In her conversation with Dr. Kishimoto, Dr. Kim discusses the integration of AI and technology in the Kent School District. Dr. Kim emphasizes the importance of digital and media literacy and developing an AI policy to ensure ethical and biased use, integrating AI into core learning without compromising academic integrity.
Enjoy the conversation with Dr. Kishimoto and Dr. Kim below.
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The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Dr. Kishimoto
Welcome everyone to The Stories We Must Tell. I am so excited to have this amazing leader with me today, Rebecca Kim. Dr. Kim from the Kent School District in Washington, right here in my backyard. Dr. Kim is doing outstanding work as she leads the Teaching and Learning arm of the Kent School District and is doing amazing work with AI and Technology. Rebecca, welcome.
Dr. Kim
Thank you. It’s great to see you again.
Dr. Kishimoto
It’s great to see you. I love seeing your presence all over the state and regionally, and love to talk about what’s happening. But let’s start with the fact that we’re several months into the school year. There’s so much going on. How is it going for everyone? How is it going for you?
Dr. Kim
It is very busy. We have budget cuts. We no longer have ESSER funding to support us, and so we’re doing a lot with less. We’ve had some staffing restructuring happening in Teaching and Learning, so it’s been quite busy, but we continue to keep our North Star around the importance of our students experiencing joy and pride in their learning, and that is centered around some of the instructional leadership work that we’ve been focusing on for all our school and teaching and learning leaders. There are 20 teaching and learning leaders, and we have 44 schools represented. So, all of our principals and assistant principals are really focused on the learning and the implementation this year. And so, it’s been exciting, and the feedback has been positive thus far.
Dr. Kishimoto
This is why I love talking to you because you do focus on your North Star, the district’s North Star. You’re always focused on excellence for students and the opportunities we need to keep providing them. We know how complex education is these days. We know that funding is dropping everywhere. There are challenges at the state level, and at the local district level, and we also know that we have an election coming up. There’s just so much happening, right?
But you stay focused on that North Star. I am so excited about highlighting Kent School District because you have several decades of amazing history in terms of being recognized for being at the forefront of bringing technology and innovations into the classrooms and being very student-focused. With that, you’ve won the Microsoft Award for being one of the most internationally innovative models in the classroom. You’ve been part of the Digital Promise League of Innovative Schools, so there’s a long history. This is not new work that you’re leaning into in terms of AI and Technology, but we have new innovations happening. So, I’d love to dig in more on that and really understand your passion for why technology is such a critical tool in how you are structuring teaching and learning for kids today.
Dr. Kim
Well, I will start with our strategic plan. We’re in year two. Our first goal is that our students will be global citizens, and it is our responsibility to ensure they are ready to learn and experience life and become leaders outside of their K-12 experience. So that, being said, those 21st-century skills that students need to build are essential. It is our priority and obligation to ensure that our students are ready to be global citizens. A lot of our curriculum is digitally based. We know that our students and adults everywhere across the world are dependent on digital content. And so, our students are engaging in their learning, their assessments, their interventions, their creating, and their critical thinking, all digitally based.
As we think about our students and their digital experiences and preparing them to be global citizens, we want them to be ready for careers. We are really excited about a partnership we had with the City of Kent, and we did an external evaluation of where are we in our career, connected pathway experiences for students, and how are we leveraging or not leveraging the business partnerships that we are surrounded by. We have Boeing, we have Blue Origin, we have many apprenticeship opportunities, and so the city has been really generous in providing us with some funding to be able to expand those business partnerships with our school district, to increase apprenticeships, and to increase career connected pathway, learning content, and curriculum, not just at the secondary CTE level, but from elementary, middle, and high school. And so, we have all of these opportunities around CTE, the everyday digital learning and curriculum, and the importance of recognizing that we need our students to be ready and to be competitive when they leave our school district.
Dr. Kishimoto
So you have partnerships that you lean into, and I love that. Because bringing in that perspective of business and industry and bringing local city partners is really important. But at the same time, we know that there’s this broader state context, and it’s not just a state context. Certainly, we’re watching it here in Washington, but there’s also a national context of funding that is not sufficient in education, despite the kind of innovations we really need to be bringing in for our schools to our students to experience. But also, enrollment overall has been on the decline for over a decade across this country. And so, it’s not a one-for-one. You still need the teachers, you still need the innovations, you still need the materials, and so forth. And so, how is this challenging the Kent School District? How is this challenging the ability to continue in this innovation work considering the budget impacts?
Dr. Kim
Yes, as I mentioned, we are doing more with less, and so how do you build that internal capacity to then ensure that that is coherence across all 44 schools, that there is coherence in the way that we are looking at what is high-quality instruction, that there’s coherence and experiences for students in those career connected pathways around STEM.
I think the greatest challenge is once we build that internal capacity, and we might have one year of success in building some of that capacity. How do we ensure the sustainability of the work? And so that’s why, when we say that we’re investing in instructional leadership this year, it’s not just the principals, it’s not just the teaching and learning executive directors. It is the assistant principals. It is the assistant directors. Because when we invest and when we do that shared learning, we are building a culture, and we’re building common expectations, and that coherence is a priority of our superintendent. And so, with that coherence and taking what we can in the moments we have, with the budget that we have and with the staffing that we have. That will build sustainability because we have that focus.
Dr. Kishimoto
I love that focus. It’s really the capacity you invest in today is the capacity you will have for tomorrow as budgets go up and down, and it still allows for a tremendous amount of work and focus and intention to happen. And so, I love the way you have strategically approached this.
And I know your superintendent, Israel Vela, who is also in the midst of working with his board and with the community and the internal staff, parents, students, etc, to figure out this capital and technology levy that’s coming up for a vote. I believe it’s about $32 million, correct me if I’m wrong. We know that budgets need to be supplemented. We know how important that is. And I wish you all the best in that passing so that you continue to do the work that’s needed. How do you keep people focused when we still need to keep the work going?
Dr. Kim
It’s inevitable. I think we’re going to talk about AI in a moment here. But you know, AI surrounds us all. Digital content surrounds us all. And what is inevitable and what is non-negotiable is that we build our students’ digital and media literacy. To do that, we need to think about how we can leverage additional professional development and support through potential levy funding. But if not, how we continue to build internal capacity by being really intentional in the way that we are integrating technology into core learning, that it’s not a one-off, that media literacy does not live alone? It’s not a standalone but how do we thoughtfully integrate that into the way that students are engaging with social studies or ELA resources? How do we make sure that students can differentiate between real news and fake news, which we see is so prevalent right now, especially in our political climate? So how do we make sure that, with or without this funding, to prioritize the importance of this technology integration again, so that our students are prepared to be strong, competitive, global citizens when they leave our time here in KSD.
Dr. Kishimoto
Rebekah, I’m glad you raised the topic of AI, because we know that it was just a short while ago, November 2022, all of a sudden, we were all faced with something called Chat GPT. And it’s amazing how quickly the use cases spread as people started exploring this for the first time.
AI is now more ubiquitous, and whether you’re a student on your own at home, or whether you’re a parent, a grandparent, or you’re formally using this in business and industry and education, there is just this explosion of ideas around how to use AI and how to leverage it for different use cases. Talk about the use case of teaching and learning. How are you and your team thinking about the ways in which you use this to enhance teaching and learning, but also to prepare students for the future, their future?
Dr. Kim
Thank you for that question. It’s an area that I’m really passionate about and leaning into. I think there’s a lot of admiration for the concept of AI. I’ve been to many national conferences where I hear keynote speakers talk about the concept. When I get a little, what’s the right term, when I kind of just question, how much ground-level experience and knowledge do we have in the field? I really lean in and try to immerse myself in the learning. And so, this is an area that I’ve become very passionate about because AI can be weaponized to catch students on academic integrity. I’ve seen that happen with my own child. In some cases, that has happened. They didn’t use it to turn in an assignment, but I’ve just heard some expectations and guidance around that. That’s why I think it’s so important that you’re being intentional about, what this looks like at the system level.
So, first of all, there are policies and accessible use policies that we know govern our school boards, and we do have a legislative policy that’s available to us to adopt. What we are doing in Kent School District is first starting with a co-constructed vision of what is artificial intelligence in KSD that involves our central office leaders, school-based staff, and students, and we have a draft of what that vision is.
And then we used our state OSPI, human-centered AI principles to guide and be the foundation for the way that we wanted to construct our guiding principles around our vision. And one of the things that we leaned in on was the danger of racial, gender, you name it, biases that could be troublesome with the way that we engage with AI.
And so those are some of the guiding principles that will drive the practical guidance that we are now building this school year. We have an amazing team leading that work, and they are going to embark on doing some co-construction around student and adult best practices that will then inform the way that we want to bring forward an AI policy to our school board that will help to inform the kind of digital tools and AI tools that we would approve of in our district, ensuring that those biases are removed, ensuring that our students have the data privacy in their AI interactions, etc., etc.
So there’s some exciting, intentional work that we are doing, and the team has developed this beautiful roadmap that is going to take us in that direction. We will probably be able to then share that with our school board to say we’ve done this ground-level work to now present this to you, instead of simply just accepting a policy as is. So really personalizing it to who we are in KSD.
Dr. Kishimoto
It’s certainly a lot of work to think about how you bring this into your existing systems, and you talked about things like bias and safety and data integrity, all of those things are critical. One of the things that’s always been so impressive about the Kent schools and its approach over the last decades is that while you’re always ensuring that safety and those protocols and those policies on that end, you don’t do that necessarily first before getting to the innovation. And I think the innovation work is something that you do hand in hand, and it’s a leadership mindset that you bring into your role and how you work with your staff, and really appreciate that side of it, which is the innovation side.
How are you and your team thinking about how AI and the wealth of opportunities for innovation show up in the classroom to really empower students in a different way in terms of a pedagogical construct?
Dr. Kim
When we ask students to construct something they are able to at their fingertips with great use of AI, bring in multiple resources in ways that they haven’t been able to before. They are able to use that to really inform a bigger picture or more global perspective of the way they are learning and engaging with content. It will also help them to think about ways to construct and bring in ideas that they may have not simply been able to do outside of AI. I also think there are opportunities to build those critical thinking skills when we ask students to not just use AI to go find a thing, but to compare and contrast, and to understand those different resources they might be able to quickly and efficiently pull from AI, but then doing something and constructing and applying what they’ve learned from that. So that intentional use is something we’re really looking forward to providing some guidance around so that we’re calibrated, and that adults and students feel equipped and empowered and confident in the use rather than rushing to academic integrity concerns.
“I was first introduced to Chat GPT and the practical use of AI at the inaugural convening, When Women Lead, in June of 2023. It was here where Dr. Kishimoto had us engage in activities around “writing” policy using Chat GPT. My inside voice was thinking, “Why is she so into this Chat GPT thing for this conference? Of course the wise Dr. Kishimoto knew what was coming in the next two years AI, AI, AI at almost every national conference, with K-12 organizations scrambling to figure out the best use, while other banning the use. I reminded her of this in our recent conversation around the exciting working happening in Teaching and Learning in the Kent School District. Thank you for being a pioneer and leading the way in this work! I can’t wait for the upcoming Tech, Power and Equity summit!” – Dr. Rebekah Kim
Dr. Kishimoto
I agree that there’s this tremendous opportunity on the application side of AI for students to construct, design, and start using learning time very differently, which means that teachers need to think about their pedagogy differently. It’s just an exciting time, and I have a hard time getting caught up in kind of the fears of it. And I know there were some fears, and those are legitimate. It’s because we want to make sure we have a safe learning environment and the correct utilization of tools. But I am so excited about the things that are going to come from engaging students in this way through AI-enabled tools and technologies because they push us, right. We’re not the ones designing. We’re going to expose them to it, and they’re going to be the designers of these new concepts. And it’s just exciting. Rebekah, I’m excited to keep exploring what’s happening with the Kent School District.
We run out of time very quickly when we have these conversations, because there’s so much to share and learn from one another. What’s your vision for what this may look like, or what schools will look like in the next 10 years?
Dr. Kim
I think our students are going to be so sharp, they are going to be learning and showing their understanding in different ways. That makes me excited. I am very passionate, and that’s a story for another day around serving the whole child. How are we seeing and knowing the whole child? I think that these innovative experiences and ways that students can show and demonstrate their learning outside of high-stakes accountability and assessments are going to provide opportunities for students to show who they are in different ways. Bringing in more student voice and student agency is going to be inevitable. The way we design instruction and teaching in the classroom allows us to choose whether or not agency is there for students. With the innovation, there isn’t going to be an option. Students are going to have agency in the way they engage with their learning and the way they demonstrate their understanding of the learning.
Dr. Kishimoto
Well, Dr. Kim, as the Associate Superintendent of Teaching and Learning for the Kent School District I have to give you a shout-out for what I always hear coming from your presentations and your discussions, which is, you are always about the whole child. You are always about the students showing up as their full selves, not leaving anything at the door, and having a space that honors and respects them. And so, I thank you for leading in that way, and I also thank you because I am so excited that you’re going to be at our Tech, Power and Equity conference in Phoenix, Arizona, sharing the work that’s happening in the Kent School District along with other leaders across the nation.
Thank you for joining us today.
Dr. Kim
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to see you again in January, maybe somewhere in between since we live in the same state.
Dr. Kishimoto
That’s right, we have to get together. Thank you.
