Middle school English teacher Michele Haiken knows how important it is for students to find and be comfortable with their voice, especially in their writing.
With the rise of generative artificial intelligence, which can generate English-class essays faster than humans, it’s even more important to remind students that “their thinking is what is valued when we think about writing,” said Haiken, who teaches in the Rye City school district in New York. “Student voice is what matters and what counts.”
Schools and districts across the country are trying to figure out what role AI should play in the classroom, while also dealing with growing concerns about the ubiquitous presence of digital technology in kids’ lives.
One way Haiken is addressing this concern is by helping students develop critical thinking skills when using technology. Education Week interviewed Haiken about this topic ahead of her presentation at the ISTELive 26 + ASCD annual conference held in Orlando, Fla., from June 28 to July 1.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What does it look like to center students’ thinking in the classroom?
When we’re using AI in a savvy way to support our students, we have to be critical close readers of it, in order to get the prompt right, in order to read the output and see if that’s what we wanted. That critical thinking is so important with using AI, because we can’t just be consumers of AI and accept what it’s giving us. We need to be able to read it, question it, revise and resubmit if we need to. All of those critical thinking skills that we as educators are already using, we want to impart to our own students when they’re using AI.
How do you do that with or without tech tools?
In my middle school, we use MagicSchool AI. I’ve done a customized bot for my students, where I’ve programmed the bot when we were doing a creative writing unit, to respond in a way that’s going to give feedback but not the answer, so that students can start to utilize it with guardrails to become better writers, to ask for feedback, to critically consider the feedback that they’re getting, and whether they want to accept it or not, to elevate their own creative writing.
There are activities that are tried, trusted, and true that we don’t necessarily need technology for that really bolster and build students’ critical thinking, like hexagonal thinking, where you give the students categories based on a topic and they have to put together physically how they connect, and then writing about those connections. One group can have a totally different answer than another group, as long as they’re providing their reasoning to support those claims, which builds the groundwork for that critical thinking that they need.
How do you talk to your students about using tech in a responsible way?
When we’re writing and editing, I always say: Your voice first, then phone a friend or a teacher, then third, maybe go to AI, and then come back and think and focus on your voice. But always go for human feedback before we jump on AI.
AI can help throughout the writing process for students, and that’s something that I’m looking at closely. But I want to really bring my students’ voice to the forefront of my classroom.
What’s a challenge teachers are facing when it comes to building students’ critical thinking skills today?
There is a group of parents coming in who don’t want 1-to-1 anymore, or don’t want their kid online as much playing too many ed-tech games, accessing AI, and we have to just see how that rolls out.
I’m not somebody who believes in going backwards. I want my students to be proficient readers, proficient writers, able to creatively communicate across all mediums. We live in a world where we get information through podcasts, videos, images, as well as print and digital text, so I want my students to be able to not only read all those texts closely and critically, I want them to be able to create those types of texts, as well.
We learn best by experience, not by being talked to. So when somebody is telling you what to do, that doesn’t stick as much as when kids are involved in scenarios, experiences, interactions. That’s what they need in order to work with AI and be the savvy critical thinkers that we need for the world today and beyond.
Do you have advice for other teachers navigating this challenge?
Teachers need to play around themselves, experience and try it out, and consider how they can use it with their students to support their students’ literacy learning and tip the scale where human thinking is still the majority. We can use AI as a thought partner, absolutely, but when AI is doing most of the thinking, that’s when we’ve lost our voice. So it’s about maintaining the teacher voice and the student voice.
