Building an Inclusive AI Ecosystem for Education With Matthew Winters

Full Transcript

Dr. Emma Zone:
Do you believe that AI has the potential to be a creative partner in the classroom? Well, our next guest certainly does, and he’s helping to make that a reality. In this episode, we look at how K-12 teachers are using artificial intelligence and machine learning for more than just grading at administrative tasks. We’re going to learn how an evolving framework, ongoing professional learning, and a little creativity are helping to reshape teaching and learning.

Announcer:
Welcome to Teach & Learn, a podcast for curious educators brought to you by D2L.
Each week we’ll meet some of the sharpest minds in the K-20 space. Sharpen your pencils, class is about to begin.

Dr. Emma Zone:
I’m joined by a very special guest today, Matthew Winters. So excited to have you on the podcast. You are the first state-level AI education specialist in the US, which is super exciting. I know you’ve had a few more join you, but you get to claim that first and from policy to practice, he’s helping schools and educators really unlock AI’s full potential in the state of Utah and really beyond. He’s also the 2025 recipient of the ASU+GSV Summit Global Award for Education Innovation Impact, and somebody that I have been following now for quite a while. I’m super excited to have you on the podcast. So thanks, Matt, for joining the conversation. And welcome to Teach & Learn.

Matthew Winters:
So great to be here, Emma. Thanks so much for the invite, and excited to talk about the work happening here in Utah.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yeah, awesome. So, before we move into this unique role that you have, I do want you to tell our listeners a bit about your background, in respect to how you got into education and sort of a little bit about what brought you here.

Matthew Winters:
Yeah, absolutely. I have a weird route. First of all, I almost dropped out in high school. I was in my English class when I was a sophomore, and I went, “I don’t know if this is for me anymore.” And I ended up having a great teacher in my second semester who pulled me in and taught me how to be a student again. And so I stayed in school, wanted to be a teacher. Got pulled into being a college professor track, and wanted to specialize in Irish literature. So I actually have a master’s in language and literature to start off with, and I realized I love just teaching. Got my second master’s in education in 2016, and started teaching in a middle school, and did that for seven years.
Was made a educational coach about a week before Covid. And if you ever see my profile picture, it still does not have the gray here because this is my Covid patch, we were able to keep most of our teachers in the classrooms through Covid. Four of us left the building of about 60 teachers, and one of them was me. I moved on to state work, where I worked at Utah Education Network for three years, which is our statewide ISP for education and training, and then moved over to this role in 2024.
So, it’s been quite a ride. I never expected to be working in AI, but it’s one of the things that I’ve been most passionate about in the last decade, as I’ve seen the changes that we’ve had for educational technology and things like that in our educational environment and ecosystem.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yeah, I love that. Yeah, interesting route. But I find that sometimes those detours can teach us a lot. So, excited for you to bring your perspective to the conversation today. I do want to unpack your title and role a bit, because it is unique. It’s not something that certainly we hear about nationwide, or even really across the globe. And so it would be great for us to understand a little bit about, what does that mean AI specialists? What does that look like on the day-to-day? And I’m also curious if you have any insight as to how that role even came to be in the first place.

Matthew Winters:
Absolutely. And you’re not the only group that’s really interested and fascinated by this role. We now have, I think it’s six or seven of us across the country, because other state educational agencies have gone. We need somebody governing this conversation in our state, and collaborating and making things happen. But then also, as of a few days from recording of this episode, I’m having some conversations with some countries in the Middle Eastern area, because they’re interested in hiring people as well in that space.
So my role day-to-day is kind of unique. I’m not legislatively or federally mandated. So I was a role created by the state board, and the visionary leadership of our state superintendency at the time. And also now as well I spent a lot of time talking to our state superintendent. The focal point of the job is really three different areas that are pretty large. So the first one is working with in policy with our stakeholders, so legislators, higher education, our K-12 folks, and then non-profit for-profit groups, to really try and figure out what are the best approaches to policy and governing that conversation and working through it.
The second area is I work with our local educational agencies, so our districts and charter schools, to do a variety of things to help them develop policies in schools or districts, or even in the classroom, providing ongoing professional development, and just basically supporting them in any way that I can that they ask for.
And then the third area is I’m internal professional development for the agency here. So, if somebody wants to up their skills around AI or EdTech generally, I’m here to help support them at USBE. But then also I kind of say I’m the Robin to their Batman for presentations and things like that, so that they can have some support if they need to go out and talk to the communities.
The role came to be because of that visionary leadership. About two years ago I was working at Utah Education Network, and we saw as soon as ChatGPT hit November of 2022, there was a group of us that went, “We need to start getting ahead of this conversation, because it’s going to go really, really quickly.” And so we were one of the first groups, there was four of us that developed a free statewide professional development course through Canvas on AI, and kind of the goals of what is good AI implementation that we could find at that time, that’s gone on to now be split into I believe two or three different courses that still support teachers in PD.
At the same time, at Utah State Board of Education, the superintendency and a large group of team members got together and formed a committee called the Sky Committee. And they got about six months in and were building a framework and went, “This is a lot of work. We need somebody to take the workload on.” And so they put out the call in April of 2024, and I was hired in May and started in June. So, I’m really thankful for the visionary leadership and the work that Superintendent Dickson who left office in July, and now Superintendent Hart, but then everyone else who’s on the Sky Committee that supports the work that I do, and really pushes it forward, because it’s paying dividends.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting when you talked about understanding the pace at which these conversations, this work has to move in order to stay ahead, keep up, depending on the way you look at it, and just needing a nexus to be able to say, “We can’t continually waste time having to parrot out this message to all of these different stakeholders.” So you have this really interesting advantage of being able to help bring that work to life, and probably cut down on some of the back and forth and the time. So I think that’s super interesting.
And you get to bring that policy, if there’s policy happening in one place, and we’ll talk about policy here in a minute, how nice to be able to understand the underpinnings of that when you’re working with teachers in the classroom, or when you’re thinking about what this means for professional learning, or even the internal professional development. I’m sure it all informs itself, and they’re all related.

Matthew Winters:
Yeah. I often describe what’s hitting us as a wave. Dr. Zach Boyd, who’s over the office of AI policy in the state of Utah, where we talk about AI just as this giant wave that hit all of us at once. And so we really have to think through the amount of stuff that’s hitting us on a daily basis. I often tell people, I downplay my expertise in AI, because I’m not a builder, I’m not a data scientist. I’m really good at organizing people and creating conduits for communication, and then negotiation around that. And I think that’s really what a lot of people need right now is, it’s not so much about let’s build new systems, or even the new technologies, it’s about connecting the people who are building those systems to the boots on the ground teachers and the administrators, and then also the legislators who are making all the rules around those to help support everyone that’s going forward.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yeah, it makes total sense. And that pathway and that continuation of that pathway versus the silos is critical, right? The work won’t get done. So I do want to talk a little bit about the policy pieces and the framework in particular. I know we’ve had previous conversations around the framework that you and your team have worked on. Can you tell us a little bit about it? We hear a lot about frameworks in AI, EdTech, you name it. So, what has that been like? And tell us a bit about how you approach that work.

Matthew Winters:
Yeah, absolutely. So, the framework that we have here in Utah, we were somewhere in the 10s to 15, I can’t remember which state number we were that put out a framework. But we were pretty low in the rollout process. That work really started before I was even hired. And so we had a wonderful leader here who has since retired named Patty Norman. She was our deputy superintendent of public instruction. And Patty really led the discussion around this, and asked so many people in our organization to really think through what this technology was doing to our systems, not just in terms of classrooms, but what is it doing to our infrastructure in IT, how’s it going to change professional development, teaching and learning, special education, all sorts of things, and really pushing the conversation about, “Let’s not go so far out in front that we are getting into conjecture, but let’s really be purposeful about how we create the document.”
So, our framework has really put around a couple of big things, versus any laws and codes that are existing from the federal government, also the local state governments, and then also internal policies to USBE, that help support best practices, and are supporting the conversations around AI. So things like data privacy, cyber security, all kind of weave into this.
The second area is really some background information around what is AI, how is it changing our society, changing our education system. And then there’s a list of AI dos, AI don’ts, some things that are really meant to be a thought process. And one of the big things that we come back to again and again that’s in the policy, or it’s not in the policy, in the framework, is keeping a human in the system, or human in human out. We want to make sure that when teachers are using and students are using AI, there is someone there monitoring the work that the AI is producing, and that it doesn’t just become the students are creating work using AI, the teachers are commenting using AI, and so the AI is the one that’s learning.
And so that’s a big chunk of our framework. And it’s a meant to be a living document as we go forward. So, right now I’m working on a version too, I’ve been working on it for the last couple of months. There’s a lot of shifts in the conversation around AI, but I want to make sure that we get good information, and the best information that will help support our LEAs here in the state of Utah.
So right now, a couple of things we’re adding are things like glossary of terms, because that was absent in the first draft. Just basic terms like, what is a walled garden, what’s an Agentive AI, those sorts of things. And then looking forward to some of the things that are coming down the pipeline to prepare our systems because it’s coming fast. Things like agentive, things like AGI and ASI, how does that play in, and what are some possibilities there.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yeah, that makes total sense. And I think it has to be a living document in this world, for sure. Not just for the pace, but just you’re having different people seeing the document and the framework as different levels of readiness also. So I appreciate that idea of thinking through everything from a glossary, where we can’t make assumptions about what people do or don’t know, or even how that relates to their role. Do you think, as you’ve been working then within the school setting, are you finding that the framework has been a good entry point? How does that work when you’re working with teachers, for example, or instructional coaches, students? Is it something you reference, or is it just you’re trying to weave those pieces into those types of engagements?

Matthew Winters:
Absolutely. So, we have lots of touch points with our community. I’m very big on listening and finding out what the community needs, but then also trying to go out and talk more to them. And so we have touch points with our teachers. We just finished, well, didn’t finish, we’re working on completing a professional development series that brought in 5,500 educators roughly from the state of Utah, which is about 20% of our teaching population in the state. We were hoping for 1500. That went way off much higher. We just finished a series of leadership summits for our administrators; we’re working on some professional development for teachers; and we’re trying to work with students as well. And so whenever we have these touch points, a lot of the framework gets woven into that process.
Things like, again, keeping a human in the system, data privacy has been a massive concern as well and making sure that, if students and teachers are using tools, that they are approved tools and under a data privacy agreement in their districts. And that’s something that we really reinforce quite frequently through this. But we’ve also been reinforcing the importance of creativity and critical thinking, as we move through these systems as well.
One of the big structural points that we’re excited about right now is starting to look at how AI can be effectively used in work with students with disabilities, or multilingual learners, and trying to see and lead out with not just our local educator communities, but with our larger corporate partners and things like that across the state. And so that’s a big part of, it’s just weaving in the framework as we do those things. But then on top of that, in the state of Utah, like many states, we have local control. And so we have encouraged many of our districts and charter schools to read the framework, and then make their own that is effective for their local community. And at this point, we have somewhere between 50 and 70% of our districts have some sort of work in play, and many of our charter schools are working on it as well, because they can develop those policies more effectively for the local constituency.
And so that’s part of what the leadership summit was last week, was to encourage some of our LEAs to really work that through. We’re doing some for charter school specific in a couple of weeks as well, and it’s really to just support everyone, so that we can get the best policies in place for our students going into the future.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Well, and we’re seeing a lot of repetition in this work, so it’s helpful to have some level of template to be able to go off of, and maybe broaden the view of different leadership teams, especially as they’re thinking about their communities and their populations, but also bringing to light things they might not be thinking about, because there’s certain things we might be focused on or not.
We talked about the living document. And I know in previous conversations, and I’ve heard you bring this up before, but I’ve heard you talk about the portrait. And we all know Portrait of a Graduate if we’re in the K-12 space and beyond. But you have a bit of a twist on that when you talk about the portrait of an AI graduate, right? Is that what you call it? And I’d love for you to speak to that a bit, because I think you’re working on iterations as well, not just of the K-12 graduate, but also college, et cetera. So, I think our audience would be interested in that, because that’s really compelling work.

Matthew Winters:
Yeah. So about six months ago, and this was the end of April, beginning of May, we put together a team that looked at portrait of a graduate. We were a big portrait graduate state. There’s many of us across the country and then around the globe. And if you’re not familiar, portrait graduate is the knowledge skills and dispositions we would like to encourage in a system for when a student graduates from high school. And it’s a really powerful project. It was something that I did while I was in my classroom, and encouraged my other fellow teachers to look at it. So when I moved over to the state board, I knew that that’s as our former Superintendent Dickson also always put it, but then Superintendent Hart now, it’s our guiding star. We want to have all of our students graduate with these knowledge skills and dispositions.
So, when we convened this team together in April, late April, early May, we wanted to build a portrait project around artificial intelligence. And so it’s, again, knowledge skills and dispositions. And we wanted to do students and teachers, because, again, it hit all of us equally at once.
And so there’s a lot of similarities between the portrait because the skill sets right now are very similar. There are differences in terms of roles and needs there, but it includes things like, things that we want our students to generally learn, creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, but then also things like prompt writing, and prompt development. That’s so important to understand the changing nature of how to work with an AI, and actually ask it the correct questions, but then also things like data privacy, and where is your data going. And so those portraits we’re waiting on one last thing to publish them. We’re hoping to have them out very soon. I am working on that actually later today as of this recording. But on a side note on that, I shared this work with our university partners, particularly at the University of Utah. And they have an organization there called the Responsible AI Initiative, ran by Dr. Penny Atkins and Dr. Manish Parashar. And shared this information with them and they went, “That’s incredible. What would this look like for business?”
And so we ended up convening a group at the end of July that was an intersectional group of business leaders, professors, entrepreneurs, students at the college level, and then myself, who no business background. They asked me to come in and lead the room, and it was a really incredible experience. In about eight hours, we cobbled together a first draft of a portrait of an AI ready company, and a portrait of an AI ready employee. And those particular documents are currently going through the university system at University of Utah to be improved and then make them publishable.
The hope is that, eventually, and this is a project probably for November, is to do a portrait of AI-ready professor, and an AI-ready college student as well, so that we can have this kind of ecosystem set of documents that all support and look at each other and go, “This is what we want for our society around artificial intelligence in the state of Utah.” And so it’s aspirational documents, but then it gives us a roadmap.
There’s been some follow-up conversations in the last couple of weeks about some further work about how do we work with startups, how do we work with employing this in a school system, those sorts of things. And so those are things that we’re hoping to work on over the next six months, and bring more to the public eye when they’re ready.

Dr. Emma Zone:
See, I love that, because I think there’s just this natural call to action around how we are creating articulation from the K-12 to post-secondary workforce experience and beyond, and whatever that might look like. I mean, geez, I feel like as someone who’s been in a lot of roles both in K-12 and in higher ed, we’ve had conversations about skills and skills articulation across curricular areas forever, right? And I’m still not totally convinced that we’re doing that great of a job at that articulation. So, it’s sort of interesting that this conversation around these different portraits could be also replicated across some of those other areas for a need that we know exists, those conversations across these different sectors, the kind of learner experience, so to speak, and then thinking through those different roles. I think that’s incredibly powerful.

Matthew Winters:
Yeah, that’s something that we’ve been thinking about quite heavily here, because again, you don’t have an AI-ready future, or an AI-prepared future. If you don’t have a pipeline from K-12 to higher ed to work for AI engineers, for prompt engineers, for the next generation of people who are able to use AI to do really creative processes. And so you have to start with looking at it as a full ecosystem.
And one of the things I talk about quite frequently here in Utah is the increasing artifacting we’re seeing from business, being employed into K-12 systems. Things like cybersecurity. You have to have a cybersecurity system now, because we rely so heavily on business-related products and K-12 systems.
And so if you start looking at the whole world as a larger ecosystem in terms of AI, you start to see some really interesting things, and then you just have to start, in my case, and I would say anybody who’s in systems work, doing outreach to the people who would govern those processes, and share with them the work that you would like to see happen, and then you’re willing to build with them. A lot of times they’re also looking for, at least it’s been my experience here in Utah, maybe we have a more in-depth collaborative culture, but it’s been really exciting to see them talk to me, and have the same kind of questions that I’m having around AI and workforce development or AI in higher ed, and then just being able to collaborate through that process.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Right. Well, the work doesn’t happen in a vacuum, because the experience for the learner, the employer, the employee, the student, and those roles, even as an individual shift over time, once you could be a student and a teacher. So, I think that’s also what’s really noteworthy. And I think that collaboration, having that happen within the state is critical, but I know you’re involved in the national conversation as well.
I want to shift to the professional learning side a bit, because I mean, there’s certainly no shortage of opportunities to learn about AI depending on what that looks like and what that might mean. But I’m curious what you think we’re getting right about professional learning approaches and what are we getting wrong, because I know that there’s a lot of experimentation. We want to fail fast when it comes to this, we want to provide ongoing support, it can’t be one and done. So curious what you’ve learned as you’ve introduced these professional learning programs to your communities.

Matthew Winters:
Yeah. First I’ll say this about professional development. My personal hero, Ken Robinson, once said that, “Professional development should not be looked at as a cost, it should be looked at as an investment.” And I think that’s no more true today than it was 20 years ago. It’s been true forever with teaching. And it’s true for companies as well. The more you pay into your employees and helping them develop the skills that they, A, need for their job, but then also B, that they’d like to learn to have self-efficacy in their position, then the more likely they are to have job satisfaction and excitement. We actually see less movement sometimes because of that, because people are excited to stay where they’re at.
So, I always think about professional development as it’s a investment in our future. With artificial intelligence, you said it right off the bat, it can’t be a one and done thing. I was just preparing an agenda for an internal meeting today about some updates to AI systems, and I haven’t looked at some of those updates for about a month. And my list is about a page and a half long. There’s so much happening that we have to come back again and again and again, and help teachers to understand, and administrators, and our parents, and our students to understand what’s the mechanisms here that can help you do new things, and new exciting things that you may have wanted to do in your classroom but never been able to do before.
The other thing I’ll say is I think it’s really important, at least for me, and I think it’s also important for a lot of people in these systems roles, is to remember that there needs to be a local context to these conversations as well. It’s great to have people come in from a larger national positioning, and it’s great to have speakers and things like that, but unless you have the structure in-house to monitor, to provide, and then to follow up with professional development, to make sure that things are moving forward, you’re going to be up a creek with a paddle. So you need to make sure that there is a system in place.
So I often look, I got a piece of advice from somebody I really respect about a year ago that said, “We need to create the next generation of people like you.” And I went, “That’s great.” So I’ve been looking in our community, we hired, just to give you kind of a behind the curtain, the professional development that drew in 5,500ish teachers, we were able to hire a part-time director for that, her name’s Emma Moss, she’s from a local district here in Canyon School District, and then six other trainers from across the state for the summer. Those trainers have been either teachers or coaches that I’ve been seeing at events. There’s many people who applied, and it was a really hard decision and picked the ones, but it just happened to be a bunch of people that I’ve seen things, and they’ve been excited about, not just AI, but the work happening in Utah.
And so I think it’s important to look to local communities and find those people that are excited about what you’re doing, that are experts in what they’re working on, know the local community, and you can help bolster and give them a microphone. One of my friends in the national scene, he always says, “Don’t be the speaker, be the microphone.” And I’ve taken that one to heart, I try to say, “Thanks, Matt. I’m going to throw this over to this person.”

Dr. Emma Zone:
And it’s funny, because what we know about professional learning and PD experiences in general, especially when it comes to teachers and educators, whether you’re talking K-12 or higher ed, changing their practices, you can put every expert or piece of research in front of them, but they are much more likely to make a decision or a change to their teaching practice based on something they’ve heard from a colleague. And I think that’s probably true for most of us in most industries. So there is certainly power around sustainability of a PL culture that is deeply rooted in those who are a part of that community.

Matthew Winters:
And then investment’s a two-way street too, off of that. The more localized you can have that, and somebody’s in their room with them on a weekly basis, maybe even a daily basis, that’s an investment right there, they can really provide dividends down the line. And I’ve seen that in action, not just in my old school, but across schools in the state of Utah. We have a very robust coaching culture and it’s been really valuable to see.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yeah, that’s great. I mean, it’s something we talk a lot about, just being in my role at D2L as we think about how we can also create communities of practice using technology to help have a local piece and that also even statewide connecting teachers from across the state. We’re across the system in some cases, where they can’t necessarily get together face-to-face all the time. I do want to shift to this notion of the creative application. You would talk about the policy piece, we know there’s the privacy side of things. We know that there’s administrative efficiencies that happen both from a teacher’s perspective and certainly from an administrator’s perspective as well.
But I think part of the work that you’re doing is really trying to shift the mindset beyond just, here’s an efficiency, here’s a quick way to solve something or do something, and let’s start thinking about how this can be a tool for moving creative approaches forward, and how AI can be a collaborative partner. And I think that sounds great, but if I were a teacher, I think about when I was a high school English teacher, I’d be like, “Well, what the heck does that mean, Matt? Maybe that’s a little creepy, I don’t know.” So what is AI as a collaborative partner? What does that look like? And are there any anecdotal examples that you might be able to share from the work you’ve done?

Matthew Winters:
Absolutely. Just to start off this summer I helped with those coaching or going out to some of those sessions as well. And one of my favorite, I had a series where I had to go to some sites in rural Utah. There’s one that was basically, you throw a rock and you’re in Arizona. And I wanted to show the power of AI and the creativity factor there. And so I started off my presentation and said, “I have a real big worry about this generation. I think too few of them are experiencing dying of dysentery on the Oregon Trail.” And then I showed them in real time how to code an Oregon trail type game in a couple of different tools that was deployable with students immediately.
And so in real time, it took maybe 10 minutes to show teachers that. But the effect on them was amazing. We often see in this training that we’ve been doing, I’ve noticed a trend, and I’d love to figure out how to document it and things like that. It’s a little bit hard to do, but a lot of teachers come to us in the frame of mind of fear, “AI is going to take my job,” “My students are going to use it to plagiarize.” And those are fairly straightforward conversations to have that can be easily discussed, but then they move into productivity. And that’s where a lot of professional development sits is, like you said, it can help me write an email, it can help me write a lesson plan, but if it stays there, then it kind of dies, mostly because that is a singular perspective, “How can it help me?”
And we want this technology to be outward facing, especially in the classroom. And so with a little bit of pushing, a lot of teachers are able to move into creativity, and being able to say things or do things in their classrooms that they’ve never been able to do before. And then naturally, as we’ve seen teachers really get into that creative strand, they start to go, “Ooh, how can this be accessible for all of my students in my classroom?” So they move into accessibility. It’s been really kind of cool to see that.
So a couple of examples of this. One of our teachers who did an intensive training with us back in, I believe it was in February or January, he did a two-day with us. And at the end of it he was like, “My classroom is mostly students with disabilities. I work with the students that have trouble in other classes, and I really want to leverage AI, and I want them to have a bot that they can talk to.” And so I walked him through the constitutionalized process, and he started writing a bot for all of the students to use to help with their social studies in different classes that then focused on disabilities. And about a week into that process, he called me and he was like, “This is so hard. I don’t know how to write this. I can’t get the AI to do it right with me,” blah, blah, blah, blah. And it dawned on me that he didn’t know and understand that he could write a bot, multiple bots, not just one bot.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Oh, right. Got it.

Matthew Winters:
So he ended up writing a bot for every student keyed into their disability, and the content area that they were struggling with. He said it took him about a day. He only has, I think he said like five to seven students per class period. But then the turnaround with him was incredible. He had nonverbal students and he is like, “I was able to ‘hear’ them for the first time, because I could read their writing.”
And that’s getting us into from right out of productivity, into creativity, and then directly into accessibility. And so I need to follow up with him. It’s been a few months, and see how he’s been doing. But it’s an incredible move.
The other one I always go to is we had have a teacher in the Provo area at a charter school who did a similar training, and he’s a social studies teacher in secondary. And the first thing he asked the students to do was, “I want you to go home. We’re going to learn about the Vietnam War in the next unit. Choose your favorite chatbot. Ask any question you want for 20 minutes about the Vietnam War. Copy the transcript, turned it into me. That’s it.” And he said the students kind of rebelled. They were like, “This feels like cheating.” I was like, “It’s not cheating. I’m asking you to do it.”

Dr. Emma Zone:
Right. This is the assignment.

Matthew Winters:
Yeah. As some people point out, there’s some data privacy concerns with that. But really, it’s just looking at what questions and knowledge activation.
The next day he came back with a notebook LM, notebook that he had put only sources from the Vietnamese side into, and had the students ask questions of that chat in class the next day. He had the same notebook open, but had removed all the Vietnamese sources, and only plugged in American sources from American’s point of view. And had the students go through some of the same questions and watched as the information was different. And so he had this really great set of standards that he was working off of, and he hit all of them. And so those are just a couple of the things that we’re starting to see from educators. Part of that program that we were running, the teachers who finish, which right now we have about 500 of them that have finished, will be paid out for a lesson plan that either uses AI with students or teaches about AI with students. All those lesson plans will be available on an OER Commons in the next few months for teachers worldwide. We’re excited to see them.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Oh, wow. Yeah. So, you heard it here, listeners. Even if you’re not Utah-based, this is something anybody can access.

Matthew Winters:
Yep.

Dr. Emma Zone:
That’s cool. That’s really cool. Well, and as you’re talking, I’m thinking about the other topic that is sort of in my mind lately, which is all about assessment and how we’re rethinking strategies related to evidence-based instruction, but also how we’re using assessment data. This has long been something I’m passionate about, but understand that it’s hard to get, as a faculty member myself and teachers that I know, it can be difficult to support that data-driven instruction in the classroom. But as you’re talking about these different types of assessment, I think it’s shining a light on the creativity around that. In some ways, I think that that’s also bringing fear for folks who have done it a certain way for a very long time.
Do you see potential for AI in those scenarios like, number one, being able to rethink assessment, which I’m assuming is yes, because you’ve just described it, but also how it might help teachers use data more effectively to actually change or pivot some of their teaching practice?

Matthew Winters:
I think there’s a lot of space for this place, or for data use to grow with AI. I think the biggest worry here is to do it right. As in any country, we have data privacy laws for students. In the US, it’s FERPA and COPPA. In Utah, we have more laws on top of that that are localized, that are really important and need to be very deeply respected. But in order to get to a place where we understand how AI can affect assessment and achievement, and whether or not that information or those test scores are actually system-wide, or if they’re only localized to a classroom, you really have to have systems that enable researchers.
As we know right now, as of recording, this conversation is only about two years and eight months old. And that’s not a lot of time for research cycles to do mass studies on these. And so that’s something that we as systems workers, it’s something I paid deep attention to. We have a collaborative here in the state of Utah that is our higher end institutions, or workforce folks, our Utah systems of higher ed, our K-12 team members, and then also some for-profit and non-profits.
Then we also have groups from Stanford and MIT, and University of Chicago on board as well. And basically what we’re trying to do is figure out how to leverage AI and AI-adjacent tool sets to help speed up that research process, not just for education, but across governance. Right now we’re looking at some things with synthetic data, and some of the work that may be interesting in that area. But we really have to, if we want to get to a place where teachers can more effectively use data, we have to understand how AI actually affects student achievement and student growth. And I think it’s going to take another couple of years before we get there.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Yeah, for sure. Well, there’s a theme, right? You’re talking about, again, this is not a problem to be solved just within one system, there has to be that cross-sector, cross-functional approach if we want to do it right. So appreciate that, for sure.
We are getting to the end of our time. So before we sign off, I always like to ask our guests for any words of wisdom for our listeners, or a message that you want to impart to those listening who might be interested in some of the topics that we covered today.

Matthew Winters:
Yeah. I’ve been thinking about this one for the whole conversation. I think the biggest thing for me is listen more than you talk. There’s so much going on with this conversation, but then in education in general, and you’ve got a lot of competing interests. And so if you sit and listen to people and try to understand their perspectives, you’re going to be in a much better positioning, than if you spend most of the time chatting, or talking. And so that’s been something that I really try to do here in my work, is listen more than I talk.
The other thing that I would say is words of wisdom is always look to your local community. Ask them questions, see what they need, what are the worries that they’re having, and try and do your best to respond to those, because I think that’s going to pay a lot of dividends down the line as well.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Right. Love that. Good advice. Whether you’re talking about AI or not, right?

Matthew Winters:
Yep.

Dr. Emma Zone:
So thanks. Thank you, Matthew, so much. This was such a great conversation. To learn more about Matt and what he and Utah are up to, you can check out schools.utah.gov. And thanks again so much for being here and being a part of the conversation, Matt. We really appreciate it.
Matthew Winters:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Emma.

Dr. Emma Zone:
Of course. And thank you to our dedicated listeners and curious educators everywhere. Remember to follow us on social media. You can find us on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Facebook, @D2L. And of course, subscribe to the D2L YouTube channel. You can also sign up for the teaching and Learning studio email list for the latest updates on new episodes and master classes. And if you like what you heard, remember to rate, review, and share this episode. And please, remember to subscribe so you never miss what we’ve got in store.

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Resources Discussed in the Episode

• Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation
• Utah State Board of Education, AI Overview
• Artificial Intelligence Framework for Utah P-12 Education: Guidance on the Use of AI in Our Schools
• ASU+GSV 2025: Utah Shares Plan for Statewide AI Education