Artificial intelligence is changing the job of teaching.
That’s according to an overwhelming majority (90 percent) of educators surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center in December.
And nearly all—97 percent—said they expect AI to change the job of teaching at least a little over the next five years, according to the nationally representative survey of 990 teachers, principals, and district administrators.
Whether the rapidly evolving technology will have a positive or negative impact on teaching and learning is still unclear. Experts have talked up generative AI’s potential to transform education into a more personalized experience, but skeptics are concerned about its biases, its tendency to fabricate responses, and its potential effects on human creativity and cognition.
Still, some teachers have started to experiment with the technology, and a small but growing number are even using AI tools regularly in their daily work.
Education Week talked to three veteran teachers who have incorporated AI into their everyday practice. For them, using AI has been a big timesaver and has made a notoriously high-stress, high-responsibility job more manageable.
Here’s how each teacher uses the technology in their work.
A high school science teacher uses AI to generate quiz questions
When a colleague told her about ChatGPT in the early days of its introduction in late 2022, Amanda Pierman was “so upset” and “mortified” by the thought of students using a robot to do all their thinking. Now, the high school science teacher at the Benjamin School, a private P-12 school in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., says her AI use has become ubiquitous in her daily life.
“I think many teachers had that huge gut reaction because they didn’t understand that it could be used in a positive way,” said Pierman, who is also the technology-integration specialist for the school.
After learning more about and playing around with generative AI, Pierman has found many ways to use the technology in her work, giving her more brainpower and brain space.
For example, Pierman now uses ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools, like Brisk Teaching, Quizizz, and EdPuzzle, to generate quiz and test questions.
Before using AI, Pierman had access to one bank of questions, tied to the textbook, that she would pull from. Each chapter has about 150 questions or more, and she would sort through every single question, choose the ones she wanted students to answer, and modify questions as needed. It took her seven to 10 hours to make one test, she said.
With the help of generative AI tools, crafting an exam now takes 40 minutes. She can put the exam topics into the tool and prompt it to generate multiple-choice questions and even ask it to mix up the questions so students have different versions.
AI tools have also helped her grade multiple-choice questions, including short-answer ones, Pierman said. For short-answer questions, the AI-generated feedback is a starting point for Pierman, and then she adds her own “glows and grows,” or what students did well and what they need to improve.
With AI taking those tasks off her plate, “I don’t get burnt out as much,” she said.
Pierman also uses generative AI tools to generate questions about videos students are assigned to watch, figure out whether a video is worth watching, and make quick changes to her lesson plans.
The science teacher also uses Merlyn Mind, an AI-powered voice assistant that allows her to control her computer screen while moving around the room to interact with students. For instance, when her class was dissecting a chicken wing, a student asked her what the body temperature of a chicken was. Instead of walking back to her desk to look it up, Pierman asked the AI voice assistant.
An elementary teacher uses ChatGPT to create family newsletters and build lesson plans
Joe Ackerman, a 5th grade teacher at Mead Elementary in Mead, Colo., is an early adopter of generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini. He uses those tools to refine and expedite his communication with staff members and families, produce design-thinking lessons for students, and help grade student work.
“It has helped me free up my time [that I can] then devote to teaching,” Ackerman said. “I’m spending less time crafting emails, I’m spending less time on administrative tasks, and it also helps me provide more feedback on a more frequent basis.”
Before ChatGPT, Ackerman would spend an hour putting together family newsletters, which include reminders about upcoming school events, homework assignments, and exams. With ChatGPT, it takes no more than 10 minutes.
He has a running dialogue with the AI tool, in which he lists the items he wants to include in the weekly newsletter, and ChatGPT generates it for him. After Ackerman makes a couple tweaks, such as changing the tone so it’s more friendly, the newsletter is ready to send to parents and guardians.
Ackerman also uses AI tools to build design-thinking lessons, in which students have to work together to come up with creative ways to solve a problem. For instance, after his class read Night of the Spadefoot Toads by Bill Harley, Ackerman asked ChatGPT to create a lesson in which students design and prototype an innovation to help the main character feel less lonely. The students came up with an app to connect the main character with friends, a robot companion, and an interactive journal.
“It’s a way for [students] to connect with the text and collaborate with each other,” he said.
In the past, Ackerman would’ve just used a graphic organizer and a writing prompt to accomplish that feat. With the help of generative AI tools, though, he can quickly create an engaging, hands-on lesson plan in one evening and present it the next day. Without the help of the technology, he said, it would have taken him a week or more to write it all out, think of the ideas and parameters, and gather all the things he needs.
A high school English teacher uses AI to provide students with personalized feedback
Yana Garbarg, an English teacher at the Young Women’s Leadership School of Astoria, an all-girls public secondary school in the Queens borough of New York, was hesitant to try generative AI at first, because of its ethical implications and her fear of “automation bias”—thinking that suggestions or work from AI are inherently better than what humans can do.
But she started playing around with generative AI tools and found the technology “a helpful timesaver,” she said.
As an Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition teacher, Garbarg has to read dozens of student essays. Providing targeted feedback for every student can be time-consuming. So she started experimenting with using AI tools to expedite the work of providing personalized feedback for students’ writing.
Now, Garbarg reads all her students’ essays to get an overall sense of their “glows and grows.” Then, she puts students’ writing into a generative AI tool—in this case, MagicSchool.AI—and instructs it to write feedback based on a set of criteria and her thoughts.
For instance, she’ll tell it to “shout them out for their very clear and organized topic sentences and their use of transitional phrases,” and then she’ll ask the tool to pull out examples from their writing to show where they’re doing a good job. If she’s pointing out a skill that a student needs to work on, such as writing a clearer thesis, Garbarg will ask the tool to give the student an example or a better version using their own words.
AI has made her feedback become “more like a narrative” for her students, which is better than “some ugly red markings” on their papers, Garbarg said. The technology has also made her feedback more timely and more comprehensive.
Students are better able to look back at feedback from previous writing assignments and see how their writing is improving and what skills they need to focus on, Garbarg said.
Before using AI, Garbarg still identified “glows and grows” for students, but she didn’t have time to pull out examples from their own writing to support her feedback.
“[AI] just helps create less burnout for teachers and makes your job feel more manageable,” said Garbarg, who also uses generative AI to modify the reading level of a text for students and write clearer overviews and instructions for assignments.
“I was definitely one of those teachers who would grade on the weekend and after school for hours and I have realized that’s no longer tenable as life goes on and I have other priorities outside of work,” she said.
Their advice for other teachers? Play with AI tools
These veteran educators say they encourage teachers who are hesitant to use AI to play around with different tools.
“The more you play with it, the more you’ll be able to see its capabilities,” said Ackerman. “The more teachers do that, the more they’ll recognize that it’s not something that’s going to replace people. It’s not something that’s going to stop students from learning or stop the need for teachers. It’s just going to be another tool.”
They recommend starting small and providing the generative AI tool with very specific parameters so the output is more useful. The teachers also underscored the importance of knowing there’s a time and place for technology use.
“AI is really exciting,” Pierman said. “And yet, there’s still part of me that keeps [thinking about the] ‘Terminator’ movie … knowing it could be used for harm. We have to teach how to use it responsibly.”
