A Safer Alternative to ChatGPT for Student Scenarios

Vicki Davis (00:00): Tech Tool Tuesday, Episode 971. Today, we’ll talk about better ways to create teacher-facing AI built on best practices that really can help you with behavior in the classroom.

Announcer (00:13): This is the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.

Vicki Davis (00:14): Today’s show is sponsored by Ellis, a free resource from Children’s Health Council that helps teachers think through tough student moments and find practical next steps. Today’s guest is Natalie Tamburello, a learning disability and education equity advocate at Children’s Health Council, the nonprofit organization behind Ellis. All opinions on today’s show are my own.

Vicki Davis (00:45): Natalie Tamburello is Community Engagement Manager at the Children’s Health Council in Palo Alto and a learning disability and education equity advocate. She holds a degree from Cambridge and has worked with Understood, Learning Ally, and the National Center for Learning Disabilities.

Natalie, one problem that teachers are facing right now is that they have students with mental health issues. They have students with learning differences, and a lot of them are turning just to regular old AI, or to talk to other teachers, and that can help some. But why is everything falling short of what we’re seeing right now in the classroom?

Natalie Tamburello (01:22): Vicki, exactly what you just said. Educators are really inundated right now. They’re not short on care. They’re short on time, steady support, and clear next steps in moments when students need them most. And many teachers, I think, enter the profession because of the relationships that they can build with students.

I think over the past decade, and especially since COVID, those relationships have become a lot harder to protect because of a lot of competing priorities. Students are coming to school with much more complex learning and behavior and emotional needs. Educators are being asked to respond to anxiety, depression, learning differences, attendance challenges, classroom disruptions, academic pressure, all at the same time. For many teachers, they’ve never received the training to handle those types of challenges. And we really don’t think it’s reasonable to continue to ask educators to do all of that thinking and then carry all of that work alone.

But often colleagues are stretched thin. A counselor may have, you know, over 300 students on their caseload. A learning specialist is more focused on students who are already identified, or a Tier 3 student.

Even now, as GPTs become more popular, they go online or they go ask an AI, how can I help this student? Or even on social media. But what they find is not specific enough, practical enough, grounded enough to use in the moment. And they have no idea whether they can trust it.

Vicki Davis (02:45): Issue with just general large language models like ChatGPT is that they weren’t trained on whether information was accurate or not. We talk about research-based best practices, but if we’re using regular old AI chat, we’re not getting that.

Today, you work with Ellis, a tool that the Children’s Health Council has created. So under the hood, how is this different from going to a regular ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini?

Natalie Tamburello (03:16): So the difference with Ellis, there’s two things. There’s a difference in how it’s built, and then there’s also a difference in the product itself and how it gets answers for you.

We use what we call a RAG, which is a Retrieval Augmented Generation. That’s what it stands for. So instead of scraping the entirety of the internet to get a response, we have a pool of resources from vetted partners who have expertise in the LD and mental health fields, that are all nonprofit organizations just like ours, to ensure a really accurate response.

Ellis isn’t trained on the open internet. It’s specifically when you ask a question of Ellis, the system searches a curated library of really trusted resources that humans have vetted and that we have partnered with. And what’s really great about this is that there’s a lot of amazing organizations that exist out there, but have really amazing resources. And so this is a way of getting that kind of content that might not be accessible.

Children’s Health Council, we have our own content. That’s the organization that’s built Ellis and owns and operates Ellis. And Understood, which is an organization that focuses primarily on parents and supporting them through their journey of having students with learning and attention differences. CAST is an organization that works on universal design for learning and making sure that you design a classroom to be accessible for all students. And then CASEL is another one that people might recognize, which is a social-emotional learning. We also have Ensemble Learning, which is for students who are learning English as a second language. I mean, there’s a lot of different partners that we have.

Vicki Davis (04:47): So we have these resources in there. So I’ve tested it out and I took in a student situation, typed in the information that I have. So if I type in the information about a student — obviously, I’m not going to put their name or anything — if somebody’s using Ellis or really any tool, do you have guidelines for how the teacher should type in information to get these ideas?

Natalie Tamburello (05:09): Yeah. The other way that Ellis is different from AIs is that it walks you through a strengths-based prompt process. So teachers have actually told us that even the act of inputting a scenario, before even receiving a response, has changed how they were thinking about the student, because teachers are often coming to use Ellis at a time where they’re pretty frustrated, right? And rightly so.

One of the first three questions that is asked is, what are the student’s strengths? And so really trying to reframe your thinking about the student’s strengths. And that also helps Ellis respond and give suggestions and strategies that are based in that student’s strength rather than their weaknesses. There is a prompt process, which is also helpful, but is very different from another AI, that really leads you through the process where it’s not really relying on you inputting the information. It really guides you through that process.

We do guide them not to share any personal identifiable information about the student. But if you happen to do that — say you’re copying over a BIP or an IEP and a name slips through — Ellis automatically removes that. So personal identifiable information is protected. Again, not something that another AI might do.

Vicki Davis (06:19): Okay, so we have better protection. I like how it’s really guiding us through the prompts. And when you’re frustrated, you may or may not remember those things. Let’s go through a typical scenario.

Natalie Tamburello (06:30): One of the things I’m really privileged to do is to be one of the main people who speaks to a lot of our users. So I have a lot of conglomeration of stories and anecdotes to share with individual teachers.

The first thing that they’ve said — and pretty much every teacher I’ve talked to has said this when they’ve inputted a scenario — it feels very validating and very relieving. I think they’re worried that Ellis is going to come back with all of these strategies that they’ve never seen before. And that’s not true. Usually you’ve tried some of the things that Ellis has suggested. So it’s that immediate validation, and then feeling really confident that you have a plan moving forward.

So what’s also very different about Ellis is that it has an action plan built into it. So instead of just a text response that you might get from another AI, there’s an action plan that goes week by week that’s customizable based off whatever strategies that you select, and you can track your progress through that. So it feels doable and actionable. So that’s another thing that teachers have really mentioned.

And another story that I can share — when we designed Ellis, one of our biggest concerns when working with an AI is that a lot of AI, and the criticism around AI, is that it isolates people even more. People become more and more siloed, and we didn’t want Ellis to do that. We wanted Ellis to encourage collaboration. And although Ellis is built as individual accounts for teachers that are free, we are seeing teachers using it collaboratively. They are mainly using it with teacher teams like MTSS teams, or through coaching, or learning specialists are using it with a teacher to help create some neutral common ground, especially when there’s differing opinions. So that’s been really amazing to see. Like, we knew we were going to be successful with Ellis, or we were doing the right thing, is if people started using it in a collaborative way — even though the tool currently isn’t built to be used collaboratively.

Vicki Davis (08:21): What are some things that a teacher cannot expect Ellis to do?

Natalie Tamburello (08:24): We draw a really clear line. Ellis supports classroom decision-making, not clinical decision-making. And it doesn’t diagnose, it doesn’t assess, it doesn’t provide therapy. It really specifically shows classroom-grounded strategies that can be implemented. It will not create an evaluation. And if there’s anything related to suicidal ideation or self-harm, we immediately shut down the conversation and direct you to proper reporting procedures as a mandated reporter.

And when I’ve talked to teachers about, oh, what kind of training did you receive as you were getting your teaching credential? They say, well, maybe I had a semester in learning disabilities or mental health while I was getting that credential. And then when they actually show up in the classroom as a general education teacher, they realize, well, I’m teaching all different types of kids, and I have to be able to at least triage a little bit and manage that classroom, because not every single kid with an IEP or 504 is getting pulled out all the time to be handled by someone else. And so developing your skills as an educator is really important. It’s completely separate from clinical advice.

Vicki Davis (09:31): Now, how do you answer that question of those who say, I’m opposed to all AI being used in anything with student behavior, mental health, or learning differences?

Natalie Tamburello (09:42): Yeah, I would say your skepticism is healthy. I think I would probably agree with a lot of the skeptics out there. Student mental health is way too important to hand over to AI, and that is not what Ellis was designed to do. And that’s also why Ellis is teacher-facing and not student-facing. We don’t need more kids in front of screens. And at the end of the day, every decision still belongs to the teacher.

Ellis is there to make trusted knowledge easier to access and more actionable. So you know that you have reputable strategic strategies to try. A lot of this is a lot harder to access than you would anticipate. And we’re able to uplift organizations that you wouldn’t necessarily see or recognize. Also, everything in Ellis is cited. And you can click on them, you can share them, you can save them.

Vicki Davis (10:28): So Natalie, a teacher struggling — what can they do right now to get into Ellis? Can they get started right now?

Natalie Tamburello (10:36): Yeah, you can go to askellis.org, create an account. The account creation process is pretty quick. And then once you’ve done that, you can start a scenario. You have the ability to start an individual scenario if you have a particular challenge that you’re having with an individual student, but then you can also do a classroom scenario. So if you’re having a classroom dynamic or challenge — and it shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to get a response, depending on how much you give Ellis. If you give Ellis quite a bit, it’s going to take a little bit longer of your time. But it should be really self-explanatory. We created Ellis so that it was really easy for you all to use.

For me, it’s really personal. And I think anyone listening can identify with the experience of having a really amazing teacher. I’m dyslexic. I also have experienced anxiety as a student. And I can remember teachers who made a real difference in my life. And it was not because of a lesson plan or a test, unfortunately — I think a lot of teachers would love that — but it was because they took the time to understand what I needed in a challenging moment and had the grace and the humility to adjust their approach.

And I’m sure we can all think of a teacher that impacted our trajectory. And it was likely at a time when you were not at your best, whether you had a mental health challenge or a learning difference or not, and they knew what to do to encourage you forward. And it’s that kind of relationship that can really change a student’s trajectory and experience of school. And that’s something that AI cannot replace. But I hope — we hope — that Ellis helps facilitate more of those moments.

And whether you use Ellis or not, I think taking a moment to be curious before being corrective, and thinking about how you can grow as an educator and develop your skills by learning from your students and with them as they’re going through some challenges.

Vicki Davis (12:24): This has been a fantastic conversation with Natalie Tamburello, Community Engagement Manager at the Children’s Health Council. And we’ve been talking about Ellis. They are a nonprofit organization. And this is really, Natalie, I think, where we need to be heading — with more highly vetted teacher-facing resources that do use AI to do what it does well, which is pull together a lot of information, but then do what we humans can do very well, which is accurately vet all of this wealth of resource so that we can do a better job. So thanks for coming on the show.

Vicki Davis (13:04): That was Natalie Tamburello from Children’s Health Council, and today’s show was sponsored by Ellis. Ellis is free for teachers. You describe a real situation with a real student, and Ellis answers from a knowledge base of content from trusted partners like CAST, CASEL, Understood, and others. Ellis gives you information, not clinical advice. It doesn’t collect personally identifiable student information.

I’ve spent the drive home thinking about that one student. When I went to Ellis and put in what happened, it gave me some great ideas to try. I was impressed with the suggestions it gave me. If that’s you, go to coolcatteacher.com forward slash Ellis. That’s coolcatteacher.com forward slash Ellis. It’s free!

Vicki Davis (13:57): Thanks for tuning in to the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast. Watch the video version of this podcast and catch my new radio and TV show, Cool Cat Teacher Talk, on YouTube and a radio or TV station near you. Join my Cool Cat Teacher Classroom Matters newsletter at coolcatteacher.com forward slash newsletter. Leave a review if you found this helpful. See you later, educator.