Sometimes, facing multiple challenges at once can create unexpected opportunities for discovery and collaboration.
“A phrase that I use frequently with my team is, ‘How might we?’ instead of just immediately going to ‘That’s not going to work within our system,’” says Jeremy Sullivan, Director of Innovative Learning and Student Supports for North Kitsap School District. “We’re always approaching it through that curiosity of ‘how might we,’ especially because one thing I’ve learned over the last three years is that a lot of previous ‘Nos’ or ‘That’s not possible’ or ‘I have no idea how to make that happen’ has changed. And AI has helped bridge that gap, especially from a systemic analysis and a systems lens.”
Sullivan has worked to implement the district’s technology integration effort–which is branded as NKSD-connected, and features four tenets: future-ready graduates, equity, collaboration, and innovation–into its multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS). North Kitsap School District enrolls about 5,100 students across approximately 110 to 120 square miles in rural western Washington State, including the Port Gamble S’Klallam and the Suquamish sovereign nations. Using AI to boost MTSS has helped to bridge distances and differences, and for staff to work smarter, not harder, in supporting students.
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“AI has let us work in a way we’ve never been able to do, like quickly taking 10- to 20-page plans and analyzing outlier interventions, synthesizing action steps that certain buildings are taking so we can connect them so they have partners to help them understand the work that they’re doing,” says Sullivan.
For this and other efforts, Sullivan–who came from Springfield Public Schools in Missouri to North Kitsap five years ago to help launch the district’s 1-to-1 initiative–was recently recognized with a Tech & Learning Innovative Leader Award at a recent regional summit.
Three Tiers of PD
Sullivan says the district started small with this effort, initially gathering school leaders over a few years to determine what an MTSS blueprint would look like. All the district’s elementary schools now have one, with the secondary schools close behind.
Sullivan and his team of 13 have been working with Tier 2 and 3 intervention teams across 10 buildings to use AI to sort through the large swaths of data they have, including student well-being surveys, academic records, attendance and behavior data, and other critical information. The district has partnered with Panorama, which offers a student success dashboard.
“We are data rich now but we are still information poor,” Sullivan says. “So how do we understand what this is telling us to the level where we can actually take action? And this year AI has really helped us with that because we’re able to take these large data sets and identify trends and patterns, both at a systems level and a school level. We can identify that our students are still struggling with this but excelling in that. We can also see that our staff are struggling in this and excelling in that. So what does that mean? And then that can scale down to both the school level and the classroom level.”
Appropriately, the initiative’s support structure for staff follows a three-tiered model, mirroring the MTSS concept:
– Tier One includes district-wide professional development and staff meeting access for everyone.
“I did a training yesterday during which I was able to show them within five minutes how to click a button, attach a class, ask a question–a simple prompt–analyze the most recent SEAL and student well-being data, synthesize it, and tell me the key points that I need to know,” he says. “And just immediately they get the data broken down in a very easy to understand way. There’s no filtering. It synthesizes it for them beautifully.”
– Tier Two involves 27 AI “lighthouse” teachers, early adopters working with smaller groups of teachers, following a shared leadership approach.
“The AI lighthouse classroom teachers come and get additional training from me and my team and then they help support in their buildings with that job-embedded support,” says Sullivan, adding that having that practical, hands-on experience accessible, along with coaching, helps foster implementation.“Those AI lighthouse teachers are the ones who really push it into the classrooms and work with their buildings to help them understand it all.”
– Tier Three focuses on individualized support, during which Sullivan and another instructional specialist are deployed to work with specific teachers or student support teams as needed.
“So ultimately, it’s just thinking about how are you covering all of those tracks for your system because you’re going to have people–that Tier One everyone needs to get–but then how are you helping support the 20% to 5% who need something more.”
Advice For Other Districts: “Teach To The Smiles”
Sullivan advises other districts interested in using AI for MTSS support to begin by listening to a diverse pool of stakeholders, including certificated and classified staff and principals, to understand current practices, desires, and systemic barriers. With that insight, you can assess the lay of the land.
“You can begin to develop your map because that’s when you know where your rivers are that you’re going to need to build a bridge, where the mountains are that you might need to do some drilling or some blasting to get through into that system,” says Sullivan. “But until you know the lay of the land, you have no idea how to structure your map to get to that end goal.”
He stresses the importance of starting small by identifying innovators and early adopters, focusing initial efforts on developing human capital and authentic ways to shoulder the work, noting that teachers are more likely to be open to new tools and methods coming from other teachers versus coming from IT staff. And then it’s about scaling that influence through shared leadership with the lighthouse teachers.
When confronted with resistance during implementation, Sullivan suggests following the advice from one of his former supervisors.
“She just said, ‘In those moments, Jeremy, look around and find the bright spot. Find the smile. Because oftentimes the smile is the quieter one in the room, but the smiles are there. And in those moments, teach to the smiles,’” he says. “Change never happens if we only talk to the ones who are in right off the bat. The reluctant ones need to see other people change first, and see that they have success in that change before they’ll feel safe doing it.”
Sullivan shares some of the edtech tools he regularly uses.
- NotebookLM – “This is my current workflow game-changer. The source-grounding feature allows me to create Notebooks trained solely the resources from my district (policies, procedures, CBAs, handbooks, etc.). The Studio feature allows me to create and scale support resources for my system like never before. With the click of a few buttons, I can have infographics, reports, mindmaps, videos, and interactive podcasts focused only on what I want it to focus on. When you are a small district team, these creation capabilities are incredible.”
- Google Gemini – “Since we are a Google Workspace for Education school district, Gemini is our native AI tool. Much like NotebookLM, the ability to create Gems trained on your own sources and instructions allow for the creation of task-specific tools that get to the meat of the work faster. Much of my role involves analyzing qualitative and qualitative data for our system. Gemini in Sheets helps me whip up the right formula or quickly identify measures of central tendency, frequency distributions, etc. When creating resources in Slides, I can often obsess about the visual layout (colors, fonts, sizes, etc.) WAY more than I should. Lately, I have been leaning into the “beautify this slide” feature in an attempt to let some of that control go. I add the text and pertinent imagery, and let Gemini make it visually appealing. Major time saver!”
- Panorama Student Success – “This is our district’s data dashboard that serves as a home for all student data. Our district prioritizes meeting the needs of the “whole child,” and this dashboard helps us do that by collecting the academic data as well as our behavior, attendance, assessment, social emotional learning, student well-being, and climate and culture data. We also utilize it to refer, program, assign, and progress monitor individual and group student interventions and to gauge the impact of the interventions we are utilizing. The dashboard is used in a variety of other ways at the district, site, PLC, MTSS team, and individual educator level.”
- Panorama Solara – “I had to list this as its own tool even though it is born from our Student Success data dashboard. This is Panorama’s AI tool that allows for direct interaction with data available in the Student Success dashboard. Teachers can attach up to 20 individual students from the students in the classes, attach a single entire class, or upload their own resource to use with the tool. The Intervention Planner asks a series of questions and then automatically programs the trackable intervention with the appropriate team members assigned in the dashboard. We have created an MTSS Agenda Tool that automatically fills out the agenda template with the appropriate data based on the students selected with guiding questions for the meeting directly aligned with the data. There are so many incredible use cases for this resource.”
- MagicSchool – “Our system adopted MagicSchool as our main teacher and student-facing AI resource. While I don’t utilize the tools as frequently in my role, I do create custom tools for our system within MagicSchool. This allows us to train the tools in alignment with our adopted curriculum resources. For example, we recently launched a custom tool that aligns our K-5 CKLA curriculum with our K-5 RULER SEL curriculum. Teachers can easily ask instructional design, instructional strategy, differentiation, and other questions and receive answers that authentically integrate the academic curriculum with the SEL curriculum. Marry that with how Solara can quickly analyze their students’ most recent SEL data, and you can begin to see how data analysis followed by purposeful planning that used to take hours can be accomplished in minutes, freeing the educator up to engage with students in deeper ways.”
- Dotstorming – “It is an oldie but goodie that I still use for quick group brainstorming that has voting and commenting features that allow it to be used to go from dialogue to discussion to decision.”
- ChatGPT – “This one will also be on this list because it was my OG when I first dove into the LLM world. It has been trained by me for over three years and just “get’s me,” ya know?”
- Canva – “Love this tool, but it can be dangerous for me because there are so many options for creation and design. That being said, the ability to create polished visuals, with the assistance of AI if desired, is awesome. It can be used by staff and students. I love tools that help students demonstrate their learning in authentic ways for authentic audiences!”
- Audible/Amazon Music – “Throwing these on here because they keep me sane. We can’t work all the time, and I love to unwind with a great book or podcast. My current book is Dungeon Crawler Cark (very not education related!), and my current non-educational podcast is Dark Downeast.”