Generative artificial intelligence is here to stay, and K-12 schools need to find ways to use the technology for the benefit of teaching and learning. That’s what many educators, technology companies, and AI advocates say.
In response, more states and districts are releasing guidance and policies around AI use in the classroom. Educators are increasingly experimenting with the technology, with some saying that it has been a big time saver and has made the job more manageable.
But not everyone agrees. There are educators who are concerned that districts are buying into the AI hype too quickly and without enough skepticism.
A nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey of 559 K-12 educators conducted during the summer found that they are split on whether AI platforms will have a negative or positive impact on teaching and learning in the next five years: 47% say AI’s impact will be negative, while 43% say it will be positive.
Education Week talked to three veteran teachers who are not using generative AI regularly in their work and are concerned about the potential negative effects the technology will have on teaching and learning.
Here’s what they think about using generative AI in K-12.
AI provides ‘shortcuts’ that are not conducive for learning
Dylan Kane, a middle school math teacher at Lake County High School in Leadville, Colo., isn’t “categorically against AI,” he said.
He has experimented with the technology personally, using it to help him improve his Spanish-language skills. AI is a “half decent” Spanish tutor, if you understand its limitations, he said. For his teaching job, Kane has experimented with AI tools to generate student materials like many other teachers, but it takes too many iterations of prompting to generate something he would actually put in front of his classes.
“I will do a better job just doing it myself and probably take less time to do so,” said Kane, who is in his 14th year of teaching. Creating student materials himself means he can be “more intentional” about the questions he asks, how they’re sequenced, how they fit together, how they build on each other, and what students already know.
His biggest concern is how generative AI will affect educators and students’ critical-thinking skills. Too often, people are using these tools to take “shortcuts,” he said.
“If I want students to learn something, I need them to be thinking about it and not finding shortcuts to avoid thinking,” Kane said.
The best way to prepare students for an AI-powered future is to “give them a broad and deep collection of knowledge about the world and skills in literacy, math, history and civics, and science,” so they’ll have the knowledge they need to understand if an AI tool is providing them with a helpful answer, he said.
That’s true for teachers, too, Kane said. The reason he can evaluate whether AI-generated material is accurate and helpful is because of his years of experience in education.
“One of my hesitations about using large language models is that I won’t be developing skills as a teacher and thinking really hard about what things I put in front of students and what I want them to be learning,” Kane said. “I worry that if I start leaning heavily on large language models, that it will stunt my growth as a teacher.”
And the fact that teachers have to use generative AI tools to create student materials “points to larger issues in the teaching profession” around the curricula and classroom resources teachers are given, Kane said. AI is not “an ideal solution. That’s a Band-Aid for a larger problem.”
Kane’s open to using AI tools. For instance, he said he finds generative AI technology helpful for writing word problems. But educators should “approach these things with a ton of skepticism and really ask ourselves: ‘Is this better than what we should be doing?’”
Experts and leaders haven’t provided good justifications for AI use in K-12
Jed Williams, a high school math and science teacher in Belmont, Mass., said he hasn’t heard any good justifications for why generative AI should be implemented in schools.
The way AI is being presented to teachers tends to be “largely uncritical,” said Williams, who teaches computer science, physics, and robotics at Belmont High School. Often, professional development opportunities about AI don’t provide a “critical analysis” of the technology and just “check the box” by mentioning that AI tools have downsides, he said.
For instance, one professional development session he attended only spent “a few seconds” on the downsides of AI tools, Williams said. The session covered the issue of overreliance on AI tools, but Williams criticized it for not talking about “labor exploitation, overuse of resources, sacrificing the privacy of students and faculty,” he said.
“We have a responsibility to be skeptical about technologies that we bring into the classroom,” Williams said, especially because there’s a long history of ed-tech adoption failures.
Williams, who has been teaching since 2006, is also concerned that AI tools could decrease students’ cognitive abilities.
“So much of learning is being put into a situation that is cognitively challenging,” he said. “These tools, fundamentally, are built on relieving the burden of cognitive challenge.
“Especially in introductory courses, where students aren’t familiar with programming and you want them to try new things and experiment and explore, why would you give them this tool that completely removes those aspects that are fundamental to learning?” Williams said.
Williams is also worried that a rushed implementation of AI tools would sacrifice students and teachers’ privacy and use them as “experimental subjects in developing technologies for tech companies.”
Education leaders “have a tough job,” Williams said. He understands the pressure they feel around implementing AI, but he hopes they give it “critical thought.”
Decisionmakers need to be clear about what technology is being proposed, how they anticipate teachers and students using it, what the goal of its use is, and why they think it’s a good technology to teach students how to use, Williams said.
“If somebody has a good answer for that, I’m very happy to hear proposals on how to incorporate these things in a healthy, safe way,” he said.
Educators shouldn’t fall for the ‘fallacy’ that AI is inevitable
Elizabeth Bacon, a middle school computer science teacher in California, hasn’t found any use cases with generative AI tools that she feels will be beneficial for her work.
“I would rather do my own lesson plan,” said Bacon, who has been teaching for more than 20 years. “I have an idea of what I want the students to learn, of what’s interesting to them, and where they are and the entry points for them to engage in it.”
Teachers have a lot of pressure to do more with less. That’s why Bacon said she doesn’t judge other teachers who want to use AI to get the job done. It’s “a systemic problem,” but teaching and learning shouldn’t be replaced by machines, she said.
Bacon believes it’s “particularly dangerous” for middle school students to be using “a machine emulating a person.” Students are still developing their character, their empathy, their ability to socialize with peers and work collectively toward a goal, she said, and a chatbot would undermine that.
She can foresee using generative AI tools to explain to her students what large language models are. It’s important for them to learn about generative AI, that it’s a statistical model predicting the next likely word based on data it’s been trained on, that there’s no meaning [or feelings] behind it, Bacon said.
Last school year, she asked her high school students what they wanted to know about AI. Their answers: the technology’s social and environmental impacts.
Bacon doesn’t think educators should fall for the “fallacy” that AI is the inevitable future because technology companies are the ones saying that and they have an incentive to say that, she said.
“Educators have basically been told, in a lot of ways, ‘don’t trust your own instincts about what’s right for your students, because [technology companies are] going to come in and tell you what’s going to be good for your students,” she said.
It’s discouraging to see that a lot of the AI-related professional development events she’s attended have “essentially been AI evangelism” and “product marketing,” she said. There should be more thought about why this technology is necessary in K-12, she said.
Technology experts have talked up AI’s potential to increase productivity and efficiency. But as an educator, “efficiency is not one of my values,” Bacon said.
“My value is supporting students, meeting them where they are, taking the time it takes to connect with these students, taking the time that it takes to understand their needs,” she said. “As a society, we have to take a hard look: Do we value education? Do we value doing our own thinking?”
