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Elaine Roberts teaches AI as a tool.
65 Plays21 days ago
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Elaine Roberts: Adjunct Professor, Dept of Communications (writing and gen ed literature) and Division of Education (Children’s and Adolescent Literature); independent consultant as instructional and leadership coach
Past role(s): Systems analyst/programmer (abt 12 yrs for companies including Harris Government Communications Systems and Prodigy when it was still Trintex and just getting started); math/computer science/English professor; corporate wonk for companies including Pearson Education (team design, developed, and maintained online degree content for university partners); Follett Software, Hand2Mind (corporate work with education companies including Pearson & Hand2Mind)
One sentence on your purpose and/or passion: I want to help others be their best selves, which sometimes means helping them discover possibilities they hadn’t imagined.
Additional information such as awards, hobbies, and interesting facts: I’m a research and tech geek. I love to read. I’m an occasional editor. I like to travel, bike, experiment with new recipes, and I like to explore random stuff that seems interesting. I have two Substacks: Mental Peregrinations (https://elainejroberts.substack.com/) in which I ramble about whatever and Learning Out Loud (https://ejroberts.substack.com/) in which I write about things I’m learning related to education.
Music by AudioCoffee: https://www.audiocoffee.net/
Contact us: Starr@masteryportfolio.com crystal@masteryportfolio.com
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Transcript
Introduction to Learner Centered Spaces Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Learner Centered Spaces podcast, where we empower and inspire ownership of learning, sponsored by Mastery Portfolio, hosted by Star Saxton and Crystal Frommer.
00:00:14
Speaker
In each episode, we bring you an authentic conversation with educators, both in and out of the classroom, that will hopefully encourage you to try something new. This podcast is created for educators who want to learn more about how to make the shift toward learner-centered spaces for their students, schools, and districts or education at large.
00:00:34
Speaker
The learner-centered spaces podcast is a member of the Teach Better Podcast Network. Get ready to be inspired as we dive right into the conversation with today's guest.
Guest Introduction: Elaine Roberts
00:00:49
Speaker
We are very excited to have Elaine Roberts on our show today. She is an adjunct professor of the Department of Communications, which includes writing and general ed literature, and Division of Education, which includes children's and adolescent literature, independent consultant as instructional and leadership coach.
00:01:07
Speaker
Previously, she did corporate work with education companies, including Pearson and Hand to Mind. Her passion is to help others to be their best selves, which sometimes means helping them discover possibilities they hadn't imagined.
00:01:22
Speaker
Elaine likes to research and she's a tech geek. That's what she says. ah She loves to read. She is an occasional editor, also loves travel, biking, and experimenting with new recipes.
00:01:34
Speaker
She also likes to explore random stuff that seems interesting. Check out her two sub stacks that will be linked in the show notes. She has two sub stacks there and she likes to write about things that are related to education.
00:01:48
Speaker
So we're so excited to have Elaine today. Thanks so much, Crystal. It's a pleasure to be here with you, too. Thanks so much, Elaine. I always love talking to you. And it's going to be interesting because I think we're touching on stuff that we really haven't talked about before.
00:02:03
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So as we get started, if you could tell us about a defining moment in your educational journey or what you're working on right now that seems to really matter most, we'd love that.
Elaine's Career Journey
00:02:16
Speaker
Thanks, Star. um So this is an interesting question because I never planned to be in education. um i was going to be a juvenile defense attorney, so if that didn't happen.
00:02:30
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But i i i was doing I was doing some work for a technology company. And I decided that um I wanted to explore some teaching after after a friend of mine asked me, you know, would you teach this programming course at at ah at a local college? And I thought, sure, you know, how hard can that be?
00:02:52
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Which was much harder than people make it look. And so I started i started teaching a programming class and I thought this... This is cool. Now, mind you, I'd been in computer programming as a systems analyst and and and systems engineer for about a dozen years by then.
00:03:11
Speaker
And so I left the company I was working for and took a 52% pay cut. I'll never forget that, ah to go into teaching full time. And as a result of that, I've been curious about what makes...
00:03:26
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education matter to
Impact of AI on Education
00:03:29
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kids. And because I've always been curious about things, and i what I'm working on right now really has to do with ai because everybody's talking about AI, but how do we find the intersections between artificial and so intelligence and all of the other things that are so... because everything's important in education, that's part of the challenge and part of the trauma for for teachers is that everything is and seems to be important um But finding, you know, just kind of unpacking everything, unlayering everything to try to come down and distill it to the most critical moments of, so what really matters most to students so they can be the people that they want to be because their world is not my world and their future is going to be completely different from what I can imagine.
00:04:20
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You know, Elaine, i I really love that you brought that up because part of what made me innovate in my own classroom when I was in the K-12 space, you know, when I was working with high school students is when I did my national board and I started doing all this work around reflection to understand myself as a learner.
00:04:41
Speaker
And i realized at that point just how much of my thinking wasn't visible until I wrote about it. right And so part of that of that curiosity, like you said, about understanding what's important to kids and then restructuring learning in my space to mimic their needs and wants rather than my curricular choices was a really big equity jump to start thinking about how to build a truly learner-centered space that would both give students the skill set and content knowledge that they needed to be successful with wherever they chose to go after they left us, meaning, you know, whether they went the traditional academic route or if they chose another pathway for career. Right.
00:05:32
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but also to not shame them if they chose another pathway or career, which at that time, we still very much were on the everyone needs to be an academic.
00:05:43
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Yep, yep. And so what I'm wondering, since you see them at the higher ed level, can you see a difference in kiddos that come from spaces that are more learner-centered versus kiddos who are mainstreamed in regular traditional public education?
Diverse Educational Backgrounds
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah, that's that's a great question. And that's something that I've been wrestling with for you know decades now. um Because yeah the the short answer to the question is yes, I can see the difference.
00:06:16
Speaker
and And I think that it's possible that I see the differences differently because my trajectory was unusual. But one of the things that I do notice is that my my students who come from larger public high schools have a and done attitude about writing assignments.
00:06:41
Speaker
They just want to get it done, tick the box and move on to the next thing. They also don't understand deadlines, but that's a whole different issue. um private schools, and there are a number of them that that that students come to us from private schools,
00:07:00
Speaker
they they but because the the rat the the the relationship, the ratio from teacher to student is much smaller, they've gotten more personalized attention than the students in public schools.
00:07:15
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So they are already accustomed to a certain level of coaching and a certain level of teachers sitting next to them and speaking specifically, okay, Crystal, what's on your mind about this? but What's the thing that's challenging you most about this? Or Star, how can we help you make sure that you can reach your deadline, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:36
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And my students who are homeschooled completely different because they have essentially had to manage their deadlines and their work on their own.
00:07:49
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but they So they also struggle, by the way, with deadlines that are imposed on them um in in ah in a semester long. schedule at at at a higher higher level.
00:08:00
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um And I think that's the other that's the other issue is that students forget college. you know First year semester freshmen struggle the most with college because the schedule is completely different.
00:08:12
Speaker
I mean, it's completely different. There's nothing familiar to them in this schedule in college. So classes meet twice a week or three times a week. and they And it's only for 15 weeks.
00:08:23
Speaker
We don't have the luxury of a year. i have this many class periods for this many weeks. And you folks have got... to meet the deadlines and get the work done as it's been scheduled. and but But then my challenge then, going back to the idea of the learner-centered instruction, is trying to figure out how to manage the necessities of the constraints and limitations of a college semester and meeting the needs of the students, some of whom can go faster, some of whom are still struggling with some basic fundamentals.
00:09:01
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And I don't want to hold up the whole class for the kids who haven't had the kind of writing instruction they need prior to my class. But I need to make sure that they can meet the expectations because they have to have a certain grade to move on to the next course.
00:09:17
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And they don't understand that because a lot of them, hate to say, have been socially promoted. and so they just kind of figure they'll, you know, be able to get by and it'll be cool.
00:09:30
Speaker
That is so interesting. um I relate to your answer because I went to a very large public high school and also struggled with deadlines when I got to university.
00:09:41
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um And I teach in a private school and have for a couple of decades. And I completely see what you're saying. We sit side by side with the students, constantly working with them.
00:09:52
Speaker
um So everything that you're saying rings true to my own life. So thanks for sharing that.
Incorporating AI in Writing Lessons
00:09:57
Speaker
and You mentioned earlier about AI, and I would love to learn more about how are you incorporating AI with teaching writing or assessing writing, or how is it incorporated into your courses?
00:10:10
Speaker
I love that question because I am obsessed. Yeah. ah One of the things that I've been doing this summer is reading just about anything and everything i can I can read on AI for a couple of reasons. One, I want to know what's happening in the corporate space and in the workspace, not just you know not just in corporations that are covered by Fortune and Forbes, but in other workplaces, like how is AI being used at Walmart or Costco, or places like that.
00:10:36
Speaker
oh So I, long ago, long ago, that two years now, Long ago, everything is relevant. um I started, i decided I'm not going to be the person who says, no, you absolutely cannot use AI, but I am going to say you can't use it without permission because you don't know what you're doing.
00:10:57
Speaker
um So what we're going to do is incorporate it. So for example, My, I have a lot of athletes in, in my classes. We have a lot of, we just have a lot of athletes at our, at our college and um they all think precious things. They all think they're going to go pro, which of course most of them are not, but that's beside the point.
00:11:17
Speaker
So one of the first assignments I have them do in first semester, College writing is we look at Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, and I may include Copilot this semester.
00:11:31
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And help them create a prompt where they ask each of those AI tools what kind of writing will be required in my profession of choice.
00:11:45
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So they get that information back and and and there are a couple of things that are happening here. I want them to learn how to write a prompt. I want them to learn how to assess the information given back to them, which is why we look at more than one tool because they never answer the same exact way.
00:12:03
Speaker
And then going to use that information. They're going to use that information to write an assignment for me. I also later on will have them provide, we'll use at least three tools and they'll upload the work that they've done to each of those tools.
00:12:23
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And I give them specific prompts, for assessment, like what's my sentence structure here, analyze my paragraph structure here, analyze the level of vocabulary here, the audience to whom I'm writing is this, how well how how well did I do?
00:12:40
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um So they'll have different kinds of ways to get feedback from the AI tools. They'll decide which of that information they will like best and want to use most.
00:12:52
Speaker
to craft their revision. I don't use AI to assess their work because AI can't hear voice and doesn't know nuance. It just doesn't. So I would prefer to go ahead and read the papers on my own. I know it's time consuming, but if they've already done that first level of assessment using AI and gotten some feedback that way,
00:13:13
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then My experience so far is that um they start to learn something about their writing and how to think about audience and how to think about purpose.
AI as an Educational Tool
00:13:27
Speaker
It's interesting that you framed AI as a tool, and I'm wondering what advice you might have for high school English and history teachers, humanities teachers, on how they could start teaching students in high school or even down to middle school of how to use AI as a tool.
00:13:44
Speaker
Well, but the same the same sort of thing. and i And I think that's the most important point is that it is ah tool. I remember million years ago, gave, it seems like a million years ago, I gave a presentation a conference because technology was then. I remember when the Blackboard you know i remember when the first blackboard was launched and everybody was like, what is a learning management system? This is amazing.
00:14:13
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And how people were concerned about word processors and being able to use those and how students were going to be able to cheat with those, which never really made sense to me, but that's beside the point.
00:14:24
Speaker
But one of the things that I kept trying to tell them is this is just a tool. A pencil is a tool. a pen is a tool. a computer is a tool. So we need to figure out the best ways to use this tool and not be afraid of it since it's going to be embedded in the and and the work that they do for the rest of their lives as far as we know.
00:14:46
Speaker
So talking with them, i would i would say recognize that it's a tool. don't It's not your enemy. There are ways to make use of it. I could recommend some some books by some great folks who've really thought about this.
00:14:59
Speaker
There resources online, way too many to enumerate. um But I think it's a matter of as with anything with professional learning is finding ah thing you want to try and experimenting with it to see how you can make it work. I will i will tell you, k Crystal, in follow-up to that question, um when i did do I did a presentation recently at the Illinois Reading Council, and one of the questions that one of the participants asked me was, well, how can I rationalize using AI myself if I don't let my students use it. And I said, well, i don't think you can, but i don't understand why you're not letting your students use it when you think about the reasons you're using it. Your students struggle to outline because they don't know how to outline or because because nobody has yet taught them or they're not outlining the way you want them to. So, you know, let's go ahead let's go ahead and and and practice outlining
00:15:56
Speaker
with AI and then have students go from there. I mean, there's a long list of different kinds of things that they can do with AI that will make their lives and kids' lives easier. And, and by the way,
00:16:14
Speaker
likely prepare them for the workplace because there's a greater expectation that students are going to have ai skills as well as universities because more and more universities are expecting a particular level of AI literacy.
00:16:29
Speaker
i I love the term AI literacy and I wonder what that would look like in a high school setting because I could tell you in a lot of ways when I think about AI, Elaine, think Like, even when I use it, it still feels like cheating a little bit. I'm not going to like, I mean, like that's my own personal, like as a writer, for example, I've started to really use it for first drafts of things more so that like, I find during this current climate, when I'm in a place where I don't have the focus to be inspired, if I'm writing a column about something I don't know as much about or
00:17:08
Speaker
You know what I mean? Like just something that isn't completely in my wheelhouse all the time. And I've gotten really good at querying ChatGPT to give me what I want and then ask for revisions and then fine tune whatever it spits out in my voice.
00:17:26
Speaker
um with additional resources and take out all the things that, first of all, I would never say. Second of all, don't seem accurate. Or third of all, I don't want to spend two more hours researching to make sure they're correct. yeah Yes.
00:17:41
Speaker
um But the work is still in the revision, regardless of who writes the first draft. Exactly. Exactly. And i I could empathize with you on so many levels as a writing instructor that as a and and now as as an author as well, like the vast majority of my books I wrote without AI.
00:18:02
Speaker
I did not have that tool when most of my books were written. And the last few, i I used it as a research companion. Right. um sometimes structurally, sometimes just to know where to start looking for certain things.
00:18:19
Speaker
And it does, it is a much more ah efficient way of narrowing down what's in Google. And we could have a whole other podcast about the kind of like the the ethical implications of AI and yeah where it's getting its information from. And as an author, i have all kinds of feelings about um the IP issue what publishers do with that.
00:18:47
Speaker
But it is something I think we need to teach kids to do. I know that when I would teach kids to use Google to search, they'd be like, come on, miss. I know how to use Google. And I'd be like, do you?
00:18:59
Speaker
Yeah. yeah um I see that you only look at the first two things. You click that and you think that you have done a great job, but you actually haven't. um So i do think that there is, in fact, a literacy around this. Yes.
00:19:15
Speaker
And somebody needs to write a book about that then have course of curriculum about how that looks in the long, because it is a skill, just like all the other things. So I so appreciate you kind of bringing that out in your conversation.
Recommended Resources on AI in Education
00:19:33
Speaker
um So I know that you said there's a lot of resources and we always like to kind of do shout outs here. So if you could think of folks that our listeners should be listening to following.
00:19:44
Speaker
And by the way, I love your blogs when you post them on LinkedIn. I am always in there to see what you're wondering about um yeah to today. um what who who should people be following? Who should we be looking out for that could be helpful to this literacy that you speak of?
00:20:02
Speaker
Well, and and that's a great question because there are so many folks out there who claim to be so-called experts and and we all have a level of expertise, but I would certainly not call myself an expert, even though I've been shoulder deep in this for a while. I...
00:20:17
Speaker
um I particularly like ah Rachel Danae Poth's book, How to Teach AI. I love her book ah simply because it doesn't really matter that it's been out for a little while and because a lot of those ah suggestions are timeless.
00:20:36
Speaker
Another book that i recently discovered is um Becky Keene's book, K-E-E-N-E. Her book is AI Optimism.
00:20:48
Speaker
What's interesting about Becky's approach is that she incorporates Sammer, which kind of puzzled me at first, but then it made a lot of sense. she's ah she's done some She's done some real nice work but that with those with that book.
00:21:03
Speaker
um I've got all kinds of things marked in it. um I would go ahead and give a shout out to Matt Miller. He's the ditch that textbook guy There are some people who find him a little challenging at times, I think, because he is so excited about everything.
00:21:20
Speaker
um But he's he's what I like about him is he's still in the classroom and he's experimenting with things in the the classroom. And he's going to give you some nuggets.
00:21:32
Speaker
But I would say if you're a book person, you're going to go with Rachel Poth and Becky King.
00:21:40
Speaker
And me. I haven't written a book, but you can read my blogs. Maybe one day we'll see a book from you. Maybe one day. Maybe one day. That's a lot to sustain. I'm always impressed you know by people who write books and write more than one book. So Star, I am i i remain in amazement.
00:21:57
Speaker
You are so capable, Elaine. And your writing style is, it's like fun to read. You have that whimsy in your writing that I enjoy so much.
00:22:08
Speaker
Thank you.
00:22:10
Speaker
And I know that youve you post on LinkedIn and you've got your sub stacks. Where else could listeners engage with you or find out more about you if they want to follow up?
Connect with Elaine Roberts
00:22:22
Speaker
Well, I'm i' am also on Blue Sky and Threads. I can be found there as EJ Roberts or Elaine J. Roberts. um I don't do as much education stuff on those because I think it can be harder to to find people very specifically, but I'm on Blue Sky and Threads and LinkedIn.
00:22:43
Speaker
Well, fantastic. All of those links will be in the show notes. And Elaine, we really enjoyed this conversation. And I think so many listeners are going to benefit from this. Thank you. Thank you Thank you, Crystal. Thank you, Star. It's been a pleasure.
00:23:00
Speaker
Thank you for learning with us today. We hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as we did. If you'd like any additional information from the show, check out the show notes. Learn more about Mastery Portfolio and how we support schools at masteryportfolio.com.
00:23:15
Speaker
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00:23:27
Speaker
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00:23:38
Speaker
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