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Robots Programmed by Students Ease Staff Shortage Strain
Grapevine-Colleyville (Texas) independent school district students are learning practical technology skills to ease staffing shortages in its facilities and maintenance department, according to an article in EdTech magazine.
The district’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Kyle Berger is using robots programmed by students in the district to automate tasks such as cutting the grass and cleaning the floors in schools. Science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) lessons are used especially to program robotic automation and device repairs.
K-12 schools nationwide today face challenges with staffing. Teacher shortages make headlines across the country, and schools are feeling the strain in other departments, too, such as IT, transportation, food service and maintenance. Berger is sharing what he has learned with other districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex and beyond. Few K-12 schools use robotics and automation for facilities maintenance.
Berger’s ideas for robotic automation and device repairs generally do not generate pushback from administrators due to the bottom-line benefits. Projects that cannot be completed by students, such as network upgrades, are sourced out to services.
Grapevine-Colleyville independent school district (GCISD) has 11 elementary schools, 4 middle schools, 3 high schools, 2 alternative schools and a virtual academy. In 2021-2022 the district had a student population of 13,930. As a District of Innovation (a concept created by the Texas legislature), GCISD may choose to be exempt from uniform start date, minimum minutes of instruction, class size ratio, the 90 percent attendance rule and other items.
Classroom Creativity Reduces Burnout; Improves Teacher and Student Well-being
At least 15 years ago it was a question of when – not if – teachers would flame out toward the end of the year, writes teacher Brian Johnsrud, Ph.D., in an Adobe blog post. With ideal conditions, some teachers could make it until April. Others showed signs of burnout by mid-year.
A survey of K-12 teachers produced expected results. More than half reported experiencing burnout. Sixty-six percent shared feelings of complete exhaustion. Classroom management, low student engagement and student mental health contributed to teachers’ deteriorating well-being.
One promising nugget jumped out of the data: teachers who practiced creativity or integrated creativity in the curricula reported lower levels of stress and mental fatigue for themselves and their students.
Ninety-five percent of educators said fostering creativity leads to better mental health and less stress for themselves and their students. Of respondents who used creative activities with students in the past year, 82 percent saw positive impacts on student well-being and engagement, leading to teachers’ increased feelings of satisfaction and less burnout.
“Creative learning allows for stronger relationships between student and teacher,” said a 5th-grade teacher. “This creates a more positive environment for both. It also gives me a break from direct instruction while the students are working, giving me time to appreciate their talents and creativity I might otherwise not see.”
“Being able to be creative and involved in creative activities with students gives me an opportunity to connect with them,” said a high school library and media specialist in the survey. “This makes me feel that I have made an impact on my school and students.”
Creative activities emanate from an almost endless well of ideas and projects:
- Create a multimedia biography for a historical character
- Adapt your name into an acrostic poem
- Make a poster sharing a memory from your perspective
- Design a poster to illustrate a figure of speech
- Design an infographic about a historical figure
- Create an infographic to visualize a geometry concept.
- Design a poster presenting your dream career
- Design a poster to share an important memory
- Design an infographic to illustrate a chemistry concept
- Create a web page to analyze bias on social media
- Design a magazine cover on note events or people
Research shows micro-activities of creative expression throughout the school year can have a significant impact. Think 10-minute creative prompts are the beginning of a department meeting. Or 15-minute creative challenges at the beginning of a class each Friday. Or 30-minute creative kick-starters at the beginning of a new unit.
Schools can help educators manage their mental health struggles, daily stress levels, and growing list of responsibilities by giving them an outlet to release their own creative expression. A school-wide culture of creative teaching should draw on the support and inspiration of other creative educators.
ChatGPT Is Omnipresent In One District – Here's What It Looks Like
ChatGPT has found a home in the Wichita district in Kansas, according to an article in Education Week. The district has integrated artificial intelligence technology into almost every aspect of daily life.
The 50,000-student district embraced the new technology soon after it was introduced last year. And the district has no plans on stopping.
Rob Dickson, chief information officer in the district, became familiar with the new chatbot at about the time it launched in 2022. Immediately, he presented it to the district leadership, and district leaders decided staff members across the district need to be trained as well as the leaders.
The first teachers to be trained were instructional coaches. “The main thing with teaching teachers about any technology is to introduce how it is going to help them save time in the classroom,” said Tia Jones, a technology instructional coach. “At the start some were very, very excited and some were a little bit hesitant.”
The entire educational staff was given access to ChatGPT and then participated in a district-wide summer “ChatGPT camp” to master the ins and outs of the chatbot and maximize its use in classrooms.
Only faculty and staff in Wichita Public Schools have access to ChatGPT. If a student is using AI in the classroom, they must be supervised.
Said one middle school teacher: “Sometimes with teachers we have these really cool ideas and dreams we want to accomplish. The logistics or the small details end up bogging us down. ChatGPT is a good way of getting unstuck. It makes things so much quicker, finding ways to use AI to help get feedback to kids, help lesson plans, even to help communicate with parents and make those things more streamlined.”
It was challenging to reduce stigma surrounding AI with many of the teachers on district campuses. Teachers are worried that kids aren’t going to be able to think for themselves. District administrators said grappling with the new technologies is essential to guide students in how to use it.
One example of using ChatGPT: the coordinator of digital literacy and citizenship wanted to use shadow puppetry as an introduction to a unit on Mesopotamia for 11-year-olds and asked ChatGPT for help describing ancient Mesopotamia and work done there.
The school system has figured out how to use ChatGPT to its advantage in almost every possible position in the district. One teacher drops emails and instructions into ChatGPT and asks it to rewrite for clarity, optimism, positivity, and to add emojis to provide context for students when English may not be their first language.
Another example: a teacher searching for research will go to ChatGPT and say, “Give me five articles based on critical reading processes that I can share with teachers.” Teachers do have to go into ChatGPT content and make sure research articles, for one example, are appropriate for the teachers’ goals. Many teachers use ChatGPT as a “good starting point,” as one said.
Some teachers copy and paste student work in ChatGPT and ask for feedback to improve their work.
It’s not necessarily grading the paper. I planned an entire semester of lessons using ChatGPT as a tool. AI is not going to replace us, but it can really help us save time,” said one teacher.
Want to Fix Bad Behavior? Stop Punishing Students
Bad student behavior “continues to escalate,” said Matt Cretsinger, director of special services for the Marshalltown Community School District, in an article in Education Next. “There are more behavioral needs than we’ve ever seen… it’s a shock to teachers.”
The numbers tell the story. “We’re suspending kids like there’s no tomorrow; we’re giving detentions even more than that,” said Russ Greene, a student behavior specialist. “We’re expelling to the tune of 100,000 students a year.” Corporal punishment is at 100,000 instances per year, restraint or seclusion is close to that, and school arrests total more than 50,000 per year, according to Greene.
Incrementally, a small but growing number of schools, teachers and administrators are changing how they handle misbehavior. With hundreds of research studies reporting that students who respond poorly to problems and frustrations are lacking skills, these schools are engaged in putting an end to punitive discipline. They want to take the focus off student behavior and train staff to recognize, and avoid, situations likely to fire up bad behavior.
If something is triggering outbursts from children, simply asking them to sit quietly at their desks or giving them a surprise quiz are examples of how teachers can find alternatives to accomplish what is needed.
Not blaming children for their outburst requires a paradigm shift that’s long overdue, according to some practitioners. Mona Delahooke, a pediatric psychologist, uses her own go-to phrase: “Children don’t throw tantrums, tantrums throw children.”
But old mindsets die hard. Even when people agree that suspensions and other punishments aren’t working, they fall back on these tools if an alternative can’t be found.
And the research is pretty clear about what works and what doesn’t. One study concluded that out-of-school suspensions for middle school students had a negative, not positive, effect on students’ future behavioral incidents. These students were more likely to be suspended in the future, the study found. Severely disciplining high school students “does not serve as a deterrent for future misbehavior” the same study concluded.
When disciplinary tactics have been reduced, it means a school has structured itself so those outcomes are not the default methods anymore. The focus shifts from the behavior of the student to identifying expectations the student is having a hard time meeting, and then engaging with students to solve those disconnects in one-on-one conversations.
Schools implementing any model that adheres to these non-discipline basics will need at least a year to train staff, allow them to practice methods, and provide coaching on their efforts.
Teacher Shortage Revives “Zoom-in-a-Room”
Online instruction in school has for years linked students to subjects they otherwise couldn’t take, such as A.P. Calculus or Latin. But districts are increasingly using online technology platforms to teach core subjects – a consequence of the ongoing shortage of teachers, according to a report posted by The 74.
More than 40 percent of the nation’s schools reported teacher vacancies last year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Districts are spending thousands, sometimes millions of dollars on virtual teachers, according to The 74’s review of purchase orders in GovSpend, a data service.
“This is happening all over,” said Jennifer Carolan, co-founder and partner in Reach Capital, a firm investing in education companies. She estimates approximately a dozen companies offer virtual teaching – “meaningful scale” in her words.
Given the lack of teachers, district leaders assert a virtual teacher is better than none at all.
“You’ve got to find a way to get instruction in front of those children,” said Andy Pruitt, spokesman for the Charleston County schools in South Carolina.
Charleston paid more than $450,000 for virtual teachers in math, language arts and social studies for 22 classes across seven schools last year – and sent an email to parents informing them of the practice prior to the start of school. But the district, using federal relief funds to give each of its almost 3,600 teachers a $5,000 bonus this year, doesn’t expect to need virtual teachers this year.
About an hour west of Charleston, the 4,900-student Colleton County School District will again this school year fill positions with virtual teachers. Last year students had virtual distance learning for required courses in algebra, biology, English and history. The district’s school board approved $18,000 for high-tech cameras that allow virtual teachers to see the entire classroom and deter students from wandering out of class.
Demand for virtual teachers is skyrocketing. Annual spending by districts on one virtual platform increased from $6.3 million in 2020 to more than $21 million last year.
“It seems to be developing into a behind-the-scenes boom industry, said Kerry Chisnall, principal of Hawley Middle School in Creedmoor, North Carolina. The school used four virtual K-12 teacher last year.
15 Detroit Schools' Multilayered Effort to Reduce Absenteeism
After missing four days of classes last fall at Gompers Elementary-Middle School, Jay’Sean Hull was called into the cafeteria with 100 other students with similar attendance records, according to a report in Chalkbeat Detroit.
The group was introduced to attendance agent Effie Harris, a key figure in the school’s efforts to improve on a dismal statistic. The previous school year, 82 percent of students in the northwest Detroit school were chronically absent, meaning they missed 18 or more days.
Harris explained that the students had been selected for a relatively new program pairing students at risk of becoming chronically absent with 20 adult mentors in the building.
Jay’Sean’s mentor: Harris herself. Over the next few weeks, she would greet the sixth-grader at a side entrance designated for middle schoolers, visit him in his classrooms on days that he arrived late, and regularly check in with his family.
This high-touch, relationship-based investment was part of a multipronged approach at Gompers last school year to tackle a problem with tragic consequences: Chronically absent students are more likely to become disengaged from school and more likely to drop out, research shows.
Gompers Principal Akeya Murphy, a veteran educator, tapped just about every staff member to help with the effort. Along with the mentorship program, the school dispatched staff to students’ homes to help families solve problems contributing to absenteeism, used data to track attendance patterns, and offered incentives ranging from field trips to the local movie theater for students to grocery store gift cards for parents.
Murphy, Harris, and other leaders at Gompers set an ambitious goal for last school year: to shave 20 percentage points off the school’s chronic absenteeism rate.
When Murphy became principal at Gompers at the start of 2022-23, she made sure to move the attendance agent’s office into the main office, a decision she hoped would amplify the importance of student attendance to families as they walked into the building.
Harris spends a portion of her days reaching out by phone and in person to parents and caregivers, trying to help them make plans to get their kids to class. It can be difficult, she said, stressing to families how two absences a month can quickly add up to a student being chronically absent.
The conference room at Gompers is testament to the school leaders’ determination to make a dent in absenteeism. On all four walls are dozens of easel paper sheets, with handwriting in bright pink, green and orange marker. Each sheet details strategies Gompers staff have employed to try to make kids come to school every day.
Field trips to the local movie theater and bowling alley. Gas and grocery store gift cards for parents. Arts and crafts activities in the gymnasium. A mobile video game truck. “Gator Bucks,” named after the school’s mascot, for students who complete classroom assignments and exhibit positive behavior.
“These are the kinds of things that we’re discussing, constantly thinking and trying to be innovative about,” Murphy said. “How can we entice kids and make sure that families are consistently bringing their children to school?”
While incentives are a significant part of Murphy’s vision to encourage student attendance, relationship building remains the core tenet of the school’s efforts.
“Children need to know that you care for them, that they’re in a safe space, that they have a trusted adult that they can communicate with and someone that is building a relationship with them, because that’s going to open the pathway for learning,” she said.
By the end of the year, the chronic absenteeism rate declined to 64 percent — just shy of the 20-point decline school officials were aiming for, but down significantly.
Encouraged by the progress last year, Gompers school staff plan to continue their strategies in the new school year that began this week.
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