AI-Powered Teaching: Voices from the School Teams AI Collaborative
12/13/2024
Examples of AI-Powered Teaching in Practice
As educators work to meet an evolving set of student needs and hopes, AI-powered teaching offers schools a unique opportunity to improve upon traditional teaching and learning models. However, for educators to harness new classroom practices, they need access to tangible, actionable examples of how AI can support their work, improve student experiences, and promote equitable learning outcomes.
This is where the School Teams AI Collaborative steps in. Developed through a partnership between Leading Educators and The Learning Accelerator, the Collaborative brings together school-based teams from 19 schools across diverse contexts to experiment with AI-enabled instructional practices, share what they learn, and refine promising practices for real-world application. Our goal is to help educators explore the possibilities of AI, not just as a tool for efficiency but as a catalyst for deeper learning and student engagement.
We’re excited to highlight three examples of how educators in the Collaborative are innovating with AI to meet their unique classroom needs. From practicing interview skills with AI stand-ins to creating accessible content for multilingual learners and harnessing AI for purposeful efficiency, these stories showcase the creative ways AI is being integrated into instructional practice.
Building Confidence with AI as an Interviewee
Jennifer Kosloski is a 7-12th grade advisor and co-founder at Valley New School in Appleton, Wisconsin. Her innovative use of AI in education is helping students build confidence and sharpen essential skills.
At the heart of their personalized learning plans is a project-based process in which students are required to utilize primary research. For many projects, this means conducting interviews with local experts who can provide insights into their project’s topic area—a daunting task for many students, especially after years of limited social interaction during the pandemic’s emergency remote learning.
To support her students, Kosloski introduced ChatGPT as a practice tool. Students used it for:
- Question Generation: Students prompt ChatGPT to suggest interesting questions for their interviews. This involved synthesizing their preliminary research to identify areas of curiosity and then using AI to refine and expand their question set. This process often introduces students to new vocabulary, subtopics, or search terms they hadn’t considered, unlocking further avenues for exploration.
- Role-Playing with AI: Students asked ChatGPT to act as a field expert — e.g., “a retired heart surgeon with 40 years of experience” —and practiced conducting interviews with their generated questions. This simulated experience helped students develop critical soft skills like active listening, reordering questions in response to the conversation’s flow, and asking follow-ups.
- Critical Analysis: As students engage with ChatGPT, they sometimes encounter vague or unexpected answers. This pushes them to clarify misunderstandings, verify the tool’s responses against their existing research, and refine their understanding. In some cases, discrepancies between ChatGPT’s answers and their secondary sources spark deeper learning as students analyze and reconcile the differences.
Kosloski’s approach reframed AI as a partner in learning rather than a threat: “We were hearing people in the media saying, ‘What are we going to do about this?’ And we reframed it and said, ‘What are we going to do with this, and how is it going to help our students?’”
Valley New School developed this Project Checklist to support students with how and when AI might be integrated into their project process.
Expanding Access for Multilingual Learners with AI
Marquitta Pope is a 9-12th grade visual arts teacher at United Charter High School for the Humanities II in Bronx, New York. She uses AI to break down language barriers, creating an inclusive classroom for her multilingual learners while honoring the value of using multiple languages as a resource for language learning.
Pope leverages AI tools to transcribe YouTube videos into students’ primary languages, providing bilingual captions that allow them to engage with lessons independently and at their own pace. “It’s like creating individualized stations,” she explains. “They can pause, process, and respond in their own time.”
By incorporating students’ primary languages into instruction, Pope supports their understanding of the material and fosters a deeper connection between their linguistic strengths and new learning as they deepen their understanding of the English language and progress within their ENL class and beyond. It also creates an inclusive learning environment where multilingual learners can engage with the same materials as their monolingual, English-speaking peers.
By embracing AI, Pope empowers her students to leverage their linguistic strengths, ensuring that language differences become opportunities for growth rather than barriers to learning. AI tools like Brisk also help Pope generate quizzes in multiple languages from videos incorporated into her instruction that can be viewed in students’ native languages. This saves valuable time while ensuring that her students’ academic abilities are accurately assessed, avoiding a common misinterpretation of a language difference as an academic gap. As a result, Pope can develop a more complete picture of student understanding that allows for more informed instructional decisions.
According to Pope, leadership at United Charter High School promotes the safe use of AI. Within that, she has the flexibility to design the visual arts curriculum, which allows her to experiment safely.
One of the values we’ve held [in the AI Collaborative] is to dare to experiment, and I did that with this application,” Pope shares. “I did not know what it was going to give me, but it gave me an opportunity to create something very quickly. I ask my students to take their time seriously and think critically. This application allowed me the opportunity to do that, and I’m grateful to be able to share it with others.”
Using AI for Purposeful Efficiency
Zach Kennelly is a 12th-grade AP Psychology, Civics, and AI Pilot teacher at College View High School in Denver, Colorado. His approach to AI emphasizes purposeful efficiency — not just saving time, but creating space for deeper, more impactful teaching and learning. As an AP Psychology and Civics educator, Kennelly uses AI to streamline routine tasks like research, summarizing, and feedback generation. This frees him to focus on implementing his newly adopted AP Psychology and Civics curriculum, leading complex student projects, and fostering critical discussions about AI ethics and responsibility.
Kennelly views AI not as the most powerful tool in the classroom but as a means of amplifying what matters most: the passion and expertise of teachers and students.
The tech isn’t magic,” Kennelly explains. “But the tech can drive results for your community.”
This belief underpins his work with students, encouraging them to not just use AI passively but also to direct it intentionally toward building projects that matter to them and their communities.
A standout example of this approach is a voter engagement app that Kennelly’s students recently created. With AI tools like Playlab and other proprietary platforms, students developed a resource to educate and engage voters across Colorado for an upcoming election. This authentic project increased their pride and ownership while fostering real-world impact.
For Kennelly, leveraging AI allows students to iterate faster, receive meaningful feedback, and see the results of their efforts in authentic contexts. He notes that when assignments feel purposeful, students are motivated by curiosity and passion, not grades.
Cheating goes out the window,” he says. “It’s not about the grade. It’s about building something that matters to us and our community… So much of what really matters for many students is an authentic audience.” Kennelly asks about his students, “Do they get to build something that people see that the students feel really drives value in the world?”
Kennelly’s intentional use of AI creates space to foster creativity, deeper learning, and fulfillment — not just for students and teachers, but for the community at large. “AI is not just about saving time,” Kennelly concludes. “It’s about doing better work in the time that we have.”
Building on Teachers’ Brilliance
The School Teams AI Collaborative is all about exploring how practical applications of AI can build upon the brilliance of teachers — not replace it — to drive meaningful instructional outcomes for students. The innovative practices shared by Kosloski, Pope, and Kennelly demonstrate how AI tools are already enhancing student confidence, expanding access to content, and creating purposeful efficiency to deepen learning.
These stories are just the beginning of what’s possible when educators harness AI’s potential to transform teaching and learning. During this pilot year, we will continue to share learnings and resources from the Collaborative.
We encourage you to explore these examples, reflect on how they might inspire your own practice, and join us in continuing the conversation about AI’s role in education. Together, we can unlock new opportunities for equitable, student-centered learning.
About the Authors
Sandra Jin is the Director of Innovation at Leading Educators and a former and forever teacher who continues to be inspired by her experiences in the classroom. She is driven by her belief in self-determination as a right for every child, designing innovative programs and practices at the intersection of impactful pedagogy, student agency, and technology.
Jin-Soo Huh is a Partner at The Learning Accelerator. He brings over a decade of experience as a teacher and administrator implementing and scaling innovative, student-centered learning models. He strongly believes in the power of collaboration and works to share resources and connect people so challenges can collectively be solved.
This piece was originally published by The Learning Accelerator.
