Teacher Shift

Bye, Bye Burnout! How one AI Tool is Freeing Up Teacher Time With Thomas Thompson

• Thomas Thompson • Episode 83

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Are things like lesson planning eating up all your time? Do you want to get your time back? Today’s guest, Thomas Thompson may just have what you’re looking for!

Thomas Thompson is an educator of five years and is the co-founder of Eduaide.Ai, a fully integrated platform for instructional planning and design. He sits down with Ali and JoDee to discuss what Eduaide.Ai is, how it can assist teachers in their lesson planning, and the future of AI in education. 


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Episode Transcriptions
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Ali  0:06  
Teachers are natural innovators, entertainers and problem solvers. They dream of growing old into the profession, teaching their kids kids. But sometimes career goals shift, and that makes opportunities outside of the classroom seem intangible questioning, who am I if I'm not a teacher? I'm your host, Ali Simon.

JoDee  0:29  
And I'm your co host, JoDee Scissors.

Ali  0:32  
And this is Teacher Shift.

JoDee  0:43  
It's no secret that some of the most creative problem solvers out there are teachers. Every day, they are tackling issues on top of the heavy workload, which we all know can lead to stress and burnout. Today, our guest talks with us about a new innovation in lesson planning, resources and assessment. Meet your new BFF, Eduaide.

Ali  1:07  
Today, our guest is Thomas Thompson. He and his co founders created Eduaide.AI, a fully integrated platform for instructional planning and design. The idea is to cut out the friction of planning and provide a working framework for evidence based instruction. Thomas is also an educator of five years and counting. Welcome to the show today.

Thomas  1:30  
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

JoDee  1:32  
Thomas, we've been excited all day to interview you. I am excited because I'm such a techy person. And we went on to Eduaide.ai and started playing around a bit. And just right off the bat, I want to say beautiful interface, like really nice job very intuitive. But this gets me excited because planning is a heavy lift. And it can lead to a lot of hours after school, at home, in your car, at your child's basketball game. Planning spills over into a lot of areas. And if you don't have the right tools, or the right approach to it, it can really take over and lead to some, I guess negative type of repercussions such as burnout. So I'm excited for this because this was never an option for me when during my 13 years of teaching. So we're excited to dive a little bit deeper into it. So just what led to this, like, tell me a little bit before we kind of go into the specs of it. What led you into creating such a tool like this? 

Thomas  2:49  
Well, it really started with my co founder, Thomas Hubble and I teaching across the hall from one another. I was a social studies teacher. He's a science teacher. And we both started teaching right around COVID. Right. So my first year got interrupted March and we all went home. Right? Well, that led to Humble and I having a little more time to talk, reflect, think about the career we've chosen, that we're getting ourselves into. And out of those conversations, you know, we had a lot of naive and idealistic ideas about you know, how the system could be improved. I moved, he moved, we started teaching at different schools. I pursued my master's degree. I thought maybe there was some solutions lying i  open educational resources, which is my research focus was in. And then Thomas Hummel came to me. We're both named Thomas, it makes it easy for no one when I'm recount Thomas square like I love it. Yes. And that's actually my name on our Discord for Eduaide is T squared. But anyway, he said, Hey, I think this generative AI stuff might actually have some interesting use cases in education. He had a good friend who was far more tech savvy. He's an engineer, knows all the kind of technical back end. And the three of us got together and started discussing, you know, a platform that would enable teachers to interact with AI. But that journey has even changed, and I'm sure we'll get into it in this podcast in that we're increasingly thinking of ourselves less as an AI platform and more as just this place for teachers to engage in instructional design. And AI kind of makes that possible because it allows us to integrate all the tools you need for that in one place.

JoDee  4:40  
Do you think that the word AI is settling well with teachers or the ed industry at all? Because I know it's a very popular topic. I get a lot of like updates on like, what are popular topics from Ed Week or Edutopia and AI is always like number one or number two. So how do you guys approach etachers who maybe not... They don't know what it is? Or perhaps they have an idea that it's going to take over the industry or something. So what's your approach to that?

Thomas  5:13  
One is dose of healthy skepticism. Right? We should all be discerning and asking a lot of questions about it. Teachers have been burned by tech adoptions before. How many, you know, smart boards do we have just sitting on walls collecting dust or being used as simple projectors? This is largely due to a lack of professional development or when there is professional development, it's not effective, because it kind of kind of ignores the principles of what we know about learning. Right? As it turns out, it's not sitting in meetings, it's deliberate practice actionable feedback, all the things that we use for our students. So yes, I think it's good that teachers are skeptical and asking a lot of questions about AI. I think these conversations should continue, I think we should be a little more hesitant to adopt the technology than we have been in the past as a field. Although I will say that fear shouldn't be paralysis, we have to move, because if we don't, well, the technology is already being used by students. It's already being used by staff. It's already being used by tutors, teachers, parents all over the place. So it's important that we build the capabilities of the people using the technology. So my suggestion is always to kind of dive in, maybe do some research on your own. But I also know that, you know, resources are limite/d, times limited. Who has a lot of energy to go in and do a deep dive on AI I will say, though, that Google actually offers in their Google Cloud skills boosts platform, a really nice intro degenerative AI course. It's probably only going to take you about 40 minutes to do. And I think it would give the teacher a firm basis to understanding what the technology is. I mean, I could we could go into that a little bit if you would like me to kind of break that down or whatever you think.

Yeah, so Ali's kind of going into this a little bit more blindly. I kind of like dove in and she was like, I'm gonna dive in. And I was like, actually think it's better if we're kind of have opposite perspective. So I think that would actually be really good. Not just for the listeners, but for Ali too. 

Ali  7:18  
Yeah, and I actually do love that you shared that course, though. I know that Google offers a variety of courses, and I will probably take this sounds awesome. But yeah, maybe just like a cliff notes version of generative AI, in case we have someone who knows nothing about it.

Thomas  7:33  
Yeah. So at bass, I mean, AI has been around us for a long time AIs are really old field, it goes back to the 1950s. The textbook I have on my wall right here, Artificial Intelligence, A Modern Approach, was written in 1994. What's new is generative AI. And the way these models work is essentially they are trained on vast amounts of data from all over the internet, huge crawls from most any website that is openly available. There's some debate about whether or not everything was openly available that's used to train the models. And there's a lot of copyright issues. I'm sure you may have seen the news with open AI issuing a statement back to the New York Times about copyright infringement, but ingest a lot of information. And the way this works, so GPT stands for generative pre trained transformer. What that means is, it will be able to essentially make a guess as to what word will come next in a sentence in its given context. Now, as it turns out, if you just use the most common word to follow in a sentence, things aren't really... they don't really resemble human writing. What it takes is a little bit of randomness. So you might sometimes pick the fourth most used word in this regard. And what that ends up looking like is a lot more human level writing. Obviously, the machine is really good at doing this. I mean, it outperforms humans on a lot of tasks. We can look at studies. There's this great substack by Gaya, Ethan Moloch. He's a professor at, I think the University of Pennsylvania. He does a lot of work on how generative AI not only is changing education, but maybe changing the workforce even more. And one of his studies was looking at a consulting firm in Boston, and some of their employees were using AI others were not and they kind of measured productivity efficiency, and, you know, general correctness and responses and in the work that they did. And not much of a surprise, the people who were using generative AI were much more efficient, much more effective. They were getting things in before deadlines, they were turning in work of higher quality. But then this raises some key questions like who's the core driver of action in human AI interactions? Like let's assume you have an AI Assistant, there's a lot of these popping up. The assistant learns from your responses learns from your documents, right? It's writing style and your writing style will begin to merge syntactical correctness that they give with a little the right amount of your kind of person. Sindel flourishes, we have a machine to heighten you. But the obvious problem is, you know, who's the core driver? Where does enhancement replace human autonomy? Who's directing action? Who's modulating that action? What effect does that have on humanity? Are these training sets that the models are built on? Are they biased? Are the models providing incorrect information? And then also, when we're prompting it, are we using the word as it is actually defined? Humans have a lot of ways of kind of having a vocabulary in mind that does not actually reflect what the word necessarily means, right? Malapropisms are, you know, rampant all over the place. We use words incorrectly all the time. So a lot of issues. A lot of opportunities. Ultimately, it goes back to the first question, why I think it does a healthy skepticism is probably for the best.

Ali  10:47  
You know, one thing is I'm not quite as tech savvy as JoDee so I think we do have a good balance here on the podcast. I pick up things pretty quickly. I learned by doing but, you know, if you're using Gmail, or if you're on a, you know, a smartphone, and you're typing out a text message or an email and starting to finish your sentence, like, that's a form of generative AI. So like, for everyday people, like you're using it already. And this, I think, is just like taking it to the next level, in terms of what you know, maybe it can do. And I love the possibilities. I think it just, it sounds like it could be an amazing tool. I mean, I've used ChatGPT already in some of my personal and professional life. And I've seen the benefits of using it in both ways. So I'm, I'm really excited to have this as an option for educators who are tackling some serious issues right now. JoDee mentioned earlier, burnout, and access to quality resources. You know, teachers are burnt out, they're working more probably now than ever. I mean, I don't have like the data on it. But from what we hear from our guests, they're just inundated with more and more things, more and more meetings, like you alluded to earlier, Thomas, where we're not actually getting to do the things that we should be doing. And so this could potentially take some of the lift off of their shoulders, if they can have a way to, you know, customize lessons pulling from, from your platform, basically, from creating them that way. And the other thing I really like about it is quality resources. Now, I know that there should be a healthy dose of skepticism with where we're getting the data from. And, you know, I've been listening to NPR and the news about, you know, some of the problems with with generative AI. But I think that the benefits outweigh kind of those risks, especially if you're an expert in your field, like, I was thinking about how can I use your tool when I was a Spanish teacher in the classroom, right. So if I wanted to make a lesson plan that was centered on some sort of a concept, but that also linked up to best practices in foreign language education. Like I know what those best practices are. And I know, the different theories, I know the different, you know, methodologies, the different types of tasks I would normally ask students to do. But maybe I'm just burnt out. And I just need some help with coming up with a more innovative way. Or I want to, I saw an option was like cooperative learning. Like maybe I want to do more cooperative learning in my classroom. And so I really do see a way for for teachers to be able to utilize this tool to help them out. But keeping in mind that it's not doing all the work for them. They still have to, you know, think of the topics, the ideas. And so I guess my question for you would be how have you been able to use this since you are a teacher in reality? Or how have you heard teachers using the tool in their lesson planning?

Thomas  13:39  
So I am a, I teach in what's called the Co-taught pod at my school. So I have a co teacher, I have high numbers of students with IEPs. I have English language learners. A variety of diverse needs in my classroom. The way that I use Eduaide, currently, unfortunately, making it kind of ruins it for you. So every time you're using it, it's all about testing it and how to make it better. And you know, but when I'm actually employing it, but a great thing is, you know, teaching in the classroom, I get to do that kind of product testing, on my own trying to see, you know, how do I actually save time? How does it help me? How does it bring me to some new ideas, new techniques or methods? Typically, the main way I use Eduaide, today is differentiation. I'll have an assignment, have some sort of material have a goal in mind, and I'll be able to make, you know, four or five different copies of the same assignment in less time than it used to take me to just make one, you know, that is really the power and promise for me is the ability to personalize instruction to the unique needs of my contexts that I'm working in, while also working within these kinds of evidence based parameters. And what that means is really, I mean, everything we do at Eduaide is a comes from just a few basic principles. One is that learning is mediated by prior knowledge. So, I mean, well, in addition to prior knowledge learning is also mediated by a host of other factors like motivation, engagement, teacher efficacy, contextual factors. Outside of school, meaningful learning, we find occurs in the act of integration have to be learning material with existing knowledge and experience. So learning that is meaningful, that is worthwhile is an active process. And that, of course, assumes a lot of things like engagement, motivation, requisite prior knowledge and skills, proper scaffolding. How do you build that into a platform? Through a number of ways one would be prompting, right? How we actually get the resources back. So setting the parameters for say, our lesson plan to always include prior knowledge measures, always include options to activate that prior knowledge, always include scaffolding steps if a student does not have the necessary prior knowledge. That's big. Maybe there's some practical implications there. So orderly sequence of instruction. So our unit plan, making sure that resources pair and things, you know, progressively build up towards some sort of student mastery of the specific learning objective. Clear, again, I keep going back to prior knowledge. It's so crucial. I mean, I see a lot of pressure top down to engage students in more kind of collaborative learning environments, inquiry based learning. But the problem with that is, those are only effective in very specific circumstances where students have shown the competencies to be able to do it. Otherwise, it can be actually quite damaging. Students could ingrain misconceptions. They could come to false conclusions based on their inquiry, because they did not have the necessary knowledge and skills to engage with it. And then, of course, the activation of that prior knowledge. The next one was definitely that deliberate practice and actionable feedback are central to the pursuit of mastery. So at Eduaide, we've organized all of our resources to essentially be a sequence that you can follow. From planning documents, we move into information objects, the presentation of material. From there, it moves right into independent practice, where the students can engage with that material in some sort of deliberate way. Maybe then moving into some sort of cooperative learning, and of course, assessing, and then moving on to the next thing to the next step in that process. Next is that working memory is a resource that can be overwhelmed. So this is very much like a cognitive load theory, informed principle. The idea being that our resources should not be jam packed with a bunch of extra stuff that is unnecessary, superfluous, or may serve to distract the student. And then our fourth kind of foundational principle for designing the platform is that if you want to improve student attainment, the best way to do that is to improve teacher efficacy. And if teachers are burned out, and are leaving the field on mass, I mean, how do you build excellence in a field that cannot retain talent? You can't. You have to figure out a way to retain talented people, and make them want to get involved and make them want to develop to build mastery. Because a master teacher has such an outsized effect on student attainment. And unfortunately, given the field in its current format, it's tough to, again, retain talent.

JoDee  18:08  
I see that all time. I have worked with some of the most amazing educators around and they are leaving. And to me, that's a problem because I've also worked with some duds that just weren't really... I mean, I'm just being honest. Like, I've worked with people that just, it wasn't for them, but they were there to get the paycheck. Most teachers aren't like that. But I have seen in the past few years, some of the most spectacular educators, they're ready for their next thing because they're, they're burnout, they're tired of the same problems reoccurring, over and over and over. And, you know, as I was playing with Eduaide, I was like, Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, like put my teacher hat back on because I do a lot of... I still work in education. And part of what I do is revise old curriculum, or develop new. And rubrics are a really good universal way to assess students if you don't know, because we're my audiences kind of nation, international, some of them. I don't know how they're assessing students. But a good way to universally make an assessment is to have a rubric on the concept. And so just to kind of give the listeners an idea, I went back and I was, you know, the last grade I taught was fourth grade, and I pulled up language arts. And I was like, I'm just gonna make a rubric really quick on something that I've been working on. And I just wrote, like write a monologue that conveys how a character is feeling about a friend that they're having conflict with. And then it sharpened what I said. Your tools sharpened what I said, and wrote, students will be able to write a monologue that effectively conveys a character's inner struggle with a friend. Totally what I said My word vomit. Made it really nice. And then it made a criteria and made a rubric. And those criteria were clarity of inner struggle, understanding of characters, emotions, creativity, and originality. I usually spend on one rubric an hour plus, just making sure that I'm getting the language, right that it is purely aligned with the lesson that I have revised. And so it takes a lot of back and forth, to make sure that I have it really, really tight, because honestly, like some of the rubrics that I've worked on, were just totally like, unrelated to the lesson or it seemed revisions through time. And nobody ever thought to revise the rubric. So that happened, like in a split second. So in terms of saving time, right, but also, like, felt 100%, like motivated and empowered, that it could be done so quickly. And I could reference it and set up clear expectations for a student who is trying to reach a goal. And I really loved that aspect that I just did.

Thomas  21:02  
I mean, then you can take that a step further, and you can use that rubric. You can put it in the feedback bot, and then it'll give students comments, actionable, direct and positive feedback, based solely on the rubric that you created in relation to the work that the student turned in. And then you can have, you know, personalized feedback to each student on a rubric that you made specifically for that assignment in a fraction of the time that would have taken you to just make your own rubric before.

JoDee  21:32 
I love that it's of all the stakeholders here. Really, it really is very thoughtful.

Ali  21:39 
What I think is, I knew before the interview, I didn't know 100% that you'd been a teacher. I was like, well, he has to he has to have been a teacher is a teacher because somebody wasn't a teacher would not spend time making a product for teachers to be honest, unfortunately, that's kind of the world we live in. But because you have that insider knowledge, because you, you've been in the trenches, like you know, what is helpful, what isn't helpful, you can be a beta tester, like you just have that ability and your team that you're working with sounds fantastic. That you are all in it for this bigger purpose, which is really, to streamline processes for teachers to produce effective. And, you know, hopefully, like research base tools that teachers can utilize, and it will make their lives simplified. And you hit on it earlier. If a teacher can be a more effective teacher, if they can, you know, take less time to lesson plan, they have more time to spend with individual students. Right. So that is really key. And I think providing quality education, and to, you know, to taking that burden off of teachers who are really burnt out. One last thing I do want to get to today, I want to give first of all, a shout out to Fonz, Fonz Mendoza comes from my Ed Tech Life, who is actually on the advisory board. Like every wonderful in all the spaces and he is he's awesome. But I I'm really passionate about having teachers be a part of advisory boards, especially when they're educational organizations like nothing pains me more to see an advisory board with no teachers on it that serves young people or isn't education. So I'm hoping you can tell our listeners a little bit about your advisory board selection and accountability and just kind of how that that might grow. Why you value having educators on your board as well. ,

Thomas  23:34
Yeah, I mean, so our advisory board, we meet with them on a regular basis. We're set kind of for quarterly meetings. And what we do is we kind of give them an overview of where the site's going, what's on there, what we're doing, maybe create a few things for them, throw them around the site. And what we end up getting is a whole bunch of feedback, notes, suggestions. We have a Slack channel where we interact with each other and they kind of are like, Hey, I was looking at your site, and maybe you want to take a look at this. Really the idea is that they keep us accountable to our founding principles, to best instructional practices and to teachers everywhere. I mean, my my co founder Thomas Hubble, we're two white guys named Thomas with mustaches that taught in the exact same school. Like we don't have a very broad range of perspective. So having a great advisory board that will keep us grounded that will, you know, keep us responding to our users is crucial. The way we went about choosing the folks that we work with, I mean, really, they are different educators, professors, school leadership that we've interacted with in our lives that we knew. On our board, for example, Dr. Marty Stockman, she's wonderful as she has this great, she's kind of have a foot in both places. She's had successful edtech startups in the past. She's made exits with those companies. She has done a lot of great work in the EdTech space. And she was also a teacher as well. Dr. Earl Watkins, he is a school superintendent of the Mississippi Achievement School District. He works a lot in low income areas, and it's very much, you know, keeping us aware of how to make our product and how to make our platform accessible not only to teachers who can afford it, right, but teachers everywhere. So we have our scholarship program, for example, where teachers reach out to us, let us know that, you know, hey, I really like Eduaide, but really, that's too much of a financial burden can't do it. We've granted 100% of those requests. So we're working with schools in Egypt, for example, where we're providing members of their staff full access to Eduaide at no cost, and they just re up that each year. And we'll just keep it going. Right? Sosts should never be a barrier to educational materials. I'm running through the list because each of these people are absolutely wonderful. Dr. Devers, he was my professor during my master's program, strong cognitive science basis. Really keeps us honest when we're talking about instructional principles. So it's like does our unit plan actually offer opportunities for interleaved distributed practice, is there are opportunities for practice testing, different strategies that we know are effective, or maybe while there are boundary conditions that may make them less effective in your school, we know that it's kind of putting you in the ballpark where learning is more likely to happen. Dr. Yolanda Holloway was Thomas and I's principal at our school. She has a wonderful eye for not only just the needs of teachers, but the needs at the school district level. Of course, Fonz, absolutely just the terrific guy in everything ed tech. And then my mentor, Mr. Clair, taught me everything I know about teaching. I was going to law school, he talked me out of it. He said, Hey, you want a meaningful career, you would go into education. My senior year of high school, I didn't have any elective classes, I was his student teacher. I shadowed him, made copies. It was just in his class learning from the master. He just showed me everything he knew. I mean, then I've been in the classroom learning about how to be a teacher ever since my senior year. From that moment on, I was sold. So it's a great group of people with great commitment to our field. And you know, they keep us honest.

Ali  27:14 
I love just your energy and positivity, like radiating from you. It's just like, it's so refreshing. Because we don't hear that as much, especially with I don't know how old you are. But like, the younger, you know, the younger generation. We've had a lot of teachers who've they started during COVID, and they left and I'm like really appreciative that you're still teaching, that you're working on all of these educational things. I love this. It just feels like a breath of fresh air. Like I see the future being really bright for people who are in teaching right now. And you know, JoDee and I left for various reasons, but the time in the classroom for us was just life changing. I mean, it is a very meaningful career. And I feel like I got so much purpose out of those, like, seven years that I'm trying now to find somewhere else.

JoDee  28:03 
I think Ali like Ali, a breath of fresh air is exactly that you took the words for my mouth. Because Ali and I don't know if you guys have been to South By yet to present your product or anything. But when we were at South By last spring, South by Edu, it felt like we could see the future. It's like, you know, we have our perspective and what we did in the classroom, but things are changing, and to not be afraid of that change. We took it as a chance to understand the future. And I left feeling very hopeful. Because there were a lot of, you know, Ed, tech industry people there creating things. And they were led by teachers, they were had a council of people, an advisory board of people, helping them make really informed decisions. And also what I see is that, you know, your high school teacher mentored you into this profession, you obviously have a knack for this as well. And you're creating opportunity for teachers, whether it's an advisory board or eventually if you're able to make more hires. You're, you're creating a future outside of the classroom for perhaps the teacher that wants to get in to this type of industry. And that to me is you know, you're a trailblazer. You're thinking outside the box, but you're using that foundation of being a teacher to guide you. And I really appreciate that aspect of your personality and your work ethic. So thanks for what you're doing for teachers, not just with the platform, but eventually, hopefully, we hope to see, you know, a whole organization built on the backing of the phenomenal things that a teacher can do.

Thomas  30:00
Well, thank you. I mean, that means a lot. It really it just comes down to education is a public good. And it's a human right. And we should be doing whatever it takes to make sure that everyone has access to high quality instruction, high quality materials, high quality learning experiences. And if we're burnout, and we're turnover, and you know, there's a new crop of teachers coming in every year who are trying to learn the ropes, but there's no one to learn from. That's not going to lead to great returns over time. And if, if the education system fails, I mean, you. That's a tremendous loss of value, not only for our country, but for the world for future innovations that could have been. I mean, Mr. Clair, my mentor said that education is the silver bullet, it's the one thing that can create a positive change in someone's life. Neither of my parents went to college.You know, my family is very much lower middle class, Western Pennsylvania, all the opportunity left rusted out old steel mills that no one's working in. It's pretty hopeless. But, you know, school was a was a positive outlet. And I know a lot of students don't have that experience. A lot of teachers don't have that experience. And it's not for what's going on in the classroom. It's a lot of just the institution of education can be really stultifying, and you know, not encourage innovation, not encourage risk taking. The current structure and timing for teachers to plan does not give them the opportunity and does not encourage them to explore new methods, new ideas. It doesn't treat them like a craftsperson doesn't treat them like an expert doesn't treat them like a person who's on a path to mastering a skill and a craft, which is exactly what education is. 

JoDee  31:46
I think we've called that in the past the factory style teaching where the the institution says do this and you just regurgitate it. And it takes away from the risk taking and the creativity of what truly is what an educator can do in a classroom. And we all know the best teachers that have always made an impact, always thought outside the box.

Ali  32:06
So I hope that Eduaide will just be another tool that those teachers can use to really excel in the classroom and to help more students and to help themselves. And I'm excited to be able to share with our listeners where you can learn more about Eduaide We're gonna link in the show notes how you can find them on Twitter, Instagram, and on their website, Eduaide.ai. Thank you again so much for your time today, Thomas.

Thomas  32:30
Thanks again for having me. This is great.

Ali  32:39
Are you interested in suggesting a topic for Teacher Shift? Being a guest or recommending a guest? Please see the episodes page on our website to make a submission. And if you'd like to write for us, see our blog page. If you liked Teacher Shift, give us a five star rating and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Apple podcasts, Spotify and Amazon music. Today's episode was written and recorded by me, Ali Simon and my co host, JoDee Scissors. Executive produced by Teacher Shift. Produced and edited by Emily Porter. Original Music: Emoji by Tubebackr.