So much worthy of commenting on here, but I'll say that I just most appreciate the depth and scope of reflection you're modeling for others.
From the get go I argued that we needed to treat this technology as an an opportunity, not a threat, not an opportunity to invite more tech into the classroom, but as an opportunity to deeply consider what most matters when it comes to the experiences of school. I'd gotten to this place prior to ChatGPT's arrival because I'd already worked through my disillusionment with "schooling" as I evolved my pedagogy for teaching writing, but what I think you demonstrate here is that this is no longer just an individual choice. We have to look at these problems at the school and system level if we're going to do right by this generation of students.
Thanks, John. More and more of the schools I’m working with (and by definition it’s those schools that are really starting to think this through) are recognizing that you cannot talk about the “AI question” in a vacuum. It’s really not a tech question but a purpose question. I’m trying to be optimistic - if the final result of all-encompassing and powerful AI is a forced reconsideration of what we want students to do in schools for 6 plus hours a day, I’m all for it.
A generous piece, as usual. I like how much time you spend on delivery, on who supplies the content, the student or the machine. On that ground, many perceive the contest is over. The machine answers the questions faster than the student. You raise this in your point about the wrappers. But when the tenth graders you report going around the circle saying less, less, less, I hear them asking for leadership. We have to articulate clearly what the work is now. The old answer, the teacher who carries and delivers the material/content into the classroom, has been taken shaken. Are we still the people who deliver the content? Or are we something else? What is our role now, as teachers? If we spend less time policing, maybe we can answer the big questions that the kids are asking (or booing for).
Succinctly summarised, thank you. This is exactly where I feel we are at. Both extremes, both from teacher colleagues and pupils, for me, are a form of intellectual laziness. It’s easy to fully block an idea or unthinkingly go all in. It takes effort & graft to disentangle parts that genuinely work in one’s own context.
I feel lucky to be an English teacher approaching this moment. I agree with everything you’ve said. Also I know that the writing workshop model that has allowed me to have conferences with students for the last two decades about their drafts has created space for my students and I to now conference about their choices with AI as a co-author—how and when to use it to get unstuck, how to protect their voice, how to iterate… My fellow teachers who’ve been using a more banking-transmission model of education seem to be the ones most uneasy about the future. Maybe we will all lean more heavily on conversation and building relationships at the high school level… wouldn’t that be a great upside?
The relationship frame maps cleanly to clinical training. The risk is not only that AI supplies an answer; it can break the feedback loop that tells a learner what they actually attempted, what evidence they used, and what a human coach should correct next.
Before adding the tool, I would want to name the learning act it must preserve.
Stephen, I'm new to Substack -- just published my first post, actually. After reading "Teaching in the Age of AI," it's clear we're thinking about a lot of the same things. I'm in an interesting position: I spend my days talking with educators and educational leaders about what education really means in a world reshaped by AI. Would love to stay connected.
Having experienced the inception of AI from the beginning in 2022 within the post-secondary sector I think this is a very good reflection of my own observation and experience. I would add that we need to do more research on human cognitive impacts of this technology in education and find better ways to tease out where AI can be helpful and where it cannot add educational value. These are still early days, and more digital pedagogical research will lead to better outcomes. In the meantime, we need to ride this bucking bronc until we persevere.
Agreed, though research on learning has rarely informed teaching practice as much as you would think. Maybe AI will be different. As AI ends up doing more and more of it. It might have an incentive to tell us how much it helps! Just a thought…
100% aligned with pretty much everything across this piece—the values, of course, but also the specifics. I think the short term gesture towards humility and focusing on what is human is the only thing that makes sense from my vantage point as a classroom ELA teacher—but I am also quite humble about how there needs to be a better, more-intentional path forward.
I also remain very convicted that the answer for my classroom/context is (1) partly based on my own lack of expertise/mastery over this ever-evolving tool as well as (2) not at all an "answer" for any other classroom. In particular, I would love to see far more schools creating pathways for students to develop AI Literacy in dedicated spaces, such as what Mike Taubman and Scott Kern created and have shared extensively about. (I'm also admittedly the grumpy English teacher who doesn't like to be told that our content area has to continue shouldering all of society's new inventions and ills.)
Appreciate the broad sweep of this piece, and continue to genuinely value your perspective—and perhaps it is a reminder to many, I think, that the margins between the hyperbolic extremes are where solutions are going to be found.
I had a couple of threads I've been thinking about for the past couple of weeks and your post kind of snapped things into place - my biggest challenge with respect to AI over the past few years is how to square my interest in explaining to students how the technology actually works - which I think has to involve, to some extent, actually using it - vs. the opportunity cost of doing so in my classes where content tends to be centered and I don't want to use up my precious class time for something I feel like should be tackled more broadly across the curriculum (but is not being done). Add that to the ongoing and controversial decisions around the country to rush the tech directly into classes with little to no understanding of the ramifications. Despite what you may think, I have demonstrated a lot of restraint - the overwhelming majority of my classes have nothing to do with AI but it is always lurking in the background to an extent when we discuss any kind of out of class work. Anyway, this is a little bit of my "state of the union" and I'm really hoping next year will be more productive. Based on the conversations with the schools I'm working with, it seems like more and more are ready to roll up their sleeves and start doing the harder and long term thinking about their curriculum.
I think this is also a judgment call currently that we all have to make for our own contexts. For me, particularly in a literature-driven course, it's just not worth it (and it might be different if I was more skilled!) but I fully acknowledge that it is a case-by-case basis. If you were doing far more research work, for example, I think you can make a really convincing case about how outdated a zero-AI research process is right now.
And I do believe in your restraint! I know that you have a particular focus here (rather than my haphazard, "what do I feel like writing about today?" approach 😂) and that doesn't mean it is what all your classes are like.
This state of the union was needed, in my opinion, and I'm always up for exchanges on this—via comments or emails or spoken aloud!
So much worthy of commenting on here, but I'll say that I just most appreciate the depth and scope of reflection you're modeling for others.
From the get go I argued that we needed to treat this technology as an an opportunity, not a threat, not an opportunity to invite more tech into the classroom, but as an opportunity to deeply consider what most matters when it comes to the experiences of school. I'd gotten to this place prior to ChatGPT's arrival because I'd already worked through my disillusionment with "schooling" as I evolved my pedagogy for teaching writing, but what I think you demonstrate here is that this is no longer just an individual choice. We have to look at these problems at the school and system level if we're going to do right by this generation of students.
Thanks, John. More and more of the schools I’m working with (and by definition it’s those schools that are really starting to think this through) are recognizing that you cannot talk about the “AI question” in a vacuum. It’s really not a tech question but a purpose question. I’m trying to be optimistic - if the final result of all-encompassing and powerful AI is a forced reconsideration of what we want students to do in schools for 6 plus hours a day, I’m all for it.
A generous piece, as usual. I like how much time you spend on delivery, on who supplies the content, the student or the machine. On that ground, many perceive the contest is over. The machine answers the questions faster than the student. You raise this in your point about the wrappers. But when the tenth graders you report going around the circle saying less, less, less, I hear them asking for leadership. We have to articulate clearly what the work is now. The old answer, the teacher who carries and delivers the material/content into the classroom, has been taken shaken. Are we still the people who deliver the content? Or are we something else? What is our role now, as teachers? If we spend less time policing, maybe we can answer the big questions that the kids are asking (or booing for).
Succinctly summarised, thank you. This is exactly where I feel we are at. Both extremes, both from teacher colleagues and pupils, for me, are a form of intellectual laziness. It’s easy to fully block an idea or unthinkingly go all in. It takes effort & graft to disentangle parts that genuinely work in one’s own context.
I feel lucky to be an English teacher approaching this moment. I agree with everything you’ve said. Also I know that the writing workshop model that has allowed me to have conferences with students for the last two decades about their drafts has created space for my students and I to now conference about their choices with AI as a co-author—how and when to use it to get unstuck, how to protect their voice, how to iterate… My fellow teachers who’ve been using a more banking-transmission model of education seem to be the ones most uneasy about the future. Maybe we will all lean more heavily on conversation and building relationships at the high school level… wouldn’t that be a great upside?
The relationship frame maps cleanly to clinical training. The risk is not only that AI supplies an answer; it can break the feedback loop that tells a learner what they actually attempted, what evidence they used, and what a human coach should correct next.
Before adding the tool, I would want to name the learning act it must preserve.
Stephen, I'm new to Substack -- just published my first post, actually. After reading "Teaching in the Age of AI," it's clear we're thinking about a lot of the same things. I'm in an interesting position: I spend my days talking with educators and educational leaders about what education really means in a world reshaped by AI. Would love to stay connected.
Having experienced the inception of AI from the beginning in 2022 within the post-secondary sector I think this is a very good reflection of my own observation and experience. I would add that we need to do more research on human cognitive impacts of this technology in education and find better ways to tease out where AI can be helpful and where it cannot add educational value. These are still early days, and more digital pedagogical research will lead to better outcomes. In the meantime, we need to ride this bucking bronc until we persevere.
Agreed, though research on learning has rarely informed teaching practice as much as you would think. Maybe AI will be different. As AI ends up doing more and more of it. It might have an incentive to tell us how much it helps! Just a thought…
100% aligned with pretty much everything across this piece—the values, of course, but also the specifics. I think the short term gesture towards humility and focusing on what is human is the only thing that makes sense from my vantage point as a classroom ELA teacher—but I am also quite humble about how there needs to be a better, more-intentional path forward.
I also remain very convicted that the answer for my classroom/context is (1) partly based on my own lack of expertise/mastery over this ever-evolving tool as well as (2) not at all an "answer" for any other classroom. In particular, I would love to see far more schools creating pathways for students to develop AI Literacy in dedicated spaces, such as what Mike Taubman and Scott Kern created and have shared extensively about. (I'm also admittedly the grumpy English teacher who doesn't like to be told that our content area has to continue shouldering all of society's new inventions and ills.)
Appreciate the broad sweep of this piece, and continue to genuinely value your perspective—and perhaps it is a reminder to many, I think, that the margins between the hyperbolic extremes are where solutions are going to be found.
I had a couple of threads I've been thinking about for the past couple of weeks and your post kind of snapped things into place - my biggest challenge with respect to AI over the past few years is how to square my interest in explaining to students how the technology actually works - which I think has to involve, to some extent, actually using it - vs. the opportunity cost of doing so in my classes where content tends to be centered and I don't want to use up my precious class time for something I feel like should be tackled more broadly across the curriculum (but is not being done). Add that to the ongoing and controversial decisions around the country to rush the tech directly into classes with little to no understanding of the ramifications. Despite what you may think, I have demonstrated a lot of restraint - the overwhelming majority of my classes have nothing to do with AI but it is always lurking in the background to an extent when we discuss any kind of out of class work. Anyway, this is a little bit of my "state of the union" and I'm really hoping next year will be more productive. Based on the conversations with the schools I'm working with, it seems like more and more are ready to roll up their sleeves and start doing the harder and long term thinking about their curriculum.
Ah, I appreciate that phrasing: opportunity cost.
I think this is also a judgment call currently that we all have to make for our own contexts. For me, particularly in a literature-driven course, it's just not worth it (and it might be different if I was more skilled!) but I fully acknowledge that it is a case-by-case basis. If you were doing far more research work, for example, I think you can make a really convincing case about how outdated a zero-AI research process is right now.
And I do believe in your restraint! I know that you have a particular focus here (rather than my haphazard, "what do I feel like writing about today?" approach 😂) and that doesn't mean it is what all your classes are like.
This state of the union was needed, in my opinion, and I'm always up for exchanges on this—via comments or emails or spoken aloud!