"Why not our kids?" Findings from a report on AI use in Rural K12 settings

That was great.

Thanks, folks.

As I'm getting my screen shared here, I just want to start with a note of appreciation for having us.

We're really passionate about the work, excited to see how it's coming along, and really appreciate the platform and the chance to talk about what we're learning.

As you shared, my name is Michael Hamm.

I am a partner for research and policy at Full Scale.

In past lives, I worked at the US Department of Education's Office of Ed Tech.

as an Education Pioneers Impact Fellow.

And before that was a classroom teacher in Duval County Mobile Schools in Jacksonville, Florida.

So literally have spent time like in the 10 years that I've been in this space going from on the ground implementation up to like how far from kids can you possibly be removed? and trying to set policy and have spent the last several years trying to knit those two things together via research, via practice, via things like the report that we're working on.

I'll start by just grounding us in the research and the theory of innovation that we are rooting our program in, and I'll pass it to my colleague, Megan, to talk a little bit about the program and to introduce herself as well.

So our program is really founded on this theory of innovation that puts coherence and constraint in contention with one another.

So this idea that innovation is really shaped by like the level of coherence and the conditions that help systems align, right? Like shared directions, coordinated actions, the things that enable ideas to become sustained innovations.

But on the other hand of that is constraint, the conditions that shape an actual system, things like limited time, staffing, resources, the pressure and the trade-offs that really like that shape what things actually emerge and persist.

So when you put these two things in a conversation, we really think that rural offers us a place where we get to look at school systems that are really highly coherent, right? Because like when you walk down the hallway and you can talk to everyone who's working in the school district, right? The superintendent can have an idea.

We can really move quickly on some of these things.

There isn't some of that bureaucratic red tape that we're working through or some of those things that slow down innovation in other places.

But at the same time, there's this ethos of innovation within rural school districts that really focuses on, that forces focus and that like allows us to think about like, What are the hard trade-offs that we have to make here? We can't do all of the really great things that we want to see happen for kids.

How do we place our bets? How do we really invest in the things that we think are going to be most transformational for students? So when we put these two things together, we have this idea that really the most innovative practices might be emerging from these highly constrained districts like rural school districts.

that also have this really high sense of coherence, a really high level of coherence within them, right? So not saying that innovation is coming out of larger school districts or school districts that aren't operating under the same constraints, like not saying that they're not as valuable, but when we're really thinking at full scale as an organization, how are we fundamentally re-imagining what teaching and learning looks like? We think that some of those re-imagination practices, like the things that are really truly next edge, like really like rethink what is the grammar of school, that we think that some of those things are going to be coming out of rural places.

And so we've designed this program around that idea, a theory that we're practicing, but also rooted our project in some research that is at the center of the report that brought us here together that really focused on 241 schools and districts looking at what are the things that they're working on, how are they actually implementing AI, conducting 22 interviews with national, state, intermediary, and local leaders, and then also looking at the 114 applications for the Rural AI Strategy Lab that Megan is running and that Jessica and Jason are participating in, as well as 33 in-depth interviews with finalist teams.

What we're seeing here is a set of emerging practices where innovation is showing up around operational, administrative, and non-instructional workflows, things like administrative efficiency, IT support, planning, school operations.

There's another piece that's instructional workflows and teacher-facing workflows, things like lesson planning, differentiating, providing feedback, instructional design.

those sorts of things, as well as direct student-facing usages, meaning tutoring some sort of career exploration, building students' AI literacy, authentic learning experiences, and using AI to power those things.

And what's really interesting, I think, is among these practices, we see consistently across all of these data points a set of driving opportunities, as well as a set of system-level conditions that are shaping how they're taking place or what they're actually looking like in each of these different schools and districts.