What I Want Teachers to Know about AI
Thoughts from a sympathetic colleague
The past 5 years in our schools have been among the most tumultuous I can remember. Whether you've been teaching for 3 years or 30, pandemic lockdowns, zoom school, asynchronous classes, along with the plague of cell phones and social media, have forced veteran teachers into early retirement and dissuaded younger people from joining a profession which already suffered from low pay and diminished prestige. On top of all that, in November 2022, advanced generative AI came from out of nowhere that can complete almost any homework assignment and is essentially undetectable. You could not design a more perfect storm of confusion and upheaval for both teachers and students if you tried.
In a previous post I wrote about what I want students to know about AI.
Here is an Open Letter to teachers.
Colleagues,
Whether you’ve spent your life in schools or are just starting out, the current crisis in education, particularly at the high school and university level, revolves around generative AI.
Unless you've been living under a rock, at some point in the last two and a half years, you've heard about AI, most likely in the form of ChatGPT.
I share four perspectives:
You Owe it to Your Students to Learn About AI
As educators, we love students who are curious. We reward kids who ask questions, crave knowledge, and look for new opportunities to push themselves. How can we, as role models, shy away from modeling these same qualities that we foster in students when it comes to AI?
Regardless of where you stand on its potential role in education, there's no escaping that AI is everywhere. Students are using it across every discipline. It’s built into virtually every application they use. They're experimenting with it for homework, essays, research, and everything in between.1
Learning about AI doesn't mean embracing or even supporting it as a pedagogical tool. It means understanding its capabilities, limitations, and where it might affect what’s happening in your classroom. It means being able to have informed conversations with students about responsible use and being able to articulate your position with knowledge and authority. Above all, it means that you establish yourself as someone students can trust when it comes to discussing what may be the most transformative technology to come along in decades.
If you don't familiarize yourself with AI platforms, how can you identify how students are using them or how they might affect your learning objectives? Only by exploring these technologies can you even begin to have productive conversations about authorship, academic integrity, creativity, intellectual growth, critical thinking, and all the other ways AI impacts the learning process. You might even discover ways to leverage AI in your classes. But you'll never know if you don't learn about it.
And the longer you wait, the harder it will be to keep up. The number of models since 2023 have exploded as have their capabilities and advances. Criticisms from 18 months ago may not apply today and quality issues in 2025 may be moot in another 18 months. If you think AI means just ChatGPT, try out Google’s NotebookLM, Perplexity’s Deep Research mode, or Suno’s AI song generator just to name a few. Virtually all of these tools are free and easy to use. If you’re interested in others, check out the list of the top 100 most popular.
There are also ample resources available online.2
Keep an Open Mind: Avoid the False Binary
Wherever you currently stand on the issue of student AI use in schools, will yourself to keep an open mind. I love this quote by the philosopher Robert Nozick:
I used to think it important, when I was younger, to have an opinion on just about every topic .... When I met someone who had an opinion on a topic I hadn't yet even heard of, I felt a need to form one too. Now I find it very easy to say I don't have an opinion on something and don't need one either, even when the topic elicits active public controversy, so I am somewhat bemused by my earlier stance.
It is very, very difficult for teachers not to have an opinion on students using AI.
Many teachers have drawn a line in the sand and feel compelled to defend that position at all costs. Wild pronouncements and declarations issue forth from all corners.
A large part of the problem with holding firm opinions about AI is that the ground beneath our feet is shifting almost daily. A statement made today may be irrelevant or obsolete in as little as 3 months let alone 3 years. Right now, we can't predict the future so the best we can do is try to understand the present.
It is also very easy to get drawn into a false binary about AI—either seeing it as the destruction of critical thinking or the salvation for an educational system in much need of an overhaul. We owe it to a conversation of such magnitude to approach it with a little more nuance.
How AI practices develop in schools will be constructed a day at a time, a week at a time, and a month at a time by dedicated, passionate, and curious teachers willing to explore these tools both on their own and, eventually, with students. AI may have as much potential to enhance learning as it does to undermine essential skill development, but we won’t know if the majority of teachers claim to have already made up their minds.
I have whipsawed back and forth at least a dozen times as to where, when, and how AI may be of use, especially when it comes to promoting or undermining skill development. Some early takeaways: unsurprisingly, most students do not know how to use AI. They don’t know how it works, they don’t know the newer models or their capabilities, and don’t understand why it’s a bad idea for them to use it the way many of them are. It’s up to us to explain it to them and we can’t do that if we don’t know either.
Despite what you read in the press3, I believe that the vast majority of students do NOT want to run afoul of academic integrity policies. They are craving guidelines and looking to us to engage in conversations about it. If you are teaching a subject in which AI is eroding your assessment practices, it may be time to take a step back and rethink what exactly you are asking students to do and why they are so easily able to turn to AI to do it.
Trust Your Gut: You Know Your Students Best
Whatever the new tool or technology, one thing remains constant: your professional judgment. Trust your instincts about when and how AI might bring value to your classroom. Once you’ve experimented a bit and feel comfortable with what you see, have a very frank discussion with your students about your position on AI. Listen to their concerns. Don't use AI just to use AI, but don't dismiss it outright either.
Similarly, when you suspect AI-generated work, trust your knowledge of your students. Ideally, you know their writing styles, abilities, and patterns better than any AI detection tool. Inconsistency is often the most reliable indicator - a situation in which a student who routinely misunderstands basic concepts and then suddenly explains a complex issue in a grammatically flawless piece of writing is worthy of a conversation. That said, be wary of false accusations and referrals to disciplinary boards. AI detection is notoriously unreliable. Most institutions do not have clear AI guidelines and many teachers do not have the expertise, patience, or time to engage in a lengthy confrontation with a student who digs in when threatened with academic consequences. It’s not an easy situation.
Our students are navigating a technological revolution without a roadmap. Many of them are genuinely confused about what constitutes appropriate AI use. In most institutions, students are getting mixed messages from different instructors, watching professionals use AI in the workplace (including their own teachers), and trying to determine these boundaries on their own or from their peers.
I’m extremely sympathetic to writing teachers in large classes who are getting mailed in and consistently AI generated work in the hopes of receiving credit, but an us-against-them mentality does no one any good. Obviously, the serial offender who has no intention of learning requires a different response than the vast majority of students who are simply trying to figure out the new landscape. There is no magic bullet.
Keep an Eye Towards the Future
Not only is the AI in schools conversation not going away, but it's only going to get more complicated. It may be a cliche to hear that it’s our responsibility as educators to prepare students for a world where AI is ubiquitous, but it doesn’t make it any less true. More and more evidence suggests that AI literacy will be a requirement, if not for entering college, then almost certainly for entering the workplace.
"I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been." - Wayne Gretsky
What will the world look like in 10 years? 5? Or even 3? If you do not plan for a future where AI is omnipresent, you will find yourself more and more isolated. This does not mean teachers must embrace or even integrate AI into what they do. But they must make their courses “AI Aware.”4
Consider redesigning some assignments to incorporate AI intentionally. Have students analyze AI-generated writing, compare multiple AI responses to the same prompt, or use AI as a brainstorming tool after developing their own ideas independently. Use the results to rethink, re-evaluate, and re-commit to what you are doing which should always include carving out exclusive space for non-AI assisted writing. Nothing I’m suggesting contradicts the very real fears that a generation that becomes too reliant on AI will end up less prepared than prior generations. We are stuck in a giant pedagogical experiment with no safety net.
Focus assessments on the skills AI cannot replicate: creative problem-solving, ethical reasoning, interpersonal collaboration, and the application of knowledge in novel contexts. Create more in-class writing opportunities where you can observe the process directly and establish a baseline of student abilities to track progress more methodically. Use debates, oral presentations, and other ways students need to demonstrate and explain knowledge in real time.
Stay informed about evolving AI capabilities and educational best practices. Join communities of educators wrestling with these same questions and share what works (and what doesn't). I have found Substack to be home to an incredible group of people who are doing outstanding work in this area.5
Teachers are essential to schools. Notwithstanding Bill Gates claim that AI may replace teachers within 10 years,6 I’m actually more optimistic than ever that face to face interaction between teachers and students is absolutely crucial, not only for learning, but for social development and basic human flourishing. If we took away anything during the pandemic, it was how much we all desperately needed that human interaction and connection. Kids don’t want to learn from a bot.
And what many of them are doing with AI right now is not learning. We need to investigate these tools and figure out if there is a place for them in our schools. We can’t do that if we don’t do what we do best which is to learn and share what we find with our students.
400 Million people use AI every week; half are students. WSJ, March 2025
I highly recommend Marc Watkins Substack Rhetorica for pedagogical and practical guidance and Ethan Mollick’s Substack One Useful Thing for more technical comparisons of AI model’s and capabilities.
Annette Vee has an excellent post on this very idea. On AI Aware Courses.
In addition to the two mentioned above, Mike Kentz, Nick Potkalitsky, Terry Underwood, Andrew Maynard, and Annette Vee are just a handful of folks whose brilliant posts have given me much food for thought on these issues. Here you can find some creative, unique, and fascinating ways they are exploring the use of AI in their classes.
What a thoughtful approach. Thanks for sharing it!
Great advice, Steve. Your call to teachers to talk with their students about their concerns and listen to frank comments from their students is a good call. Thanks for the shoutout, too!