The Education Professional Standards Board (EPSB) heard about the launch of a new artificial intelligence (AI) agent called Ask Diego during its meeting on Dec. 16. The agent will be used on the GoTeachKY website.
Marty Park, chief digital officer in the Kentucky Department of Education’s (KDE’s) Office of Education Technology, explained that Diego primarily functions as a triage and navigational tool and can answer questions from website visitors. While answering, the agent provides direct links to the GoTeachKY website, providing visitors with additional resources and supports.
Additionally, the AI agent is helping KDE team members with deeper understanding on what visitors are asking and how KDE can help continue to remove the friction on teacher retention and recruitment.
Park explained that Diego is helping better identify that most visitors to the site are not current, standard-pathway teachers. Rather, many visitors are interested in career changes or are out-of-state transfers, lapsed teachers or international applicants.
He explained that visitors often look for paths into teaching that fit their situation, and so far, Diego has gotten many questions related to emergency certificates and ways to get into teaching without going back to school. He said Diego can help prospective teachers to find the best way into teaching in Kentucky.
Diego only uses information on the GoTeachKY website for the knowledgebase, instead of outside sources. Park said Diego has had more than 500 interactions in the past 90 days.
Educator Preparation Provider Spotlight
Members of the EPSB also heard presentations from two educator preparation providers during its meeting.
Educator preparation programs are structured courses of study designed to equip aspiring teachers with the necessary skills to teach. Since August, the EPSB has been spotlighting Kentucky’s educator preparation providers and highlighting the innovative practices occurring within these programs across the Commonwealth.
Todd McCardle, interim associate director of the School of Education at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU), makes a presentation to the Education Professional Standards Board. Photo by Hope Cole, Kentucky Department of Education, Dec. 16, 2025
Eastern Kentucky University
Todd McCardle, interim associate director of the School of Education at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU), explained that 85% of its students are from Kentucky, and they are happy to serve multiple under-represented populations.
“We’re proud that two-thirds of our students (are first-generation college students),” McCardle said. “Another thing that we’re proud of is this is the third year of growth in our underrepresented minority student population.”
Educator preparation efforts span across two colleges at the university, the School of Education and the School of Applied Human Sciences.
EKU’s largest program is the elementary education program, while its newest program is the online bachelor of science in elementary education program.
The EKU team recently received the Frank Murray Leadership Award for Continuous Improvement through the Council for the Accreditation for Educator Preparation. The Frank Murray Leadership Recognition for Continuous Improvement is awarded to 22 educator preparation providers that achieved accreditation with no stipulations or areas for improvement by demonstrating strong evidence and data trends.
McCardle said one of the university’s strategic plans this year is to intensify its collaboration with its Model Laboratory School.
The Model Laboratory School at EKU is Kentucky’s only public teaching lab for grades P-12. It offers a hands-on learning experience for EKU students, allowing them to apply their education with students from pre-K through 12th grade. The school helps to address Kentucky’s teacher shortage by providing training and research opportunities in several fields, including education, nursing and occupational therapy.
McCardle said this year they started a cohort from their elementary education program where education students are taking professional education core courses on the Model Laboratory School’s campus. They embedded clinical experiences within those courses, to where students are doing the course and the clinical experiences inside the course at the same time. EKU started it with two courses this semester, and McCardle said they’ve received great feedback so far.
EKU is actively engaged with 77 school districts in the state. They frequently hold partnership events and collaborations on Model’s campus, including speeches, presentations, fairs and assessments.
One of the Kentucky Board of Education’s and KDE’s goals is to advance statewide efforts to support educators in the implementation of high-quality literacy and numeracy instruction. McCardle said EKU is working to implement new numeracy requirements based on the Kentucky Numeracy Counts Act. They have a numeracy team with math education professors, math department professors and two clinical educators.
EKU changed the assessment system across the college of education to require all students in student-teaching semesters to upload a lesson video and a post-observation. The numeracy team will be reviewing data from these videos. For the fall, they will review videos from 73 candidates and in the spring they will review 100 candidates. They will plan a research study based off reviews of the videos, and detail what EKU is doing to meet numeracy requirements.
University of Pikeville
Coletta Parsley, dean of the Patton College of Education at the University of Pikeville, said that the college’s guiding theme in teaching about education is “unified in the pursuit of excellence in teaching and learning.”
“We integrate our theme into our vision and mission so that our students are always aware that excellence in teaching and learning is at the center of what we do,” Parsley said. “Our quality assurance system is based on continuous improvement. We have multiple measures, evidence-based strategies and stakeholder involvement.”
Pikeville offers teacher education programs that lead to initial teacher certification at the elementary, middle grades or secondary levels. They also offer a master’s degree in teacher leadership.
Pikeville was the other state recipient of the Frank Murray Award from the Council for the Accreditation for Educator Preparation for having no areas for improvement or stipulations.
Parsley said the school’s model of undergraduate teacher certification program is inspired by the university’s iconic “99 steps.” During a ceremony at the beginning of each school year, freshman are led up the 99 steps by the university president to signify the beginning of their journey at the school.
The teacher certification program has three steps: full admission to undergraduate teacher education program for Clinical 1; admission to Clinical 2 for student teaching, and teacher educator program exit.
During Clinical 1, which is the first semester of an education student’s senior year, teacher candidates in the undergraduate teacher education programs get acclimated to being in the classroom before they start student teaching. They spend half-days with assigned cooperating teachers to acclimate them to the students, classroom procedures and other teachers in the school. They return to the university for coursework for half-days.
Clinical 2 is traditional student teaching completed during the last semester of the program.
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