AI Integration in Teaching Practices: A Conversation with Dr. Kecia Ray and Cathy Cavanaugh

Note: This is part of a 7-video series with Dr. Kecia Ray in conversation with industry experts on using artificial intelligence in the classroom.

Welcome back to AI Insights: Conversations with Dr. Kecia Ray where we connect with experts in the educational technology field to stay on top of trends in artifical intelligence (AI).

In this episode Dr. Ray speaks with Cathy Cavanaugh, Ph.D., the Assistant Director of the University of Florida's Lastinger Center for Learning. She has a distinguished career in educational technology, including leadership roles at Microsoft and extensive research on technology-empowered teaching and learning.

AI integration in teaching practices with Dr. Kecia Ray and Cathy Cavanaugh 

A full transcript of the episode appears below; it has been edited for clarity.

Kecia: All right, everybody. I am here with the incredible Cathy Cavanaugh. I know you’ve all heard of her, but now you get to see her and hear her quasi-in-person. I am forever grateful for her friendship and for her saying yes to this incredible interview. Hey, Cathy, would you mind filling everyone in on where you are now and what you’re up to and what your current works are around?

Cathy: I’m happy to and I’m delighted to be here. I can never say anything but yes to Dr. Keshia Ray. I am assistant director of the Lastinger Center for Learning, which is a center within the College of Education at the University of Florida. It has been around about 22 years, and we focus on the critical milestones in education from our perspective, which are kindergarten readiness, third grade reading, and algebra. We provide services across the entire state of Florida and beyond for students and families and teachers because we take a systemic approach to improvement in our outcomes across the state. We primarily focus on teacher professional development, and we’ve just started adding some AI development because we see some opportunities and challenges that we think AI is super well-suited to help us to meet.

Kecia: Of course you do. And in a previous life, you were involved in machine learning, which is, as all should know, and they will after listening to this broadcast, a component of AI, right? So you’ve been in the space for really quite a minute. Quite a minute. Do you want to elaborate on that? 

Cathy: Yes. My decades of work as an educator always involved technology.

But recently I got involved in education analytics. I got to work with some school districts and some big IT companies on thinking about how all of the data that we already have access to can help us to know more and to tune the work that we’re doing. Worked with gigantic statewide virtual schools analyzing what was working and what could work better and then worked with some district-level data as well.

And yeah, for about 10 years, actually been working with big data in education systems. 

Kecia: Isn’t that crazy? Time passes so fast and not just in the U.S. You’ve been in the Middle East, Australia. You’ve literally been around the world looking at education systems. You are a hero to many.

Since you have done a lot of work in this space and are continuing to keep it at the forefront of your work, how do you think teachers can start to identify when and where to bring AI tools into their instructional practice. 

Cathy: I think we’re in an interesting point, which we always reach at every sort of horizon of educational technology. We’re tipping from using consumer tools and figuring out what they can do for education to having more purpose-built tools specifically for learning science with safety and security because kids and teachers are using them. Teachers have a lot more options right now. They and informed colleagues can help to identify some of the tools that really think about safety and security and tools that are designed to solve education problems.

I think that part of what we bring people together for in schools and in learning experiences in general is for motivation for teachers to help with engaging students in learning and seeing the excitement of it and helping students to persist through the work of learning. We call it motivation, engagement, and persistence.

It’s one of our challenges in education and teachers are the main way in which students maintain motivation, engagement, and persistence. AI can free them up in a lot of ways by taking on some of the tasks and the time-consuming lower-cognitive-level work: Writing letters of recommendation, looking for curriculum, adapting content for specific student learning needs.

Many of the teachers that I work with who see generative AI for the first time and they ask it to adapt a lesson or a project for students with very specific needs or reading levels, whatever it may be, they’re amazed at how much time just that saves them. And then they get lots of ideas about how it can help.

Kecia: I think that’s the key to AI, when you talk about lesson development, is that it is a beginning point, not an ending point. It’s where you can start with your thinking, posing a question, and where you can start just having ideas thrown at you instead of you tossing ideas up and then having to think through your ideas.

We’re always more critical thinkers when we’re analyzing what we see and what we view. So you’re getting information, you’re viewing it, and you’re like, Oh, I can use this. I can use this. I can tweak this. This doesn’t apply at all. So it’s not like we’ve given away our human intelligence to AI.

We are actually accelerating it because we’re not overusing the components that we don’t need it for so to speak. 

Cathy: Yep, exactly. 

Kecia: If you had a teacher sitting here that was currently in the classroom, what kind of advice might you give that our teacher who just started using AI? Where should they start and what should they maybe be paying attention to?

Cathy: I think that teachers tend to learn really well from colleagues and colleagues can share the best ideas about how to get started and what works well because there’s always a teacher that’s just a little bit more experimental and maybe a little bit more adventurous and is willing to try something even if it might not pay off initially.

Those are colleagues to keep and make friends with and share ideas within professional communities. But I would say find the tools that maybe your district or your state has already approved. Again, we’re far enough along that districts and states are starting to create policies and they’ve identified some effective starting points.

I would also say be an advocate for yourself because we’re also at a point in AI where we’re moving past teachers having to go and figure this out and find the tools and companies and providers starting to create tools that meet their needs. Identify those needs and let people know, because companies listen to teachers.

It might not feel that way. But it’s in their interests and they often have mechanisms through conferences and other kinds of channels to listen to teachers and learn more about how they can specifically meet their needs. But experimentation, networking and community, and advocating, I think, are the ways to get short-term and long-term benefits from tools like AI.

Kecia: Do you think it’s something that they should kind of report that they’re using in their classroom. Is it important, do you think, for them to let their principal or department chair know that they are dabbling in AI and wanting to use those tools? Or do you think they could probably do it without worrying about any kind of circumstances? 

Cathy: Yeah, I think it’s probably a mix. If a teacher is getting lesson ideas, like that’s their job, they use the tools that they have available to them and they’re not releasing any confidential information when it goes farther, and they might be, for example, using a safe, secure tool and adding some student results to get some suggestions about how to help them with specific skills, then that’s something that should be done within the guardrails of the system and just with awareness.

We’re always taught not to plagiarize, to give credit to where we get some of our ideas and do some of our thinking. And so I think it’s good to be open about that. It’s also really instructive for other people in a school or a system to see the tools that are benefiting a teacher and ways in which that’s happening. Because otherwise it could be easier for a more restrictive policy to exist.

Kecia: Yeah, that’s very fair and great advice. 

What about professional development? Do you think that there are different types of professional development teachers should take advantage of? And if so, what kind of PD do you think teachers need to integrate AI effectively into their teaching? 

Cathy: I think professional development is always a safe space for asking hard questions or being confused and asking for help and experimenting and just trying out some ideas.

Great professional learning facilitators provide a lot of options and opportunities for some hands-on an application and kind of processing and discussion. It’s a good place for spending a little bit of time and getting something that can provide a benefit. I think local and synchronous sessions are really valuable, but also listening to things that have been recorded and gleaning out those tools that might be useful.

And then finding out what is available from providers that already work in the school or the system. There are partners there that probably have a lot to offer that are ready and willing to do that. And then, absolutely, there are local experts. Communities of practice are fantastic. Then teachers can identify an ongoing sort of program of learning and development and sharing.

Kecia: We have the HMH professional learning system, but we also have the ISTE professional learning system.

How can AI support teachers in their day-to-day tasks, like planning for the year? We’ve talked about lesson planning, but how do we think it can work to help them plan for a year in advance. 

Cathy: Because so much is changing, especially with regard to assessment, I think that AI can be a really helpful thought partner in understanding what the curricular goals are for the year. Then, identifying creative and personalized ways in which students can show what their knowledge is through projects and other means that might not be used in the classroom already and adapting those kinds of project-based learning and creating rubrics for those sorts of projects. A project can be designed so quickly and then the instructional design piece that kind of knits all that together into a coherent learning experience, that can happen as well.

It’s like having instructional designer as a consultant on demand. 

Kecia: Great analogy. Especially if you have access to that data, making sure that you let everyone know that you’re utilizing AI if you’re using student data, but if you have access to that data and you can create personalized projects throughout a year for students or for groups of students, that could be super sharp in a classroom.

Cathy: Those outcome data can also help identify what students could be grouped together for specific teacher reports. So, the teacher can always be tuning zone of proximal development and working with students as they need it on specific concepts that they might need along the way.

Kecia: Yeah, absolutely. Mixing them up, too. Doing some cross-functional work with the groups would be super, super hot. And if you’ve got more than one teacher that’s doing kind of similar strategies, that can be even hotter. Not to throw too many ideas out at y’all, but what about, as they’re thinking about tools for this school year, what kind of AI tools might you recommend, or even sources that teachers could go to find those tools. 

Cathy: Like specific names of tools? 

Kecia: Not necessarily specific names, but maybe categories. Categories and resources. I’m using right now a notes program that comes in with my video tool and freaks everybody out because it says it’s AI and everybody’s all whoa, I didn’t invite AI.

And I’m like, I did. She’s my best friend. But I always use a note-taking tool because I learn better when I go back and reflect on the notes that I’ve taken. Because I don’t necessarily hear what I’m saying, or sometimes I don’t hear what other people are saying. So, I always go back and look at notes.

Note-taking tools, I think, are really cool uses for AI in a tool format. But there’s a lot of others out there that could be very beneficial to teachers. 

Cathy: I’m thinking about teachers’ communications with families, and often families want more communication or more detailed communication. Even something like copying a student’s results or a few weeks’ worth of grades, things like that, into a generative chat tool that’s secure could create some summaries and some talking points and some suggestions for families.

As teachers are documenting how students are doing, that information could be summarized even for IEPs. A lot of the logistical work the teachers are doing where the similar information needs to go in different directions for different purposes could be reworked. You could even describe what an IEP is or copy in the IEP policy and say, Here’s the information. Now, put it in the format that I need it for the IEP.

Something along those lines, I think, is really helpful. But there’s so many lesson tools that do more than describe a lesson. They can help with all of the different pieces of planning and adaptation. So there’s some free teacher AI tools out there that are really powerful and getting more powerful all the time.

Kecia: Just as you said AI, my AI turned on and started summarizing what you were saying on my desktop. I think the summarizing tool is very effective for today. I’ve seen some really great planning tools that I think if I were a teacher today, I would be getting on that bandwagon. Not that I want somebody else or something else to create my lesson plan, but back in the day, we would look for hours through our manuals and our books, just to get an idea, especially if we didn’t want to use the typical thing. This is pre-technology for those of you that are listening.

And then when we got technology, we could peruse and see what people might have put on Teachers Pay Teachers, or one of those tools. But now I have exponential access to lessons or ideas and concepts for lessons that are worldwide and global. I can bring any of that into my classroom.

So to me, lesson planning today should be a really fun activity. But, it may still feel tedious to some. It should be really fun and AI can make it even more fun. 

Cathy: I agree. And by this time of year, teachers understand students’ interests. Asking for a set of practice problems, for example, that are adapted for these five different interests to get different kinds of contexts, I think would make the work a lot more engaging as well.

Kecia: Yeah. There’s so much we can do around student engagement with AI, too, just in developing activities or project prompts or anything. We as humans have limited knowledge on every subject area, right? We’re usually going to be limited to the knowledge that we’re passionate about, but with AI the sky’s the limit.

I have a kid in my class who likes sports more than I like sports, I should be able to accommodate his interests because I’ve got AI. I think that’s one way we can think about AI, and that doesn’t really involve data per se. It just involves me knowing what his interests are. You might want to do an interest inventory type tool, but that’s not data that we would be concerned about being shared widely.

My last question for you . . . this is my last formal question, then I’m gonna ask you if you have anything to share that you haven’t already shared. So you can be thinking of doodling on that. But how do you think AI will better connect teachers with students and families?

That is a lot of the work that you do on a daily basis, and you’re talking about adding AI in. So, I know you’ve got some great ideas. 

Cathy: I think as AI develops, it will be more integrated into the systems that are already used in schools. I envision a day not too far into the future where AI can help families to plan when they’ve got a school event, something like that.

It can tell them the weather for the day and what a kid might want to wear or how they might want to dress. It can tell them there’s this big event. Here’s where the parking seems to be closest or available. It can help the systems in the school adjust the temperature because there will be a thousand extra people there. Adjust the lights. Whatever it might be. Adjust the oxygen level.

I think that a lot of the work that’s human-driven, but very kind of tedious, will be relieved. I think really within the next couple of years, honestly, the systems and technologies are already there. It’s just adding some AI engines to them. I’m thinking about even if a teacher makes a phone call or is contacting a family, they can ask the family, what’s the way in which you want information?

Do you want it as a message? Do you want it as a voice message? You want it as recording? And the same information can be automatically generated in different formats, based on information that’s already in the teacher’s hands about a student. 

Kecia: It’s so much easier than it was even 10 years ago to integrate some of these tools to increase your efficiency.

And Lord knows we need more efficiency in classrooms because so much is being asked of our teachers. So, if we can use these tools to offset the burden of the load that’s been passed on to us, I think all the better for it. The note taking tool is another good tool that they can use in conferences.

A lot of times when people leave the conference, they don’t necessarily remember what they said. If everybody can agree to a note-taking tool taking notes on behalf of the meeting and then being shared out. Nobody’s touching the notes. It’s just what was said that is going to be summarized and shared out.

I think that it certainly takes a kind of burden off the teacher to say, here’s what I think was said in the meeting. It’s a neutral party, so to speak, that’s reporting what was said. I know, especially IEP meetings and some of those other meetings that can be tenuous. That’s a really good use of an AI tool, I think.

Cathy: And when a teacher’s learning, like trying to update their subject matter knowledge or pedagogical knowledge, AI can do summaries as well and provide practical implementation tips. It can go from just a summary of what the research says or what the practice is to, okay, and then what can that look like?

Kecia: Yeah, how can I pull this off? Exactly. What other pearls of wisdom does the amazing Cathy Cavanaugh have to share with our viewers today?  

Cathy: I think we need to have open minds and we need to be critical. We need to ask some questions about what the AI does to protect us in education, but always be open to those new tools and opportunities.

I think that at the school and district level, it may be the case that some of the application providers, technology providers, are actually looking for people to trial some of their new tools. That’s a fantastic opportunity to put their stamp on it and get it to do what they want it to do.

Not only be on the lookout for what’s available, but to participate in creating the next generation of some of those tools, because there’s huge investment and development right now, and we all need to be involved in it. 

Kecia: Especially our teachers, because at the end of the day, they’re the ones that are the most impacted by all of these tools coming out.

A district leader, my former self, would look at it and say, Oh, everybody’s going to love this, thou shalt use these things. And the teachers had, you think they have a voice because you did a survey that they may or may not have received in their email, 500 emails a day. I think to the extent that they are willing to and are able to be involved, that’s wonderful advice.

I appreciate you sharing that with them. They can follow your work at the Lastinger Center. We’ll make sure that’s in the piece so that they can see where that is and have access to your amazing research that’s still available there. I thank you immensely for participating and I thank everybody for viewing this. I look forward to seeing you all again at one of our other sessions.

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