Paul Cancellieri

This week I worked with teachers in West Texas working to understand how AI can help them do the kind of teaching they want to do, or (at least) recognize they need to be doing. During that first day–focused on teacher moves with AI–one teacher really caught me off-guard. She had been exploring what AI tools like ChatGPT could create with carefully constructed prompts from her. She had never used ChatGPT before and was straddling the line between excitement and cognitive overload from the amount of new information she was learning. I walked over to her table during a work session, expecting her to be in full-on panic mode. [The moment when a reluctant educator really hit her stride with AI]Instead, this teacher was "in the zone". She had already collaborated with ChatGPT to re-think her Revolutionary War unit, giving her some new ideas to reinvigorate a unit she had taught for decades. But when I approached, she called out to me, "Check this out, Paul!" On her screen was not just a plan for the unit, but dozen or more browser tabs of useful resources she had found and created using the AI as an assistant. She used ChatGPT to help her create a fun pre-assessment and to decide what her differentiated lessons would look from there. She had even coaxed into creating an interactive map of battles from the War. Her crowning achievement, however, was an AI-generated song (from Suno.com) that told the story of the Revolutionary War in the style of a classic Taylor Swift break-up song. It was magical. I was floored. Here was a teacher with more classroom experience than me who had gone from genAI newbie to accomplished prompter and excited creator in just a few hours. It was really amazing. And it reminded me that educators are rock stars that never cease to amaze me.