His district offers Cyber Week, an optional week in the summer for teachers to explore innovative teaching practices. This past summer, the theme of Cyber Week was AI.
Additionally, the district has low-stakes, monthly, one-hour meetings where teachers can explore generative AI without expecting to immediately incorporate it into their classroom or teaching. “I believe that not having that outcome expectation … breeds more innovation in our schools,” Guidotti said.
The wider implications of AI
Part of experimenting with AI is to help teachers improve instruction.
Although AI tools may seem useful in everyday tasks, generative AI tools for instructional design must have a critical lens, according to Mark Watkinsdirector of the Mississippi Teachers Institute.
Watkins pointed Harvard AI Pedagogy Project as a resource for teachers who want to learn more about the ethical use of AI and practical tools. The Modern Language Association has also collaborated with the Conference on College Composition and Communication to form a writing and AI task force dedicated to the development of guidelines and resources.
“When it comes to creating content that is for distribution to students, we ask that teachers be transparent” about using AI-generated activities or lesson plans, Guidotti said. When a teacher discloses their own use of AI to students, it creates an opportunity for a broader conversation about when it may or may not be appropriate to use AI in an educational setting, he added.
According to Dukes, AI is not particularly good at creating curricula. Instead, he suggested using AI to generate creative word problems and activities that fit into an existing curriculum.
“Experimenting (with AI) can be useful and fun, especially if the teacher is intellectually engaged in the process and paying close attention, because AI makes a lot of mistakes,” Dukes said.
Dukes also warned about overt and implicit biases when it comes to using tools such as AI detection software and AI evaluation, especially if the result will be assessed for punishment or disciplinary action. “The (teachers’) biases will shape the decisions they make about who to investigate, and that has consequences,” Dukes said.
Protecting student privacy and data, copyright infringementand disclosure of use are also major ethical implications to consider when using AI as a teacher. For example, “you definitely don’t want to give ChatGPT your students’ names,” Dukes said.
According to Watkins, artificial intelligence that provides feedback to students like OpenAI can prioritize the white standardized vernacular of English, leaving aside students who can speak and write from a different cultural framework. Students may also “have neurodiversity that requires a different level of nuance to be included in the assessment process,” Watkins continued.
Even with a coherent set of policies and instruments, change is inevitable. According to Dukes, the real challenge is that in a few years, as the understanding of AI technologies becomes better, “then we may have a whole new generation of AI capabilities and AI-powered tools.”
Teachers are still hesitant about using AI
For Marcus Lutherhigh school English teacher in Oregon, the implementation of AI in the classroom and in K-12 teaching has moved too quickly. It does not use artificial intelligence in lesson planning or in the classroom, and its current curriculum standards do not require it to teach its students about the use of artificial intelligence. He does not feel confident enough in the ever-growing technology of generative AI to use it outside of curriculum standards in a thoughtful, ethical, and academically oriented way.
He said he had one professional development session to deal with AI tools for educators, but the approaches he saw didn’t make him feel supported in implementing AI in the classroom because of the broader implications .
What he’s looking for is to deepen the learning process, and he’s not sure the tools he’s seen achieve that, but he might prefer a “shortcut to efficiency.”
