Dr. Kevin Gregorio: Implemented Properly, AI Can Be A Valuable Teaching Tool

Dr. Kevin Gregorio, director of Learning Services at St. Joseph’s Prep, was an early adopter of Artificial Intelligence, looking for ways to utilize it to help students be the best versions of themselves.

While Gregorio was pursuing his Ph.D., in Educational Psychology, a professor encouraged the use of AI in his class, suggesting that students use it to prepare for his tests and exams. Gregorio, who was writing his dissertation on retrieval methods, saw a way to incorporate it into classrooms. 

Already Gregorio was putting his retrieval ideas into practice at the Prep. Using practice tests and flash cards to help students learn to retrieve information from memory. Could AI help him in this?

Gregorio connected with the CEO/Co-Founder of Flint AI which was involved in AI for education already. “I already believed that AI could be a valuable tool but I could also see that it mattered how it is implemented,” Gregorio says. “I saw that it could be a good way to measure retrieval and that Flint was already positioning itself in this capacity.”

Gregorio compares it to a coach on a sports team or a director in a show. “How can I get students to get more reps,” he says. “If you have a classroom of 20 students, you have a fundamental scale problem where it’s impossible for everyone to get a ‘rep’ from just one teacher. Not everyone can answer the same question. However, if you create the right ChatBot assignment tool, they can have this conversation and get feedback in an individualized way in a way that a teacher cannot always do. If implemented correctly and thoughtfully, it can facilitate reps with feedback at a scale that a human cannot achieve. Everyone can get an at bat or a ground ball.”

The teacher receives an aggregated form to see the interactions from each student and also from the whole class, to see what items need better coverage or which students require more directed work. The Flint software allows you to coach AI to respond like an ideal teacher.

Gregorio’s implementation of Flint AI is just one of the AI initiatives that the Prep is working on for this year. This month, the Prep will hold a day of professional development called “Making Sense of AI,” with goals of: giving Prep educators a deeper understanding of what generative artificial intelligence is and what its potential and pitfalls are when it comes to education; give each person a hands-on experience with AI tools as well as the time and space to envision and discuss possibilities for classroom applications; consider the impact of AI instruction, planning, and assessment.