DENVER — In Zach Kennelly’s senior civics class, students are building custom chatbots with artificial intelligence.
One student is working on a chatbot that better curates movie and television show recommendations based on a viewer’s recent watch history.
Another is creating a chatbot that — somewhat ironically — helps members of Gen Z like herself practice their communication skills, such as by coming up with conversation starters.
Other students, according to Kennelly’s co-teacher Gianna Geraffo, are brainstorming chatbots that could support mental health, improve financial literacy and provide resources to immigrants.
Soon, students will refine their ideas, and eventually, the class will select one to develop into an app.
It’s a similar trajectory to the one Kennelly and Geraffo followed last semester, when their students ultimately built and launched VoteWise Colorado, an app that helps people register to vote and also helps break down the various candidates and measures on the ballot.
“Pretty early on we thought it was going to be a massive failure,” says Kennelly of last semester’s project. “But it became a huge hit. Students loved it. They were like, ‘I ran to second period to build this thing.’”
The class project was then — and is again now — part of an effort to help students understand and apply AI in practical ways in school and in their lives.
“It’s not AI-driven at all. It’s AI-leveraged,” Kennelly clarifies. “It’s driven by our students, by their expertise, by their passion.”
Kennelly and Geraffo are part of a small team at their school in Denver, DSST: College View High School, that is participating in the School Teams AI Collaborative, a year-long pilot initiative in which more than 80 educators from 19 traditional public and charter schools across the country are experimenting with and evaluating AI-enabled instruction to improve teaching and learning.
The goal is for some of AI’s earliest adopters in education to band together, share ideas and eventually help lead the way on what they and their colleagues around the U.S. could do with the emerging technology.
‘Advancing Instruction’ With AI
The collaborative, which is co-led by two national nonprofits, Leading Educators and The Learning Accelerator, kicked off in October, with an in-person gathering of the various school teams right here in Denver.
The nonprofits — both of which are more focused on “advancing instruction” than on indiscriminately promoting AI, notes Jin-Soo Huh, a partner at The Learning Accelerator — conceived of the idea after seeing that generative AI was making ripples in education from its very earliest days.
Many teachers, already, are looking for ways to use AI to build lesson plans and improve student feedback, Huh says: “We know it’s coming. We know that, whether it’s this year or next year, more and more teachers are going to be looking for these examples.”
Huh adds: “We wanted to identify, ‘Who are the teachers already doing incredible work with AI?’ Can we elevate promising practices?”
Since their kickoff event last fall, participants have met virtually to discuss the projects they’re working on, the lessons they’re learning and what’s exciting them and their students about the technology.
Traci Griffith, executive director of the Eliot K-8 Innovation School, part of Boston Public Schools, has found the cross-school collaboration invigorating.
Just a few weeks ago, she says, during a meeting of the School Teams AI Collaborative, her four-person school team was in a breakout room with another team from California. Everyone left the call buzzing with excitement over what their colleagues on the other coast were up to.
It shows you the power of bringing educators together.
“It shows you the power of bringing educators together,” says Griffith, whose school team is using Claude, an AI assistant developed by Anthropic, to give pre- and post-assessment feedback to middle school students on their writing assignments. (Part of the challenge, Griffith says, is that teachers must first learn how to train Claude, adjusting guidelines and tweaking word choices, before Claude can give beneficial feedback to students.)
The collaborative is “intentionally platform-agnostic,” says Alex Magiera, senior director of innovation at Leading Educators, meaning the group’s leaders did not sway educators in the direction of, say, ChatGPT, over Claude or Gemini.
In Denver, students use a platform called Playlab, which describes itself as a “safe sandbox to learn, adapt and create educational AI for your context,” to build their chatbots. Playlab allows students to toggle easily between different AI models, since each one spits out a different result.
So far, students in Kennelly’s class this semester are not yet impressed by the potential of AI, he concedes.
“They’re all over the board,” he notes. “They’re scared. They’re excited. They’re confused.”
But it’s still early days.
Geraffo, his co-teacher, recalls that last semester students experienced a major shift from the beginning to the end of their term, “from, ‘I am someone AI happens to,’ to ‘I am someone who drives AI.’”
People who don’t understand this technology are the ones most likely to be exploited by it.
That kind of empowerment is critical, Kennelly believes, since AI is already here, and it’s virtually inevitable that it becomes a part of his students’ careers and lives.
“People who don’t understand this technology,” he adds, “are the ones most likely to be exploited by it.”
A Pragmatic Approach
The collaborative is in some ways predicated on a certain pragmatism about AI, Huh says — sort of like, well, it’s here. It’s likely to stay. So what are we going to do with it and about it?
“We’re not here saying AI is the solution and the end-all, be-all,” he says. “I think there is a healthy skepticism in our group.”
Everyone involved has some level of excitement and hunger around understanding and using AI, but they are committed to integrating it into their schools and classrooms “responsibly and effectively,” Huh adds.
“This group sees the potential and possibility with AI,” Magiera says, “and also recognizes that in the past, technology has overpromised and underdelivered.”
The collaborative creates a community where folks can share victories and dead ends, express enthusiasm and trepidation, ask questions and help answer them.
For now, the group is set to culminate over the summer, after the school year wraps up. But already, Magiera can envision the teams continuing their conversations and work well beyond then.
“This definitely isn’t the end,” she says. “These schools are saying, ‘Is there a 2.0?’ They want to keep the momentum going.”