K-12 AI Workshops and Programs

An annual summit for NYC-area educators, organized as part of New York EdTech Week. Minh co-developed the companion self-paced course, Generative AI for Educators, which participants could complete for up to 7 CTLE credits. The four-module course moves from how generative AI works technically, through hands-on tool exploration and bias analysis, to classroom application and ethics. The culminating activity asks educators to produce a concrete artifact: a student-facing AI policy, a classroom ethics lesson, or a teaching philosophy statement.

A workshop using Ishiguro's novel as a lens for examining one of the least-discussed dimensions of AI in education: emotional AI and AI companionship. Using Klara and the Sun, narrated by an AI companion robot, as an anchor text, teachers engaged directly with AI companion tools and explored questions of trust, dependency, and what it means for students to form relationships with machines. The session surfaces the ethical and emotional dimensions of AI that standard AI literacy programs rarely address. Minh subsequently wrote about the workshop in a reflective piece published through the Digital Futures Institute's Perspectives series.

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A professional development workshop designed for a delegation of Tsinghua University High School teachers visiting Teachers College. The focus was not AI tools, but pedagogical strategy: how educators can use AI to raise the ceiling on student thinking and build learner agency, rather than lower it. The session drew on Minh's experience running AI workshops for TC faculty, NYC K-12 teachers, and international educators, and made enough of an impression on the school's leadership to result in a formal invitation for Minh to keynote their 110th Anniversary Summit in Beijing.

A workshop for K-12 humanities teachers on immersive technology as a tool for literary exploration. Using the "Traveling While Black" VR experience as an anchor, teachers explored how spatial and sensory environments can deepen students' engagement with literature. They then used Spatial, a 3D virtual world platform, to design a mini gallery around a text they were reading, translating the experience into something applicable to their own classrooms.

An international keynote representing Teachers College, Columbia University at one of China's most prestigious secondary schools. The talk put the global AI-in-education landscape in perspective, comparing how the U.S. and China are approaching K-12 AI integration and surveying the leading initiatives shaping the field, including AI4K12, TeachAI, MIT RAISE, Stanford CRAFT, and Harvard's AI Pedagogy Project. It closed with a three-pillar framework for human-centered AI education: AI that enhances rather than replaces teachers, literacy embedded across all subjects, and learning designed for lifelong adaptability.