Faculty Experts on AI in the Classroom: Obstacle or Opportunity?

The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 sparked a surge of students using the technology to help with writing and research, accompanied by an outburst of concern from educators. Were students using this powerful new artificial intelligence tool to enhance their education, or to cheat?

The role of AI in the classroom has come a long way in a few short years, changing how teachers teach and learners learn. While concerns about the impact of AI remain, educators now recognize how it can enhance learning and free them to focus their attention where it does the most good.

Teachers use AI to automate routine tasks and expedite student assessments. They increasingly rely on AI to provide personalized lessons that allow students to explore topics that interest them rather than relying on one-size-fits-all curricula.

The mix of trepidation and excitement surrounding AI in education is nothing new. Calculators once posed a similar challenge. As Jennifer L. Steele explains in a Computers & Education: Artificial Intelligence paper, “We need a future that is broad and democratic, a future in which people widely understand how AI works—its strengths as well as its dangers and limitations,” she writes.

Steele, an AU School of Education faculty member, addresses concerns and answers questions about AI in her teaching and research. Let’s take a closer look at AI in schools and how educators like Steele shape practices and policies. 

AI and Education: How It’s Used in the Classroom and Beyond 

Teachers are finding creative ways to use AI, such as customizing instruction and automating repetitive tasks. A U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology report outlines several helpful AI applications. They include:

• Handling low-level details to ease teaching burdens and increase focus on students
• Assigning relevant additional classroom work and providing feedback to students
• Making teacher professional development more productive and fruitful
• Scoring and providing feedback on essays

A recent White House executive order entitled “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth” includes mandates to prioritize the use of AI in discretionary grant programs for teacher training to:

• Reduce time-intensive administrative tasks
• Improve teacher training and evaluation
• Provide professional development for all educators so that they can integrate the fundamentals of AI into all subject area
• Provide professional development in foundational computer science and AI, preparing educators to effectively teach AI in stand-alone computer science and other relevant courses

Embracing AI’s potential for positive change doesn’t mean ignoring its risks. Even its proponents acknowledge potential issues with AI, such as generating false or biased information, compromising learning by automating tasks that students ought to do themselves, and potentially lessening teacher-student engagement when educators rely on it too heavily.

Commonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools, a booklet created by the American Federation of Teachers, addresses these issues. It advises: “Given the potential benefits and risks of AI, educators and policymakers must work together to make sure it’s used safely and responsibly; that we reduce—not expand—the digital divide; that users learn to identify misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes; and that we ensure these new technologies support teaching and learning, not control them.”

The Rewards 

When used correctly and ethically, AI can benefit students in multiple ways. For example, educators can use AI tools to promote equitability.

As Steele asserts in Computers & Education: Artificial Intelligence, AI “has potential to shrink social disparities and improve social equity by making it easier to complete arduous tasks—including writing according to standard genre conventions—that have long served as barriers to opportunity in our education systems.”

A Teach AI toolkit includes suggestions for how AI can enhance student learning via:

• Aiding creativity, such as using generative AI to spark innovative approaches across diverse subjects
• Collaboration, using generative AI tools to supplement group projects by contributing concepts, supplying research support, and identifying relationships among varied information
• Communication, with AI offering real-time translation, personalized language exercises, and interactive dialogue simulations
• Content creation and enhancement, using AI to generate personalized study materials, summaries, quizzes, and visual aids
• Tutoring, employing AI technologies to make personalized learning more accessible to a broader range of students

The guide also suggests potential rewards for teachers using AI. These include enhancing assessment design by creating questions and providing standardized feedback, aiding in content development, and recommending books or articles relevant to a lesson.

Educators can teach students about AI in ways that help mitigate risk and build critical-thinking skills. A school system near Atlanta has incorporated AI into its policies and procedures while establishing a human-centered approach to the technology that emphasizes ethical, responsible use. Students at Gwinnett County Public Schools are encouraged to use AI and look critically at its capabilities and limits.

“If you’re just talking about the tools and technology, you’re missing a critical piece because you cannot be a responsible and ethical user or decision-maker if you don’t understand how AI works,” says Sallie Holloway, the school system’s director of artificial intelligence and computer science.

The Risks

The potential benefits of AI stand side by side with a number of risks. These include copyright issues, inaccuracy, and data bias. Integrating AI into teaching can also make it more difficult for educators to measure student knowledge and skills.

The Teach AI guide lists the following potential risks for students using AI:

• Bullying/harassment
• Over-reliance on the technology
• Plagiarism and cheating
• Unequal access

The guide also warns about risks for teachers using AI, including:

• Reinforcing societal bias, such as reinforcing stereotypes and making discriminatory evaluations
• Diminishing student and teacher agency and accountability
• Privacy concerns, with AI potentially infringing on the privacy rights of students and teachers

A measurement challenge could arise from AI-driven tools that standardize learning pathways, undermining creativity and individuality, according to an article in AI & Society. It cautions: “This could lead to a situation in which students with unconventional or creative ways of problem-solving would be assessed against narrower criteria, for instance, that reward efficiency over original thinking.”

Steele worries that AI may render historically essential human skills obsolete. For example, in some professional writing tasks, AI excels. Steele explains: “[ChatGPT’s] facility in obeying the conventions of nearly any genre or style is truly a thing to behold… Although ChatGPT is mimicking the conventions of human language use, its command of such conventions is a struggle for many people, in much the same way that many people struggle to do complicated arithmetic in their heads.”

This raises unsettling questions: “What does it mean when a machine can write original content faster and more clearly than many students with years of schooling behind them? What does this say about us as educators, and about future demand for the skills we teach?” The answer to these questions must acknowledge the inevitability of a technology that increases efficiency and reduces costs. Steele concludes: “To prepare our students to thrive in an evolving world, we must help students learn not to fear automated writing tools, but to understand and leverage them responsibly.”

How AI Can Improve (and Demand) Other Human Skills 

Some of AI’s advantages and disadvantages in education point to a common conclusion: it lacks humanity, doing some things better and some things worse than humans. As Steele notes, AI “doesn’t understand humor, originality, beauty, surprise, irony, envy, or love.”

That makes human skills more crucial than ever in the AI age. Students will have the best chance to excel after graduation if they learn negotiation, teamwork, delegation, giving feedback, and general leadership ability.

As AI automates some processes, the human-powered ones become more critical. James Christopher argues that AI poses a greater potential threat to people with STEM expertise than to people with more adaptable skills. “With whole categories of jobs disappearing while new ones emerge, successful workers must have human skills like conceptual thinking, communication, and problem solving that machines cannot replicate,” he asserts. 

Educating the Educators: Faculty Expertise Helps Colleagues and Industry, Too 

Jennifer Steele’s investigations and instruction on AI encompass teaching teachers. She discussed AI and its implications with other AU faculty members in a 2024 workshop called “So Your Colleague is a Chatbot: Preparing Students for AI in the Workforce.” In a Trinity Washington University symposium presentation entitled “The Opposite of Artificial is REAL: Getting Real about AI in Higher Ed,” she offered educators a four-point framework for assessing and implementing AI. Let’s take a closer look at that presentation.

Getting REAL About AI: A Closer Look at Jennifer L. Steele’s Insights

Steele coined the REAL acronym to highlight AI’s opportunities and challenges in the academic sector:

• Realistic: AI speeds up analytic and communication tasks, creating challenges and opportunities.
• Equitable: AI is an asset to delegators and a threat to delegates. We must prepare students equitably to outthink AI and delegate to AI.
• Adaptive: To outthink AI, we must understand the kinds of mistakes it makes and why. The tech will improve, but so can our understanding of how to use it for good.
• Leadership: Higher ed must lead discussions of AI implications and prepare students to lead in an AI-powered world, making choices that optimize human well-being.

The presentation highlighted a recurring theme in Steele’s work and an essential part of the AU curriculum: embracing evolving technology while balancing the risks involved with AI. 

Learn With Education Experts and Innovators at AU

Faculty members like Steele help shape best practices and policy in education. Aspiring educational leaders can learn alongside them in AU’s online MEd program. The program features a cohort experience, where students progress with diverse peers, taking the same courses and accomplishing milestones together.

Program faculty include:

• Reuben Jacobson, director of the Education Policy and Leadership Program and senior professorial lecturer. Jacobson has worked at the intersection of education research, policy, and practice for nearly 20 years, and has researched and written about the growing field of school and community partnerships for organizations such as the Brookings Institution and the Center for American Progress.
• kecia hayes, senior professorial lecturer, championed antiracist k-12 leadership in New York City for more than two decades. She led two community-focused organizations at Columbia University: the Double Discovery Center, where she transformed the organization’s approach to college access and support for low-income and first-generation community youth; and the Raising Educational Achievement Coalition in Harlem, where she served as founding Director and chief architect of Teachers College’s university-assisted, community school initiative.
• Jason Snyder, Hurst senior professorial lecturer. Snyder’s teaching and research focus on education law and education policy. He developed and served as founding director of AU’s Education Policy and Leadership (EPL) program from 2014-2018 and as deputy assistant secretary for policy in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.
• Emily Peterson, associate professor. Peterson serves double duty, teaching in the School of Education and serving as an affiliate faculty member in the Psychology Department and the Behavior, Cognition, and Neuroscience PhD program. Peterson applies methods from educational psychology and cognitive neuroscience to investigate cognitive and motivational factors that support (or hinder) student learning in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).

The online MEd faculty prepares future academic leaders via:

• Analyzing systems, policies, and leadership, with students framing problems and understanding the role of racialized identities and positionalities
• Research, with students leveraging research practices that will help them analyze data to inform antiracist decisions and continuous improvement
• Cross-boundary and antiracist leadership, where students focus on collaboration, communication, advocacy, and management
• Systems thinking and change, with students encouraged to disrupt and dismantle elements of oppressive education and other social systems to reimagine and rebuild them

Take the Next Step: Earn Your MEd Degree at AU Online 

Take the next step toward a transformative education career by joining AU’s Online MEd Degree program. Start your application or connect with an enrollment advisor for personalized assistance.