The New 3 Rs: Reading, Writing, and Robots?

Education never stands still. As an undergraduate, this constant evolution both frightened and fascinated me, especially when one of my professors challenged us to research current slang terms. Standing in front of my peers, delivering an earnest presentation on the words "basic" and "on fleek," I initially felt ridiculous. Yet even then, I understood the deeper lesson: to truly serve our students, we must remain connected to their world.

When it comes to curriculum and pedagogy, the trends change with the wind. From No Child Left Behind to Common Core, and thirty thousand movements in-between, the only thing predictable and steady about education is its tendency to change. I choose to believe (possibly from an angle of naivety) that these changes stem from a desire to better the lives of children, and because of that, I am always eager to adopt the latest best practices.

This means that as a fresh-faced college graduate, I started teaching with a focus on gamification of lessons and growth-mindset activities. Everything was project-based and geared towards engagement. Within the next couple of years, I started to emphasize portfolio learning and cross-curricular lessons. Since the COVID years, my lessons have completely transitioned from involving physical materials to being solely online. This year, I made a conscious shift to start including artificial intelligence in my instruction.

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the classroom is a very controversial topic. Even within my close circle of colleagues, there is a vast array of different opinions. Selfishly, I would love to say that the use of AI will forever be banned in my classroom. I would love to keep all instruction completely free of technological manipulation because then I don't have to be concerned about how students might possibly be misusing technology. But if I am truly committed to helping students be prepared for the world beyond high school, then I have to look beyond myself and my threshold of comfort.

Because of this uncomfortable reality, I have been working to not only use AI as a teacher (if you are a teacher and haven’t experimented with MagicSchool, you’re shorting yourself) but to teach my students how to ethically incorporate AI into their own studies. This is completely new to me, but I wanted to take a minute to share what I have learned.

First of all, with the rise of AI in education, students have to decide that they actually want to learn. With more traditional education strategies, teachers could take a heavy-handed approach to teaching and could almost force students to learn by requiring assignments that could only be completed by the student (or by peers and parents, but still by a human). With AI, students are constantly given ways that they can usurp their own learning process, if they choose. When I started talking to my students about AI, this importance of agency in choosing to learn was the first conversation that we had.

The second thing that we talked about is the ethics of AI use and plagiarism. Previously, it was simple to have the students avoid plagiarism by citing the resources that they used for assignments, and in order to check for plagiarism, I had only to search the internet for the words/concepts used to see if the work was plagiarized. Now, because AI creates completely new sources and information with every interaction, checking for plagiarism has become nearly impossible. Because of this, if I am to require students to complete anything on their own time (outside of my watchful eye), I must either A: trust that they are doing it alone or B: allow the use of AI and not grade work that is completed outside of the classroom so that homework becomes more personal and study-centered rather than assessment-based.

I have chosen option B. I do not give homework that will be graded. All homework is given as a tool for students to use to build on the skills practiced in class, and students are allowed to use AI in their studies. I will tell you now - this has been a tough adjustment. At the beginning of the school year, I had a plethora of students regularly failing in-class assessments because all their studying was being done by AI. They were only learning what I could monitor and were choosing to bypass any sort of struggle on their own. While this was a tough time where we had many come-to-Jesus discussions about the importance of education and the commitment needed for personal betterment (I have never felt more elderly than when I stepped in front of a room full of teenagers to talk to them about their choices), we did survive. Students gradually started to understand the value in the struggle. I started to notice that test grades and in-class writing assignment grades rose back to the level of the age before AI. I am now seeing students use AI to brainstorm in ways like asking it for ideas for research papers or to summarize complicated passages so that they can understand them and then be able to complete higher-level assignments. This has given me the freedom to give assignments beyond just asking "what" or "who" and into "how" and "why," and personally, I find this to be much more meaningful instruction.

When we look at AI in education, we have to remember that while this may be to a new degree, we have done this before. Socrates famously said that the rise of a new- fangled educational tool would ruin students' memory. The tool was THE BOOK. This also happened when calculators were invented, and within 5 years of them being introduced to the general public, the National Advisory Committee on Mathematical Education recommended that all students should be able to use calculators in the classroom. It took the internet less than a decade to move from horrifyingly new to integral in everyday life. AI is just the next wave of newness that is scary and exciting, and as self-proclaimed guardians of the next generation, it is our responsibility to help them be armed and ready to face the world that they will meet upon graduation. In my own classroom, I am still ironing out the specifics of rubrics and requirements, but I am excited to be able to say that I am facing this new horizon with an open mind and an eagerness to help my students grow.