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How can math teachers harness AI to lighten their workload, differentiate with confidence, and boost student thinking—without losing the human touch?

The AI wave isn’t coming—it’s already here. In this energizing episode, Dr. Nicki Newton returns to share how AI is transforming the way elementary math educators plan, differentiate, and reflect. Whether you’re an AI skeptic or already tinkering with ChatGPT, this conversation reveals how AI can empower—not replace—educators. Dr. Nicki brings practical, real-school examples from coaching sessions, lesson planning, and multilingual support that will shift how you think about your role in the classroom.

Here’s what you’ll walk away with:

• A ready-to-use AI prompt structure that enhances math lesson plans, questioning, and scaffolding—especially for multilingual and neurodiverse learners.

• Ways to use AI for deeper math assessment analysis, moving beyond surface-level data to guide instructional next steps.

• Real examples of AI transforming dull topics into engaging math mysteries, routines, and riddles that excite students and inspire teachers.

Press play to discover how AI can become your most powerful co-teacher this school year.

Attention District Math Leaders:

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Ready to design your math improvement plan with guidance, support and using structure? Learn how to follow our 4 stage process. https://growyourmathprogram.com 

Looking to supplement your curriculum with problem based lessons and units? Make Math Moments Problem Based Lessons & Units

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Kyle Pearce: Hey, hey there math moment makers. We are so delighted to be welcoming back a guest and actually John I should have went back and I should have counted up how many times this guest has been on the podcast because they might be you did. Okay. Are they in competition with with where’s James Tanton here because

Jon Orr: Two, I did. This is the third, so that’s pretty good. think he’s three and a half week, we said last time.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, because he came on with some other people like, yeah, so he’s three and a half. So he’s still ahead. But this is just like we’re putting it on James your radar right now, wherever you are, if you’re climbing a mountain let in Phoenix or something like that, you better pause and you better, you know, reach out to us to get a booking here because Dr. Nikki Newton’s back and she is hot on the trail to try to be the most guested. Is that what we would call this? I don’t know.

Jon Orr: Yeah. Well, I think, I think, I think we have to like put her in that spot because she’s not only been on twice. He was on episode 317 where we talked about, you know, multiplication division. We talked about on episode 62, we talked about running records, which, you know, 62, this is episode like 490. I don’t know. It’s something, it’s a lot. So it’s like, that was a long time ago. But, not only the two, I think.

I think we’ve talked about this before Dr. Nicky, that I think you are the only person to have attended every single of the seven, because the summit is coming up, the seventh annual summit is coming, and I think you have been in every one. So I don’t think anyone else has that record.

Kyle Pearce: I’m celebratory emojis are flying on the screen right now. That is huge. actually, John, I’m so glad that you did the appropriate homework here because in my mind, I did not look at either, but I wanted to talk about the summit as well. Every time I’ve had the pleasure of hosting your session a few times on the summit, I didn’t get a chance to do it in every single summit, but every time.

Dr. Nicki: It’s been an honor.

Kyle Pearce: The chat is on fire. People are loving it. You’re always full of energy. you know, we’re happy to have you back here on the podcast, but of course, super happy to have you back at the summit this November. It is our seventh summit, I believe, and we are looking to make it the best one yet. So Dr. Nicky Newton, welcome back. How are you today? And what’s going on in your world?

Jon Orr: Give her a chance. It’s her turn to talk now.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, yeah, okay, I’m done, I’m done. I’m gonna hit the mute button. Here we go.

Dr. Nicki: No, I’m fantastic. I am in New York City in the principal’s office. I said, I have to make my lunch and do a podcast. She said, okay, go in my office.

Kyle Pearce: I love it. I love it. Fantastic. Well, if you’re Prince, if the principal you’re working with or the office you’re borrowing, they want to come on the show to feel free to welcome him in. But remember, just like James Tanton, you welcome somebody else in and you’re only going to get counted for half an episode here on the podcast. So that could hurt your numbers. Dr. Nikki, you’ve got always got a lot of things going on in the math world, but the topic that we are going to be digging into here today, and we’re going to dig right into it.

and I think a lot of people are gonna lean in on this one, is AI. And we’re talking about like, how do we use it? How can we use it for good? I’m sure there’s ways we can use it maybe for bad or for some, you know, poor outcomes. What’s got your head sort of spinning around AI and what’s got you so intrigued to sort of bring it in and how we can reimagine the K to five math classroom?

Dr. Nicki: Well, you know, NCTM asked me to do an Ignite, one of the virtual conferences in the spring. So I was like, I’m gonna do AI. And my friends are like, why are you doing AI? And I was like, because I use AI all the time and I’m interested in it. And I knew that preparing for the Ignite would make me even go deeper. So that was in April and I haven’t slept since.

Jon Orr: You’ve just been talking to chat GPT the whole time.

Dr. Nicki: I just, yeah, nobody will have to do the pods anymore, you see?

Kyle Pearce: thought AI was supposed to make our lives easier. It sounds like it’s made your life more difficult.

Dr. Nicki: Yeah, all my friends are like, they won’t answer my calls because they know I’m going to talk about AI.

Jon Orr: Or they’re like, I don’t even know if it’s Nicky anymore.

Kyle Pearce: Well, you know what, for those who are leaning in and while I know that you like to focus in on K to five, I think a lot of the topics we’re to be talking about can be, you know, sort of taken and extended to other grade bands, of course. So start us off. Like, obviously it’s intriguing. I’m sure, you know, a lot of people are interested, but what really grabbed your attention about what this could do.

Dr. Nicki: You know, because I had been like using it. But when I did the ignite, it really, really made me like dig deep in and see what it was. And then I thought, I got to write about this because we’re in the fourth industrial revolution. Like everything is shifted. I’ve been teaching almost 40 years and I was like, I am now a Jetson. I can sit.

off the computer. And I can say, you know, all those shows I grew up on, because I’m about to turn 60. So I grew up on, you know, the Jetsons. I grew up on I Dream of Jeannie, where you bob your head and then it happens. I could do that. I could sit at the computer, bob my head and literally, I don’t even have type. I could say, give me three flying monkeys carrying orange bananas and bob my head and then it’s there because it goes my voice.

Kyle Pearce: You know what, the only thing that makes it obvious it was AI generated is that they were orange bananas, know, everything else. If you said yellow bananas, then people would have never known the difference. Yeah.

Jon Orr: The person had six fingers carrying them too.

Dr. Nicki: Yeah. And so I love it. I love it. And then of course, for me, the first thing I was, I said, I got to write about this. I got to write. got to write. So I called up Erin from Corwin and I said, these are three books that I need to write. I need to write a K2, a 3.5 and a 6.8. Reimagining math with AI.

Right, and I’m not even talking about using AI with kids. I’m not even there yet. I am talking about teacher work and our lives and what AI can do for us and how we then can use that to impact what kids have done. So I’ve just finished the first book, the K2 book, and now it has a rhythm. So the three-five I’ve already started writing in and the six-eight, they’re all different topics. because it really goes into the content of the grade band. But it’s just amazing the things that we can do.

Jon Orr: Yeah, like talk to me like I can imagine, but I want to hear your take on it because because I know teachers are listening to who they’re also using it for planning, know, structuring, you know, using as a reference, like what is your top recommendation right now today for teachers to use tomorrow?

Dr. Nicki: Well, what I could be-All my other experience is not connected. I think what I see, because I’m in Jersey a lot, I see a lot and I’m from California and my background is as a bilingual teacher. So when I go into classrooms, even here in New York City schools, right, we have kids that speak all kinds of languages. So the teachers like, you know, it’s one thing if you’re in a community where you have a lot of bilingual teachers, even if your teachers are monolingual, there’s still supports for, say, Spanish. You know what I’m saying?

If you get a child that speaks Hmong or Nahuatl, nobody speaks that. So there’s no support. So the teacher’s just like, in general, I don’t know what to do. I don’t speak Hmong, and he doesn’t speak English, and I don’t know what to do. And so the kids are just kind of out there. Well, with AI, you can go in. I love it for so many reasons. And there’s a lot of bad stuff about it. But I love it for so many reasons. Because…

I can go in as a monolingual teacher and I can differentiate instruction according to the WIDA standards, which are the six levels of acquisition, language acquisition, right? And I can now get questioning that is appropriate. So now I know this child at level one, they don’t speak any English. I’m gonna ask them to point to the answer.

I’m going to say, it yes or no? I’m going to ask different questions according to the language that the child has so that everybody can participate. think AI really invites more people to the table. gives us more tools to work on. Not to mention now, do you know that there is an earphone that you can put in kids’ ears and it’s not really prohibitively expensive?

So the child speaks Hmong, you speak English, everything you say and you program your computer, everything you say is automatically translated. So now they know what you said.

I just, and then lesson planning, lesson planning, of course you have to have teacher content knowledge. Of course you have to have mathematical knowledge, right? You have to have pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge. But with that, you can go in and say, I mean, it’s all about prompt engineering. You’ve got to know how to talk to AI and work with AI. And I’ve become a really good prompt engineer, if I must say so myself. And I’m getting better every day. And AI will help you. You can say,

Right, make it right. So you can go in and say, you have to say specific things. You have to say, this is one of my main prompts. I want a lesson and I want the learning goal. I want the success criteria, which we still don’t do a lot of. But you’ve got to have the success criteria so kids know what they’re supposed to do.

what it looks like when you’re doing that thing, right? I want teacher notes that explain what to do with multilingual learners and neurodiverse students. I want language stems, because as Heidi A. Jacob says, we’re all language teachers. And I want the vocabulary. I need the exit slips. And I need the questioning, the teacher questioning and the exit slips.

to be at the DOK levels one, two, and three. That’s my standard prompt. That is going to elevate your lesson plan.

Jon Orr: Mm-hmm. I think the fact that you’re putting the D okay in there at the end because like just gives it the the added that To differentiate like what you’re rightly looking for is to say like give like I you can imagine that it might just give you surface level if you didn’t say that last part

Dr. Nicki: Right, you have to know, it’s only going to give you what you ask for. So you have to know what to ask for and what all of the stuff is saying. You know, China’s way ahead of us on this. I mean, they have K-12 curriculum. But UNESCO has done some stuff. The European Union has come out with a fantastic document. It’s out right now for review. And then, you know, the United States is doing some stuff. Europe in general is doing some stuff.

We’re getting better at it, but saying that the skill sets for teachers and students is knowing how to prompt it, knowing how to lie, the critical awareness. You have to know you can’t accept everything it said. You have, there’s a couple of them you have to know. You have to know you can’t accept everything it says. You have to know that it’s biased, right? In my book, every chapter, we put perils and pitfalls because, know,

AI is very biased. AI is horrible for the environment. AI hallucinates and makes stuff up all the time. It’s getting better on all these fronts. And different AIs do different things. So I, now I go to Max AI, because I can have like eight AIs right there and go back and forth. So I can go and say, I can do it on Claude.

Jon Orr: I was gonna say, just make stuff up all the time.

Dr. Nicki: and then go to Chad GPT and say, Oh, Claude said this, can you make it better? You know, that kind of stuff, always pitting them against in saying this to this, make it better telling Claude, even if it gave you something fantastic to make it better, because it will write the iteration is a super important piece of it. I use the script as my prompt generator. Now there’s a book written by Knight.

in 2025 actually, just like current. Everybody has all their acronyms. I like script because it leads you through and script is an acronym for how you should prompt it, right? That you should be very specific, that you have to have parameters, that you have to give it a context, that you have to iterate, you know, and so forth.

You have to think about the tone. There are things you have to say or you’re not going to get because people will say, well, I didn’t get all that. Well, you ask for all of it. You have to. So that’s one of the teacher skills, right, is to know what to ask for. We have a lot of prompted.

Jon Orr: Yeah. What do you what are you seeing teachers use it for now? Like like, you know what mean? Like what are you seeing in classrooms or like pre classroom getting ready?

Dr. Nicki: Well, this is the big. Some teachers are beginning to use it for lesson plans, but they’re using it for like maybe a parent letter or something. There’s so much stuff AI can do for you and people are still some people are still really stuck in. AI kids are just going to cheat. And my thing with that is first of all, any new technology has always been bashed, right?

Jon Orr: Or banned. Like how many school districts right now are blocking Chachi BT from their firewall and firewalling.

Dr. Nicki: because they say we’re always going to change. The thing is that we have to develop our own skill sets and they say this in a lot of the documents that are out as well in the European Union’s new document as well they really stress. We have to come up with activities that meet the moment. We are giving 19th and 20th century assignments still and then blaming it on the new technology. Give a 21st century assignment. Give an assignment that does not.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah, like looking more critical thinking, not fact-based, you know?

Dr. Nicki: Yes, yes. Anybody can write an essay on Romeo and Juliet and AI can do it better in one second. That’s not the assignment anymore. The assignment is to go, don’t tell people don’t use AI, tell them to use AI, but in a critical manner. Write an essay or have AI write an essay and then give it three different prompts to make that essay better.

And then critique the essay it gave you. What is missing? What is there? What would you add? What do you think is like a human perspective that AI couldn’t give you, right? Generate two essays about Romeo and Juliet from two different bots. Do chat and clod. What are the similarities? What are the differences? Why are we giving 21st century a site?

Jon Orr: Right, yeah. What is your experience so far? Think about math coordinators, math coaches, as leaders in our buildings. How are you seeing teachers and also leaders use AI to sort of professional development for deepening their own learning?

They’re not yet, we’re not there and we need to be there because we’ve moved on. I was just reading a book that said, all the beginning AI stuff is done. We are moving on to agents. We need to know everything about AI agents. And I’m like, I don’t know where he’s at, but so many people are not even at just sitting down to AI and typing something in. Nobody’s ready to build an agent. You’re just doing the very basic. So what does it do with coaching?

I use it a lot in my coaching. I’m here at this school coaching. One of the things I did, it’s the beginning of the school year, went in, went into the kindergarten classroom. We wanted to see if the kids could write their numbers to five. The teacher just gave me. I went in yesterday, she did it, and she gave it to me today. So we saw all the kids that could, whatever they interpreted that as. We put it on a sheet of paper, take a picture of it, and then ask AI for an analysis. Now we did a teacher analysis as well. What are our noticings? What are our wonderings?

first and foremost, because we know the kids. But then to get AI to give an analysis, which is just phenomenal. It brings in all the research on number formation, on where your class is at, where they need to go, what the next workstation should be, all of that. The same thing with first grade. Actually, we did write your numbers 1 to 10 in first grade.

you know, they’re coming up from Kinder. And it was amazing what we got. We got all kinds of stuff. And so now we’re trying to plan workstations. I was like, we know what to do now. Right. The other thing we’re doing is they’re working on addition, but we know there’s kids that they’re working on adding within 10. There’s kids that can’t add within five. So how do you use AI to help you really condense that data and interpret it?

and analyze it and then find out what’s next, right? Because don’t you agree that still to this day, even though we’re pushing on it, assessment is often used to find out what kids don’t rather than assessment to find out what kids do know and what’s next. Given that you know these things, where are you next on the trajectory?

Kyle Pearce: I love it. Right. What you’re saying.

Dr. Nicki: Right? Because I know where I’ve got to get you, but I need to know where you are and what you do know so that I can then help you get to the next step. So I was in the second grade classroom and they’re working on Bridgington. Okay. I don’t know how many ways to say that’s inappropriate because Bridgington is definitely something you learn on the trajectory. It is not the first lesson, the first week of school, but that’s what their program has them doing because guess what?

It’s second grade. A lot of those kids still can’t add to five and 10. So we need to scaffold it. What can they do? Where are they? How are we gonna scaffold everybody getting to the point they need to do? And AI can help you with that because you can go in and say, I need three intervention lessons. And I’ve done this a lot. I need three intervention lessons on whatever doubles. I need them to be concrete, pictorial, abstract.

I need DOK level one, two, and three. I need all the things that I told you guys I asked for. And it will give me the most beautiful laid out. And then I could say, I need an assessment because remember NCTM in their statement on AI said, one of the things we really need to do is reimagine assessment to get away from shallow assessments. And I still see that today. And God bless them because teachers are doing a lot of hard work, but a lot of

times teacher-made assessments are stuck in DLK Level 1. This enhances. AI is meant to enhance. It is not the robot takeover. It is not a scene from Terminator 2. It is there. It’s your friend. It is your digital best friend. And it doesn’t ask for chocolate.

Kyle Pearce: Yeah. Well, I will say this is the things that you’re saying, it’s like in every example you gave, there’s always a thing to even take it further, which I think is the best part of it all, right? So it’s like, as you were mentioning, you’re kind of at the beginning saying like, if we’re using this as a tool, you think about how difficult it is to try to extend, say, content knowledge for educators.

And when you take, you know, we can go all the way back to one of the earlier examples of, know, taking student work and then having it, you know, analyze where is this student? And the next question could be, you know, if the students struggling here, what might I do to help scaffold them to that place? Boom, here’s an idea. The part that I think is really important, and I want to make sure anyone who’s already using AI, or maybe they’re now they’re going to hop in there and they’re like, my gosh, I haven’t been using AI and I want to.

is to always ask the questions why. Because like if you ask why chat GPT gave you that, now you can learn and you might not need chat GPT the next time you see this. So I look at chat GPT as this opportunity, not only for a classroom teacher themselves just to make life better, but I think of it from a district leadership perspective and I go.

Dr. Nicki: Right. right because it’s not yes.

Kyle Pearce: my gosh, it’s so difficult to help raise the content knowledge of all of our educators. We actually just recorded an episode this morning about that and how challenging it is. Now we actually have a way if we can help our teachers utilize the tool, not to just make life easier, right? Cause I think that’s what we default to, right? We look to technologies. How do I make my job easier? How do I, you know, how do I do this faster? And it’s really not even that it’s about how do I do it better?

How do I become a better educator? How do I know better what to do next time so that when I see that next time on student six, I now know what I can ask them in the moment instead of me taking a picture, going back to AI and saying, hey, where are we in the trajectory? What are we doing? So you can kind of see here how you use the tool as a bit of a guide, but then you learn.

And you actually won’t need the tool as much as the educator because you’ve actually built your own content knowledge and you built your own understanding.

Dr. Nicki: And you learn like if you keep prompting the okay level one, two, three, you learn what that looks You learn how to ask those questions

Jon Orr: Right, yeah. you have to, like what Kyle’s saying, you have to go in with that mindset that I’m using it not just to speed up my work, I’m actually using it to become stronger. And if you go in with that, then you’re naturally going to become the better prompt engineer.

Dr. Nicki: Absolutely. Well, and the other thing I think with like coaches. So I was in a room in the kinder room and they were doing this routine about where’s Hannah and Hannah was hiding under numbers. This was last spring and but Hannah they were like, is Hannah under four, is Hannah under five? And I was like, we need to know where Hannah is. It’s April. Like she should have been found by now. But I like the idea of the routine.

So I put in chat GBT, like exactly what the routine was. And I was like, how do we take this to the next level? And it spit out like 20 things and they were so on task. then when the teachers had done, I was like, I love the routine. I think we got to push on the rigor of it. And I put it in chat and this is what it gave me. And she was like, oh my God, look at all the things I could do with this. And I was like, oh, and here it is because I can just share the document that came up. Right? And so I just think it really helps us.

Jon Orr: Yeah, awesome. If you think about we have the the summit is coming up. If you’re listening to this, you know, in live time or around the fall, November 14, 15, 16. This year 2025 is our seventh annual summit. Nikki is presenting at the summit. She’s presenting on AI. Nikki, what is the what is the biggest takeaway that you think participants of your session in the summit? Maybe it’s the same as the big takeaway from your book and your book series that you’re writing, participants or readers will have from the work you’re doing right now.

Dr. Nicki: I think it is that AI is here to stay and to make our lives better and to make our lives more interesting and to help us to enhance and augment what we do, even though a lot of the research is now talking about co-creation. It’s not even just saying enhance, it’s talking about co-creation.

Right. And so what does that look like for educators in the 21st century? And I think that’s an important question that we must take up for our kids sake. I’ll give you one last example. I was working with the sixth grade teachers. They’re doing a unit on exponentiation. This is the summer. So we put in AI, you know, how do you make exponentiation interesting? So

It gave us the coolest activities. And that’s one of the things about the book series is AI will give you, AI came up with something that the teachers were, and sixth grade teachers, you know, they’re not impressed by much, right? So they were like, oh my God, this is fantastic. You know what it did? It gave us, it made the kids detectives. And then it gave them all these cases for exponentiation. And the kids, it said, these are the common errors.

you’re a detective and you’re looking for these errors in these cases. And then it set up all the math as cases. And then the kids were detectives. And then at the end, you either got your detective badge or had to go back for some more training. was very funny. But it was like really just a cool way of framing that kind of intense math.

Right? That kids would be engaged in and that teachers were like, this is so cool. That is one of the other things I really like about AI is like, I do a lot of riddles and like if I want to teach place value, I’m like, give me a bunch of riddles so kids can practice. And kids are much more likely to want to practice a riddle than a bunch of problems. Right? AI will give me mysteries. It’ll give me escape rooms. It’ll do like all that kind of stuff.

that’s kind of labor intensive and then I can go through and change and fix and whatever. But I think that one thing if you say, I’d say one of the biggest things is I want people to realize there’s so many more ideas about how to teach the content that we haven’t even ever thought of that AI can give us if we know how to prompt it.

Kyle Pearce: I love it. love it. first of all, we want to thank you. You’ve given so many great examples. And the beautiful part is, I have a sneaky suspicion. When people show up to your summit session, it’s going to be different than what we just discussed, right? So we’re going to be talking about a lot of the same ideas, but it will be fresh. we know that you’re going have all kinds of amazing goodies, great examples, visuals, all kinds of things, very interactive.

Dr. Nicki: Thank It’s gonna be very interactive. It’s gonna be interactive.

Kyle Pearce: Love it, love it. So we are so excited to have you back. And folks, if you have not yet, you should head over to summit.makemathmoments.com. Get yourself signed up. It is a free live event for you to dig into. Of course, there’s ways to extend your ticket and do all kinds of fun stuff there. But definitely, Nicky, yours is one of those sessions where, you know, we do a little battle because we all wanna host your session on our end as the host of the summit. So we’re looking forward to doing that. Once again, summit.makemathmoments.com. Nikki, we will see you in November. And folks, if you’re listening to this after November, you can join the Academy so that you can dig into this year’s summit as well as the other six full summits and of course, all of the other goodies inside the Academy.

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