Navigating the Future: Stokes County District’s Journey to GenAI Policy & Paradigm Shift in EdTech

PRESENTERS

Kimberley Thompson-Hairston

Dr. T-H is a dedicated AI enthusiast and experienced educator with over 16 years in the field. She combines her passion for teaching, leadership, and technology to explore AI’s transformative role in education, consistently driving meaningful learning and student success.

Brooke Johnson

Brooke serves as the Instructional Technology Facilitator for Stokes County Schools. Previously she was a middle school ELA and Social Studies teacher. Brooke supports educators in integrating innovative tech tools to enhance teaching and learning while fostering creativity and collaboration.

TRANSCRIPT

Kelly Fitzgerald:

So thrilled to welcome our two presenters, both from Stokes County Schools in North Carolina, Dr. Kimberly Thompson. Harrison is the director of Media and Technology, and Brooke Johnson is the instructional technology facilitator. Thank you two so much for joining us today. I am going to go ahead and turn the time over to you.

Dr. Kimberley Thompson-Hairston:

Wonderful. Thank you for having us. I’ll have Brooke launch our presentation and I will say it is definitely a journey and a journey that we are still on, but it’s leading to bigger and better things for our district and for our students. So Brooke, I’ll let you go ahead and advance slide there. So just a little bit about me. I’ve been with Stokes County since August of 23 in this role. My previous role, I was an instructional coach for eight years and then an administrator after that. So I’ve only been with Stokes County for a short period of time, but our state has initiated gen AI policy at the state level and provided a multitude of opportunities for us to learn about gen ai and that’s really where Brooke and I got into being able to do this work. So I’ll let Brooke give a little background about herself.

Brooke Johnson:

Hi, I’m Brooke Johnson. I am the ITF for our school district. I serve as the only ITF for 17 schools, but I am born and raised in Stokes County and now I have the pleasure of having my office at the high school that I graduated from. So I am really passionate about ai. So when all of this came to be, we really wanted to jump on this and we love what we do, so we thought we would share it out with you guys.

Dr. Kimberley Thompson-Hairston:

So our goals today is really to understand the need for gen AI policy, learn how we went through our policy development process, talk about implementation strategies. It does come with challenges, so we’ll talk about our challenges and the solutions we had and then evaluate for impact and future direction, which is where we are right now, which is exciting. So some key takeaways we want to share with you is we leaned on the AI for Education framework, which was really important for us to have a solid framework for our policy development share best practices that we have work through during our implementation project, challenges and adaptations, addressing challenges and solutions, and then just our vision for AI and education.

So why now? I think more than anything we rely heavily on research. I am a researcher at heart and actually working on research projects actively around the topic of gen ai. It is rapidly evolving. It’s insane how quickly AI has taken over and how quickly it continues to change the landscape for industry and now impacting education. And so for us it was really important to match what was happening in industry and what we’re seeing how industry is utilizing AI and our students. I mean our students are using AI tools. So on our side of things, it was really important for us that as these tools become accessible, we need to help teachers and students and parents learn to navigate this new way of utilizing technology.

So the new hiring imperative, this is some research that came out in May of 24, so I’m sure it’s likely to be higher, but leaders would not hire someone without AI skills. 66% of those leaders are looking for those skills. And then 71% of leaders are more likely to hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills compared to a more experienced candidate without ’em. So we are definitely seeing a trend with if you can put AI skills on your resume, that is putting you ahead of many other candidates. And then the World Economic Forum posted a future of job reports. And this was so enlightening to me because when I started in education in 2008, we would hear this saying, we’re teaching kids for jobs that don’t exist yet. And I really could never understand what that meant until AI came out and we are literally teaching students for jobs that were created yesterday. There are new jobs coming to market every day now because of gen ai. So as educators, we are definitely in a new world and charged with having our students ready for this new realm of what work looks like.

And then about half of teachers, students and parents are using ai. We hear all the time from students that they’re using it. There’s so much now research coming out about how students are using it, why students are using it, and there’s a lot of just gaps right now, specifically at the post-secondary level. We’re seeing universities are just still grappling with what AI policy should look like. And so with that in mind, if you don’t have clear policy, clear guidance for teachers and students, that’s where we are seeing issues and lawsuits and things are popping up. So we want our students to be ready to go on to post-secondary and be confident in their AI skill use and how they use it.

And just a little bit more research, this is pretty brand new. The survey was in 2020 4th of October. So we’re seeing students really have a cognizance of what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable. So to research topics students, 54% of those surveyed said that’s an acceptable use of AI to solve math problems. They were about 50 50 on that one, but to write essays, it’s not acceptable. So students do have a good baseline understanding around the ethical use of ai. And so for us as educators, that’s important because then we can strengthen that ethical use by modeling and then providing them with structure in how they use AI in the classroom. So our initial motivation was we wanted to manage the integration of AI responsibly. We were already seeing issues with English teachers in particular that students were using AI to cheat. Brooke, I’m going to give you a moment to kind of talk about some of the particulars around that.

Brooke Johnson:

Yes, so with my role being the only one that serves the whole county, what we saw last spring is that we had so many teachers that would just email me or they would call my office phone or because, and from this district, they would just call my personal phone in the middle of the day as well and be like, I have this assignment from this student and I need to know if they’ve used AI to cheat. And so it got to a point where it was such a large problem that we really had to find a solution but not just to hinder students from using ai. And we’re going to talk about that a lot when we get to our stakeholder documents and how we worded a lot of our policy, but also to protect our teachers and making sure that they’re fulfilling their curriculum requirements and provide that support from our central office. It definitely, that section has driven a lot of what our professional development around AI looks like and we’ve seen already so much positivity come from that, and that will come full circle towards the end as well.

Dr. Kimberley Thompson-Hairston:

And then the next piece would be preparing students for a tech driven future. We know that there was already a need for digital literacy skills and that need continues to increase with all the things around our life being so digitally based, but AI literacy now is another need and we want to make sure that our students are ready for those future careers. As Brooke mentioned, we wanted to support our educators. We never wanted our policy to be hurtful of students or undermine teachers, so our guidance documents are really tailored to support both of those groups. And then Brooke does a really good job in our district with highlighting tech tools that provide accessibility. And so this was an opportunity when having Esser funding and having that one-to-one technology gap closed. We quickly saw that AI could be another digital divide and we did not want that to happen. So we have spent a lot of time looking at how AI can continue to address equity and access gaps for our students.

So a little bit about our journey. North Carolina established an AI collaborative last fall, which was absolutely phenomenal. I’m sorry, before, which was absolutely phenomenal and it gave Brooke and I the space to explore tools to learn about gen ai, and that really got us our appetites ready to do this work. Another thing we did in our district was prior to my arrival, there was no vetting process of using any type of web tool. So we implemented a web tool vetting process, and that really pushes our teachers to not just go to a conference and see a tool that they like and say, Hey, I want to use this, but to really dive in, make sure that the privacy was good for our students to look at the tool through the instructional lens. And that has really tailored now that our teachers are very, very specific in asking for tools that are going to support learning.

Again, as Brooke mentioned, we had students using AI and then the consequences of those uses that were not appropriate. Next, we worked on drafting policy, and I’m a big believer that policy is absolutely fundamentally needed. However, most parents, students, other stakeholders are not going to sit and read a five to 10 page policy document. So Brook’s work was so wonderful for our district in creating these guidance documents, and so we’ll obviously go through those here in a bit. The next was an advisory committee. We tiered this. I’m actually over media coordinators as well in my role. So I had an in-house advisory committee already to pull from because media coordinators, they touch such big portion of the school community. So they were a wonderful group of people. So we met with them, we went through the policy, they provided feedback, we went through the guidance documents, provided feedback.

Then we held a second advisory opportunity in June right after school ended, and we opened that to any staff member across the district to come and sit and work with us. We invited some key stakeholders who were a bit hesitant, and I think that’s always important to have those people who are going to give you some pushback because their thoughts and ideas around the why are so important for us to understand. We were also fortunate that in North Carolina, each region has a digital literacy or a digital coach. So we invited ours to our meeting and he was able to come and support us in that work. So at that meeting, we also had some students that joined, just happened to be teacher kids, so they came as well. So after all those advisory meetings, we were ready then for our attorney to review our policy, so send it to his office and he reviewed it and then we did a school board presentation and then it was passed in July, and then we really just ramped up our professional development.

We have Canvas is our learning management system, and so we built gen AI curriculum and modules in that Brooke and I did. So teachers have that access to on-demand learning in our district, though we do recognize that student or our teachers rather prefer face-to-face professional development. And so even though we rolled out everything in August, we were seeing a lack of implementation. And so with that, we had an opportunity in November to do face-to-face professional development, and after our teachers had that, they really started gaining some momentum and traction and implementing the AI work that we’ve been doing. So at that point it’s been ongoing advisory and so we’re going to move on and we’ll kind of tap into some of the work we’re doing now.

So our core guidelines, we wanted to make sure we hit responsible and ethical AI use. I think at the beginning of Gen AI coming out, it was the wild west. There was just a ton of LLMs coming out. No real responsible youth or ethical use around these. So that was a huge concern for us. I think that is improving now with bias and hallucinations, but still that work is ongoing. Ensuring data privacy and security was really important for us at the district level. That’s always been a key factor for us. Integrate AI tools for personalized learning and instruction. We see so much value in how these tools can support personalized learning and then professional development for AI literacy and competency. We did use the AI roadmap for schools. That was the roadmap that we used to get to. It really gave us the structure to develop our policy. So we have that linked for you. And then just our AI policy as a whole is there. I’m going to let Brooke take over and she’s going to kind of walk through our different guidance documents. This has been the heart of our work because this has been the most impactful pieces of what we have done so far.

Brooke Johnson:

So with our policy, we didn’t just want to have policy just out there and I’m actually going to share our policies that you can see what this looks like from our point of view. So I’ve just pulled it up and it is linked. So if you would like to go back and just read it more thoroughly, then I’m hitting you are more than welcome to. But we started out with our categories of what we wanted in this policy. So what is the purpose of having an AI policy? One thing that you will find on your journey to establishing an AI policy is that you really have to have key stakeholders have that buy-in already. So one thing that Dr. Th did very well was she went and had a great conversation with our superintendent because prior to her coming in, all AI was blocked and we know that students will find a way around it.

And so once she had that great conversation with him, she then moved on to our board of education, which in our school district, because we’re very rural, they’re the local business owners and the farmers. So she really tapped into what their needs were personally to show them how important that was. On my end, I work with teachers, so I hit the targeted groups that are not very tech savvy typically. So I did our athletic directors or our PE teachers and I showed them how AI can transform what they’re doing in their classroom, and that really helped us get this momentum going. When we talk about our purpose, we made sure to include that part in there. Then we what AI is because there is a difference between AI and generative ai. So we wanted to make sure that we established that one of the sections we’re proud of is our leadership and vision.

One thing that we didn’t want to come out of this policy is it’s just a paper that is on record, but nobody actually goes back to it and reviews it. We wanted to show people that our superintendent, our board of education, our principals, all of these groups that are at the top in our district are supportive and they will support teachers and students with that. We cover responsible uses of AI tools and in this section we broke it down into student learning and teacher support. One of our main focuses for doing that is that we wanted students to not feel attacked with an AI policy. I have seen a lot of policies that have floated around from school districts and it breaks my heart a little bit because they just block everything. But that’s not preparing students for the future, which is why we use so much data to drive why we are doing this in the first place, and then we know that teachers are using it as well.

So we focused on our teacher support section for our prohibited uses of AI tools. We actually did not separate that because wrong is wrong across the board, and we had our lawyer go through and make sure everything was good and concise. On that. We talked about our ethical considerations and safety. So what does bias look like? What does a hallucination look like? How should you talk about i I with students? And so that also has helped develop our professional development with teachers so that can be relayed to them. Then we had an academic integrity policy for this. We had a student policy and a faculty and staff policy against separating that and not attacking one group or the other. We made sure in here to address consequences that would tie into our code of conduct handbook that we have, but also what are the ethical things that teachers need to do.

And for that, it’s our North Carolina Professional Teaching standards. And then our review, it is very, very important to include a review section because AI is constantly changing and you’re going to have to go back and look at this so often. So every year we have established that this is not a policy that’s on a three year rotation kind of review, but it’s an yearly thing. And we’ve already been looking at this and although we feel very confident about our policy, there’s been new state laws that have come out about DeepFakes and all that that we want to include. So this is just the meat of our AI policy. Then we get into our guidance documents. When we looked at stakeholders, we wanted to hit the three main groups. So we did students, teachers, and parents. In our guidance documents, we included some of the basic same information.

So every group, this is the one for our students. We included just what is ai, what are appropriate uses and what are inappropriate uses. But for each one, we kind of had a different section for students. Okay, and what’s not okay, because that’s really the meat of what they want to know. For our parents, we included a section on how will AI impact my child’s education because you can tell them all that you can about ai, but they really only care about how it’s going to affect their child. We also included some AI terms to know, just because I know if I were to try to talk to my mom about ai, if I say algorithm, she’s not going to know what that is. So we wanted to give them very basic definitions of all of that. And again, we hit what is gen ai, what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate for our teachers?

It looks a little different just because we included our academic integrity policy so that they have that at the ready if they need it. But we included a section of why not just block ai. For a lot of our teachers, AI is scary, but it’s because it’s new and they just trying to keep up with everything, which is why we’ve really custom tailored our professional development in the district. But we don’t want to revert to pen and paper for everything because then we’re not preparing 21st century learners. We need to be, and the data shows that we need to be teaching AI literacy to students, especially our high schoolers because they’re the ones going into the job field immediately. So we had all three of these papers ready to go at open house, so all stakeholder groups were able to get that at the bottom of every one. It does have a link to the full policy so they can read it in its entirety, but this is something that we could give them that was just in their hands ready to go.

Alright. We also, let me go back. Included a rubric that we could give teachers to have in their classroom of can I use AI on this assignment? This is something that they could see with a red light, green light, something that they’re used to. And we sat down with our advisory committee at the beginning of June and we really went in and we’re like, what do you guys see of this? What needs to be changed? And a really positive conversation that we had was we had a, can I use AI sixth through 12th grade? That was initially K 12, but then they said, this isn’t really relevant for our K five students. So we developed one that was more appropriate for that subgroup and that has really benefited them. So when a teacher is giving an assignment, they can say we are at a level one.

You may use AI as a thought partner, but you cannot use it to write your paper. You may use it as spell check. Grammarly is a great example, but you cannot use it for this, this, and this. So having something that they could draw the line as a teacher and show where AI is acceptable and not acceptable, but not taking back from the student’s creativity, this is great for them and they really enjoyed it. One other document that has come out as our professional development journey has gone through is once we got our, especially high school English teachers on board, they were like, okay, I’ve got them. We’re good to go. How do I cite ai? So as we’re continuing our journey, we’re finding that there are some things that we need to make sure that we’re including. So we’ve developed this one pager. Some of our English teachers have actually printed it out and included it in their classroom. Aside our can I use AI on this assignment rubric just to give them something that they can see, but also role model for those students of being transparent of, yes, I used AI on this, but I’m citing it. I am telling you that I’m doing it. So it’s not just one group of stakeholders like students or teachers using ai, but they can see how each other are utilizing it.

And that is it. We do have all of these linked AS templates towards the end. So if you want to to take something like that one pager and work for or tweak it to whatever your needs are, you can Dr. TH. Do you want to talk implementation or you want me to?

Dr. Kimberley Thompson-Hairston:

I’m going to go ahead and let you discuss that.

Brooke Johnson:

Okay. So this is kind of our rollout schedule of how we got everything going. Fall 2023, Dr th and I joined the AI collaborative. This was so good to be a part of. This is where we got a lot of our information and developed, alright, what do we see for Stokes County? Because North Carolina had given their guidance documents and their policy, but it didn’t necessarily fit for what we needed in our very rural district. So we made sure that we could tailor that. Early spring, Dr th started having discussions with principals during leadership meetings and these were great opportunities because she was showing them little tidbits of not a full professional development session, but small tidbits of, okay, well you have to interview for this position. You’re a PE teacher, but you’re interviewing for high school science. Do you know that? Alright, well let’s develop these questions and answers to help guide you through that interview. And that made a very, very big difference because it ended up creating that trickle down effect starting with our superintendent, our school board, our principals, and then to our teachers and then to our students.

Dr. Kimberley Thompson-Hairston:

And I’ll just jump in real quick that every time we have an everyday leadership meeting with our administrators, we are showing them a tool and how to use it. So we just did notebook lm and then I think the next day some administrators came to you, Brooke?

Brooke Johnson:

Yeah. I was already scheduled for professional development at a school and I did not even make it to the library before a principal stopped me and said, I know you’re covering this, but I would love if you could cover notebook LM because I see what it can do and I really think it’s going to help us in our school. And I said, I can definitely do that, but this is also, I will say a principal that was not AI there for a while. So he has seen how this has changed and now he is emailing me questions almost daily at this point. So it’s been really, really good. Early summer is when we developed our advisory committees, and again, that started with our media coordinators and we included our tech team on there. We did have one person on our tech team that is very anti ai, just does not want anything to do with it.

Having that person in that discussion made a large difference because the reality is we’re going to have parents or teachers that have similar views, so how can we blend those and make it beneficial for everyone? Then Dr. Th during the summer did the school board presentation and the adoption of the policy because it needed to sit for 30 days. When we came back to school in the fall is when we gave out those guidance documents. We started the more professional development and then mid-fall about November is when we did our student advisory committee and that was great. I really did enjoy hesitating on having conversations with students after things rolled out. We learned so much that I think if we had done our initial advisory council with our students, we would not have seen the results that we did. It really opened up to showing us that our science department was rocking it with AI and that was something that I did not predict would happen. They told us about their fears for what the future looks like with AI and we got to have these great, great conversations that I was quite shocked about at the end of the day. But having that initial discussion in early summer and then waiting until November for the students ended up being just a great idea.

Dr. Kimberley Thompson-Hairston:

Yeah, it really helped us to understand where we were at in our implementation. We identified some gaps and one of those big gaps for us and very just, I can learn asynchronously, it’s not a problem for me, but we really realized that our teachers preferred face-to-face professional development, and so we pivoted to meet that need for our teachers.

Brooke Johnson:

I would love to sit here and tell you that this has all been a breeze and it’s been amazing and nothing has gone wrong, but that would be a big lie. We have definitely had to overcome some obstacles and you will in your journey as well. For us, we have seen any sort of obstacle as a, okay, we get it. There are fears. How many people have seen the Terminator or the new Megan movie iRobot and that’s their perception of what AI is. However, they have never had that conversation of AI in education, so that drove a lot of our good conversations of tell me, get your fears now let’s work through it. So we have found some teachers that were pencil paper people that are now seeing the light and seeing the benefits for their students. We have made sure that we are adapting to all feedback that we get. Citing Gen AI was some feedback or sorry, let me go back. Creating the citing Gen AI document was part of feedback that we had received from teachers. So we’re constantly updating and making sure that we’re improving what we’re putting out there.

So where do we go from here? We have definitely seen positive impact, but we know that we’re going to have a long way to go. There’s always going to be negative side effects of anything large that comes out, AI included, and we live in a state where there’s been some negative things about AI and education when it comes to misuse and inappropriateness of that. However, we’re making sure that our vision for our district is a positive one and role modeling for students and teachers what they can do and how it can maximize their efficiency and learning.

Dr. Kimberley Thompson-Hairston:

So one of the things we did this year was I was able to secure two teachers to go to our NC Ties conference, which is a tech ed conference. That was an absolutely amazing experience for them. They came back, actually it was three teachers that attended, but two teachers that had never gotten the opportunity to attend, and so they’ve become teacher champions for us. I think every moment that you can to teach somebody, even just a tiny piece of how an AI tool can improve their efficiency is relevant to their work needs. I think Brooke and I spend a lot of time just one-on-one. Someone will email us or ask us, Hey, I have this task, and then we’ll show them how to do it. We all have our kind of favorite tools, but Brooke and I do a really good job of working across different platforms to see what are the strengths and weaknesses of platforms.

That way if someone needs a tool, we can say, Hey, Claude is really good for this or Perplexity is really good for this. We don’t specifically if I can get a tool for free, that is our goal, but we are writing a grant right now. We’re very excited. That would give us a platform to use that is a protected LLM because that is still a dire need for our teachers is they’re very fearful and our students as well about personal identifiable information being out there on the worldwide web. So we are writing a grant, so if we get that grant, that’s just going to allow us to keep, that’s really our vision for AI and education is to make it a safe and usable place for our students.

Brooke Johnson:

Again, in our presentation we have links to all of this, so if you want to read what our academic integrity policy it says in its entirety, you can definitely do that. But all of our guidance documents are all templates that you can then change, utilize shape. We are all about collaboration, not hoarding information in our district. So definitely utilize what you would like. And then questions.

Kelly Fitzgerald:

Thank you too, so much. This has been so insightful. While we’re seeing if there’s any questions coming in through the chat, I had a question as you were talking about rolling this out and talking to the instructors and faculty. You said at the beginning it was kind of slow and then you had that meeting that was face-to-face and then from there you were able to kind of see the growth from instructors and faculty using it there. What was said during that meeting or where do you feel like that kind of changing point was for those faculty who might’ve been a little bit more hesitant to start using AI tools?

Dr. Kimberley Thompson-Hairston:

Yeah, I think for Brooke and I, just knowing that we were there to support them, I think initially when we put all of the asynchronous modules up, it was like, Hey, here it is. Go log in and do it. But when we did our presentation and they saw the human in it and that we were there and we didn’t expect them to learn all this stuff and try to implement it the next day, that was really powerful for us because they saw the human connection. We had missed that initially

Brooke Johnson:

When targeting these certain teachers. What we really focused in on is what is one way that AI will change what you’re already doing? So a lot of our driving questions were, what do you spend the most time on that you wish you didn’t have to? And for our athletic directors and our PE teachers, which are mostly our coaches, a lot of that was creating social media posts to promote their athletics. And they’re like, it’s just not really something that I really like doing. I’m not a tech person is what they would always tell me. And so we actually have a Canvas subscription for our district and we went in and let me tell you, those athletic directors have blown us out of the water. They are creating these amazing videos and highlight reels. And the athletic director at the school that I’m based at was my PE teacher growing up back when he had hair is what I always tell the students.

But he actually will text me, I made this today. What do you think about it? He’ll be like, did you use ai? And he’s like, I did. Please be proud of me. And it’s just those little nugget of moments that you can take and you can see because he’s a role model for another group of people. So he’s going to take that information and show it show and it wasn’t a daunting task for him. For him and the others. I can definitely see it was just the fear of the unknown. And that is where if you are scared to start, you’re not going to make progress. So we have really tried so hard in this district of being, alright, tell me what you would like to see now let’s make it easier for you. Because we don’t expect people to know what an LLM is. They just know AI bad sometimes. And a lot of times you just hear about the negative things that have happened, but we wanted to show them the positives. So taking a nugget of information and making it worthwhile for those people.

Kelly Fitzgerald:

That’s amazing. Well, thank you too so much. I really appreciate you answering my question for that. We don’t have any other questions in the chat here. Just a lot of thank yous from everybody, so I’ll add mine to that as well. Thank you so much Brooke and Dr. Thompson Harrison for this impactful session. I am so impressed with how purposeful and intentional and prepared all of your documentation and the policy and the whole implementation process that you’ve created is, and I’m sure I echo all the attendees here as well. And thank you for sharing your work with us. So today this wraps up our session. We will take a 15 minute break before the next session begins. If you haven’t already be shared to bookmark sessions that you want to join. And then you can see those on the My Itinerary tab. It makes it easy to organize your schedule that way. We also have an expo hall that you can visit during breaks. If you visit, you’ll be entered to win a pair of AirPods. And lastly, please make sure that your profile is set to feeling social if you’d like to chat with other attendees. Thanks everyone and see you at the next session.