AI in the Classroom
By Hadley Cress ‘27
Courtesy of Ila Reynolds-Kienbaum 27’
Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow and influence the world. The more advanced it becomes, the more it creeps into education. As it grows, it is important to understand how it can be helpful and how it can be detrimental to student learning.
The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development talks about the importance of how students view their learning when it comes to the use of AI. They believe that if students passively view their learning, then their use of AI will be more harmful to their education because the students are more focused on getting the work done than actually receiving the learning.
Teachers cannot prevent students from using AI, so it is important to educate them on how to use it in beneficial ways and why it is important not to depend on it. AI benefits both students and teachers in the classroom, however, it isn’t always helpful to student learning.
Passive compliance with AI, for instance, can have many negative effects on student learning. Examples include students losing their ability to be independent if they rely on AI to do their work and making it hard for them to do the same tasks independently after relying on AI for similar assignments in the past.
Teachers at Catlin Gabel School (CGS) use a wide range of AI tools in the classroom. Wendy Wilkinson, a French teacher at CGS, has been experimenting with Flint AI for homework assignments. She can give the chatbox specific guidelines on how to interact with students and see their conversations with the AI.
This allows her students to receive proper feedback and further their learning even when Wilkinson is unable to be with them, such as during homework time. This feedback can be very beneficial because even when she can’t be with every student, they are still able to progress in their learning. However, AI must be properly instructed; otherwise, it can overstep and harm the learning process, such as by doing writing or learning for the students, which detracts from it.
“The AI Chabot really wants to please the person that it's interacting with so it will make things up,” said Megan Mathes, a Faculty Advisor at CGS. It is thus very important to be specific with the AI when it comes to writing. Teaching students how to set a boundary between constructive feedback from AI and over-assistance is a crucial part of integrating AI into the classroom.
By having specific guidelines and boundaries set for the AI, teachers are able to make sure the AI is being used in a beneficial way. Additionally, having specific prompts for the students to use prevents the AI from giving unwanted feedback.
Amanda Williams, a history teacher at CGS, had students use Perplexity, an AI chatbot that lists its sources and allows students to easily see where the information is coming from, to do research. To ensure that the AI did not overstep and inflict damage on the learning process, she had the students use a premade prompt. Precise prompts allow teachers like Williams to feel confident employing AI in the classroom.
Mathes agreed with the importance of having a prompt and proper guideline for AI chatbots. Mathes helps many teachers in the faculty to use AI in the classroom and in an interview, stressed the importance of well-crafted prompts. “The hardest thing about working with AI is asking the right question, prompting it in the right way to get it to do what you want it to do and to get it to not do the things you don't want it to do,” stated Mathes.
While AI can be extremely useful in the classroom, it can also be a tool for students outside of it. With the use of specific prompts that instruct the AI to ask probing questions or simply give you ideas, the AI can help you expand your writing.
Another way AI can be helpful is if students don’t understand the instructions given by teachers. Having AI reword them can be beneficial and allow the student to fully grasp the entire question. Similarly, using AI to condense a project outline and make sure you still have all the pieces can help with feeling overwhelmed. “If you're having trouble getting from a great big project handout to where do I even start? It can help you with that,” said Megan Mathes.
AI can efficiently do many things. However, students need to be open and talk to teachers about how they are using it to ensure that it isn’t harmful to their learning. Every teacher has a different policy and opinion on using AI in their classroom, which makes it even more vital that students communicate openly with their teachers about the use of AI.
Even outside the classroom, when working on homework or outside of school courses, AI can continue to be helpful in beneficial ways. Asking AI to give students feedback on their work without writing it for them or asking it to better explain things they do not understand.
An important thing to remember about AI is that it doesn’t pull quotes or information from specific places; it guesses how the words fit together based on the patterns of other information it has consumed. This information is not always accurate, so students need to check it.
Similarly, it is important to check the information AI has provided because it could be lying to please the reader. AI only has access to information available on the Internet, so when asked to find specific quotes from a book, it most likely can not provide accurate information.
Asking for a less specific answer like ‘Can you give me some chapters where I might pull quotes about …’ from a book is more likely to give you credible information. AI has access to summaries and different resources about the book online and will likely be able to pull information from them.
AI will continue to grow and expand. The education field must continue the conversation on how AI can be helpful or detrimental to the learning process. Including students in the conversation and educating them on how to use it beneficially instead of making it a taboo tool will allow students to adapt to this new tool and use it to progress their learning.