Artificial intelligence is a critical solution for improving writing scores in Kentucky’s Henry County Public Schools. Superintendent Jim Masters says his district’s AI strategy even helps him on the administrative side of the aisle. Here’s how to replicate his district’s success.
Henry County’s educators wanted to grade students’ writing assessments per Kentucky state guidelines for scoring. More importantly, they wanted to provide students with adequate feedback.
Masters and his team created a prompt that embedded the grading criteria for the Kentucky state exam in the AI (in this case, Google’s NotebookLM). They fed the chatbot the state’s publicly released sample questions and answers until the AI learned how to score exactly like Pearson Kentucky, the agency that administers the exam.
“It took some trial and error, but we were finally able to dial it in,” says Masters.
Teachers also use AI to create lesson plans.
“We went back to writing a prompt that will generate an evidence-based lesson plan pulling from the work of Robert J. Marzano and John Hattie and others in the template that we as a district wanted to use,” he says. “It created a lesson plan organized in a very specific way.”
“By being able to get consistent and immediate feedback to our students, the teacher was then able to spend time doing what she does best, which is building relationships with the students and talking about how to improve their writing instead of having to spend hours reading each one of those papers,” he explains.
Additionally, every student who participated in the intervention group saw improvements in their overall writing scores.
From an administrative perspective, Masters says, AI keeps him updated on the state’s education policies. He simply uploads documents to NotebookLM and asks specific questions.
“Maybe, I can’t remember all the details of a referral process or which holidays a 240-day contract staff member is supposed to get,” he says. “I no longer have to go looking for the answer. I just type in a question, and it’s answered immediately.”
AI strategy advice for leaders
Only 5% of school districts nationwide have implemented formal AI policies, according to a fall survey by the Center for Reinventing Public Education. Masters encourages superintendents to look for ways AI can alleviate teacher workloads and elevate student learning.
“AI can address, one, saving teachers a lot of time, and two, ensuring that you’re creating evidence-based solutions,” he says.
