Campfire Session — Critical Thinking Activities

Introduction • 00:00

• Lulu introduces the session and agenda.

Ice-breaking news • 01:02

• Lulu shares some relevant news to the topic at hand, including a study from MIT and news of Microsoft's recent $325,000 grant to the NEA for teacher training on AI.

Examples of critical thinking activities • 02:37

• A detailed example shows using a persona to simulate a Spanish learner, where Sparky asks questions and reinforces family-related vocabulary. The setup includes crafting a responsive back-and-forth conversation and incorporating occasional facts to enhance realism.

• A demonstration of a vocabulary activity is described, with words uploaded and the system quizzing learners. The approach emphasizes back-and-forth dialogue and prompt customization.

• A practical demonstration of using AI to enhance lower school activities. Lulu explains prompting Sparky to drive critical thinking tasks and to structure student-led reasoning with evidence, including a writing activity and a polar bear example, followed by reflections on pacing and classroom weariness.

• The group discusses practical capabilities of Sparky within critical thinking tasks, including counting questions, using debates, and ensuring alignment with curriculum through example ideas across science domains.

Brainstorming with Flint • 16:27

• Lulu describes how Flint chats can be used to help brainstorm and craft lesson plans and activities that enhance critical thinking.

• Lulu describes creating a critical thinking activity designer and uploading multiple resources to guide teachers. It is noted that Flint can summarize sources and tailor activities, with a focus on designing prompts that encourage student thinking.

• Lulu shows how the activity for helping teachers design critical thinking activities was set up.

• A live demonstration shows how the activity setup collects context (subject area, grade level) and generates a usable preview for Flint, enabling automatic configuration of activities.

• A discussion about designing an activity as a thought partner for research, with emphasis on guiding students to find sources and ask questions. It envisions using Flint to surface relevant articles and help students engage with material, including citing sources and evaluating credibility.

• The team tests the template behavior and confirms manual build works. A copy is created, and content attachments are checked for consistency as sources appear in guidelines.

• Lulu Gao verifies updates, demonstrates adding sources, and plans to escalate to engineering for a more robust solution. They note a potential issue with attaching multiple sources.

• Lulu demonstrates document features. The group discusses showing the activity, sharing screens, and validating how Sparky interacts with writing in real time.

Educator shareouts • 33:45

• David Berthold describes using a writing tool that analyzes a sample paragraph against a rubric, then returns reflective questions and feedback. The response scores and provides a self‑assessment report, which the user finds highly helpful and actionable.

• Bill Campbell asks how the self-assessment report is produced and how students might export or save it for portfolios. David Berthold explains that ratings feed into a calculated score and that settings can save reports for later use, with a suggestion to export to Google Docs for portfolios.

• A problem arises as participants discuss tracking student thinking, and a plan is made to explore real-time attention features and coaching for metacognition. The team considers how to surface student thinking to teachers and how to balance privacy while highlighting chats for instructional use.

• Isaac Wu prompts for feedback on student self-generation of critical questions, and Christa Forster responds by sharing a vivid example where student discussion diverges from text, see-sawing between personal issue and literary analysis to drive engagement.

Conclusion • 01:01:37

• Lulu concludes the session and highlights the plan for upcoming campfires.

• Lulu also shares QR codes for people to check out the Campfire Calendar, Flint's Instagram (which has a bunch of teacher-facing content), and the Flint Community.