Many students haven’t developed a high level of AI aptitude. Fortunately, the way students use AI can tell teachers a great deal about students’ skill and knowledge gaps. Once identified, teachers can teach to those gaps, thus maximizing instructional time and learning. For example, a student may struggle with integrating research into their essay. Instead of penalizing the student when a teacher detects AI use, they can use that student’s experience to inform their upcoming lessons on research. Reaping the benefits of AI as a powerful classroom tool requires teachers to first investigate their discomfort with its potential to improve pedagogy for students and teachers alike.
From Fixed Mindset to Mindful
When ChatGPT was first released, the word “cheat” was on the tip of every educator’s tongue. This was an interesting word choice because cheat has two definitions; the first being the practice of trickery or fraud, while the other focuses on deprivation of something valuable. While teachers may experience some trickery from their students, one would be hard pressed to find a teacher who believes their students are frauds. Like many, I believe educators have a growth mindset about their students and are invested in their learning and growth. Therefore, we can assume that when teachers fear cheating, it’s because the act deprives the student of a valuable learning moment.
Using AI without accompanied citations threatens a student’s unique perspective and the way they make sense of the world. When teachers remove their ego from the equation, we can better understand how students are doing a greater disservice to themselves than to us when not disclosing their use of AI. Celebrating a student’s thought process and viewpoint ensures that they also see the value in speaking from their authentic lens.
Once teachers can reflect on and accept that a student’s use of AI is a threat to themselves and not an affront to their instruction or practice, we can acknowledge that students need to learn how to appropriately and respectfully use AI. If teachers are reluctant to lead a lesson on crafting a prompt for ChatGPT or detecting the use of Dall-E in an image, we must ask ourselves why we are being resistant and if that resistance is in the best interest of our students. As educators, we want to prepare our students to thrive in an ever changing world that will include forms of still undiscovered technology. As teachers, we may have personal and professional opinions regarding academic trends and technologies. However, we must not let our bias interfere with how we introduce students to these topics to preserve the opportunity for students to explore them with respect and integrity.
As educators, we actively push ourselves to serve our students even if we experience discomfort. Our commitment to lifelong learning does not stop when we secure our first teaching position. In fact, that’s when our knowledge of ourselves as learners and teachers truly takes form and blooms. Like other new technologies we’ve embraced in modern history – internet, e-books, Zoom, for example – we must learn, teach and perfect AI so it becomes an effective tool at our disposal. Doing so will model problem solving and lifelong learning for our students. As young people in the 21st century, they will encounter situations that we have yet to dream of. We want our students to meet those opportunities with curiosity, excitement, and a hint of skepticism. The emergence of AI provides us with a unique opportunity to demonstrate to our students how to approach and integrate change while also making mistakes and navigating challenges.
Pedagogy as a Prism
Once we become more mindful of the role AI will play in our students’ professional, personal, and academic lives, we can begin to understand its role as a teaching and learning resource. Instead of fearing its use as a tool for cheating that can decrease creativity and propagate inauthenticity, we can employ it as a prism through which we can elevate our pedagogical practices. When we spot AI in a student’s work, instead of assuming malintent, we can ask the student metacognitive questions to determine why and how they used AI. This will help identify the knowledge or skill gaps that we must bridge for the student to achieve the intended learning goal of the assignment. If students continuously use AI in their submissions, we may want to reflect on our practice by assessing our assignments’ level of rigor, required skills, and interest to the student. This level of self awareness can help teachers identify their instructional gaps related to differentiation and student engagement.
While AI is oftentimes used to alleviate cognitive challenges such as summarizing, describing, and explaining, some students employ the tool to boost their creativity. Many students get stuck at the beginning of an assignment or project because they don’t know where to start. AI can support them in brainstorming, outlining, sketching a diagram, or even connecting an academic assignment to their interest area or preferred modality. Instead of students consistently delivering similar presentations, we may see them explore podcasting, vlogging, collecting oral histories, creating zines, and other creative outlets that speak to their strengths.
Once students learn how to use AI and can see their creativity at work, they will begin to better understand and advocate for their authentic voice. Some classwork and assignments can ask students to conform to certain ways of thinking and learning that may not align with their unique personhood. While an occasional worksheet may be important, supporting students in creating their own choice boards and menus not only acknowledges and elevates their voices, it also boosts engagement and motivation. Some students struggle to identify and cultivate their unique perspective which can cause frustration and even work avoidance. Teachers can coach students’ use of AI detectors to pinpoint what aspects of their writing is unique to them and unable to be replicated by AI. It provides teachers with a glimpse into how their students engage in meaning making.
These practices promote critical thinking in a way that is, currently, unique to AI’s abilities and programming. When AI can support students by organizing their thoughts and offering feedback, it provides more cognitive space to explore concepts in deeper and more interesting ways. Students, like adults, spend a fair amount of time struggling or navigating anxiety over certain executive functioning tasks. By using AI as a tool to support in this area, students have more time and greater cognitive ability to engage in high ordered thinking such as synthesis, creation, collaboration, and implementation. Instead of spending precious instructional time having students draw a concept map, teachers can use AI to create the concept map and ask students to explain how and why it is organized in such a way and if it can be organized differently. This allows instruction to leapfrog over certain pitfalls without compromising the development of skills.
Crafting Your Toolbox
As with all growth, teachers will encounter setbacks and discomfort, just as our students do in their learning. We know from Kolb’s Stages of Learning that we all need time to feel, watch, and think before we can do it. Here are some ways to help educators become more fluent and less fearful of AI:
Provide time and space for teachers to reflect on their perspective of and relationship to AI.
Host professional development led by early adopters to allow teachers to learn from their peers in a way that is collaborative and low stakes.
Deliver schoolwide and regional professional development on ways to integrate AI into the classroom to build community while strengthening teachers’ skills.
End the year with a student and teacher AI showcase celebrating the tangible results and the mastery of a new skill.
By encouraging ourselves to wade through the discomfort produced by AI, we become even more effective teachers. Above all, we serve as authentic role models for our students who are consistently navigating a changing world. AI may not reveal the unexplored or undiscovered, but it can help teachers change how we think about, react to, and integrate new technologies into our understanding of learning and our practice as educators.
About the author
Danielle Peloquin, Ed.D., is an educator, researcher and instructional designer in secondary and higher education with a focus on social justice, diverse learners, professional development and adult education. She currently serves as the Director of Instruction at Fusion Academy.
