Our professional learning experience demonstrates that artificial intelligence in education requires in-person dialogue, tough conversations, and exploration of safe, effective use in order to move beyond tools alone and start thinking strategically about transformation. 

Denver Public Schools is in Year 3 of our AI strategy. We started in Year 1 with 225 teachers out of 7,400 participating in semester-long Professional Development Units (PDUs) we co-created and facilitated. These weren't just workshops – they were 45-hour deep dives where teachers ranging from early childhood to high school co-designed lessons and shared their AI innovations. The creativity was incredible. Teachers were coming up with use cases we never imagined.

Year 2 was about scaling to support as many teachers as we could. We trained 4,000 teachers using our AI 101 (basics) and AI 201 (more advanced) frameworks. Our EdTech Specialists partnered with PDU graduates from the first year to facilitate learning at the school building level. We worked with our MLL team to create specialized AI training for multilingual educators. The key was not getting too far ahead as individuals – we wanted everyone moving forward together as a team.

This year, we are focusing on AI for universal design for learning (UDL) and curriculum support. We are building custom bots with our Exceptional Student Services team for content-specific use cases. For example, we created a custom chatbot that generates our district's specific Content Language Objectives format, embedding language objectives. All of the training sessions were built off of our comprehensive AI handbook, spearheaded by my colleagues Kali Peracchia and William Sayers. 

We used an RFP process to identify MagicSchool AI as one of our key partners. The ability to build custom bots and scale them district-wide means when we create something valuable, everyone in our Denver Public Schools (DPS) domain can access it immediately. We have learned from partnerships with other large, diverse districts like Gwinnett County Public Schools and Anaheim Union High School District. We have also participated in the School Teams AI Collaborative and AI Accelerator from Leading Educators and FullScale. 

We have seen a lot of great returns on investing in this work. Governance is the next frontier for us. We are launching AI subcommittees with teachers, leaders, senior leaders, operations, HR, families, and community members. Multiple working groups will report back to build capacity across DPS.