AI and Academic Honesty: The Second Crisis in Schools

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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Honesty. We need to be honest about where we are in education. Whether authentic, true, genuine learning is happening should be the question for all of us in education. None of us wants to pretend or participate in a farce. AI guilt is now “a thing” college graduates are talking about. College graduates who are not being “caught” but feel like they spent the last years pretending to learn.

Dr. Christian Miller, author of The Honesty Crisis, has spent more than a decade running some of the largest funded research projects on honesty and moral character. He says that the internet was the first honesty crisis in education. AI is the second one.

We talk about both sides of the desk on this one. Both the student writing their paper with AI and learning nothing, and the teacher giving AI-generated feedback without disclosing it to students. This is why an honest expert is staying up at night about the papers his philosophy students are writing (or if they are not).

Whether that’s plagiarism from the internet, whether that’s plagiarism from another student’s paper, whether that’s plagiarism from AI, it still counts as plagiarism and plagiarism is dishonest.

Christian B. Miller, A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University

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Resources Mentioned in This Episode

Christian’s books

• The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World (Oxford University Press) — the book at the center of this conversation. It maps six areas of society where Christian sees honesty eroding: deepfakes, infidelity, education, political misinformation, celebrity, and religion, including sermon plagiarism. Education is only one chapter. Published May 19, 2026 — we recorded this before release, so you’ll hear us both talk about it as coming. The publisher’s page is here at Oxford University Press.
• Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2021) — the academic book underneath the trade book. If you want the actual definition of honesty he keeps referring to, and why it is bigger than “don’t tell lies,” this is where it lives.
• The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (Oxford University Press, 2017) — his earlier book for general readers, and the most accessible entry point to his research on moral character. Good faculty-book-study material.
• Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (Oxford University Press, 2013) — where he first argues that most of us are neither virtuous nor vicious but a mixed bag, which is exactly the frame he uses in this episode to explain why good people still cheat when it gets easy.

The research projects

• The Honesty Project — the $4.4 million research effort Christian directed at Wake Forest University, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, built around five big questions about what honesty is, how much of it people actually have, and what makes it grow or collapse. Free, public, and a genuinely useful place to send a curious student.
• The Character Project — the earlier Wake Forest initiative he led on moral character across philosophy, psychology, and theology. Conference videos and funded research are posted there.
• The Beacon Project — the Wake Forest project on moral exemplars, the people who are not just good but exceptional, where Christian served as Philosophy Director.
• The John Templeton Foundation — the funder behind the Honesty Project and the Character Project.

The AI detector Christian names

• Pangram — the AI-detection company whose accuracy claims Christian says have caused him to revise his thinking. The specific number he cites, and what it does and does not settle, is broken down in the Sources section below. Read that before you take a detector result to a parent conference.
• Note: At this time, I’m not recommending any AI detector as I think we should focus on learning detection. Oral conversations, discussions, and methods for building on assignments should show students that we are focused on learning.

Find Christian

• christianbmiller.com — his site, with his CV, popular writing, talks, and pages for each book.
• His Honesty Project faculty page at Wake Forest University.
• @CharacterGap on X · LinkedIn · Facebook

Before you accuse anyone, ask them to walk you through the paper. When Christian gets a suspicious paper, his first move is not a detector — it is a conversation, run in the least confrontational way he can manage. Tell me about this paper. How did you write it? Walk me through the steps. Can you explain this idea? It wasn’t in the class material — where did it come from? He says students often admit it on their own at that point. And when they do, he stays lenient: there is a consequence, the grade takes a hit, but he does not fail them or send them to a hearing. They rewrite the paper and get a second chance. The whole exchange fits inside a planning period.

About Dr. Christian Miller

Dr. Christian B. Miller

Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. He was most recently the Director of the Honesty Project (honestyproject.philosophy.wfu.edu/), funded by a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In recent years he was the Philosophy Director of the Beacon Project (www.moralbeacons.org), funded by a $3.9 million grant from Templeton Religion Trust, and the Director of the Character Project (www.thecharacterproject.com), funded by $5.6 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation and Templeton World Charity Foundation. He is the author of over 130 academic papers as well as Moral Psychology with Cambridge University Press (2021) and four books with Oxford University Press, Moral Character: An Empirical Theory (2013), Character and Moral Psychology (2014), The Character Gap: How Good Are We? (2017), and Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue (2021). His new book, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, is forthcoming from Oxford in 2026.

Dr. Miller was a science contributor for Forbes, and his writings have also appeared in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, and Christianity Today. Miller is the editor or co-editor of Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (OUP), Character: New Directions from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (OUP), Moral Psychology, Volume V: Virtue and Character (MIT Press), Integrity, Honesty, and Truth Seeking (OUP), and The Bloomsbury Handbook of Ethics (Bloomsbury Press).

Editor’s note: this bio was written before publication. The Honesty Crisis is no longer forthcoming — Oxford University Press released it on May 19, 2026, and it is available now.

🐾 Sources & Citations: AI Detection Accuracy

Verified August 23, 2026. Christian says on the show that he has started revising his thinking about AI detectors, and he names a specific error rate. Here is exactly where that number comes from, who has checked it independently, and what it still does not settle. This is a fast-moving area and these are the two best sources available right now, not the last word.

Where the “one in 10,000” number comes from

Emi, B. (2025, March 27). All about false positives in AI detectors. Pangram Labs. Source

Key finding: Pangram reports an overall false-positive rate of roughly 1 in 10,000 — that is, human writing wrongly flagged as AI — and 0.004% on academic essays specifically, which works out to about 1 in 25,000. The same post lists its rates by writing type and is candid that the tool performs worst on short, formulaic text like poetry and recipes.

Caveat: This is the company’s own internally measured figure, published on the company’s own blog. Treat it as a vendor claim that happens to be unusually well documented, not as neutral testing. And a rate is not a verdict: at 1 in 10,000, a school that runs every submission through a detector will still eventually flag a student who did nothing wrong, and no detector output tells you anything about intent.

Somebody outside the company checked it

Jabarian, B., & Imas, A. (2025). Artificial writing and automated detection (NBER Working Paper No. 34223). National Bureau of Economic Research. Source

Key finding: Two University of Chicago Booth School of Business economists audited four detectors — Pangram, Originality.AI, GPTZero, and an open-source RoBERTa baseline — against a purpose-built corpus of human-written and AI-generated texts across multiple genres and lengths. Pangram had the lowest false-positive rate of the four. The paper also proposes a framework for how schools and institutions should think about writing detection into actual policy, which is the more useful half for educators.

Caveat: This is a working paper. It has not been through peer review, and it tests detectors against a constructed corpus rather than real student submissions from real classrooms. It also cannot answer the question I raise in this episode, because no detector audit can: the false negatives you never see, when a student runs AI text through a “humanizer” and keeps rerunning it until it comes back clean.

🐾 How I used AI on this post: On an episode about honesty, it would be strange not to say. I used AI to help clean up the raw interview transcript, to help draft and organize these show notes, and to help hunt down and verify the sources above. Every citation, link, book title, and publication date on this page was checked against its primary source before it went up. The opinions, the questions I asked, and the conclusions are mine. I am happy to answer any questions about AI use. Ultimately, I’m accountable for what is here.

Other Shows for Teachers Wrestling With AI and Academic Honesty

• Honest Conversations About AI: The Need for Truth — the Cool Cat Teacher Talk hour this interview came from, where Christian and MIT’s Justin Reich both join me. If this episode left you wanting the longer version, start here.
• AI Assisted Grading: A Teacher’s 30-Second Checklist — the practical companion to the uncomfortable half of this conversation. If you are using AI anywhere in your assessment workflow, run through this one next.
• Brain First, AI Second: Teaching Writing in the AI Era with Philip Seyfried of Teachers College, Columbia — on why AI detectors fail, what the MIT research actually showed, and how to build trust around AI in a writing classroom.
• How to Prevent AI Cheating: Integrity in the AI Age with Professor Laurel Aguilar-Kirchhoff — the assignment-design answer. She turned a midterm essay into a storyboard rather than fighting the tool.

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Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Vicki Davis (00:00): If you use AI to write student feedback and they think it came from you, who’s being dishonest? Today on Thought Leader Thursday, we’re discussing the honesty crisis.

Announcer (00:12): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:16): Today we’re talking with Dr. Christian Miller, the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. For over a decade, he’s led some of the largest research projects on honesty and moral character ever funded, including The Honesty Project and The Character Project. His new book is called The Honesty Crisis, and it will be out May 19th, 2026.

We’re going to talk about something that every teacher and administrator and every college professor is feeling right now: what honesty means in the age of AI, and how it’s under threat in our classrooms from both sides of the desk. So, Christian, thanks for coming on the show.

Editor’s note: this conversation was recorded April 15, 2026. The Honesty Crisis was released by Oxford University Press on May 19, 2026, and is available now.

Christian Miller (00:58): Great to be with you. I really look forward to our conversation.

Vicki Davis (01:01): What do we do about honesty, and where has it gone, especially in the age of AI? And some people just say, oh, it’s always been this bad. As a teacher who’s been teaching 24 years, I’m not convinced. What do you think?

Christian Miller (01:12): On the historical question, I’m not convinced either. I mean, student cheating has been around forever. That’s nothing new. That’s nothing we haven’t heard before. I did think, though, that it ramped up when we shipped it to the Internet. So when the Internet came along, that was first what I call an honesty crisis, where honesty becomes more appealing and dishonesty is hard to detect. So it’s easier to get away with dishonesty. When you had the Internet, that was, I think, the first big moment.

Editor’s note: “where honesty becomes more appealing” is left exactly as spoken because both independent transcriptions of this audio produce the same words. From context, Dr. Miller appears to mean DIShonesty becoming more appealing. Unresolved — flagged for review before this line is quoted.

You could go online, you could find material, you could put that material into your paper or find answers to problem sets and really cut corners that way. But that didn’t end there, of course. And so with the dawn of AI, I think that’s now the second honesty crisis we’re facing in education. Progression of more and more opportunity to cheat, as well as difficulty in being caught cheating.

That’s a bad combination. When it’s easier to cheat and it’s more difficult to get caught cheating, recipe for dishonesty.

Vicki Davis (02:04): So what does your research say about honesty and this topic? I mean, do people want to be honest? Is it as rampant as we think it is, according to the research?

Christian Miller (02:13): In general, I think people do want to be honest, but there are limits. It only goes so far. So the research I’ve consulted suggests that, in general, we believe that things like cheating are wrong. We also care about how we’re perceived by others. We want to be perceived by others as honest people. We even want to think of ourselves as honest people. So those are all good things. Those are going to keep dishonesty in check.

At the same time, we do have a desire to cheat if we think we can get away with it, and it’ll benefit ourselves. Our character, I think, here is complicated. It’s multifaceted. It’s not like simplistic. We’re good, we’re bad. We’re honest, we’re dishonest. I think we’re a mixed bag. As the opportunity to cheat gets easier and the rewards get greater, the good side of our character can erode. So that belief that cheating is wrong will have limits. That desire to think of ourselves as good people or not as people, that has limits.

So what is happening with the AI situation is, before there was always this threat, maybe I’ll get caught. There was this idea, well, it’s still going to take me some work to go on the Internet, and I’m going to have to find this stuff, and I’m going to have to change it and adapt it for my purposes. Now it’s so easy that a lot of the traditional safeguards aren’t as effective as they once were. So all I have to do is go to this website, give the prompt, and I can get, in a span of five seconds or 10 seconds, my assignment completed for me. I can get a quality work done for me in 10 seconds, whereas normally that would take me an hour or two. That’s a really hard temptation to resist. Once you know it’s there, it’s available to you, it’s a really hard temptation to resist.

Vicki Davis (03:57): So you’ve also said something that’s caught my attention — that in education, the dishonesty problem isn’t only about students, but it’s also about teachers using AI to give feedback. Now, I will admit that I use AI to support me. So I’ll put in my rubric and I’ll grade, and I’ll go in AI and I’ll say, hey, this is the points they have off, you know, write this up so that I can paste it in. And I’m kind of, I guess, using it like a word calculator.

But what’s your perspective on AI to give feedback? Is it having AI, quote, grade — something I personally think we should never have teachers do? Or what’s your take on that side of the desk?

Christian Miller (04:36): Yeah, I think it’s so easy to jump into the student side of it and just focus on that. But I think there’s lots of other aspects to this whole AI discussion. I mean, we could even have a discussion of whether AI itself is honest or not.

There’s a question of what about in the teacher’s research, if they’re doing research or just newsletter, publication, communication with parents, all that kind of side of thing if they’re using AI.

But here you’re focusing specifically on teachers grading or teachers assessing student work. I think it’s all a question of whether there’s transparency or not. So let’s start with the student case, but then go where you took us, to the teacher case. I have no problem from an honesty perspective if a student is transparent that they used AI, because now we’re out of the — there may be other problems. Maybe they weren’t supposed to, maybe they’re violating the rules, but from an honesty perspective, at least they’re forthcoming, they’re transparent about what they did.

If they don’t do that, if they present their work as if it were their own with no disclosure when it wasn’t, then that actually meets the definition of plagiarism. So they’re using another source to produce the work and they’re taking credit for that work themselves. That’s just a kind of standard example of plagiarism. Whether that’s plagiarism from the internet, whether that’s plagiarism from another student’s paper, whether that’s plagiarism from AI, it still counts as plagiarism and plagiarism is dishonest.

Now we shift to the teacher case. If the teacher says, look, I’m going to assess your work using the help of these tools. Some of my communication with you is going to be generated by AI to help save some time of writing these emails or whatnot — might be other ethical questions that arise, but there’s no, in my mind, question about honesty.

Here’s where I think it gets quite tricky. So the student gets the paper back. On the paper are some typed comments, or somewhere there’s this feedback. The feedback is AI generated. The student isn’t told that. It looks like it’s coming from the teacher. That’s what any reasonable person would have assumed is not.

They’re actually being dishonest towards the student. If that were to be discovered, that would be a violation of trust, and I think erode the trust in the classroom, which is very important to have.

Vicki Davis (06:50): Our policy at our school is that some AI feedback tools are allowed, but with complete oversight with a teacher, complete transparency to your students. So if I have a massive project and I have AI, quote, looking at it or whatever and supporting me as it’s a huge project, I always say, okay, students, I’ve reviewed this. This is the grade that I’ve given you. But I did use AI in portions of assessing this for you. So if you have any questions or issues, I want you to look this over and bring it back to me. Is that how we should handle it? Or should we just not even use it at all?

Christian Miller (07:28): Well, as far as an honesty perspective, I have no objections at all. You’re being very transparent. You’re being very clear.

There’s a larger question of role modeling beyond honesty. You know, how should we think about a good person? How should we become better? And one really important idea is role modeling good character in front of other people, if you want to try and inspire them to be good themselves.

So the point here is, transparency is great, no problem with honesty. Now, if you’re saying that to the students, they’re going to naturally have the thoughts, well, if you’re using that, why can’t I?

Vicki Davis (08:04): And of course, in my classroom, they can, but yeah.

Christian Miller (08:07): Yeah, but many of them wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be allowed. So if it’s perceived as in any way a double standard or hypocritical, like you’re not letting us use it, but you’re using it, why not let us use it too? That’s going to create problems.

So instead, if the idea is I’m going to role model — look, I know these tools are available, I’m not going to use them. I’m going to instead pour myself into grading this paper using my own knowledge and experience and skills, and it might be not as reliable. So I want you to come to me if I made a mistake or whatnot, but at least you know that this is entirely me speaking and I’m not drawing on anything else. That’s another idea. I’m not saying it’s better or worse. I’m reticent to tell someone who’s working tremendous hours in K through 12 that they’re doing something wrong.

Vicki Davis (08:53): So when we have a student bring something to us, I mean, all of us teachers have a different way of, quote, handling the situation.

Say my friend Dawn across the hall — a student brings her paper that is obviously most likely AI written. And we know AI detectors don’t work, which is a big part of the problem. Is there any research on the best way to handle that possible dishonesty issue?

Christian Miller (09:18): I have a couple of things to say here that are going to be controversial, and I’ll just flag that. And, you know, listeners, please feel free to take it for what it’s worth.

On the detector front, I would have agreed with you maybe even a year ago or two years ago. And I know you’ve had past guests talk about this too. Recently there seems to be a bit of a change, a pivot. So I’m seeing places like Pangram, which are reporting stunning reliability and detection. So almost no false positives. So one in 10,000 kind of rates of error with false positives. So I am revising my thinking a bit about whether to go to these detectors or not.

Even if that’s true — let’s just assume that there is this great detector out there now — still, I think we want to have some valid concerns about using it. One is it’s not 100% reliable. Even if it’s 99.99% reliable, it’s not 100%. So there’s questions of whether it’s going to meet the threshold for punishment of the students, especially in my case at a university. We have an actual committee where you would have to go through kind of trial process. And so would we meet the evidentiary bar there? I mean, and there’s also larger questions about trust and, you know, if this is something that’s known to students, they’re going to have to run their papers through that. What kind of classroom environment does it create? Does it break down trust in the classroom and create an atmosphere of fear? Those are all valid points and concerns.

So, having said that, I’m of two minds. One part of my mind says, okay, this person has brought this paper to me, has brought a paper to me that they’re suspicious about. One part of my mind says, let’s use these detectors and see what they tell us. Part of my mind says, let’s enter a conversation with a student. So if it’s my student, I would have a student come in. If the professor came to me, I recommend to the professor enter in a conversation with that student, to try and do it in as least confrontational a way as possible, to try and extract that truth from the students about what they did, rather than making it adversarial from the very beginning.

I’ll say, look, you know, a student comes into my office — bit about this paper. How did you write it? Walk me through the steps. Can you explain this idea? This wasn’t something in the class material. Where did this come from? How did you learn about this? At some point, often they will say, I admit I used some other source.

Editor’s note: both transcriptions garble a few words at the start of this exchange (one renders it “read about this paper,” the other “bit about this paper”). The likely phrasing is “tell me a bit about this paper,” but the audio is not clear enough to state that, so the fragment is left as transcribed.

If they do that, then I tend to be quite lenient. I will not take them to any kind of hearing. I’m not going to get other people involved. I’ll say something along the lines of, look, there has to be some kind of consequence for this, but I’m not going to fail you for the class. I’m not going to sack you for the entire grade. Your grade will take a hit, but let’s learn from this, rewrite the paper, and give you a second chance.

Vicki Davis (12:00): They were honest. So in the detection, you know, my students are pretty open and honest. We’ve had conversations about humanizers, right? Students will, whatever AI tool of their choices, generate or use it. And then they’ll pull it into a, quote, humanizer, which supposedly makes it undetectable. And then they’ll run it through whatever AI detection tool they know people they’re using, until they get a paper.

So while a detection service may have false positives, I guess my question is always what you can’t test, which is the false negatives, right? Like, that’s the big unknown here, because all it takes is one or two getting away with it, telling all their peers they’re getting away with it, to discredit any AI detection tool we could try to use.

We want to make this easy. It just doesn’t feel like an easy solution. And it is a crisis. I agree.

Christian Miller (12:53): If you want the magic solution, I’m not going to have it. Also say, confess, I struggle the most about this. And I don’t have an answer. And this is what keeps me up at night, is when we get to more advanced classes. And this would apply, I think, in middle school and high school, not just in college. Intro classes are one thing. More advanced classes are another.

In my case, I’m a philosopher, teach majors-level philosophy classes. How can I not have papers, which I want my students to reflect on the topic, do a lot of thinking, construct an argument, raise objections, respond to the objections, do all that kind of work, which you can’t really cram into 50 minutes of class? How can I take that away from them and still think that I’m doing a good job teaching them and giving them the skills that they need as philosophy majors or proficient students in English or history? I don’t have an answer to that, and that keeps me up at night.

Vicki Davis (13:46): We have to be honest with ourselves about the state that AI has put us in with education. Because if we can’t discuss these honestly and say, hey, I’m not buying the line of the tech companies that AI is going to fix everything — AI has broken a lot of things.

And a lot of us K-12 have moved to oral conversations. My AP class, they have to be able to defend every line of code verbally, on the spot. But then part of my struggle with the handwritten papers — we’re doing that too — is that when you have a student who is dysgraphic and dyslexic, as I do in my own family, and struggles with written expression, those students literally and legally need technology to be able to help them to truly express themselves in the world.

And then there’s the piece of entry-level jobs are going away in lieu of jobs where people can manage AI. They have to be able to manage AI agents is where we’re heading, and know how to do that type of work. So we really are in a conundrum, aren’t we?

Christian Miller (14:59): We are. So I have a similar situation in my family, so I’m very cognizant of that.

You could make the quick point, but it’s not completely satisfactory, that there’s one thing of, and it’s a different thing of using a computer with internet access. We have ways of shutting off or blocking internet access, so at least they have the typing tools and the spell check and whatnot without the option of going somewhere else for help. But that’s not a completely satisfactory point.

I agree with you also on — well, at my level of college here, doing a disservice if we’re not providing an opportunity to the students to make use of these tools, because then they’ll be at a disadvantage when they get out in the job world. I don’t know about that. I mean, I think they have plenty of opportunity to use this on their own, and they’re using it all the time anyway.

And at least in my world of the humanities, I don’t see — I mean, maybe it really varies by field. So maybe I should qualify what I say. My business students would be different or my science students would be different. Maybe I have to go field by field. I’m not so sure that my humanities students are at a disadvantage if I say, look, I don’t want you to use this stuff for my philosophy papers. I think they’re going to have plenty of opportunity to use it for other things. Maybe I’m here being naively optimistic, but I don’t want to think that I’m disadvantaging them by discouraging them from using it.

Vicki Davis (16:18): So, Christian, what is your goal for the book, The Honesty Crisis?

Christian Miller (16:22): The book is larger in scope than just education. So it’s talking about six different areas of society where I see honesty crisis happening, and education is only one of them. Others include things like deepfake videos, political misinformation, celebrity, even religion. I talk about things like sermon plagiarism. So I’m worried about honesty crisis popping up all over the place.

I guess my goals would be threefold. One, just appreciate what honesty is in the first place. Get a better handle on what it is to be an honest person. That’s actually quite interesting and more nuanced and complex than you might have thought. It’s not just a matter of don’t tell lies. It has way more richness to it than that.

So greater appreciation of what honesty is. Greater appreciation of where it’s eroding in society, places we might not even have paid attention to. AI in the education case is an obvious one. Some are more subtle.

Lastly, a kind of feeling and a motivation to do something about it. Not only now I’m better equipped and more knowledgeable about this, but I’m also inspired to change my life and work towards change in other people’s lives to address these honesty crises. There are things we can do concretely. It’s really important that we do them, because honesty is our most treasured virtue. It erodes. Terrible things tend to happen in society. So it’s worth fighting for.

Vicki Davis (17:41): Honesty is worth fighting for. As an educator, I want to believe in the integrity of what’s happening in my classroom. I mean, we don’t want to give our lives for something that’s pretend, that’s fake, that’s not real. And we know that people struggle with, you know, what do I believe in in the world anymore?

You know, more than ever, kids do need to see teachers who do have honesty and integrity and understanding — all of us are flawed, of course. But as I say to my kids, when you mess up, fess up.

So we’ve been talking with Dr. Christian Miller. The book is The Honesty Crisis. It’s one I’m looking forward to, and I think that we all should be discussing. As I always say, we don’t play king of the hill, we make a bigger hill. There’s a lot of room for conversation, and these are the things that we need to be talking about in our staff meetings, at the lunch table, as we move forward and work to make the world a better place. So thank you, Dr. Miller, for being part of that conversation.

Announcer (18:40): Thank you for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

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Teaching Autistic Learners: Listen, Believe, Then Act

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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Wow, this is a sensitive topic. And remember that every person with autism has a different experience. But Claire O’Neill is a teacher and she’s telling her story of school.

Claire can see the roof of her old primary school from her classroom window. She remembers walking up to the school door with that gnawing, upset feeling in her stomach and the itchy, scratchy uniform that made her so uncomfortable. She says the room was either too hot or too cold. It was almost always too loud, and she says it was smelly. Claire got in trouble a lot. Now, that she’s studied autism, she understands better why.

Claire has spent more than twenty years teaching autistic students and is a PhD researcher at University College Cork (Ireland) studying what school is actually like for autistic teachers.

Claire shares her story from an educational perspective. A full-circle moment of a PhD expert teacher reflecting upon the girl she used to be and advocating to help us all understand how to help children like her.

My Mom was one of the most compassionate, intuitive teachers I’ve ever known. She always said when I had a student who learned differently and I would accommodate for the whole class, everyone in the classroom learned better. Claire says the same thing. She also talks about the importance of Universal Design for Learning (UDL).

She also encourages us to listen to our learners. Believe them when they tell you how they experience your room. And to act upon what they tell us.

Claire is an expert, but I’m not. While I’ve taught some precious students with autism and most of them thrived in my classroom (one early in my career, I wish I could go back and use strategies I know now.) I share this story with sensitivity and the knowledge that I don’t know what I don’t know but I know it is important to listen. And isn’t that what Claire tells us in the show?

I hope this show makes us all more empathetic on this Wonderful Classroom Wednesday because not every child actually thinks our classroom is wonderful and we need to listen and learn to make it better.

The more you make the effort as a teacher to connect with your students, the better it’s going to be for everyone. And really, it is as simple as listening to your learners, believing them.

Claire O’Neill, teacher, researcher, and neurodiversity consultant, Cork, Ireland

Listen to the Show

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Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• The Strengths-Based Guide to Supporting Autistic Children: A Positive Psychology Approach to Parenting by Claire O’Neill (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2023) — Claire’s solo-authored book, written for parents and teachers, on identifying and building on a child’s character strengths instead of managing a list of deficits.
• It Takes All Kinds of Minds: Fostering Neurodivergent Thriving at School edited by Rachael Davis, Claire O’Neill, and Sue Fletcher-Watson (Speechmark / Routledge) — the book Claire mentions on the show, a fifteen-chapter collection on environments, pedagogy, and relationships in and around school. You can also see the full table of contents on the publisher’s page.
• CAST — the nonprofit Claire sends teachers to first. This is the organization that created Universal Design for Learning, and it is where the free explainer videos, podcasts, and text overviews she describes actually live.
• The UDL Guidelines (version 3.0) — the official framework behind the three principles Claire names. CAST released version 3.0 in July 2024, and it is organized around Engagement, Representation, and Action & Expression. Free, and the fastest way to see what “offer more choice” actually looks like in practice.
• Dr. Margaret “Mags” Flood, Assistant Professor in Inclusive Education at Maynooth University — she wrote the Universal Design for Learning chapter in It Takes All Kinds of Minds. Claire recommends her podcast, Talking About All Things Inclusion, and her site Equity In Mind, home of #UDLchatIE.
• Professor Sue Fletcher-Watson — Claire’s co-editor, Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and the co-editor I mention at the top of the show. She was my guest on The Beautiful Nuance of Neurodiverse Classrooms.
• University College Cork School of Education — where Claire is a PhD researcher.
• “I Saw Things through a Different Lens…”: An Interpretative Phenomenological Study of the Experiences of Autistic Teachers in the Irish Education System — Claire’s own published research with Neil Kenny, in Education Sciences, 2023. Open access and free to read. If you want to know what the teachers in your building who are neurodivergent are carrying, start here.
• Thriving Autistic — the neurodivergent-led Irish organization where Claire serves as Head of Training.

I had not heard of this term before so I wanted to highlight it in the show notes.

Claire mentions the double empathy problem while describing being in trouble at school without knowing why. The term comes from autistic researcher Damian Milton, who argued that when an autistic person and a non-autistic person fail to understand each other, the breakdown runs in both directions. It is a mismatch between two different ways of experiencing the world, not a deficit sitting inside the autistic person. That reframe is the whole reason “listen and believe” is a strategy and not just a kindness. Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: the ‘double empathy problem.’ Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. Read the full paper free.

About Claire O’Neill

Claire O’Neill

Claire is an experienced teacher who has worked across primary and secondary education settings in the Republic of Ireland. As a dedicated teacher-educator, her work focuses inclusion, neurodiversity and wellbeing. Claire is a significant contributor to education literature and research, having worked as author and editor on several publications related to equality and inclusion. As a neurodivergent individual, her professional commitment is deeply informed by lived experience, driving her to explore participatory, creative and innovative methods in her teaching and research.

Claire’s books: The Strengths-Based Guide to Supporting Autistic Children (author) and It Takes All Kinds of Minds: Fostering Neurodivergent Thriving at School (co-editor).

Connect with Claire: LinkedIn · Thriving Autistic

Other Shows for Teachers Reaching Neurodivergent Learners

• The Beautiful Nuance of Neurodiverse Classrooms with Professor Sue Fletcher-Watson and Vanessa Castañeda Gill — the closest companion to this episode, and it features Claire’s own co-editor on It Takes All Kinds of Minds. Sue explains the double empathy problem and monotropism, and makes the case for quiet space as a real support rather than a favor.
• What Happens to Your Student’s IEP After High School? with Dr. Toby Tomlinson Baker — what accommodations look like once a student walks out of K-12, and what we should be teaching them about asking for what they need before they get there.
• Can AI Replace Teachers? Dr. Catlin Tucker on Smarter Lesson Design and UDL — Catlin on building real student choice into a lesson, and where AI genuinely helps you plan a UDL-aligned lesson without adding hours.
• Throw Out Learning Styles and Replace it with UDL with Kathleen McClaskey — an older episode and still one of the clearest explanations of why learning styles do not hold up and what to use instead.

Listen and Subscribe

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• All 10 Minute Teacher Episodes

If this episode gave you something to try, share it with the teacher down the hall who has a student they haven’t reached yet.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Vicki Davis (00:00): Today, for Wonderful Classroom Wednesday, we’re going to look through the eyes of a person who is autistic. She’s now a teacher, but she tells us this story from when she was a child.

Announcer (00:14): This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:18): Today, we’re talking with Claire O’Neill. She’s a teacher, researcher, and neurodiversity consultant from Cork, Ireland. She’s the author of The Strengths-Based Guide to Supporting Autistic Children, a PhD researcher at University College Cork. She is a co-editor of It Takes All Kinds of Minds: Fostering Neurodivergent Thriving at School. I’ve also had one of her co-editors, Sue Fletcher-Watson, on this show as well.

Claire, there’s so many things that we can talk about. But you’ve spent 20 years teaching autistic students and you’re autistic yourself. How does that dual perspective as both teacher and someone who experiences the world differently shape how you think about helping neurodivergent students thrive in school?

Claire O’Neill (01:13): What a question to start with. I think my autistic way of being in the world just informs every part of my teaching. Before I was ever an autistic teacher, I was an autistic learner myself. And my school experiences, by and large, weren’t very positive.

I went into teaching with a fire in my belly. I knew things had to be very different for autistic people to thrive and flourish in school environments, and had a fair idea of what was needed in terms of change and what was needed in terms of support. And I hope in my years of teaching that I have helped autistic learners learn, thrive and flourish in school.

Specifically, looking back at my own school experiences, adapting the environment and making sure that the environment is as supportive and as sensory friendly as possible is really important. And a very, very close second, even if it is a second, is the relational environment.

How do we create a sense of belonging, a sense of everybody here matters? We believe when you tell us that the lights are too bright, that the overhead projector is too loud, and that we believe your experiences of school. And not only do we believe them, but we actively work hard at changing the environment, adapting the environment to make it a place where neurodivergent learners can learn and learn optimally.

Vicki Davis (02:37): So Claire, take us back in time and describe that environment you said wasn’t as supportive. Describe a day and what it felt like for you in an unsupportive environment, just so that we can get that empathy and feel what it felt like for you.

Claire O’Neill (02:55): I live very near to my primary school. And if I look out my window here, I can actually see the rooftop of it.

I can still remember the walk up to school and just that nagging, gnawing feeling in my stomach that I was going in somewhere it just wasn’t going to be pleasant. And that feeling started the minute I put on my itchy, scratchy school uniform. And in my school where I went, we spoke a lot of Irish, so it was a bilingual school. And that was fine. But I didn’t really like talking a lot. I just tried to stay under the radar. I didn’t find having that bilingualism in school difficult. It was only when I was called on to answer questions.

Definitely had subjects that I preferred to others, and in subjects that I really, really liked I can remember having no sense of time. But in subjects that I did find not as interesting, I can just remember looking out the window an awful lot and getting into a lot of trouble for that. A lot of trouble for all that doodling, fiddling, looking out the window.

It was probably helping me concentrate. It wasn’t impeding my learning. I don’t think it was impeding anyone else’s learning, but I would have got into a significant amount of trouble for that.

I can remember school always being way too hot or way too cold, and always too loud, too smelly, and getting into trouble for things, not really knowing why I was in trouble. And that was nearly more anxiety inducing when somebody said, why are you in trouble? And you’re like, I don’t know. So just that kind of double empathy problem, just being very present.

I can remember walking the perimeter of the schoolyard at break time, just wishing I could just kind of sink into the walls and not really getting a lot of the games, the rules, and the hidden curriculum of the schoolyard.

That was primary school. Secondary school then, definitely a lot of masking, trying to fit in socially, found it difficult changing from teacher to teacher with different approaches. Certainly in my post-primary school, a certain type of learner was valued. I’m probably going to be a bit facetious here, but to my teenage self, it was somebody who could sit down very quietly, learn off notes that were given by the teacher, and be able to regurgitate notes. And if you’re that type of learner and you excelled, and if you weren’t, there wasn’t really a place for you in my post-primary school.

Thankfully, university was where I did start to thrive and flourish. My love for learning kind of really reignited it. And my husband jokes and calls me the Pokémon of universities because I have to catch them all. I think I developed a lifelong love of learning.

But it was things like when I got to university, I had agency as a learner. I started with an arts degree, so there wasn’t a lot of contact hours. So I was able to regulate a lot during the day. I was able to self-direct my own learning. There was more choice and assessments. All of these things that can be easily applied to primary and post-primary education, just with a bit of reframing. So that’s kind of a bit of a trip down memory lane.

Vicki Davis (06:00): So if little Claire walked into your room today, how would you teach her to be the kind of teacher she needed?

Claire O’Neill (06:10): It will be a teacher that shows an interest. I teach her it’s really important to show an interest in somebody as a person, not the learner you want them to be or you think they should be. Certainly wouldn’t be using tactics like shaming or comparison. Comparison is the thief of joy, and I believe there was a high element of shame in my primary school teaching, which just shouldn’t have been there.

If I was teaching young Claire to be future Claire the teacher, I would be really, really encouraging her to be interested in people, be curious about people, and see what it is that’s there to connect with people. I think that’s a good advice for life anyway. But when it comes to that really special relationship between teacher and learner, I think seeing the person first is really, really important.

And finding ways to connect, finding ways to get in to their interests, what they like to learn, what topics they like to learn about, and use that as foundation for that really important relationship.

Vicki Davis (07:13): So my mom was a great teacher, and she always said, when you have a student who learns differently and you accommodate, it improves the classroom for everybody. She was a teacher in the 90s, 80s, 70s, before all this was out. The concept is the same. When you differentiate instruction, it improves it for every learner. It’s not that you’re just, quote, delivering this to one student.

Where are some places that they can start? Because it can be overwhelming and teachers are so busy.

Claire O’Neill (07:41): In our book, Universal Design for Learning — there’s one specific chapter dedicated to Universal Design for Learning, written by Mags Flood from Maynooth University.

For UDL, I think the first place to start would be the CAST website. So that’s like CAST away, C-A-S-T. And I really feel like that’s a website that talks the UDL talk, but also walks the UDL walk. Want a quick podcast, a quick video or a quick text overview of what UDL is, you will get it at the CAST website.

Vicki Davis (08:15): Claire, do you have any last encouragement for those that need a little bit of a pep talk about reaching their neurodivergent students?

Claire O’Neill (08:24): The more you make the effort as a teacher to connect with your students, the better it’s going to be for everyone. And really, it is as simple as listening to your learners, believing them. And then when they tell you something about how they learn or what they’re interested in learning, that you act upon that.

I know it’s not an easy task in busy classrooms, but that’d be such a big step to making classrooms more accommodating for neurodivergent learners. Care and kindness, that pedagogy of care is just so important for all learners. But if that care was really extended to neurodivergent learners by listening to them, our classrooms would absolutely transform for neurodivergent learners.

Vicki Davis (09:10): That’s wonderful. And it takes time. You have to build those relationships so that they know that you hear them. I mean, it took a while to get my student to where she would tell me, where she would ask for the seating she needed. It took time to build trust, because when they open up to you, if you don’t act, it’s probably the last time they’re going to tell you anything.

So you really have to, I think with all students, hear what they’re saying and read their body language and understand where they’re coming from. And that’s just the beauty of teaching.

So Claire, this has just been delightful. We’ve been talking to Claire O’Neill, teacher, researcher, and neurodiversity consultant from Cork, Ireland, who has spent over 20 years teaching autistic students. And the book that she is co-editor of is It Takes All Kinds of Minds: Fostering Neurodivergent Thriving at School. Claire, thanks for coming on the show.

Announcer (10:07): Thank you for tuning in to the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This episode includes some affiliate links. This means that if you choose to buy I will be paid a commission on the affiliate program. However, this is at no additional cost to you. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” This company has no impact on the editorial content of the show.

The post Teaching Autistic Learners: Listen, Believe, Then Act appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

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AI Agents Explained: What Teachers Need to Know

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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I find this conversation interesting because it tells a story from when ChatGPT was released about how a college student responded to it. Zach Kinzler was a junior in college. He was sitting in the front row of a systems engineering class when a friend punched him in the arm and said, “Look at this.” The student had just used ChatGPT to solve the problem on the board. And Zach’s journey began as he not only used ChatGPT to help him in his work but also talked openly with his professors about it.

He did write his papers with ChatGPT. (OK, now I’m not for this, but this is Zach’s story, and it is worth a listen.) Understandably, professors got upset. But when they did, Zach asked them to quiz him on what he wrote and what he had learned. He felt like he was learning faster.

Zach leads academic sales strategies at Boodlebox and hosts the Smarter Campus Podcast. We discuss the difference between using AI to learn and using AI to skip learning. He also discusses AI agents and how they work. But here’s a point I want us all to understand – Zach has struggled with reading his whole life.

As I told a commenter today, not all uses of AI are good. However, not all are bad. I believe AI should improve human flourishing and never detract from it. Yes, AI is a flashpoint issue. People who are angry and hate it really hate it. And some who are fans really love it. I find myself somewhere in the middle. Just like in Web 2 days, actually, when I knew that social media could do good but also had the potential to do great harm.

And I don’t like to call AI a brain, but I also know that there is (and should be) room for different opinions and the voices should be heard. I’ve aired interviews of pundits and pro-AI advocates. But we need to listen, because often the way forward is in the conversation that helps us see what the future can look like. All the AI haters in the world, I don’t think, can make it go away. Nor can all the AI advocates every convince me that AI should be student-facing for many of our younger students. I am interested to see what you think after you listen to this show.

I do want to note that, as I cared for my Dad last year, I fell behind on airing some of my shows. This interview was recorded in 2025, but we’ve worked to preserve the story and relevant arguments. That delay was all mine, so if you hear anything dated, just know that’s on me. As always, thank you for listening to the show!

AI is really just a second thinking brain, if that makes sense.

Zach Kinzler, Head of Academic Sales Strategies, BoodleBox

Listen to the Show

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Resources Mentioned in This Episode

• BoodleBox — the company Zach works for. Kinzler and the company describe it this way: a collaborative AI workspace that puts multiple AI models in one place so a team, a class, or an institution can work in a shared space rather than in separate private chat windows. It offers a free tier and paid institutional plans. They didn’t sponsor this episode and all opinions are his own.
• The Smarter Campus Podcast — Zach’s own weekly show, where he interviews students, professors, and administrators around the world about what is actually working with AI on campus. Vicki has been a guest on it.
• Zach Kinzler on LinkedIn — where he posts short explainers and clips, and the place he named on the show as the best way to reach him.
• ChatGPT — the OpenAI tool Zach got on the waitlist for as a college junior, and the one he was using when he told his teachers about it. Free and paid tiers.
• Perplexity — the AI answer engine Vicki mentions offloading research to so she can spend her own time writing instead of reading for hours.
• NotebookLM (now branded Gemini Notebook) — Google’s research and study tool. You load in your own sources, such as the PDFs Vicki gives her students, and it works only from those documents. This is the tool Vicki calls “fantastic for studying.”

A note on the first item: Zach Kinzler works for BoodleBox, and this is an editorial interview, not a sponsored one. The description above comes from the company’s own materials and from what Zach said on the show. I have not independently tested or verified BoodleBox’s security, privacy, or compliance claims, and nothing here should be read as an endorsement. Evaluate it the way you would evaluate any vendor describing its own product.

The most useful thing in this whole episode is not a tool at all. We know that tools like Google Notebook LM can do this, but this is something worth testing when you’re learning.

Make the AI ask you the questions. Zach’s habit is the reverse of what most students do. Instead of “write this for me,” he types “ask me questions about this and I’ll answer them.” Then, when something still isn’t landing, he climbs a ladder: explain this to me like I’m five, then like I’m 10, then like I’m 15. Give your students both moves at the start of one class period, in any subject, with whatever tool your school already allows. Neither one produces a single sentence a student could turn in as their own work, which is exactly why they are worth teaching first.

About Zach Kinzler

Zach Kinzler

Zach Kinzler is an education and AI enthusiast with a unique blend of industry and academic experience. His career has focused on empowering students and educators through innovative technology, including his current role leading academic sales strategies at BoodleBox.ai, where he helps higher education institutions prepare students for an AI-powered future. He holds a BS in industrial engineering and a master’s degree in business analytics from the University of San Diego (CA).

Connect with Zach: LinkedIn · The Smarter Campus Podcast

Other Shows for Teachers Working Out Where the Line Is With AI

• AI in the Classroom: Assignments Students Can’t Fake with Nancy Frey — the closest companion to this episode. Zach describes what honest AI use looks like from the student’s side; Nancy takes the same problem from the assignment-design side and her expertise in learning science. Another one to listen to as well.
• Brain First, AI Second: Teaching Writing in the AI Era with Philip Seyfried of Teachers College, Columbia shares information on MIT Media Lab research, why AI detectors fail, and building classroom trust around AI. It is the research backbone under Zach’s “want to learn” argument.
• Vibe Coding, Agentic AI, and What Schools Must Teach Now — the full-hour Cool Cat Teacher Talk show on agents, if Zach’s ninety-second explanation left you wanting more.
• Honest Conversations About AI: The Need for Truth — a full hour on honesty, integrity, and transparency with AI, which is the thread running underneath everything Zach says here.

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If this one gave you something you can use tomorrow, share it with the teacher down the hall who is still deciding what to do about AI — and leave a review wherever you’re listening. It genuinely helps other teachers find the show.

Episode Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki

Click to read the full transcript

Vicki Davis (00:00): Happy Tech Tool Tuesday. This story from when ChatGPT came out lets us examine the question, can AI be used to learn and not just to cheat?

Announcer (00:10): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:15): Today, I’m so excited to be with Zach Kinzler from BoodleBox. A lot of research is coming out about the need for transparency with teachers. We need to help our students know how to use AI in the right ways, how to hold them accountable when people just have AI write for them and turn it in as their own work. That’s not only dishonest, but it defeats the whole education process.

Zach works with BoodleBox, and I really like it for some different reasons in that you can use all the different AI models. And we’re going to dig into it a little bit. But Zach, first, talk a little bit about what you do. And because you’re a young person involved in an AI startup, BoodleBox, and you’re working with higher education institutions. And now a lot of us, well, what’s your job like every day?

Zach Kinzler (01:05): Thanks for having me. First off, it’s a very fun day today. What I get to do is I get to talk to educators from all over the world. I work with students in Africa, the US, Australia. And pretty much what I do is just figure out what’s working, what’s not working, show them BoodleBox, do some general AI education, right? Prompt engineering, safety. I have my own podcast, which I’ve had you on one time, which is awesome.

And really what I get to do is just work with people and actually help them use the tool. My job’s kind of transitioned from introducing it to implementing it. So I get to go into education systems and kind of say, hey, here’s an example of how you can take what you had before and make it better with AI in a safe, kind of ethical manner.

Vicki Davis (01:48): So tell everybody the name of your show.

Zach Kinzler (01:48): It’s called the Smarter Campus Podcast. So I have teachers on from all over the world. Lots of kind of interesting conversations of just learning about how people are actually doing it the right way, which is super, super cool to see. And I learn a lot from every single one that I do, which is fun.

Vicki Davis (02:03): One more question. How did you decide to go to the AI direction? Because, you know, there are a lot of people your age in their 20s actually hate AI. When you talk to them, they don’t like AI and they’re scared of AI. What led you to embrace AI? How’d you come across it, and why are you jumping in?

Zach Kinzler (02:19): I was a junior in college when ChatGPT came out. And one of my friends was very like Discord, Reddit, always super interested in like how technology is changing and stuff. And we both got on the wait list of ChatGPT because I was like, I don’t even know what this is. This kid just thinks this is going to be really cool.

And I’ll never forget, we were like sitting in the front row of a systems engineering class and my friend like punched me. Look at this. And ChatGPT did the problem on the board. And I just like — both of us got so infatuated with it, where I did every single thing with ChatGPT when it came out. And it was really bad then. Luckily, I had a teacher that was super interested in it, an engineering professor, that kind of helped us.

And then what we ended up doing was just go tell my teachers that I like wrote my paper with AI, and then they would get upset about it. But then I’d be like, I guarantee you if you ask me questions about this versus everyone else in the class, I probably know a lot more about it.

Like ignited the passion. Wow, no one has any idea what’s going on and this is going to be a big mess, right? I just started interviewing college students and teachers, really anyone that would talk to me, so that when a teacher would be like, this stuff’s bad, I would like show them interviews of other people, which is really cool.

I didn’t have thought it was super cool. I’ve always been a very ideas person, where I have lots of business ideas and I have lots of things that I like to do. But I would hinder myself a lot of the time because I couldn’t do the technical part. Like I couldn’t finish the idea that I had. And that’s why I love this thing so much, is that I can do anything and anyone can do anything.

Vicki Davis (03:43): You feel like you were very transparent with your professors. How did you use ChatGPT or any AI tool and not cheat yourself out of the education? What’s the difference between how you used it when it started and how people are using it now?

I had a kid I was talking to anonymously. He’s like, I can’t even write a paragraph anymore. I’m like, okay. And I was talking to him about what he’d written about and he couldn’t even recall anything he’d written about. There’s obviously a difference between what you did and what this student did.

Zach Kinzler (04:10): Really, I made a video about it this morning. It’s like just the want to learn. If you don’t care about something and you don’t want to grow from that, you’re not gonna be able to write a paragraph. I think it’s more of a reflection of self than people talk about.

AI is really just a second thinking brain, if that makes sense. Like the thing that I do a lot more that I don’t think people do is I get it to ask me questions. What don’t you understand about this? Ask me questions and I’ll help you with this. And then it’s like the other, explain this to me like I’m a five-year-old. I probably use that more than just about anything else on AI.

And just to explain something super simply, and then it’s like, okay, explain this to me like I’m 10. Explain this to me like I’m 15.

I struggle with reading. I always have struggled with reading. I’ve been a terrible reader and writer my whole life, but now I really like writing, reading and creative stuff, when I didn’t like that, because a lot of the things that would hinder me or just the actual doing of it. But you know what a good paragraph sounds like. And if you read, you can’t not read what you do. And that’s the other thing that people do shockingly so often. They just make things and then get rid of it.

Vicki Davis (05:09): This is a great example for those who are dyslexic or dysgraphic, like a lot of students I work with, to understand that if you use this as a learning support, you’re still learning. We’re the only place you can learn is in your brain, right?

If you’re truly supporting learning and you’re holding yourself accountable that I’m going to learn this, I’m going to use it to help me where I’m weak. I’m actually a very good writer. I love writing. I love reading. So for me, writing is a different experience with AI, because I love researching, but I can research for hours. Offloading the tools like Perplexity and some of these other tools, the research piece frees me up to write.

You and I are both using it in different ways, but we’re using it to support places that help our unique needs as a human being.

Zach Kinzler (05:58): I think that’s it. That’s what it’s all about. Taking what you’re good at and freeing up time, using what you’re good at to use the things to effectively do what you’re not good at.

Vicki Davis (06:07): Well, this conversation makes me so happy, Zach, for my kids, my students. I call them kids. They’re adults now. To hear this conversation about the effective use of AI I think is as important as the BoodleBox face.

[Editor’s note: the word after “BoodleBox” is unresolved. All three transcription passes render it as “face,” which does not make sense here. It is left exactly as transcribed rather than replaced with a plausible guess, and will be corrected from the audio.]

Agents are — so my personal learning objective for this summer 2025, as we’re recording this, is I made this my summer of agents. So I’ve been digging into just creating agents, using agents, understanding agents. Could you give a simple explanation of what an agent is and why it’s so important?

Zach Kinzler (06:39): That’s high level BoodleBox. So an agent is super important for people to understand, because the difference between a bot and an agent is a bot, you have to prompt it, right? So you have to tell it, hey, complete this task. But an agent, you can set up where, hey, every time I get an email, you’re going to read it, you’re going to give me a draft, and then you’re going to put it in an Excel sheet so I can see the emails that were sent today. So as you can see, there was only one instructions and lots of tasks were accomplished afterwards.

And agents are a very interesting concept. I totally recommend everyone going to read into it further on, because there’s lots of misconceptions that agentic AI is here right now, but a lot of it and the real value of it is just stringing together large language models. Very interested in it as well right now.

Vicki Davis (07:22): Specifically strange tasks. So thank you, Zach, for helping me create the first assignment for my AP kids. And you know what, kids, you’re probably — students, you’re probably going to end up creating some of your own bots.

I love that. I started giving all my kids a lot of PDFs, because not only are we using tools like this, but honestly, Google NotebookLM, fantastic tool for studying. So I want to give my kids the content they need to effectively train.

So thanks for coming on, Zach, for sharing this, for teaching my students, for sharing all those out there. And what’s the best way to get up with you if they want a demo of BoodleBox?

Zach Kinzler (08:00): Totally reach out. I’ll send my LinkedIn, email, all that stuff, and I’d love to connect and stay in touch.

Announcer (08:06): Thank you for tuning in to 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is not a sponsored episode and this post contains no affiliate links. No company paid for or influenced this conversation. Zach Kinzler works for BoodleBox, which is discussed in the episode, so his description of that product is his own and I have not independently verified the company’s product, privacy, or compliance claims. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

The post AI Agents Explained: What Teachers Need to Know appeared first on Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis @coolcatteacher helping educators be excellent every day. Meow!

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