1. Pedagogy: The method and practice of teaching, especially as an academic subject or theoretical concept.
2. Professional Development (PD): The process of improving and increasing one’s abilities and knowledge in a professional setting.
3. Initiatives: Planned actions or strategies undertaken to achieve a particular purpose.
4. Bite-sized: Refers to small, easily digestible portions of information or content.
5. Portfolio: A collection of documents or materials that represents a person’s achievements, skills, and experiences.
6. Mobile-based: Relating to or designed for use on mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets.
7. Meta studies: Studies that analyze and summarize the findings of multiple research studies on a particular topic.
8. Condensing: Making something more concise or compressed.
9. Nuggets: Small, valuable pieces of information or insights.
10. Job-embedded: Learning that takes place within the context of one’s job or profession.
11. Embarrassment of riches: An overabundance of something valuable or desirable.
12. Curated content: Selected and organized content chosen for its relevance and quality.
13. Ethics standards: Guidelines and principles governing moral conduct in a particular profession or field.
14. AI (Artificial Intelligence) coaching: The use of artificial intelligence systems to provide guidance, suggestions, or support in a learning context.
15. Instructional strategies: Techniques or methods employed to facilitate effective teaching and learning.
16. Collaborative piece: An element or aspect that involves working together with others towards a common goal.
17. Seat time model: A traditional approach to measuring professional development based on the amount of time spent in training sessions.
18. Integrity: The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles.
19. Sourced: Having a known origin or identified source.
20. Essential questions: Fundamental and thought-provoking questions that guide the learning process and exploration of a topic.

This is the ten minute teacher podcast with your host Vicky Davis. Today’s sponsor is the modern classrooms project. If you’re ready to take a free course on how to center students in your classroom with modern pedagogy, join modern classrooms@coolcatteacher.com. Modern now, I’ll tell you more at the end of the show about this fantastic opportunity to improve of your classroom. Hello, this is Vicki Davis, and I am here at ISTI with some of our experts from ASCD to talk about Quitsby, which is a new PD platform that is mobile based. I know nothing about it, so you’re going to learn along with me, except that I did read all about it, and it sounds really exciting. So we have with us Penny Reinhart. She is deputy executive director of ASCD. And I do want to mention she’s a two time teacher of the year, 18 years with k through eight students, which for me as a teacher carries a lot of credibility. She’s also done stuff with AI, probably before everybody was talking AI. And then we have Rob Lecher. He is managing director of digital and learning products. Thank you guys for coming on the show today. Thank you very much. Yeah. So, Penny, let’s start with you. What is Whitsby? What’s your vision? So, having taught for 18 years, like you mentioned, and then having delivered professional development for about 20, I realized that some of the same problems today are the same problems that we’ve had for years and years. Teachers don’t have enough time. There’s too many initiatives going on, and you really can’t measure the effectiveness of the PD. One of the frustrating things that I had as a teacher was just not being able to apply the pedagogy that I was learning or the strategies I was learning to actually my content area or my grade level of students. When I came to ASCD, I’d worked on several different platforms, and none of them did everything I thought it should do. We decided that we wanted to build a platform that allowed educators and districts and schools to combine their subject matter content, their initiatives, with our quality content, which is things like Carolyn Tomlinson and Jay McTigue and those big names out there, and they could make it their own. And we wanted to create a product that had bite sizes of information because you don’t have time to sit there and listen sometimes to a two hour podcast or video or even go through a 15 hours course. So a lot of teachers don’t have that, and they need solutions at their fingertips. And we needed to be able to look at everything I’ve done in professional development, even if I move district to district to district and have it show one portfolio of everything I’ve done, because I wanted to be able to say, I learned this here, I learned that there, and have that complete record of what I have done in professional learning and show my growth as I move maybe from district to district or school to school. So our vision was to make it very easy for teachers to get PD, for administrators to see what that PD is, to measure the effectiveness and be able to portably take it with me wherever I went so that I’m not starting over all the time. So it’s mobile. It is mobile and portable. I can take what I learn in one district to the next district. I don’t lose my information. Rob, you’ve kind of been the brain trust that’s kind of been doing all the little stuff. You and your team. Oh, boy. I actually love ASCD. Your stuff is always the best. It’s so high quality and so research based. It’s fantastic. That’s what I was struck with when I came to ASCD. I spent ten years in classrooms and schools working. I spent over 15 years doing professional learning for online teachers. And when I got to ASCD, it was immediately clear that the value that we bring to the field from our author, expert practitioners, they have, 90% of our authors have, on average, 16 or more years in classrooms and schools. And so we have all this amazing content. And when Penny shared what the vision was, I immediately started thinking, okay, how do we solve some of those barriers? How do we solve time? Well, one of the ways you can solve time is by condensing and really getting to the nuggets. Right. The things that are applicable that I could use today. We don’t want to get teachers stuck in theory. We want them applying. So we thought about small pieces, we thought about job embedded kinds of work, and also really focusing on leveraging the amazing. It’s an embarrassment of riches, like the content that we have in books and magazines. We have 80 years of El magazine to pull from. And so the first thing that I did was take a look at the research. What does research say about effective professional learning specifically for educators? Because it’s different for lawyers or doctors, but very similar in some ways. And so looked at what the research says, and so looked at meta studies of effective PD and really designed the platform around all of those best practices, because, as you’ve already said, it’s shorter, it’s applied, and a lot of times it’s collaborative with your colleagues. Right. Is there a collaborative piece to this? Yeah. So we are tying the platform into our community platform. And so you might be watching a video, and after the video, there’s reflection questions. You can reflect on that yourself, or you can go to our community and reflect with the hundreds of people or thousands of people who have watched that video in their own schools, in their own districts. And so there is that collaborative piece there as well, because so many educators are islands in their schools in terms of topic or even their passions. They’re passionate about project based learning, or they’re passionate about whatever. And so those, like, mean. That’s why I’m here. It is. Steve. Sometimes schools themselves are islands within their districts because they’re really focusing on their own goals. And one of the things we really wanted to make sure we had in Whitsby was number one self choice for educators. Right. We want to give a choice to them. By the end of July, we should have 50 courses, full courses, sitting there ready. And for the cost of taking one of those courses someplace else, you can get 50 of those courses. It’s an all you can eat platform. We’re not piecemealing you by pay this for this. Right. You get access to it all. Wow. Dozens of what we call learning lists, which are really channels of curated content around topics, topics like writing, great learning objectives. That’s a topic. And there might be videos and articles and book chapters around that. So we make it very easy for an educator to find what they’re looking for right away without having to commit to a course. Penny, this may be for you. So this term, seat, okay. Has kind of been a term that as educators have not liked for a long time, because it’s like you’re telling me that me sitting in a chair for 20 hours is going to prove that I know it when I know that if I don’t take it and apply it into my classroom, that’s what I have to do. I have to little short chunk and then apply it. So how does it equate to the quote seat time model? And how do teachers get professional development credit? Well, we are still measuring the amount of time that you actually spend on something, but we’re taking it a step further. It’s all about reflection. And so the teachers are able to reflect on what they’ve learned and kind of record that we also, in our instructional strategies, they’re able to look at those strategies, work on those strategies, reflect on how effective it was, what changes they need to make, and then go back to that later and adapt those and use them in the classroom. The key thing that we’re doing, though, I think, is the way we’re planning to add AI coaching into the platform. So one of the things that we’re doing first in our AI on the platform is looking at the ethics of AI that we want to apply. That’s critical for us as educators. That’s really a big deal. So we want to make sure that we’re defining what ethics standards we’re going to be utilizing on the AI platform. But we want teachers to be able to go to a course, go to a learning list, and then if they need help in applying that, they have that coach there to help them. So we’re not only building the AI coach, but we’re also building a way for us to have personal coaches in there as well. And of course, the way AI coaches work is you feed them, you have all that training data, and they’re training it with all the ASCD data it sounds like. So that would make it fantastic. Now, one thing I talk a lot about is there’s student facing AI when you’re the learner, and there’s teacher facing AI when you’re teacher. Right. So one of the questions, I guess a lot of us are asking is we’re concerned about our own students harming their learning by not being ethical or honest. And so many of our teacher platforms are just Just asking us to write. Right. They’re not asking us to anything else. And so when the teacher is the student, it kind of makes you wonder, okay, what are you doing to protect the integrity of, this is truly the teacher. Not that teachers are not honest, because I have a great amount of respect for teachers and I think most of us would not be. But there’s always that temptation for somebody out there. Right. There are a few teacher facing AI tools starting to pop up on the market. And one of the pieces that we recognized that we have sort of some issues with, concerns with are the fact that they’re not necessarily sourced. So you have no idea where those results are coming from. Correct. Right. And that’s problematic for us, number one. Number two, they are focused on, not that we don’t want to make teachers lives easier, but they’re focused on making teachers lives easier in ways like, great, here’s your lesson plan. You look at it and you’re like, that’s probably a decent lesson plan for someone who just came out of college. Like, when you look at the quality of lesson plans that they’re creating, it’s not terribly creative work. And so we’re really not focusing so much on write me a lesson plan about. What we’re really focusing on is trying to develop an AI instructional coach. Think about what an instructional coach would do with that person. They wouldn’t write the lesson plan for them. Right. They would say, I see what you did there. Here’s what the research says about this topic and how you’re teaching. Why don’t you try some of these tactics? It’s suggestive. It’s not doing the work for. Right. And sometimes for me, as I have written a lesson plan, because a lot of times I start with my lesson plan and I know what the essential questions are in here. There’s a great book called the Future is faster than you think by Peter Diamandis. And he says that in the next ten years, we will have 100 years of technology change. And that can be scary. But if we just make a commitment to constant PD and constant learning, then we’re just going to learn alongside our students. So thank you both for sitting with us today at ISTI, Penny and Rob and ASCD and just everything that they have going on and this really cool Whitsby tool. No, this is not a commercial for Witsby. And no, they didn’t pay me. I just am actually fascinated with excellent PD people who are actually training AI with high quality data. That’s what we’ve got to get to because as you said, most of the AI out there has just been trained with everything and it’s like spaghetti on the wall. Maybe something will stick, and this is something much better than that. So thank you both for coming on this show. Modern classrooms project will help you bring engaging, exciting teaching to your classroom with their free online course and community. Go to slash modern right now to sign up for the modern classroom’s essential course for free, where you will learn about the strategies, research, and resources that can drive student centered, self directed learning in your classroom. They can show you how to use technology to unlock deeper student relationships with your students. So many people ask me how to respond to artificial intelligence, and my response is always that we need to shift our pedagogical practices into the classroom to the time tested, research based best practices. That is what you get with modern classrooms. So go to coolcatteacher.com modern today and sign up. You’ll be glad you did. You’ve been listening to the ten minute teacher podcast. If you want more content from Vicky Davis, you can find her on Facebook, x.com, TikTok Threads, Instagram, Blue sky, and YouTube at Coolcat Teacher. Thank you for listening.