Priten: Welcome to Margin of Thought, where we make space for the questions that matter. I'm your host, Priten, and together we'll explore questions that help us preserve what matters while navigating what's coming.
Today we're joined by Brian Marusy, an educator working with students with cognitive impairment. Brian brings a unique perspective shaped by years of teaching special education in international contexts. He's witnessed firsthand how the pandemic disrupted student development in ways we're still trying to understand.
In our conversation, Brian grapples with one of the central tensions of our time: How do we harness AI's potential to enhance accessibility and student expression while remaining vigilant about its ethical implications? This is a conversation about hope and caution, and about believing in technology's promise without losing sight of its risks.
Let's begin.
Brian: My name's Brian Marusy. Nice to meet you, by the way. I work at Niles High School. This year I work in a classroom that is a federally funded classroom. I work with students who are cognitively impaired in grades 9 to 12, preparing them either for the workforce or—in the state of Michigan—they have access to education till they're 26. So it depends.
My background is varied. A little plug for Jess Madry—I think you know about me through Jessica Madry. My wife and I worked with Jess in Abu Dhabi for a couple of years. I worked overseas as an educator for about 20 years. I worked in rural development and community development in microfinance as another part of my career. So I've worked here in the United States and worked overseas in a variety of positions, all with the aim of seeing communities develop. That's my mission in life—whether it's with students or adults.
Priten: Very cool. Those are all getting to the same larger mission, but it's a very varied career path. What started your interest in education, and specifically in working with students with cognitive impairments?
Brian: I run a program here called Peer-to-Peer. Outside of this classroom, I run a program that gets high school students working with students with various learning challenges in my school district. When I was a senior in high school, I did a very similar program, which led me to getting my degree in special education. That led to me working in Abu Dhabi, in Poland, in Penang, Malaysia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uzbekistan. Because I teach special ed and have a degree in special ed, I've broadened my view of development. But I genuinely desire to see different learners—at whatever age level—develop and be able to be productive citizens wherever they're at.
Priten: Those are all very different contexts. I'd love to hear more. I'd like to ask folks about their own memory of an EdTech tool as a student. When was the first time there was a technology tool—however you want to define it—used in your classroom?
Brian: When I was in junior and senior high school, I was friends with students who were learning coding on the TRS 80, which was a Radio Shack computer. That was my first exposure, though I didn't code. They did. As far as my own education, I was always early with Google, no matter what Google was. When I went to university and got my degree and my master's in community economic development in 2003, I was connected to whatever Google was. That was my first real introduction. Then, when I moved to Penang, Malaysia for seven years, I became an EdTech teacher. For me, EdTech brings about access to the curriculum. It provides genuine avenues to access the curriculum more fully and richly, if used the way it should be.
Priten: That's what I'd love to talk about today. I'd love to hear about what EdTech tools you've used in the past—specifically pre-pandemic—and then we can talk about what it's looked like post-pandemic. Especially in your role as a tech teacher in Malaysia.
Brian: Pre-pandemic, when I was an EdTech teacher from 2006 to 2012, everything was Microsoft because we were a Microsoft school at the time. This was at the edge of when Google was looking to get involved in classrooms. I became very enthusiastic about spreadsheets as a way to communicate, so Google Sheets—when it was new—was about getting students to convey information visually. I had students using surveys through Google Forms to create visualizations when nobody was doing surveys in Google Forms. Sixth and eighth graders collected information about favorite ice cream via Facebook and got 1,500 responses from around the world. That was about getting students to understand how they could take dry data and create it visually to make it more informative to people around them.
Microsoft had a tool where you could create small videos with pictures and use that to convey stories. It was quirky and difficult to use because everything Microsoft was quirky and challenging for me then.
As far as apps go, I was in Uzbekistan in 1992 teaching English as a second language at Somercon State University. I was going back to basics with office tools—word processing when nobody had a word processor there. I had a portable printer that nobody had. My 20-megabyte laptop, which was huge at the time, used OmniPro, I believe, which is now gone.
From the time I was an educator in Uzbekistan through my time in Congo, working in microfinance, I was creating PDFs and telling stories about working moms who were very, very poor and had access to banking through our organization. Working in Uzbekistan and then in Penang, Malaysia, what I used was rudimentary compared to now. There were different apps on flash drives before the cloud really came about. My later apps were more skill-based because I worked with programs for behaviorally challenged kids in Maine, then in Abu Dhabi and Poland, finding whatever was available to help kids access the curriculum.
I became very fond of speech-to-text in any form. Helper Bird was an app I used a lot that's broad in what it offers. Helper Bird was before COVID. Moat came about at the very beginning of COVID.
Priten: That's perfect. I'd love to hear what the transition to the pandemic looked like. What role were you in during the pandemic?
Brian: I was a special education teacher in 2020 when it began. In March, I was a special ed teacher at the American International School of Abu Dhabi. During the pandemic, we had three months of classes that were primarily online until the very end of school. I was an inclusion teacher there, assisting students in other classes to accommodate the curriculum. I was doing cleanup work and trying to get students online and able to see their faces, helping them access their classes and what the teachers were presenting through primarily Google Classroom and using whatever the Google Suite was using to support them. That was my primary use in Abu Dhabi.
I moved to Poland in July, and I headed up the special ed department at ISK, the International School of Kraków. It served K to 12, so the younger ones in K through three were always at school, whereas grades three to five and six to twelve went on a cycle: if there was a case of COVID, they went home, and after 10 days, everyone would come back. That cycle continued on and off throughout that school year.
Telling stories through Google Slides became more of a possibility at that time because Google Slides started allowing different formats of sound files. That was a particular means I used at ISK during COVID that first year.
Priten: How did your students react to the virtual environment? My younger brother has Down syndrome, and that last year of his schooling was his final year in New York. The state provides schooling through age 21. He really struggled—both in fully understanding what was going on and with the huge social component of schooling. That social environment was hard for him to digest. I'm curious: was that a unique experience, or what kinds of experiences did you see?
Brian: What your brother experienced was something a lot of folks were experiencing. It's compounded when there are delays in development. What I saw during COVID was that the kids who were younger and could still come to school—like in Kraków, Poland—weren't as impacted. The school had new routines of washing hands and wearing masks, but the interaction, particularly outside, was the same. They were still playing with each other. Poland had different ways of dealing with COVID than other countries, so they were more less restrictive, especially outside.
But yes, there were delays. I would say it wasn't so much the during—although it was impacted during—but the ongoing impact from that one to two years of not interacting. I've seen that across the board wherever I go. That's my qualitative perspective on it.
Priten: I think that's something we've heard a lot about. Even teachers at older grade levels are seeing students struggle, especially during transitions. When you see a fresh batch of middle school students come into high school—students who had early middle school or late elementary school years during the pandemic—they're developmentally in a different spot. Both in terms of maturity and motivation to be in school.
Brian: All of their executive functioning skills have been impacted and experientially delayed. It's because of missing windows of development when they would've been together at school.
Priten: Right. So now, post-pandemic, let's specifically talk about the AI space. What have you seen be helpful to increase accessibility of the curriculum and of the school in general? And what do you see as challenges you're currently facing?
Brian: Are you asking about me or the general teacher population at my school?
Priten: I'd love to hear both, but let's start with just you.
Brian: Alright. Since I tend to be close to first in with technology in general—I'm not right there, but I'm pretty close—I'm not a coder, but I'm a user. When ChatGPT first came out, I was in Kraków in 2022, and I said, "Well, holy cow, I can summarize a book." For students who have a really difficult time accessing reading—students with dyslexia, students with specific learning disabilities in reading—this could help.
I remember ChatGPT going on an extended period where it was hallucinating. It was so off but telling me things in an accurate format about a book summary. I learned quickly that AI is not accurate all the time and to question AI's validity and accuracy all the time. But I did see the advantages from the get-go. I can do things with this, and as it's grown, it can help me think through things better as a teacher.
Now, I'm a fan of Notebook LLM because I have pages of standards I need to utilize as a teacher and pages of elements of teaching from Marzano that I need to demonstrate. Notebook LLM and Brisk have both been go-tos for me to say, "Okay, here's a bunch of information." With Notebook LLM, I can dump a bunch of stuff in there, but the time it takes me to format my prompt—because I know what I want it to say and what I want it to do—sometimes makes me think, "Could I have done that on my own in less time?" Most times, yes. But there's a lot of time spent learning prompting without just using my own knowledge. I'm always looking for new go-to prompts that other people have found, but those seem to be hit-or-miss—sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they're just clickbait.
I see it as beneficial to me as a teacher for developing lesson plans. I've got six preps and another set of preps for Peer-to-Peer, so seven total. It's mind-bending, and AI helps me eliminate the chaff of 20 pages of a PDF to focus on what matters. Brisk is good at coming up with lesson plans that are usable, but they need a lot of formatting. It gives me a very rough draft that I can tinker with and make my own.
As far as teachers at my particular school here at Niles High School, I see no specific direction from the board yet. Everybody's on their own. You have specific things about what students can produce and promoting authenticity, but every teacher is on their own as far as how to determine authenticity. It's not a criticism; it's just that things keep changing, and it's hard to come up with a unified way of approaching things when it's a moving target. That's my experience.
Students are avid users of AI. That's just a qualitative perspective. The students in my classroom, though, are not avid users yet. They're good at gaming, but I don't see them accessing AI in general. Perplexity is also something I use a lot. I don't use ChatGPT; I use Perplexity as my go-to AI.
Priten: That's perfect. I'm curious to hear what you see as the next steps for the integration of AI within your classroom. Obviously, a lot of this is going to be dictated by state policy and district policy, but in terms of the most promising things that you think can happen in the next few years, what excites you?
Brian: What excites me is that Google has a text-to-speech feature. I know some students are users of it. The students I work with are between 14 and 19 years old. AI is going to help them be expressive about what they know. My hope is that it will be able to capture what they're thinking when they speak about it. I've got students with lots of different dialects and tones. There are various challenges in how they communicate, so being able to broaden what they're thinking with what they say means they can speak credibly and be able to capture what they're thinking credibly. They can have discussions about what they're thinking.
The idea of typing is difficult for them. Speaking to AI versus typing prompts into AI is very different. Because they're avid game learners and able to adapt to the formats games give them, I truly believe AI will adapt in a similar way and be able to make course corrections. That's one hope I have.
And at the same time, it scares the bejeebers out of me because they're talking to something that can talk back. Who are the creators of that, and what are their ethics behind it that give it its mind? The plus side is that they will be able to create and draw and do things they never could have dreamed about in their life. The drawback is how they can be drawn into things they would never have been drawn into before. That could be life-changing positively, or it could be life-changing detrimentally.
Priten: Yeah, I think those are concerns I share as well. When you think about that potential for there to be a mix of experiences that students have on a daily basis, what do you think the educator's role is in trying to keep it on the positive side and away from the detrimental side?
Brian: I describe my position like this: yes, I'm a teacher, but I'm a curator of development. That's how I see myself. I believe in what I believe, in the sense that I truly want them to access the curriculum. The state mandates that, and those mandates are a lot less flexible than AI ever will be. I'm bound by those mandates as a teacher, but I'm creative in doing that.
I believe teachers' jobs are important. We are vetted considerably. That doesn't mean there aren't bad apples out there—there are. But I believe I'm a good apple, and the vast majority are good apples who want to see positive outcomes for students. I see myself as a curator of development. With the students I work with, I know they're developmentally delayed. I know some of those delays will continue to develop after they leave my classroom, whether they go to another classroom or into the workforce. It's my job as a curator to get them set up as best as possible to access that development.
Priten: Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time today to talk with me. I have not yet spoken to a teacher working in special education, if I'm not mistaken. So I'm glad I got to hear your perspective. The potential for the accessibility piece is one I think is one of the most promising and exciting parts of this. There are some folks talking about what they think is utopian but what I think is dystopian ideas of education. I think one of the first interventions we can make is with the accessibility piece, because that feels like a much better starting place than some of these other ideas. So I'm glad we got a chance to talk.
Brian: Wonderful. Thanks so much.
Priten: Take care.
Speaker 2: Thank you to Brian for that conversation. Brian reminded us that technology and education isn't one-size-fits-all. It requires context-dependent decision making that honors the complexity of our classrooms and our students. His optimism about AI's accessibility features, balanced with his deep concern for ethical implementation, captures the tension many educators are navigating right now.
As we continue this season, keep listening as we explore how thoughtful educators are making these difficult choices in real time. And for help navigating context-dependent decisions, order my book "Ethical Ed Tech" at ethicaledtech.org.
Priten: Thanks for listening to Margin of Thought. If this episode gave you something to think about, subscribe, rate, and review us. Also, share it with someone who might be asking similar questions. You can find the show notes, transcripts, and my newsletter at priten.org. Until next time, keep making space for the questions that matter.