Why Flint
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Case Study
Why Woodward Academy chose Flint to personalize learning for students with AI
Lulu Gao | lulu@flintk12.com
Connie White | LinkedIn
Aug 21, 2024
Case Study Summary
An introduction to Connie White
As the Director of Learning and Innovation, I oversee curriculum development, drive innovation, and lead schoolwide professional development initiatives. One of the focus areas of my role is leveraging AI to enhance our innovation efforts. Professional development, curriculum development, and working with our AI Committee to safely and effectively address the changes that AI has brought to education has been a priority for the past few years.
What are some of the ways that AI impacts your role?
I work with an AI committee and we have identified, written, incorporated feedback, and communicated a policy for our school. In April of 2024, we shared login information about Flint and a message on why we should use Flint. We wanted a platform to protect the personally identifiable information (PII) of our students as teachers used AI in various situations. We also wanted a safe platform that teachers could use with students if they chose to do so. Flint was a way to be consistent in providing safety measures that would otherwise be unavailable.
We aim to ensure that students gain hands-on experience with AI as part of their academic journey before graduation. To achieve this, we have offered camps, introduced an AI-focused course, and integrated experiences using Flint into our curriculum. These initiatives help students develop skills in crafting effective prompts, understanding how AI operates, having AI serve as a tutor in some cases, and recognizing the potential limitations, and biases inherent in AI systems.
I have been incredibly impressed with both Flint’s responsiveness and the dedication of the Woodward AI committee. This group of highly intelligent and committed individuals is deeply invested in understanding the benefits and challenges of using AI with students. They’ve thoroughly explored how Flint can be utilized in various educational contests and have provided valuable feedback to enhance the platform. The Flint team has consistently risen to the occasion, even addressing complex, high-level physics questions posed by our faculty. I’m truly grateful for how the Flint team adapted their product to meet the evolving needs of our teachers and students.
Woodward’s design of an AI policy
How did you and the AI committee ultimately define your AI strategy and what steps to take with AI over the course of last school year?
In November 2022, schools began to recognize the potential of AI, and by January 2023, Woodward Academy initiated training sessions for leadership and administration. We emphasized that AI was something that we could not ignore due to its significant and growing impact. We highlighted real-world applications of AI already embedded in daily life, like facial recognition, virtual assistants, and self-driving cars. Additionally, we highlighted educational tools using AI such as Grammerly and Duolingo. It’s noteworthy that many of the tools in our Woodward Technology toolkit, including Canva, Formative, and Toddle, have since integrated AI features.
Throughout the year, we brought in AI experts to speak and work with our entire faculty. For example, Eric Hudson led sessions entitled "Generative AI, Our Students and Us and How might AI help Our Students Think?" We also offered school-based training, wrote articles, and offered AI sessions at our annual STLinATL conference.
We formed our AI Committee in the fall of 2023 made up of volunteers who were interested in shaping our policy and testing various products. This group was eager to learn all that they could about AI and its appropriate use at Woodward. We even used AI to help us draft our initial policy but after gathering feedback, we found the first version to be too overreaching. In our next revision, we introduced a usage scale based on the work of Leon Furze, which allowed teachers to clearly indicate and communicate the acceptable level of AI integration for each assignment.
We highlighted student and teacher responsible AI use in our Woodward Academy Policy for the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). With student responsible use, we included four major areas: compliance with AI terms and conditions, recognizing biases and inaccuracies that existed, responsible use of AI on assignments, and proper citation and justification. The responsible use of AI on assignments incorporated a modification of Leon Furze's scale which talks about no use, collaborative use, and the five levels of usage that would be defined for the assignment. For faculty, our policy included the use of approved faculty AI tools, the acceptable use scale and mitigating bias, and grading and feedback.
We also made clear our commitment as an institution to host ongoing professional development and an ongoing review of our policy. AI technology continues to evolve at a rapid rate that necessitates ongoing review and retraining to best support our teachers and students.
Woodward’s adoption of Flint
How did you hear about Flint? What about it stood out to you at first and what made it feel like the right choice for Woodward?
What we appreciate most about Flint is the company’s exceptional responsiveness to our feedback. Flint offers a comprehensive solution that prioritizes safety and security, enabling us to confidently use AI with both students and teachers. Security is our top priority, and Flint’s commitment to safeguarding our community was a crucial foundation for our partnership.
There are many other tools we like—Brisk, for instance, is excellent for adding comments—but it doesn’t offer a comprehensive solution for the entire school. While we might use some of the free tools available, Flint stands out as an all-in-one platform, especially for classroom use. Rather than investing in costly alternatives like ChatGPT for the entire faculty, we can encourage teachers to utilize Flint’s built-in functionalities to achieve the same outcomes.
Flint is a wonderful tool to help us truly personalize learning, allowing us to differentiate instruction and provide targeted remediation for each student. As an independent school, we’re committed to meeting the unique needs of every child. Flint is another valuable tool in our arsenal, helping us continually improve, strive for excellence, and empower our students to reach their full potential.
Uses and impact of Flint
Do you have any concrete examples of how teachers have used Flint or use cases that really stood out to you with Flint?
Each year we administer a suite of ERB assessments, a standardized assessment used in many independent schools. We administer the first ERB Milestone, which is a shorter assessment, in the areas of reading comprehension and math computation in October and February before the ERB CTP, which is administered at the end of the year.
We administer the ERB Milestones in order to identify student learning gaps or strength areas early in the year in order to provide instructional interventions and/or enrichment opportunities when needed. Teachers can use Flint’s Friendly AI to differentiate and personalize instruction for our students. Teachers can generate practice problems, create discussion prompts, and generate case studies targeting specific standards. Increasing the productivity of teachers with this safe resource can be an amazing, time-saving benefit.
As you've worked with the tech specialists and teachers to roll out Flint at your school, how has it gone and what has stood out in their usage?
We're still in the process of fully rolling it out. We have communicated that Flint is available and individual schools are now offering training sessions for teachers. Creating tutors to generate student feedback, accessing the library of ideas, featured templates, and more will be part of the training.
Future of AI at Woodward and final thoughts
What else do you imagine the Flint + Woodward partnership enabling, in terms of using AI to personalize education for students?
As we move forward, we want to eventually identify, flesh out, and update cornerstone performance tasks in our courses. These performance tasks are opportunities to integrate disciplinary skills as well as our Portrait of a Graduate skills. Engaging students in real-world applications is possible as teachers think outside the box to inspire our students. For example, in my class last year, we used a Flint tutor to conduct an interview with Jennifer Doudna the author of Code Breakers, the story of her Nobel Prize-winning work on gene editing and CRISPR technology. This approach illustrates how we can integrate innovative tools to enhance learning experiences.
I have found the example templates that you've put together to be extremely valuable. I plan to incorporate them into my own class. We'll encourage teachers to look at those templates and think about how they could modify those or create their own to utilize this technology and help their students become familiar with it.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
As it relates to Flint, we've been really pleased with your responsiveness as well as the ongoing research and development that has happened over this past year to continually improve your product. We have identified certain things that would be helpful and Flint has always exceeded our expectations. I am thankful to partner with Flint as we help our school learn to leverage the benefits of AI.
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