Best-selling author Dr. Catlin Tucker joins the podcast to discuss her journey from a teacher in crisis to a leading voice in educational technology. She unpacks the core principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and makes a powerful case for student-led learning, exploring how AI can serve as an indispensable partner for designing equitable and engaging experiences that combat teacher burnout.

• CatlinTucker.com, Catlin’s website
• Catlin’s LinkedIn profile
• Education Reimagined: Student-led Learning | Dr. Catlin Tucker | TEDxFolsom
• CUE (Computer-Using Educators)
• The UDL Guidelines from CAST
• Google's NotebookLM
• SchoolAI
• Class Companion
• CK-12 Foundation

Nick, welcome to Talking technology with Atlas,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host. Kristina llewellen,

hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with Atlas. I'm Kristina llewellen, the

president and CEO of the Association of technology

leaders in independent schools,

and I'm Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey,

and I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of

Information Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher

school in Richmond, Virginia.

Hello, gentlemen. We have had quite a

week together, and now we're together virtually once again.

But we spent the weekend together at the Atlas board

retreat in Columbus, Ohio, and then we all had challenges

getting home. So yay for summer storms. It's very lovely to see

you guys safe and sound back in your home recording areas.

I know Hiram is busy at a little bit more of a

travel story than I did, but I'm definitely still in recovery

mode, a little tired, a little too much time in a car. But

other than that, I am feeling much better.

I hear you, Bill, and the fact that I arrived in

Charlotte and had to go to South Carolina in order to get a

rental car to go back up to Richmond, was the tour de force,

indeed.

Yeah, so my atlases staff had a hard time

getting home Kelsea ended up driving back down from DC. So I

think that, like we just all scattered, got to where we could

get to, and then figured it out, like any good technology leader,

right? Exactly, we got most of the way there, and then we were

winging it on the back end.

What I loved is it put me in a car with somebody

who was there as part of the ALI program. So at least I had a

traveling partner on my eight and a half hour, nine hour

journey back to Jersey from Columbus. So it was great.

Well, we're gonna jump right into our

conversation today, because I feel like we're gonna need the

time. We have a huge get for our podcast today, we are really

excited to bring someone to us with a lot of notoriety. Today,

we are welcoming Dr Catlin Tucker. She is a best selling

author, an international trainer and a keynote speaker. After

teaching for 16 years, Katlyn earned her doctorate in learning

technologies from Pepperdine University, and she currently

works as a blended learning coach and education consultant,

and she teaches at the Masters of Arts teaching program at

Pepperdine University. Catlin, welcome to our podcast. We are

so grateful to

Dr Catlin Tucker: have you here. Thank you guys for having me.

I'm thrilled to join you

now. I would love to start with the fact that

you are a multiple time author of many best selling books, and

these books range in topic on everything from blended learning

to designing with AI all sorts of UDL and balanced and blended

learning, texts and thoughts and thought leadership. Tell me a

little bit about your background, because for you to

be so prolific in this space, really carving out all of this

cutting edge approach to teaching, you had to have lived

some years in the classroom. So tell me a little bit about your

journey.

Dr Catlin Tucker: I love to tell people that my origin story as a

writer and author really came from this moment of career

crisis. So I entered the classroom as like a bright eyed

22 year old. I had all these really big fantasies about this

amazing classroom I was going to create that involved kids just

bounding through the door super excited to learn. I was an

English teacher at the high school level, so I imagined us

sitting in circles and talking about literature and life and

like it was going to be amazing. And then I got into the

classroom, and the reality was so different from these

elaborate fantasies I had concocted in my head. Students

did not bound through the door. There's like lots of trudging

happening. Nobody wanted to engage in conversation. I did

not feel like most of them wanted to be there. And I felt

like I was failing, right? I was failing to create this classroom

I had dreamed about. I was failing to engage my kids. And I

am like so type A that this was very hard for me to accept. And

I remember about year five, I just got to this moment of

thinking, I've made an enormous mistake, and I might need to

just leave this profession. But I was like, You're not a

quitter. Like, give it one more year, but in that year, you need

to start treating this space like a laboratory, just

experimenting, trying something different, seeing what sticks,

what excites students, and a lot of that the early

experimentations it's like around 2007 we're starting to

leverage the small devices walking through the door in some

of my students pockets, and I'm talking like one out of six kids

might have a device. And really thinking about, how do I

leverage this limited access to start to shift students into a

space of questioning and. Discovery and exploration and

using devices to kind of foster that collaboration, and it was a

huge game changer for me. And I wrote my very first book on

blended learning in 2010 and it was me just sharing what I'd

been through and how this kind of unlearning of everything I

thought I knew about what it meant to be a teacher and what

it looked like to be a student. How that unlearning process and

that experimentation and that strategic use of the tech I had

access to really transformed my experience, what I saw in my

classroom in terms of my students engagement. So that's

really where it started. And I think I'm definitely a person

who as I learn, as I create, as I work with other educators,

writing is just my vehicle to like reinforce what I'm learning

and fine tune it. And I think one of the things I'm good at is

taking what sometimes feels complicated and overwhelming or

very theoretical and pinning it down into really specific

resources and strategies and making it concrete for teachers.

So I just keep writing books.

I love that. And as you've been expanding

your reach and sharing your thoughts, you've also found your

communities. It sounds like you're really active in several

organizations. Where did you go in those early years as you were

trying to figure things out, and eventually you started putting

some words on paper. What do you consider your professional

communities?

Dr Catlin Tucker: You know, it's interesting. I was on a campus

where I was very much going it alone. Nobody else was doing

what I was doing. We didn't have a lot of technology on the

campus. In fact, I feel like the first couple years I had like, a

secret Wi Fi that I gave, like a weird name so my kids could get

on it, because we just didn't even have that available for

students on campus. And so there were two spaces where I really

started to build my networking and connections. And one was the

computer using educator like the Q network in California. And

then the other was Twitter. Honestly, I had started writing

a blog just kind of sharing my own blunderings in the

classroom, things I was doing, what worked, what didn't work,

what pain points I was trying to solve, what strategies I found

really useful, and sharing resources. And I realized that

if I was going to get anybody reading what I was writing, I

needed to find a way to kind of like, share it online, and

Twitter became my space. And it was there that beyond Q I really

started to connect with other people who were excited and

experimenting, and that, for me, was transformative, because I

wasn't really getting that in PD or interactions on my campus.

I mentioned that Atlas is a blended

community of former educators and also some tech folks who

came into education. So for our listeners who might not be

familiar with the concept or term UDL, can you explain what

that means to

Dr Catlin Tucker: you? Yeah, absolutely. So universal design

for learning actually has its beginnings in architecture, this

idea that we wanted to or architects are designing

buildings that anyone can access. So then, if you take

that universal design concept and you apply it to learning,

the idea is that we're really trying to design, or architect

learning experiences that are accessible, inclusive and

equitable. And I kind of have to pause here, because we're in

this moment where there are a lot of schools and districts and

states that are shying away from the word equity, and I want to

be really clear about what that means, which is it is this

acknowledgement that individual learners need individual inputs

to reach a particular output. So if we want students to reach a

standard aligned learning objective or goal, we're

acknowledging that students are going to need different amounts

of our teacher time and energy input, different amounts of

scaffolding and support or feedback in order to reach that

particular learning objective. And so universal design for

learning is really about proactively identifying and

attempting to remove barriers in the learning process, like what

might make it challenging for a student to acquire information

in a particular mode, what might make it challenging for them to

process new information or apply what they're learning or

navigate a multi step learning experience? And how do we as

educators try to proactively remove those so the learning is

accessible and inclusive and equitable?

How does technology fit into that in terms of

lowering those barriers or providing those opportunities

for students to reach those particular goals?

Dr Catlin Tucker: I think technology can be so incredibly

helpful in this process, because one when we think about how

important it is in a classroom for students to be acquiring new

information, so often information transfer happens

with a teacher at the front of the room providing a lecture,

facilitating a short mini lesson. There. Are a lot of

barriers that actually can make it very hard for a student to

acquire information, if that is the only way it is presented,

right? Whether it's distractions in a classroom, whether it's

because they have a hard time focusing or attention deficit,

or they don't have the background knowledge, or the

pace is too fast, like when you start to think about everything

that might get in the way in those moments, it's like, oh

yeah, why is this the only way we transfer information in a

classroom? And so a lot of my work when I talk with educators

is, you know, for those explanations, we're going to say

the same way for everyone. Can we also create a video? A video

has accessibility features kids can control often, the playback

speed. Add closed captioning. They can watch it 10 times if

they need to. And now we even have AI tools like notebook LM,

where I'm like, Ooh, this is a really great article. Reading

might create a barrier to students accessing information

in this article. Now I can throw the article into notebook LM,

it'll generate a podcast, and now I can say to students, hey,

which would you rather engage with to learn this information?

Would you rather read? Would you rather listen? And giving them

those really meaningful construct specific choices is

part of the equation. When we talk about removing barriers, I

actually think the easiest way to remove barriers is to give

students meaningful choice whenever possible, so they can

decide, is this option or pathway in a work better for me,

or this option and pathway? And when we ask students to

demonstrate their learning, you know, multiple means of action

and expression, which is part of the UDL guidelines, is really

about acknowledging that not all students are going to

demonstrate or share their learning effectively in the same

way. So I might prefer to put pen to paper and write out an

explanation, and another student might feel more confident going

into Canva and creating an infographic to explain or to

highlight what they've learned. So technology can serve all of

these different purposes when it comes to that meaningful choice

conversation.

The example that you gave of notebook LM is a

conversation I actually had with our director of Ed Tech

yesterday about that very use of it. But when you mentioned the

idea of including an article from a secondary source, this

this is kind of getting deep into the notebook LM, and some

of the issues with AI and how this works, does, including an

article like that, as opposed to your own notes or your own

resources that you've developed, are there copyright issues

around using other articles that you've may have gotten from

other places, putting them into notebook LM, and Then using them

in the way in which you're describing

Dr Catlin Tucker: that is a good question. I wonder, for

educational purposes, if that would be the same kind of an

issue. That's what I was Yeah, yeah. I don't know the answer to

that. That is a really good question. One of the issues to

back up a little bit that teachers face with notebook LM

is, it's not approved for under 18, right? But if I'm a teacher

and I'm like, Ooh, this is a really fabulous article, it

might not be accessible for some of my students, or I want to

make sure my multilingual learners can access this

information. I'm going to put it into notebook. LM, I'm going to

have it spit out that original podcast I always in the

description and the notes for it, say source material and the

citation. And I don't know how many educators probably make a

practice of that if they're creating it and then downloading

the audio file, putting it in Google classroom or their

learning management system and sharing it, but I would

definitely suggest that as a best practice. I think whenever

we are taking source material that's not ours to create

something we should be giving credit to that in my own work as

a professional learning facilitator, the majority of the

texts that I take to create notebook LM, original podcasts

are my own. So it's not necessarily something I have to

like, spend a lot of time thinking about, but it's a

really, really good question.

Yeah, to that end. I think what's also interesting,

I at lunch today, I actually had a conversation with a science

teacher who was talking about textbooks like CK 12 textbooks.

He posed the question, you know, can I dump a textbook into AI

and have it rewrite it for different reading levels? And

it's different when it's your article, right, as opposed to

another source. And I said, I think you're getting into some

very squishy territory. I'm gonna lean on the side of

probably no to that. But AI is making an interesting landscape

for being able to provide differentiated instruction, but

I think we need to be really mindful of things like fair use

and copyright absolutely so

before we kind of dive deeper into AI,

which we'll definitely get to, because I'm sure that you have a

lot of perspective on that, I'd like to unpack this idea of

student led learning and what that means in terms of where we

are in this moment. So, you know, I guess it's not.

Specifically an AI question quite yet, but really, we are

empowering kids with a lot of tools. So what does student led

learning look like?

Dr Catlin Tucker: It's interesting. This is the entire

topic of the TEDx talk I did last June. And I think sometimes

when people hear this topic, or they're student led, they're

like one no students can't lead. That's what the teacher is for.

It really drums up a lot of these very traditional notions

about teaching and learning,

right? It's a very different like the

teacher being the shepherd of it is a very different thing than

the sage on the stage.

Dr Catlin Tucker: Oh, for sure. And the sage on the stage is

apparently very hard to let go of, right? It's something that

we're all apparently very comfortable with in education,

even though we just talked about all the barriers that exist when

teachers are this age, on the stage, transferring information

verbally, live in a classroom. So when we talk about student

led I'm really clear. It's not to say students lead every

single aspect of the learning experience. However, the goal, I

think, for every educator, should be a gradual release of

the learning and the ownership and the responsibility over to

students. Our job is not to be the owners of the learning. Our

job is to teach students how to learn on their own, and if we do

not release aspects of the learning experience over to

them, model, how do you do this? Give them opportunities to

practice, provide feedback, then how are we ever going to expect

those students to thrive in a world that is rapidly advancing,

as quickly as the one that we have around us right now, right

and AI is only going to exponentially change and

develop, and it's going to have huge repercussions for our

learners when they enter careers in college in however many

years. And so for me, it's like, okay, let's take a really

concrete example, if I'm asking teachers to really think about

being intentional about how they deliver instruction. So I do a

lot of training around multi tiered systems of support,

particularly on the instructional side. And we start

deciding like, Hey, I'm gonna look at this concept or skill

that I need to teach today, and I'm going to ask myself, would I

say this? Would I model this the same way for everyone? If so, I

would advocate put it in a video, that way we can shift the

control over the experience to students. And if what you're

going to explain or model for students is really complex, it's

nuanced, it's something they've struggled with in the past, or

you've been teaching a while and you're like, Whoo fractions,

this is always a troublemaker. Then why would we do that whole

group teaching to this mythical middle why wouldn't tier one

first pass instruction happen in differentiated small groups

where first pass can be tailored for the students in front of me?

I'm choosing problems and prompts at different levels of

rigor and complexity I have scaffolds and supports at

different levels for different needs. To me, that is strategic,

but then teachers will say, but if I make a video like, what if

kids don't watch it? What if they don't understand it? What

if they're not really paying attention? Okay, let's build a

student led protocol around that experience. If I want to use a

video or a notebook LM podcast to transfer information, why not

use reciprocal teaching, put students in a group of four and

teach them how to work together with an inclusive comprehension

multimedia strategy that allows them to unpack that video, that

online article that podcast, and make sense of it with peer

support. So for me, it's all about really figuring out, how

do we position students to lead aspects of the learning so it's

more engaging, it's more effective. They're actually

interacting with their classmates. That's really what I

mean when I talk about student led learning, and it's honoring

the agency that they come into our classrooms with. Are we

designing to honor that agency, or are we really focused on

control and compliance?

I'm sure, in a lot of ways, this is a

challenging conversation, because when you do your

customized PD for educators, you probably get half the room that

are all in and shout an Amen, and then you probably have a

good chunk of people who are like, Wait a minute. I'm tired.

This has been a hard couple years. I'm wondering if you

could reflect for a moment on the state of teaching. You do

spend a lot of time with educators and teachers are

tired. That is something that from our perspective, primarily

as technology leaders, many of whom are former educators. You

know, we're trying hard to help our teachers because we

recognize it's a tough gig, and in a lot of ways, the tech teams

can help them unlock learning experiences like what you're

talking about, but our teachers are tired and sometimes

resistant to hearing about things. Things that could help

them. So do you have any advice or thoughts about what you're

seeing, or even advice, I guess, for technology leaders who

really are trying to help educators, and yet, sometimes

there's a little bit of a wall up because they're just fried.

Dr Catlin Tucker: Yeah, well, I empathize with all of the tech

folks listening who have to design and facilitate PD on

their campuses, because all staff PD is definitely a

challenge. You're right. I go into rooms, it's a totally

different experience. When it's opt in, when people have been

like, I want to take this workshop. I want to work with

Catlin. I'm like, awesome. This is going to be rad. I can't wait

when it's an all staff, I know very well, I'm walking into a

space where there will be, I think, half as generous of like,

really excited. You know, you get your like, quarter who are

like, I am down. You get another quarter who are like, I'm

curious but hesitant. You got your skepticals, and then you

got the people who just come in with their arms crossed, and

they're like, all right, Lady, do your best. But I'm not really

planning on engaging in this experience, and I do know that

right now, we are in a really challenging moment. All you have

to do is look at the research to know how challenging this moment

is. Around teacher burnout, teacher attrition, around the

just huge numbers of vacancies and then the number of jobs

being filled by individuals who are under qualified, which just

means they haven't been through a teacher or training program.

That's one part of the puzzle. But then you look at the

research on the student side and their experience, and 75% of

kids at like the elementary level, they love school. They're

super positive about it. You get to high school, 65% report being

checked out. You got almost 75% at the high school level

reporting negative feelings about school, particularly

tired, stressed, bored. So something's not working in the

current way that we design and facilitate learning, and I get

it change is always going to require two things that we don't

have a lot of as educators, time and energy, and I think also a

willingness to fail. I think we expect ourselves to be the

experts on everything before we try it, and so therefore, we

don't try as much as we could if we just saw ourselves as the

lead learner in a classroom and was like, I'm gonna try it.

We'll see how it goes. I'll ask my students for feedback, and

then we'll just iterate, because that's actually what learning

looks like. So for the teachers who are just feeling exhausted,

my message is I have been there. That is part of the reason I

wanted to exit this profession at year five, and it was only

until I started to gradually release ownership over the

learning to my learners and students that I actually felt

like I was able to take a breath and enjoy this profession. And

I'm not going to say it doesn't take a lot of intentionality at

the beginning of the year to set the stage for this. I tell

teachers all the time that I felt like I was just carrying

all 32 students in each of my classes on my back, climbing up

a hill until about the beginning of October. You know, we started

mid August, and it was about mid October, beginning of October,

where all of the sudden they started to get it and they

started to take over some of these systems and

responsibilities in a classroom. And from there on, the rest of

the year was magic, right? Because they're doing self

assessment, they're writing their families weekly or bi

weekly updates about their progress. They're doing all of

these things in a classroom that I used to do. So if teachers are

exhausted, it's probably because they're doing the lion's share

of the work, and they're not feeling like they're getting or

seeing the outcomes in terms of their students learning and

engagement that kind of brought them into this profession in the

first place. So the only way to change our reality is to change

the way we approach this work. So

Catlin, you've mentioned a few of the barriers

to the success to reach what I would call the ideal teacher in

today's environment, especially the ones that I think you

envision and are trying to create with your courses and

your course work. What do you think is the secret sauce that

is needed for somebody who's coming in new to the space as a

teacher? I know Kristina has a budding teacher with one of her

own daughters. My daughter is at year three as a young teacher,

and it's fair to say that it's a difficult profession for many of

them. What do you think are some nuggets that these folks can

take away almost immediately? The

Dr Catlin Tucker: first one is more mental, which is, if you

are entering this profession, but you haven't gotten in a

classroom yet, close your eyes and imagine in your head a

teacher. What is that person doing? And I think that reveals

a lot about the mental models that we have about teaching and

learning. Because for most people, even young people, like

every single student I'm working with in my beginning. Teaching

methods class right now, teaching is their first career,

and there are still these very traditional models guiding their

thinking. So if you close your eyes and you picture yourself at

the front of the room presenting a lesson, explaining something

you're passionate about, if you see yourself at a teacher desk

with a stack of papers and a red pen like that, to me, is a bit

of a flag, because information is everywhere. Students have

access to unlimited information. They have access to AI. They

don't need us to be the fountain of knowledge anymore, and I

would love anybody coming into this profession to really think

about if information is everywhere and easily

accessible, then what is our value in a classroom? What

should we be spending our time doing? Because I would argue,

the more technology and AI permeates every aspect of our

lives. What actually is going to make teachers unique and special

and irreplaceable is everything that makes us human, our ability

to like watch kids interact and listen to their conversations

and respond organically to their needs and empathize with them

and and engage them in discourse and conversation like this is

what makes us special. This is what the teachers of the future

need to invest their time in. But yet, I think even new

teachers are still coming into this profession with that kind

of outdated vision of, hey, this is the value I'm going to bring

into the class. I'm going to get kids excited by telling them all

of these things. And to me, that's the first piece of the

puzzle is like checking in and really understanding what is

bringing you into this profession. What are you

passionate about? Where you think you're going to bring your

value in this technology AI era?

I think that that leads us really well into

AI. So let's talk about that for a little bit. I want to just at

least start by asking you to give me the lens through which

you are viewing AI at the moment.

Dr Catlin Tucker: You know, for me, I wrestled for a while with

how to approach AI, given my body of work, I am very

interested and passionate about the instructional side of

teaching and how we leverage technology strategically. These

technology enhanced models, blended learning models. And in

the very early days, I was online, and I was seeing all of

these teachers, and I'm still seeing a bit of it, not the

crazed excitement of the early days, where the conversations

are like, hey, check out this AI tool. You can throw in a

learning objective, you can throw in a standard or a

collection of standards, and it'll just spit out a lesson,

it'll spit out a unit. And I was like, this all makes me very

uncomfortable. I understand that planning lessons is time

consuming. It is cognitively challenging work, but I don't

want to just replace like crappy lessons from Teachers Pay

Teachers with free lessons from AI that really aren't elevating

the learning experience at all and don't know our kids at all.

Right. We are teaching in classrooms increasingly diverse

populations of learners with lots of different needs, skills,

abilities, language proficiencies, learning

preferences, interests, and that one size fits all, lesson,

which, right now, most of the education powered AI tools are

still kind of spitting out. It does not get me excited. What

gets me excited and where my focus is now and kind of has

been, is one on the design side, everything I have been asking

teachers to do or advocating for for the last 15 years, the

biggest barrier was one time and just the time needed to invest

in the design work, right? So if I'm asking them to go from whole

group, teacher led, teacher pace to something like the station

rotation model, the biggest pushback I get is, yeah, that

sounds good. Differentiating consistently would be nice, but

like that takes a long time to design one of those lessons. And

I'm like, Okay, now we have this super charged way in which to

design learning, and I want teachers to leverage AI to

elevate their design to now design for these diverse

populations, to differentiate effectively, to offer meaningful

choices, but leverage AI to do it in a fraction of the time.

That is one part of my focus. The other part of my focus is on

flexible, Personalized Pathways. So how are we using technology

and AI specifically to create learning experiences that allow

students to sit in that driver's seat, that allow them to access

explanations and pathways that work for them, that remove

barriers for them. And I think AI can absolutely do that in

really, really exciting ways.

So as a follow up to that, I mean, you're talking

about. Existing teachers and how you're getting in and talking to

them and trying to motivate them to take these different

pedagogical approaches and the way in which they're going to

look at these things. I want to take this back to the work that

you're doing in the college with the students that you're

preparing for these pieces. What are those conversations look

like there? And what are you seeing with those coming in, and

how are you preparing them for that step when they graduate?

Dr Catlin Tucker: That is quite the question. When I got my

first syllabus, I basically for the beginning. So I teach

beginning secondary methods. I teach advancing secondary

methods. And I remember getting the syllabus, and was like, This

is what the person before you did. And I was like, I was like,

I don't think I want to do any of that. I think I want to do

something totally different. That means why I work with

teacher candidates is I want to help them enter this field in

the space of I'm here to architect dynamic learning

experiences. I'm here to partner with students. I am here to

ensure that I'm facilitating learning. I'm not just directing

learning. And so it has really taken some redesign of existing

curriculum for me to feel comfortable and confident I'm

doing that, but even as a professor, I teach inside of my

own little box of expectations. But what I will say is, I

remember the first week with my current cohort where we were

sharing about their teacher placements, and one of my

students made a comment like, I mean, just technology is such a

distraction, and so we've basically gone back to

worksheets in our classroom. And I was like, Oh my gosh, we have

so much work to do here. Like you are, like, in your early

20s, this is your first profession. Like, I don't love

this at all, and it's not the technology is the problem. It is

the way that it is being used that is the problem. So for me,

it's about helping them to think really intentionally about their

design. So the entire time, we are leveraging AI for design. I

am teaching them how to engineer prompts, how to evaluate output,

how to take existing pieces of their curriculum and create

construct specific alternatives. We're talking about the

challenges around AI or the challenges around assessment in

an AI world, and making sure we're really getting an accurate

picture of what students know. And how do we combat some of

those concerns and challenges? How do we design prompts or help

students design prompts that are going to be interesting and

engaging? How do we rethink where some of the work happens,

right? Like, if we just keep sending prompts, writing prompts

that kids don't care about home into an environment that might

not be conducive for writing. We should not be surprised if they

submit something that they generated with AI, right?

There's all kinds of equity issues around that workflow. And

so how are we creating spaces in the classroom for students to do

authentic work for them to get feedback from teachers, for them

to learn how to use AI responsibly. So I sometimes wish

you know, I only have 15 weeks for each of my courses, and I

feel like I could spend 45 weeks doing this work with them in

each course. But yeah, it's threaded through everything I

do. Every class we have, there's student led strategies at play.

They're doing reciprocal teaching. They're using the

jigsaw strategy. They're doing choice board, you know, peer

feedback routines. I want them doing it as students, so that

when they go into classroom working with their future

students, they're prepared to do those things.

So, Catlin, it sounds like you've got this

really well run in your space in terms of higher ed, how has the

Department responded or been receptive to the instructional

strategies that you actually employ within your course as a

pedagogical framework for the entire department? And I say

that because I found it interesting when you talked

about beginning instructional strategies and then advance. I

remember taking instructional strategies, but it was only

advanced instructional strategies. And I asked the

prof, where's the beginning instructional strategy or

intermediate? They didn't have an answer for it, so we were

right to advance. So curious to see, is this being even adopted

by higher ed? Are they looking themselves in the mirror and say

this is how we're teaching our students in your courses. And

these are great things. We should be doing this as well.

And then does that impact the rest of the university in terms

of instructional strategies?

Dr Catlin Tucker: I

don't think so. Unfortunately, universities are different from,

say, a high school, but in the same way, I feel like there are

these silos of groups of educators focused on different

aspects of teaching teachers or teaching different subject

areas. So I teach online. We have a live two hour class every

week, and how I teach that class is totally up to me. I obviously

have to hit. Certain topics and cover certain things, but like,

I have total autonomy in terms of how I facilitate that in that

live, synchronous experience, and I know it's different from

how other professors do, and I don't think that there is right

now the collaboration time built in to that sharing of

strategies, or like, Hey, how did you facilitate this

synchronous session? But I would bet it's probably not a mere

copy of, like, what I'm doing. And in general, I think higher

ed has a lot of growing to do, even just the college level,

right? Like, I have so many teachers who will be like, well,

but this isn't what the kind of stuff they're doing in college.

In college, they sit through a lecture and then they go to when

I you know, and I'm like, okay, cool, so let's just keep doing

that, just because some of them might end up in college and have

to go through that too. For me, it's about, how are we moving

from that passive consumption, whether it's at middle school,

high school, college to active engagement, how do we start to

reimagine the ways in which we design and facilitate learning?

And it's happening on some college campuses, for sure, but

there are still really traditional, outdated modes, and

I think in part that has to be due to the fact that if you're

not talking about a teacher training program. You're just

talking about, like the college setting, that a lot of college

professors, they don't have teaching training, right?

They're like researchers, and they teach this class. And so

that's part of the issue as

well. Absolutely. And independent

schools, we like to think that there's some flexibility in how

we get to the end goal, and yeah, it is hard to shake that

off when it's all we've ever known. So if you were talking to

a teacher, that's kind of new to either blended learning or the

ways that you're talking about using AI, not just kicking out a

lesson plan. With these emerging tools, with adaptive tools

becoming more prevalent, what are some of the best first steps

that a teacher, not somebody that you're teaching out of

college, an established teacher who's sort of been doing it and

is in a groove and is busy and has extra duties as assigned,

where do we convince them to start with a baby step?

Dr Catlin Tucker: Maybe? Yeah. I mean, right now, I love what

school AI is doing with spaces? I think spaces are so versatile,

and teachers can do really cool things to very quickly design a

space that students can interact with, whether it is designed to

help them unpack and understand a complex concept by inviting

the student to say, Hey, can you explain it through this lens.

This is something I understand and enjoy, but I'm not

understanding this concept. Help walk me through it. Now, instead

of asking a teacher to, like, personalize that experience and

really speak to every student's interests and needs, we can lean

on AI to do that, and that lessens the burden on the

teacher. Or you can train the space to go back and forth with

feedback and school AI, isn't the only product that does it.

There's class companion. There's all these other cool products

that like can almost serve as the student's individual coach.

So if I'm a teacher trying to give feedback over here, or I

need to pull a small group for support or intervention, or

whatever the scenario might be, now I have something students

can engage with that is responding to their specific

needs, that is guiding them through it, asking questions,

giving them feedback. And so think about the parts of this

work that feel unsustainable from a teacher perspective,

personalizing explanations, giving feedback, like, let's

start to figure out how we can kind of release some of that

load onto AI, because it's really good at it, and it

doesn't mean the teacher won't ever give feedback. Doesn't mean

the teacher won't ever give those explanations, but students

are going to need more of it than we can accomplish in a

class. And so I think as teachers start to kind of

offload some of those time consuming, overwhelming tasks to

AI and that functionality the more they're going to feel like

they see the value and the benefit of like, oh, wow, that

was great. Like that really saved me a lot of time. Look at

my students responding to this, and I'm getting formative

feedback from their interactions with AI that I think becomes

this kind of positive, motivating feedback loop for a

teacher to continue leaning into that,

yeah, can we stop down on the assessment

piece? Because I hear a lot from teachers, and we're not even a

teacher specific organization, but I think that there's some

mixed feelings around writing comments, providing assessments

that are meaningful in an age of AI. So can I peel back the onion

a little bit on that and hear what you think about that kind

of aspect, or what you would say to a teacher who is trying to

wrestle this? Am I cheating my students by using comment

writers? Is it still giving the experience that an independent

school kid is and parent is going to expect? Yeah, obviously

it does lessen the load, and I think we're gonna have to kind

of reframe assessments, maybe in this

Dr Catlin Tucker: age of AI, yeah. So I take the same

approach to feedback and assessment with AI that I do

when I talk about prompt engineering to design equitable

lessons with an AI chat bot. Right now AI chat bots are

definitely the best way to do that. Right is to really

understand how to design the prompt. Engineer it so that

you're getting a really high quality outcome. However, what I

always say is it's teacher at the beginning, teacher at the

end. Teacher is engineering the prompt, given everything they

know about their students, their subject area, the standards, and

then they are evaluating that output, for bias, for accuracy,

for quality, for like, you know, is this going to meet the needs

of my kids? And so I don't have any problem with teachers having

AI tools give students feedback. However, I think there's that

instructional piece that happens before and then as students are

working, writing, creating, whatever they're doing, AI can

be giving feedback along the way, but that does not negate

the need for teachers to still get eyes on work in progress,

because it's when we create the space. And I'm talking in the

classroom, I do not want teachers taking feedback home,

I'll be really clear about that, but if we're stuck at the front

of the room talking the whole time, that's hard to do. But I

think formative feedback is critical, because it's that

moment where we can look not at everything, but at a specific

element, see how our students are doing, right we get that

understanding of how much are you getting this? How much

progress are you making? Are you really struggling here? Because

that is going to need a teacher instructional intervention,

potentially, and then giving a piece of actionable feedback

ourselves. So for me, I think the responsibility for something

as important as feedback needs to be a shared responsibility,

right? Teachers are giving focused, actionable, timely,

formative feedback, not every day, not all the time, not on

every aspect of work, but they're making space for it.

They're teaching students in this student led mode. Here's a

peer feedback choice board partner up, either in writing or

as a conversation. Choose two of these prompts to guide your

feedback to your partner about their work in progress, and Hey,

over here, here's your AI feedback support bot, who is

going to also be asking you questions and giving you

feedback, because they know the rubric, the standard lined

rubric I'm going to grade this thing with, and it can help

coach you on what you're doing well and where you need to spend

more time. So now it's not like, oh, as a teacher, I always hated

feedback. AI is going to do that for me. And I never really look

at kids work, and I have no idea where anybody's at it has to be

teacher in the beginning, teacher at the end or during the

process. So for me, it's just like, not an all or nothing.

It's just this wonderful way for a kid who's stuck where a

teacher might be over here doing something totally different to

not just sit there and be like, I can't figure this out. It's

like, now they have a little coach, and I know how helpful

that is, because I lean on AI all the time when I'm like, hey,

you know, I'm writing this blog, and I started with this section,

and I'm curious, do you think this should go next, or should

that go next? Or, Hey, I used this word twice in these two

sentences. They're back to back. Which one would you say I should

replace? Like, these are the questions I'm asking AI all the

time as a writer, and so I just think there has to be balance

with everything. There has to be balance, right balance, the AI

with the humans, whether that's you or a combination of you and

your students, think about feedback and assessment through

that lens.

How are you picking or how are you talking to

schools about picking the right tool, because, as the tech

director, we're in a position where we need to vet the tool.

We're need to understand the data privacy around the tool.

There's costs associated with the tool. There's all of the

different possible uses in which one does which which one does

the other. And then there's all we talked about earlier, all the

PD that goes into the tool. How are you picking tools? What are

the criteria you're using? How are you talking to either the

teachers that you're going in and doing PD with, or the ones

that you've got in the classroom about the tools that are at our

disposal?

Dr Catlin Tucker: That is a great question, Bill, and a lot

of that I don't have to worry about, because when I go into a

school district, somebody like you has already had to make

those decisions. So basically, I'm given the guidelines of

like, hey, here are the AI tools we vetted, we've approved, or we

pay for whatever. The orchestra of figuring all of those

decisions out is, if I have my druthers, it's really because I

don't. I'm not confined to the privacy because every school,

some are tighter, some are looser. You know, there's so

much at play here that I really, honestly don't have to think

about for me when I'm thinking about tools, or if I'm working

with a leadership team that is considering AI, I will break

down what I like about the tools that I. I use that if they're

like, Hey, we haven't really explored AI. What do you think?

And the biggest challenge, Bill honestly, is just that these

tools are changing so fast, they're popping up, they're

gonna die off. It's just like the ed tech boom of like, 12

years ago or whatever. So for me, it's really about

functionality. It's about flexibility. You know, a lot of

teachers are super excited about magic school AI, and I get it,

it does a million different things. For me, I'm still like

more drawn to using a chat bot more flexibly, which most

teachers, that's a big ask for them. They'd rather have the AI

powered tool that they can just put the simple inputs and it

does all the background stuff and spits out something for

them. And I want more personalization. And so that's

why tools like school AI are attractive to me. Is the

opportunity for teachers to kind of create the context, the

boundaries, and then let students access the support

notebook, LMS, one I talk about a lot, and then teachers are

like, Wait, students can't use that. And I'm like, Well, I'm

like, Well, the way I'm advocating that it be used, they

don't have to use it like it's a teacher tool we're using to

create a resource that then we make available. So it's really,

really complicated, but one of the things you said, I do want

to really stress is I don't think the PD should be focused

on how to use the tool myopically. I think that's one

of the biggest mistakes school districts make, is they invest a

ton of money in devices or in tools and applications, and then

the training is like, here's how you do this. Not to say that's

not important, but if it's not wrapped in a larger conversation

and professional learning experience that is grounded in

strong pedagogical practices aligned with your school

district's priorities and values. It's only going to be

this surface level addition to the teacher's tool set, it is

not going to fundamentally impact any substantive change,

and I think that's the biggest reason why all this money we

dumped into devices, all this investment in Wi Fi

infrastructure, hasn't for a lot of school districts, actually

yielded substantive improvements in student success, student

learning, student engagement.

So Caitlin, we have some good news for you.

Gemini and notebook LM are now considered to be core services

out of Google. Under 18 is okay? Oh, that's great. So the various

districts have to actually allow it, and many of them are

probably in different stages, because it just went live with

that agreement from Google. That's exciting. And so as a

school, we're having those conversations about which

organizational unit do we want to actually place it in? Do we

want to just in our upper school right now? Do you want to go as

far down as the middle school, but it's under 18? Is okay? It's

a core service.

Dr Catlin Tucker: Well, I will share with you, Hiram, my first

interaction with notebook LM is because my daughter, who was a

senior, she was studying for an AP Bio exam, and it was the

morning, and she's kind of a slow mover, and I always have to

be like, get out the door. You will be late to school. And I go

down the hall and I'm hearing this conversation like she's

watching television or something. And I was like,

Cheyenne, what are you doing? And she's like, What is your

problem, mom? And I'm like, What are you watching or listening

to? You have to get out the door. She's like, Mom, it's an

AI app that I fed my AP Bio notes into, and it created a

live podcast, and I'm listening to it while I get ready so I can

be ready for my test today. And I was like, I'm sorry, what is

this thing you're using? I need to know all about it. And so the

fact that now students under 18 could have the flexibility to

create materials that might better work for them in the way

that they're going to understand or retain information. Because I

think the thing that shocked me about notebook LM, when I fed my

own articles into it, was that the two conversationalists were

like, creating these analogies that were not in my writing, but

were wildly helpful to try to, like, understand the things I

was talking about. And so I can see this being such a wonderful

resource for learners to customize their own learning

experience and studying habits and all of the above.

I think that that is a really great example.

And I love that you have your own teenage daughter voice, I do

the same voice, even though none of my daughters talk like that,

I have four of them. Whenever I do the teenage daughter voice,

it's like, oh my god. And they're like, We don't talk like

that, right? Like, Mom, stop. So I get the Mom Stop plenty. So

I'm 100% with you. All right. So as we start winding this down. I

do want to make note that you had a very pivotal moment in

your career, and that was you won the Sonoma County Teacher of

the Year award. That recognition had to have shaped your own

trajectory as an educational thought leader, and you have

since done all these really cool things leading other. Teachers.

I think what would be really interesting for our audience to

hear is if you had to kind of go back to your early teacher days,

but it's set in today's setting. What do you think you would do

differently? In other words, like, what is your advice for

teachers entering the workforce? Or how would you tackle that?

Because you do have this experience now as an educational

thought leader and an award winning teacher, young kids

don't have that when they're entering their first teaching

gigs. I think that it'd be really interesting for

technology leaders to hear your response to this, because in so

many ways, the tech leaders can help teachers be successful, and

in fact, they're a customer like we want teachers to be

successful. So what do you think your advice is, or would be, to

new teachers starting out now?

Dr Catlin Tucker: Oh my gosh. So to put this in my own journey, I

sometimes cringe when I think about the first five or six

years of my teaching career and those poor students. I was so

rigid I wasn't doing any of the things that we just talked about

the last like, however many minutes we've been chatting, I

was like, we're all gonna do it this way. We're gonna submit

this. And I felt like I had to dictate everything. I felt

pressure to know everything, and I absolutely did not. I was

terrified of student feedback. And so I think if I was to go

back in time, or if I was to just kind of give a new teacher

advice, one remember that these kids are in these spaces all

day, five days a week, and think about how it must feel to sit

and be expected to be quiet and focus and listen for the better

part of seven hours every day. Like, I can't do that as an

adult. So one give yourself and your students grace, and don't

lose the fun after third grade. Like, have fun with these kids.

Invite them into the process. If you don't know something, be

like, I don't know. Let's figure it out. That's that right now

we're a community searching for an answer, and now it's not

scary for my kids to say, I don't know. I don't know the

answer to that. And do not be afraid to ask your students for

feedback. And you just said, teachers are the customers for

some of the IT people, right? But like students, are also the

customers. They have to consume everything we dish out and ask

them to do. So how's it working? What are they enjoying? What are

they not enjoying? Because I will tell a very brief story.

One of the things I was immovable on in my first five

years was annotations. I was an English teacher. We read six

books a year. Every single page had to have an annotation, at

least one on it. And every time I asked my students for feedback

on the Google Form at the semester break, the thing that

they almost unanimously, over 90% said what they wanted to do

less of in my class, because that was a question annotations.

And I was still like, no, they're good for you. They

worked for me. They work for you. And then when I got to year

six or seven, I was like, why am I making everybody do this the

same way? They hate it. So I the next year, spent the first six

weeks of school onboarding them to three different strategies

for active reading. After that, they could choose the one that

worked for them, the next Google Form survey I did for feedback,

I had two out of 170 students mention active reading. That's

it. So for me, there's just some real learning that happens once

I think you get comfortable with yourself and realize you don't

have to be perfect, you don't have to have all the answers.

These kids have really wonderful insights, and you should be

asking them for feedback.

Okay, so now I have a challenge for my co

hosts, and that is, you just heard Catlin say that she would

have encouraged additional flexibility and soliciting

student feedback. Okay, so that's her advice for young

teachers. How can tech teams then support that? You guys are

the tech leaders. So if you had a teacher who came to you and

said one of those things, I'm being kind of uptight about

things, I'd like to be a little more flexible. I'd like to get

some student feedback going. What can a tech leader do to be

responsive to what she just said?

I think the one thing I would go with, and it's

topic we've talked about on the pod before is I would make sure

I was be willing to model for them what I think will work, and

even model failure and how to be adaptive to failure. Because

when you fail, you've learned something, and so you're not

really failing at it. You're just figuring out this wasn't

the way to do that. And I think opening up about the work that

we do on even a day to day basis, maybe you're not modeling

it directly related to the task that you're trying to show them

to do, but to be able to pull out that anecdote or that

example of what you did, what you thought you were going to do

to make things easier, where it fell down, and how you were able

to pivot to get you to where. You are currently with those

things. I think those are important lessons, and they're

ones, particularly with earlier teachers that fear of failure,

you know that I'm doing something wrong, and the

unwillingness or the hesitancy to kind of embrace that as a

learning opportunity is something that I think we need

to do a better job at

Christina. I think what I would encourage this is

really, I think the frosting to what Bill said is, when you have

a young teacher come on in, oftentimes they are completely

unaware of what your school's tech stack is. So when they come

in and they have this interest to do some exploration on how to

reach students at all levels, introduce them to the tools that

you already possess as a school. And to Bill's point, you model

that effectively. You point them to lead teachers that are also

using these certain tools effectively. They may actually

be in different divisions, which means you can get a cross

section of how tools are used across different age groups and

different skill abilities. And so this is an opportunity, I

think, as tech leaders and Ed Tech directors in particular, to

leverage that tech stack that's already been a approved. The

terms of service are all a good thing. The data privacy is in

sync, and there's no risk of this. Said new teacher going out

on their own, trying to find tools that they're trying to

explore, see in order to leverage to reach more students,

take advantage of the tech stack. Keep it up to date.

Catlin, how do you feel about that?

Response? Sounds like some additional good advice. I

Dr Catlin Tucker: love that. I love the modeling bill. I think

what you said is critical. I also would love leadership to be

doing that right, like everybody in the school community should

be modeling learning and failing forward, period. And I do agree,

Hiram, just making the visibility of like this is what

you have access to, and these are some of the pain points and

problems and things that they solve or they do. And also,

here's a teacher using something and doing a pretty awesome job.

Why don't you go check it out?

There's a lot to be concerned about with

education, and we've talked a lot about some of the challenges

in education. But for our final question, can you tell me what

excites you about the future of education? What do you get

really

Dr Catlin Tucker: ramped up about? I love learning. I am

like a huge dork, and so I think for me, I don't think AI, I

don't think tech, it's not saving education. But I think in

the hands of curious, excited, passionate educators, these

tools can help us to transform environments that right now, a

lot of them are like operating like network television, and

everybody's getting like, kind of the same thing at same time,

the same way, whether they like it or not, need it or not, the

pace works or not, and really start to create spaces that work

for teachers and learners, and for me, we're not there yet. It

sometimes feels like an uphill journey to make change in

education, but I see the light, and I want students to enjoy

being in our classrooms and enjoy wrestling with ideas and

feel supported and feel inspired and feel that it's relevant. And

I think all of these things we talked about today, we have

potential to do that.

Dr Catlin Tucker, you are a delight, and I

think that you are like the dream teacher that every tech

team would love to support. Thank you so much for sharing

your insights and for kind of bringing us into that incredible

brain of yours, because I think that you're on to more than a

couple of things here. So this is fantastic. And thank you so

so much.

Dr Catlin Tucker: Oh, my pleasure. It was wonderful to

spend this time with you

guys. This has been talking technology with Atlas,

produced by the Association of technology leaders in

independent schools. For more information about Atlas and

Atlas membership, please visit theatlas.org if you enjoyed this

discussion, please subscribe, leave a review and share this

podcast with your colleagues in the independent school

community. Thank you for listening. You.