Her district offers Cyber Week, an optional week during the summer for teachers to explore new teaching methods. This past summer, the topic of Cyber Week was AI.
Additionally, the district has low-assignment, monthly, hour-long meetings where teachers can explore productive AI without expecting to immediately incorporate it into their classroom or teaching. “I believe that lack of outcome expectations… breeds innovation in our schools,” Guidotti said.
Broad implications of AI
Part of the experiment with AI is about helping teachers improve instruction.
While AI tools may seem useful for everyday tasks, productive AI tools for instructional design should have a critical lens, according to Marc Watkins, director of the Mississippi Institute for Teachers.
Watkins pointed to Harvard’s AI Pedagogy Project as a resource for educators who want to learn more about ethical uses of AI and practical tools. The Modern Language Association also partnered with the Conference on College Composition and Communication to create a writing and AI team dedicated to developing guidelines and resources.
“When it comes down to creating content to distribute to students, we ask teachers to be transparent” about the use of AI-generated activities or lesson plans, Guidotti said. When a teacher discloses their use of AI to students, it creates an opportunity for a broader discussion about when it is appropriate or inappropriate to use AI in an educational setting, he added.
According to Dukes, AI is not very good at creating lessons. Instead, he suggested using AI to generate word problems and activities that fit the existing curriculum.
“Exploring [with AI] it can be useful and fun, especially if the teacher is smart in that process and listens carefully because AI makes a lot of mistakes,” said Dukes.
Dukes also warned about implicit and explicit bias when it comes to using tools like AI detection software and AI programming especially if the output is to be assessed for punishment or disciplinary action. “[Teacher] bias is what will shape the decisions they make about who to investigate, that has an impact,” said Dukes.
Protecting student and data privacy, copyright infringement, and disclosure of use are also major ethical implications to consider when using AI as an educator. For example, “you never want to give ChatGPT your students’ names,” says Dukes.
According to Watkins, AI that provides feedback to students like OpenAI can prioritize white native speakers over English, leaving out students who may speak and write from a different cultural background. Students may also “have neurodiversity that requires a different level of nuance to be brought to the assessment process,” Watkins continued.
Even with an agreed set of policies and tools, change is inevitable. According to Dukes, the real challenge is that in a few years, when the understanding of AI technology is better, “then we may have a new generation of AI skills, and AI-enabled tools.”
Teachers are still reluctant to use AI
For Marcus Luther, a high school English teacher in Oregon, the implementation of AI in the classroom and K-12 education has moved very quickly. He does not use AI in his lesson planning or in the classroom, and his current curriculum standards do not require him to teach his students about the use of AI. He doesn’t feel confident enough about the ever-expanding technology to produce AI to use it outside of curriculum standards in a thoughtful, ethical, and academically sound way.
He said he had one professional development session to address AI tools for teachers, but the methods he saw didn’t make him feel grounded in using AI in the classroom because of the broader implications.
What he wants is to deepen the learning process and he’s not sure the tools he’s seen will accomplish that, but he might like a “shortcut to efficiency.”
