To improve English language arts performance in Sumner County Schools, a Nashville, Tenn. regional district serving 30,200 students across 52 schools, Director of Schools Scott Langford is leveraging artificial intelligence so teachers can focus more attention on students needing additional guidance and those requiring a higher level challenge, according to an article in K-12 Dive.
K-12 Dive interviewed Langford about his plans for AI-assisted instruction. Note: the interview has been edited for length.
What’s your district’s strategy for using AI in the classroom?
Landford: When I look at a lot of the AI products that are out there now, they try to do everything — instead of smaller things. For instance, one of the things we asked ourselves is, “How do we improve the delivery of ELA lessons?”
We invested heavily in HQIM [high quality instructional materials]. We emphasize foundational literacy very strongly. But after a couple of years, you start to see that there are some gaps in the way instruction is being delivered, and also teachers are overwhelmed with all the data they receive.
So, our question was, “How can we improve the data that teachers are receiving so they can make more informed teaching decisions?” That’s where we found Coursemojo. It’s about a 15- or 20-minute lesson that’s embedded into an ELA lesson, and it pushes students on their understanding and moves them toward a deeper understanding of the text and the assignment.
Students are pushed hard to grow in their knowledge and understanding of the main point of the lesson. Teachers at the same time receive feedback on how each individual student is doing. As they transition out of a module, AI pulls all the data together and suggests questions the teacher can ask the whole class — providing instant support to the teacher as well.
AI filters through large amounts of data for an individual student, and also for a whole classroom full of students. It functions as a kind of teaching assistant for each student. It doesn’t replace the teacher — it just increases the efficiency and power of that teacher.
What were some of the apprehensions that you might have had to address with teachers when you started incorporating AI in schools?
Obviously, the fear of cheating is pretty widespread. We’ve messaged that cheating has existed as long as there have been pencils and desks side by side, and there’s so many easy ways to address academic dishonesty that we’ve dealt with for generations.
The biggest fear was that it was going to replace teachers. I think by just showcasing it to teachers and giving them room to experience the product, [they can] understand there’s no scenario where there’s any AI tool that’s going to replace a classroom teacher. But what we can do is [show them how it can] cut out hours and hours of teacher tasks so they can focus that time on engaging with students — which is where every one of our teachers prefers to spend their time.
What are some of the biggest successes that you’ve seen with the AI tools that you’ve used?
From our benchmarks, we’ve shown that every one of our schools using Coursemojo is either at or ahead of where they were last year. We’re anticipating seeing some sizable gains in their ELA performance, and we won’t know until late June or early July, but the feedback from our benchmark testing that’s pretty closely aligned to our accountability test shows pretty steady progress across the year.
And that’s just piloting. Next year will be significantly better, because we learned a lot this year. We’ll have this model in more grades, and our support will be a lot better.
Our district loses the most growth among our highest-quintile kids, because a lot of times the teacher is focused on supporting students who are struggling, and the students who are very successful don’t get as much individualized attention. So, anecdotally, at first they didn’t like (AI), because it kept asking them questions. It made them cite, for instance, the text they were referencing and then develop a stronger topic sentence to support it more clearly.
Over time, they’ve grown to appreciate AI. But then I think on the flip side, students who were struggling with vocabulary or understanding a passage had the opportunity to go deep with the platform instead of being in front of their classmates, so they felt like they had a much better understanding to participate in group discussions.
On the teacher side, some of our new teachers have expressed how much easier AI has made it for them to ask better questions.
In the future, as we run this to a larger scale, administrators will also be able to look at the dashboard and see exactly where kids are individually and across classrooms.
What advice would you give to other district leaders who are still trying to figure out how AI would fit into their schools?
The biggest thing is just not to be scared, but to ask specifically, “What is it that we need? What need are we trying to address?”
I think AI is best suited right now to meet needs that are defined, like individualized or niche needs that a school might have. It could be IEP [individualized education program] writing, it could be ELA support for lessons, high school schedules — if you identify the need, there are plenty of great AI companies out there.
You also need to talk to not just a sales rep but the CEO or someone fairly high up in the company. In the past, it was just, “You can have whatever you want as long as it looks like this, and then you bend what you’re doing to what we produced.” Now, the best AI companies will almost custom-build a product to meet the needs of your school or district.
What are the most important questions for district leaders to ask AI vendors up front?
Will you be on the ground talking to our leaders and teachers? What is your process for receiving feedback to make changes to the product? What kind of training and support do we receive — and not just once — but how does that training and support look over the course of the school year and subsequent school years?
K-12 Dive
