Rethinking meaningful learning and student work in the age of AI with Matt Miller

Episode transcript

Brittany Blackwell: Welcome back to another episode of the Leading and Learning with AI podcast. I'm your host for today, Brittany Blackwell, former educator of 13 years and marketing lead here at Panorama Education. I am so excited to be chatting with the Textbook Ditcher himself, Matt Miller. Welcome to the show, Matt. Matt Miller: Thank you so much. I don't know if I've gotten that specific intro before, the Textbook Ditcher. I'll take it, though. Yeah. Brittany Blackwell: Well, for those listeners who may not be familiar with your work, could you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you teach, like, what makes you this leader in the AI and education space? Matt Miller: Yeah, absolutely. So my name's Matt Miller. I taught high school Spanish for more than 10 years here in little bitty schools in west Central Indiana. Since then, I've written six books, including a book called AI for Educators. And in a lot of ways, I'm just doing what all the rest of us are doing, which is I'm trying to learn about AI and figure out what it is, but mostly, how is it being applied in schools and the impacts and the effects and the implications on learning, all the way down to the teeny tiniest of assignment, all the way up to the, you know, the biggest implications on education. And so since then, I've gotten to speak at schools and school districts all over the United States at different events as a keynote speaker and a workshop presenter and everything. But I'm also teaching in the classroom, so I'm practicing it in my own class. I'm a high school Spanish teacher right now, and I'm teaching part time, face to face. Matt Miller: In fact, I just gave my final exam yesterday. So as of the recording of this right now, I am officially on winter break. So that's. That's kind of me in a nutshell right there. Brittany Blackwell: I mean, I love. The original book was Ditch that Textbook. And you were very big into that. And I think that follows along with, like, AI and all of those things. And, Matt, teachers know that AI has really changed the game from what you're seeing in classrooms and what you're experiencing in the classroom. What are teachers still trying to figure out right now when it comes to AI? Matt Miller: Everything. Everything. Right. I mean, because it can have implications in so many different places. You know, I think the first thing, especially if you talk to middle school and high school teachers, the first thing they're thinking about is students are using AI to do all of their work for them, and they want to keep thinking going. They want to keep skill development going. They want students discussing and, you know, really growing. I Guess they want all of that stuff to still go on. Matt Miller: And I think that it certainly can with, with AI in the room. But, you know, there's this hurdle to go over where we have all of these assignments that teachers have assigned for decades, maybe some centuries at this point, you know, asking students to show us what they've learned and show us how they're thinking by putting it on paper. And of course, these days, paper sometimes means a digital document. And if you put text on a digital document, then, by golly, AI is really good at that. And so we're trying to sort of square the circle now of like, how do we understand that learning has happened? How do we understand, you know, how do we help students to make their thinking visible to show that learning has happened? All we're really doing is we're just trying to, you know, give them a bit of accountability that they are growing and developing as human beings. But when in schools we've gotten so fixated on the end product, you know, give me the answers to this math problem, give me the abcds to this multiple choice question, you know, this essay, this research report whatever whatever. And AI is really good at creating end products. But our, our traditional education system has gotten to the point where the end product is the checkbox that we have to fill to show that learning has happened. Matt Miller: Even though as teachers and our students know this too, but as teachers, we know the good stuff isn't tied directly to the end product. A lot of times it's in the process and the wrestling of getting there. So I think that's one of the big things that, that teachers are really trying to figure out, whether they have words for it in this way or not, is that the way that we've shown learning in the past is kind of being poisoned by AI and so now we're going to have to come up with a different way to be able to do it. And what does that different way? Look, that's the hard thing right now. That's the thing that everybody's trying to wrestle with, is how do we reshape and reform how we've done education for decades or maybe centuries, in light of this brand new technology that so many of us are trying to wrestle with. Big deal, you know, just like little stuff like how do we totally reshape how we do education? Brittany Blackwell: Exactly, exactly. And I think you hit the nail on the head when we're talking about the fears that teachers have around AI. And the biggest thing that's on their mind is, yeah, these end products can be easily replicated by AI, especially when it comes to, like, writing tasks. And I think that's why it's so important for us to be in the middle of the whole process, the writing process. What other types of assignments have you seen teachers struggle with now that AI is so heavily embedded? Matt Miller: Yeah, I think writing is definitely one of the big ones, but, I mean, really, it's anything where you want students to do independent thinking. Another big one that I think is a real issue right now is just homework at large, homework in general. You know, I've had issues with homework for a long time, and as a high school Spanish teacher, I quit giving homework years ago just because I didn't feel like it was producing the results. You know, the amount of time and effort and an argument that sometimes you have with students just was not justifying itself in results. And so I kind of gave up on it. But today, you know, in the AI age, so to speak, to send students home and ask them to do things that they don't see as relevant or they don't see as important or they don't see the connection, and. And they're just doing it because a teacher tells them to do it. Of course they're going to outsource things to AI. Matt Miller: It really does sort of speak to a bigger issue that's happening. And actually it's happening with us as adults, too. We're looking at the work that we need to do, the things that we need to do. And we're asking, does this deserve my attention? And, you know, as adults, we call that efficiency. We call that productivity, and we think of it as a good thing because it means that we can take our attention because we know our attention is finite, right? We don't have an infinite amount of attention. We only have a certain number of minutes and a certain amount of attention. And so we're basically, you know, using AI, using technology, using whatever it is that we can to help us to use that attention and focus those minutes on the things that matter most. Well, here's the problem. Matt Miller: Students are doing it, too. And sometimes their judgment is not the way that we would like to see it. And so we're stuck in this spot where if we send it home and they don't see the relevance or the importance, or if they just run out of time, or if they just don't really care about the grade that much or whatever it is, they're going to find a way to get done with it faster so they can allocate that attention to something else. See, it's sort of like this big human condition. We just don't like sometimes the way that students are applying it. And so I think that's really a big call for all of us as educators to make sure this doesn't solve all of it, but to make sure that what we're asking students to do is relevant, that it's important that they understand why we're doing it, that they understand how they're going to grow and benefit as a result. I think for the longest time as educators, we've always just assumed that they could figure that out. But these days, I think it's going to be even more incumbent upon us to make it very clear why we're doing what we're doing. Brittany Blackwell: Absolutely. I think you were kind of touching on this, too. But engagement looks a lot different now than it did because tasks that we want students to do no longer demand the thinking. Sometimes what does engagement look like when the task no longer demands thinking? Matt Miller: You know, engagement was a tricky thing to define even before AI you know, some people see it as our students having fun. Some people see it as our students on task. Some people see it as, do they have a. Why do they have a reason for doing it? Some of them see it as students being in sort of a flow state where they're totally connected to the work and they're. They're really sort of like, vibing with the work and everything. So, you know, engagement was hard to define before, and now that you. Now that you have AI it's like it gets even. Even trickier. Matt Miller: So I think you're right. We have to kind of dial in on what it is that we want students to do and what's our goal, what's our outcome out of all of this? But I think I really do think some of it does come back to attention. Comes back to. Well, I would say attention if we're trying to define engagement, which is what you asked me. Right. And in terms of this sort of, like, new AI World, I think attention has something to do with it, but also, like, our intended purpose. Like, what are we trying to get out of this? And also what are our goals? What are students striving towards, what are we trying to accomplish as a class and everything? You know, for a long time, we've had to have answers to that on the class level and on the school level. But nowadays, you know, AI does give us the opportunity to personalize things down a little bit more. Matt Miller: You know, you connect students with, you know, like, with a AI Chatbot or some sort of AI model or something, and it can help kind of personalize those things. So, yeah, when it comes to engagement, you're right. It's all sort of changing a little bit. But I think we've really got to be focused on where are we headed and what are students willing to spend those attention minutes on. Brittany Blackwell: Yeah, and you know, we are talking a lot about, like, how teachers are thinking about AI as being used as the shortcut instead of like a thinking tool. How can teachers instead kind of raise the level in student thinking? And where have you seen, like, teachers use AI in that way? Matt Miller: Yeah, so I think there's sort of a misconception out there that AI is going to make students stupid and it's going to shortcut their thinking and it's going to cause them not to think. And you know what, there are lots of ways where it can be used that way, but there are also lots of ways where it isn't used that way. Now, here's another misconception. Another misconception, especially for the AI cheerleaders, is that if we use AI to do all of these things all the time, then it will lead to all of this deep thinking. And I don't think that's the case at all either. You know, there are all of these calls out here. It just feels like on social media recently, I've seen a lot of stuff about ban the laptops, ban the technology. Screens are terrible. Matt Miller: We gotta get back to paper and pencil. We gotta get back to. And you know what, there's some benefit in that too, I think. But I think if we want to come to the right answer on all of this, it all comes back down to the teacher and the instructional. You want to accomplish strategy or accomplish it the most. And for me, you know, it's something that I'm seeing in my own Spanish classes. We still do an awful lot of whole group instruction. I like to talk to my students in Spanish. Matt Miller: I like to, you know, tell stories and, you know, just be sort of silly and ask them questions and stuff so that they hear lots of spoken Spanish. That is non AI, non technology time. But you know what? If I'm going to have a sub in the room, if I'm going to leave class, a sub plan where there's an AI them instant feedback. Because if I just leave them a packet of worksheets, if I decide, oh, somebody said that technology and screens are terrible, so I better not use them. You know, if we just keep doing all of this all or nothing thinking, then I'm going to Leave them that packet of worksheets and they're not going to get any sort of instant feedback. So I think that's where as, as teachers, we've got to just use our teacher brains and just decide, is this best or is this best? And which one am I going to use for this particular. We get granular about it, right? We get down to the little specific activities instead of just saying technology is the savior or technology is terrible. Brittany Blackwell: Yeah, I really like how you're kind of, you're explaining not only what are the fears, but also where people are being a little bit too, like, gung ho about AI. Where are teachers making really big mistakes when they're experimenting with AI? Matt Miller: Ah, that's a good question. I think in general, experimenting. I might take your question in a couple different directions if I could. I think experimenting with AI, I don't think there are necessarily lots of mistakes. You know, there are some of those, you know, like baseline, like keep yourself safe, understand not to put personally identifying information into a chat bot and understand what it's using the data for. You know, there's all of that sort of like baseline AI literacy stuff that you have to be. Be careful with. If you are experimenting on your own to figure out the technology and figure out how it works, I figure, you know, push all the buttons and pull all the levers and figure out how the technology works so that you can figure out if it's. Matt Miller: If it's good for you or not. You know, one mistake that I would see teachers making if they're going to start to use it with students is to take the human out of the loop. You hear more and more people talking about, you know, this is sort of like one of those, you know, like computer programming, like developer ideas of having a human in the loop. Which means, you know, we don't just let AI run with everything on its own. We want to make sure that there are human eyes on it and that there's a human brain processing in the background. So if something weird happens or if the results are unintended or whatever, then we can, you know, sort of intervene. That goes for when students are interacting with it live. You know, for instance, you know, we've got so many of these platforms where you can keep an eye on how students are working synchronously, you know, like live in the moment. Matt Miller: You can see those transcripts, you can identify what students are doing. It's good to do that, to make sure that if something is going completely wrong, you can shut it down. Or if you need to go talk to an individual student about how they're using it or about a particular response from AI. You can do that, you know. So I think when it comes to live, I think that's important. But also for teachers, I think another place where having a human in the loop is important is when you test it out ahead of time. You know, for me, whenever I'm making these assignments, I'm going to preview it and I'm going to see how it looks. And then if it doesn't perform the way that I want, I'm going to go in and adjust the instructions that I've given the AI and then I'm going to test it again. Matt Miller: I'm going to test it again. And we know that AI doesn't perform the same every single time. So there is a level of uncertainty. But the more that you hone those instructions in and you test them out, you know, you do your due diligence as a teacher ahead of time. Once you do some of that, you have a pretty good idea of how it's going to act with your students, and you don't let it loose to interact with your students until you feel pretty good about what you've got. So I'd say, you know, to answer your question, as far as where are some missteps? I think that's probably one of them is, you know, just turning AI loose a little too quickly when we don't have that human in the loop. Brittany Blackwell: Yes, I love that saying, the human in the loop, because I think, you know, one of the biggest fears among teachers are that they will become non existent or we won't be needed. But the human is always needed in that loop. We talked a little bit about this earlier, but AI is really forcing teachers to rethink what counts as meaningful work. How is that? So can you kind of go a little bit more into that? Matt Miller: Yeah, that's a, that's a good question. What counts as meaningful work? Because it's not meaningful if a student doesn't put any human thought into it whatsoever and lets AI do it. But also on the other end of that spectrum, it might be meaningful work. If they interact with a chatbot and they pursue a line of thinking that they might not have considered, but a traditional teacher might look at that and say all they're doing is just chatting with that chatbot, that doesn't count. I think you bring up a really good point on both sides. We have to rethink what's okay and what's not, because if we continue to Send homework assignments home or asking students to do, you know, like essays and research reports that they're not really doing that they're just cognitively offloading to AI. That's not okay. And it's time to start to rethink. Matt Miller: But then on the other side, we might come up with new tasks and go, oh, wow, I was interacting with that chatbot and man, in my experience, I was learning a lot about it. And that would be really helpful for students. I need to consider that as a new thing. And then I would even say in the middle of that spectrum, if I painted that spectrum well enough to make it make sense that, you know, there are things that we're asking students to do that are not meaningful and then there's things that we've never really done before that actually are meaningful in the middle. You know, I think we've got some of those practices that we've done before that we're going to have to adapt. And I see this. Let me give you an example. In like English classes, humanities classes, social studies, government, you know, stuff like that where students are having to write and if you send them home with it, and if you also aren't very hands on with it, then you know, they're going to probably see it as this great big task and they're not sure how to do the steps or they're unsure of themselves. Matt Miller: And you know, that, that self efficacy can lead students to want to offload things to AI. But if you sit with students, even in a whole group setting, and you go, okay, we're going to do this piece by piece, bit by bit altogether, that's an adaptation that I'm seeing some, some folks do now. That does mean that we're going to get students more likely to do the work themselves if they're doing it there in person. But of course, the drawback to that is it's time consuming. It's a long time. You know, maybe something that was done in four days gets done in six or seven or eight days. Oh, I said six or seven. Somebody's going to scold me for that. Matt Miller: But like in six or seven or eight days or something, it takes us to that long to do and we're going, my goodness, this didn't used to take this long before. I would love to have a magical answer that, that makes that make sense. But I think the reality is that, you know, we have to look at our students and go, maybe their skills to be able to pull something like this off are not as good as they used to. Be. And they're going to need a little bit of extra hand holding. We might not like it. It might not be where they, where we want them to be, but maybe it's where they actually are. And if our whole goal, I know for me, with my students, my whole goal is to take them from where they are and just move them up, it's not to assume that they're all the way up here and just start teaching up there. Matt Miller: I want to figure out where they actually are and I want them to develop. And, you know, maybe that's, that's what we've got to do. I don't totally remember what your question was, but I hope we answered it. Brittany Blackwell: No, it. You did answer it. And I really think, like, this whole process of the way that we're, we're kind of changing up assessment and what's important, all of those things, I think what we're starting to really go back to, and I think teachers for a long time have felt this way, but never had a way to, to do it right or show the importance is that the process is more important than the product. And I think that that's very freeing for a lot of teachers, but it can be really uncomfortable, too. It's kind of how you explained it in the, the spectrum that you kind of explained there. Matt Miller: Yeah, you're right. And that's something that I'm hearing more and more and more people talk about is the importance of the process. And, you know, the way I always like to say it in, like, my presentations and stuff is I'll say, you know, when AI can create, when AI cheapens the product, then we focus on the process. And I feel like that's kind of where we, where we are now. One thing I think we have to be super careful of is that folks in positions like me or in positions like you, or if you're in a, you know, professional development training position or a leadership position or something, it's easy to throw little catchphrases and buzzwords around, like process over product, and then tell teachers, okay, that's what you need to do. And the teachers will roll their eyes at you and be like, yeah, but how does that actually show up in a real class? So I think if we're going to talk that talk, I think we've got to be able to walk that walk and talk about how it shows up. And so, you know, for instance, if we have an end product, whether it's a project or a research paper or whatever it is, I think one very practical way to look at it is how are you allocating points in the great book? Because we know for lots of students, points in the gradebook are like a currency. They're like your bank account. Matt Miller: And how you're going to allocate those points are going to have a lot to do with how I proceed with your assignment. And so if we look at that assignment and we go, end product is where all of those points are, what message is that communicating? It's communicating that the end product is the most important thing. And how I get there is not as important. And I'd say in today's day and age, we're going to have to almost flip that on its head. I've talked to some teachers who have said I've started almost allocating more points to the benchmarks along the process instead of the end. The end product, because that's the stuff that matters, and that's where I see the real learning happening. Those are some of the little things, I think when we talk about process versus product, I think we're going to have to ask those very practical, concrete questions of how does this really actually show up in a classroom? Brittany Blackwell: Yeah. Can you think of any, like, off the top of your head right now where you've seen or that you've done where that process has been more important than the product that you can give, like, a clear, really good example of? Matt Miller: Oh, gosh, in my class, that's really all that it is. I was just telling my wife the other day, you know, I'm a. I'm a high school Spanish teacher. Right. I feel like after all of these years, I feel like learning Spanish is kind of like shooting free throws. I'm from Indiana. Basketball is king here, you know, so I've got to do a basketball analogy. And how do you get better at shooting free throws? You just shoot lots of them and you miss a lot of them. Matt Miller: You know, even the people who are really good at shooting free throws are still going to miss, you know, 10% of them, 15% of them, 20% of them, depending on the level that you're on, you know, so you end up missing them. But your muscles and your, you know, your muscle memory and your ability to replicate that process gets better with practice. And so for me, you know, that's why I put so much emphasis in that. I was telling you that that whole class instruction where my students are listening to me speak in Spanish, because we also know that in world languages, that your ability to hear and comprehend is much better than your ability to create output to be able to write or to be able to speak. So I'm giving them lots and lots and lots of input, and that's the process. And sometimes my students will look at me and be like, Mr. Miller, we've done like two or three of these goofy stories in class where you're just making stuff up and telling these stories. And they're not all that funny either. Matt Miller: It's hard to be creative on a regular basis, I gotta tell you. But they're like, all we're doing are these practice stories over and over and over again. And I'm like, yeah, but are they easier to understand every time? And whether they, like, identify it or not, the answer is gonna be yes. That's the process. And so if I went to the end product and I said, I want you to go write one of these stories, and we hadn't done all of that repetition, that's jumping to the end product. And if they look at that and they go, I don't know if I can do that. I doubt my ability to do that. I don't have enough time to do that. Matt Miller: I don't understand the steps to do that. What are they gonna do? They're going to turn to Google Translate, and that's not what I want. Right. That's. I mean, that's just the first example. Of course, it comes right out of my own classroom, but that's the first example I can think of as far as, you know, the process being really important. Brittany Blackwell: Yeah. If there's a teacher listening and thinking, you know, I know AI is here, but I'm really just not sure how to respond without lowering my expectations. What would you want them to hear? Matt Miller: Oh, my goodness. I think we've got to continually go back to that idea of what are my goals and what do I want students to accomplish and how can we get them there. That almost sounds too simple, and it sounds a little bit like a cop out, but I think that we've got to go back to those. Those foundational things. So we look at those assignments that feel like because you said without lowering my expectations, that's such a loaded statement that we can go in so many different directions on. Right. Because some of it is, if my expectations are here, but my student skills are much lower, what are we going to do? I can keep my expectations up here, but if my students aren't there, you know, we could play the blame game all day. We can make it a Covid thing, we can make it a social media thing, we can make it an AI thing. Matt Miller: We can make it whatever it is, you know, the parents or the culture, I don't know. At some point, the blame game doesn't really matter. The reality is, is that my students are here and my expectations are here, and somebody's gonna have to move and I cannot wave a magic wand and boom, make my students skills get higher, because that's the point of school. Right. So at some point, I think we're gonna have to. We're gonna have to come to terms with where they really are. So maybe that does mean lowering your expectations a little bit. Sorry, I know that wasn't really the answer to the question, but I think we've got to meet students where they are, or if we want to keep our expectations high, we've got to scaffold the heck out of it. Matt Miller: You know, we've got to come up with supports that help our students. You know, I keep using my hands, you know, that like, if my. My expectations are up on the seventh floor of the building and my students are only on the second floor, you know what scaffolding looks like. If you're going to like paint a house or build a house or something, we're going have to build a whole bunch of that scaffolding up there to get them up there. Something's gonna have to happen. And that's really sort of like the heart of teaching, I think, is supporting kids to be able to make those leaps, to be able to understand things, to be able to grow to the point where they can get up there. And it's slow and it's tedious, and it's not linear either, because we think that if we do the work over time, we're gonna see consistent growth. You don't always. Brittany Blackwell: Right. Matt Miller: And so I think if we can sort of get real with our. With our reality and understand that maybe we have further to go than we think. And we're going to have to provide kids with all of the supports that we can to help them to get there. I think that's my best answer. I wish I. Like I said, I wish I could just wave a magic wand and, you know, come up with a way for us to be able to get up to those high standards. But that's sort of. That's sort of the challenge of education. Matt Miller: That's the challenge of teaching real human children in a classroom, I think. Yeah. Brittany Blackwell: And I think this moment really creates a lot of possibility. And you said it earlier, but it's really not about giving up the rigor. It's not about any of those Things, it's meeting your students where they are and really being able to progress from there. Last but not least, I want to ask one more question we're asking leaders in this space, and I just. I would love to hear your thoughts on this in the next one to three years. When it comes to AI and education, what are you most excited about? Matt Miller: What am I most excited about? I could probably go any number of different directions on this. I'll give you my one most excited for today, knowing that if you ask me again tomorrow, it might be something different. I think the one thing that I'm most excited about and, you know, some of the, like, big influencers and thought leaders in our space and everything would say, oh, you're thinking too small on this. I would tell them that's evidence that you haven't been in a classroom recently. Here's my thing. I'm excited about giving teachers some support so they can get through the work and get home at night and improve their mental health and not feel like they're burned out all the time. Because if you look back over the last three years, five years, 10 years, probably farther back than that. We lose really good teachers because teaching is hard and because schools pile lots of things on teachers plates and they don't give them the supports to be able to get through all of it. Matt Miller: And if we can leverage AI to get through some of the tedious, monotonous stuff faster so that we can focus teachers on the things that they were made to do as teachers, that's going to be good for teachers, it's going to be good for kids, it's going to be good for schools. It's going be to. It's going to be good for this world because kids will get the education that they need to go out into the world. So, you know, I might have different things about personalizing education and meeting kids and, you know, all of that stuff today. It's just I want to equip teachers so that they can get through the stuff that they need to so that they will keep being teachers. Because we still need really good teachers. Brittany Blackwell: Absolutely. I mean, teachers will always be needed and AI will never take over that part. So I'm glad we're just reinforcing. And for any teacher who's out there who's like you just kind of let me breathe a little bit. Thank you for that. Today we surfaced a lot of shifts that are happening in classrooms right now. But your session in at Panoramic is going to walk teachers through strategies that make those shifts work for real students. Can you talk just a little bit about what your session is about and what teachers can expect by attending Panoramic? Matt Miller: Yes, absolutely. So we're going to touch on some of these realities in the classroom. And you know, how do we keep critical thinking and problem solving and all of those very important human skills? How do we keep those at the forefront? How do we help students to develop those? And spoiler alert, sometimes it doesn't have anything to do with AI. Sometimes it involves putting the technology away and having conversations and having students do work offline, but also learning about how all of it works so that we can grow the humans so that we can grow those very human skills to prepare students for whatever comes their way. So we're going to be touching on a lot of that stuff as it applies to the classroom and the school. Brittany Blackwell: I'm really excited for that, Matt, and excited for more educators and leaders to hear this episode. So thank you again for just, you know, popping in and sharing more about your thought process with AI and just helping to soothe teachers minds when it comes to the fears that they have around AI, but also what you're looking forward to as well. Matt Miller: Absolutely. Love the conversation. Thanks Brittany. Brittany Blackwell: Yeah, if any part of this episode made you think differently, you will want to be at panoramic on February 26. The link to show up and sign up for free is in the show notes below. Thanks again for tuning in and as always, keep leading, keep learning and keep building. What's next.