How Wesleyan School formed their AI position and expanded learning possibilities with Flint

When generative AI came about, what did that look like at Wesleyan?

We all remember around Thanksgiving a few years back when generative AI dropped, and we were all hearing it on the news and the radio. Immediately when that happened, our high school principal said, “This is going to be a game changer. This is something we really need to start understanding.” 

So, for that first year starting in November 2022, Wesleyan’s AI goal for the next six months was AI education—to educate the teachers, to educate the parents, and to understand what the students knew about AI. In that brief period, our school decided we needed to educate all of our stakeholders before we just kind of let AI explode. The reaction to initially block AI programs like ChatGPT, even in hindsight, was a smart reaction as we used this time to educate teachers that AI was coming and, eventually, it's going to be allowed for student use in our school.

So, in this little time that we had, we learned. We held parent coffees where we just talked about AI and how it was going to change our workforce. We held trainings with teachers based on things like ChatGPT, how they could use it to lighten their workload, and then how it might affect the content that they were teaching. 

Last school year, 2023-2024, we formed AI committees comprised of a teacher from every department, middle school and high school. We wanted to have a good meld of teachers in those committees.

What were the goals of the committees and how did they achieve those goals?

Committees had just two meetings based on lunch periods of the day: a middle school meeting and then a high school meeting. And then our fourth-grade teachers joined the middle school because at the time we thought that was as far down as AI is going to go. But now, seeing things that are coming out, maybe our first graders might touch a little bit in Flint.

The members were given four goals at the start of the committee that we were going to work on throughout the year:

1. Acquire a working understanding of AI.

2. Learning how to best integrate AI within each academic department using Flint and other tools.

3. Define academic integrity with AI.

4. Create a school-wide AI policy.

To address goal number one, we used Matt Miller's book, AI for Educators and that was basically how we started the committees—educating our teachers. We read about a quarter of it for each meeting and then had discussion points. And I think this was a really eye-opening book for the teachers just because Matt Miller is a teacher himself, so he's speaking to teachers who are scared of technology and he helps them understand why this is going to be so important for their profession, for their students.

For the second goal, all of our teachers in that committee were asked to use Flint, create at least one lesson with their students, and come back to the committee with their feedback. Flint was the main AI tool that we wanted to focus on mainly for the safety standards and security that our teachers had around it. At that point, we basically said teachers can use ChatGPT for themselves, but it's not really something we want to be using with our students. Flint is built on ChatGPT so we can harness GPT’s power while still having the safeguards.

The third goal—defining academic integrity with AI—was really the big one. A lot of the teachers who joined the academic committee wanted to help form the school AI policy. This was a big one for them because they didn't want an AI free-for-all at our school. Some of them were kind of scared of AI still, so they wanted to be part of that discussion of what academic integrity with AI is. 

Finally, the big ending goal was to create the school-wide policy. 

So, how did your committees go about forming an AI policy?

Our fourth-grade teacher, Megan Smith, was probably one of the biggest users of Flint to start off with. She had an aha moment where she saw how our policy would take shape. It was not so much going to be a policy, but rather more of a model of how to use AI. She used to be an educational technology coach, similar to my role and she did all of her teaching based on the SAMR model, which is a framework for how you integrate technology.

So, she based our policy on the SAMR model, which reflects how technology can transform or enhance learning. That's where the middle part of our chart came from. The middle covers how Flint either enhanced a lesson or transformed a lesson. 

So even though our policy is geared towards a student, the middle part is really for teachers to realize, “Oh, I could transform this science lab by having students actually interact with a real-world scenario”, or, “if it's just the generation level, instead of an entire real-world scenario, we're just going to use AI to build background knowledge on these chemicals we're using.” Meghan found that Flint could be used in all of these different ways.

The big decision point we had in the committee was, “Can students just use AI to study, however they need to study?” That was a big question, discussion-wise, across all departments. We eventually landed on yes. They can use it to study outside of a specific assignment.

Secondly,  at the start of the school year during pre-planning, each department decided if they were going to use an AI cover sheet. This mostly applied to our English department where students were writing essays and they wanted the teachers—if they were going to allow the students to use AI—to mark off which part of integration they were using and then describe in detail specifically how the students were allowed to use it. The English department chair wanted to ensure that all bases were covered for academic integrity and that everyone understood what was expected of them and what was not allowed. 

It was interesting because as we were explaining the new AI policy there were definitely teachers who were very hesitant. However, the teachers from the committee that we had were so excited and shared their personal testimonies about how they were sitting in the audience’s shoes a year ago, but then used it in their class, and it was really useful. “Here's how I did it. Just try.” 

They really became the cheerleaders, which is what my goal as a tech coach is. I can never go out and meet with every single teacher and get them all excited about something. You have to start with a few people and get them excited, and they will spread it within their community. Knowledge within their department is really the biggest thing. And so, in any project I work on, that's how I try to get the excitement going for something new in the school: target a few and then hope those few become the cheerleaders for it.

Are there any other details that you want to add about how you formed the AI policy?

One of the other details that came up at the end of last school year was citing AI. The MLA Chicago APA citation guides are geared towards more of your Gemini or ChatGPT chatbot style of AI tools. When our teachers started using Flint with their students, and, for example, in an essay Flint was telling them to change big parts of their essay, the teachers kind of stuck their heads up and questioned, “But, how do we cite this? And how do we teach our students to cite it?” 

There really was no guide for it. If you follow citation guides for regular generative AI, it's kind of confusing to use with Flint because although you can share a link to the Flint chat, the name of the chat is what the teacher created. So, we wanted to create our own little guide for how to cite Flint in the MLA and APA style, just so our teachers felt really confident that we were all teaching citation the same way to our students. And of course, it's based on both MLA and APA styles, but we just tweaked a few things here and there.

Another one of our big initiatives was making the AI policy a poster. It is a poster now that's in all the hallways and all the classrooms. It's everywhere, and students are well aware of it. We're also, in the next few weeks or so, going to make a student version of this AI policy presentation with a video and then have a short quiz at the end. That way, we know they understand what this graphic that they're seeing in all their classrooms means. That's our next big step—making sure our students understand this policy since it's new this year and they signed off in their handbook that they understand it.