I’m sure I’m not the only educator who has wondered that now that some schools are beginning to get a handle on student cellphones, do we now have an even bigger challenge on our hands with artificial intelligence becoming ubiquitous?
I’ve previously published several posts offering some support to educators.
Today’s post kicks off a new series offering specific advice on what kinds of AI guidelines teachers and students can use in their classrooms.
AI Is Like a Microwave
Brett Vogelsinger is an English teacher from Pennsylvania with experience in middle and high school and about to enter his 23rd year of teaching. This article features ideas adapted from Brett’s new book, Artful AI in Writing Instruction: A Human-Centered Approach to Using Artificial Intelligence in Grades 6-12, from Corwin Press:
“We have to pay attention to what this is doing for us and what it is doing to us,” I say, when I allow students to incorporate AI in our writing process for English class. “If all it does is speed things up, or worse, if it creates the illusion that you know things you do not yet know or can write in ways that you cannot yet write, then this technology cheats us both of a valuable experience.”
“The truth is, I’m learning it to. We are learning how to use AI together, and I want to learn from your experiences just as you will learn from them. So always know that you can talk to me about whether a use is fair or right whenever you feel uncertain. And you do not have to use artificial intelligence at all if you don’t want to. Most of all, I want to hear your voice in your writing.”
We are teaching in a world where few guardrails exist to keep students—and teachers for that matter—from veering off a cliff with artificial intelligence, losing their ability to work hard, think critically, and experience the pleasures of intellectual breakthroughs.
Many schools have not done much to acknowledge the complexity of what it means to “use AI” in assignments and therefore have not done enough to clearly communicate their reasoning and boundaries. The stoplight model, an image that helped schools to start thinking about AI usage, already feels dated and oversimplified for the school year we are about to enter.
So when I talk to students about a writing assignment where they will be allowed to incorporate AI, I try to be brutally honest about my own experience and inexperience with this technology, always emphasizing what matters to me about their writing. This means centering human assets, skills, and needs. It means having an “is it cheating” discussion in which I demonstrate uses of AI that would clearly violate academic integrity and AI uses that we need to reason on together as a class before they forge ahead with their projects.
Here are four principles for teachers and students that are sure to see us through the emerging use of artificial intelligence in the classroom.
1. Think deeply and create artfully. Students and teachers must pay attention to when AI helps us to do this and when it hurts our ability to do this. The speed of generative AI can be useful in pushing our thinking or creativity, but if efficiency is the only goal, it replaces some important processing that students need—and adults benefit from, too!
For example, when AI brainstorms ideas for us, it steals an opportunity for thought. But when we brainstorm first and ask AI to point out gaps or weaknesses in our thinking, it pushes us, often awakening fresh material that goes beyond our initial list of ideas. Making art means making choices, so we must never let AI take away our ability to deliberate thoughtfully and choose.
2. Cultivate adaptability to change. Students are probably better at this than adults. But just as teachers believe all students can grow, all teachers can grow, too. When I started teaching 23 years ago, I used chalk and overhead projectors with pens that would stain my ties.
In the arc of two decades, technology changed under and around me, and cultivating a professional persona that was open to change, even when I am given little time to learn or I am critical of its side effects, has helped me to navigate the advent of blogs, wikis, and podcasts; of YouTube, 1:1 laptops, and cellphones; of teacher websites, online gradebooks, and learning-management systems.
I have not grown bitter and jaded with people or technology. Instead, I am willing to listen to what young people are discovering in their own use of AI. I don’t like everything I hear and I’ll tell them when I think they are using technology poorly, but they always know I’m interested in hearing about what they have to say about it. Just like some adults, some students hate the very existence of AI, and that’s valuable to hear as well. Listening to how they are adapting helps me to learn more about how the students perceive themselves as writers, thinkers, and creators.
3. Value voice. In classrooms where the teacher values student voice—spoken and in writing—dishonest use of AI to altogether replace one’s voice is less tempting and easier to spot. There is warmth in classroom communities where students know that their teacher knows their voice, where students get to know each other’s voices, so investing in learning how each student sounds when expressing themselves early in the academic term is more valuable in the age of AI than ever.
I encourage teachers to be honest with students when students turn in work that is clearly AI-generated. “I don’t like this,” I say, “Do you? This piece is missing your voice, and I want to hear you.
4. Be ruthlessly reflective. Many of my colleagues fear that artificial intelligence will ultimately erode human intelligence. I understand their fear. But if we require ourselves and our students to pause and reflect on each use, even write by hand some musings about the experience, we devote our brainpower to a substantive and important academic and life skill.
If through reflection we realize that artificial intelligence dulled an experience or left us feeling hollow, we have had an important epiphany that guides our future use, an epiphany we would not have if we only notice the efficiency it brought us and moved onto the next task or mindless scrolling.
There are abundant issues surrounding AI to read about and reflect on as well, such as environmental impact, intellectual property rights, and biased outputs. These are rich interdisciplinary topics that invite the whole school to dig in and explore one of the most important topics of our time in real time, as the story develops.
Students find this messiness genuinely engaging because there are not answers in the back of the textbook—they require real human engagement, inquisitiveness, and ingenuity. Requiring reflection every time we engage with AI helps us in these early days to slow down enough to reckon with what it has done or is doing to our work as teachers and learners rather than throw up our hands, overwhelmed by the incoming tidal wave.
Writers have compared generative artificial intelligence to a tool, a monster, Gutenberg’s printing press, or a microwave that can speed up aspects of cooking up words but never replace a full kitchen. It is all of these things and none of these things, and we are all still learning and feeling a lot about it. Deciding on a few key principles to guide your decisions can relieve some of the paralysis that gets in the way of making the best decisions for ourselves, our classrooms, our schools, and our students.
Thanks to Brett for offering his thoughts.
Today’s post answered this question:
What guidelines do you offer students and/or teachers to help them think about artificial intelligence and how they use it?
Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.
You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo or on Bluesky at @larryferlazzo.bsky.social .
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