What can we learn from real classrooms where teachers are piloting AI — not in theory, but in practice?

In this episode, Chelsea Waite, Research Principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, and Caitrin Wright, CEO of Silicon Schools Fund, share findings from their joint study of a cohort of educators who designed and tested AI use cases in their schools. What emerged challenges common assumptions about AI in education. Teachers used AI to strengthen human relationships, not replace them, and the most promising pilots weren't about saving time but about expanding capacity to reach students who needed the most support.

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Key Insights:

• Why time savings was a means to an end, not the goal, and what educators were really solving for
• How one teacher used an AI chatbot to coach reluctant writers into producing 300-word responses independently
• Where AI fell short, including reliability thresholds and unexpected compute costs
• What made some pilots sustainable while others fizzled out
• Why building your own AI tool, even an imperfect one, makes you a sharper, more informed user of the technology

Whether you're exploring AI in your school or trying to figure out what responsible experimentation looks like, this conversation offers a grounded, honest look at what's working, what isn't, and what it takes to support educators through the messy middle.

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