to our seventh and eighth grade families, just to retool this idea of how much is too much exposure? So just like calculators, when you think about people are like, you can't use a calculator in math. Well, would we say that now? So I think we should be always thinking about, for families especially, what is your child interacting with at home? Kind of do a, I don't know, a survey at your house. Like what, and we always say reading is thinking. So please make sure there are like hardcover books and paper books. And if you are letting your student or child use the computer, what are they using?

34:11It's about decisions too, because the decisions you make as a family at home impact how they interact at school too. They're all, everything, and let's go back to the infinity, right? Everything in and out, it keeps connecting back.

34:26Jon Krohn:The physical books thing is interesting because I find it so much easier to stay focused and just to comprehend what I'm reading if I'm leafing through a physical book as opposed to having something on, say, a tablet. Is that something that, yeah, I guess this is like a research-backed thing that we should be having kids working with physical books. And what's interesting about that is obviously we're not talking about university education or high school education really very much in this episode. but a lot of the big educational publishers have moved to digital only for the textbooks that they provide.

35:07Jon Krohn:I went recently to, I did my undergrad at a small university in Ontario called Wilfrid Laurier. And I had, when I was home, because my family still lives in that area, when I was home over the Christmas break this most recent year, the alumni office took me on a tour of the campus and it ended at the bookstore. And the bookstore, when I was there, was full of books. And now there are no books. There was one kind of book. They still have anatomy textbooks because I guess somehow that, you know, like second year anatomy, there's like hundreds of things on a page and it's probably just too unwieldy to get into a digital format and have that work.

35:53Jon Krohn:But other than that, you know, they had a couple like, kind of like touristy kind of books about the university or about the region. But that bookstore that was once full of books was now full of sweaters and key chains and that kind of stuff. And yeah, it's, I don't know, it seems weird to me. I wonder if I could have succeeded the way I did as an undergraduate student if all the learning that I had to do was on a computer instead of out of books. You're speaking my love language. And I think it's an interesting thought. Obviously, as a school, we do believe so deeply in, if you've walked into my office, there's books everywhere.

36:40We love reading. And for our kids, We send book bags home with kids. We have bags and books. And we also have kids reading online. And kids can bring in a Kindle if that's the way that they feel inspired to read. Because at the end of the day, we have all that research that says kids need to read. And they have to read at least 30 minutes at home. And they have to read at least 30 minutes during school, at least, to accelerate. And so we go to the library here. I love bookstores. They're like few and far between. But we do have a little one in the North End, which makes my heart sing that, you know, my youngest, both my kids went to the Elliott.

37:29My youngest, she's like, I'll meet you at the bookstore after school, mom. And she's like 24 years old. So this love of reading also inspires a love of learning because we know reading is thinking. And then simultaneously in the upper school where the kids want to, you know, we do have, everybody has a Chromebook at the Elliott and in Boston. There was a clear commitment to ensuring technology, especially during COVID. But I would say BC, before COVID, there was always this idea that we need to make sure that kids have access to high quality literature that reflects not only them and their identities, but gives them a window to the world.

38:19And that's what books do. And if we just say you have to go, you know, you can only use the computer, we need to have multiple modes because every learner is different. So I just, that makes me sad that, you know, bookstores are on the out. But, you know, there's, there are hundreds of thousands of people that believe so deeply in the actual pen to paper, which we also do. We have Google Classrooms and we have those, you know, the old black composition notebooks where kids are capturing, you know, and keeping a repository of their thinking in notebooks as well.

38:55Jon Krohn:Right. That makes a lot of sense to me that we have this blend of approaches and I can see that working. There are some advantages, of course, to digital learning. Resources can be updated in real time. You can search for terms more rapidly. you can have just way more content at a much lower price in a digital format. So there are some advantages, but yeah, there's a, I don't know if I've said this on air before, but something that I've definitely been saying to people over the years, my fantasy day is to be able to be in. So at that same undergrad university that I went to, I just had like a simple flip phone at that time, could really only make phone calls on it.

39:40Jon Krohn:You could text, but you had to like, you know, to get each character, you had to press the number, a certain number of times. It was pretty tedious. You wrote, you wrote really short texts, CU with just the letters C and U. And I could, I could go into a study room and I have the specific study room in mind that was called the fishbowl because it had windows on all sides. And so you could go into the fishbowl, you get a desk to yourself. Nobody had a laptop in that space. We had computer labs that you would go into when you were typing up a report or whatever. But in these study areas, people didn't have laptops.

40:21Jon Krohn:They had textbooks out and notebooks. And I specifically, one of the most enjoyable textbooks for me personally was calculus for some reason. As you work through those calculus pages and your mind opens to some completely new concept that just a few pages ago would have been impossible and how that journey through those hundreds of pages through the calculus book, if you were to start at the back, it's impossible and it looks like nonsense. But if you work through it from page one through page 400 or whatever, by the time you get to the end there, all of that what would be nonsense makes sense.

40:58Jon Krohn:And that is, I don't know, it's such a cool experience to be able to sit there for two hours, uninterrupted by emails or phone calls, and to just be able to work on calculus problems. That's like my deepest, darkest fantasy. I mean, I was right with you. I'm thinking about the fishbowl and the ways, I mean, I'm in an office right now. I've never sat this long in a space without interacting with others. And at the same time, it's just really important for us to create those spaces for our students. So I really, I appreciate you sharing that with us. Yeah. So anyway, I ended up talking a bit more about myself than I need to on a podcast that's really about you and the kids.

41:41Jon Krohn:But prior to recording this episode, you sent me an email where you talked about there being three distinct failure modes as you were developing these AI systems that required complete prompt redesigns. And so it seems to me like for any of our listeners, whether they're parents or teachers or whatever, that are trying to figure out ways that they can be leveraging AI tools to help themselves or help kids learn, what were those failure modes that you encountered and how did you fix them? So that's great. We're always in failure mode. And I think that's the mantra of failing forward. The first one definitely was this idea of generic feedback.

42:23If we didn't actually give Claude or Jem the correct way in which we were thinking about giving feedback, it was just so generic, like, great job. And that was the second failure, which is Too much encouragement, like, great job, great use of this. Well, that's not feedback. That's just something else that has two letters that I can't use on a podcast. And we knew that even the teachers, you can't trust it, right? So this idea of we want students to be critical consumers, we wanted our teachers to be critical consumers. Do not just throw something in and send it to a child. So this idea of the generic feedback, then the next thing was too much, good job, good job, pat on the back.

43:17And then the last thing is over trust. And so how we work through it is, we had to use this as an actual way to train the AI. And as we continue to train the AI, I think it was a missed opportunity for us to capture all the ways in which we were prompting. So, you know, that fail forward is great, except for, you know, teachers were doing it in different spaces. Although we had like a coordinated Claude and we had projects in the Claude, we had a shared Claude account with Claude with multiple users. we weren't always like connecting all of the work together. So one of our, our lead teachers and, and, um, one of our other fifth grade teachers were like talking at night and saying, Oh, I tried this, I tried that.

44:07And then it wasn't, it wasn't in a repository that we could actually then learn from. Cause maybe we didn't meet that week or we, you know, we were meeting, we were meeting weekly, but also trying to document all of that work. So it's been, for us, the journey and the challenges of the journey have made the journey that much more impactful for both the students and the teachers.

44:34Jon Krohn:Thank you for sharing those. And yeah, it provides us with some useful context on the ways that we can be developing AI systems ourselves. A particular group that you mentioned earlier in the episode, well, you talked about two groups earlier in the episode that I want to kind of highlight here. You talked about multilingual learners and students with disabilities as being particular categories of students that can leverage this AI world positively. And so tell us about how AI can be a differentiator for those groups. So I think for us, we talked about AI as being part of a solution. It is not the solution.

45:17It is one of the tools. we always start with a problem of practice, right? So we know from our data, there were groups of students in different grade levels, whether it was a student that was a multilingual learner, or a multilingual learner, and a student with disability, or just a student with a disability, that clearly there was an opportunity for us to think about the data that was coming out, that we could adjust the feedback so that the teacher could prompt and say, this is the writing from a student who is on this lexile level, which is a reading level for the non-educators in your audience, that they're reading at a, so say the student is in fifth grade, their reading level is in third grade.

46:07The standard is the same. So, but you want to be able to provide actionable feedback for this particular student you can prompt quad or prompt Gemini, whatever the LLM you're using, so that that student is receiving that feedback in a way that's actionable at their reading level. And then that's where we were seeing that prompt engineering and creating, you know, the under the hood, I guess, the architect part of the creating the response was it was clear that we needed to

46:43Jon Krohn:make sure that everything was in there so students could move based on that feedback. And it's all connected to data, John, because if you don't, if you're doing something and you're not collecting data and you can't show the growth, you can't abandon something because you keep thinking to yourself and there's like the, we're overprompting ourselves saying good job, even though it's not a good job because you're not actually accelerating the learning. And AI was a differentiator in that way. and then teachers are coming together when they see this data and this one teacher was seeing a lot of gains.

47:18So then the teachers were like, okay, how did you prompt? What was the way you did that that got us to there? And it's all connected.

47:29Jon Krohn:You're talking there about data and the importance of tracking data effectively from some written conversation that you and I had also before recording this episode. Something that came up are the kinds of metrics that you're tracking, which I think are interesting. So in the data science world, the kinds of metrics, when we're thinking about evaluating a model or process, we talk about these things like accuracy, precision, recall. The metrics that you're measuring include things like writing growth, teacher time saved, student metacognition, and ethical understanding of AI. Can you walk us through some of those measurements?

48:05We sure can. And we can also be super honest that this is an area that we continue to grow with and iterate on. I think for us, capturing a data system, and as I said, when we started in Denver, we had an idea and created a Google Sheet and started to think about, we're doing something, we have to collect data, and so that the actual writing growth data was really important, setting goals for students. And then the piece around, there's an assessment called the SEIO, Student Assessment of Youth Outcomes. And so teachers are being surveyed. Surveys are hard and they're important at the same time.

48:54So thinking about triangulating all of those data sources is something that we continue to try to figure out how to ensure that we're not just spending all of our time assessing and also not losing the opportunity to find ways to document and in real time say the data is showing this this and this um i'm trying to think what was the other

49:23Jon Krohn:uh student metacognition ethical understanding of ai is that what you're yes just so thinking we always say thinking about thinking. So how do we track thinking about thinking? And we have, I have heads, we have heads of school and we're thinking about the students that when we go, when I, when I was telling you about going in, I go and visit classrooms all day. Kids will be wondering where I am today for an hour and a half, because usually I visit, I visit probably at least 20 classrooms a day across the three buildings. I get a lot of steps And this idea of validating and valuing students being able to share their thinking and be able to explain their work and their reflections so that we have a repository, we have a Google Classroom.

50:12So when we're thinking about the reflections, that it's built into the units of study, that there's portfolios. And our next level of work is ensuring that year over year, there's a way to capture that learning. Because we know what we're doing is absolutely amazing. And it has to be replicable and scalable. Those two pieces, like we can continue to do this work and move the needle. And we need to bring everybody else along because this is not just here. This is, we're talking about access and equity and closing opportunity and wealth gaps, not opening them and widening them.

50:55Jon Krohn:Some of those metrics like writing growth, it's kind of easy to understand. You'd have a pre and post evaluation on writing quality. Teacher time saved requires some logging of teacher time, but you can imagine that's quantifiable. For something like student metacognition, is that something that is converted into some kind of quantity that can be tracked over time? That's really, we think about this all the time. We've always had this problem. We want, so probably in your audience, this could be another startup around capturing data around student metacognition. And I imagine maybe there is something out there.

51:36we're also thinking about those 21st century skills that the soft skills that we know are mission critical in the workforce and we always keep talking about the future of learning connected to the future of work and you know when we have a portrait of a graduate and we have a you know as we right before covid um we were launching into um deeper learning and thinking about how all of our units should be considering problems to be solved in the ways in which students have access to think about their lives beyond the fourth grade classroom they're sitting in and giving them access to people from different walks of life and in their professional lives.

52:22And it's just so hard to measure. And then there's the ethical considerations around how are we tracking this? How are we thinking about getting this information and sharing it? So a lot to think about. And we'll keep thinking about our thinking.

52:40Jon Krohn:Yeah, it's a fast moving space in terms of AI capability. And so this kind of this idea of fail forward and experimenting with different things, tracking what data you can, it seems like the best that you could possibly be doing in this scenario. you are retiring in june uh i don't know if this is are we announcing that on air is this i mean you just announced it john so i i announced it in the end of september i started socializing this idea and creating space and opportunity for uh the next generation of leaders to continue this amazing work at the elliott and beyond so how do you build an ai program like this where, you know, we've been talking about how flexible it needs to be and adaptable.

53:27Jon Krohn:It seems like a big part of this working. I mean, obviously all of the teachers there need to be on board with making something like this work, but you've been a big, a big piece of it. How do you build an AI program so that it can continue to grow once you've retired? So I think it's more than just an AI program. I think it's about what's the foundation in our public schools that encourage and invite innovation to the forefront of accelerating student outcomes. So for the past 19 years, we went from a small single building school to two buildings to three buildings. And in that time, the foundation of the work that we do and the culture of collaboration was critical to our success.

54:21So for anyone thinking about AI work, they also need to look under their hood, right? They need to look at how their school is organized for learning and leading and failing forward and doing some type of kind of survey of their own learning organization, and then thinking about AI is not going to replace the humans, it should amplify the work that you are doing. And the work of improving student outcomes is why we are in education and in service of children. And there's so much that goes into the structure and systems that need to be in schools, that learning, both the adult learning culture and the student learning culture is equally important.

55:14I don't know if I've said this to you, but if you don't feed the teachers, they eat the kids, right? There is a... You've definitely not said that to me. Well, I mean, it's intuitive, right? Counterintuitive in the sense, if teachers don't get the professional learning diet they need, how can they accelerate the learning of their students. And so, you know, the big picture is, how do we as a country think about schooling and public schools? Because the transformation that can happen in a school is, I mean, I can speak to it because I've been here 19 years. I've been in one district for 34 years.

56:00at the Elliott, this is the foundation of innovation. Whether you're an innovation school and we're an autonomous school, so we have some more flexibility around certain autonomies around curriculum and instruction. At the end of the day, when we started at the Elliott, we were a traditional public school and we still had the same mindset, which was, we're all learning this. Whatever we're learning, we're learning it together.

56:27Jon Krohn:A report from Brookings from January of this year concluded that the risks of Gen AI in children's education currently outweigh the benefits. You've been doing this now for a while and are seeing great benefits. What the heck happened in that report? What are they getting wrong? So that's a really important report because everybody's reading it. And when you think about the world and where the world is around using AI, I mean, you've probably seen that graphic came out a couple, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago or something. People send me so much because they know I'm all on about AI at this moment.

57:07But I'm not just all on about AI. I'm all on about being prepared for the future. And so we're not taking children and just plopping them in front of a computer with an AI-driven, you know, there is the human interaction that is happening all the time. And so maybe what I took out of Brookings was, you know, don't deploy, don't deploy. And I'm saying deploy carefully, deploy intentionally, and be thoughtful and intentional about how you're thinking about the work. And in most of the work, I often talk about this with other leaders as well. I have this one, three, five, right? One day, three days, five days, one month, three months, five months, one year, three years, five years.

57:56So in five years from now, when I'm looking back and listening to this podcast, and I now have my own podcast show, and John, you've helped me start it, and we're doing some work together. I'm living in that utopian world at the moment. I'm looking back and saying, do you remember five years ago when we were talking about that Brookings report? The schools that deployed carefully and thoughtfully, look at where they are. Because that's another metric. We need to be looking at schools that are doing this work really well and have data to show that. And then we're sharing that broadly, not just in one district or in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts or in the West Coast or the East Coast.

58:39We're finding a way to share practice that is going to raise the level so that the United States in PISA is number one. Right. We don't we don't want to be in the middle of the pack. We want to be at the top. And in order to do that, we have to find a coherent, consistent way to share this work in public spaces, in public education. You know, I presented at the AI show in April. And even since then, how much has changed? um we the social emotional learning that has to happen in order for ai to be even used we we believe that the social emotional learning is at the foundation of anything you do in a school and we have to share this and not think that oh it's just this school that can do it or because they have you know this crazy principal who thinks like this it's not about that it's about committing to public education and changing the world.

59:37That's it. It's very simple, I think.

59:40Jon Krohn:It does seem to me like you talk about going up the PISA rankings. So PISA, I believe it's spelled their rankings of education across the world. You can compare country by country. And it does seem to me like something like AI adoption could make a big impact and get the US up those rankings because the US does lead the OECD in things like bandwidth, connectivity, early adoption of technologies, access to AI, and obviously all the world's leading frontier labs are in the US. So it's an interesting possibility there. For our listeners, wherever they are in the world, who are listening to this episode, and they want to be improving their own education or particularly the education of their kids, what can they practically be doing?

1:00:37Jon Krohn:Do you have guidance? So in some previous episodes, like episode number 975, which we had recently, the guest in that show, Zach Kass was talking about private schools that are in the US and starting to proliferate around AI education. So things like Alpha School was one that he particularly highlighted. But not everyone is going to live near one of those schools. Not everyone is going to be able to be in the position that they can put their kid in a private school. What do you recommend to, I guess, public school systems, to parents, to teachers? What can they be doing today to be taking advantage of the benefits of AI?

1:01:18That's a really great question. I think I'm currently serving on a task force through the Department of Elementary and Secondary Ed in Massachusetts. And so there are a lot of different organizations that are thinking about this. And I think anyone that's there, there's so many resources out there that we need people to really look at the resources. And I mean, I overuse this, but critical consumers of any resource that don't expect AI to solve a problem. You actually have to understand what the problem to be solved as a district or a school community. Currently in Boston Public Schools, we're really excited about kind of thinking about the guidelines around AI and an AI policy.

1:02:08And either one is never going to be stagnant. So it's no longer that you have one acceptable use policy that we had when I started in 1992 with kids going onto the internet. But there is a clear commitment from many, or if not all, public school districts looking closely at policies and guidelines and procedures. it's really important that you slow down and move fast at the same time. That's that leadership on the line. That's one of my favorite books too. That this is important that as a organization that has leaders, superintendents, or even principals, that there is an ongoing conversation about the ways in which we can put AI into our practices and we're thinking about AI enabled practices, not just an AI practice, right?

1:03:08It has to have a clear connection to a problem to be solved.

1:03:12Jon Krohn:Nice. I like that clear guidance. Obviously, there's no one size fits all answer. And that's kind of your main point is that it's an ongoing conversation, but being able to track things and know that things are improving sounds like a key part of your approach throughout. With your retirement coming up, are you planning on spreading the good word of AI? Yes, indeed I am. I'm really excited to continue to support schools, support districts. Specifically, I'm a lifelong Bostonian, so I'll stay continuing to work with the Elliott School and Boston Public Schools. And I literally was texting with the superintendent saying I was going to be on John Crone's podcast, and she was super excited.

1:03:59This is lifelong work, and I am a lifelong educator and Bostonian, and I want to see this go beyond. There clearly is a need across cities, suburban towns, and rural areas in our country, from the northeast to the northwest, to the Southeast of the Southwest, that schools need opportunities to think about this work, not just about AI, but public schooling, because this is our workforce. And I'm all in, John. So if your listeners want to get in touch, or they want to come and see the work at the Elliott School and want to talk to our friends, the fifth and sixth graders who in 10 years from now will be running our world, definitely reach out to us.

1:04:51I know that you'll have all my information by LinkedIn. We'll be live. And I'm so excited and grateful for this opportunity to share where we are right now and knowing that we're always going to be getting better and learning. Yeah.

1:05:10Jon Krohn:Exciting times ahead. Exciting times ahead indeed. And I'm a big techno optimist, it seems to me like the, the having abundant, affordable intelligence all over the place accessible to us. There's so much possibility for positive impact and yeah, education is one of those big places. So thank you so much principal, Tracy Walker Griffith for taking the time in today's show. The very last thing before I let you go, you've already kind of given us how we should be, uh, you know, continuing to stay in touch with you after the show. But my final question for you, which is perfect, given the love of books that we both been expressing in today's episode is what book, what book recommendation do you have for our listeners today?

1:05:59So that's so great. I, I mean, I love books and, um, I don't know if I in earlier in the episode, there's out of HBS, Linda Hill. She has a new book that it's actually being shipped to me as we speak. It has not arrived, but it's called Genius at Scale. And it continues to embrace this idea of collective genius and cultivating genius that, I mean, I'm not the genius. The students are the genius. The teachers are the genius here. And so I'm looking forward to thinking about leadership. And this is a book that if you're a leader in any organization, it's thinking about genius at scale, how great leaders drive innovation.

1:06:43And I mean, we can read it together and maybe you can check it out. And offline, we can think about this. This is a big responsibility that we are embracing as a school and as a country and in our world, that we need to have people thinking it's not just me, it's us, right? There's no, there's no I in team, right? And I do believe that. And this is one of the books that I'm, I'm hoping that's going to continue to grow me and my thinking and as a leader. So hope, hope you like the book. I'm looking forward to reading it.

1:07:20Jon Krohn:Sensational Tracy. Thank you so much for taking the time, making the time, you know, to, to hear that you've never sat in kind of all your years of teaching from starting in 1992 to retiring, this coming summer, that this is the first time that you've sat still for 90 minutes in an office. Thank you for doing that for us. We really appreciate it. What a special episode. And yeah, looking forward to checking in in the future again and seeing how the AI education journey is unfolding. Thanks, John. And I hope maybe Michael Walker Jr. and I and you can meet at a beach someday soon. That sounds great.

1:07:56Jon Krohn:Looking forward to it. Thanks, John.

1:08:01Jon Krohn:Such a valuable and long overdue episode from Tracy Walker Griffith today. In it, she covered how she transformed the Elliott School from an underperforming school on the closure list into the highest performing school in Boston. She talked about how kids as young as four at the Elliott work with robots and coding tools like Kibo and Scratch Junior, learning that the quality of their input determines the quality of their output. Garbage in, garbage out. She talked about how for younger students in kindergarten through fourth grade, teachers use AI behind the scenes, scanning student writing, feeding it into custom Gemini gems with rubrics, and using the AI-generated feedback to identify patterns and form targeted small groups.

1:08:40Jon Krohn:She talked about then how students in grades five through eight interact with AI directly, comparing their own writing responses to AI-generated ones and reflecting on which is better and why, building metacognition and critical thinking. And Tracy provided her guidance for schools considering AI. Don't expect AI to solve a problem you haven't clearly defined. Invest deeply in teacher professional learning. Deploy carefully and intentionally. And always connect what you're doing back to data. All right, that's it. As always, you can get all the show notes, including the transcript for this episode, the video recording, any materials mentioned on the show, the URLs for Tracy's social media profiles, as well as my own, at superdatascience.com slash 983.

1:09:23Jon Krohn:Thanks to everyone on the Super Data Science Podcast team, our podcast manager, Sonia Breivich, media editor, Mario Pombo, partnerships manager, Natalie Zajski, researcher, Serge Massis, writer, Dr. Zarkarche, and our founder, Kirill Arumenko, for producing another excellent, another educational episode for us today. for enabling that super team to create this free podcast for you. We are deeply grateful to our sponsors. You can support the show by checking out our sponsors links, which are in the show notes. And if you're ever self, and if you yourself are ever interested in sponsoring an episode, you can get the details on how by making your way to johncrone.com slash podcast.

1:09:58Jon Krohn:Otherwise, share this episode with someone who would also benefit from Principal Tracy's perspective on children's education with AI. review this episode on your favorite podcasting app or on youtube subscribe if you're not already a subscriber but most importantly i hope you'll just keep on tuning in i'm so grateful to have you listening and i hope i can continue to make episodes you love for years and years to come till next time keep on rocking it out there and i'm looking forward to enjoying another round of super data science podcast with you very soon