By Nicole Leachman
Within the last five years, artificial intelligence (AI) has morphed from being a motif of science fiction to a ubiquitous part of everyday life, simultaneously altering the educational landscape. Tools like ChatGPT, Magic School, Grammarly, Diffit, and Kahnmigo have changed the way that both teachers and students approach learning. Many educators are still skeptical of these tools, yet it is clear that generative AI is here to stay. Consequently, the question is no longer if we should use AI, but how we can incorporate it into our classrooms. To do this, we must shift our mindsets to understand that artificial intelligence isn’t here to replace educators; it’s here to support us in powerful, practical ways. In order to move into the future, educators must embrace AI as a tool while preparing students to do the same.
Lesson Planning Made Easier
Prior to this past fall, I was a high school teacher who was a bit skeptical of AI. I had reservations about the ethical implications of using these tools to do a job that I had trained for years to do. Was I doing my students a disservice by using chatbots to help plan my lessons? I knew that my expertise would be superior to what any bot could create, so while I would definitely use AI for some generic idea generation, I was loath to rely on it too heavily.
And then I had a baby, and he absolutely hated sleeping. Suddenly, I became willing to try whatever tool could help me to maintain my standard of teaching, while also saving precious time–after all, my evenings weren’t my own anymore.
As any teacher knows, it takes an incredible amount of time to develop strong, standards-aligned lessons and activities that are engaging for students. AI can help with this, creating material in seconds that would have previously taken hours to generate. For example, this past spring my students were reading 1984 by George Orwell. When we reached the incredibly dense book-within-the-book, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, I knew that my students would need additional scaffolding and support to understand it; I wanted an in-class activity that we could use to work through the text in groups, rather than having them slog through it independently and miss out on the significance of the content. So what did I do? I went to ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT to design a standards-aligned jigsaw activity that helped students to break down Goldstein’s ideas in plain language and connect them to the themes of 1984. In less than a minute, I had a thought-provoking group task that not only guided students in their understanding of the texts, but also felt very Orwellian itself in nature. Could I have come up with something like this on my own? Absolutely. Would it have taken hours that I truly didn’t have at my disposal? Also true. If the students were learning, did it truly matter where the activity came from? I decided not.
The AI planning possibilities are truly endless. Need ideas about how to sequence an upcoming unit? How about a bell-ringer to formatively assess what you taught the previous day? Trying to come up with discussion questions for a Socratic seminar between classes? Need to differentiate a lesson for lower-level and higher-level learners? Want some help figuring out what feedback to give a student on a particularly rough essay draft? Need a quick rubric for an assignment? Generative AI can do all of this for you in a matter of seconds.
To be clear, this doesn’t mean that teachers must sacrifice their professional judgement and skills — we still are the authorities in our classroom who know what works best for our students. To be honest, the AI needs your expertise to accomplish the tasks you ask of it: the better your prompt, the better your product. You must be specific about standards, student needs, and desired outcomes in order to get a quality output. AI can simply do all this more quickly, which ultimately allows you to focus your time on things that the algorithm can’t do, such as cultivating a classroom community and providing one-on-one instruction and feedback to your students.
Teaching Students Responsible AI Use
Whether we like it or not, the world is changing as AI advances. It’s not going away, and students will continue to turn to it for support. As such, we have a responsibility to prepare them for that world. We must explicitly teach students how to use AI ethically, responsibly, and effectively. At Compass PD, we pride ourselves on evidence-based practice and know that the research on AI’s use in classrooms is desperately trying to keep up with the changing landscape. Since secondary students have multiple opportunities outside of school to interact with AI, we recommend responsible AI use with secondary students.
First, we must teach students that tools such as ChatGPT are not perfect and the information they provide is not always reliable. They are trained through data that is input into the model and information that they find on the internet. As such, chatbots can output incorrect information or perpetuate biases inherent in the data they have been given. Students need to become accustomed to verifying information using other sources. Speaking of data input, we additionally need to expressly teach students about data privacy and the dangers of inputting personal information into these engines.
Second, one of an educator’s greatest frustrations regarding students’ use of AI is academic dishonesty. Moving into the future, departments and districts need to have a collective commitment on what exactly that means. If that hasn’t happened yet, individual teachers should clarify what kinds of AI use are allowed within their classroom. Can students use artificial intelligence to:
These boundaries need to be clearly communicated to students.
Once we have established these boundaries, we should guide students in using AI to enhance their learning. We can craft lessons in which the expectation is that they use AI, not as a replacement for their work, but as a tool. If students are writing essays, they can paste their work and the rubric into the chatbot and ask how to improve their writing. If they’re learning a complex scientific process, maybe they ask the chatbot how to break it down into more simplistic terms to aid in their understanding. If they’re practicing math skills, the AI could generate a list of similar problems for them to solve. By doing this, we are preparing students for the world they will enter after graduation, rather than attempting to shelter them from it. Isn’t that what school is all about?
Conclusion
As AI continues to evolve, educators will determine how it will impact the learning environment. Like any tool, the power lies in how we use it. If we approach AI with intention, we can positively impact student learning into the future.