Utah State Board of Education’s AI Strategy for Schools

Jeff Kavanaugh:

I'm Jeff Kavanaugh, Global Head at Infosys Knowledge Institute. And we're here at Infosys Foundation USA Crossroads 2025, where leaders across education, technology, and social impact have come together to shape the future of learning. I'm joined today by Matthew Winters, AI Education Specialist, only one in the country, at the Utah State Board of Education. He previously served as the president of the Utah Coalition for Educational Technology and was named as one of the ISTE's 20 to Watch in 2023. Former English language arts teacher, Matt brings a unique lens to AI and education, focused on equity access and real-world impact. Matt, thanks for coming.

Matthew Winters:

Happy to be here.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

AI is often thought of as a technology. It's technical. How has your background in humanities helped you in this?

Matthew Winters:

One of the things about artificial intelligence that we really have to understand is that it's an underlying technology. So, it's a lot of the theorists I talk to and a lot of the scholars I talk to, they think of it as the underlying technology of the 21st century. And what that means is that AI isn't just a tool that teachers use to meet the needs of their students for personalized learning or to speed up things in the classroom. It's that it's behind everything.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

So you're in this role. Yes. As you mentioned, the only one in the US state that has a role like this. What are your priorities? What is your North Star?

Matthew Winters:

So the Utah State Board of Education, our North Star, generally is our portrait of a graduate. But basically what it is is a document that says, here are the skills and dispositions and knowledges that we want students to graduate with in the state of Utah. And so there are things like academic mastery, but then there's also things like respect. And we want students to have these kind of skills and dispositions going into their lives. And so we build that document and everything that I do comes back to that. So if I'm thinking about artificial intelligence and I can attach it to our digital literacy standards, or if there's a tool in artificial intelligence that helps with financial literacy for our students, that's something that I want to explore.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

So you’ve got a framework that you can measure it against and evaluate. AI not on its own, AI is relative to your goals.

Matthew Winters:

Exactly. It's an avenue for us to meet those goals. And so that is something that I come back to again and again and again. And my state superintendent, Superintendent Sydney Dixon, she is incredible at pointing us towards that every step of the way and so is our incredible elected board. And so as we work through any system, whether it be AI or personalized learning, competency-based learning, or meaningful inclusion of students with disabilities, we always try to come back to our portrait of graduate and see how it fits. Now with that said all of those things I just enumerated of like personalized learning, meaningful inclusion of students with disabilities, all of those things are part of my lens that I bring to artificial intelligence. Right now, the state of Utah, we want to move past this is a tool, AI is a tool and a technology that helps us to move faster in things. It helps us with the administrative trivia things that happen, to quote my friend Carl, to do actually something that's creative. And in that creative space, also be inclusive of people across all walks of life, all the students that we have in our classrooms, whether they be a student with a disability, a multilingual learner, or somebody who's gifted and talented. We want to make sure that we harness the technology to meet their needs. And so that's something that I'm spending a lot of time here today at Infosys, is seeing the inclusivity work that you're doing here and seeing how that can apply in Utah and beyond because again, we're all in this together. AI hit all of us at the same time all at once. And so the more we can do cool things in Utah that I can share out with people, other states, other constituencies, it adds some value.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Speaking of that, talk about a cool thing in Utah.

Matthew Winters:

So a couple things that I'm really proud of right now. One, we were the first state to have, thanks to our community push, we have a great set of technology directors and technology coaches across the state. They're just fabulous human beings. And they all came together about a year ago and said, we really want safe, reliable, cheap AI tools for our students because that's a barrier. And so we were able to work the first consortium pricing in the country around AI tools for students. And so there's a lot of competition right now to get tools into classrooms across the country and we've already kind of taken a step a year ago to make that happen. That's one thing I'm really proud of because I'm all about cutting down friction and cutting down barriers as much as we can. But right now currently the thing that I'm most proud of is we've been running out of program that is grant funded through an organization called Intermountain Healthcare in the state of Utah that is allowing us to do distributed professional development with teachers across the state and pay them for it. And at the end of it, they write a lesson plan in their content area and grade level that uses AI with students or teaches about AI with students, including things like, what's my policy for plagiarism? What's my policy for using AI in the classroom? Or how does AI impact business decisions? Those sorts of things. All those play a role. And we're collecting those lesson plans, paying the teachers for them, and we're going to be publishing those in the fall for everyone globally.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Also understand that you're part of this Teach AI Advisor Committee. What trends are you seeing out there?

Matthew Winters:

We'd like to see more of a trend towards teachers seeing artificial intelligence as a creativity tool and a tool to help push. Not simply the next calculator. Exactly. A creativity tool. Yeah, to let them do things that they've never been able to do before. And so that's how we've couched our professional development in Utah. But then that's what the conversation largely is about, is how do we harness this tool to actually do the things that we want to transform in our educational system moving forward. And so part of that trending process is working together as a group to make sure that we put pressure where pressure needs to be on companies, on organizations, whoever it might be, to make sure that AI isn't just seen as another thing in the classroom or in the educational system. It's not another bobble. It's actually something that, again, is an underlying technology that can really transform what we're seeing. There's also a lot of pushes right now for AI literacy, which I think is incredibly valuable because the... again, it hit all of us equally all at once, including parents. And so how do we provide literacy for our workforce? And those are largely our parents out there as well to understand what this technology is, how it operates, how to be safe with it, with data, because we know with large language models, the data can get, you know, absorbed and have some issues that way. And so we want to make sure that AI literacy, and this is a trend I'm seeing, isn't just for students. It's for teachers, it's for administrators, it's for parents, it's for everyone, because we all are struggling with this right now and the implications of it.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

I'm part of the Knowledge Institute. So we think about thought leadership and how do you apply thought leadership with your case studies, data, research, whatever it is, to make your point and to reach these people persuasively?

Matthew Winters:

That is a wonderful question. I really love the work of the Stanford Design School. We talked a little bit there about the idea of there's this the fire and then there's the smoke or I call it the inferno and the smoke problem. And this happens all the time in education, but also in a lot of other disciplines. We feel the inferno, we can't ignore the inferno, we have to respond to the inferno now, but then we forget about the smoke of the next inferno. And so persuasively how I've been working with our state superintendents, or sorry, our superintendents across the state, our district leaders, even our teachers in the classroom, is I'm reminding them that if you don't pay attention to this now, it will become a fire later. So we have to start thinking about what systems need to be in place now in order to help work that through and make sure that it's done the right way or at least the best way that we possibly can right now. The other side of that coin is my personal thought process, even going back to when I was in the classroom as a coach and things like that, working with other teachers, is how can I help reduce friction for that person or that now organization or system to make things move a little bit smoother so that the grit can be put where it needs to be, which is in the learning process. So students actually engage and build off of. And so things like the professional development that we're doing or a couple of the other projects that we've been working on, even the getting the AI tools in place, those are all helping to reduce the friction to help the system move quicker and get things where they need to be so that the actual learning and educational system can start working.

Jeff Kavanaugh:

Great. Well, appreciate your input. Well, let's get back to the conference, which is why you came. Very much appreciate your contribution. And as you like to at the Knowledge Institute, keep learning and keep sharing. Thanks.