We owe it to our students to prepare them for a future imbued with AI, to gift them competency, discernment and ethical thinking.
Teachers, therefore, need to be empowered explorers of AI themselves. Towards that goal, please use the free resources on this page, and let's plan for some AI professional development for your teachers!
Teacher professional development and learning
Harnessing Generative AI
Generative AI brings a tsunami of opportunity and challenge to schools, but go beyond the hype to empower your teachers to prepare your students for their future
We want to prepare our students for their emerging future - isn't that our core business? Understanding (by doing) is the first step - but you know that, you're a teacher!
Together we can build a package perfect for your teachers
Building Blocks to get you thinking:
GenAI Hack-a-thon. Let's get hands-on practical and competitive in a session that's learning-by-doing. It's way more fun that PD is supposed to be.
Understanding Generative AI. Aimed at your whole staff (and assuming nothing) this session gives enough of an understanding "under the hood" to stimulate great thinking. Nothing empowers like understanding - of course!
Practical AI for Teachers -NOW. A smorgasbord of practical ideas (including the how-to) for busy teachers to leverage AI to magnify their creative output. Build a fun class learning games and activities. Learn how to use AI to easily generate individualised learning, reflection of specific learning and to prepare activities and solutions they way you would. How to train AI to apply great pedagogy (e.g., cognitive load theory, SDT) in what it creates for you. In short, if AI is a dog, this is your puppy training class.
Build an AI Agent. Maintain your voice and create bespoke AI agents that know your lessons, your priorities and how to teacher by learning how to create AI agents. Create an agent to help your students reflect on, and evaluate their understanding in this module - where the AI agent know just what you have covered and how. Create agents to strealine a myriad of useful tasks so they are quick and easy to adapt and re-use.
School leaders think tank. Aimed at your key staff, this session explores strategic thinking and how to guide your school for this complex adaptation. We draw on some great national and international thinking to plot an efficient path to an effective framework that will work for your school. Start building your adoption and policy framework... sure, we are building the plane while flying it, but we can still be intentional.
Authentic Assessment. This is the (first) pointy end of AI, the challenge to retain authentic and varied assessment without replacing everything with a test. Critically re-examining assessment lifts the hood on some great thinking to retain richness and authenticity even (and especially) in the age of AI. best combined with the Understanding Generative AI.
Trail Blazers and Early Adopters. You know who they are in your school and how crucial they are for effective change, so don't leave them yawning. In this session they start creating their own agents, harnessing the power of AI as creators not consumers and look towards the near future through the lens of "how can this boost teaching and learning?". (Max 6 participants, 1 hour)
Departmental Workshops. Small teams are a great place to bridge from the big ideas to the actual in a subject-specific context. The logical step is to assist your department teams to brainstorm, try, review and embed.
Stage these across the year and keep your staff in that zone of proximal development.
AI thought pieces and practical skills
About the presenter
Throughout a secondary teaching career spanning three decades, Roger has focused on student motivation, learning, and engagement through innovation. He thrives on the challenges of leading teams of teachers and derives joy from crafting lessons he would enjoy as a student. He has headed up departments in leading schools across Victoria and NSW.
Meshing this wealth of practical experience with his Ph.D. in Educational Neuroscience, Roger bridges the gap between educational research and reality of schools, classrooms and Year 9 period 6 Friday.
Working part-time as a post-doctoral research assistant at UNSW, he loves the evidence based approach to evaluating teaching pedagogies and the practical utility of great theories of learning. He is a current contributor to the educational research field and is an academic reviewer.
Roger established The Future Project, a collaboration of schools, research companies and universities to provide secondary students with authentic experiences of real-world research science. His adventure as a Teaching Scientist at Quantal Bioscience sees him continuing to forge school-research-industry partnerships, inspiring students' enthusiasm for learning by empowering them as creators in real-world scientific research. He has recently established Learning Forge as an opportunity to indulge his passion for teacher education and professional development.
He describes himself as a teacher who researches educational psychology and neuroscience, loves new challenges, electronics, and creating tech. Mostly, he simply enjoys working with high-school students in all their majesty, complexity, simplicity, and potential.