Hello and welcome. My name is Maria Heiler and I'm the deputy director of the Washington DC office and a senior researcher with the Learning Policy Institute. One of my roles there is to direct the Educator Preparation Laboratory. Ed Prep Lab is a partnership between Learning Policy Institute and Bank Street College of Education, Graduate School of Education. It is a growing network of teacher and leader preparation programs across the nation committed to transforming educator preparation through research, practice, and policy. While we wait a couple of minutes for more people to join, feel free to introduce yourselves down in the chat box by telling us your name, organization, and where you're from. See some folks from Georgia and California. Welcome from Mexico. See a colleague there. Joining us from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. See someone joining us from Saudi Arabia. Welcome. A lot of New Yorkers and I say a rich in Virginia. Thank you for joining us today. All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. Thank you for joining us for this one hour sequel to our April 23 webinar. If you're joining us for the first time, it's not necessary for you to have viewed the webinar. From April 23rd, but we do encourage you to access that at your convenience. And as we begin, I'd like to thank our partner, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education for their support with this webinar. We appreciate their partnership and the leadership of Lynn Gangone. I'd also like to let the audience know that this webinar is being recorded. A video recording will be emailed to you in a few days. So no need to take any screenshots or be taking notes furiously. We'll have some that information for you in a few days. As I mentioned, today's webinar is a sequel to our April 23rd webinar entitled how educator preparation programs are adapting during COVID-19. You can find the link in the chat box. We'll be continuing the conversations about how some of our ed prep lab members are adapting during this pandemic. And again, while we will touch on issues of PK 12 teaching and learning the focus of this webinar is on teacher and principal preparation specifically. We appreciate that our speakers who are national leaders in education, educator preparation from across the United States agreed to come back and share more in depth about the work they're doing at this time, particularly as states and districts across the nation are starting to discuss what schools could look like in the fall as we start up schools again in September or August. We've organized this webinar in the same format as the first one with the bulk of the hour being a conversation amongst the panelists. We will also have two audience polls for you to take over the course of the webinar. And then we'll end with participant Q&A towards the end of the hour. If you have questions throughout the webinar, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. And if you'd like to engage in discussion, you may click the chat button and type in the chat box at the lower right side of your screen. Before we begin, I'd like to quickly introduce each of our distinguished panelists by name and title, so we can jump right into discussion. Their bios are available through their institutional websites. First, we have Rebecca Chung. She's the director of the principal leadership Institute at the University of California Berkeley. Anna Marie Francois is the director of Center X at the University of California Los Angeles. We have Ira Litt with us today who is associate professor and the director of the Stanford University Elementary teacher preparation program. We also have Jennifer Robinson, who is a professor and the executive director of the Center of Pedagogy at Montclair State University. And finally we have Kathy Schultz, who is dean and professor of education in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. Thank you all for joining us today. We appreciate you being here in the midst of unprecedented times. And I'd also like to thank the audience for attending. We know that everyone is incredibly busy during this time, and we're grateful that you took the time today to be with us. As a reminder, if you have any questions, please click the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. And if you'd like to engage in discussion, you may click the chat button and type in the chat box at the lower right side of your screen. We want you to be as engaged as possible, so feel free to make comments or ask questions. So I'd like to start this webinar exactly the same way that we started the last one in April. I'd like to go around and have each of you just remind us about what values you're holding as a way to guide your decisions. And what centers you and your colleagues as you have to make increasingly challenging decisions in this time. And this will give the audience members a chance to hear your voices and to hear your perspectives of what your values are in your institutions. So if we can go ahead, Anna Marie, can you get us started? And you're muted. Thank you. Thanks for having us back. It's so good to see you and our Edprep colleagues. So much has happened in the past month, so I think that my values have not shifted, but the ones I want to highlight today, given everything that's happened in the last month is social justice, the dignity and worth of individuals in the collective, and the centrality of relationships. And I think what's centering myself and my colleagues across the state are the humanity within ourselves, the humanity of our students, the humanity of our colleagues, especially teachers and leaders in K-12 and ECE settings because they are the ones on the front line and the humanities of the families and the communities we serve. Thank you, Anna Marie. And I appreciate you being on mute because it wouldn't be a Zoom webinar without someone being on mute. Ira, can you share with us the values that you're holding close? Sure. Thanks Maria and thanks to everybody for joining us and thanks to our host for welcoming us this afternoon. Some of the values that I'm holding on to tightly at the moment include community, relationships, equity, access and inclusion, professionalism, and a very healthy dose of humility. Indeed, I think we all need to be holding that. Jennifer, what about you and your colleagues at Montclair? I'll build on what Ira said, humility for sure. I think that we haven't really changed anything about our mission, which is making sure that our students, our students as well as the students that they work with, to all of the resources that they need. Certainly, I think promoting an environment, a culture that is equitable, that really promotes the democratic values that we hope our teachers will take into their classrooms and then their students will learn as well. I think it's important that we definitely are focusing on nurturing, nurturing our teachers, nurturing each other. That's a big thing within our college and we've done a lot to help build each other up as well as we're hoping that spills over to our students and then their students as well. And I think also leadership, helping our students understand that as they step up and recognize that they are essential workers in the midst of all of this as well, I think is important. Absolutely. Thank you, Kathy. So I could ditto what everybody said. As an educator preparation program, we practice and teach pedagogy that acknowledges and lifts up the humanity of leaders, teachers, students and families. We center compassion and our interactions and decisions, and we teach and work with a focus on kindness, dignity, and as many people have said, deep humility. That's the echoing of humanity. Rebecca, can you send us off? We continue to be inspired by the words of Director and Professor John Powell of the Othering Belonging Institute. First, thinking and acknowledging the two opposing narratives in our country right now, one of othering and the other of belonging. And specifically how social distancing and social isolation can lead to a lack of solidarity and how we continue to practice social solidarity during spatial separation. In other words, how do we not hold, how do we continue to hold in the center essential workers? How do we continue to hold in the center those who are helping us to combat this pandemic while we are isolated in our homes when we can't see them and how we continue to practice holding our community together. Thank you. What I appreciate about each of one of you and the words you shared and I want to encourage our audience if you don't know these programs, you should get to know them because the words that these folks are speaking really resonate throughout their programs and it's just not an individual speaking. So I appreciate you sharing those thoughts and know that your programs are working in alignment with these values. So I'd like to turn to the audience and ask you a poll and you'll have 30 seconds to respond to this poll. We're interested in knowing now that we're in this for a few months, especially those of you who directly teach courses in educator preparation. How prepared you're feeling to develop to deliver online and virtual instruction and in particular what types of support you've been having from different places. So we're going to launch that poll. And you have 30 seconds. And it's a choose all that's applied to you. We appreciate that those of you who are still instructing online and know that it takes a lot of time and effort to do so at a quality manner and we'll be hearing a little bit more about the thinking of that from our panelists. We'll give you a few more seconds. All right, and we'll go ahead and end the poll now and we'll see what the results are. All right, it's good to see that at least 50% of institutions are represented here providing resources and a lot of you all are just doing a lot of the work on your own. Oh, and it's good to see the collaborative nature that we're seeing colleagues coming together and giving advice and support so that's very informative. Thank you and encouraging. We have a ways to go but it's a good start so thank you. So back to our panelists. It's been about a month since we've talked and we know that you've had new learnings in that time I feel like every day is a new opportunity to learn something new in this space. So I'd like to start with Jennifer and just ask what types of new understandings or practices have you developed since this is all started in relation to educator preparation. Thank you and I want to thank you again Maria for inviting me back to have this conversation with wonderful people from around the country. So I you know I'm of a mind that since we had our last conversation really really thinking more about some of the principles of working with online and even working with our colleagues and as opposed to strategies per se or specific things that we're doing and you know I want to emphasize the fact that when we went remote we didn't and we still don't have everything figured out neatly and I think that that's true for everybody and so like one principle which is creative group problem solving that absolutely all of us have something to add to the conversation that we ask our students to be flexible and to prepare their students to solve problems that we've never met before. And here we are in the midst of solving problems that we've never met before. And so I think really modeling that for our students and recognizing that that's what we have to be about. And I think not giving it even a nod towards we've never done that before because yeah we've never done that before and and being open. I think that's that's one real principle that we've had to go deep on and I think, I think another thing is trying to emphasize the focus on our mutual work with our school partners and focusing on the fact that they're P 12 students that you said it best earlier that they're really at the focus and at the heart of this their families their communities and the populations that we're aiming to serve. And I think about the fact now that when I start meetings, really turning to our school partners, who we are constantly trying to have at the table and fortunately, during the daytime some of them are actually available. And so I'm going to capitalize on that and hearing from them from their perspective, and I think that really sets the tone for a lot of the discussions that we're having. For example, yesterday was in a discussion partnering our counseling department, our counselor school counselor preparation department with the Office of Student Life, and one of our partner districts, and hearing from them some of the challenges for social emotional learning that they're trying to address, and really really hearing the empathy from our faculty, not only the ones who were in the meeting but even talking about including other faculty, who have other strengths that that can add to the conversation to help. So we had a really rich and deep discussion and our school partners were very open and honest about what they needed. Hearing our faculty talking about trauma check ins as a model for how to go into a classroom, not only in our, our courses, but again into the classrooms that they're helping out with our interns helping out with them. I think focusing a lot more on why schooling in general, you know, why learning, and hopefully even getting us back to, you know, the curiosity, the desire for learning, the openness to learning has, has really come out of this this situation, because we've had to be a lot more creative we've had to think on our feet and, and, and think creatively about ways that we're going to reach our students in ways that we've never thought of before and I think coming together, much more so than we ever could in other times, because we have to communicate more we have to be together. I just left a meeting a few minutes ago, where we had our faculty department chair, adjuncts our school people, our clinical practice directors, all working together and talking about how are we going to do this work together, which we were doing before, but it's much, much more high stakes now than it ever has been before and I think, you know, learning how to be more respectful of each other and again that word humble with each other as well. So I'm glad that we're going to have this conversation and I'm going to try and make this more for my perspective or conversation because I'm really looking forward to hearing what everybody else, the panel has to say. Thank you, Jennifer. I really appreciate the perspective it made me think that we're becoming the students in that we need to do all those things that we're telling them to do and so the idea of modeling is so important when we talk about teacher and leader preparation for deeper learning and equity. Kathy, what's going on at CU Boulder, what are you all doing and what resonates with what you heard Jennifer talking about? So a lot resonates always with what Jennifer talked about so it's nice to follow her. In the month since we talked last we went from sort of the emergency phase of doing whatever we could because we had sort of been thrown into the remote format to really planfully thinking about next fall and how we will return to campus. Our campus is making the decision has made the decision that we will have face to face classes, though the density of who's on campus will be reduced dramatically. And that's allowed us to have the opportunity to imagine and think about designing what we want our teacher preparation courses to look like. And so just this morning I was in a conversation with all the deans talking about how the goal, you know, sort of given health and safety concerns, the goal will really be to have students spend about 50% of their time face to face and 50% of the time remote in some remote kind of format and and thinking about that in particular around teacher preparation. We've been worried about the idea that students if K 12 schools are in are happening or actually face to face themselves. What doesn't mean to have students fanning out to many different schools and then coming back to campus. As we know that the social mixing that is what we want to avoid on campus as much as possible. And so what our teacher educators have been thinking about is spending the beginning part of the semester in face to face classes perhaps outside. And we're lucky to be in Colorado where we can pretty much unless there's snow we can pretty much predict nice weather that we can be outside, but having the intensity of our face to face classes be at the very beginning of the semester. And then when students and if students can go into their classrooms and this is particularly in the third and fourth year where they students spend a lot of time in schools and in classrooms. And we will shift our time to remote learning and that as we sort of calculate how much face to face time. We have with the students we can count the amount of time that they're actually in classrooms as part of her face to face time. And that's the time that our faculty will meet one on one with students and small groups of students with students by school site. And as potentially a whole group in a in a large zoom format that we've all gotten so used to synchronously and asynchronously. So it's I think it's gotten us to think really creatively about the multiple modalities and also sort of the counting the time in classrooms in a different way and sort of in in concert with the kind of time that we have in the university classroom. We always talk about trying to bridge those experiences the field experiences in the classroom experience, the university classroom experience and, and I do think that this will help us do that. We have interesting challenges in our area because many of our districts don't allow videotaping and so we'll have to be able to be creative and asking students to write and reflect and critically reflect on their experiences in order to bring them alive back to their supervisors or back to their instructors their professors. And one person I was talking to yesterday was one instructor I was talking to yesterday was saying that she plans to meet with her students outside of the school she doesn't want to go in the school because if she visited inside every school she would be the vector that we're all worrying about. She's happy to meet with them outside of the schools and gather together, and that's really in response to the students saying, you know, it's important to us that you see physically see our schools. And so, like Jennifer, we're really listening very carefully to our students, we're listening very carefully to the schools, people at the school site, talking to the superintendent's talking to the supervisors talking to the classroom teachers talking to the prospective students and the current students themselves to both allay people's fears, acknowledge people's fears, and begin to design experiences that feel safe and comfortable, but importantly, educative for everyone. And again, like Jennifer saying I think, you know, these are tough times, and there's so much we can learn and about teaching and learning and about our lives as human beings by you know, centering humanity and everything that we do. I really appreciate, you know, it's interesting because we are always we in the past we've been so focused on teaching and learning and how do we do deeper learning teacher and leader preparation and now we have to think about the physical safety and health of our students and I think what you just said really highlights the balance between thinking about that but still being committed to that high quality instruction. Rebecca, I know that you all have to have had to do some major shifting in some of your work that you're doing so if you wanted to share about that that would be great. Sure, so I'm going to pull on this theme that is emerging around collaboration and take you into this last month, and how we had to intensely collaborate to redesign on the within three weeks, a major performance assessment that we have inside of our program. So just a little background first. Our program the principal leadership Institute has had a long history of using a formative performance assessment so I want to distinguish it from, you know, summative or external assessments like the ed tpa or the an administrator performance assessment these are all within our program. And we use them as mile markers for students and some of them sound like they have different names we don't call them performance assessment. So for example, oral exams, or a portfolio presentation a mock expulsion hearing, or a mock interview. In the last month we had our spring assessment center. Now spring assessment center is the three quarter mark of the program. It literally demarcates for students how they're doing and how much they're learning tells our program where students still need to go before completion. The day, which is seven hours long on a Saturday in any other year, includes students dressing up in their professional gear and spending the day emulating the life of a leader, what they want to do in the future.  The schedule is impossible because that's the life of a leader, you have to go to this appointment you have to go to that appointment. You have to get some collaborative work done you have to have individual work, we just really try to emulate that process so that they can practice. And so this is also an event that includes all the instructors that teach in the spring semester, it's actually a culminating assessment of the content of the spring as a semester. And it involves all of our leadership coaches who work individually with our students in the field so this is a large gathering, and it's really a moment where we all come together and celebrate the learning that has occurred. So, a typical spring assessment center would have a case study that's presented in advance with pre work, and then they would come in ready for an initial conversation about the case which situates the days activities. And then, and we would observe them in while they do that. And then there might be some time for the work group to work collaboratively so our students are organized into work groups to work on the tasks of the day the leadership tasks that are often on a plate like designing interview protocols, designing a professional development plan, etc. And then also they would have to give a presentation at the end of what they were able to accomplish and develop. And then finally we did have we do have an individualized part around an a practice exam for the orals. So we do something called a mock oral exam where students get to practice. Now imagine the amount of collaboration it took in three weeks to take that whole seven hour experience and turn it into a virtual experience and we did it. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good. And I think that was because of the amount of collaboration we did examples of that collaboration started way before assessment center. We started observing each other's video classrooms. Anytime anyone was doing anything performance like in their classroom, a bunch of us would go in there and just observe and debrief and talk about what we learned from that process and that informed our design this kind of iteration, quick cycles of iteration. And so in the end what we did was we actually we actually extended the pre work to be more we actually had we gave the case out as we always do in advance. And we asked each of the work groups to schedule their own initial conversations about the case separate from the day. And then we asked them to record themselves in a two minute video recording of the three priorities they felt that the principal needed to work on in this case this is the case where you're a new principal at a school and there's a lot of data and etc. And so all of the instructors in the field supervisors the coaches, we were able to watch those videos in advance, because they were actually pre loaded several days in advance of assessment center. And so we had a sense of where people were starting. This allowed us to shorten the synchronous part because seven hours of synchronous activities. I don't need to tell you is not going to work. And so what we did was, we shortened it to only focus on a couple of activities. The other thing that we did though in terms of the schedule was, typically in assessment center, when it's in person, we stagger the we stagger and rotate the activities, meaning two groups might be engaged in the mock or while two groups are engaged in a discussion. And now this time because of the synchronous environment, everything was done at the same time, meaning everyone first did their mock orals, the individual part, and they practice that part. Then we went to work group time for students to work on their assignments we gave them some collaborative time, and then instructors and coaches had time to talk about what they saw in the oral exams who still needs help. Who needs follow ups, etc. What patterns did we see. Then we came back and we went to breakout rooms for presentation so everything happened simultaneously where in the past, the schedule would have been more complicated. And then we ended the day as we always do with appreciations, no champagne and apple cider this year, but at least we were able to come together and celebrate each other's growth, and it was really quite a tremendous day. I would just want to say the collaboration has been really important. It's been intense, but we can do this. Thank you for that I love this thread of collaboration and I want to highlight that all the programs here for the audience have engaged in really deep collaborative collaboration and have structures in place for that. So if that's not what your institution looks like. It's a great time now to start to develop those relationships and structures, because it's been key, I think in the institutions that I've had the opportunity to talk to it's been key collaboration to the success of the work that they're doing. I like to shift a little bit to collaboration with families and communities because I know at the last webinar that was a real deep question and a lot of people had wonderings about how folks are doing that so I like to turn and ask Ira what are you doing and how are you engaging your candidates with families and communities at this time. Sure. Thanks Maria. Maybe actually this is important for thinking about the work that we do with families and communities I want to take a minute and just acknowledge the essential fact that all of us and all the folks we work with. All the educators all of our students families communities we're all living through an extended crisis and deep and complicated one. It doesn't diminish the moment that we need to rise to this occasion do deep and meaningful work. We're all attempting to do that, but we need to hold true to the fact that everybody is living through crisis and I think if we leave if we can keep that fact on the table, it will help us to ensure that we do right by those that we aim to serve. So I just want to take a moment and that's especially true as we're thinking about the work that we're doing with families and communities, we have to acknowledge the experiences the surreal and challenging and complicated experiences that families and community members and educators writ large are living through and trying to work through. I take a little bit of a moment to focus on some of the clinical and community experiences that our teacher candidates are experiencing at the moment. I think we've always framed and thought of our teacher candidates as essential partners in the work of care and community work and education with our school partners. I'm thinking a lot of ways this particular moment has really elevated that fact and brought some clarity to the essentialness of that partnership. We get lots of regular feedback from our school partners from principals from mentor teachers from district leaders that our teacher candidates are essential in this moment. It's really complicated for our schools to do the work in the ways they want to do it without that partnership. So small things like maybe actually these aren't small things schools need to be in touch with every family they can't do the work they're doing without knowing where families are what they need, how we get in touch with them what are the resources that will allow them to be in communication. That takes a lot of person power and also relationship capacity and so our teacher candidates have been really important members of the team from the schools to reach out to folks in the community to figure out where families are what are their challenges what are their stress points what do they need for basic contact and communication. That's dovetailed rather nicely with a course that I teach year round for our teacher candidates and in the spring we typically focus on building positive collaborative relationships with families. Given all the work our candidates are currently doing with families is actually made it even more real and authentic and meaningful. In a traditional year we have to work a little bit harder actually define access points and touch points for our teacher candidates to be in conversation and extended and meaningful ways with families, whereas now that's really a core part of their work. So it allows us to take the framing that we do to offer some of the knowledge base around building positive productive relationships with families, thinking about an assets base approach. Thinking about the funds of knowledge that family members and communities have to offer thinking about the strategies for building positive productive relationship so it's a real partnership between families, educators and schools and helping to elevate educational opportunities for youth. All of that work and the way that we do the work has some real deep resonance because it's in the moment right now our candidates are in fairly regular touch with families and in fact this is true in particular for our elementary candidates. They can't do any educational work without also engaging the family members because this is a real partnership. Family members are on the calls whether it's a regular phone call or a zoom call or FaceTime. So it also helps our candidates to appreciate the essential nature of this meaningful partnership. I could go on about some of the strategies and resources that were using it that's helpful but actually thought I'd take my last minute I actually wanted to take the opportunity to bring one of my teacher candidates into the conversation for a moment. So I have a really brief email that I got just two days ago from one of my teacher candidates that's really relevant to this conversation so if you'll indulge me I'm going to do a quick read aloud and share a short email from one of my candidates. So it says hi Ira, I hope you're doing well. I just had a long zoom meeting with a mother who's had a really hard time connecting with us because of time constraints and challenges with internet access. She only speaks Spanish so I use my high school Spanish and Google Translate to communicate. Unfortunately her son wasn't home because he was spending time with grandma but I had a wonderful conversation with the mother. It made me extra appreciative of our role playing and rehearsals that we're doing in our seminar course. I started by really checking in with her and asking about things other than schoolwork. At one point I said to her in Spanish the most important thing is that you're all healthy and doing okay right now and I want to be supportive of that. If we're able to get some schoolwork done together that would be a nice bonus and I'm happy to help with that as well. So I shared my screen with her, I went over how to do an addition and subtraction problem so she could help her son use the workbook that we sent home. I also told her how and when I could meet her son over zoom so we could do some more collaborative work together. At the end of the conversation she was so happy that we were both almost in tears. It was her first time to really be in contact with anybody online because I had sent her step by step pictures of how to join a zoom meeting which she didn't know how to do. So as I'm writing this email I'm feeling very proud and happy and feeling a little more ready for family interactions for the coming year. And I wanted to offer that as a reminder about those that we're serving and the work that they're doing to serve others. And also just to share how ridiculously proud I am of all of our teacher candidates and all of yours. I think given the current moment and all of its challenges I'm so deeply hopeful about the future that they're going to bring to us with their level of commitment. It's a deep concern for issues of equity access and inclusion. The future they're going to bring for us for our profession and for those they serve is really bright. And I'm incredibly hopeful to talk to educators like you all because the intentional preparation of the candidates for that type of interaction that doesn't just happen. All of that theory you were talking about in the ways in which you prepare the funds of knowledge the acid based perspective. All that is necessary especially when you have candidates that are so different from the students that they serve. So I'm just deeply grateful for the work that you all are doing to be able to prepare teachers who can have those kinds of interactions and leaders. I know that you're doing the same anemory with the center acts and your candidates so could you share a little bit about what you're doing and how that looks like. Sure, but first I just want to thank I write think everybody on this webinar and all the participants were so encouraged by that email so thank you for taking time to share it with us. The things I want to pick up that I were talked about is about this moment and how this moment is right for how we rethink parent and community engagement and teacher preparation, and I would add that that moment includes a new positionality for parents and teachers and leaders in that relationship to support K 12 students. I think in the moment of the pandemic, there is increased empathy across that those labels, there's increased appreciation across those labels, and there is a willingness to collaborate in ways that I don't think that we have seen in the past because let's be honest so we're all teacher educators, most of us are the one area of teacher development that we haven't really done very well and I don't think the field beyond teacher preparation does well is figure out how to involve and engage schools and parents and families and communities and really authentic reciprocal powerful ways. This pandemic and everything involved in it is pushing us to do that so I'm really appreciative of the fact that this is an equity issue that is being addressed out of necessity right now. So you know traditionally traditional forms of parent involvement and engagement really positions parents as either learners or in service of schools and classrooms and so at UCLA. We're really, we have really been attempting to disrupt that view of parent school interactions and to create a really new paradigm that's more about authenticity it's about reciprocity, being conscious of the humanity of ourselves and others. That also really privileges are individual and collective knowledge skills and power beyond the labels that come with and the meanings behind that label, when you start dissecting people into your just a parent, you're just a teacher, you're just a student teacher you're just a teacher educator. And so in our teacher education program we really believe, like all of our colleagues on the call that one of our primary responsibilities is to help our candidates build positive relationships and families and communities and offer them multiple opportunities for involvement engagement and also solidarity building and I think that's what this moment is helping us to do and I'm really excited about that. So before the pandemic, we have a, we've long had a signature series of courses that build on one another the first of the series is about an ethnographic study into the community so getting to know the community people that live there. Their assets, their needs, their desires and then we move into the second quarter with something more about identity and how do your social identities affect how you see communities, how you see parents, how you see the power of education. And the last part of that series is a course that we call working with parents and families. And in that course candidates create learn about creating and nurturing authentic relationships with families and building with parents and families to improve opportunities for for young people. And as I mentioned in the last webinar. Our teacher education program really does reach out to the other departments and units on the campus to help to help bring expert knowledge that we may not have as teacher educators into our teacher education program. And so, in this case we have drawn upon the expertise of the center x parent empowerment project and local community based organizations like families as schools to serve as not only guest lecturers but to help us to refine the curriculum and to provide provide some support for connecting us with schools and local parent group, someone earlier in the introductions mentioned humility I think Jennifer you mentioned it I think Rebecca mentioned it. When it comes to parent connecting our candidates with parents and communities. I think that's the first value we need to hold on to is that we need to be humble enough to recognize the resources and the assets and the cultural wealth and capital that parents bring into the conversation around how we structure coursework what the content is and what kind of assignments would be evidence that candidates are ready to make that part of their practice. So that's the course series but then what happens. When we have to take this virtual, like all of us we can easily move our courses online. But something else happened at UCLA. Is that when you go virtual. You come together you create something new that builds upon the best of what we, we, what was, because as I reminded us last time, there are things that we really do well. And then there's opportunities to build on those things. So what I worry about is that people are scrambling to create things as opposed to reflecting out what you have, and then enhancing them into this remote environment. So to that end, one of our most recent efforts that we actually launched tomorrow is called conversations of the soul conversations for the soul, which is actually going to take place on Facebook live. And this effort is led by the center x parent empowerment project in collaboration with the center x culture and equity project. And conversations for the soul is going to provide regular opportunities for parents to come together to have real conversation with one another about those school things that matter most to them. To provide the parent audience with information but also and more importantly, to give them space and time to share the challenges that they experienced engaging with schools to help one another problem solve, because they have the answers. If they come together in coalition, they can create these answers for themselves, and then to launch a parent learning community that's ongoing and sustain. And what we have done is we've invited our teacher candidates and our mentor teachers, many of whom are parents themselves to join as equal partners so that they can hear and learn from the voices of parents and community members, and also lend theirs to the conversation. Without that power differential that happens across the two sectors right. So this week's virtual gathering is titled waiting to exhale, and it asked the question.  It's really going to be a real conversation about parenting during the pandemic. And we have really high hopes that these conversations will impact have an impact on the participant and provide insights that will deepen the discussions that our candidate or teacher candidates are having in their in their 405 parent and family workforce. And as they begin developing their teacher identity, and make parents is invaluable and invaluable partners, part of how they see their, their identity and their practice moving forward, and that parents are resources for student learning and teacher development. Is that a closed group? I'm sorry, I'm raised at a closed group on Facebook line. No, it's open to everyone. And it's not all night. It's at 6pm Pacific time because we want parents to be there and we know how busy parents are during the day so it's an open group and it's going to be an ongoing thing. I also want to mention, I know my time is up, but this activity is really reflective of a statewide effort to really honor the voices of parents and take some of our lead as educators from them. So our state superintendent of public instruction actually last month had his very first parent support circle. And it was intended to provide resources and emotional support for families. And I feel like our conversations for the soul is a more localized effort that aligns with very nicely where the state is going. And then I also want to give a plug for, I don't know if you all read, this probably isn't the right time, but I'm going to take advantage of my 32nd. There was an article in the media and yesterday, I believe it was called we cannot return to campus this fall. And it was written by a high school teacher in Oakland. And he really deconstructs all the challenges for opening in the fall. And I'm really excited to have conversations with our parent and family communities about what are their concerns as their children will be entering schools perhaps sooner than they might feel comfortable with. That's a great pivot actually so thank you for taking the 30 seconds and in the chat they asked for the link if you have a link for the Facebook live. I want to take this chance to pivot back to the audience. You know we were just talking about planning and thinking ahead and so we're curious for you all who are teacher and leader educators. So we have fall planning and what's going on in your institution so we have a poll that we're going to launch that as asking about how, how has your institution or how have your institutions been planning for fall scenarios and we know that there's multiple scenarios that could occur so we're going to go ahead and launch that poll, and you have 30 seconds. It's choose one not all of them. And we know again like we're planning for hybrids some virtual some in person, you might have a BNF place where they're opening. So we want to know if you're doing a lot of planning some planning. A very little. And if you're unaware of your institutions fall planning that's fine. We know some people are further away from the decision makers. We'll give you a couple more seconds. And then we're going to close the poll. And Okay, we see some to a great extent almost 50% to a great extent and some to some extent and it's good to see that very few are not planning at all because we have to be prepared for a variety of scenarios come the fall. And I want to take this time to shift to audience question and answers because we actually have a question about the fall planning. And so I wanted to get to take a question from Pamela Pamela, who is the executive director summit public schools. The question that she has is how are you preparing to build community with newly enrolled candidates, if they will enter your program in a virtual setting. So wanted to see if any of you are thinking about that. You repeat that Maria. How are you planning on building community with your newly enrolled candidates. And I know I've been talking to some of your colleagues, Ira you all have a week orientation usually that's like eight hours a day. Have you been talking about what that looks like. Excuse me let me offer a few quick thoughts so I think for all of us I mean this is a time where we're going to have to be engaged in some real creative problem solving and creative crafting necessity will be the mother mother of invention. And we will build some things that are new and different many of what of which I hope will be exciting and fruitful and valuable. All of the building and creative work that we're doing needs to be founded on core principles values and aspiration. So we can't let go of the things that we know to be true and that drive our work and so community always comes up for us and every conversation we have about how we're going to craft the work that we do. Because it's so essential to the way that we do productive work and the way that we model it for our candidates to do in the schools and classrooms they're going to work. It's relational and it's community oriented. I can say for a fact that I am not in order to speak for my colleagues are we expert on building community from a distance but I have a lot of confidence that it's feasible and possible. We're tooling around with different possibilities this quarter again out of necessity. We've made some mistakes we've had some successes. We will build a range of different kind of online orientation activities. We've been talking about divvying up candidates and starting to get to know them from a distance and different kinds of ways.  So I think there's a lot of creative possibilities we just have to hold to the fundamental fact that community is essential and then that will drive us to do a range of creative work informal and informal spaces that help us get to the outcomes that we so desire. And that's related to another question from Barbara Burrington the director at the University of Vermont who's asking about describe the new conversations and adaptations you are engaged in with schools and mentors about the fall semester and beyond. And I know Jennifer you started us off at that place so I wanted to know if you had any reflections about that and if anybody wanted to jump in after you. Yeah you know I want to first of all thank Kathy for the last time we were together talking about ways that we should really be focusing on what works. And I think that there are a lot of things that we could learn from this period right now that's working. And so one of the things that we're doing is we were actually because there aren't any ceremonies and there aren't any events that are going on. We're still available. It's the end of the semester and we're conducting a series of focus groups we started yesterday, and we had to today. And we're going to continue to have them with our mentors with our cooperating teachers with our school partners with our faculty or adjuncts, our graduates as well, just talking about what seemed to be really effective for them and we're and we're building we've been having a series of conversations, almost since we had this webinar at last with a lot of different constituents and stakeholders who are weighing in and one of the terms that I use and is 360 is is hopefully getting a 360 perspective on what's happening on behalf of preparing new teachers and leaders, so that we were looking at all sides of this situation. So in June, we're going to. I'm holding a special teacher at policy committee meeting or educator preparation policy committee, where we're all going to come together a lot of faculty and again our school partners will be there as well. And, and arts and sciences as well arts and sciences or education our school partners as well to consider the ways that looking at the data looking at what we've collected and beginning to shape out what we hope to do in the fall and that's that's one of the things that we're we're going to be doing. Again, a previous conversation folks are talking about having a virtual orientation that's going to happen closer in August and bringing in people who have really been thinking about this and we're finding those experts so called experts or individuals who have had some success and to come in to talk to all of us. Further about you know ways that we can build community, learn from each other and work together. If I can jump in. I noticed in the chat a question about trauma informed practices and I want to sort of use that to connect to this question to say that we have been using and thinking about how to use trauma informed practices to connect. Really as a group as Jen has been talking about but individually with our student candidates with our master teachers with our principles and, and the superintendents and with people in our community. And so, in terms of trauma informed practices that really starts with listening and eliciting feelings and fears and, and people's concerns about the time that we're living in, as we think about school placements next year, and the kinds of work that we're both preparing students to do and supporting our teacher candidates to do once they're in the, in the schools and so I think, you know really thinking hard not only on about how our perspective teachers and leaders need to think about how to address the trauma that's very real in the schools and potentially in their own lives, but how to use those practices that we know of starting with kindness and compassion, and really just listening deeply to people to shape the relationships that will form the basis for the learning the teaching and learning that happens in the fall. I think we will stop there because that brings us full circle right back to the values that we started with and I'm just so hopeful, like I said earlier and feel really grateful for you all sharing because I think the threads of collaboration with the community and just being thoughtful and intentional at the work you're doing is so important during this time and it's a great opportunity, I think, for educator preparation to be really relevant and really useful in a way that hasn't always been the case and the idea that we're really, you all are really centering K-12 partners and the needs of our students and schools is really powerful and I think is a way that we need to continue forward past the pandemic and to continue to build on these practices that you have continued and innovated on so I wanted to thank you all for sharing your knowledge and thinking during this time, especially coming back again. I feel like we could do this every month. We'd also like to extend the thank you to our partner AACTE for co-sponsoring this webinar with us. Our partners and presenters have had some wonderful resources available on their websites as shown on these next couple slides. These resources are available on the web page shared in the chat box. I'll link to the recording of this webinar as well as to all the resources we share today will be sent to you via email. And finally, I'd like to mention that a survey will appear in your window when you leave this webinar and we'd really appreciate it if you take the time to give us your feedback. Thank you once again for joining us today and we hope you have a wonderful rest of the day.


And thank you to the panelists for being here with us today to discuss this very interesting topic that seems to have gotten a lot of chatter, but yet there is still so much to be discussed. So while we all have seen AI seep into our lives, whether we like it or not, with very strong opinions about it, we are at a sort of a crossroads in the PR industry. Things can go two ways. We can either reject everything AI has to offer and settle in for the vintage era to set in or we can accept the AI benefits and move into a new uncharted future. So let's start with a peek into your perspectives on AI and the future of work in the PR industry. So Jagathi, let's start with you. Can you share with us your perspective on how AI is shaping the future of PR and communication? Hey, very good afternoon, everyone. So thank you so much, Tarunjit, for this question and starting with me. Let me start with a small story.  So the story goes back to a little vintage time where a kid comes back from school, must be five, six years old for a second standard and is very depressed, doesn't know what to do. Maybe it's end of life while I see. And the grandfather who's around in the house quickly notes and asks, what happened, child? The kid says, you know what? Today I saw someone copying in the exam. So, well, it's so sad.  The grandfather had a smile on his face and he said something so, so noteworthy is that don't worry. Copying is an art and not everyone can do it. This was such an existential question then and I think it's still persist.  It was me. Yeah, so it's so etched in my mind that, listen, let people copy, let people do GPT-ing around. But at the end of the day, dude, if you can't stitch the story together and if it doesn't sell to the audience and you don't get paid for what you are supposed to do, I think it's of no use. So, rightfully taking a cue from this, I would say that AI is definitely here to stay. And at the end of the day, it's upon us, the human mind, to make sure that we harness the power of AI appropriately. Awesome. Shaprit, what about you? I think taking on from something that, you know, Jagruti said that, of course, there's a tool and I do think it's a fast evolving technology and it really has the potential to make teams more productive and aligned. But the discretion and the judgment of the PR professionals doesn't go away. You know, I think that's gonna play a really important part in how we utilize AI to make, you know, bring more impactful results for our clients to make our own firms more efficient, maybe bring it more innovative and creative thinking, you know, into how we're servicing our clients. So I think there's a huge potential for AI and public relations to go hand in hand because it can create a faster turnaround time. You know, there's a crisis situation happening. You need some information very fast. AI can bring that out. What we would do on a Google search for two hours, you can probably get it in two minutes. But then how do we utilize that for personalization of communication? How do we use it to understand user behavior? You know, at H&K, we use Brandwatch, we use Global Well Index to understand data insights that are happening in the industry to understand consumer. But that personalization still comes from the PR professionals. And I think we can really, really efficiently use AI to maybe enhance the level of strategic thinking, creative content, brainstorming, and spend more time on those aspects by automating some tasks by using AI. Absolutely, so our jobs are secure. Deepika, would you like to add to that? Yeah, I think, Terjeet, I have, my answer is gonna be more from the other side of the table in terms of having been on Brandside and kind of having interacted with PR professionals. Now, some of the requests that goes from us marketeers to PR professionals is have author articles, have industry articles, and all of this end of the day requires a lot of research from the PR team to sort of put this together. It also requires a lot of research on what is happening in global markets to sort of also any thought leadership article that you're gonna write is gonna be more future looking than just finding out what is gonna be on Google. So while you can build a straw man or a skeleton for an article, essentially what makes it worth the time of the reader is the practical experience, is the fact that this is what I am going through here and now and these are the nuggets of my experiential wisdom that is gonna help the reader and that is what makes it enjoyable and rich in terms of knowledge. So I think whether it is PR, profit.com, whether it is press file, I think there are a lot of AI tools for my friends in PR to use, but I definitely do think that when an article will come to me, I will know, is this just done by AI or is my friend in PR, is there a hand in there? Because I know the signature. This is a very interesting point. I was a part of this discussion on a global platform earlier this week where a lot of agencies were concerned about transparency, confidentiality and plagiarism. Now, these have been a challenge in the current framework itself without AI, but with the free use of AI, how do you keep sensitive business information and data breaches from happening? Like you mentioned, this is a gut feel that you had been going by, but that gut feel might not be developed by just about everybody.  How do you prevent something like this happening? So I think for everybody who's probably watching this, I think it's important to understand how the process of PR works. End of the day, the company is giving a brief saying, let's say there's a product launch, right? This is what my product launch is. These are the details of the product. Or let's say I have a campaign launch, then the company is giving details on this is what my campaign launch is. Or let's say this is an announcement of a brand endorsement or it's a funding announcement, whatever it is, the brief actually goes from the company to the PRNC. It is not something that is already on internet. Like you can just quickly research and put something together. These are very, very specific information. So those are the details. You'll be very surprised. You'll be very surprised. We've received the RFPs, which are chat GPT copied and sent to us. Without even those, the copy icon is very prominent. And if you don't copy it from the copy icon, you actually get all the labels. So we've got RFPs, which have been complete chat GPT copy. So I would beg to differ. Taran, can you add something? Taran, can you add something here? You know, going on to what Deepthi was saying. See there, I mean, I'm a former journalist, right? So we take plagiarism very seriously. And I'm very, very gung-ho about giving credit where credit is due. But I think that is an issue that comes down to the kind of people that you have in your team and what our work ethic as PR professionals is. AI or no AI. Yeah. Our responsibility to do right by our client and even right by our teams or our own organization. So when it, I mean, if you can use chat GPT, I think it's completely okay for someone to use chat GPT to suddenly find 20 pieces of information in two minutes and save that one hour of Google search. But if you're going to copy paste that and send that to the client or have it published or use it in an authored article, that is not AI's fault. That's a people problem that we have down to finding the right people for us. Very interesting. Jagatthi? Yes, I would just like to say that thank God we vintage people are still around because it's difficult to hand hold this young generation and you know, that's for what is copied to what is not copied. I think vintage is going to be the theme of this conversation on absolutely. Gaurav, your perspective. Oh, you have addressed the fossil in the room. You'll be respect the grave for now. And this is an overwhelmingly women majority panel. So I had soft to exchange for media for this. About time? Yes, of course. Just a day or two after the women's reservation bill was passed. So congratulations. Awesome. But the one question whenever, you know, new technology, new things come into the picture, there are certain parameters and certain questions that we must ask. Is AI similar to the invention of wheel? Is it that big a deal? Is it as good as the invention of internet? Is it going to revolutionize or trans or be an agent of transformation? And if it is an agent of transformation, will it be like the invention of fire or electricity? How will it change our lives? That is the fundamental question. I think that we need to ask because we have been doing PR. We have been doing communication even when there was no technology to say. Agreed, but Raul, see this is a fact that it is changing our lives, whether we like it or not. When I think for the last five or 10 years, we've been cribbing about the quality of writing happening on both brand as well as agency, as well as sometimes even journalism as a field, right? When that has always been a challenge, how is it now with the advent of AI that is it's already impacting our lives, right? That was my next one. Like the key who can kind of identify this is copied from somewhere. This I know has not, this is not the writing style. But when this scenario is presented to us, keeping sensitive information in or preventing a data breach is becoming even more problematic, right? We do have confidentiality clauses within our agreements, et cetera, all of it, right? How do you enforce it? What I was saying is, one that it is going to be transformative, but we also have to be custodians of two things. One is ethics. That is a challenge that the leadership faces. Secondly, what is the kind of work culture that we are promoting? One, we all know, our gray hair does know, will stand us by, that we know the right workers from the wrong ones. We must not, and I emphasize on this point, that we must not promote the lazy ones from those. Ultimately AI is a tool for good work for a better governance, for better productivity, but it is a tool, it is an assistant. It cannot overwhelm the work culture that we wish to develop. With the advent of email also, with the advent of the internet also, the work culture is a leadership domain that is a challenge before the leadership. And that is where the leadership must come into play. And that is where say, it may be a big revolution, but that revolution, the direction of that revolution needs to be guided by the leadership. This is the point I was making. Very well, very well put. Jaapati and Suprit, you had something to add? Something along the lines of what he said, I mean, and what I said earlier that it eventually boils down to the ethics and what kind of, sourcing we want to offer. And I don't think that's an AI problem. That's a problem that can exist with various other things. Again, I'll go back to the days when I was a journalist, if there was news about a brand that came out and we wanted to find that information out, we would call every possible branch head, every employee who the friend of a friend of a friend and try to get information out. But to, and same for the PR agencies that we were dealing with, right? We'd call our friends in the PR agency and say, What is the leader thinking? But don't say anything. Give me some hints, I haven't published yet. You know, all of that, we've done it. We've all journalists do it. Everyone wants to find that information out. That's part of our KRA then. Now being on the other side, the part of the KRA is to make sure that your client's information, you treat it as your own and you hold it close to you and you treat it right and you do what is justice to it. AI can actually help you enhance it quite a bit. You can use social media listening tools to understand where the sentiment on the brand is going. Is it going in the right direction? If it's not going in the right direction, you can have it flagged to you at the right time. So you can take corrective action to turn things around for your client. Okay, you can use AI to understand your target audience. And I mean, use that information to work on something that can more effectively target that audience, right?  And if you use the tool right, we really can enhance what we're going to service our clients or how are we going to service our clients. What AI isn't is a shortcut essay writing, or theoretical writing tool. And that is now how it should be used. And that's not the only skill set that AI provides. It can be used like that. Like it can really deep dive into giving you insights, giving you data, saving you time on information. So you have more time for, you know, brainstorming and analyzing audience, analyzing sentiment, flagging off negative news. If we use, I mean, the spectrum of what AI can do for us to make us better pre-op professionals and actually increase value to our clients is huge. But yeah, I think we need to train our newer teams on how to utilize it. I think there needs to be, of course, the talk about ethics is flat out. That existed 10 years ago, 20 years ago, it exists right now. But it can be a transformational tool. I don't think it's a small peg that is going to come and go. I think it can become part of an everyday working SOP that you have to do faster, better work. You know... In fact, I'll agree with Shupri during my days of journalism as well as her. So I am trying to find that nexus in the panel itself. Awesome. So plagiarism was always looked down upon. Plagiarism was in the newsroom. If somebody plagiarized one sentence, it was, you know, that was the holy cow moment for many of us. And but I also agree with her that this is the compute with it is something that we must deliberate. And ethics come very heavily into the picture that we must emphasize on how ethics is going to play a role. Because that is something we'll decide the course for the future and we will be answerable to the future. Absolutely. And ethics also play a role in one of the points that you touched upon, Rafa earlier was biased, right? AI generated content, whether it's text, videos or pictures, we see a lot of people putting up mid-journey pictures nowadays, right? It's based on existing data. And as AI learns to think like humans, there is also a strong possibility it'll learn all our biases. And it's being prevalent in specially video and image context in currently and very soon, you know, internationally also people are seeing it creep into text format. Now as PR professionals where, especially in a profession where optics matter and we have worked very hard to create a strong positive inclusive reputation for a particular brand that we are working on. How do you think that the reputation industry can mitigate this particular risk of AI not copying our own biases? Jagruti, I'd like your inputs on this first. So Tarunji, interesting question once again. I'll take a step back to say one thing is that AI is going to help us save time for sure. It's like, you know, reading 100 books but not the books, the back page, the back cover of the book that gives you a gist of the topic. If that helps us well and good but tomorrow a well-researched perspective or ideation. For that, you have to read a book. You have to go get inside the book. You can't just rely on the back cover of the book. Now, answering your question, biases exist everywhere. I know, be it online offline with AI without AI. So at the end of the day, if the biases are so curled out with the reputation of the same ask and if that really sells, well, good, we party. It's a party time. But if it doesn't, I think that's a question we are asking. How to really do that? And I think to stay in the game and to, and stay in the game of reputation management whether it's personal or company reputation or a firm's reputation, either ways, I think authenticity and breaking through the clutter is going to help us. So that's when I say that change is the constant. So as we want to change and is the game, AI will also have to do the same thing. It's going to mirror the human mind. So as long as the human mind is alert and knows what is right and wrong and what sells and doesn't sell, I think that's where AI is going to be the body. Otherwise it could disrupt in a different way. So interestingly, when you mentioned this, it's the human mind that will need to be even more agile, more active, more alert to be able to deal with the AI challenge as well. However, with everybody talking about replacements, departments being replaced by AI, replaced by chat GPT for that matter, we've seen a certain amount of, there is a mood of the industry that is shifting towards possibly a doom scenario. Now, in your own teams, how do you think these changes are impacting employee morale and engagement? Chopri, it will start with you. You wanted to address the earlier question as well. So kind of related to that itself, I think one very important aspect, and maybe I'm a bit of an idealist over here and again, old fashioned in my thinking, but a very, very important part of working in any organization and a very important part of public relations is relationships, right? I mean, at the end of the day, PR and PR team is the extended team of the Corpcom. The Corpcom is the extended team of the leadership. Okay, there's a relationship, that's a human relationship and AI cannot, it can maybe think like us, like maybe let's say what you were saying does end up happening, right? That they're thinking, AI is thinking faster, it already knows how I write, it knows how I think, it knows I'm gonna take it out and like give the information out. But there is something about sitting together and discussing what's the next steps that the AI cannot do. This thing about picking up the phone when a crisis goes and being able to call a CEO that you spent three years building a relationship with and saying, okay, you know what, I know you don't wanna hear this from me, but I need you to trust me and this is what we're gonna do. And that is a long-term relationship building that we do with our teams, that our teams do with the Corpcom, that we as leaders do with the leadership of our clients and that I don't think is going anywhere. And like I said, maybe I'm an idealist over here, but I genuinely don't think that can be really replaced. And I think that's a very, very core of how the journalism, journalist, client, or slash brand and PR agency relationship network works. Absolutely, that's invaluable. It's still very, very core and very solid. That's invaluable. Thank you for that, Dipti. I actually wanted to react to what was being said earlier first in terms of AI picking on our biases. I have actually, and I'm sure all of us have seen recently about a food company which tagged a police on something which was just supposed to be, I would say a tweet and jest and was kind of drum-rolled and we all know the consequences of it. That was done by human, not by AI. So it doesn't matter. I'm gonna be a little bit of devil's advocate here and say, let's not all blame AI as humans, we are just so perfect and we're just doing it so well. I mean, come on, there are the whole reason why somebody wants to get an AI or a program is to avoid these very jarring errors that humans are doing. And I had something very similar in my own company where instead of replying to a DM, an employee actually commented on a post which was there to view for all of our 10,000 followers and I had to immediately tell them, listen, this is what you've done. So there are examples of errors that humans have done that somewhere you can program an AI to say, listen, remove biases, you can do that to a program but you cannot just talk to a human being and tell them to remove biases, it doesn't happen. So we learn worse than what an AI does. So there are definite advantages and I think there is a higher chance of AI not having biases than humans not having biases. So that needs to be- Very well put, said, but I also want to address your question on loss of jobs. I am a startup, I started seven months ago and then we had to get an art director. My creative director said, no need, I'll handle it. I got my journey, our AI director is called Vaidehi, V-A-I-Dehi and he started putting out these creatives and it was fun, it was great, the client was approving, everything went very well and now work has increased. He has no time to put Vaidehi into action. We need an art director. So it's not like jobs are gonna, eventually the jobs are gonna be there. But yes, will it help a startup like me who might not be able to afford 10 people, fast track, then yes. But eventually I do need a graphic designer to use Vaidehi and to kind of put these creatives in a way that can be presented to clients respectively. So what I really think is, look, here's what it is. The way we all learned Instagram, whether we liked it or not is a different question, but we had to, we didn't have options. The problem is when we behave like AI does not exist. The problem is when we behave like we don't need to learn AI. Well, that's how the solution. I think there's this wonderful channel called overpower.ai, run by Tanmay Bhatt on Instagram. I really recommend everybody to follow it because every day there's a new tool that's coming up.  Those assets were not gonna get created without AI. It's not like that asset took anybody's job. Nobody is doing that anyway, right? No, absolutely. You're very right. It's leveled the playing field for, let's say a lot of firms, especially when it comes to small, mid-size, and boutique firms to be able to play the game, be in the game, so to say, reducing the need for a large workforce. But, you know, when you're talking about this, it kind of, this question comes to mind. There is a very strong need for a proper framework and guidelines for communicators and for our PR industry as a whole. While we all spoke about ethics, and ethics is still a very well-debated topic in the entire PR industry, and it's a very thin line. With AI coming in, I think there is still a very strong need for communicators to form a guideline for the entire PR professional community to follow and adhere to. So do you think this is something that should happen one? And who should be taking this up? Should this be the government or a PR-apics body? Rahul, would like your views on this first. Thank you. In fact, let's not miss the artificial in AI. Okay. Let's not miss that, that's important. And I think that the government, certainly any new technology, which has the potential of revolutionizing the way we work, the way we perform, and the way we interact, has to have a say of the government. It must be regulated. It cannot go unchecked. It has huge potential. It has huge potential. And as I'll agree with Dipti, that we have made mistakes and blunders. Every war and every act of violence is an example of the fact that we have not learned from our past. So we must learn from our past and we must not let AI go unregulated, unchecked. Whether it is self-regulation, whether there is a need for a regulation by the government, because if it is unchecked, there is every chance of this being misused. Chronic capitalism is against a mistake of the human mind, but it does exist. So we will have to be very careful on how AI is helping us. And so therefore I do not rule out the fact that the government must have a role. To, we must also see to it how democratic, is it in any way going to democratize the way we function? Whether it is within the organization or outside of the government? Does it democratize? Does it empower? If these two fundamental points are in our minds, I don't think AI, after all this artificial, will go as planned. Okay, okay. That's a very optimistic view of it. And it's like, I agree, it's like a child that is being taught and I hope we teach it better. But let's get down to your personal integration of tech into your work. So what are the three top three AI tools that you have personally used, you've been impressed with and you've integrated in your daily work? Shuprit, let's start with you on that. So we kind of rely on a couple of our internal tools quite a bit. One is called brand watch. It's like a social listening tool and I think that's like an everyday tool for us. So we use it to see what key things is our client's brand being resonated with and how do we need to bring about a change? We also use it for measurement before and after campaigns to see did we actually manage to achieve the result in terms of having that brand resonation come alive. We use it to see where the client's sentiment in the market is, positive, negative, neutral, how much is it changing? Emotions, what emotions are tied to the brand? So these are something, this is something we use pretty much on a daily basis when we're working for our clients and definitely one before coming up with campaign ideas to see what information does it give it and then also after campaigns to measure if we actually manage to do what we intended to do for a client. There's also something called GWI where we use it to break down audiences for us, to understand which audience is relevant for the client. What are the personas? What are they interested in? What is influencing them? Most importantly, we want to know where are they getting the information? Where are they consuming their content and what is actually influencing them to cause a behavior change and see how we can use those insights and create a campaign that is not just a campaign for being out there, for being loud but actually having a change that takes it from brand recall to brand relationship. I know my teams have used chat GPT to take out information. Let's make that a constant that everybody's been using chat GPT. So that's one of the tools that you integrated. Let's talk about the two other ones. We also have something called Influence Plus and that helps us. I mean, there again, for all of these tools and I think there's going to summarize what all of us have already been discussing. These are tools that we use but there's a huge amount of human intervention after that data pull out. So Influence Plus helps us find the right kind of influencer that doesn't mean only big influencers. It's not dependent upon following numbers. It's dependent upon relevance. But again, we do a lot of human intervention for the next round of filtering. Same for brand watch, same for GWI. So yeah, we I think already have a good mix of human AI integration going on. We of course want to take it to the next level. So let's see. So brilliant. So from you, it's GWI and brand watch, right? Brand watch and Influence Plus, yeah. Dipthi, what about you? Sorry, so you've taken chat GPT out of the equation. So I'm going to leave that. Pepper.ai, which is a tool to write, add copies is definitely something that we have used. It also helps in SEO. I think chat GPT also helps in SEO. So Pepper.ai definitely is one. In fact, I want to say that the, if you go to decisionpinackel.com and the first image that comes to you is actually AI generated. It's generated from a tool called DeepAI. It's a text to image generator. So what I very specifically wanted was chess pieces, glass chess pieces, purple tint, gold tint, and AI throughout the perfect image for me with a couple of rounds of iteration. So DeepAI, which is a text to image generator. And of course, there's mid-journey for all of our VTO and imaging. You have given us four. Rahul. We use writeSonic, which is the alternative to chat GPT and in some shades a little better. So, but first of all, let me say there is no organizational push towards any of the AI tools. So hence, I'm asking you personally because I know organizations as a whole are still resistant towards your... So we are not resistant. We are walking cautiously. Cautiously, okay. Let me put it cautiously then. The tools that you have been impressed with and have integrated into your life. WriteSonic is great. Okay. The other one is pitch prefer. That again is something that people can use. And third, I suggest this to the young one is don't hesitate using Grammarly. Yes, perfect. Can I just say thumbs up to that one journalist? Journalist, proper journalist, journalist. I think in those days we used to rely on Thesaurus.com quite a bit and I was so happy when Grammarly came out because I was the generation when the internet just came out. So yeah, thumbs up on that one. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Jagruti. Well, I would depend on all this through our agencies. So you provide the human intervention, right? Yes. I love the aggregators here. I'm confident it's very difficult to have all this on the system. So let me give you a different question. Let me give you a different question, right? So say you tell your leadership team, agencies, that the content that is being generated was or been submitted to them. It was done by AI. Will that level of transparency be acceptable without replacing departments or humans in India? Oh, of course.  So what they expect is not just a script, right? Someone has to speak that out, has to deliver. And I think that makes the whole difference. So it's easy to copy. But then how do you deliver it? And do you then intersperse that with stories, with personal experience, with emotions? That's something I think leaves to the human as of now, and I don't see it changing for at least a decade more. And I would love to see the fact that one day we all are sitting here, or maybe we are not, it's just the robots who are just answering and asking questions. Then I would wonder who's the audience? I leave it. Yeah. Interesting, yeah. Ditti, what about you? Would you give it out to the client that this has been generated by AI? This has been created by AI? Absolutely. And also, I'm on the client side sometimes. So it's a bit of a hybrid role that I play. And let's just say somebody tells, forget telling the client that it's AI. I go and tell the agency sometime, just create something out of AI. I don't have money to produce it by shooting. So it's also sometimes about the fact that you can produce more assets at a lower cost and you're perfectly fine using AI, machine technology, whatever is out there. Because I'm expected to produce new content on Instagram every day. Where is the money gonna come from? And we are in a content race game, whether we acknowledge it or not. So I'll take any help that comes my way. Fantastic. Now, Rahul and Shuprit as former journalists, while you might be fine with Grammarly because it corrects grammar. To be able to generate something, if you've seen chat GPT-4, it's absolutely brilliant or bad. I pretty much like that. So would you be open to letting your clients know that this content, this piece of content has been generated by AI? So see, I do, like I said, at the core of it lies the relationships. I do believe in being very, very transparent with clients. But the one thing I think I would never allow my team to do, and I don't think my team will do it as well, is plagiarize. So it's okay to use chat GPT for research and tell the client that, listen, we had 10 minutes. You wanted this information, we typed it in, we got all of this. This is what we filtered out is relevant. Let us know if something is missing. The whole point is to work together with your client as one team. So that's fine. If you've used, I think one of the tools that DP talked about, we've tried it out. We've not actually used it for a client, but we've sat and experimented with it, which is the text to image generator. And that really does throw out some really good results. And it is more efficient, more cost effective and impactful as well. And if we get an opportunity to use that for a client, we'll actually tell the client that we've tried it through this. Of course, this is the variation that a designer came out with and this is the variation we got out of an AI tool. Let us know what works. But what we have to do before we go to the client is ensure there isn't a duplicate copy outside. Someone else hasn't done the same thing. Make sure there's no plagiarism. Tool the plagiarism, let me come to that. That check we have. You and Rahul, I want the one tool that you would recommend others use to check for plagiarism. I've forgotten the name. There is something that most universities, even we used to choose where we would put essays in and it would dig out, maybe Rahul knows, but where it, and even during our copies and submission of story deadlines, it just pulls out sentences from the internet and they've been copy pasted. Even a sentence or a phrase. And then you filter out. See, sometimes you use a metaphor, which is a well-known metaphor. So that of course you'll ignore, but something that's directly copied. I've forgotten the name of it, but yeah, worst case scenario, do a simple Google search guys. Like it pops up for a client. But having said that boils down to the fact the team needs to know that your manager should not have to check. Like to a client, something plagiarized cannot go, something plagiarized cannot go on a live platform, cannot go to a newspaper, cannot go to a digital media. That's absolutely true. Rahul, back her up on this. The plagiarism. Yes, in fact, there are certain UGC recommended plagiarism tools with check, any copy that goes as a synopsis or a PhD or an infill article. So there are a couple of them. There are a couple of them. And plagiarism also, for the kind of literature that we develop, I think one glance and you can tell that whether it is plagiarized or not. So it is the human mind. Very subjective. So you need to give me one tool that you recommend for the PR industry that they must use this for plagiarism. There are a couple of them. I think I'll have to recollect. Give me some time. I will. Okay. So it doesn't come immediately to my mind. There are so many of them. There are so many of them. So after this session is over, Rahul, if you can go down to the comment section and give us a couple of recommendations, that'll be wonderful. Last question that could go to everybody. Think of this as a rapid fire because it seems like the next generation of PR professionals will need an entirely new skill set, right? So to wrap this up, I want to hear from each one of you on the panel. Your top three picks for new skills that the graduating class of 2024 needs to acquire. Dipti, we'll start with you. Three skills. I want to first say it's detect text. That's the AI tool to check if an article is written on GPD. That helps. I think the first and the most important thing that any class, not just PR, but any class will need is to understand that there is a reason why liberal arts is now the most taken course throughout the world. And that's because companies like Google, Microsoft, Intel are now going ahead and recruiting children who are studying liberal arts because if there's one thing you can't replicate through AI, it's humanness. So it's the empathy. It's the power of perception. So the human quotient or the HQ is definitely one skill to pick up, hone, continue to get better throughout life. The second is going to be integrity. End of the day, it doesn't matter which role you are in, the job you're playing, where you are at, which you're going to be known for your integrity for the rest of your career, just starting your career. And that kind of is a stamp that stays with you for the rest of your life. And the third and the most important is have fun. Don't take yourself so seriously. We've all, on this esteemed panel, made mistakes, learned from it and been here after that. So have fun. But just make sure that it is not at the cost of integrity. Awesome. Jamrati, please. Well, yeah, being authentic, I think that's very, very important for me and I would want my team or my students to definitely be authentic. Second is emotions or EQ because in today's world that is the differentiator, the real differentiator and especially in the topic that we are discussing. And third, to have the prudence, to take the right shots. Okay, Rahul. One would be willingness to learn and reinvent oneself. I think that that is something that I would recommend. The second would be close to what Deepthi said, empathy. Right. Third, I would recommend, and that is a dying art, is read. I love that. But read the book, not GPT. Shabri. So I think recently I did a LinkedIn post on one of my first bosses who was my editor at Economic Times. And there I had mentioned that real confidence actually comes from being freely open to learn more and knowing that you don't know everything. So for me, the first one would be confidence but actual confidence. Confidence, not that I know everything. Confidence that I don't know everything and I think that's a very important attitude to have be it in a PR job, any job. Second is integration. I think integration skills in the day and age of today's PR are very important. And the second you'll realize that you need to know what integrated PR offerings are. Then tools like AI or social media coming up or digital media coming up or video production coming up is not gonna scare you. You're gonna try and understand each and every one of them and figure out how to work it into the ecosystem. And the third is most importantly work ethic. So I think when you have the right work ethic, then on your own, you don't take shortcuts. On your own, wrong information will not know. On your own, you'll be honest to your client, you'll be honest to your lead, you'll be honest with your teams, you'll be collaborative with your teams. So yeah, I think those are the three things I kind of look for when I'm hiring as well. These are the three skills. Absolutely lovely to have these skill sets put out here. None of you mentioned a tech skill or an AI skill to be put out there. Can I say something on that? I genuinely believe that if the person has the, anyone has the intent to work, they will pick up the skills that are needed. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we will all focus on developing the human behind the AI, the human behind the computer. And it's lovely to have all of you share these views and these skill sets, because I think these are the ones that will actually define how the entire PR industry also moves forward with the next generation of workforce that comes in. So fantastic. Thank you for this vibrant discussion. This is an ongoing discussion. I know it's a never ending one, but I do hope we see AI integration in PR, creating a future where we have to do less grant work and let the humans do the big picture thinking. And making sure that the gray, the old, the vintage wins. Awesome. Over to you, Karan. Thank you so much, Tarun. Thank you. Thank you so much to all our panelists. Thank you so much, Tarunji, for moderating that. Thank you. You can have also a better start to the day. Thank you so much. Awesome. The pleasure is ours. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, everyone.