From Zero to Infinity: AI Transparency in the Classroom

0:00You're tuning in to this week's episode of Deep Learning Dialogues. The podcast for education and artificial intelligence collide. Wear your hosts, Whitney McKinley and Katrina Gowett. Join us as we navigate the possibilities of generative AI together. Before we begin today's conversation, we would like to pause and acknowledge that we gather and record on the traditional territories cared for by the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabi, and Chinatown peoples. Our voices travel across lands and digital networks that connect territories of many indigenous nations throughout Turtle Island. We recognize the enduring presence, deep traditional knowledge, laws, and philosophies of the indigenous people with whom we share these lands today. As podcasters and educators, we commit to continually educating ourselves about indigenous histories, current realities, and futures. So today, we are talking about an exciting initiative of Waterloo Catholic aimed at academic integrity and transparency in classrooms.

1:02Specifically, we're talking about the question that our teachers have been asking about generative AI since it's landed on the scene, can I use AI? And more importantly, what does that even mean for students and my assessments? And what I love about how we're approaching this today is that we're not talking about policy as a firewall or as a way of just simply blocking everything. We're talking about a practical tools that teachers can actually use that's already hanging on the walls in all of our classrooms across the school board from grade 6 to grade 12. And that poster is the zero to infinity poster. Our educators should be pretty familiar with it now, but we're going to tell all of you the whole story behind it, a little bit peek behind the screen. Is that what we say Whitney? I don't know. In the curtain. The Wizard of Oz? Yes. Okay. I was thinking more of a digital screen, I guess. Okay. So we're going to bring you back all the way to the November PA day that happened this

2:05past fall, as well as a conversation with another school board, students at St. Benedict's School, and all of the feedback that shaped what you will see on that wall and what will attach in the show notes here. Okay. So let's get started really quickly with the inception, or I guess the beginning of all of this works. Waterloo Catholic has guidelines. We wrote our guidelines. And within our guidelines, we provided a reference to work from another educator who you could find on our podcast name is Vera Cubero, and that assessment scale lived in our guidelines. Didn't do a whole lot, but it lived there. And so it was a reference for some of our educators to be able to go to or our families to see. And then our guidelines kind of took a lot of different iterations and lots of fun and exciting things happened with AI. And then come, we'll fast forward to our September 2025 finding out about our ministry PA days, and knowing that one of our PA days was going to be focused on artificial intelligence.

3:11And so our board chose the November PA day for that. So the November PA day was for elementary and secondary, and in the morning, we spent it on AI. The ministry had directed, it had specific items that they were looking for us to cover. So we looked at those items and developed a morning that would bring our educators back to our AI guidelines to review those pieces, but then also facilitate conversations and explore resources that they could use as well. In secondary, we framed it as departments working together. And they did something called a Moscow activity. And that's where they were able to kind of step back and look at the must have, the should have, the could have, and the won't have. And when it came to AI implementation, there are classrooms. What did they want at the end of a 90 day period? What were they looking to develop together? So this was something that departments have been asking.

4:13They really want to work together on issues like this on our PA days. So we were excited that they could have these conversations. At the end of that PA day, Whitney and I, we gathered all of the chart papers that the departments had sticky notes all over. We also had collected feedback and we requested department heads to send in, what is their plan? What's their 90 day plan? And so we looked at all of that data and information, including from our elementary teachers, their feedback to see what are the trends, what are the themes that we really need to look to. So looking at all this data, we could really see that academic integrity and lesson designed were core needs within our school board. And as well, educators wanted time to sit with it. They wanted time to be able to go through resources or find out what they didn't know or confirm what they already knew about AI. And so that PD really helped us to see as a system, where do we need to go and what support

5:17do we need to give? Now following that PA day, we did have some PD that we ran for secondary teachers. We had over two separate days, AI literacy PD that took place. And part of those days were really opportunities for our educators to voice their ideas and share how they were implementing and teaching AI literacy within their own classrooms. So from these conversations, we really spoke at length, surprise, surprise, about academic integrity and we pointed them to our guidelines that included that assessment scale that we had talked about. And this assessment scale was something that we had been given permission from Vera Cabero from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. This was something that they had been using. And so we asked for that permission to include in our guidelines. And it was there in our guidelines. Teachers were really looking for something concrete as well as our guidelines to really inform that and it helped them to address that academic integrity piece. And so as with most conversations with AI, there came up the question of AI detectors.

6:21So we really had to talk about the fact that at Waterloo Catholic at this time in particular, we won't be using detectors. We know that those tools produce false positive, original student work as being AI created when it really is not. We know that they have bias in there, including that they disproportionately flag multilingual learners. And they create really an adversarial culture that erodes teacher and student trust. So we're sitting with this issue and having these conversations back and forth and it's the end of November and we really wanted to come up with something or have a way that we could really help our system. And then it was great because right at the end of November, we ended up sitting or meeting with school boards from Southwestern Ontario, leaders from those boards where we got to sit down and share what's going on in our school boards so that we could maybe adopt some of those ideas. And I ended up at a group with someone from Niagara District, I think Sam.

7:25And they were talking about that they had printed off the posters from Veracubero and put it in all of their secondary classrooms. And that we thought, wow, that is a great idea, a good transparency tool. Maybe that's something we could think about doing here at Waterloo Catholic. And so the zero to infinity framing that you see on our poster will put it in the show notes. But if you're a teacher at Waterloo Catholic, you can probably just look over to the wall and see it there. But that is an adaption of what Veracubero created. And if you look at the bottom of the poster, you're going to see credit to her as well as the original where the original work came from. So she had adapted her graphic from the research of Perkins, Ferz, Roe and McVaugh. And so there's a lineage there. It is from peer-reviewed research and then it's that adaption and we remixed it into something

8:28that fits our Catholic school context and our values. And so we were really excited about that because we think it fits. If it's our schools, even more specifically, so we're proud of that. Yeah. And so before that poster really came into play in December and January, we did take a lot of time to really look through the research, read the research, pull it apart, ask some questions of our colleagues, of other educators within the classroom who are really living that work. And look at the assessment scale that has been coming out of all of that research. And seeing that it is genuinely rigorous. Put links to all of the research that we have been following. But what you're going to notice from the original is that the framework has been translated into 30 languages. It's adopted in hundreds of institutions around the world and has been refined based on real feedback from educators across five continents from K to 12 all the way through higher education.

9:30It's peer-reviewed evidence-based and thinking about how to approach AI in assessment in a way that's actually defensible and practical. So the AI assessment scale started as a response to what was happening in Australia and higher education in early 2023. So universities were reverting, dependent paper exams, something that we're familiar with and K to 12 all across the world is familiar with. Educators were panicking. And the research recognized that there had to be a better way, something more sustainable than just banning AI or pretending that students weren't going to use it. And the core insight that the question was really asking wasn't about AI at all. And we're finding the same thing in our classrooms every single day. The question's about assessment validity. What we're actually trying to measure and does our assessment design actually measure the thing that we're trying to assess? So one of the arguments in the research is that it really landed hard in that validity

10:31isn't necessarily just about catching cheating. It's about the creation of the assessment itself. And does AI undermine what you were trying to measure or does it assist what you were trying to measure? And where does it sit if a student uses AI or doesn't use AI? Yeah, and it's really the AI AS is it's really clear. It connects directly to our own stance here at Warloo Catholic that AI detection tools are definitely not the answer, like we had said before. And the research is emphatic. These tools are unreliable. They produce all of the false positives that we've regularly discussed with educators as well as here on the podcast head back to some podcast episodes with Mark daily because he gives some really good context there. But we really want to focus that the relationship between the teacher and the student is so important. And so that brings us back to our guiding principle of formation over automation.

11:35And so this zero to infinity or the AI AS, it's built on that similar philosophy. And it frames AI as a tool that can be part of learning depending on the context, depending on what you're trying to teach. It's not good or bad, it's contextual. And so what I appreciate about this is, it's not a hierarchy. It's not level five is better than level one, like when we look at a rubric often we go there immediately. But that's not how it is. This is a scale. And so it serves different learning outcomes. So we really tried to reflect this visually on the poster. So that's why it's more of a scale horizontal than a vertical up and down. And the zones are presented as options, not a progression. So there's no arrow from one to the next. And I think also the level one, the no AI assessment might be the right choice for a particular learning outcome, a time supervised in class writing task that is going to really give

12:39the educator a student's genuine voice, get a sense for that. It has so much validity that is so important. So we can be really intentional about it. But there's also something really important the research says about no AI designation. And that's that you can't just label a take home essay as no AI and hope for the best. If you can't actually enforce the absence of AI, that label is so meaningless and students know it too. So research really calls that security theater and I love that phrase so much. It's like you're performing an academic integrity without actually achieving it. And so that's even worse than being transparent because it creates this culture of performative compliance. And that's not what we want. What does legitimate no AI assessment look like in class? I don't know. What do you think, Whitney? There's so many possible ways that we can have no AI assessment. And I think going back to potentially that human, that human focus.

13:42So something that's happening in class, something that's supervised by an educator, something that maybe doesn't need a device, an oral presentation. And I know that can be really difficult for students. Sometimes we have that anxiety about having oral presentations. But it can just be a discussion. We think about what the real world looks like when we are really excited about learning something, we can have discussions about that. So there are a lot of options. They just require that the conditions actually support the claim. And then your sequence of those alongside other assessments at higher zones. So you're building a picture of the whole learning over time rather than relying on high stakes moments. And I think that helps with those discussions and those things that maybe our students might have a little bit more anxiety over because it's showing a holistic view of our students as opposed to, hey, this is the assignment we're doing and the assignment is an oral presentation and this is worth a massive amount of your grade.

14:45Instead we can spend all of the time over a semester or over a term to really think about what it means to be a student and what is the learning path of our students. And where do they set when it comes to our curriculum expectations? So there's lots to be had there, but really all of this came out of all of the time that we spent sitting with this research and talking about it and just almost being obsessed with it really because we were, we were really seeing there's this great need, but what do we do and where do we go? So we started drafting our own version of the poster and knowing full well that we needed the boots on the ground view who was going to be using the poster and we wanted to know what they had to say. So we send it back to our secondary educators who we worked with over those two days, the PD that we ran, the sessions we ran at the end of November and we really worked to get feedback. So we got amazing feedback from those teachers and a few of those teachers shared it with

15:47their students for feedback, which we love that student voice piece. I'm not sure. I'm sure most of our audience has gone and they've looked at the Waterloo Catholic multi-year strategic plan that just came out a couple weeks ago. It's pretty exciting, but for a board who really thinks about student voice and prioritizes student voice, getting that student voice and the feedback on something that we hope that they would be using often was really, really important to us. And so after dozens of iterations, we were talking today about the progression that it went from from zero to infinity, but really the progression that the poster went, there were so many it are based on that feedback and most of it based on the feedback that we got from students. And now we have this amazing poster that is in all of our grade six to 12 classes across the school board. Yeah. And I'm giving feedback about the icons, the design, how much text was there, the clarity around vocabulary, all of those things were so important to us.

16:47And even if I was at a school, I had it in my backpack. I would pull it out and I would show it to teachers and say, what do you think about this? And I sat down with a speckhead teacher and said, do you think your students, they would identify with this? And so that makes us really confident that this poster can have a life in classrooms, which is super important. In the next episodes, we're publishing to a double episode today, but you'll hear directly from one of those teachers and her students about what this process was like on their end, because they really were, yeah, super helpful. What I love though, that I do want to point out, because I think it's just such a fantastic activity that any educator could do very quickly. So one of the things that Rosie did, and you're going to hear from Rosie in the next episode, but she pulled it at the poster out and said when we were modifying and said to her students, we're working on an assignment right now, what level is the assignment that we're working

17:49on? Because she wanted to know, is it clear enough? Are my expectations clear enough, but then does the poster align with what the expectations are? And the whole class unanimously said, yeah, it's a three. Clearly, it's a three. And I think that that's so interesting too, to have that piece of student voice and say, if you're doing an assignment instead of saying, I'm going to preemptively, I'm going to label this assignment as, it might even be worth presenting the assignment and saying to your class, OK, based on the AI assessment scale, and based on what the assignment was that you just received, where do you see this assignment? And having that training conversation, I thought that was really cool. Yeah, you know, I love doing that even with, I'm sure you did probably too, but taking an assignment and looking at the rubric, the students would look at the rubric, and it was an exemplar piece, and the students would market and decide, where does it sit on the rubric, and that moderation with students, having them look critically at something, especially a rubric, this is not a rubric, but having them it and thinking about it backwards

18:54really helps them understand it even better. So let's think about what does the poster, what's on it? There are five zones, zero, it says, no AI, I'm looking at the poster right now. And so it says, AI must not be used at any point for this. And we did not say assignment or task or something specific there because it could be a whole range of things happening in the classroom. It might be a group working on a project, it might be a conversation or a discussion. There's so many opportunities that AI can be brought in throughout the learning process that for this one, we really were intentional about. You're just not using it for this thing we're doing it all. And then number one, so zone one, AI ideation, this, the text on here is AI helps you brainstorm and create a plan to get started. What I love about this is it can really, if I'm not marking a student on their idea generation or their brainstorming, that kind of thing, this can help, really help get students going. This can really be a great entry point for many students who get stuck in just that initial

19:57phase. Zone two, that's AI feedback. So AI can provide feedback to help you edit your work, but again, the work is yours. And then if we go to zone three, that's AI assistant. AI is used to complete specific tasks. And then we end with the infinity symbols as an AI partner, where AI is used throughout as a collaborative partner. And the tag lying on the poster is something we really like. It says, don't assume, ask, what is the AI zone? Thinking about these, we really don't want students sneaking around or you'll get shadow use. And we don't want teachers to have to spend their time policing. We know this poster is not going to solve all of the challenges that we have in the classroom, but we want teachers to really be able to have an explicit conversation in that transparency and somewhere to start. I do think about those zones, though, and how this does give us a place to say, you know, if this is going to be one task and it's going to have some brainstorming in there, what

21:00exactly does that look like? Can we teach what that looks like before we say, this is what a one task is? Or if we say, this is a two task and we're going to do some editing, it does editing mean that I can say to the AI, the AI, hey, can you edit this and then rewrite it and then make this sound better? No. Well, what does AI look like? What are those prompts and what is the language that needs to be there? So we're really working in these zones because we want to be transparent, but we also want to think about how exactly does AI operate in these assignments? And really is it operating in these assignments? The poster doesn't replace the WCDSBAI guiding principles, our faith and form guiding principles still are foundational to all the work that we do. But really the posters and operational tool that lives within the value framework that we here have here at Waterloo Catholic and the goal would be that we have something here that helps us be transparent, that really helps us move forward in this post plagiarism

22:02world because it is, it's not easy. It's so hard. And even for, you know, teachers communicating with parents, so we do have a public facing site that is available for parents to view, to get some ideas about this AI use scale. So we can include a link to that as well if people are interested. So we're here is sitting in the place of transparency, but where we headed. We have transparency now, but our next step is really looking at assessment design. The poster in our classrooms is achieving something real. It's creating a transparent shared language. Teachers have a framework that they can point to and students have clarity about what's expected for a given task. The transparency is the foundation, but really the next step is assessment design. It's really a bigger lift if we're being honest because what the research is telling us is that what our own reflective practice is as educators really has to be the foundation.

23:04And slapping a zone label on an existing assignment without changing the assignment itself doesn't actually serve our students. We're at a starting point right now and we're getting there and putting a label on it helps us to be more transparent. In the end, we're in the business of serving students. We're in the business of guiding our students to be the best that they can be. So if you assign a five paragraph essay and you put a zone three on it, you maybe haven't changed anything. You've just made the AI use visible. So real implementation means asking what am I actually trying to assess here? What does it mean for a student to demonstrate learning in this particular outcome? And how does AI change what's possible and what's meaningful in this task? So this is a harder conversation. It's going to take some time. It's going to take some professional learning. It's going to take a lot of collaboration across departments, across subject areas with administrators, but teachers need to feel safe enough to try something and have it not be perfect the first time.

24:09This research helps us in that it helps us really think about that the learning here really. It's a journey and it's not an end destination. And I think it's important to add in that we've we have resources available to our educators. Whitney developed an incredible adapt framework that can really help teachers take the assessments. They already have and adjust them so that they are they meet the needs of students not learning. Going back to the research, though, the AIS itself was published and then refined based on feedback from hundreds of schools and then revised again. So we should have the same posture here. Itter of humble learning as we go, adjusting things. And we want to support teachers and having those authentic conversations with students with the why behind the zone they've chosen for a task. Not just posting the poster because they were told to actually using it as a pedagogical moment and opportunity for that conversation.

25:11I myself love to know the why behind something just being told to do something just because often doesn't make me a collaborative or cooperative learner or partner. And I think teenagers in particular are the same. So we want to develop exemplars for assessment redesign across subject areas. So teachers aren't reinventing the wheel alone and we want to keep connecting to the research because this field is moving so fast and we need to stay in it. There's really something in our faith and form guiding principles that offer here a really genuinely distinctive difference. Our principle of formation over automation, that is not just a phrase. It's a commitment to asking in all the context, is this technology serving the growth and development of this whole person or is it short cutting something essential? We need to be building the foundational skills in our students and taking the shortcuts to just get to the end product and then a grade that corresponds with it

26:16often doesn't promote the learning. So these are really important conversations. And I think also that our guiding principle of discernment in a changing world. We're not just saying AI is all good or all bad. We're saying our students really need to develop the capacity to make wise judgments about these tools and that has to be a thoughtful process on their part too. And we're going to have to guide them. I think as teachers demonstrating think alouds, it sometimes feels a little bit silly when we demonstrate our thinking to our students or our process and not to influence them but to show them the ways in which they can think through a hard thing. The only way we're going to build this capacity though is through practice, reflect conversation, conversations with our peers, educators, with students, with families, with our administrators, all of our partners, we really need to be talking about it. And that's what this poster invites.

27:18That's what assessment redesign is going to hopefully make possible. We want formation, not compliance and really that is the essence of the through line for all of this and this work that we're doing. So if you want to learn a little bit more about the feedback process and some of the amazing things that are happening in classrooms, hop onto our next episode where we spend some time with Rosie Curry, who is a fantastic, amazing educator from St. Benedict's High School in Cambridge and some of her students. And you can hear a little bit more about the assessment scaled to zero to infinity that we have in the classrooms, how it was edited, and really where students see the importance of their voice when it comes to the work with AI. So until next time, keep inspiring, keep innovating, and let's navigate the future of education together. With a generation, the one to the fire, we're breaking down homes, taking high.

28:21And this time as well, we will be confined, pushing boundaries, we'll redefine. Break the law, let your spirits so up, take your chance, open up the door. With a future, we're giving life, break the law, shine a new light.