Building AI Study Partners and Teaching Assistant Agents: Creating Safe, Practical Tools with ChatGPT and Brisk

AI teaching and learning tools have advanced rapidly, giving teachers a realistic opportunity to provide personalized practice, guided review, and instructional support without adding to their workload. This session shows educators how to build two kinds of AI tools using platforms they already know: student-facing AI Study Partners that interact with students to deepen disciplinary knowledge and/or practice new skills, and teacher-facing Teaching Assistant Agents that are customized and automated to assist teachers with everyday tasks. Teachers will also learn to develop customized Study Partners (GPTs) to prompt deeper thinking, offer hints rather than answers, identify misconceptions, ask follow-up questions, provide scaffolding, and guide practice without giving away the work. Using ChatGPT to create the “instructional intelligence” (i.e., logic, tone, workflows) and Brisk to perform document-level actions and analysis, teachers will also learn how to design safe, customized Teaching Assistant Agents that will help teachers perform everyday tasks such as generating feedback, creating differentiated practice materials, transforming readings, planning lessons, drafting parent communications, and producing class-wide summaries or reteaching recommendations. Integrate these tools safely and ethically, reinforcing curriculum and academic integrity. Attendees will leave with a functioning student-facing Study Partner, a teacher-facing Assistant Agent, and simple templates they can adapt for their own purposes, with practical, easy-to-implement tools that enhance human teaching and learning.