Educating AI

Welcome to my new substack, Educating AI! Let's figure out how to best integrate and implement AI-assistive technology in today's classroom.

AI-assistive technologies will most certainly change the nature of school as we know it. But before computer scientists and AI-technologists refashion schools into testing grounds for new technologies, teachers, administrators, and educational researchers need to weigh in on the efficacy and ethical nature of these products.

That is why I am launching this substack and a larger writing project exploring why teachers, administrators, and researchers in the educational arena need to be at the forefront of the discussion on how schools should change in light of these new, exciting tools and applications. 

In an initial round of newsletters, I will do my best to give you an educator’s viewpoint on the development and functioning of ChatGPT and other large language models and explain their most promising applications for instructional settings. In a second round of newsletters, I will follow-up with an extended discussion of the several challenges posed by the design and operations of AI-assistive tech like ChatGPT and Bard for teachers, administrators, and students. 

With these preliminaries out of the way, we will then dive into the exciting work of figuring out how to integrate and implement this new tech in our classrooms and other educational settings. I will write these installments as part of a larger book project, Educating AI, and as active reflection on my own work as a high school ELA teacher at an independent school in Southwestern, Ohio.

Before we proceed, a few particulars about me:

I am a White, cis-gender male in my 40s with a doctorate from Ohio State in post-1950 American literature. I have taught middle school, high school, and college. I have taught Latin, history, humanities, rhetoric and composition, and ELA. I am a trained Montessorian. I have 2 Ohio teaching certificates and have spent several years teaching in public schools. Although I have a passion for reading and analyzing literature, I love teaching writing the most. I love the complexity of the writing process–how it stimulates so many different mental, emotional, and social faculties and potentialities in my students. Theoretically, I tend to think through a rhetorical framework, so you will probably hear some of that jargon along the way. I will do my best to translate jargon as I go. 

In my discussion of integration and implementation of AI-assistive technology, I will draw on a few guiding principles:

1. All integration and implementation depends on the teacher’s relationship with students. Openness and honesty need to be our operating principles when addressing these new technologies in an effort to cultivate and maintain rapport and trust with our students throughout this exciting process of change. 

2. Students need a clear signaling system that assists them in knowing when to use AI-assistive technologies as part of the learning process. In tandem with principle 1, students should be part of the process of designing the signaling system.

3. Schools need to stay committed to existing skills, competencies, and literacies, even as AI-assistive technologies encroach on these skills sets. Schools are entering the challenging period of re-teaching the value of connectivity and experientiality to all parts of the research process, even as these new tools open up intriguing, alternative horizons inside that process. 

4. Schools need to adopt AI-literacy curriculum across the sciences and humanities in order to teach students’ best practices with AI-assistive technologies. This curriculum need not be unified, but should adopt a common language so that students can readily transfer skills from one discipline to another.

5. Approaches to teaching existing skills, competencies, and literacies will prove useful when teaching best practices with AI-assistive tech, just as new instructional approaches that surface while developing AI-literacy curriculum and implementing that curriculum will prove useful and even enliven the teaching of existing skills, competencies, and literacies. 

6. Given that there is not a considerable amount of data and evidence about the impact of integrating and implementing AI-assistive technology into classroom spaces, the process of drawing these products into the instructional domain should be slow, studied closely, and incremental based upon proven success. 

Thanks for joining me on this journey. In addition to my reports on AI-assistive technology, I will also offer some discussion about equitable grading. This year, I am planning, with the assistance of a more experienced teacher at my school to integrate a more equitable grading system into my 9th grade The Art of the Essay class. 

It is my sense that grading systems will slowly emerge as an important factor in the debate about integration and implementation of AI-assistive tech. We teachers evaluate our students too much. We have successfully sucked most of the joy out of learning as a result. When students feel so disenfranchised from their school experience by a grading system stuck in the Industrial Age’s equivocation of intelligence with performance, are we at all surprised that AI-assistive tech is a tempting way to get ahead?

Just some things to think about as we move forward…

As always, I am excited to hear your comments and questions.

Have a great rest of the summer. Try to get a little more rest before the students start arriving!

Remember, our work ahead is educating AI for the benefit of our students, not educating our students for the benefit of AI.

Be well!

Nick Potkalitsky Ph.D