EP224 — AI Hacks for Any Teacher Working with ELLs

[upbeat music] Teaching ELL students is a privilege and a joy. Is it easy? No way. But with the right support, you can feel empowered to tackle each day with ease and confidence. I'm your host, Beth Voshell, founder of Inspiring Young Learners. With over 10 years of teaching both nationally and internationally, I know what it takes to ensure that your ELL students have what they need to thrive today, tomorrow, and for life. I'm on a mission to empower you to equip your English language learners. Welcome to Equipping ELLs. Let's get to today's episode. Hey there, and welcome back to the Equipping ELLs podcast. My name is Beth Voshell, and I am so grateful that you are joining me here today. Today, I wanna talk about something that most of you are probably using, experimenting with, or at least thinking about right now, maybe you're afraid of it, maybe you've avoided it, and that is AI. Specifically, I wanna talk about what AI can actually do for teachers that are working with multilingual learners. What it can do in a practical, useful way, and what it cannot do, which I think is just as important to understand, right? Because here is the honest truth about AI and ELL lesson planning. AI is a genuinely useful tool. It saves time on certain decisions, it generates things fast, and there are specific ways to use it that will make your supporting easier for your multilingual learners. And this is really an episode that is for anybody who's working with multilingual learners. So I wanna give you some of those first steps to take so that even if you're like, "Language objectives? What are language objectives?" Or, "I hate writing language objectives." Let's... How can we use AI to make those things easier for us and give our students that support? But let me say this, AI is not a curriculum, it is not a system, and it does not know your students. And if you've ever pasted a prompt into ChatGPT and gotten something that looked great on the surface, but did not quite work for your actual ELL students at their actual levels, you know exactly what I mean. So today, what I wanna do is give you six specific ways that you can use AI as a teacher of ELLs that are genuinely helpful. Some hacks I'm gonna give you, okay? And after each one, I'm gonna be honest with you about where it stops being helpful and what you need beyond it. So let's get into it. Now, before I give you the six strategies, I wanna offer you a framing that I think makes all of this click. AI is really good at giving you a starting point, right? It's fast, output things in seconds, and starting points are genuinely valuable when you are planning lessons or figuring out how to support your ELL students with limited time. But for ELL instruction, the starting point is not the hard part. The hard part is everything that comes after it, right? Making it level appropriate, tiering it across through groups, connecting it to a language function, building a speaking routine around it, adding visual supports, pairing it with an assessment that actually tells you something. That is the work, and AI does not do that work. So think of AI as a shortcut to a starting point, and think of what comes