His district has Cyber Week, an optional week during the summer for teachers to explore innovative teaching practices. The theme of Cyber Week this summer was AI.
Additionally, districts are hosting low-cost monthly one-hour meetings where teachers can explore generative AI without expecting to immediately incorporate it into their classrooms and instruction. “I believe that the lack of expectations for outcomes…will generate more innovation in our schools,” Guidotti said.
Broader impact of AI
As part of our AI experiment, we will help teachers enhance their instruction.
While AI tools seem useful for day-to-day tasks, generative AI tools for instructional design require a critical lens, said Mark Watkins, director of the Mississippi Teacher Institute.
Watkins cited Harvard University’s AI Education Project as a resource for teachers who want to learn more about the ethical use of AI and practical tools. The Modern Language Association, in collaboration with the Conference on Collegiate Composition and Communication, has also formed a Task Force on Writing and AI dedicated to developing guidelines and resources.
“When it comes to creating content to distribute to students, we ask teachers to be transparent about their use of AI-generated activities and lesson plans,” Guidotti said. He added that when teachers share their use of AI with students, there is an opportunity to have a broader conversation about whether it is appropriate to use AI in educational settings.
According to Dukes, AI is not very good at creating curriculum. Instead, they proposed using AI to generate creative word problems and activities that fit into existing curricula.
“Experimenting[with AI]can be useful and fun, especially if teachers approach the process intelligently and pay close attention, because AI is prone to mistakes,” Dukes says. he said.
Dukes also warned of explicit and implicit bias when using tools such as AI detection software and AI grading, especially when the output is evaluated for punishment or disciplinary action. “(Teachers’) biases are going to shape the decisions they make about who to investigate, and that has an impact,” Dukes said.
Student privacy and data protection, copyright infringement, and usage disclosure are also major ethical implications to consider when using AI as a teacher. For example, “You don’t want to give your students’ names to ChatGPT,” says Dukes.
Watkins said AI that provides feedback to students, like OpenAI, can prioritize white standardized English and exclude students who may speak or write from a different cultural framework. Watkins continued that students may also be “neurodiverse, which requires them to bring a different level of nuance to the assessment process.”
Even with an agreed set of policies and tools, change is inevitable. The real challenge, according to Dukes, is that in the coming years, as we better understand AI technology, “we may see a whole new generation of AI capabilities and AI-powered tools.”
Teachers remain hesitant to use AI
For Marcus Luther, a high school English teacher in Oregon, the introduction of AI in classrooms and K-12 education came too soon. He does not use AI in his lesson plans or classrooms, and current curriculum standards do not require him to teach students about the use of AI. He does not have enough confidence to use the growing generative AI technology in a thoughtful, ethical, and academically minded way beyond curricular standards.
He has had one professional development session addressing AI tools for educators, but the approaches he has seen so far favor introducing AI in the classroom because of the far-reaching implications. He said he did not feel that way.
What he’s looking for is a deeper learning process, and I’m not sure the tools he’s seen so far will do that, but he may prefer “shortcuts to efficiency.”
