How AI Can Save You Time as a School Leader with Principal Mo, ep. 245

How AI Can Save You Time as a School Leader with Principal Mo, ep. 245, Instructional Coaching with Ms. B Podcast

Chrissy Beltran  00:01

Welcome to instructional coaching with Miss B where we believe that every teacher deserves a coach, and every coach does too. I’m Chrissy Beltran, an elementary teacher who became a coach, and I had to create my own coaching program that worked now. I teach coaches how to design their coaching programs, build a school wide action plan and use differentiated strategies to support teachers. Plus, I’ve got a special spot in my heart for literacy coaches. Now let’s dig into the episode.

Chrissy Beltran  00:25

Hey coach and welcome to episode 245, of instructional coaching with Miss B today. We are talking about two letters that you may love or you may not love. They are a i. So we’re talking about how AI can save you time as a school leader with my guest Principal, Mo, this is well into our series on time management for instructional coaching. The first episode was about time management, starting with your goals, and then using those goals to help you manage your time better. Last episode was about managing the mini hat of an instructional coach, and today we’re looking at a time saving tool, AI. Now the jury is still out as to whether this is a really great fit for kids in our schools. Obviously, we need to teach kids how to use these tools, because they’re exposed to them, but it is really difficult figuring out, you know, what we need to be doing, and what that can look like at a school level. So I’m excited to talk to my guest today, Principal. Mo, about how she uses AI as a school leader, and also some thoughts about what they encourage, how she encourages her faculty to use it, and doing some thinking about what it can look like in school. So we’re going to dig into this topic today. So let’s welcome our guest. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ashley. I really appreciate you making the time to speak with us.

Principal Mo  01:48

Oh, no problem at all. Thank you for having me.

Chrissy Beltran  01:51

As a quick way to introduce yourself. I would love to hear about a few things about you. What do you or who do you help? And how do you spend most of your time and energy at work?

Principal Mo  01:59

I help a lot of different people. I help students, staff, parents, community members. As a school principal, I spend a lot of my time and energy interacting with different stakeholders, being in and out of classrooms, talking to students, parents, talking to families, interacting with staff, coaching staff. So spend a lot of months time people. I like to call it people.

Chrissy Beltran  02:29

Yes, I like that. And then my next question is about a hobby that you love? Because I’m on a mission this year to share as many hobbies as I can with school leaders, because we don’t really make the time to do the things that we love. So what is something that you love to

Principal Mo  02:43

do? I actually love. DJ, oh, how. I’m glad I asked. Yeah, so this hobby that I love, and my sons deal with me. I am a twin mom. I have nine year old twins, and they when I learned, they learned. So it’s been a thoughtful journey with all of us learning how to DJ together. Wow, I love that. Okay,

Chrissy Beltran  03:06

so we are talking today about AI, and so can you give a rundown on how AI works for people who have kind of been avoiding it or aren’t familiar at this point?

Principal Mo  03:17

So how AI work is basically, it is a language model. So what it does is, if you ask it a question which is considered to be a prompt, you can ask it to, you know, do anything. And what it does, instead of like Googling something, what it does is it takes different pieces of information from like Google, from different this website and that website, and then it puts together an answer that best answers your prompt. So that’s the best way to I would say it’s almost like a chef using a different kind of recipe that’s a lot faster. So if we’re talking about using open fire, you know, to cook, versus a stove. You know that that’s almost like very to how AI works, in terms of it working a little faster, and then you don’t have to do any other guess first. So actually, we’re comparing the stove to air fryer here. If you want to be honest, it’s a little quicker. You know, there’s less stuff, a lot less preheating things of that nature. But what it basically is it takes information from different places on the internet and then compile a response in about 30 seconds or less, depending on what you ask it,

Chrissy Beltran  04:33

right? Okay, awesome. So what are some of the AI tools that you love to use? And then I’d love to hear a little bit about maybe some of the things that you’ve done with them, how you’ve used them to complete tasks that maybe they were time savers, or they just create something better than you would have done without that support, really, if you could just kind of share a little bit about your experience in using different AI tools and what that would like. So

Principal Mo  04:57

I am going to ask you a question, though, because that’s. Feel like, just to tailor it to your audience. Like, if I ask you, like, what’s up a pain point for you in terms of, like, what it is that you need to get done, the work that you need to complete every day. Like, what’s one pass that you spend a lot of time on?

Chrissy Beltran  05:16

One thing that I know that that I spend time on, and that I know that a lot of coaches spend time on is compiling like for professional development, thinking about, Okay, this is the topic, but what are all the different kinds of ways that we can have people interact with the content? What are some research based practices, or evidence based practices that really can support what this looks like in the classroom, and then, and also just providing the research to support the implementation in the first place, like creating the justification for actually doing

Principal Mo  05:50

okay. So what I would do to have aI help you do that a little easier, faster, is one taking your instructional data, as long as it’s clean of any personally identifiable information or PII, you could ask AI to analyze it, identify trends, strengths, weaknesses, and possibly PD areas where you could leverage, or you could with specific groups of teachers, maybe the whole group like, maybe they find a trend, and I say they maybe can find a trend where you know you need to work on specifically, boom, now you have all your instructional data analyzed. And then after that, you can say, Alright, I want to build out an PD outline based on their strengths and weaknesses, or based on that one particular topic that everybody needs to work on. Then from there, I would ask again, okay, so how can we differentiate this possibly for people who are new and novice, versus people who are veteran teachers, people who can, you know, take it and they can replicate it very easily, versus those people who need a workshop any more hands on learning. And then from there, then I would ask, okay, what are some scholarly articles? Because you have to be realistic when you talk to AI as well. What are some scholarly articles or research based that? Research based information that would support this professional development? This will probably take you less than 10 minutes the room. So, but the one thing about AI that’s really important is the prompt engineering. And prompt engineering is basically asking really, really good questions so that you can get really, really good answers, and also asking follow up questions to the answer that you truly need. So when you prompt engineer, the big things is making sure that you talk about who you are. So for example, you would start your front with, I’m an instructional coach. You would talk about what it is that you need, and I need you to analyze this instructional data. Then pull in for I would like to then present this instructional data to other instructional coaches or teachers, and then what’s the output? How? What do you want it to look like? And then say, or I would like for this to be in a chart or in a graph, or just a quick summary of the data. And so when you engineer a prompt like that where it has all of that information in it, you will get a better answer. I know some people don’t like aI because they’re like they ask it something very general, and then they get a very general answer. Ai works better with more details. If you could almost like an AI to like a newer novice teacher, where you you have to take them step by step by step, and explain. And then AI learns you. And once it learns like you know your your voice, your writing, you you know it can and what you’ve asked it previously, it bases his answers based on previous interactions that you’ve had with it. And that’s it for any language model, whether it’s Gemini, whether it’s chat, GPT, notion, Claude, so any of those. So that’s really, really important for people to know. All right, so now to the tools, because not every tool is created equal. So like, you know, most people, when you say AI, people all think chat, G, E, T, A, that’s not the only language model out there and not the only generative AI out there. It’s popular because I feel like it’s just been the one since the beginning. But you know, most companies are keeping up with the Joe, just so to speak, in terms of the type of AI tools that you can produce. For example, Gemini is now produced by Google. You don’t need to pay for right now. I don’t know what’s going to take later, but if you have a Google account, you have access to Gemini. So that’s another link, large link. Model that you can use in generative, that you can use, and it’s very similar to chat BT, I just don’t think it’s as fast, and it doesn’t answer things as in depth as chat GPT does one large language model that I in generative, AI that I love, that is not exactly your but it’s called Deep seek, you know. And deep seek goes really, really deep into whatever prompt that you’re asking it and provides you with its actual quote process, quote and then we’ll get you a very, very detailed output. So sometimes DPT will give you a detailed output depending on the prompt that you ask it. But deep seat goes like, like, deep secret, like the most quite literal. It goes very deep. So I like to use that if I want to get details and I want to behind it. One other piece of like, what AI tool is notion. Notion really great for project management. You’re working on a team, if you’re working on a team of teachers or an administrative team, is really great for outlining projects. Who’s the owner of what task within a project, assigning tasks, outlining tasks, you know, linking different things to the task. It really like productivity. It’s almost like you can create, like your own little activity, little page, so say, for instructional code you are or like an administrative team. So you can have, like, all these different projects. Like one thing could be like, you know, observations, formal observations, informal observations, maybe, like, some climate tax that you need to get. And you can easily divvy up the work. It provides you with Email Digest every day. So when people update things, you’ll know it was updated. You can certainly, if you like, and notion also is really good for expanding ideas. Say, for example, you have an outline. It does a really good job of expanding your outline. Then what you may need it so say, for and I like to tool hop. So say, for example, you know, I come up with a general outline in chat GBT, and then I want to expand it. I’m going to take it, I’m going to copy and paste whatever chat GBT was, but it didn’t notion, and it’ll expand it even more now, tool, I feel like I’m going from tool to tool. I could talk about like, I don’t know how much.

Chrissy Beltran  12:40

I’ll do this. I’ll just hold up a sign when it’s time to wrap it up. No, you’re good. Yeah, plenty of

Principal Mo  12:44

time. But, um, and then another tool that’s really great for writing and elaboration is claw. Now, Claude is not free. It’s free to a point, but Claude is a really great tool if you need to elaborate, if you need to, like, you know, go deeper in terms of, like, the writing pieces of, you know, whatever task that you have, and for images, for still images, Dolly is a L, L, E, and that’s actually a GPT. It’s another model within chat GBT, and it produces images so but that one you have to be as descriptive as possible in your prompt in order to get what you want. And one thing that I always say is that your expectation has to be somewhat loose, like you can’t have like your visual in your mind. One AI is not a mind reader, and it doesn’t know what you’re what you’re thinking. And so you have to just kind of, like, approach it with, like, an open mind see, like, what it comes up with. You can always do follow up prompts right online and things like that, and it’ll do that for you.

Chrissy Beltran  13:57

You know, refining it isn’t exactly, right? I mean, you

Principal Mo  14:01

can exactly. And then another AI tool to use for video is Sora, s, O, R, A, and it’s another model chat, G, P, T, and it produces very lifelike videos. Oh yeah,

Chrissy Beltran  14:21

because we have really cool,

Principal Mo  14:23

kind of creepy say, for example, you need, like, some B roll, like you need roll of, like papers, and like B roll is just like neural like images or video, um, you know, it’s really great for that. For example, I was making it when I wanted a video of a fresher principle, and it produced, like, three or four videos of a principal treated piles of paperwork everywhere. So, but once again, descriptive that you are the better output you’ll have. So I think I’m probably about 10. I said chat GPT, which is the general one. So. Safest one to use. It’s user. It’s very intuitive. You figure it out. You don’t need training for it. One is deep seek, which is does like that, deeper generative AI, but it is not very secure. So just be careful with that. The next one was notion, which is good project management, collaboration. And then next one was Claude, which is really good for further elaboration and stronger writing. And, you know, just more more elaboration in terms of like, actual like writing. Then talked about Dolly, which creates images, and so which creates videos. So those are, like my top seven that I use quite regularly in terms of genertem. Aa,

Chrissy Beltran  15:54

yeah, those great fun to try them out. Like you said, kind of compare. Have you used notebook.lm

Principal Mo  16:01

for the podcast, yes, oh goodness, I forgot to, yeah, I haven’t used it for the podcast feature, but it that it is good for that, especially if you and I’m like, oh my goodness, that’s when I was in graduate school. Like, you know, that’s, I mean, taking, you know, a scholarly article and then turning it into, yes, you’re driving a car, you can listen to it. For those who don’t know like notebook Ella is really great for research. If you specific articles, then you can either turn it into podcasts, meaning that it’ll be like two people that are talking talking it deeply about the topic, or what I like to use for as a principal, I actually upload the teacher contracts to it. So say, for example, if somebody says, Oh, this is not allowed with the contract, or is this allowed with the contract, I could just ask notebook Ellen the question, and then point me directly to the language in the contract where it states yes or no or whatever the case may be. So it finds that answer for you, as opposed to doing Control F and then looking for that, like buzzword what’s in that PDF doc. So it’s really helpful for that too, just to, like reference documents, or to just ask specific questions about document that you’ve uploaded to it. That’s

Chrissy Beltran  17:25

a neat idea. I was like, I was actually having to access the IRS website today and able to like, this is the tax code, and can I write this off? That’s what I would Yes. I would love to

Principal Mo  17:38

feel Yep, and, and if you have the document, you can pull this notebook and ask it that, Oh, you don’t have to comb through a three, 400 page document or 100 page document. Yeah,

Chrissy Beltran  17:50

that’s pretty neat. I love that. Yeah. My brother is is high school. He teaches government, and he using notebook.lm for just different things. And he sent it to me like, This is amazing. I listened to he’d already read the article because he wanted to see how accurately it was presented. So he read the article already, and then he had to do the podcast. And he was like, I am just so impressed with this. And then my husband had been using it for work as well, and they’ve really I may or want to put myself out of business or anything being a podcast host, but I do see the value in that of being able to take, you know, information that you may not have time to process, and you you do it, it’s surprising how much it sounds like a podcast like, how much people trade off information and they say, yes. Well, the interesting thing about that is, and then, you know, it’s really very It’s really strange, but it’s pretty, amazing

Principal Mo  18:43

is, I mean, some are area, I think, like people who are apprehensive, AI, definitely, there’s, like, two main trends that I Well, one is that they feel that they use it. And this is my husband talking. He tells me he uses it, then he’s really contributed to it for it to replace him later. And I’m like, you still need judgment. You still need humans to run things like, you know, and AI only works if you ask it questions. So it’s not like, it’s just like, on its own, you have to prompt it. And then the second thing is, is that, you know, people talk about, like the environment and the RESTful environment with AI. And, you know, I feel like people didn’t realize when you know AI has has blown up the way that it has is that, you know, there’s always, I feel like intended consequences of, like, new technology. And so what I think down the line will happen is you find ways to combat that. I mean, it’s about like, you know, power sources. I mean, we can turn to solar power, you know, for those types of things, you know. So I think that that will get addressed later. I just feel like, you know, it was just like a I feel like we went into this little new information age quickly, and. Then, yeah. And it was like, Oh, this happened, unintended consequence. So yeah, I feel like it’ll, it’ll sort itself out.

Chrissy Beltran  20:08

I was just reading about that. I think, I mean, initially, with people being concerned about the effect on the environment, it will become important enough for people to do something about, you know, changing the way that we actually like they have to cool these, you know, these towers. It’s just wild how it uses so much. So, yeah, I was reading about that myself, and I’m not an expert on that in any meet, by any means, but I did that was a little little disappointing to read about. Because, right, the big concern, I mean, you think about, I mean, Bitcoin, so many things use so many resources, and yes, and they have to figure out different ways of caring for them. Have you encouraged your faculty to find ways to you they I in their teaching or in their work that they do? You know in other contexts?

Principal Mo  20:54

Yes. So what I try to do in teammates, we have multiple levels participate in teaming. We really try to use them like collaborative sharing ideas. You know, at some level of data analysis for the things that think my teachers in particular were struggling with, is what I try to do is I try to find a pain point and then AI solution for that pain point. That’s why I asked you, like, what is your pay? Because, like, it’s more valuable to than to just say, hey, use this tool. Like, no, like, how can we use this tool and to the best of my advantage, and I can walk away and do this on my own. So one thing that we have been working on is unpacking standards. And so what we did is we used AI to unpack a standard, then tell us what exactly need to be scaffolded for students to meet proficiency at the highest level of the standard, and then we took it further and asked it to produce standardized test questions that are aligned directly to the standard and for type test types of our standard asset. So then that way teachers were like, they didn’t have to think about creating those types of questions. Then the last part is we created a proficiency chart for the student to be able to, you know, basically check off and, you know, and self check and see if they had actually mastered each part of the standard. And so law showed the teachers that they were like, I’m like, like, you guys, you guys are, like, working way too hard. So once we did that, we talked about then taking, and this is what I talk about, when I talk about, like, when I talk about tool, hi, so then taking that information that was in general, and chat, GPT, and then using brisk. And brisk is a and this is another one to the list for risk is a free chrome extension that you can use, and you can use it for a lot of different things. It can actually take your likes, for example, if you want to put your question to a slideshow, it’ll produce presentation, Google slideshow for you. So say, for example, you have, like, your lesson plan. Take your lesson plan, put it into Britt, and it will provide you with a a Google slide. So then you don’t have to do the work twice. Yeah. In terms of, like, the presentation of your lesson. So then Doug showed them that, then we talked about their tools, like, you magic, AI. And then they were like, I could literally my planning done to two planning periods, as opposed to working after school on the weekends get certain things done. And so what I try to explain to different people is that you have the knowledge and the expertise, and no one can take that away from you, and it’s no harm and no foul to find a more efficient way to do things. Because I know that’s like, people like, oh, it’s cheating. It’s like, well, can you, would you be otherwise, yes, but it’ll take you a long amount, you a very long amount of time. Also, like, is it a cut down on that? Also, yes, it’s cut down all the time so that we can get to what matters, which is, you know, getting the in my case, like, you know, for people, that’s why I say who I help early. You know, who to do I help and where I spend my time and energy. I can spend more time and energy on people rather than doing paperwork. So that, that’s how I approach it with faculty and. Staff, and you know, since then, just like taking it and running with it, which has been really great to see,

Chrissy Beltran  25:06

yeah, that’s exciting. Good. You had a good response. That’s great. All right. Well, thank you so much. I would love to let people know how they can keep learning from you. So is there a place that they can find you online and learn more from

Principal Mo  25:22

you, yes. So first is my website, which is www dot principal, mo, mo.com so just principal N, mo.com that’s my website, and my social media handle is the same everywhere principal dot saw principal underscore mode on everything. Tick, Instagram threads, Facebook, everywhere. It’s the same. Okay, yeah. So, you know, I post about AI, I post, I post about a myriad of things, like engagement at school, but that’s where people can keep learning from me, from and actually about the tools. I actually have a free on my website. I have two. So one is a guide about getting started with AI that’s completely free. So if you go to my website, you can download that for free. And then there’s also a toolkit for school leaders, like just, you know, some quick tools, what they do, and how you can use them. And that’s also on my website as well. If you want to

Chrissy Beltran  26:26

send the link for the free for the free guide, I’m happy to put that in the show notes for you so people connect. Oh, absolutely. Well, okay, sounds good. Well, thank you so much for being here.

26:35

All right, thank you.

Chrissy Beltran  26:40

That was a very good overview of AI, and I hope you walked away with an idea of some tool that you might want to use, or that you might want to kind of explore and see how they could benefit your teachers. As I was speaking with with Ashley at the end of the conversation, she said that she was working on a guide for prompt and how which AI services are actually the best ones to use with confidential information, such as data, so that you can actually submit your prompts, submit your data, and get ideas, and you know, a plan of things that you can do, maybe some resources that you will be able to use in response to that data to support kids in the areas that were identified. And that sounded like such a great resource. So definitely check her out if you haven’t, if none of the other resources that she shared sounded like it was up your alley, data review, it’s something that we all do. So I think you should really take a peek at that one and check out Printful mo on Instagram. Her account is great. She shared lots of good stuff. Next week, we are continuing our little mini series about our time management for instructional coaching, and it’s it’s important to consider how we are supporting our teachers with a limited time that we have, where we are kind of squeezing everything in and we don’t have enough time in the day. So we have to be really thoughtful with the way that we spend our time. So next week, we’re talking about, how do I support all classrooms with instructional coaching, with my guest, Lindsay Deacon. So definitely join me for that. That is going to be episode 246, you can also head to buzzing with mcbee.com webinar and get my free define your coaching role, webinar for literacy coaches. Although it works for anybody, the idea is that if you don’t know what your role is, you can’t spend your time well. So definitely check that out, and until next week, happy coaching!

Chrissy Beltran  28:36

about head over to buzzing with Miss b.com to grab some free downloads. Become a VIBee and check out the podcast show notes. Happy coaching!