K12 Showcase: Lessons From Teachers and Administrators
Summary
This OpenAI Forum replay captures district and classroom examples of K–12 AI implementation moving from tool experimentation toward workflow integration. Patrick Gittisriboongul describes the shift from asking what AI can generate to asking what schools can do differently because AI exists. Gautam Sethi frames agentic tools as a way for educators and staff to turn local pain points into prototypes, tools, and process improvements. Francesca Summers demonstrates a classroom workflow where the teacher begins with standards, learning targets, success criteria, and student writing before using ChatGPT to generate possible supports that the teacher selects, adapts, or rejects.
The durable contribution is not that districts need more prompt training. It is that professional learning, district operations, and classroom planning need to be redesigned around real work: board preparation, attendance intervention, family communication, student-work analysis, differentiated supports, and staff idea capture.
Clay’s submitted note
- Move PD from prompts/tools → redesigning real workflows.
- Ask “What can we do differently because AI exists?”
- Build a system for collecting staff pain points and turning them into solutions.
- Keep human judgment and instructional purpose at the center: pedagogy first, AI second.
Key ideas
- District AI work is shifting from experimentation to integration: less “can AI make this?” and more “what can this workflow become now that AI exists?”
- AI professional learning should teach educators to deconstruct recurring work: triggers, inputs, repeated steps, decisions, bottlenecks, and appropriate AI assistance.
- Staff pain points can become a governed innovation pipeline when districts create systems for collecting ideas, prototyping, and sharing validated workflows.
- Teacher judgment remains the instructional center. AI can generate options, but teachers decide what fits the standard, student work, and learning goal.
- Pedagogy-first classroom use starts with standards, learning targets, success criteria, and observed student needs before ChatGPT enters the workflow.
Useful quotes
Quote
“Now that question is becoming less, what can AI generate for me? And more, what can we do differently because it exists?” — Patrick Gittisriboongul, 00:08:15
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“If our PD is essentially, here are our 10 prompts, here are the buttons in this product, we’re preparing really people for yesterday’s technology.” — Patrick Gittisriboongul, 00:17:04
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“I would rather say bring one recurring problem that takes too much of your time … and then take that actual work and then redesign what that workflow looks like.” — Patrick Gittisriboongul, 00:17:04
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“I don’t start with AI, I start with the standard, what I need students to learn and what I’m seeing in their writing.” — Francesca Summers, 00:29:48
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“AI gives me options. I make the decision, the instructional decision. I review it, I select it, I adapt it, and then I teach it.” — Francesca Summers, 00:31:33
Links into the wiki
Big ideas
Claims
- District AI implementation needs living guidance and teacher-led redesign
- AI literacy takes system capacity, not just tool access
Syntheses
Source text
The original URL was intermittently blocked or not transcript-extractable from Donn’s environment, so this page is based on the transcript Clay submitted in GitHub issue #23.
Submitted transcript excerpt
[00:00:50] Mark Murray: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to the OpenAI Forum. I'm Mark Murray, the Editorial Director at OpenAI. And as districts across the country head back to school, we wanted to highlight how system leaders and educators are using AI to support teaching and learning. Brian Johnsrud, OpenAI's Global Head of Educational Engagement, will first facilitate a conversation with district leaders about how they're using AI in their districts. Then, 4th grade teacher Francesca Summers will share how she uses ChatGPT to create standards-aligned, differentiated reading lessons. We'll leave time for audience questions at the end and I'll pass it over to Brian. Brian?
[00:01:41] Brian Johnsrud: Thanks, Mark, and hello, everyone. Before I came to OpenAI, I was a K-12 teacher and then a college instructor. So, when I think about new technology in education, I don't start with the technology. I start with expert teachers and school leaders and what their goals are for the classroom and how technology's going to help fulfill those goals. Educators know better than anyone when a student needs a different explanation or a personalized resource or support. They know what's going to keep students engaged and actually excited about learning. Who takes a standard written on a page and turns it into that dynamic learning moment that changes what a child believes that they can do. That's why this moment feels so full of possibility and I'm so excited to spend time with the innovative educators and leaders joining us today. AI has quickly moved beyond answering individual questions in chatbots. New agentic tools, connectors, plugins, and automations can now work across the curriculum materials and specific course context a teacher chooses and they connect to their other essential tools and help carry out new multi-step pedagogically informed work taking an idea to something ready for the classroom. That could mean turning one lesson into several pathways for different learners, building interactive activity, or spending less time assembling materials and more time with students. It's an exciting moment in time and a journey where we're proud to be co-designers of how far student potential could go and in that journey it's the educators who first draw the map they choose the destination what students should understand where their starting points are and what meaningful learning looks like and what's possible. The researchers and pedagogical experts we work with they help measure and test the roads on that map validating what approaches are most effective for which students and in which settings and our job here at OpenAI is to help build bridges that can unlock new routes and when we get this right together schools can take students to places that would have been difficult or even impossible to reach before. So our goal is simple to build with educators learn from educators and empower educators and that's what today is all about. The innovation we're celebrating isn't happening somewhere far away it's already happening in districts and classrooms in the hands of the leaders and teachers you'll hear from today. Patrick and Gautam thank you for joining us let's get started. Can you please introduce yourselves briefly maybe starting with you Patrick.
[00:04:12] Patrick Gittisriboongul: Awesome, again thank you Brian thank you to the team at OpenAI for having me on this panel. My name is Patrick Gittisriboongul and I'm the proud superintendent of Lynwood Unified School District in Los Angeles County. We serve approximately 10,000 students across 12 elementary to middle and to high schools. Lynwood Unified is a very diverse urban school district in southeast LA. As superintendent, you know our work is really grounded in a simple mission is making sure that every student has access to high quality education, strong support systems and the opportunity to succeed. I've had the opportunity to serve in a number of different roles in education. I've served as a classroom teacher, taught math about 26 years ago so I'm dating myself now, but also was in Ed Tech, assessment and accountability, data and district administration.
[00:04:58] Patrick Gittisriboongul: And district administration. And now as superintendent, I have the opportunity to look at education from a systems and organizational perspective. I think I would say my path to education is also somewhat unique. Before becoming a teacher, I worked in the private sector as a web developer during the dot com era, the dot-bust era. I eventually transitioned into education, became a math teacher. And so that experience has really shaped how I think about technology. Technology is only valuable when it ultimately improves the experience of people using it. And so from the classroom, I moved into ed tech, leadership roles where I had the opportunity to work on instructional technology, assessment, accountability, data, and innovation across school districts and county systems as well. So essentially I've kind of spent my career sitting at the intersection of technology, teaching and learning, data, and organizational leadership. Now as superintendent, I think my responsibility, again, is very much, much more broader. It's about leading the entire system, really supporting our schools and our educators working with our board, partnering with our families and communities, managing resources responsibly, and most importantly staying focused on students. And I think that's important for the conversation today. And I'm very happy to be here. So thank you very much for having me.
[00:06:11] Brian Johnsrud: Thanks, Patrick. Yeah. Gautam, can you introduce yourself?
[00:06:14] Gautam Sethi: Sure, absolutely. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Gautam Sethi. I serve as the chief information technology officer at Fairfax County Public Schools in Northern Virginia. We are the ninth largest school district in the nation, serving approximately 180,000 students in 200 schools with about 40,000 staff supporting them. We have a diverse population, about 194 different languages spoken in Fairfax County Public Schools. So it is a large, complex school division where the needs continually outstrip the resources. And we start working with tools like AI. We are excited about the potential and possibilities of supporting the classroom teachers, supporting the back office operations, and helping build towards that stronger, tighter teacher-student collaboration in the future. Unlike Patrick, but somewhat similar, I did not follow his pathway into the classroom and to technology. I actually just stumbled into it at New York City when I joined there as a developer working on a project to modernize their student information system. And since then I've been sort of involved by the challenges in education and how technology can support it. 20 years, four school divisions later, I'm still at it but excited with the new technology because finally the promise of technology supporting education I think is getting closer and real. Thanks so much.
[00:07:46] Brian Johnsrud: Wow, wealth of experience and expertise between the two of you. Let's dive in. Patrick, my first question is for you. So every school year it seems like there's a different theme or vibe or motto that sort of can encapsulate how AI is being integrated that year and how teachers, parents, students, and school leaders yourself are thinking about it. In your school community, what would you call this year's theme or motto about how you're thinking about AI?
[00:08:15] Patrick Gittisriboongul: Thank you for the question. I would describe this year as really moving from experimentation to more integration. And I think it's because of how quickly the conversation and these platforms have evolved. A few years ago, I think the conversation was mostly about are students gonna cheat, should we block ChatGPT, what are teachers supposed to be doing about this? I think now we're entering this phase of society and even in schools where everyone is experimenting with these platforms. And so people start asking now, how do I write a better prompt? Can AI create a lesson plan? Can I draft an email? Can I summarize a document? And so that experimentation is really important because it helps build that familiarity that many of our teachers and our staff and our community and families have. So I think we're entering that different phase. So now that question is becoming less, what can AI generate for me? And more, what can we do differently because it exists? And so I think that's a much more interesting question. I think for teachers and staff, I think that could really move beyond asking AI to create a worksheet and instead using it to help analyze student work, identify misconceptions, differentiate instruction, think about the next instructional move. I think for administrators and district leaders, I think it really means moving beyond drafting this parent letter and instead helping synthesize attendance, achievement, school improvement and other information to really identify where leadership attention is needed.
[00:09:56] Patrick Gittisriboongul: Where leadership attention is needed. And so at the district level, we're beginning to look at entire workflows. So things like, for me, how do I prepare for board meetings? How do we review student outcomes? How do we develop executive briefs? How do we communicate complex information? As a school district leader, oftentimes the data that we have, the information that we provide can be very complex for our community and for our parents and our students. And so helping communicate that out, how we preserve that institutional knowledge that we have in an organization is very important. And so I think when it comes to that theme, I think we're moving away from AI literacy and more towards AI fluency. And so that literacy is really understanding what AI is; I think fluency is really knowing when to use it, how to use it, and then how to evaluate with it. And so I think that's where our educators, our leaders, our administrators are really increasingly needing to be. And so we're really moving from asking what can AI generate to now what can we do differently because it exists?
[00:10:56] Brian Johnsrud: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Even hearing you talk, the verbs that shifted, like drafting and understanding to synthesizing, preparing, communicating. Gautam, that leads me to a question I have for you. One shift we've seen, especially over the past year, is dramatically greater capabilities for AI to go beyond chat and simple content generation. Now we have things like automations and plugins and agents and use cases that weren't possible last year. How are you thinking about those changes in the technology?
[00:11:31] Gautam Sethi: Yeah, Brian, super excited about this one, right? As a technologist, and even on a personal level, I said I got into this, into the world of education as a technologist helping education improve a system. I was trained as a programmer, undergraduate in programming and computer science. And almost invariably you end up stopped kind of working on that technology as you work through the organization charts. And in the last, I would say six months, the availability of tools like Codex and all the other agentic tools that are available in the market allow anyone with an idea to be able to get back in and at least prototype that idea. I have programmed more in the last six months than I say I would have done in the last 10 years purely because I can go have that meaningful conversation where my idea can be materialized into a working prototype with just that agentic conversation. And these are really powerful tools, right? So as a technologist, I can evaluate the power of these tools. As a user, I can see the value of these tools. And when you combine those two things, the unlocks are just absolutely, there's no limit to it