John Santos:
AI is very secondary to this idea of it’s this something that helped us fuel and excitement around curiosity. And curiosity is already existing in students. So constantly as educators, how might we consider how to allow opportunities for student curiosity to emerge and show up and continue to flourish in classrooms? And so AI might be one of those tools of just because there’s such an immediacy to that of you’re curious, ask a question, what did it say, that kind of thing, right?

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of John Santos. John’s been a teacher at High Tech High for 20 years, mostly teaching 11th or 12th grade science. Right now he’s teaching 12th grade environmental science.
John’s been on the podcast a couple of times before, first to talk about grading and then to talk about how he launches projects. I love talking to John about teaching because he makes his approach sound like the most natural thing in the world, but it generally flies in the face of at least a dozen of my preconceptions about how school is supposed to work.
So when I found out that John and his students have been experimenting with using AI in a project, I had to find out more, especially because John is a guy I would go to with questions about carpentry or wilderness survival, but he’s not who I would go to if I had a question about my computer. That might sound like a problem, but John sees it as an asset. Let’s get into it.
John Santos talking about artificial intelligence. I don’t want to say that you’re the last teacher in the world I expected to be having this conversation with, but you’re reasonably close.

John Santos:
As soon as you said John Santos talking about artificial intelligence, I thought like, “Oh man, why am I on this side of the mic? They came to me to talk about this.”

Alec Patton:
If we were talking about new technology that you’re excited about, I would assume it involved a table saw, maybe some sort of new form of neoprene that was really upgrading wetsuit technology. I know you know how to use a computer, but I don’t think of it as being an experience you enjoy or seek out.

John Santos:
Yeah. I mean, that in itself makes it really exciting. This whole thing of… I often have this like, “Hey, you guys, gather around, I’m going to show you this thing I found in Google Docs,” and they’re like, “That was like five years ago, man,” but it’s like-

Alec Patton:
By they, you mean 11th graders?

John Santos:
My students, my colleagues, my children, my wife. Yeah. But yeah, I see technology, it’s such a powerful tool. And so for me, I feel like because I’m behind the learning curve, I’m always learning. Maybe you guys that are right at the cusp of this whole thing, maybe you feel a little bit more impatient. But yeah, for me, there’s all sorts of learning that lies ahead.

Alec Patton:
What made you start exploring AI?

John Santos:
So AI specifically, it’s interesting that happens, this instinct in teachers when something comes up that is new. There’s kind of this instinct of like, “Okay, this seems like there might be something in this for my students to experience something that’s authentic. This is really happening out there in the real world.”
And so this inclination of, I want to bring this in to our learning environment, and then this is where the instinct gets tricky, is like, “Well, before I bring this in, I need to go become some level of expert on this thing before I can even bring it in,” because in absence of that, there’s this potential for bottlenecks, these unforeseen outcomes, it might fall flat.
And so for me, this AI thing became… It’s a new part of the conversation and you’re kind of hearing it pop up in all sorts of places. You hear it come up with this kind of worry around, “I’m afraid students are going to use this to create their essays for college.” So there was a buzz around it, and I was just interested in the buzz. What I was probably most interested in is what does it look like for a teacher to jump in and learn about something alongside their students?
And so AI actually just happened to be what was happening right then that I was unfamiliar with, but it seemed like there was some value or at least interest or application. And so it was like, “Huh, I wonder how we might wrap our learning around this and dive into it together.” That’s what I loved about jumping into AI with students is that it was immediately very messy and all sorts of unforeseen things that I wouldn’t have actually brought up.
I would’ve probably, if it was left to me, I would’ve chosen one platform and I would’ve said, “Okay, it’s going to be Chat GPT or Bard.” But students started bringing up this idea of, “Did you know that Snapchat has its own AI?” I was like, “I had no idea.” And so they brought in all these other platforms, and then it started to become these questions of what would it look like to ask Snapchat AI and Bard or Chat GPT the same exact set of questions? What would those responses look like?
And it was like, oh, that conversation yielded more than ultimately the questions and responses we were even getting from AI was more the conversation around how will we use AI? And then also I think what it felt like as a community, that wasn’t one person thinking that, we were collectively trying to figure something out together. It felt good.

Alec Patton:
To understand how John and his students actually ended up using AI, first you need to know about the project they’re working on this semester.

John Santos:
The whole goal of the project is to understand how feeding our community impacts our own health wellness, but then also the wellness of the environment. And the question we’re asking specific to biology is what does it look like to be proactive about our health and wellness? I think so much of our understanding of health and wellness is actually really our approach to curing illness. So as a society, we predominantly function on this thing that if you’re well, just keep doing whatever it is that you’re doing, and then if something comes up and you fall ill, that’s kind of the construct around wellness.
And so we’re asking ourselves that question, what does it look like to be proactive about wellness? And so our students are looking at their own backgrounds, their values, their identity. They’re looking at things very specifically and myopically around food and nutrition. But then they’re also asking themselves questions about what are their behaviors, what are things that they might try that might impact their health and wellness? The whole goal in the end is that they have kind of a sense of what it looks like for themselves to act in ways that contribute to their health and wellbeing and that align with their values.

Alec Patton:
How did you launch that?

John Santos:
The way we launched it is we ate a bunch of food and I put out just the spectrum of snacks from candy to celery, and they started considering what happens with digestion and what’s involved and what’s going on in that process. And then we started coming up with questions around diet, nutrition, but then also as it applied to our own identity and our background and our values, and we sort of threw a bunch of questions up there.
And then I felt like once we had at least this initial representation of our curiosity and our wondering, then we thought, “Okay, where do we go from here?” And I think traditionally you go to an expert, and that might be a teacher at the very base level. It might be some person who’s a nutritionist or something like that, but it’s like there’s this new thing now. Is AI an expert? And I think that’s kind of part of what we were looking at is can we trust AI as an expert? And then ultimately the other thing is can we get our questions answered and get information as well?

Alec Patton:
So you kind of started with a very classic inquiry-led project of let’s look at a thing, let’s generate some questions from the group. Lots of projects have started that way throughout the history of project-based learning, and then it was like, “Oh, there’s this new way to try to answer this. Let’s field test it.”

John Santos:
I think that’s a great description, this idea of just jumping into it together, field-testing it. And I think it wasn’t on the front end. I don’t think that there was this agreement that this inquiry will be answered by artificial intelligence. It was like, “Let’s see how this comes out.”
And I mean, for me as a teacher, I think there’s such a greater value in teaching your students how to ask good questions and how to be curious and how to wonder and how to let that kind of drive the learning process. And so it’s not that we had this one day where we came up with this set of questions and then we ran that up through AI and got some responses. It’s really that like, “Okay, well then what comes next?”
And we’ve continued to use AI not in any sort of everybody uses it sort of way. It’s like every once in a while with individual students, I’m like, “What would this look like if we ran this through AI?”, or, “What would this look like if we actually reached out and connected with somebody, a human in the community and asked them this set of questions?” And so the goal of the project is actually to continue to interview and just for the opportunity to interact with people outside of this place. We have our students interviewing other experts as well. It’s all part of that process.

Alec Patton:
So talking to experts is a big dimension of this project.

John Santos:
I think talking to experts is a big dimension of learning.

Alec Patton:
And so it seems like you had the idea that students should talk to people and talk to experts who are outside the classroom and expand their horizons, and they started that process by talking to robots.

John Santos:
Yes, and each other.

Alec Patton:
And each other.

John Santos:
Yeah. But yes, yeah, talking to robots.

Alec Patton:
What insights did you all get from the robot stage of this project?

John Santos:
There was something really lovely about it, this idea that I don’t know that students typically scrutinize responses they would get from a human expert. They would accept them as vetted, true information versus this idea when there’s something new or even something that you’re skeptical about. Remember Wikipedia where it was just like, “Hey, everybody, okay, I don’t know. You guys should stay away from that”? But it’s this idea is that as it came through, I think that they were that much more, in a really great way, they kind of scrutinized their responses and considered the value of what it was that they got back.
I think that we were really surprised, or at least students were really vocal about this idea of, “You should take a look at this response that I got here. It is incredibly thorough and informative, and it gave me back all sorts of stuff that is even kind of in addition to the question that I asked that I wasn’t really expecting,” or you had the other end of the spectrum, which was really great to hear from students of, “This is the most bland, non-informative response that I could have,” typically which came from Snapchat’s AI, just so everybody knows.

Alec Patton:
And my understanding is one of the things that you started using it for was actual preparation for interviewing humans.

John Santos:
Yes. And what was so interesting about this is I thought of it as like, “Well, let’s just see what happens here.” But again, it was a genuine exploration, and I would’ve thought that it would basically be kind of a dressed up Wikipedia of, “We’re going to get online, we’re going to ask some questions, we’re going to find some information, and it’s going to be very transactional.”
And in the end, it felt like there was a greater value than I thought there was going to be. Students learned how to use it as a tool. I think there was also really healthy conversation about where you wouldn’t use this kind of thing and where it just didn’t feel applicable or it was going to be a contributing tool.

Alec Patton:
Where was that?

John Santos:
I think it starts to run into challenge when it comes to things around preferences and the emotion behind things. It’s really hard to get AI to respond in emotional ways. So a lot of this was around values, and it’s this idea of you can get the internet to tell you all sorts of information with regard to what is the healthiest snack you should eat to start your morning right, but if the internet doesn’t know who you are and what your values are and what types of culture you want to bring into your own eating processes, it can’t really give you responses that then have any sort of value to you.
AI does much better than something like Google or just the basic internet does to where in terms of adjusting to a person’s identity and saying, “Hey, this is a really important value to me heading into this question,” so you know can you use this as a filter as you start to look for responses. It was still limited, but still pretty impressive.

Alec Patton:
And so at some point you started running practice interviews.

John Santos:
So yeah, we created interviews. And then the first-

Alec Patton:
When you say created interviews, you mean a set of questions?

John Santos:
Our students created sets of questions intended to be used in interviews.

Alec Patton:
Right. And you field tested them on each other as you would have 10 years ago of like, “Hey, I’m going to do this interview.” You pair off with this person and do a role play. I’m familiar with that process, but then it was like, “Why don’t you do this interview with Chat GPT or do this interview with Snapchat’s not very good AI?”

John Santos:
By and large, what students used it for is they created a set of questions and they ran those through one AI platform. But then there were other students that were actually more interested to see if they ran that same interview through different types of platforms, what types of responses they got. So they had this kind of secondary curiosity of, “Yeah, I want to see what it says about my diet and nutritional choices that I’m making, but I’m also really interested to see what types of differences kind of emerge,” so that kind of drove their curiosity as well.

Alec Patton:
Was there a point in this process where you thought, “I wish I’d actually done a little bit more background before I brought the students in on this”?

John Santos:
No. I would say it was exactly the opposite. I felt very celebratory of this idea of I’m so glad that we really dove into this at the same exact time alongside each other. That being said, there was also a degree or an element of luck. For instance, a couple of things came up of very first thing, they flipped open their school computers and just said, “Oh yeah, all AI is blocked on school computers.” And so then one student said, “Yeah, but you can circumnavigate that if you log into your personal email address and you could do it that way,” or another said, “You can actually access it by way of your phone and do it this way.”
And so I get that there could have been a couple huge roadblocks that came up that just shut the entire thing down that we would have to, I guess, pivot and figure out. So there’s a degree of luck in that, but it worked out. And for me, the excitement around we’re really in this together and the idea that I don’t know that I would’ve been able to figure out how to circumnavigate that of this idea of like, “Well, I’ll try my personal email.” It’s like students are really good at that stuff. So no, I’m really glad we explored that together. It felt good. It felt like real learning.

Alec Patton:
Is this podcast going to be how IT finds out that you skirted their protections in order to have your students go directly onto AI from school computers?

John Santos:
IT and I are always on the up and up. They’re total colleagues in this, and I went to them and that’s what’s interesting is IT right now, I think it’s across the board, organizationally, it’s this big question mark with, what do we do with this? Do we block it completely and just keep it away from the conversation at all? Do we figure out one that we use? Do we completely open things up? So for now, it’s blocked. IT’s been super cool about it. They themselves are asking the question of to what degree and how might we make it available as a very useful tool to students.

Alec Patton:
No claims that you’re like an expert. You’re like two months more of an expert than somebody who’s totally new to this. But what are your pro tips for a teacher who’s thinking, “Yeah, seems like I could be using AI with students”?

John Santos:
What are my pro tips? Man.

Alec Patton:
Professional AI user.

John Santos:
Yeah, yeah.

Alec Patton:
John Santos.

John Santos:
Professional AI user, John Santos, his pro tips are… I don’t know. I think of it as AI is very secondary to this idea of it’s this something that helped us fuel and excitement around curiosity. And curiosity is already existing in students. So constantly as educators, how might we consider how to allow opportunities for student curiosity to emerge and show up and continue to flourish in classrooms? And so AI might be one of those tools of just because there’s such an immediacy to that of you’re curious, ask a question, what did it say, that kind of thing, right?
And so it’s like, how might we use it as a tool to foster or support curiosity in the space? Use your students definitely and open up the conversation because they’re probably already using it in some ways. I would say don’t constrain the exploration and don’t say like, “Snapchat, absolutely not.” That to me was probably one of the more valuable things we got out of that. So I think I have two, not three. Can you think of any tips?

Alec Patton:
I don’t know. Two’s good. Two’s good.

John Santos:
Okay, good.

Alec Patton:
Thank you very much, John Santos, for joining us. The listeners should know that you’ve been dressed as a professional lobster fisherman for this entire interview, it being October 31st.

John Santos:
Happy Halloween.

Alec Patton:
Happy Halloween.
As you’ve just discovered, we recorded this interview last October, and at that point the project hadn’t finished yet. So last week I talked to John again to find out what happened next and how he feels about the project and AI nearly a year later.
All right, John Santos, it’s been not quite a year. It was Halloween when we last spoke.

John Santos:
Wow.

Alec Patton:
You were dressed as a lobster man.

John Santos:
That’s what I dress as every year. If there’s anything I want to come through in this podcast, just pick one thing and dress like that every single year. You’re going to save yourself some headaches, so lobster man every year. Go on, back to the interview.

Alec Patton:
So when we left that project, the kids had been asking questions about health and wellness to various AIs, and when we finished it, they were just about to go out and start interviewing real people out in the field, out in the community. So let’s pick it up from there.

John Santos:
I had students coming up with interviews that they were going to run through AI. My goal was to have my students have access to an abundance of information. What I found that was really interesting that I hadn’t predicted is that what it really kind of bolstered was curiosity. And that was super cool, is that the students came in with these sets of questions that they came up with, they critiqued and ran them through each other first and came up with, “This is going to be my interview.” They ran it through AI, they got back these responses, and what I loved is that it didn’t necessarily fill this cup. The students weren’t like, “Okay, cool. I have enough information to move on.” It was like what it really left them with is more questions.
The way that I kind of sensed that I guess is not watching what they submitted to me, it was the way that they interacted with each other of, “Look what I found out,” and then just to see it inspiring a greater degree of curiosity, I really love that within a project because I think that’s ultimately what you’re kind of hoping for, not that it’s this information search or this way that you’re going to use a project to necessitate research that yields information and then you’re kind of done. You want kids within the process of a project to be more and more and more and more curious to where at the end they’re not even done. They feel like it’s kind of the beginning of something.

Alec Patton:
And did you notice differences in the interviews themselves?

John Santos:
Yes. So that was what was really interesting too. I don’t know if this is comment on me as an educator, but I just thought of interviews as a way to access information. And while it is definitely that when you have students interview a field expert or somebody that’s has an expertise in something, there’s definitely something that’s like, “I have this question and you have this response.” There’s going to be some degree of information, but there’s these things that come secondary to that to where with AI, I was really interested in how much that fostered this greater sense of curiosity.
And then with experts, what it was is it was a modeling of curiosity. That’s kind of what was the conversation when people came back is that I think a student’s perspective on an expert is that they’re this container of information within that field and they are and they bring these perspectives, but I think what was the most exciting part that really is different from AI is that they saw these people that were just wildly curious about their fields. And I loved that that was the experience for students is that they came back and were like, “Oh, interesting.”
It’s not necessarily the amount of information a person holds within this field that makes them the expert. It’s the degree to which they’re curious and kind of almost unendingly curious. And at the end of the day, I think that that’s so much of what we’re trying to do, right? I think of school and schooling as very transactional and it’s like in school you learn information, but as learners, the biggest thing that drives learning is curiosity. And so that was my big takeaway is like, “Whoa, within projects, how might I consistently design and allow opportunities for greater curiosity and for students to expand on their curiosity?”

Alec Patton:
What’s your relationship with AI now?

John Santos:
I would say it’s funny to have this conversation because I’m interested to see what it looks like to expand on using AI as a partner in our learning. And so I have a teaching partner, Pat Holder, and I love what he does. He has his students reading articles, preparing for discussions and having a discussion every single week. But within each week, what he has them do is prepare a question inspired from their readings and from their discussions for AI. And so they’re constantly essentially running their curiosity through AI, and what’s cool is the students have access to each other’s questions.
I am interested to see where you can go from there, because I mean, that is essentially, it’s doing two things. It’s kind of like it’s allowing these opportunities for our students to expand on their own curiosities and access information, but you know there’s more. You know we can go further with this. I mean, we’re starting to see our own relationships as educators that we have these platforms where we can use AI as a thought partner in designing projects.
And so that’s been really interesting for me is not just like, how do I create opportunities for my students to seek more information or to be more curious. It’s like, how do I do that for myself? How do we do that as a school? So that’s been an interesting one this year is starting with designing projects with AI, your teaching partner and your colleagues as all kind of partners in that.

Alec Patton:
So have you started using AI for project design?

John Santos:
Yeah. Yeah. For this, I mean, the project we had already planned in the spring, we hadn’t, which is kind of an interesting thing to design an entire project and then take it and run that through something like AI. What is it, Inquire? Is that what we’re using right now? It’s the Kaleidoscope now. So it started as Inquire. Now we call it the Kaleidoscope. And so to have done that, and it comes in the form of a critique almost, because you see how it comes in with these different ideas and it kind of pushes thinking. It just kind of broadens things. So I’ve love that.
And then with students, man, I think that there’s room to let them lead the way a little bit more on that, especially I feel like it’s so new to me, and I think that whether it’s inside the school walls or outside the school walls are using AI in so many different ways that it’s like, I think that’s probably where I could go more with this is how might students lead the way even more with this work.

Alec Patton:
All right. I love it. John, thank you so much. It’s been absolute pleasure both times. I’m excited to see where your AI journey continues to take you.

John Santos:
Yeah, let’s check back in on this.

Alec Patton:
Yeah, absolutely. All right, man.

John Santos:
Thank you.

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to John Santos for this conversation. In our show notes, we’ve got a link to the AI project planning tool that John was talking about. We’ve also got links to John’s other episodes. Thanks for listening.