Artificial intelligence is a critical solution for improving writing scores in Kentucky鈥檚 Henry County Public Schools. Superintendent Jim Masters says his district’s AI strategy even helps him on the administrative side of the aisle. Here鈥檚 how to replicate his district鈥檚 success.
educators wanted to grade students鈥 writing assessments per Kentucky state guidelines for scoring. More importantly, they wanted to provide students with adequate feedback.
Masters and his team created a prompt that embedded the grading criteria for the Kentucky state exam in the AI (in this case, Google鈥檚 NotebookLM). They fed the chatbot the state鈥檚 publicly released sample questions and answers until the AI learned how to score exactly like Pearson Kentucky, the agency that administers the exam.
鈥淚t took some trial and error, but we were finally able to dial it in,鈥 says Masters.
Teachers also use AI to create lesson plans.
鈥淲e went back to writing a prompt that will generate an evidence-based lesson plan pulling from the work of Robert J. Marzano and John Hattie and others in the template that we as a district wanted to use,鈥 he says. 鈥淚t created a lesson plan organized in a very specific way.鈥
鈥淏y being able to get consistent and immediate feedback to our students, the teacher was then able to spend time doing what she does best, which is building relationships with the students and talking about how to improve their writing instead of having to spend hours reading each one of those papers,鈥 he explains.
Additionally, every student who participated in the intervention group saw improvements in their overall writing scores.
From an administrative perspective, Masters says, AI keeps him updated on the state鈥檚 education policies. He simply uploads documents to NotebookLM and asks specific questions.
鈥淢aybe, I can鈥檛 remember all the details of a referral process or which holidays a 240-day contract staff member is supposed to get,鈥 he says. 鈥淚 no longer have to go looking for the answer. I just type in a question, and it鈥檚 answered immediately.鈥
AI strategy advice for leaders
Only 5% of school districts nationwide have implemented formal AI policies, according to a fall survey by the Center for Reinventing Public Education. Masters encourages superintendents to look for ways AI can alleviate teacher workloads and elevate student learning.
鈥淎I can address, one, saving teachers a lot of time, and two, ensuring that you鈥檙e creating evidence-based solutions,鈥 he says.
