A growing number of educators and experts are making the case that students need to have AI literacy so they’re prepared for a world where artificial intelligence will be used regularly in everyday life and in careers.
The push for implementing AI literacy in K-12 came quickly after the 2022 public release of ChatGPT, a generative AI tool that can answer seemingly any prompt.
AI literacy is “the technical knowledge, durable skills, and future-ready attitudes required to thrive in a world influenced by AI. It enables learners to engage, create with, manage, and design AI, while critically evaluating its benefits, risks, and implications,” as defined by the U.S. Department of Education in its proposal to include AI in its grant-funding priorities.
While it’s unclear how many schools and districts are already teaching AI literacy to their students, some are ahead of the curve. For instance, the Passaic district in New Jersey is teaching AI literacy to its kindergarten through 6th grade students, while the Washington County district in northwestern Maryland is teaching it to middle and high school students.
Rolling out AI literacy lessons wasn’t easy for these districts, however. In a conversation with the Washington County district, educators shared four big steps they had to take.
1. Make sure district leadership understands how the technology works
Making sure district leadership is knowledgeable and informed about AI is one of the most important steps that the 22,500-student district took before rolling out AI literacy for students, said Ann Laber Anders, the district supervisor of instructional technology and library media programs.
“We, as a team, really put our effort into attending conferences, reading the research,” Anders said. “In order to teach our teachers, in order to teach our students, the leaders themselves need to become informed.”
The team that helped create the AI literacy curriculum for the Washington County district also made sure it was “purposeful and thoughtful,” said Christine Hurley, the library media specialist for Boonsboro Middle School and the lead secondary librarian for the district.
“We spent a lot of time talking about: What do we believe? What do we want for our students? How does this relate back to our [district’s] mission and vision statements?” Hurley said.
2. Get teachers on board by helping them understand the role of AI learning
Many teachers are still hesitant about AI and what it could mean for student learning. When districts talk about implementing AI literacy, leaders might encounter some pushback from teachers who don’t understand the technology, educators said.
“They understandably were afraid because the first thing they think is that students are going to use it to cheat,” said Hurley.
The district ensured that part of its process to roll out AI literacy for students included providing training for teachers, as well, so that they know it’s not “this big, bad, scary thing,” Hurley said.
Once teachers understood that the point of the AI literacy lessons was to teach students how to use AI responsibly and ethically, teachers got on board, she said.
3. Figure out where AI literacy fits in the school schedule
A big challenge the district had to overcome was figuring out where to fit in AI literacy lessons, especially at the high school level, Hurley said. The district decided the lessons would be delivered through its library media specialists. Depending on the school, librarians would either collaborate with English or social studies classes to teach the lessons or have those classes come to the library to receive lessons.
In middle school, it’s easier because every student has to take the same English and social studies classes. In those classes, librarians can come in and teach digital and AI literacy, Hurley said.
But the way high school classes are scheduled, there isn’t one class where librarians can meet every student, she said.
High school librarians “had to get a little creative,” Hurley said, and try to reach as many students as possible with their AI literacy lessons.
4. Update lessons every year and make them age appropriate
The curriculum the district used for its first-year AI literacy lessons was from Common Sense Media, but the district knew the lessons would have to be updated and expanded as students continued to learn more every year.
So, it created a team to develop new lessons for students who had already received the Common Sense Media lessons the previous year. Now, 6th graders will get the original lessons from Common Sense Media, while those in grades 7-12 learn new topics or dive deeper into the ones to which they were already introduced.
Sammy Baldwin, a librarian at the district’s Western Heights Middle School, was one of the people who worked on the extension lessons.
“I considered a lot of the feedback that I got from students or some of the gaps I was seeing,” Baldwin said. For instance, the most common misconception from students is that AI is just about robots, so Baldwin made sure that there’s a lesson to move students away from that perception.
The idea, Hurley said, is for “everybody to have the same [starting point], and then we’re going to age [the lessons] as we go.”
