104. How AI is Revolutionizing the Grading Process & Reducing Workload for Educators with Special Guest Quadros Flores

Brittany Blackwell [00:00:00]:

All right, welcome to the Resilient Teacher podcast, Gil.

Gil Flores [00:00:04]:

Thank you, Brittany. Excited to be here. Thanks for inviting us.

Brittany Blackwell [00:00:07]:

Yes. I am super excited to talk about this topic today because it is, it's really close to my heart, obviously. But before we get started with all the really cool things that we're going to talk about today, can you share a little bit about who you are, what you do, and kind of like, what, what led you to this place that we are in today?

Gil Flores [00:00:28]:

Yeah. So, my name is Gilles Flores. I'm the co founder and CEO of co Grader. I come from a family of educators, and so I saw very close how grading takes away sacrifices, family time on weekends. And so we started building co grader about a year ago to really help teachers become better teachers, give better feedback, individualized to kids while helping them save time, and avoiding the late nights and weekends spent grading, which is a part of this whole equation that obviously was intensified with COVID but this whole burnout and retention issue we're seeing across the country.

Brittany Blackwell [00:01:12]:

Yeah, I mean, I've seen a lot of teachers really struggle with differentiating instruction for, especially grading. Grading is such a tedious process for educators, especially for those middle and high school level teachers who may have 120 students or more that they have to grade and provide feedback to. And that time is typically spent outside of the classroom. How is AI changing the way educators can grade writing?

Gil Flores [00:01:47]:

Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you, Brett. If I kind of circle back when we started this to double, make sure that we wanted to solve this challenge together, grading. I sat down with about 50 teachers at ISTe last year and asked them, what keeps you up at night? What of the job do you like and what do you not like? And the overwhelming response was, we love teaching. We love helping the kids. We love supporting them. We really do not like grading. Some don't particularly like dealing with parents and a couple of other things.

Gil Flores [00:02:26]:

But grading kind of came consistently, and countless teachers told the exact sentence of grading is the bane of my existence. Yes, it's kind of a sentence that I just struck me so strongly that I kind of kept with it through this journey. And so, as AI pops up in, well, it's been developing around the years, but the big boom in November 22 with the release of chat GPT really brought out a new way of personalizing education in a way that wasn't possible before. I mean, all the billionaires, Jeff, Bezos, Zuckerberg, they've all tried throwing money at this problem we've been with limited success. Finally, there's a tool that can actually understand each individual person's context and be able to really help students get personalized feedback. So what we understood was happening was today, if students turn in an assignment Monday morning, I'm going to wait three, four, five weeks feeling guilty that I have all these papers to grade. You know, maybe students and parents are complaining they want to see the grades. And finally I sit down a whole weekend and do my best.

Gil Flores [00:03:44]:

I grade them all, provide as much feedback as I can within the realms of possibility of a weekend, and then, you know, just rinse and repeat. What's a new way of doing this? Students turn in an assignment on Monday morning, Monday afternoon, or Tuesday. I'm going to take an hour and a half, and I'm going to leverage AI to provide personalized feedback in 24 to 72 hours to kids. So AI is going to always get you 80% there, not 100% there. It's going to work with us to that point, but it really allows us to let each kid know what they're doing well, where they can improve and what's next. Always in a positive, constructive tone. So in a nutshell, really, AI helps teachers grade writing in a way that's better, helps them become better teachers by giving better feedback and save their nights and Sundays?

Brittany Blackwell [00:04:45]:

Yes, absolutely. And I think that's the biggest thing, is that not only is it saving us time as teachers, is it not allowing us to reclaim that time, but it's also providing our students with quicker feedback so that they can make quicker progress. Previously, when we had to sit down and we had to do those essays and we are grading each one, it may take a couple of weeks to get through all of those essays, so the students don't have the opportunity to quickly implement whatever feedback you're giving them. And so I think that's the biggest. Like the power behind your product is that they are able to make quicker progress. And then we're also, like, it's a dual thing because we're also saving time and allowing for that feedback loop to kind of be closed quicker.

Gil Flores [00:05:37]:

Absolutely. And that's a lot that we hear about teachers. Initially, they're skeptical, as they should. I mean, there's so many organizations been claiming they can do this for years and years and years. We've all become skeptical of this. But then when teachers actually grade their own assignment for the first time for their own kids and see the level of feedback they can provide and then see their reaction when in two days you're getting feedback on the short story you wrote about the great Gatsby. Guess what happens? Kids actually care. Because I was struggling to find a counter example for my claim two days ago, not three, four weeks ago.

Gil Flores [00:06:15]:

And so I actually care about that feedback because I wanted to know how I could do better in that point. And so not only, yes, teachers are saving a bunch of time, but really, kids are more engaged with the feedback they're getting. Parents are happier, and then naturally, the school administrators are also happier because personalized feedback, as I'm sure you know, Brit, is very correlated with. With improving student outcomes.

Brittany Blackwell [00:06:45]:

Absolutely, absolutely. And one other thing that I kind of want to touch on really quick, too, is that with things like this, especially with co grader, there is this step in the process where teachers get to approve that feedback to make sure that it makes sense. And instead of grading based on how you feel, which sometimes we can do as human beings, the AI does not do that. It gives like an objective amount based on even a rubric that you can, you know, you've created, you've put in there, or you can create one with the product. And I think that that is. That's really huge, too. Is the consistency behind it and the ability for the teacher to take that extra step to approve. Yes.

Brittany Blackwell [00:07:36]:

That this is accurate. And so it's not just feeding it to the students without ever looking at it, it's automating that 80% while the teachers can do that 20% work.

Gil Flores [00:07:47]:

Absolutely. I think it's relevant to share that teachers are accountable for the grades and the feedback. We're not doing that part for sure, nor do we want that responsibility. We're providing a first draft of grades and feedback at a speed that's unprecedented. And the level of quality that's would require an amount of energy for you to do for each individual student. That's just not humanly possible without using the supportive tools. I think you mentioned an important point. Consistency and equity.

Gil Flores [00:08:22]:

We all know what the drill is, right? We get our biological kids to grade for us, or we're grading 100 papers, and the first 20, we're putting all our heart and energy into it by paper. Number 80. I'm tired, you know, I'm skimming. I'm half reading. And so it's hard. It's hard. And research shows that if you put ten teachers in a room grading the same assignment, grades are going to be anywhere from c to a. And reality is that we have teachers that when they're building their own rubrics within code grader or using a rubric, Rubik's from our template from our library.

Gil Flores [00:09:05]:

They find initially that it might be too lenient or too harsh. And really it's the same rubric, guys. Thing is, we all have our own personal styles, and as things evolve, then naturally you're going to find where that lays. But it's important to have a baseline of consistency where you know that, you know, all the assignments were graded against a well defined set of criterias, which, by the way, we always incentivize should be shared with the kids so that they know what the success look like in this specific task.

Brittany Blackwell [00:09:43]:

Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yes. I know that there is a teacher, though, out there who is like, you know, isn't providing feedback on student writing kind of like cheating? What would you say to that teacher who thinks that?

Gil Flores [00:09:57]:

That's an amazing question, and people do ask that, which is fascinating. Well, what we've learned from what other teachers have told us is like, what's the point of writing? Let's go back and think about what's the point of writing? We write for a number of reasons, but I'm going to highlight two, hoping not to be too simplistic, but we write so that we learn how to think, right? We understand how thoughts can be put together to structure an argument, to structure story, to structure a narrative. And really, it's when we put down thoughts in a way that's concise that our ideas kind of come together and make sense. The second reason why we write is to generate content for others to read, to produce meaningful, relevant information for others to read. Which again, if kids are using chat GPT to write, they are missing out on the thinking part for sure. And so many kids understand this. Like I personally, for my job, I use chat GPT or AI tools all day, every day. And still I write so much, I probably write ten pages myself a week because it just helps me organize my thoughts.

Gil Flores [00:11:18]:

Whereas when we talk about producing content, some of the best teachers we work with, they're incentivizing kids to do that. Let's learn how to produce meaningful, relevant content that is not generic using these tools. And that's a skill in by itself. So kind of circling back to your question, right? So we can't use chat GPT to write our assignments, and you're using, you know, AI tools to grade. You know, this isn't fair. Well, we've heard teachers answer. It's like the goal of writing is for you to learn how to write. The goal of grading is not for me to learn how to grade is to actually grade and provide feedback.

Gil Flores [00:12:00]:

And so I think most of teachers and families in the community has, is slowly coming to that kind of conclusion.

Brittany Blackwell [00:12:12]:

Yeah. To that realization. Because I actually had somebody comment that on a TikTok post not too long ago, and it kind of blew my mind because I was like, is this a teacher or is this a student? Because if this is a teacher, I know that they're thinking about it from the lens of if a student writes with using chat GPT or if a student uses chat GBT to write, then it's totally skipping the learning process. Whereas as teachers, we're not in the learning process, we're in the feedback process. And that is only one way that we provide feedback. We can provide feedback verbally, we can, you know, and so I had this whole kind of epiphany thinking, I really hope this is a student who thinks this. And you just, you just kind of shared those exact same thoughts. So I'm glad we're on the same page.

Gil Flores [00:13:00]:

Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think there's something about, you know, the art of giving feedback that, you know, many, many new teachers mostly haven't been taught how to do that well. Right? And so, you know, leverage tools that have pedagogic best practices embedded into them. On the feedback comes sandwiched in. There's positive stuff in there to make sure kids are engaged, kids are motivated. And in the end, I think we got to put things in perspective. What did we do before we had common banks, which in a way are also copying from one assignment to the other.

Gil Flores [00:13:42]:

And on the student side of things, we're already using tools, right? We're already using Google, Wikipedia, whatever, other tools to refine our ideas and to put our thoughts together. I mean, if I'm going to write a history book, I'm definitely going to use the Internet to research and chat GPT, to kind of go around and learn my own paths. And so really what we've seen our most innovative educators do is actually embrace it. Like, you know, things are changing and how can we achieve our goals in this new era? Right. What is school for? School is to educate the new generation, is to help kids learn. And how can we do that within this new context that's not going away?

Brittany Blackwell [00:14:29]:

Absolutely. Wow, those are some powerful words. And kind of just kind of based on that, those innovative teachers, those forward thinking teachers, they're the ones who are going to start adopting these things quicker and easier. But there are some teachers who say, you know, I don't want to automate 100% of my job, and maybe they think that outsourcing it to AI will make them lose that human connection with students. What would you say to those teachers?

Gil Flores [00:15:01]:

Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, our, our whole ethos is to improve and increase human connection through the use of technology. And so we are all for one on one student conferencing, student support, tutoring, really helping students have more of that kind of one on one human attention and connection. Right. So in a way, more and more teachers are facilitators of human growth, of student growth. And so that kind of goes beyond giving feedback on the work. It goes beyond all the kind of teaching knowledge itself, but more teaching kids how to be humans in the society we live. And when I talk to teachers, what you love about your job, what do you not like about your job? What we all love is to teach kids and to be with kids and to help them and help them improve and help them learn.

Gil Flores [00:16:03]:

And then, you know, they get happy because they were being challenged with something and they overcame it. And that's a fun part of the job. Spending your Sunday looking at a bunch of papers repetitively is not necessarily the most fun thing for most of us. Right. And it is a super important job. Grading is extremely important. It's that closing of the feedback loop from students work, what they perceived from what you taught them, and kind of closing that loop and making sure that they know what, and, you know, also what you did wrong or right. So our teachers are reading student work for the most part.

Gil Flores [00:16:48]:

Some teachers are actually grading two to three times more than they used to. So they're telling us, like we used. Like, these days, I do a lot of multiple choice and maybe do writing, you know, max, max, once a month, I'm not going to do all the grading, but now with co grader, I'm actually grading, you know, every week, once every week. So reading that reading, that initial draft that students have produced, giving them that feedback and then putting them into peer groups so that they can look at the feedback and help each other out before they deliver the final assignment. So, you know, teachers don't necessarily like to read half baked assignments where the kid just wanted to kind of deliver something. So, okay, how about we grade it first? You're going to get some initial feedback. You work on that, and then once that's done, I'll take a read and be sure to give you the final feedback. So we've been getting more and more requests and also having student facing platforms so that kids can auto grade themselves before we.

Gil Flores [00:17:53]:

And so all of this to say that the teaching job has a human aspect that is ultimately the most necessary thing we have for kids. Parents are working and teachers end up educating our children and there's parts of the job that really only a human can do right? Having empathy for the kid, what's going on at home, what's going on at school, how they're dealing with adolescents and all those things happening. But there's lots of parts of the job that end up being repetitive in admin and there's no reason for us not to use tools if that not only makes our life easier, but makes us better educators.

Brittany Blackwell [00:18:40]:

Yes. I mean, enhances our instruction in a way that allows us to see what. I love that idea of kind of allowing the co creator to provide that initial draft feedback and then putting them into groups because then they're able to see the different feedback that it's giving and then they're able to take that and then have a low stakes, a low stakes way of improving their writing overall. And I just think that that's a fantastic way of really using the system to enhance us as educators. We've talked about co graders quite a bit in this episode. Can you share just a little bit about Cogrator, where it's going? What are you hoping for? The future? As far as I heard, a little bit of student facing in there. Is that a plan for the future too?

Gil Flores [00:19:33]:

I can comment too much on what's coming, but it's definitely something that teachers request. Teachers want to give more feedback and so if it doesn't, and teachers don't necessarily want to be the bottleneck for that feedback. Right. And so we can think of these AI tools as tas. They're here to support you. You still need to read student work, you still need to understand they're not going to do the job for you, but they're definitely going to help. I mean, we've had tas grade in college for decades, maybe centuries, and so you're really getting help, extra help on the parts where it can be somehow outsourced or supported by tools. What's coming in the future? We don't know.

Gil Flores [00:20:25]:

AI is developing so fast. I think my vision for the future is one where every kid has personalized education and really has feedback loops that maybe come in every day, twice a day, three times a day, whether that's in writing, whether it's, you know, student conferencing class, you know, back maybe more than a thousand years ago, education was one to one at some point, right? And then we invent classrooms and became many to one. So I wonder whether, you know, how close we are to making it possible that we further increase that, you know, individual support that kids can get from, you know, expanding kind of the firepower that an individual teacher has that. I mean, at this point, their teachers are nothing short of heroes. I think a survey came out stating that the average teacher is working 54 hours a week. 54 hours a week. A teacher like you're on stage or presenting, which is an infinitely tiring job. You know, you're, you're monitoring all these kids.

Gil Flores [00:21:40]:

You have to grade, you have to get feedback, have to prep lessons. So I'm very, very excited about how the AI tools that are coming out can finally deliver on the promise that, you know, edtech tools have maybe fallen slightly short on for the, for the most part in the last few decades. That led us to get to the point where teachers are working over 50 hours every week.

Brittany Blackwell [00:22:07]:

Right, right. I'm excited to see what the future has to hold. And I always like to ask that question, especially to somebody who is the founder and the CEO of an edtech company, like, where do you see this kind of going and all of that? I just want to say, Jill, thank you so much for coming onto the show and for sharing just your perspective. And I love meeting with people who kind of have the same thought process that I do. So it just, it warms my heart to know that there are people in the edtech world who understand teachers difficulties and are creating solutions that are going to solve some of those problems and also enhance us in the long run and help us reignite our passion for teaching. So thank you so much for being a part of this.

Gil Flores [00:22:51]:

Well, thank you for inviting and I can share with you, there's nothing I've ever done in my life that's more fulfilling than helping teachers. Teachers are immensely grateful. They send us feedback all the time, unsolicited feedback and gratefulness and thanks. We had a teacher two days ago saying that we're going to postpone their retirement now that they don't need to grade. So it's really been, my heart is really full.

Brittany Blackwell [00:23:21]:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm going to put the links for co grader down in the show notes. That way everybody can go and check it out and get their free account and just play around in there and maybe get some feedback back to their students before summer comes. So we'll do that. And thank you so much again for being a part of this. It was so much fun to talk to you.

Gil Flores [00:23:41]:

Yeah, thank you so much.