Episode 17: The Future of Assessment in K12 Education
Ryan Lufkin (00:01.166)
Hey there and welcome to Educast 3000. I'm your co -host Ryan Lefkin.
Melissa Loble (00:05.575)
and I'm your co -host Melissa Loble.
Ryan Lufkin (00:08.161)
We're so glad you could join us for another episode. And today we are joined by a very special guest, Dr. Jeff Faust, Chief Technology Innovation Officer at Chesapeake Public Schools. Jeff has deep experience in both education and technology with a great perspective on what the future will bring for both. But we've invited Jeff on the podcast today specifically to do a deep dive on the future of assessment. Jeff, welcome.
Jeffrey Faust (00:33.125)
It's great to be here and thank you guys. I appreciate it.
Ryan Lufkin (00:35.479)
Perfect. Before we dive in, give us a little bit of background for listeners who may not know
Jeffrey Faust (00:40.431)
Sure, so as you saw I'm currently serving as the Chief Technology Innovation Officer for Chesapeake Public Schools in Chesapeake, Virginia, far southeastern Virginia right out by the coast.
I've worked in numerous school divisions across Virginia, but going back to my, you know, start, start, I was actually a third grade teacher out of college and moved from Pennsylvania to Virginia where at the time there was a lot more opportunity. And I taught, you know, for several years in elementary school, moved into a sixth grade science position, and then moved into technology. And then I left education for about seven years. Went into the private
Ryan Lufkin (01:00.161)
Excellent!
Jeffrey Faust (01:21.369)
I actually worked for an LMS company doing their product development and software development and overseeing their software team. And then came full circle and took a position as a director for technology for a school division. And that was one position to go and that brings us to today. And so along the way, think I gained a pretty...
Ryan Lufkin (01:46.318)
yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (01:47.089)
great perspective, looking at things from different ways, private sector, public sector, education in the classroom, in technology, and now more recently in central office leadership type positions.
Ryan Lufkin (01:58.402)
That's amazing.
Melissa Loble (01:59.665)
love this, Jeff, you and I have known each other for a while and I did not know that about the private sector piece, which is super interesting and I'll have to pick your brain separate on that. one of the things we also like to ask guests so that our listeners can get to know you is a favorite learning moment. So can be either you teaching, you learning, some moment in your past that you remember as a learner or as a teacher.
Jeffrey Faust (02:10.791)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (02:28.017)
Yeah, so, you know, it's, I saw this question coming and thought, well, gosh, what do I and what don't I want to share? Because here's the thing about learning. think we are as humans, we have to embrace the idea that the best learning, the most valuable learning often comes with adversity. And it doesn't have to be traumatic,
Melissa Loble (02:35.329)
Hahaha
Jeffrey Faust (02:49.701)
challenging hard. I've asserted myself. I've, you know, something that I necessarily didn't think I was going to do or like or enjoy or whatever and I had to overcome challenges. And so I think that we do a disservice to try to disconnect those two things. And I think that really our greatest teachers and our greatest mentors are those people who challenge us even when we maybe don't want to or aren't necessarily comfortable. So immediately I
Ryan Lufkin (03:05.368)
Mm -hmm.
Melissa Loble (03:16.55)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (03:19.617)
back to one of my moments that helped define me was my high school band teacher, Mr. Karsner, K as we called him respectfully. He used to do these activities where...
You'd come in and a band is 60, 70, 80 people sitting in the band room. And it's hard to tell, is everybody doing their part? Does everybody know the part they're supposed to know? So on certain days of the month, if it was the 14th, you'd go one, then two, three, four, and then one, and then two, three, four, and have kids play a portion, 10, 12, 16 measures of a song just to make sure that they had been practicing and knew their part.
Well, we came in, was October 1st. And so that makes it 1111. So literally, the whole class was going around the room. Well, it got to me, I had not been doing my work, because that's who I was. I was a 10th grader at the time, and I didn't really apply myself a whole lot in high school. And we could talk about that for a long time.
But he got really mad at me, like really mad, because when it came to my part, I stumbled badly. And he kicked me out, not just for the day, but he said literally, go take your stand, take your chair, go into the uniform closet, and when you're ready to be a real member of this band and carry your weight, you can come back. And when you come back, we're gonna have you play the whole part in front of the band so that we know that you're serious. And I was devastated, right, mortified.
To this day though, his daughter and I remain friends. We were in the same grade. And we still joke about it because what that did for me is it made me realize that until I took myself seriously, nobody else would either. So I went to the coat closet for three or four days and I just practiced. I practiced during school, I practiced after school. All of a sudden it was like, okay, I've agreed to be a part of something bigger than me. And in order to carry my weight, I've got to do my job.
Melissa Loble (04:58.015)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (05:12.165)
So I think that was a turning point for me and everything. I got back to class, I said, okay, I'm ready. did the whole portion of my piece. I was a trumpet player in front of the whole band, literally applause. The room was so excited for me. Cause I think there was some collective like, they felt bad for me. Like, my gosh, that was harsh. And it was harsh, but.
What I learned from that was that he believed me enough to say, you know, I'm going to try this because this kid can do this, but he's choosing not to. And then I found something in myself that changed my trajectory, I think. Cause all of a sudden other classes, I found myself applying and trying and things that previously I kind of, you know, took the class clown route. So, so for me, that was a, that was a formative moment in my life without a doubt. And, you know, so Kay, Mr. Karschner, I'm sure you're not listening, but just in case somebody tells you about this or knows who you are.
Ryan Lufkin (05:56.12)
I love
Jeffrey Faust (06:03.935)
because he had such a profound impact on thousands of people throughout his career. Thank you for that moment and it definitely was a defining moment for me and a critical learning experience where I learned not just the content but how to be a better version of myself.
Ryan Lufkin (06:18.713)
Wow, I love that.
Melissa Loble (06:18.851)
That's such an incredible story. It's such an incredible story too because you were able to be present to that experience at that age, right? A lot of times we think back, I can think back to learning moments and I wasn't aware of that moment in the moment, but I can see how I applied it later. Yeah, what time? But to have a moment where in that
Ryan Lufkin (06:37.178)
With time, yeah, with time you get little perspective on it,
Melissa Loble (06:43.054)
especially at a young age, you're so present to it and you can think about it later. That's a very powerful pivotal experience. So cool. Thank you for sharing that. That's so cool. Well, your learning moments relates a bit, which is really exciting. And as Ryan said, we want to talk about assessment. think assessment means a lot of things to a lot of people. So let's start with student assessment in particular.
Ryan Lufkin (06:51.695)
Absolutely.
Jeffrey Faust (06:54.043)
Yeah, no problem.
Melissa Loble (07:10.892)
And sort of where do you see student assessment today? What it looked like five years ago? Sort of where are we at in assessing, particularly student success?
Jeffrey Faust (07:18.631)
Yeah, think, we're... I don't want to pretend that we're some drastically different place today than we were five years ago as far as what's actually happening.
But I do think what has changed is the conversations happening outside the classroom, the conversations happening between teachers. So I think that we are doing a good job increasingly using data that is being generated by the testing and the assessments happening in the classroom to look at student success, to look at efficacy, to look at growth. I think to the point that I would say we're in a weird place, maybe even a
challenging place where we're generating more data than we know what to do with in some cases in schools. And I heard somebody recently say, you know, schools are data rich and knowledge poor when it comes to assessment data. And I love that concept because I think that we, it's true and there's a lot of reasons why we could go down that rabbit hole.
Ryan Lufkin (08:04.612)
Well, yeah.
Melissa Loble (08:05.878)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (08:21.329)
We're doing a better job with administering assessments, using the assessments, not just treating it as a once and done, but looking back at it. And I think we are looking at longitudinal. Like, well, where was this student two years ago, and where are they today? And I think, but I do think we're, to some degree, we're still in the infancy of that.
evolution. There's a lot of talk about performance -based assessments. There's a lot of talk about authentic assessments, but I think you'd be hard -pressed to find that universally in practice across a school, a school division, a state, a country.
Ryan Lufkin (08:58.534)
I do think that's one of those kind of silver linings of COVID. I know a lot of the conversations we had around data immediately went to big brother before COVID. And I think when we had to shift online, there was kind of a massive brain shift towards the acceptance of using data for productive gains. And we can be cognizant of the potential negatives, but we can really do a lot with data if we have it,
Jeffrey Faust (09:22.621)
Absolutely, absolutely. But that's one of those one more thing that we maybe are asking teachers to do, and they're trying to find time in their day to look through. Let's say you give a 20 question test to 25 students. You end up with something in the neighborhood of 440, if I've done the math correctly, or 500 questions.
Melissa Loble (09:41.345)
huh.
Ryan Lufkin (09:42.789)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (09:45.352)
that you now have to go through and grade and now you're supposed to do item analysis and now you're supposed to so if that's still happening on a piece of paper we know that that is more work than we can possibly ask a person to do and that's where when we see things like you know Mastery Connect for example where we can take that item analysis off the teacher's plate and they can just give an assessment and get that data it helps to switch the practice towards one where okay the data
just there for me, now I just need to look at it and maybe even look at it with my peers in the PLC to say, hey, how'd you guys do so well on that where my kids really struggled with that concept? What did you do to present or teach that concept? And then maybe we get some peer -to -peer professional learning and professional development happening.
Ryan Lufkin (10:33.51)
Yeah, I think that's a great point where this is gonna really be done at scale with technology, right? So you mentioned Mastery Connect, but what are some of the technologies that support this approach?
Jeffrey Faust (10:40.145)
heart upset.
Jeffrey Faust (10:45.959)
Well, I think, generally speaking, the idea that we need a method, right, and I don't necessarily want to endorse a product, a brand, a whatever else, but I do want to talk about the fact that the technology has to allow the teacher to rapidly scale the assessment.
it has to allow them, know, ideally to say, need five questions that are aligned to the standard, like that. ideally an item bank, if you will, that we know is aligned, that one of my favorite words, psychometricians have vetted those items and put them into the library and they're good items.
Melissa Loble (11:22.786)
huh.
Ryan Lufkin (11:29.249)
I've long said, Melissa knows this, that I want to be a psychometrician just because it's like the coolest title ever. Like, I'm a psychometrician. Right? Yeah.
Melissa Loble (11:35.124)
No.
Jeffrey Faust (11:35.645)
It'd be so great to that on a business card, would it not? I agree. But yeah, so I think, you know, for me it's, can I quickly give an assessment? Can I get the data out of the platform to tell me which items were good or bad, potentially?
but also which standards were mastered or not mastered. And then more importantly, can I quickly identify the group that needs reteaching remediation and then generate a secondary assessment after the reteaching moment. So if it's a 15 minute small group or if it's a whole group because wow, we really bombed that and then can I quickly reassess that and get updated data on whether or not.
the reteaching was effective in helping the students to move.
Melissa Loble (12:22.441)
What strikes me so much about what you just described is, first of all, I don't think there's a one -size -fits -all technology at all out there. But it's also, while it seems straightforward and simple, it's an innovative way to be thinking about assessment, because you're in control of it, right? As a district, as a teacher, a whomever it may be doing that assessment, I think it's so often
Ryan Lufkin (12:29.809)
Mm
Melissa Loble (12:49.867)
in my past at least, and you know this, I started in the classroom as well, it was done to us. Assessment was done to us as teachers. We didn't have control over it or even the tools to be able to know how to do it well on our own. was so much instinct, so much gut. And I think there's a lot out there. We can be innovative. And I know that's part of your role is to identify and implement and scale innovative technologies.
Part of that, though, it's kind of scary, right? Some risk comes with that. It's a little scary for teachers. It's scary for districts. How do you balance trying new things in your role and encouraging people to own it, while at the same time work through risk or concerns as we try to implement new practices?
Jeffrey Faust (13:36.775)
Yeah, so I'm going to channel Simon Sinek here and just say that we have to start with why. So we can't use a platform or technology just because it exists or just because the salesperson told us it would solve all of our problems, both which I think are common in the world we live in. So I think if we are clear on what our why is, and to me, that why can be varied.
One, I want accurate measures of all of my students. I want accurate measures, you know, one of my sort of sayings that I keep finding myself going to, which is we have to get teachers able to stop celebrating what they taught and instead focused on what the students learned. And moreover, the most important question is what was taught but the students didn't
Ryan Lufkin (14:20.046)
Wow, I love that.
Melissa Loble (14:20.808)
Yes.
Ryan Lufkin (14:28.134)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (14:28.527)
And I think if we can make, we can, teachers are open to that. They're, they're ready to hear that feedback, but they don't have the time or the bandwidth to come to those conclusions by picking through questions by themselves single -handedly. So, so that's sort of the switch that I think we're, we're looking to change. And so the why is, you know, driven ultimately by, you know, accepting the fact that different students in my classroom need different things. we need to provide flexible.
personalized educational pathways for students. You know, and going back to the example I shared in beginning, I needed that kick in the butt from my band teacher. There are other students in that room that it probably would have destroyed. They probably would have quit band, right? That's a master teacher though. Looking and knowing the students, and our teachers do this all the time, and which one needs what from me in order to get them to their next level?
Melissa Loble (14:57.31)
Hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (14:58.03)
Mm -hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (15:11.226)
Yeah, yeah.
Melissa Loble (15:12.232)
huh.
Jeffrey Faust (15:23.261)
and what sort of intervention would be appropriate for this student and not appropriate for that student. So I think that's, know, we have to stay focused on that. And again, like, we are preparing students for an era when skills and abilities, those five C's that we talk about so much, but when it comes to assessment, I feel like we do fall back on those first two levels of Bloom's Taxonomy, it's knowledge and understanding, it's recall of information.
Ryan Lufkin (15:49.091)
huh.
Jeffrey Faust (15:52.763)
And so to me, how are we assessing specific skills, abilities, and mastery over top of knowledge, recall, and understanding?
Melissa Loble (16:05.659)
You had, so when you, yes to all of that first of all, yes to all of that. And when you said we need to start assessing what students learn, not what we taught, I had my own audit of, I still teach, and it's going in my head of like, my gosh, that is the perfect way for me to think differently. I'm about to revamp a course and to think differently about how am I not only building that, but more importantly, how am I regularly getting that input back on.
Ryan Lufkin (16:09.123)
Yes.
Ryan Lufkin (16:17.902)
I know.
Melissa Loble (16:33.917)
what are my students learning? it's, again, it's backwards design in my mind of assessment. And how do I think that's starting with that Y? Sorry, I just had to comment on that. And I'm sure you're going to pick up on AI, I Ryan.
Ryan Lufkin (16:42.575)
Yeah. No, I told, yeah, no, I was going to say, because it's 2024, we can't get through a whole podcast without discussing AI. This does, this does feel like an area that, is kind of ripe for the application of AI. mentioned personalization of that learning experience and, know, really tailoring it to a student's specific needs and academic goals. How do we, how do we help educators? There's so much fear associated with
Jeffrey Faust (16:51.335)
You
Ryan Lufkin (17:09.839)
How do we help educators get over that and start applying some of these new innovative tools?
Jeffrey Faust (17:14.479)
Well, one of my favorite examples is in the turn of the century, early 1900s, if you went to any large, you know, of the large corporations at that time, they would have had a vice president of electricity. Now, that position in this day and age is like, there's no, well, how would you have, that doesn't even make sense. Of course we have, everybody uses electricity.
I think that's where we are. think where we are is the AI right now is there's a couple of things working against us. And I think one of them is we've been burned by the Silicon Valley hype cycle before. Where I'm, you know, I have, I still owe a good friend of mine lunch because I was convinced that self -driving cars were going to be a reality by 2022. Yep.
Ryan Lufkin (17:52.412)
huh, yep.
Ryan Lufkin (18:01.362)
I brought up the launch of this segue the other day and how it was going to change the design of cities, right?
Melissa Loble (18:06.776)
yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (18:08.753)
Yeah, you're going to build roadways for segways, right? Remember all that too. I totally agree with you. And I was there. was, was, you know, bet lunch, lunch at your place of your choice. I have no doubt it's going to cost me an arm and a leg because, know, we want, you know, for those of us that are excited by new technologies and new items, and I know not everybody's wired that way, but people who are, you know, you get excited about it you want it to be true.
Ryan Lufkin (18:11.736)
Yep, yep.
Jeffrey Faust (18:33.543)
There's something different happening here though. So I think one, that's working against us because we've been burned by this hype cycle.
But there's something different happening here that I think we would be foolish not to just be really open and honest about. When we look at the difference, for example, of the performance of Chat GPT -3 .5 to Chat GPT -4, know, Chat GPT on the LSAT got like a GPT -3 .5, got like a 27 % or something, whatever that scales to. Chat GPT -4 got an 89%, like would have been top 2 % of performance for everybody. And then you go, OK, cool.
Ryan Lufkin (19:09.411)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (19:11.951)
So it takes a test well and they taught it to take that test. Okay, well two things. One, how long between CHAT GPT 3 .5 and CHAT GPT 4? And it was only six months. Now, I could take any law student, have them take the LSAT when they started law school and they probably could get a 29%. Let's assume they're into law and they're already hobbyists at.
Melissa Loble (19:22.32)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (19:34.895)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (19:36.861)
could not get a law student to be at an 89 % in six months that had previously gotten a 20. So here's something that to me is like, this is different. And when we look at that evolution, so
There's a lot of really, really smart people. again, avoiding the hype cycle and listening to the doers, if you will. Anthropic is a new -ish company. They've got a new AI called Claude. It's getting a lot of attention because it seems to be doing things better.
Melissa Loble (20:00.482)
Mmm.
Ryan Lufkin (20:00.845)
Mm -hmm. Yep. Mm -hmm.
Melissa Loble (20:07.962)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (20:08.665)
And the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodi, his projections on things are scary. I can't put it another way, they're scary because two things. One, we've been accustomed to Moore's Law, so this is where I'm gonna leverage my technology background a little bit.
Ryan Lufkin (20:23.289)
I love it, yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (20:24.807)
So we've been accustomed to Moore's Law. That's a linear growth. We're very happy with it, right? The amount of compute doubles every whatever it is, three years, da da. And it's been steady since the, think, 60s or even 70s, right? But Moore's Law has been wonderful for us. And up until just two or three years ago, Moore's Law is what was driving technology innovation.
Two things we have to realize. One is that the AI growth is exponential, not linear, and that humans are notoriously terrible at understanding exponential growth. There's a great example for that, the grain of rice on a chessboard, right? There's 64 squares on a chessboard if you're a chess player. You put one grain of rice on the first square, two grains of rice on the next one, four grains of rice on the next one, eight grains of rice. By the time you get to the 64th square, how many are there? And most people can't even come close to the number.
Ryan Lufkin (20:56.29)
Yep. Yep.
Jeffrey Faust (21:15.325)
But I'll just tell you, it's in the eight trillions of rice grains in that 64 square. That's exponential growth, and we're not comfortable with that. Here's the other hard part. The difference between CHAT GPT -3 .5 and CHAT GPT -4 had nothing to do with humans fixing the technology. And that's the one that makes people uncomfortable. What it had to do with was the AI model getting larger access to larger data sets and training itself.
Ryan Lufkin (21:17.964)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (21:20.12)
Ow.
Melissa Loble (21:36.215)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (21:43.875)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (21:44.601)
So it's like, OK, wait a minute.
To me, that's where I go, well, so in K -12, what we can't do is put our heads in the sand on this. And I understand, historically, we were taught one way, we were taught to teach one way, we've been teaching one way, and now there's something on the horizon that looks to upset that, and that can be very unsettling for people. So how do we embrace it? Well, I think one of the things that's important is that we have to have shared values. So going back to Simon Sinek,
are our values? Why are we doing this? What are we trying to achieve? Well, ultimately, we're preparing kids for their future. And I often throw in, we're preparing kids for their future, not our past, as the back end of that conversation starter. But that's hard, because what we're most comfortable with is our past, what we know from experience. I sat in the room.
Melissa Loble (22:30.934)
love
Jeffrey Faust (22:41.629)
I received those 20 page mimeo'd, purple, still a little wet, maybe a little warm, sound funny, know, tests. I was there, you were there, we were there, and we had a teacher that we often connected with that we thought was brilliant and was brilliant, to be fair to that teacher, who taught that way and we want our students to have the same feeling we had after trying really hard on those tests and doing well or doing okay. You know, I can remember college
Melissa Loble (22:46.239)
Yup.
Ryan Lufkin (22:47.221)
Absolutely. Everyone's smelling them. Yep. Yep.
Melissa Loble (23:07.627)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (23:11.535)
where I got a 53 % and somebody next to me said, wow, you did great. I'm like, we had to do what? And it was like, yeah, that's just the way college physics is. I'm like, oh, really? OK, well, so everything's great on the curve. That was a whole new concept. we know that really well. What we don't know really well is a world where those skills,
knowledge recall, whatever else, have less and less and less less value in the future because there's something else that's going to do it far better than we ever could.
Melissa Loble (23:37.427)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (23:42.237)
going to the calculator conversations, a classic one, you you're not going always have a calculator in your pocket. Oh, actually I am. Yeah, actually I am going always have a calculator. But even better than a calculator, I'm just going to ask Google, what is 872 divided by 12 or whatever it is, and it's going to spin out an answer for me. And I'm not going even type anything. So what does that look like exponentially in five years, 10 years, 25 years, 100 years? So I think that the first thing to do is just acknowledge that this is different.
Ryan Lufkin (23:45.279)
Yep. Yeah. And yet somehow we do. Yeah.
Melissa Loble (23:58.069)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (24:12.151)
And that's not to throw caution to the wind, that's not to say we replace everything with AI, because I think what it actually does is it amplifies those human traits. It amplifies that human experience and the things that make us uniquely human to be the most important aspect of school and the most important aspect of public education.
Ryan Lufkin (24:19.669)
Mm -hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (24:31.273)
love that going back to the year you started with, there was a vice president of electricity, Right now, think AI is gonna, same thing, AI is gonna be so ubiquitous, it's gonna empower literally everything and this idea that we won't be talking about AI in the same way we are currently. It'll just be this underlying technology that permeates everything, right?
Melissa Loble (24:50.431)
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting too because as you were talking through this exponential piece, I think this is where you're right. There's true fear underneath that. And we're seeing as a result AI and just assessment in general, again, in the political landscape. And not looking to pick a side or anything like that, but one of the challenges in your role is you not only are managing
Jeffrey Faust (24:51.221)
I think so.
Ryan Lufkin (25:09.835)
Mm -hmm.
Melissa Loble (25:17.41)
this vision of assessment and innovation and how can we change the lives of our students every day. But you're also having to navigate the political spectrum of, you know, people are pulling in values perhaps that aren't about education, but that are their own sort of personal political values. How do you balance those two? What kind of advice could you give other listeners trying to figure out how do I balance particularly assessment?
Ryan Lufkin (25:25.225)
Mm -hmm, cheese, yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (25:36.999)
Yes.
Melissa Loble (25:43.477)
How do I balance this political landscape with wanting to do good for kids?
Jeffrey Faust (25:48.209)
Yeah, I'll tell you what, if I had the antidote for that, I don't think I'd need to work anymore. But I think, you know, at the end of the day, I mentioned Simon Sinek and start with Y and I mentioned values. One of the things that's critically important in this day and age is doing what we can to...
Ryan Lufkin (25:52.97)
hahahaha
Jeffrey Faust (26:15.157)
separate the long -term educational needs of our country and of our populations and of our communities. Schools are still community -based. Let's not lose that fact. Our schools in Chesapeake reflect Chesapeake, and the schools in Bangor, Maine reflect Bangor, Maine. And our kids would probably feel very out of place in the schools in Maine. The kids in Maine would probably feel very out of place in our schools. And I think that's OK. I think we should celebrate that.
Melissa Loble (26:24.577)
That's
Jeffrey Faust (26:42.141)
you know, 340 or 50 million people in America and a landmass that is huge, right? The United States is huge, relatively speaking. I think that actually is more of a factor in why we feel some of this political divisiveness right now is that there just are differences across our country.
Ryan Lufkin (26:48.116)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (26:48.629)
Hmm?
Ryan Lufkin (26:59.242)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (27:00.689)
If I travel to Texas, I feel like I'm in a foreign country. If I travel to California, I feel like I'm in a foreign country. And that's okay. That's actually one of things that makes America really just an awesome, great, great country. So I think for us in a school division, as we say, well, our values aren't about conservatism or liberalism. And they're not about right or left, red or blue. They're about...
Melissa Loble (27:03.274)
Mm -hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (27:05.321)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (27:19.537)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (27:26.117)
every student that we work with and getting them to their highest possible potential. I think publishing, and this is something that we've worked on and it's something we're looking at as we roll into our next strategic plan, that we literally should say these are our values. And that's not something that the school just comes up with on its own. It's part of a community outreach effort too, to say our school division values.
getting kids to this level, making sure that people feel supported emotionally, physically safe. There's just a lot of things that we can take away from that. And by having those values and using that as the why from Simon's Index Golden Circle model.
We always, when we come to those tough situations and we have a situation where, you know, politics is working its way into, we can say, well, does our values or do our values support that? Or is that something we should say, that doesn't align with the work that we're doing? And I think it does give us a tool. So that's one way I think we do it. And, you at the end of the day, we have students whose parents believe one thing and students whose parents believe the other thing. And our job is not to interfere in that, but our job is to help those students achieve their highest
Ryan Lufkin (28:24.095)
Yeah. Yep.
Jeffrey Faust (28:40.671)
potential.
Ryan Lufkin (28:41.118)
Yeah. You know, and I think Melissa mentioned a little bit about the challenges around assessment and even government regulation around, know, what is skill mastery? What is, you know, what is, as we kind of shift to that approach, what are some of the other conversations that are happening there that are disrupting assessment in general?
Jeffrey Faust (29:00.379)
Yeah, so this may be the stickiest wicket that we have to talk about today.
being a little bit bold and forward, I think that we need to encourage our state and federal government to...
decrease the amount of bureaucracy around public education and allow school divisions to propose plans, look towards authentic assessment measures, demonstrate growth and achievement levels expected in the way that works for them and their community. And I'm sorry that that's harder for our state and federal departments of education, that every school division possibly has their own plan, but I think that's the right thing to do for kids. If we go back in history and we look at the autonomy that school divisions had in America, say,
Ryan Lufkin (29:22.537)
Yes.
Melissa Loble (29:23.091)
Mm -hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (29:28.222)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (29:49.087)
50, 60 years ago, not everything was better. don't want to be very careful about this. Okay? I'm not painting a rosy picture, but I will say this. When you look at the global thought leaders and
Ryan Lufkin (29:54.32)
It wasn't a Rosie. Yeah, yeah,
Jeffrey Faust (30:04.401)
research scientists being produced at that time by United States public schools, it's drastically different than it is today. And when we think about the current geopolitical situation in the world, global economy, where you have to compete on a global level, we need to get that back. We need to be producing the world's thought leaders. And we do in some areas, but we really don't in other areas where we used to. And so my thought there is,
Melissa Loble (30:22.674)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (30:34.397)
Their oversight guardrails are great coming from federal and state DOEs, but standardized testing one size fits all, let's just, let's have a very frank conversation about the fact that 40 years into this, know, Reagan, Reagan really pushed back to basics education. And at the time we were all celebrating it and saying, yes, we need that.
Ryan Lufkin (30:41.642)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (30:55.837)
But I think 40 years later, a lot of our colleagues and peers and allies in other countries have abandoned that and said this didn't actually achieve what we thought it would. But I think we're tough to do that because we're stubborn. Americans are stubborn and we will try it until the cows come home because we're sure it's gonna work eventually. But I think 40 years on, we do have to have a really honest conversation about is it time for us to pivot away from
Melissa Loble (31:02.579)
Mm -hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (31:02.644)
Yeah. Yeah,
Ryan Lufkin (31:10.054)
No, not Americans!
Jeffrey Faust (31:24.145)
this thing that, Finland, Japan, they've all abandoned. A lot of the country we look at and go, right, they've abandoned standardized testing at the federal and state levels or their provinces. Canada has as well, right, directly to our north. So the question then is, well, if it's not working, let's at least have a conversation about what other methods could work and what does this mean for us in the global landscape.
Melissa Loble (31:26.118)
Mm -hmm Singapore
Ryan Lufkin (31:48.87)
Isn't that fascinating, love that.
Melissa Loble (31:49.374)
Yeah. I had another reflective moment. I'm having all of these moments as you're sharing, Jeff, that was really interesting. You talk about how 40 years ago or 30 years ago, the education experiences that we have would have looked very different from one another. So Ryan, I was thinking about you in Utah, me in California, in Southern California, and the distinctions there, and the diversity of thought that that brings to the table.
Ryan Lufkin (32:14.547)
Mm -hmm.
Melissa Loble (32:16.221)
So not even just that scholarship which is missing, but that, you know, it's okay. You want people to come with different thoughts and different viewpoints. And how do you encourage and capture that? Because that's, there's so much research that's been done on diversity of thought directly leading towards progress. And I think that's really interesting if we all think back to our own education, especially those of us that went to education in the US.
Jeffrey Faust (32:16.381)
Yes.
Ryan Lufkin (32:23.773)
Yeah. Yep.
Ryan Lufkin (32:31.337)
Mm -hmm.
Melissa Loble (32:42.365)
It's a very interesting thing about how does that shape what you contribute today and the group of people that you contribute that to. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to continue on this theme of what should we be, let's be bold, what should we be thinking about or what could be different? So you talked a little bit earlier about what technology should do.
Jeffrey Faust (32:52.765)
Absolutely.
Melissa Loble (33:08.688)
What do you wish, like if you had a magic wand and you wanted somebody to go make something or you wanted technology to solve a certain problem in assessment, what do you wish existed from a technology perspective?
Jeffrey Faust (33:21.905)
Yeah, so first I'm going to say that no silver bullet exists in technology. Even as the CTIO of a large school division, the request to come in of this will fix our, and it's like, no, our teachers will fix that. Let's give them the tools they need to fix that. That tier one, tier two instruction is the most valuable tool in our toolbox.
Ryan Lufkin (33:35.091)
No. Yes.
Melissa Loble (33:37.657)
Yep.
Jeffrey Faust (33:46.565)
regardless of where technology does or doesn't go. So that leads me to, well, how do we prop up our teachers? And the answer in my mind is simple. We've got to stop putting more on their plates. I recently, it was funny, I had a wonderful little panel that I had the great opportunity to spend a day with at ISTE. And we were just chatting over lunch and came up as just like, you know.
We keep on looking to the state and the federal government to fix stuff, you know, and then at the division level, we go, well, let's ask the teachers. The teachers need to change. doing that. You hear this theme throughout. Teachers need to do a better job. Teachers need to do, and I said, well, when's the last time you gave your teachers permission to stop doing something? Of all the things we've asked teachers to do over the last two to three decades, when's the last time we said, you know what, please stop doing
Ryan Lufkin (34:42.762)
Let me take that off your plate. I love that. Yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (34:43.385)
That's not going to be your responsibility anymore. Let me take that off your plate. So to me, that's the silver bullet for our teachers and for education at large, if you ask me. A true AI virtual assistant for teachers where they can go, you know, grade that assignment for me and let me know what the themes are. You know, what are the standout, you know, things that we need to reteach that were well done, that weren't well done? Enter that into my grade book.
you know, put on my calendar for Thursday that we're gonna go do the experiment outside, whatever. So a true on -demand virtual assistant that is truly an assistant and truly smart enough to understand a teacher's experience, that we can then work with teachers and train them on how to leverage that assistant to take all of those extra duties off of them so they can focus. I mean, what do they do? Making, doing, building, creating, connecting.
Ryan Lufkin (35:32.702)
Yes.
Jeffrey Faust (35:41.095)
They know how to say to a student, you're not getting this because this doesn't make sense to you. Think about this then. if they have a chance to do that with a student, they can reinforce that concept like that because they realize that the sailboat example didn't work for that student. The whatever example didn't work for that student. They don't know what a canned green bean is. How many ounces are in a can of green beans? That kid's eating a McDonald's. Every single day, they don't know what a can of green beans looks like. So teachers sense
Ryan Lufkin (36:03.167)
I don't even know if they can agree with me. Yeah, yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (36:08.871)
they have an innate ability to make those connections with kids and go, you know what, this is a word for you. What if I said, and the kid goes, yeah, that makes total sense. So for me, clearing the runway and saying the majority of your time is gonna be, you know, direct instruction, large group, small group, interventions, one -on -one, two -on -one, and everything else is gonna be done for you, that to me is the technology we need. And I think I'm gonna be really, here we go, I'm gonna.
bite off the Silicon Valley hype cycle yet again, I think it's coming. I do, I genuinely think it's coming. But I think that the administrative year right now is burying our teachers and they feel, and that leads to risk adverse behaviors and existences where they're afraid to try new things and or let kids make a mess because they just don't want anything because they already feel like I've got 14 hours of work to do in my seven, eight hour day. And I know teachers don't waste no great hours.
Melissa Loble (36:40.292)
love it.
Ryan Lufkin (36:41.589)
Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (37:03.842)
Yeah, and I think just like the hype cycle, the Silicon Valley hype cycle, think educators have been told, well, just do this, it'll save you time. Just do this, it'll save you time. And it ends up taking them more time. And so I think they've been burned in the past too. I hear that from educators that I'm friends with. And so I think that you nailed it, Jeff, when you said tools that genuinely save them time don't need a lot of setup, kind of work in the back. think that is fascinating. What
Jeffrey Faust (37:11.322)
Yes.
Melissa Loble (37:11.369)
Mm -hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (37:31.071)
as an ed tech supplier, instructor, but we've got a partner network of a thousand ed tech partners, what are the conversations around assessment that we're not having? What do we need to address to really make this happen?
Jeffrey Faust (37:45.627)
Yeah, I think we've had themes of it throughout this. And that is there's a disconnect right now between what students need in the classroom and teachers need in the classroom. And the state is asking us to do and the federal government is asking us to do. And the colleges are preparing the teachers to be ready to do. I think that we are disjointed right now. And in some form of incongruence that is not working, where we're seeing these
Ryan Lufkin (38:07.863)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (38:14.973)
know, pre -service teachers coming to us fresh out of college, and there's a weird ageism that exists in education where we go, they're young, they know technology. And I'm going, stop saying that, it's not true. Because, I'm just gonna, I'll say one more. I'm trying not to be too bold today. Melissa, think you know me well enough, I have some bold ideas. The digital immigrants, digital natives narrative is the worst thing that's happened to us in the last 20 years, because it really, in my opinion, is thinning veiled ageism.
Ryan Lufkin (38:24.487)
Yes. Yeah.
Melissa Loble (38:24.889)
Yes.
Melissa Loble (38:33.08)
We love
Jeffrey Faust (38:43.965)
And I will tell you, I have technology leaders that have been teaching for 30 years and I have technology leaders who have been teaching for two years. And it's not because of their age that they are technology leaders. It's because of what lights their fire. And so like, that's the thing to me is like, we're not seeing our young, you know, new pre -service teachers coming to us fresh out of college. We're not seeing them ready to hit the ground running with differentiated technology driven, you know, authentic formative ongoing assessment. Like they're not.
Ryan Lufkin (38:49.13)
Absolutely.
Melissa Loble (38:53.942)
Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (39:13.181)
They're coming out of programs, generally speaking, are still having them write three page lesson plans and present a whole lot of things on paper. It might be Google Docs or Microsoft Word, but it's still on paper, if you will. The thing we can't separate is that Google Docs and Microsoft Word still look like pieces of paper that are 8 and 1 by 11. It may be digital, but it's not taking advantage of the technology. So for me, what we're not talking about is that sort of.
Melissa Loble (39:19.234)
Yep.
Ryan Lufkin (39:19.934)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (39:31.562)
They do in fact. They will still print off if you have a printer yet.
Jeffrey Faust (39:42.557)
disjointed experience that we're living through right now. And that's, my goodness, there's another one. If you had a magic wand and could fix that, you'd be set for life. But I do think that's one that I would love to see a meaningful conversation around how do we get alignment between what our 2024 students in the classroom need and what our teachers are prepared to teach and what our state and federal governments are looking to measure.
Melissa Loble (39:51.779)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (40:08.97)
Fascinating, yeah.
Melissa Loble (40:09.948)
my gosh, I could not agree more. And it's interesting, as we think about teacher prep programs, and I've taught one in the past, I'm not sure they're preparing teachers to be as efficient and effective in their work. That should be a whole class, in my opinion, about how do you use all of the tools. And then in contrast, I've seen there's so many different tools, and I think AI has actually worsened this, that if you don't understand
Ryan Lufkin (40:29.31)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (40:37.666)
how to manage that world, you're becoming less efficient and there's more on your plate because nobody's helped you figure out how to navigate through this journey to put less on your plate. And I love that idea of a personal AI bot that's specific for teachers to help them think about what's less on their plate, not more. So I'm curious, as our last question, Jeff,
Ryan Lufkin (40:41.831)
Mm -hmm.
Melissa Loble (41:03.096)
What does 24 and 25 look like? What is the next year, school year to next two school years look like for you? What are you doing within your own districts to think about how to address some of these gaps we've talked about today?
Jeffrey Faust (41:18.641)
Yeah, so what we're doing right out of the gate, so when back probably not quite a year ago, maybe about nine months ago, we realized the AI infiltration, if you will, of education was here and it was real. And a lot of my colleagues and I, we have our regional meetings, we talk, we're blocking chat TPT, well, we're blocking whatever. And I'm like.
I don't know how to block everything. Right? Right. So you close the gate, but it turns out that on either side of the gate, the fence stops. that was the initial reaction, which we got to block this. It's cheating. So I think what we started is we did some outreach. At principals meetings, we talked about the fact that AI is not cheating.
Ryan Lufkin (41:46.871)
There's no way to block everything.
Melissa Loble (41:47.35)
Exactly.
Ryan Lufkin (41:54.599)
Yep, yep.
Jeffrey Faust (42:09.841)
Misrepresenting your work is cheating, period. And I don't care how you do that. You take somebody else's work, you get a copy of the test ahead of time, your friend takes pictures and sends it to you. you know, that's cheating no matter what. AI helping you to organize your thoughts to prepare for, to do the best writing you can do is not only not cheating, it might be some of the greatest sort of writing growth that we see in students. We don't know yet, but it could be. And so we started by that. And when we said what you need to do is structure your assignments, your assessments to just assume.
Melissa Loble (42:30.88)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.
Jeffrey Faust (42:40.328)
Just because they can't access chat GPT on this school issued device, they can still do it on their phone, their home computer, or whatever else. you know, let's be real about it. So we started with that and I made a pretty bold statement of like, I do not see the use of AI as cheating. I do not see it as something that violates our acceptable use policy such that we should be trying to block it. Our blocking of sites and whatever else is based upon law and based upon, you know, very specific parameters.
Ryan Lufkin (42:45.)
Yeah,
Melissa Loble (42:45.696)
Right.
Melissa Loble (43:07.538)
Yeah.
Jeffrey Faust (43:09.67)
this does not check that box. In fact, arguably, it's a human advance that is gonna benefit society, we hope, knock on wood, at large. So that's where we started. Then we did form an AI committee, and we've been meeting monthly, and then we do, actually we do lunch hour and office hours to have the members of the committee jump in with myself and one of the technology integration leaders to say,
Hey, we heard about this thing. So we're using this as a way as a good feedback loop for us within our organization and also a way for us to put out tools like, we need somebody to pilot. Like we need a group of people to pilot.
Melissa Loble (43:46.408)
Mm -hmm. It's great.
Jeffrey Faust (43:48.529)
So what we're doing right now is we're building a culture of AI is real, AI is here, AI has great promise, but we're not going to put it out as the thing everybody should or needs to use until we're certain that it aligns with our values and our why and benefits the students that we're trying to move. And that to me is the responsible sort of reaction right now and opening up tools for teachers first, here, take a look at this.
Melissa Loble (44:05.35)
it.
Jeffrey Faust (44:18.415)
them out there. But I think we're also looking to our vendors. I want to be very fair. think, you know, and to give Instructure a nod based upon last week's event, very excited about some of the announcements around AI and the responsible integration of AI tools to support teachers and students within the platform. I think that is going to be a model that many of the K -12 tech vendors are going to follow. You
AI can be very effective and efficient when targeted at this particular platform, this particular set of features, this particular functionality, and this user group. And so, you know, we're watching that. And obviously, those are the things that I think will provide great entry points for us into AI is normal, it's okay, we're going to enable it and let you and your students use this because it's been deployed responsibly, it's been
It is designed to support what we know to be great education anyway and to enhance what we maybe couldn't do before and give us abilities to do things then. So for me...
A very long answer and I apologize for that, I think that that's what we're trying to do is we're trying to be responsible about the approach, acknowledge the fact that it's here, develop capacity within our leaders, and create opportunities for teachers who are our innovators in the front of that adoption curve who are saying, I just want to use it. I have this great idea. We think we can do and trying to identify those opportunities. And we're going to keep this committee going.
Melissa Loble (45:26.961)
Yeah. No, it's great.
Jeffrey Faust (45:56.633)
and open up tools that come across as being directly beneficial in alignment with our mission and our values.
Ryan Lufkin (46:04.972)
Yeah, this is fascinating. I keep using that word because I'm going to spend the rest of day thinking about this, but I literally wrote down, you know, generative AI isn't cheating. Misrepresenting your work is cheating. Cause I think that that line just gets it so cleanly, so distinct that I'm I'm going to go to have that conversation with my 13 year old son because I think we've been, I've been looking for a way to describe that and that is perfect.
Melissa Loble (46:05.648)
Amazing.
Melissa Loble (46:26.76)
Yeah, so many moments actually in this podcast like that, Ryan, right? Just grabbing these foundational ideas that set a framework or set those values. And then you can have conversations layered in, whether it's AI or assessment or whatever it might be, teacher workload. But it just gives us the context to be very thoughtful and student -centered as we have those conversations. So Jeff.
Ryan Lufkin (46:49.354)
Yeah, amazing.
Melissa Loble (46:50.759)
Thank you so much for this conversation today. know our listeners are going to have those same moments that Ryan and I did, frantically writing things down. Thank you so much again for being on our podcast.
Jeffrey Faust (46:53.597)
Absolutely.
Jeffrey Faust (46:59.59)
you
Jeffrey Faust (47:03.183)
It is my pleasure. Thank you guys for the opportunity to talk. I think together we all move the needle. So thank you.
Ryan Lufkin (47:09.417)
Awesome, thanks Jeff.
