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Background
Green Dot Public Schools is a network of charter schools serving students across Los Angeles, CA. Known for their innovative approach to education, Green Dot schools prioritize academic rigor, student equity, and educator empowerment.
Instructional coaches Bonnie Gonzalez (Math) and Liz Borum (ELA) are two such leaders. They support multiple schools within the network, including Oscar De La Hoya Ánimo Charter High School (ODH)—an early adopter of AI-driven teaching tools through MagicSchool.
Challenges
While many teachers were curious about AI, few felt confident using it in practical ways. Some were even skeptical.
“AI felt taboo at first. There was fear it would replace teachers or promote cheating. Our challenge was to reframe that narrative,” Gonzalez explained.
On top of the mindset shift, coaches were spending precious time walking teachers through repetitive planning tasks—creating rubrics, unpacking standards, and modeling lessons they didn’t always have the background knowledge for.
“ELA teachers, for example, needed exemplars for academic monitoring,” said Borum. “But that’s hard when you don’t have hours to write one—or when you haven’t read the text yet.”
The need for support was clear. But the real opportunity? Transforming that support into strategy—and giving teachers their time back.
Solutions
Borum and Gonzalez began by offering professional development that introduced teachers to MagicSchool’s AI teaching tools and reframed AI as a planning assistant—not a replacement.
“That shifted teachers’ thinking,” said Gonzalez. “It was the first layer where we were like, it’s not taboo. Let’s shift your thinking and start to have you explore on your own.”
Teachers quickly adopted teaching tools like the Rubric Generator, especially valuable in a standards-based grading model. “The tool that our teachers use the most is probably the rubric generator,” said Borum. “The one thing that is really helpful is when it creates the rubric, it attaches it to a curriculum standard. Because not all of our teachers have the time to do that manually.”
MagicSchool also helped Borum support lesson planning in unfamiliar content areas. “I was able to download the PDF and upload it into MagicSchool AI, and then I asked it to come up with an exemplar and a non-exemplar,” she said. “That allowed me to model an effective side-by-side for a teacher, even though I hadn’t read the story.”
Gonzalez shared that teachers at ODH began arriving at planning sessions with the pre-work already done. “They’ve already used the Standards Unpacker Tool. What they use it for is, how can I make more creative activities?”
She also noted the difference between campuses that adopted MagicSchool and those that had not. “At ODH, I can skip the prep and go straight into student work. At other campuses, I’m still spending the time making sure they have a mastery response or a no-show chart. I just got to a point where I’m like, 'We have a MagicSchool tool for that.’”
Even non-core teachers saw the value. “An art teacher said she used Raina, MagicSchool’s Education-specific chatbot, to help her generate a guiding question, and it gave her a better response than she expected,” Gonzalez recalled. “She ended up changing her lesson because of it.”
MagicStudent, MagicSchools student-facing solution that helps students build essential AI literacy skills in a safe and monitored environment, also showed early promise. “The writing feedback tool is the thing that excites English teachers the most,” said Borum. “Even when I'm grading essays, they're not getting the essay back for a while because I’ve got 150 to grade. This tool is helpful because every kid's getting that immediate feedback.”
By embedding MagicSchool into both planning and coaching, Borum and Gonzalez have seen a real shift—not just in how teachers approach lesson prep, but in the quality of conversations happening around instruction and student learning.
“It’s more along the lines of, let’s go beyond planning and do more with it,” said Gonzalez.
With MagicSchool, the Green Dot team is proving that when educators are equipped with the right teaching tools—and the right support—AI becomes less about saving time and more about what that time makes possible.
