The Future of Formative and AI: An Interview with Carlo Schmidt (Part 4)

Welcome back to Formative’s four-part interview series with Director of Product Carlo Schmidt on how Formative is integrating AI into the platform.

Part 3 covered the role of user feedback and addressed recent controversies in generative AIs. For this final segment, Carlo muses on what the future holds for Formative’s partnership with AI technology.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Formative Team: What lies in Formative’s future in terms of AI integrations?

Carlo Schmidt: We think we can help teachers save even more time. Say you’re a teacher, and you've asked your students a free-response question. Incoming responses are coming from the student. There's an opportunity there - instead of the teacher reading every single one of them, let AI group them! Or let AI notice the outliers. For example, “Hey, Joshua said this: that's not really what most folks are saying, or that's not what you were looking for.” We can use AI there to help teachers to grade responses [and] review responses as responses are arriving in real time instead of having to scan the screen and look for them to highlight the things that we think are important.

Another idea that's getting us very excited is, it's so much work already to create a formative, let alone to create personalized review content. If we feel confident about the AI, how could we use it to help deliver differentiated review assignments to students based off how they're performing in their class or on a particular formative?

Formative Team: How would that work?

Carlo Schmidt: Imagine this: you're a student in a class, and you take a formative. We see you're struggling with two standards, and Formative is offering you resources and places to go and things to learn to review that material and basically get better at those particular standards before you get another touch on those standards with future formatives.

Personalization is, and will be, a very important thing. And that's where AI shines: helping teachers personalize instruction for thirty students in front of their classes. Just to continue extending that idea, we’re also looking at how we could use AI to provide parents with next steps to support their students.

Formative Team: Is there anything else that you would want a first-time user to know about how Formative is using AI?

Carlo Schmidt: I've been in EdTech for a long time. I was a guidance counselor; I was diving through databases and trying to give kids reports on what they're doing and helping them to know if they were on track to graduate. And the amount of manual work that teachers do on a daily basis is important work. It does lead to better outcomes. But they could be using that time to work with students individually. If we could reduce that manual work by 50%, then we've just legitimately redefined EdTech and education.

Formative Team: How does that kind of goal motivate you?

Carlo Schmidt: When I get pumped, I'm looking at the possibilities of AI. I’m thinking about how a teacher could come in tomorrow, and we could say, “Here's how your students did yesterday. We went ahead and made you a quick, three-question entry ticket based off those results. By the way, we made slightly different entry tickets for different groups of students in your classroom because we saw that each performed slightly differently. Would you like to give it to your students here? Review it first? Send it out?“ If I were a teacher, I’d want to be able to do that today.

Using AI in the moment to generate some of that content and some of those questions based off what's happening in the classroom is where this thing becomes truly amazing. When we have teachers tell us things like how Formative “makes life so much easier for me. I don’t need to spend so much time correcting anymore and I can spend that time working with my students” - and that’s a direct quote! - we know we’re moving in the right direction.

I believe that we're at an inflection point. Alongside the educators and school communities who work with us every day, we're working to change the industry forever.

Thanks for reading our four-part interview with Carlo Schmidt. You can access previous entries at the following links:

• Part 1 - Formative and AI
• Part 2 - Making AI Work for Teachers
• Part 3 - Taking Feedback and Avoiding AI Bias