Campfire Session
Jan 15, 2026
Discover how to lead effective educator training in this campfire session on running a PD, covering Flint demos, hands-on strategies, and rollout tips.
Jacob Edington, Head of Customer Success at Flint
In this Running PD with Flint Campfire Session, we focused on how to design and lead effective professional development that helps teachers use Flint confidently, responsibly, and meaningfully in their classrooms. Framed as a train-the-trainer workshop, the session was tailored for instructional coaches, tech directors, PD leads, and school leaders rolling out Flint across their schools or districts.
Content covered in this session includes:
Context-setting on AI in education, drawing on recent articles from Education Week and Brookings to frame current AI trends, the “AI hype” cycle, and the growing demand for practical, high-quality PD around AI tools.
A “Flint for Beginners” PD outline, including how to introduce Flint, explain core concepts (chats vs. activities), and structure a first training session that balances demonstration, Q&A, and hands-on time.
A “Flint Leveling Up” PD outline for more experienced users, with a focus on better prompting practices, improving existing activities, and helping teachers move from experimentation to more intentional, high-impact use.
Live demonstrations of building and refining activities, including brainstorming in chat, converting chats into activities, previewing sessions as a student, and using rubrics with teacher-controlled grading.
Strategies for hands-on PD activities, such as having teachers duplicate and adapt public library activities, experience them as students, and then revise them to fit their own subjects and classrooms.
A deep dive into Groups and Gradebook as the backbone of classroom use, highlighting how teachers can organize classes, track submissions, review grades, and use group-level settings to support differentiation.
Use of analytics for instructional insight, showing how teachers and leaders can surface class strengths and weaknesses, review flagged content, and prompt Sparky for summaries that inform instruction and follow-up PD.
Examples of how Flint can support roles beyond classroom teaching, including librarians, counselors, and school leaders who use activities and analytics for guidance, feedback, and broader school initiatives.
Practical rollout tips for successful Flint PD, such as preparing teacher accounts in advance, leveraging Flint 101, mixing departments during PD, and building in time for collaboration and real-world planning.
Guidance on addressing skepticism and hesitation about AI, including talking points around academic integrity, cognitive development, responsible use, and how Flint supports rather than replaces teacher expertise.
Slides from the presentation can be found here.
Got more questions, comments, or feedback for this topic? Feel free to raise them within the Flint Community.
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Introduction • 00:00
Jacob introduces the session and agenda.
Ice-breaking news • 01:24
Discussions reference article from Education Week and the AI glow weariness, highlighting need for both student and staff preparation.
Sherronda Brown notes timeliness of article for program directors and considers how to evaluate offerings for instructors and organization.
Jacob Edington emphasizes a collective, purposeful approach to AI adoption and previews related articles, including Brookings Institute piece and Flint-specific AI applications.
Michaela Freeland notes rising AI program costs and Flint consolidating options to stay affordable.
Jacob Edington emphasizes Flint's role in safe, integrated AI use and references Brookings guidance.
Jacob Edington highlights that Flint integrates without replacing entire lesson plans, as part of teachers’ toolbox.
Training the trainer overview • 07:29
Jacob reviews what will be covered in the campfire session, including PD structure, key talking points, interactive strategies
The goal is to equip you with the structure and confience to train teachers within your school
Flint PD for beginners • 08:57
Sparky enables quick activity creation by starting from a chat brainstorm and auto-generating a prebuilt Flint activity.
World languages departments often embrace Flint quickly due to capabilities like speech-to-text and conversational features, illustrating broader adoption dynamics.
A guided workflow shows how to turn a chat into an activity, with an outline that updates in real time as changes are made.
Sparky’s configuration is discussed, highlighting how it can be tailored at three levels (teacher, learning goals, and school) to reduce overly friendly responses and behave more as a teaching assistant.
Flint PD for leveling up • 15:12
The trigger for converting a chat into an activity is explained as a conversational or in-chat process, with proactive conversion capabilities clarified.
A demonstration of transforming chat content into a structured activity is shown, including how original prompts, summaries, and the captured examples move into the activity and accompanying rubric.
Seeing Flint in action • 32:36
A live demonstration of using the public library; teachers select and duplicate activities, then customize them for their class.
A German-language activity is adapted for Christmas market presentations, including changes to language, grade level, and rubric options.
The speaker highlights the new gradebook feature and its basic functionality for tracking completion and linking to activities.
The speaker explains background and context settings for groups, including learning goals, teacher-background, and a specific example of a 10th grade world history IB class in Kansas City, Missouri, with five English language learners and a need for visuals.
Best practices for Flint professional development • 43:42
Jacob discusses collaboration structures within sessions, recommending cross-department seats and subgroups, and highlights the benefit of group analytics and differentiated activities.
Jacob mentions practical tips for session preparation, including pre-built activities and questions to guide teacher use, and signals the upcoming slide deck with links.
A discussion about PD logistics and analytics access for teachers and admins is held, including who can view personal conversations and the introduction of potential new roles.
Lulu Gao addresses student ambassador program activity and cautions on teacher-student collaboration when creating activities, suggesting shared ownership and duplicates for safety.
Conclusion • 1:03:22
Praveen Rana raises concerns about controlling AI usage in classrooms and how Flint can regulate external resources, seeking guidance on implementation.
To learn more, folks can go to the Campfire Calendar, Flint's Instagram (which has a bunch of teacher-facing content), and the Flint Community.
