Episode 51
00:00:00 Jon Bergmann: Gratitude and how AI is helping me with my workflows. That's the topic of today's podcast.
00:00:13 Jon Bergmann: Welcome to the Reach Every Student podcast with me, your host, Jon Bergmann. I've been thinking a lot lately just about gratitude. This is coming out Thanksgiving week here in the US. If you're a US person and it's a time where we as Americans, as citizens of this country. We take a pause to reflect and be grateful for our lives, and I've been thinking about that as the days have gone by and as my years have gone by. As an educator of the year forty here, and I am just grateful I. I work at such a good school. I have such amazing students. Now, do I have frustrations? Uh, yeah. But I am just grateful that I get a chance to work at such a good school. I was talking with my son and daughter in law in the past week. And as we were chatting, I said, you know, I work at the best school that I've ever worked at, and it's going to be hard the day that I leave. I don't know how many years that will be, but, it's it's so good to be at a place that's such a positive place, where people genuinely care about students. They care about each other, the staff, the administration, the whole ball game. And I'm just so grateful that I get the opportunity to work here and to impact the kids. As if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see my classroom right in room two twenty nine right here. I'll have kids here later today. And I say this. And yesterday. Right. We have a full week off for Thanksgiving, which is a great blessing. And in that full week off. so this is the Friday I'm recording this before. This is the last day before break. And yesterday, they were just out of control. Even, like, my best class. Oh my gosh. They were like, they were out of control. And juniors and seniors in high school, and I'm like, what just happened? And there's an antsy nature to the kids. And I think my classes, are sort of organized chaos. But yesterday they were just chaos. So, if that's any consolation, for those of you who think that I have it all together, you'll know that's not true. And I anticipate today more of the same. I'm gonna be honest. I just don't know how it's gonna go. the day before, honestly, some kids are going to be gone. And though I love my kids, maybe that will, mitigate some of this. Maybe I should have planned something a little bit more sedate today, but I didn't. So it is what it is. But anyways, I'm grateful and I'm looking forward personally to times of refreshment. I asked my students. I asked my students a question of the day every day, and one of them was like, what do you want to do with your free time? And a lot of them said, sleep. I think there's something I'm noticing in this generation of students. They just, you know, it's true of all generations, as I think back, we keep them at such a high level of activity, or our society is expecting them to be at such a high level all the time that there's not a lot of downtime and the students aren't getting enough sleep, and it's affecting mental health. And as we all know, there's this is the anxious generation. And a lot of that is exacerbated by screens and all the social media and all the things that we now know are detrimental to their their mental health. So I think that we as educators have to be the big boys and the big girls in the room, and we have to somehow figure out how to help our students the best as possible. And that's something I think we need to desperately do with our students. So, I'm grateful, and I'm looking forward to time of refreshment. as I was journaling this morning, I was just thinking, actually, I had a conversation with a friend yesterday as we were discussing just life and whatnot is that I want to be that teacher who's committed to the end. I don't know what day I'll retire, what that's going to look like, but it's, you know, you know, I'm sixty one. I'm not going to probably teach until seventy one. So I don't have that many more years. But I don't want to be that teacher who dials it in and just like, oh, I'll just coast, I cannot, I can't imagine doing that. And I want to be that teacher who's there, and I'm present until I'm not right and be present. As I was journaling this morning, I want to be present with my students. I want to be present with my friends. I want to be present, um, my job, I guess that's my student. My job in my marriage, with my own children who are grown now. I want to be that present person who's always there. And then I felt a sense of a bit of conviction, honestly, in that it's like sometimes I'm not because I am staring at a device and I need to watch that and check myself to do the hard thing. And the hard thing is to do to put it down and, you know, to look people in the eye and be with them anyways. now on to AI. So one thing I am doing, I have a client, I work with schools around the world and help them to flip their class, do mastery learning, think about AI. And so one of the schools I've been consulting with in in the area, I what I do is I the way I typically work is that I have a school who, you know, asks me to do some work with them, and then I'll go and meet with them on site typically or sometimes over zoom, and then I and then I give them a training, I flip it. And so the teachers who are my students, I guess the, the teachers then go through a mini course that I've created an online course, and then I spend time consulting with them over the course of the year. So this one school, I've got like six groups I want to say, and we have met twice since September. So I meet with each group. There's three or four teachers in a group and it's just over zoom. And actually it's over Google Meet. And what I have found is that's been really powerful is that I sit and we chat and I'm, I'm, I'm their coach. I'm coaching them on how to flip their class. This school is mostly interested in learning and mastery learning. And so I'm helping with this process. and I'm also when I, when I do these sessions I'm using Google. And one of the options in Google is that I can have Gemini take notes and take notes. Take notes. And I'm still taking notes on my computer simultaneously when I'm having conversations with these folks. And then it produces though like a transcript and also a summary statement. And so yesterday I want to give a report to the school. I said, what has been the results of all these conversations? And can you. So I asked, I actually used comet, right. This is this Agentic browser. My my prompt was something like this. I said, go into my notes and then click inside of all the meeting notes, read all the transcripts and all the summary statements and compile a report about the progress challenges. Steps forward and I could have done this right. Gone through and reread everything and and. But one thing that I noticed is that when it produced the report, it was pretty good. And. Actually I said, all right, I want you to emphasize this. It went back and redid itself, and I said. I need you to. So I tweaked it a little bit, and then finally I said, that's good enough for my draft. And then I then have been tweaking it. It's not done yet. I've been tweaking it and. So then I have been tweaking it, and I'm going to send it off to them in the next few days. And you know what AI is really good at is summarizing and looking for strengths and weaknesses. And so I think about the best use of AI in schools is it's going to be so good at doing that quick formative assessment and then identify weakness and strengths. And then hopefully there's going to be some kind of intervention that AI can give them because it can identify gaps. And that's where I see the power of this. This is where mastery learning comes to based learning, I think, can have such a good and powerful impact for our students when we develop the softwares and the strategies, and there are some tools that may be getting there and some that aren't there. But I think that's where the future, where AI is going to really help us as educators is to, you know, because I see I see this with a lot of my students is they come in and they're struggling with this concept, but they're not really struggling with this concept. The reality is they're don't have this background information here. And if AI can identify what that is, then they can get to here because it's a gap that's, you know, three, three lessons back. Or, you know, I teach physics, not always just all physics, but in my physics class, there's a lot of math background. And if a student doesn't have that math background, that's where they struggle. Maybe. And so they might need to go back and learn this math fact. and I can begin to identify the, the gaps that students has, because I've taught for a long time. But as I'm thinking about this on a larger, larger, more holistic perspective, I mean, I've had forty years of experience. what about a brand new teacher? Do they know what those gaps are going to be? And I now have taught enough that I know what the typical gaps are. But the reality is the average teacher, especially the brand new teacher, they haven't had that experience to know where the students are going to struggle and what those gaps are going to be. And this is where I think AI, that personalization that AI can help with is going to be the most powerful. So anyways, and it's so good at summarizing large chunks of information and coalescing it. In fact, the report that it gave me at first was this big and I said, no, no, no, shrink it. And it did a much better job when it shrunk. Anyways, it's this is sort of a hodgepodge podcast today because I'm just all over the board. I'm grateful. Um, I'm in need of refreshment. I found in my in my ancient age, forty years in teaching, it's harder to get up and give the amount of energy that I do every day than I used to. It's just I'm getting old. That's okay. Yeah, I'm I'm getting to accept that reality, though. Not completely. so I and I know I need refreshment, and so I'm really looking forward to some time. Um, mentally away. And one of the ways I do that, by the way, and this is not crazy, um, part of my vacation is going to go on long bike rides. Um, I like fifty mile bike rides. That refreshes me. It gets me kind of away. Sort of. I don't know, it's a time where I can meditate and pray and whatnot, even while I'm on a bicycle. It's there's something about the movement that really helps me. And so that's going to be one of my big goals, but also to enjoy friends, to enjoy my wife, etc., etc. over this Thanksgiving holiday. So I hope that you guys have a great, great week of Thanksgiving. Maybe you're going to listen to this afterwards. so enjoy your family. even if this is whenever you're listening to this. Enjoy them. Enjoy your job. I encourage you to be somebody who finishes strong, who continues to work hard and do do everything you do with excellence. And I think we can make AI a partner to help us to continue to be excellent. Last thought, I guess when I think about AI, I was thinking about this morning, uh, AI is going to up my game. For me to have made this report I'm talking about would have been hours and hours of work, and I would have done. I would have done an okay job. But now I believe there's a higher expectation for me. And I think for all of us and for you, because AI can make your work better. I mean, you can't use it to just do the work for you. That's that's not a that's not acceptable. But what it is is, is it's a partner that's going to up my game and hopefully it's upping your game.
00:11:33 Speaker: So I hope you enjoyed today's talks about gratitude, refreshment,
00:11:37 Speaker: and some thoughts on AI. And hey, if you enjoyed this podcast, please click subscribe. And hey, go out and reach every student John Bergman out.
