14. Throw Away the Coffee: Cary Wright on AI, Teacher Well-Being, and Better Lesson Plans
Season 2, Episode 4 of Kinwise Conversations · Hit play or read the transcript
How AI Amplifies K-12 Teacher Expertise
In this episode of Kinwise Conversations, host Lydia Kumar talks with Cary Wright, a 30-year public education veteran and co-founder of TEACH (Transforming Education through AI, Connections, and Humanity). Cary and his co-founder recognized early the transformative potential of generative AI to address the core challenges facing K-12 institutions: teacher burnout and curriculum alignment.
Cary outlines his firm's mission to use AI to reduce teacher stress while increasing student scores. We dive into the practical policy implications, exploring how leaders can navigate FERPA and student data privacy while leveraging AI for powerful, ethical data analysis. Cary argues the AI revolution is a policy and workforce challenge on the scale of the Industrial Revolution, requiring proactive adoption, not avoidance. This conversation is essential for superintendents and mission-driven executives seeking a responsible and scalable AI framework to support their most valuable asset: their teachers.
Key Takeaways for K-12 Leaders
The AI Mandate: AI is the most significant structural change in education since the Industrial Revolution. K-12 leaders must adopt a proactive policy to train students and teachers, not a restrictive ban.
Stress Reduction as a Policy Lever: Using AI to automate lesson planning and data analysis is a direct action to combat teacher burnout, freeing up emotional and mental capacity for high-touch student interactions.
Expertise Amplified, Not Replaced: AI is an "eager, slightly drunk assistant" that requires experienced teacher knowledge (E-A-T) to prompt effectively. AI amplifies the veteran teacher's content mastery and human relational skills.
Data Policy and FERPA: Ethical AI use demands a clear process for scrubbing and anonymizing local student data before analysis. This allows leaders to unlock powerful, data-driven insights without violating student privacy laws.
The Future of Work: Students who are not trained to interact with AI in K-12 will be fundamentally unprepared for a workforce where AI-powered robotics and tools are the standard.
The Policy Mandate from Avoidance to Adoption
Lydia Kumar: Could you introduce yourself, kind of share what brought you to this work that you do, and what drives you in education and in AI?
Cary Wright: Sure. I've been doing public education for almost 30 years—20 years teaching high school English and the last 4 as a coordinator in Martinsville. In 2023, I met my colleague, Tyler Hunt, and we went to a conference right as ChatGPT and Claude were in their early iterations. We finished summer planning processes for our school division in 20 minutes. On the way home, we realized this was a chance for two regular public school guys to start a small business. Now, our company, TEACH, takes what we've learned out to the world, starting with Virginia.
Lydia Kumar: What was your first "aha" moment with the technology?
Cary Wright: We were using Claude because it had the ability to upload documents. Our very first thought was to use it for School Improvement Plans—a very tedious, data-heavy, compliance-focused task in Virginia. We fed it our local data and compliance documents, and the speed at which it produced a first draft of the analysis and compilation blew our minds.
Lydia Kumar: It highlights how you can get insights rather than having to do that manual analysis.
Cary Wright: Exactly. It does a lot of the heavy lifting for you in so many of these tasks.
Reducing Teacher Stress and Combating Burnout
Lydia Kumar: How do you see the relationship between strong academics and generative AI tools right now?
Cary Wright: The majority of our work is supporting teachers and educators. We want to take stress off of them and help them with time-saving processes. We had a teacher in a session with a huge cup of Starbucks, ready to work late. After we showed her how to use AI for lesson plans and PowerPoint slides, she threw her coffee away and said, "I'm going home and getting a glass of wine."
Cary Wright: That allows her to relax, unwind, and come into class the next day a better human being to face her students. By reducing teacher stress, we create a better climate of learning, and because she is also able to analyze data quickly, student scores go up. We reduce teacher stress and, at the same time, increase student scores.
Lydia Kumar: If teachers aren't using this, they can't move on to that deeper level work of teaching students how to use this effectively.
Cary Wright: Definitely. If a teacher uses it incorrectly the first time, of course, they'll say it's trash. If they just say, "Give me a lesson plan on ratios," they'll get bad output. We want to show them how to prompt well, which is like learning to use quotation marks in a Google search—it requires skill.
Amplifying Expertise: The Power of Well-Aligned Prompts
Lydia Kumar: What are some tangible ways you've seen a lot of success in helping educators?
Cary Wright: Our favorite is lesson plans. It's very realistic for a class of 30 students to have two barely speaking English, three with special ed accommodations, two gifted, and one reading on a fourth-grade level. Truly differentiating for Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet is nearly impossible manually.
Cary Wright: We show them how to slowly load up the AI thread:
State Standards and guidance documents.
Local Requirements from the division or building.
Classroom Demographics and available resources.
Then we say, "Write a lesson plan for me." This is the process that happens inside a good teacher's brain, but now we're showing any teacher—new or veteran—how to create aligned, differentiated lesson plans.
Lydia Kumar: I think there is still a level of expertise that can be honored, even when using prompting. Have you seen experienced folks figure out how to amplify that experience through AI?
Cary Wright: Absolutely. I had a content area supervisor in a training session who got angry: "This will not replace me." We said, "You're exactly right, and in fact, you're going to be one of our best users." When you prompt it, you are going to know better than anyone else if the results are any good or not. All of your content area knowledge, all of that expertise, is now amplified. He might get 10 ideas, say, "I already knew eight, number nine is trash, but number 10, that sounds interesting—maybe it's an old-school strategy I'd forgotten."
Lydia Kumar: It's that mindset shift—moving from fear of being replaced to acceptance that a tool can support a piece of the incredibly complex job of teaching.
Cary Wright: 100%. If technology could really replace humans, that would have happened during COVID. COVID instruction was horrible. We want good teachers in the classrooms, because that's the only way this is going to work.
Ethical Data Analysis and the Future of the Workforce
Lydia Kumar: I have an ethics question: When you're talking about putting student data into AI, how do you navigate student privacy (FERPA) with the power of using AI to generate insights?
Cary Wright: We are platform agnostic. We will do a lot of instruction on how to scrub that data: delete certain columns, never put a student name or a student-identifiable testing number in there. When we teach leaders and teachers how to use their own local data safely by uploading it, it blows their minds. They can combine state standards and local test data to create special "menus" for their kids.
Lydia Kumar: The challenge is preparing the data so that it's FERPA compliant. But if you can go through those steps, there's a lot of untapped potential there, because data-driven instruction has positive impacts on student results.
Cary Wright: Definitely. And there are so many forms of data—testing platforms, state tests, even oral discussions captured through an audio tool like Otter. We teach you ways to harness all of it, clean it up, make it safe, and then use these tools to analyze it.
Lydia Kumar: What is the thing that's top of mind for you right now regarding AI?
Cary Wright: This is a transformative moment—the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution. We want to be at the cusp of this. The other piece is the future of work. Our high school seniors are going to college where they may be required to have a subscription to ChatGPT. Imagine the student who has never used it because their schools have banned it.
Cary Wright: Further out, with robots costing less than pickup trucks, students will need to know how to interact with artificial intelligence to even make a robot do what they want. Whether it's working next to a robot in a kitchen or being in charge of two robots, our students have to learn all about artificial intelligence. We have to get these tools in front of as many people as we can.
Prompts Inspired by Cary
Differentiate a Lesson Plan:
I’m a 7th grade English teacher in Virginia. I’m teaching Act 1 of Romeo and Juliet to a class of 30 students. Two students are English learners, three have IEPs, and one is reading on a 4th-grade level. Please help me generate a differentiated lesson plan that aligns with Virginia SOLs and includes learning objectives, engagement strategies, and scaffolding for each subgroup.
Analyze Class Data (Anonymized)
I’m uploading a spreadsheet of anonymized reading assessment scores for my 5th-grade students. Please identify patterns or trends by student subgroup and suggest instructional adjustments I can make. Don’t draw conclusions until I ask for them. Just analyze the raw data first. Note: Using data masking can allow you to do this effectively.
Help a Veteran Teacher Prompt Effectively
I’m an experienced high school history teacher new to AI. I need help generating effective prompts for lesson planning, document-based questions, and rubric creation. Can you coach me through how to write strong prompts and avoid common mistakes?
Simplify a Time-Consuming Task
I need to create a weekly parent newsletter for my 3rd-grade class. Can you take this raw text and turn it into a friendly, clear, and typo-free newsletter? Include bullet points, bold key dates, and make it engaging but concise.
Build a Yearlong Planning Thread
I’m teaching 9th-grade Algebra and want to start a planning thread I can return to all year. Please help me set this up. Start by asking me about my standards, classroom constraints, and student needs. Then let’s build a reusable lesson planning template that I can use week to week.
Connect & Resources
📝 Kinwise Educator PD Pilot
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About the Guest
Cary Wright is the co-founder of TEACH, a consulting firm specializing in AI integration for K-12 schools. With nearly 30 years in public education, including roles as a high school English teacher and a division coordinator for English, Social Studies, and Gifted, Cary brings deep Expertise in curriculum design and classroom reality. His work focuses on transforming education by leveraging AI to reduce teacher burnout and enhance instructional efficacy, making him an authoritative voice for school and district leaders.
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Lydia Kumar: Today I am joined by Cary Wright, a 30-year veteran of public education and co-founder of Teach, a consulting group focused on bringing practical, powerful AI strategies to educators. From his early days as a high school English teacher to his current role as a K-12 coordinator, Cary has seen firsthand the challenges teachers face. We'll explore the "aha" moments that led him and his co-founder to start their business and how they are using AI to reduce teacher stress and amplify expertise, as well as their vision for preparing students for a future where working alongside AI is essential.
Cary, thank you so much for being here today. I am really looking forward to diving into your work with Teach and your leadership in Martinsville. But before we get into that, I want to give listeners a chance to be oriented to who you are. So, could you introduce yourself, kind of share what brought you to this work that you do, and what drives you in education and in AI?
Cary Wright: Sure. Fantastic. Great question, Lydia. I'm very pleased to be here and very honored that you have chosen me and my company to get an interview. You've had some fabulous guests on. I've been listening through some of the last episodes, and it's really a great space that you're creating. And so for me, I have been doing public education for—I'm starting my 30th year. And so I did, uh, sometimes when I say I did it like that, it sounds like I did time, but no, I did 20 years of teaching high school English in Danville, Virginia, for their city school system. And then for the last four years, I've been in Martinsville as a coordinator for K-12 English, Social Studies, and Gifted. It's a smaller school division. And so I've learned a lot about how I think public education should work through all of those years.
And then as I was working here in Martinsville, I got a chance to meet my colleague, Tyler Hunt, and we went to a conference in Baltimore in the summer of 2023. ChatGPT and Claude were just in their very early iterations, and we sat down at that conference and said, we really need to figure out this technology and how it can help our school system. That was our very first thought. We skipped classes all day on the second day of the conference and just sat in a private room and just were testing this thing, and it blew our minds. Some of the summer planning processes that we knew our division was going to have to do that summer, we finished it in 20 minutes. And so then on our way home, we said, you know what? This would be a chance for just two regular old public school guys to go try a small business. And so now we're doing this as a consulting operation where we take our ideas—what we've learned—out to the rest of the world. We're starting with Virginia first because we know Virginia. He's worked in a classroom as well. And as soon as we master Virginia, we're taking it on to the rest of the world. But if any of your listeners are listening in another part of the country and you want us to come and see you, we will. We're not averse to doing that. We're just trying to start in our own backyard.
Lydia Kumar: That's amazing. And it makes sense, right? Like you start close to home and then you can expand out from there. When you were having those first moments with your colleague Tyler, and you were realizing, "Oh, this, this could actually be something," what was—do you remember like the first things you put into the first prompts you did or what those first interactions looked like?
Cary Wright: At that point, we were really onto Claude. Okay. Because Claude had a paperclip at that point and that would allow you to upload your own information, whereas ChatGPT, when it started off, just had the prompting box and it didn't have the ability to add information so we could really dial in whatever task we were working on with our locally aligned plans that we had. I know that some of the early prompts were talking about doing school improvement plans 'cause it was summertime and we knew that our building principals were going to have to do their school improvement plan. And in the state of Virginia, those can be very tedious. There's a lot of analysis of data and compilation of data and a lot of pieces to that plan that can take a team a long time to do it. And we said, "Let's just try some of these things." Bam! It was done. It was amazing.
Lydia Kumar: That's so cool. And you were able to put in... I think one of the pieces of generative AI that's compelling is that you can take all of this data and then get insights rather than having to do that manual analysis, and you can analyze qualitative data or quantitative data quickly. And you still have to evaluate that and see how you want to use it, but it's so helpful to just be able to say, "Okay, here are the options. Here's a first draft of it," and go ahead and take that first draft and revise it and everything else. But it does a lot of the heavy lifting for you in so many of these tasks.
Cary Wright: Absolutely. And then you...
Lydia Kumar: In your specific role, you're doing, you know, humanities, advanced programming, working with different populations of students. When you think about your vision for strong academics and generative AI tools, how do those things—what's the relationship between those two things for you right now?
Cary Wright: Sure. The majority of our work right now is supporting teachers and educators. And so we want to take stress off of them. We want to help them with some of these time-saving processes, take that stress off of them. One of our favorite stories is we had a teacher come into one of our afternoon sessions. This is after school, and she had a huge cup of Starbucks. And we said, "I bet you're getting ready to go home and drink that big Venti coffee." She said, "I am." And we showed her our processes on how to do lesson plans, create PowerPoint slides from those plans. She threw her coffee away. She said, "I'm going home and getting a glass of wine." And so that allows her to relax, unwind, come into class the next day a better human being to face her students. And so, first of all, taking stress off the teachers. That's going to lead to a better human in the classroom. So that's going to create a better climate of learning in the classroom. Now she's also able to analyze any data that she gets that day from her students. Her students' scores are going to go up. And so what we really like about our work is we reduce teacher stress and at the same time increasing student scores.
And so as we get down the road with AI, when it comes to supporting students using these tools, and you talk about what is your vision of the future? Our kids in school right now, number one, our seniors are going to be asked to go to college and instead of getting a college textbook, sometimes they're going to be required to have a subscription to ChatGPT. And imagine the high school student who comes to that kind of a first week of college and they've never used it because their schools have banned it. Okay, so there's a very short-term future. Long-term future: I'm living here in Southern Virginia, and some of our guys and gals drive these huge pickup trucks. They're beautiful things to be seen. And Lydia, they are not cheap. And so Elon is creating robots right now to roll off his production lines that are going to be $10,000 a piece or cheaper. That's cheaper than those trucks. And so, Lydia, what I'm thinking is when those robots have an AI brain and you have to know how to interact with artificial intelligence to even make that robot do what you want, our students have to learn all about artificial intelligence. Because I don't know, when I was younger, it was a good first job to just go work at McDonald's. Who knows in that kitchen if you're now working next to a robot who's producing a lot of this and you're in charge of two robots, so there's a lot of crazy things when we play out some futuristic roles. But that's kind of how we are looking at things at the moment.
Lydia Kumar: Right. You're really thinking about what does this look like long term for students? What is the future of learning, but also what is the future of work and how do we prepare students long term? And also when you're talking about like reducing teacher stress and just introducing them to the technology, if you aren't—if teachers aren't using this, they don't have any idea that it exists or what it can do, then they can't move on to that deeper level work of teaching students how to use this effectively.
Cary Wright: Definitely. And so it's—a lot of times, Lydia, I'll also talk about the teachers who never use it. Sure. You're already in the hole, and sometimes if teachers use it incorrectly the first time, of course they're going to say it's trash. You know, if they just go in and say, "Give me a lesson plan on ratios," and they get this lesson plan back and they say, "Oh, this is horrible. I'm never using this again." No, I mean, I got excited, Lydia, when I was an educator in the classroom and I learned how to do a Google search. Ooh, I know how to type something into that little bar up there and maybe use some quotation marks or parentheses to really get ten results that I like. So it took... that's a very similar process that if I just type something very broad into Google, I'm not going to get good results. If I go to ChatGPT or another generative AI platform and don't prompt it well, of course I'm going to get bad output. So we want to make sure that teachers and educators, building leaders, central office staff, all of them, can harness the power of this technology to help them in their work.
Lydia Kumar: How do you help—how do you help educators do that? What do you feel like is definitely—is some tangible, some tangible ways that you've seen a lot of success?
Cary Wright: Sure, sure. Our favorite jam is to do lesson plans. And so right now it's very realistic, Lydia, for a class of 30 high school students to have—and this is anywhere, I don't care whether this is Durham, Danville, you know, wherever it is—30 kids. Two of them barely speak English. Three of them have special ed accommodations. Two of them are gifted, and one or two is reading on a fourth grade level. And so if I'm going to go do Act one of Romeo and Juliet with that class, how in the world am I going to truly differentiate for all of those unique differences just within that one classroom? And I'm probably using a curriculum here in Virginia that was written for Florida or California. It may not necessarily be aligned to my standards, and so what we'll do is we will slowly load up that AI thread. We'll start off with our state standards for that course. We'll start off with any guidance document that the state has given us. We'll then load in any local requirements that our division or a building might have. Then we'll say, "Hi, I'm a seventh-grade English teacher in Virginia. I'm getting ready to do some lesson plans. My building principal says my lesson plan has to have these components. Here's what my classroom demographics look like. Here's how much time I have for class. Here's what my resources are that I have available to me. Write a lesson plan for me." And so already, that's the process that happens inside of teachers' brains already if they're really good. But now we're showing any teacher straight out of the box—I don't care if you just got here from college, I don't care if you've been doing this for 30 years—we're going to show you how to create very aligned lesson plans that truly handle the differentiated needs of all of your students.
Lydia Kumar: And as you were talking, I was thinking about the baseline knowledge that teachers need to have in order to prompt well. You still need to know state standards. You need to understand the needs of the learners in your classroom. You need—you need to have the terminology or the... that baseline to be able to get really, really good results. And so I think there is still a level of expertise that can be honored even when using prompting. And so I'm curious, as you've worked with so many educators, I think I'm—I'm curious about, I guess, veteran teachers with a lot of expertise. You're working with a lot of folks. I think, are, are—even some emerging studies are saying, you know, our new teachers are quicker to adopt this. Older teachers are more hesitant. But our older teachers also, they are—they have so much knowledge that they, and expertise. Have you seen folks with experience coming in and figuring out how to amplify that experience through AI?
Cary Wright: Oh, that's a great verb right there. Amplify their experience. That's a great way to frame that. With all of the folks we work with, there's a whole range of, of—it doesn't matter whether you're old or young, eager to adopt anything else like that. Here in Southern Virginia, sometimes it's even like a religious thing, like it's the devil. So, I mean, we've even have to fight against that. It's crazy, but what we've really found, we went into one training session with division leaders now, and they were content area supervisors. So you can imagine that a content area supervisor has been chosen by their division because they are an expert teacher in that area. One of the content area supervisors got kind of angry very first thing within the first five minutes. He said, "This will not replace me." And we said, "You're—whoa—you're exactly right. And we're not expecting it to." We said, "In fact, you're going to be one of our best users." And he said, "What are you talking about? I don't even want to use it." I said, "Well, what's going to happen is you are going to prompt it with something, and we'll teach you how to do that today, and you're going to get some results. You are going to know better than anyone else if those results are any good or not. You know what works with that content area. You know what works with kids from your area. You know what's going to work for your teachers because you know them." And so all of that human relations, content area, knowledge, all of that expertise that you mentioned is now amplified by this process. And when he says, "Okay, yeah, show me how this works," it's going to show me ten ideas. So we'll show him these ten ideas. And he'll say, "Yeah, you know what? I already knew those eight, those are good. Number nine is trash. Something just made that up. But, you know what? Number ten, that sounds interesting." And so we hook them with experiences like that where maybe I've—I've known so much. Sometimes there's that phrase, Lydia, where I've forgotten more than you even know. And sometimes these experienced teachers might have remembered—they might have been, they might have used that strategy way back in their career, but like, you know what, number ten, that's something that is really old school that I'm going to bring out again. So that's some of the ways that we can amplify that expertise. Good question.
Lydia Kumar: Have you seen with that educator that you're talking about, were you able to see—have you continued to work? Was that a one-off interaction or is that someone that you've seen again and you've been able to see the change?
Cary Wright: Oh, definitely. They—what we really like to do, Lydia, it's rare that once we get a school division as a client that they leave. That happens very infrequently. And so with that group of supervisors, we are still a part of them. And now when we see them, it's a high five and a knowing wink. And, "I love this and my teachers love it too." And so it's—it's interesting where you have to overcome that emotional inertia, and once you get that going with some real results that they see that they can use this tool effectively, they're on board and we got 'em now.
Lydia Kumar: Right. It's a, because mindset shifts are, are really important. When, uh, I think you listened to the episode with Farrah Berro and she talked about it almost being—she was quoting someone else, but akin to like the stages of grief. It's like you have to move from this maybe anger towards acceptance before you can really embrace it because there is a fear of being replaced. There's, it's strange and unsettling to see something that you built—you have built years of expertise doing—and then, you know, writing a lesson plan takes a long time and writing a good lesson plan requires intentionality and thought and expertise. And so being able to see a tool do that fairly well can be unsettling. And that's not... being a teacher is an incredibly complex job where you're doing a lot of different things simultaneously, and so just because one piece of you can be amplified or supported through a technology doesn't mean that you're irrelevant.
Cary Wright: 100%. And both Tyler and myself taught before, during, and after COVID. And if technology could really replace humans, that would've been the time where I could sit at home on my screen porch and live stream out to the kids. And surely they're gonna make all A's. That did not happen. Remote instruction was horrible. We were all eager to get back into the classroom. And so with all of the work that we do, we assure everybody, we want good teachers in the buildings, in the classrooms 'cause that's the only way that this is really going to work. We're not here to replace you. We're here to, like you said, amplify your expertise. Recently I was talking with someone from a Two Hour Learning school. Have you heard of this? It's a private school model where they do two hours of AI instruction in the morning. It's—it's really machine... like we've had machine learning in schools forever. Newsela, or Red Ink, or—I was an English teacher, if you can't... all my English examples—that's okay. But, uh, right. So there—there were all of these tools that you could use and then those tools would give—could give students—um, information on their level, particularly if you paid for them. And that is a form of AI. It's just, just not generative AI. And a lot of the tools they use are similar to tools teachers use in public schools as well. But you have these two hours in the morning, but then the whole afternoon they're spent doing these social skills-building activities like, uh, you know, if a student might open a food truck or start a jewelry business, or they do public speaking, critical thinking. And in my conversation with... they don't call their teachers, teachers, they call them guides. And with this guide I was talking to, he shared that they have like a ten-to-one student to teacher ratio, and they really focus on the relational aspect of teaching. So this is an incredibly well-resourced school, and they have all of this technology. But in all of that technology, they're really not spending all day in front of computers like you would imagine in an AI school. They're spending, you know, two hours and the rest of the day they're engaging in person because we know that's important.
Lydia Kumar: Yeah, I think it's a very fascinating model and kudos to folks who are in that space of trying something to really harness it as much as you can. Everyone's gonna be very eager to see those things come to fruition or not. We'll see what happens.
Cary Wright: Right. And it's kind of...
Lydia Kumar: Well, I was thinking about the teacher you said that threw away her coffee and it's like, I feel like there's these time tradeoffs where if you can spend your time in a different way, then you can come back in refreshed because when you think about the best teachers you have, it's not just an expertise of content, it's about your ability to connect authentically with a teacher's ability to connect authentically with a student, to motivate, to um, really to really make a student feel seen and valued and heard, and all of that is so important for engagement and achievement. So teaching isn't just about having the perfect lesson plan. It's about your ability to show up with presence and navigate 700 complex things. Uh, you, you never know what's gonna happen. You might have a kid who didn't sleep all night or became homeless or who's parents are getting a divorce or has a learning disability or, I don't know, I'm just throwing things out there. But all of those have ripple effects in your classroom, and they don't just affect that student. They can affect many students simultaneously. And then you are not only trying to explain, uh, fractions, you're trying to explain fractions while navigating a complex emotional situation. And that requires so much brain capacity. And if you could have less time where you're thinking about how do I teach this concept? What's the activity for the day? How do I analyze—like, let me sit down for two hours and analyze all this data—to instead being rested and present. I, I think that's a game changer for, for teachers.
Cary Wright: 100%. I mean, I, I work in a division right now and I support four different buildings. And so I go around and drive among these different places. One day I was driving past a guy who was cutting grass and he had a lawnmower and he had a weed eater, and that's all he had to do is he had to make sure his tools were working correctly. He could work as fast or slow as he want. That was his job. Then I walked into a first-grade teacher's classroom, the amount of human interactions in that one day's experience for a teacher is just mind-boggling. Everything that you just said at each one of those different desks is a whole universe of complexities. But then I fill it full of 25 of those and I, I spend, you know, whether you're a high school teacher, kindergarten teacher, seventh grade—a different amount of time with those kids. It's just such an emotionally human complex field to have to navigate as opposed to almost any other job on the planet. And so, something else I was thinking about too, Lydia, when you were mentioning that, being an English teacher, you also have to be able to schedule out and stagger your work. If you have a couple of different classes and you have all of those papers due on one day, you've already sunk yourself 'cause you're not going to be able to get through your work. So there's so much involved with being a teacher that, that we're just there to help them out.
Lydia Kumar: Yeah, it's, it's a big, it's, there's a lot of complexity there where you have to, um, to think about the relationships that, that you have and the relationships between students in a building. So teachers, I think about decision fatigue and how, even in someone's personal life, using AI tools can help you with, with decisions that you have to make. So, I don't know, planning your meals or just reducing those decisions because teachers—teachers have, teachers make more... I don't, I, I know there are other careers where you make a lot of decisions, but I, I can't emphasize enough for the people who have never been in education who might be listening... how many decisions a teacher has to make in a day. It's, it's from, you know, if this student goes to the bathroom right now, are they gonna—what's gonna—is, is something crazy gonna happen? Is this the right time to—um, I, I don't know, that that might—I taught middle school.
Cary Wright: No, you're right. What? Bless your heart. What a space. Yes. I get it. Yeah.
Lydia Kumar: So you just really, you really have a lot of decisions that you're making that aren't focused on content. And so if we can reduce that, I don't think—I think that's actually a win for, for teachers being able to show up with presence in more of these complex situations.
Cary Wright: Definitely.
Lydia Kumar: Have you seen, I don't... have there been mistakes that you feel like you've made along the way when it comes to using AI that you'd be, or teacher—like, I don't know, missteps teachers have made or missteps you, you have made along the way that you have learned from that other people could learn from as well?
Cary Wright: I was in a workshop the other day, like you said, down in, in Abingdon, Virginia, working with some teachers from that part of the state. And I've heard it described in, in different places, and I'm sure someone is, you know, copyrighted this term or whatever. But I like to refer to most generative AI platforms right now as very eager, slightly drunk assistants. And if you put anything in there... And so I was teaching them how to do some data analysis, and we were just starting off by putting the state standards for that class in there. And with the prompt... now when I tell them to do their first prompt is, "Hey, I'm gonna put some data in here and I'm gonna upload it, but don't do anything yet with it until I get ready," because most of the time what happens, as soon as you drop something in there, it's very eager and it's gonna say, "Oh great, here's ten ideas to do with this." And so that's one of the very small pieces of trying to use it, and sometimes it's gonna be wrong. So I put in a class worth of data. It was a hypothetical class. I filled this spreadsheet full of data, and I only wanted to talk about my four autistic students that were in that data and analyze the test results. And the first result came back and said, "Oh great, here's this one student and everything about that one student." Well then I had to say, "Well, do you see any other autistic students in these results?" "Oh, sure. Here are the other three." So it is not like you can always trust it. You have to start broad and tell it to just hold your horses until I'm ready. So there's a couple of thoughts. One other thought is, um, you can be very directive with this technology and tell it exactly what you want. But sometimes to throw a prompt in there and say something like, "Am I missing anything? Do you have any other ideas for me as I'm going through this?" So there's a way of being closed with it or open to suggestions. Those are some ideas that, that could be mistakes that, that folks could learn from.
Lydia Kumar: That's helpful. I, I was, when you were describing the prompting and giving all the information, I was thinking about giving instructions to a class and how when you work with a teacher on writing really good instructions, you're like, "What exactly do you want students to do?" And being super clear about all of the steps and giving an instruction and pausing, and just making sure that there's a clear process in place so that students know, actually understand what you want them to do, because if they don't know, then they're going to do all sorts of things. So you could imagine a class of first graders moving to carpet time for reading, and you in your head, you know, "Okay, I want all of these students to sit crisscross applesauce on the ground. And I want them to raise their hands." And particularly, I've worked with a lot of new teachers, they'll be like, "Okay, everyone to the carpet." And then it's mass chaos and kids are tripping over each other and somebody's crying and it looks... And then, you know, they see an experienced teacher and it looks like magic. And I think sometimes prompting can feel like that, is if you know what you're doing, you give all these instructions, you get the results you want, and if you don't know what you're doing, it can look like that new teacher with all these students falling all over each other because the beginning of, uh, you know, you're overly eager, drunk assistant can't read your mind. And yeah.
Cary Wright: Another, another, another lesson we've learned when it comes to prompting is let's say I build this beautiful lesson plan and I really think it's great. I'm not going to go back the next day and start a new thread. I am going to go back to that exact same thread where I wrote the lesson plan, and I can use it either as a little bit of qualitative or quantitative reflection. I can say, "Thanks, you know, and, and you're my assistant here with this. Um, here's how the lesson plan went. When we went to the rug, everything fell apart. Can you give me some suggestions for routines? I'm going to the rug." "Uh, hey, here's some quantitative data on my kids doing their reading screener." And so I don't know, Lydia, of any other company or consulting group or anyone else that says, "Go back to that thread. Click on those three dots. Rename it something you're going to remember." 'Cause a lot of folks ask us all the time, "Is what I just did? Is that going to be saved?" "Yeah, it's going to be right there in your threads, but you gotta rename it something that your brain will recognize when you go back to it. And that one thread is going to take you through the entire semester, the entire school year, and it's only going to get more and more refined as you keep on using it."
Lydia Kumar: Which is just like what it, what it is. When you teach a classroom at the beginning of the year, you gotta be really clear and then toward the end of the year it can kind of, your students know exactly what they're supposed to do. And when you're using an AI tool, it learns you too. And so there's those, um, those... that's an analogy. I'm just going to keep chasing the same analogy, Cary, I'm...
Cary Wright: It's all right. It's okay.
Lydia Kumar: I have an ethics question for you because when you were talking about putting student data into AI, I know that's a big concern that people have with, with FERPA, and there's a lot of... it's, it's useful. Like, if you can put student data into a tool, you can get great insights. And so when you're working with schools or districts, how do you navigate student privacy with the real power in, um, using AI tools to generate insights?
Cary Wright: Yeah, we, again, I think we're a very unique organization in that we are platform agnostic. We don't care whether it's ChatGPT, Grok, whatever you want to do. We're gonna show you how to use all of those different platforms. So that's something that sets us apart. Something else that sets us apart is when we come in and say, "We want you to use your own local data." And sometimes I'll, I'll go to a division and say, "You know, I'm looking for a place to eat dinner tonight. Do you, do you guys have an Applebee's?" And they were like, "Oh yeah, we have one of those." And that's kind of like an above average national chain. It's okay. But then if I say, "You know what? I really want something special. Do you guys have a local grandma farm-to-table diner?" "Oh my gosh, you have to go here. It's the only one of its kind. It's super special and unique. It uses the vegetables and produce from this area." That's what we want to teach you how to do with a generative AI platform. And so we will do a lot of instruction on how to scrub that data, delete certain columns off of it, never put a student name in there, never put a student identifiable testing number in there. And when we teach teachers and building leaders and division leaders how to use their own local data and use that paperclip to upload it, it just blows their minds when they can take the state standards, the national standards, their own local test data, and really create some good special plates and menus for their kids. It's really fabulous.
Lydia Kumar: Yeah, it's, there was a, there's a recent report that Walton and Gallup put out called, it's like, How AI Saves Teachers Six Weeks a Year, and they have all these different use cases, and one of the, the lower use cases right now is that data analysis. I think it's a little bit more complex because you have to think about how do you prepare the data so that it's FERPA compliant so that you're not violating student privacy. But if you can, you go through those steps or if you have guidance on how to go through those steps. I think there's a lot of untapped potential there because we know that data-driven instruction has positive impacts on student results, but it takes a lot of work to get there and a and a lot of teachers don't know how to do it. And so if you have a tool that can help you, you can get so many insights so quickly.
Cary Wright: Yeah, definitely. And there's, there's also so many forms of data available. You could be having a testing platform, you could have a state test, you could have an oral discussion. Something else that we also talk about is combining a generative AI platform with some audio capture tools. You could just use like a Microsoft cloud-based document and you hit the microphone. And so there's so many types of data in a classroom that are being missed. And so when you look at that classroom, and, and maybe this is not the exact human side of things, but we also have to increase student scores. How many different types of data can I collect in that classroom? We're gonna teach you ways to harness all of it, clean it up, make it safe, and then use these tools to analyze it.
Lydia Kumar: That's amazing. I think you'll, there will be really big benefits as we figure out how to use that data in a way that lets people make better, better decisions. And when you figure out how to do that ethically, safely, aligned with your, your district, your state policies and laws, I think you can unlock just a world of potential. Um, even, you know, like audio, you can look at a transcript and pull out things from the class discussion and elevate things that, that you just weren't able to do in the past. Okay. I'm gonna move us to our final question, which is, you know, a thought or idea that, that you've been—that's kind of percolating with you. But before that, is there anything else as you have reflected on your experience with Teach and your experience working with teachers that you want to, that you wanna bring up?
Cary Wright: Sure. I, I guess one of the... what our company does right now is that we provide professional development to school divisions. Um, and that's our way to go in and serve the most people all at once. We're also starting a new program where we are providing AI coaching directly to teachers. We're doing a free 30-day trial, and we already have that cohort up and running, and we're gonna take all of the data from that and all of the feedback from that and start rolling that out directly to the teachers. And so that's kind of one of the ideas that I'm percolating on, but also one of the things that I'm doing is that we want to get this directly to teachers. Even if your school administrators or your division administrators don't believe in it yet, we still have to find a way to get this information out to folks. And so another piece in that question, I think perhaps, uh, will allow me to say we also want people to use it in their individual lives. We've kind of talked about that a little bit today, Lydia, but when we talked to these teachers just the other day, we said, "Get it on your phone, get ChatGPT on your phone, take a picture, and now that picture is data that you can upload into it and ask it questions. Ask it about what's left in my refrigerator and what recipes I can make tonight." Um, put in and, and it's also interesting, Lydia, so many times when you go to the doctor now, the doctor will say to you, "What do you want to do?" You're like, "I don't know, Doc, I thought that's why I was paying you." But that night, whenever you go to a doctor visit, a lot of times you'll get the PDFs of all of your blood work and all your test results and everything else. Well, guess what I do? I throw those into my AI platform and then I go to my next doctor visit and I'll say, "Hey, Doc, what do you think about these five ideas that I got about my data?" So we have to get these tools in front of as many people as we can, and it's just an exciting time.
Lydia Kumar: And, um, you're doing so much thinking about different use cases for personally and for professionally. And we know, um, we're people regardless of whether we're at work or at home. So figuring out how to support ourselves in creating space for the things that really matter is, is important. My last question for you is just, is there an idea or a question about AI that you can't stop thinking about? It could be something that concerns you, something you're curious about, something that you hope for, but what is, what, what is the, the thing that's top of mind for you right now?
Cary Wright: The thing that's top of mind, uh, is just how this is at—we're seeing the very beginning of something here, Lydia, that, that I don't think in, in our lifetimes. Even in future generations, it's gonna be a long time, perhaps until they see something as transformative as this. Our company is called Teach: Transforming Education through AI Connections and Humanity. It's a transformative moment when we look at public schools. The last big change that made the entire structure of public education that we know in this country was from the Industrial Revolution. This technology has the chance to be as transformational as the Industrial Revolution once it comes fully online. And right now we want to be at the cusp of this. We wanna be at that, the bottom of that wave to catch it on a surfboard and rock it ahead of it. But that's what just amazes me so much. One of the reasons that we want to get our word out to as many people as possible is it's changing every single day. Lydia, I'm gonna get done and Tyler's gonna have three text messages to me on my phone. "Oh my God, Sam Altman just did this. Did you see what Grok just did?" Everything is just changing that fast and we are excited to be at the forefront of that. We are here for K-12 educators. We are staying on top of all of these changes. We are battle testing all of these technologies to ensure that they are safe and effective for our educational classrooms in K-12. And so that's what blows my mind every single day, Lydia. It's so exciting to get up to see not only how am I going to use it today, but what changes are gonna come. That's just where we are at this time in history. It's very exciting.
Lydia Kumar: Yeah. Well, your enthusiasm is contagious and so I'm sure when you're presenting to, to teachers, that is a, is a benefit. It's just like being like genuinely excited about something that has so much potential. I agree. I agree.
Cary Wright: And also, Lydia, if you're a classroom teacher and I've been a high school teacher for that many years and I've had to put on three 90-minute shows a day, you kind of get used to doing something. So you have to have the energy.
Lydia Kumar: Yes, yes. That's where that comes from. I get it. Yes. And I feel like, um, it's good when a teacher, a former teacher, can be a presenter because teachers are the harshest critics of people offering PD. Because if you've taught any grade, you have had to, you've had to, you've had to bring it.
Cary Wright: Oh, yeah. And, and one of the... one of the best parts that I love about working with educators like that is when they leave one of our sessions, they are gonna have not only skills, but deliverables, hands-on stuff they can have as soon as they leave. And it's not, and we will still support them after that, but it's not just some theory, and they're scrolling through their phone or doodling on the notebook the whole time. We make them work, and they get the skills right there. And so we love working with educators, whether it's our, our energy just interacting with folks, but also making it, making it actionable and relevant for them every day.
Lydia Kumar: Absolutely. And I love that you said your platform is agnostic because I think if you learn the skills, you can make better choices about the platforms. And it's amazing how many, um, ed tech companies there are right now. But also, the more options you have, the more difficult it is to make choices. Um, you need more knowledge to make choices. So it's, it's really cool to be able to hear about those skills.
Cary Wright: We still work for a school division. We are still here and doing this. It's not like we are a tech company from India coming in and saying, "Hey, we think this will work in K-12." No, we are in the trenches with these folks as well. Taking days off of work to go and spread the gospel around the state and the country. But, but I mean, we know it works 'cause we're still doing it every day. Whether we go to McDonald's for the french fries and Burger King for their Whopper, we're gonna be able to take all of these different platforms and know what works for these folks.
Lydia Kumar: That was such an energizing conversation with Cary Wright. A huge thank you to him for sharing his on-the-ground stories and his passion for supporting educators. I was particularly struck by a story of the teacher who threw away her late-night coffee for a glass of wine after learning how AI could streamline her lesson planning. It's a perfect example how these tools can improve teacher well-being, which in turn creates a better learning environment for students. To dive deeper into today's topics with Cary, I've put everything for you in one place. Just head over to the resource page for this episode at kinwise.org/podcast. There you'll find the full transcript and links to his work with Teach. On this episode today, I mentioned my interview with Ben Gordon Sniffen of Two Hour Learning. That is episode 11. I also mention my interview with Farrah Berro. That is episode three.
For the school and district leaders listening, if Cary's insights have you thinking about how to build a real AI strategy for your teachers, I invite you to learn more about the Kinwise Educator PD pilot program. We partner with districts to select a topic that's meaningful for your teachers, and together we build a community of practice. This chat that continues to support them long after our work together is done. You can learn more about our approach at kinwise.org/pilot.
Finally, if you found value in this conversation, the best way to support the show is to subscribe, leave a quick review, or share this episode with a friend. It makes a huge difference.
Until next time, stay curious, stay grounded, and stay Kinwise.
