The best uses of AI in classrooms occur when teachers are knowledgeable about the technology and can create situations where they guide how students use it—as opposed to failing at attempts to prohibit use of AI entirely.
A district’s policy for use of AI should have three main components:
What can students do with AI? AI is already inexorably integrated into many dimensions of our lives. To prepare students for the world they increasingly inhabit, they must be taught best practices for how to use the technology. Appropriate student use is bounded by assignments, and teachers will reasonably have different expectations for distinct types of assignments and/or how students demonstrate learning and mastery.
What can students not do with AI? At the most basic level, students should not represent any work done by an AI as their own. Doing so is a form of cheating that, in a take-home (or other unmonitored) context, is already very hard to detect.
What should guide educators’ use of AI? A recent U.S. Department of Education report and related materials laid out broad guidelines for use of AI in education, including the idea that humans are key to the appropriate use of AI in teaching and learning. Educators need to redesign some central tasks requiring critical thinking (e.g., research projects, essays, and analytic writing) as well as how they are assessed under the assumption that students have access to AI. Especially because AI creates more possibilities for misinformation (and current AI systems have documented biases that can be highly impactful in educational settings), use of AI in a democracy cannot be allowed to come at the cost of students’ critical thinking and reasoning skills.
To reap the instructional benefits and avoid the worst consequences of unfettered use of AI, districts need to train teachers about the technology. Even while use of AI is becoming more widespread, a survey conducted by Education Week in April 2023 found that 14 percent of teachers didn’t “know what AI platforms are” and an additional 47 percent thought that AI will have a somewhat (31 percent) or very (16 percent) negative impact on teaching and learning. Basic training should help teachers understand:
the principles of appropriate use of AI;
the capabilities, biases, and risks that AI brings;
the kinds of assignments are most likely to incur use or abuse of AI (e.g., take-home essays, research, and homework);
where the greatest risks of bias lie in using AI outputs to support decision-making; and
ways that AI can help save time on varied and complex instructional tasks (e.g., formative assessment and personalized learning).
For teachers of classes that typically rely heavily on take-home written assignments, additional training will likely be needed on how to draw boundaries around appropriate use of AI and accurately assess student knowledge and skills in this new context.
Finally, districts need to secure the resources required to assign a team or an individual the role of following developments in AI based on these assumptions: (a) students have access to AI and will use it, and (b) with sufficient guidance and support for educators and students alike, AI can have benefits for education.
