Three Key Takeaways for Teachers Reluctant to Discuss AI in High School Classes
Initial Findings from a Semester-Long Study of Student Integration of AI in a High School Writing Class
Change Is the Only Constant
My school year has drawn to a close, and I'm gearing up for a summer thick with change. Big news first: I've accepted a position as an AI Specialist at an Educational Service Center, where I'll be working with 30+ large public districts across Central Ohio. The role centers on crafting internal AI policy and implementation strategies—both for the service center itself and for helping these districts wrestle with Ohio's legislative mandates calling for rapid, safe, ethical AI integration. While I'll genuinely miss the daily pulse of working directly with students, I'm framing this shift as a way to reach even more young minds through thoughtful pedagogical evolution, smart infrastructure design, and classroom-level implementation that actually works.
So yes, the house goes on the market, and we're Columbus-bound—back to where I did my graduate work and where friends and family await. I'm genuinely excited about reconnecting with campus life, however much my new role will allow. Right in the thick of this transition, the Digital Communication Network Global reached out with an invitation to present at their Digital Education for Digital Transformation conference in Seoul, South Korea (June 15-17, 2025). For two decades, this organization has orchestrated institutes on digital education worldwide, creating strategic hubs for scholars and practitioners to share insights and approaches that actually matter. The timing's tricky, but I'm making the trip. I'll be running a speed-session—90 minutes to walk participants through core modalities of instructional AI case use. Plus, I'm debuting something I've been developing: the Cognitive Ecology Mapping Tool, an in-class instrument that helps teachers and students reflect on and renegotiate their AI integration pathways.
Today's article launches something I'm particularly excited about—deep work that's consumed Terry Underwood and me for months now. Together, we designed and ran an AI Theory and Composition class at my school. The entire approach emerged from a shared conviction: AI exposes fundamental problems in how we've traditionally approached writing instruction across most US classrooms, especially since Common Core took hold. Since AI devours conventional writing assignments whole, we pivoted our focus and pedagogy toward what Terry calls "writing situations." Students had full access to a FERPA-protected suite of top-tier AI tools. Rather than prescriptive assignments, they dove into investigations of specific writing situations and designed their own work within those contexts. They negotiated their AI integration patterns situation by situation. Continuously, they reflected on their usage patterns and the short- and long-term impacts: efficiency gains, cognitive offloading, information accuracy, personal values, ethics. Terry conducted interviews with students at three points throughout the semester.
Today, we're sharing some findings from our second interview round—results that might surprise you.
Running this class and now working through this massive body of evidence with Terry ranks among the most exhilarating intellectual experiences I've had since those breakthrough dissertation moments back in 2018. Here's the thing: students demonstrate far more sophistication in their AI integrations than popular media—or the anti-AI-in-education movement—gives them credit for.
Three Key Takeaways for Teachers Reluctant to Discuss AI in High School Classes
The following analysis is based on a 30-minute interview with a high school senior conducted in March 2025. This student's experiences provide valuable insights for educators who may be hesitant to incorporate discussions of artificial intelligence into their classrooms. Through the student's own words, we can see how structured educational engagement with AI technologies has shaped their understanding, critical thinking, and personal reflection. Quotations from the student interviews have been edited for clarity by removing verbal fillers and smoothing syntax, following standard practices for presenting spoken language in written form.
1. Students Are Already Engaging with AI, But Often Without Guidance
As evidenced by this student's experience, young people are encountering AI in their daily lives—through social media platforms, popular tools like ChatGPT, and various applications—regardless of whether it's discussed in the classroom. However, without educational guidance, students like this one can approach AI with unnecessary hesitation based on misconceptions.
The student described their initial wariness: "I honestly haven't interacted too much with AI, and that was another reason that I wanted to take the class... I was kind of late to the train when ChatGPT was released and everybody was using it for exciting things in school... I've always been a person that has been a little tentative to use random websites and to put information into things."
This hesitation changed through classroom learning. The student explains how formal education about AI fundamentals made them "much more comfortable working with AI," noting that after learning about "how it's been trained and how these new bots are coming out" and discussing "Alan Turing and things like that," they felt "that's when I think it really started to play a role in me getting my stuff done."
Without such conversations, the student might have continued to avoid useful tools due to vague fears. Instead, they developed the confidence to appropriately incorporate AI into their academic work: "I learned when I could and could not use AI in school and often found myself asking teachers, 'Hey, is this an AI assignment? Can I use AI on this?'"
Teachers who avoid discussing AI miss the opportunity to shape how students interpret and interact with these increasingly ubiquitous technologies. As this student observed, "Over time, just as it got popular, it got more popular in my life. Snapchat AI bot came out and Instagram AI bot, and that's when I kind of realized, okay, this is a thing that people are really using."
2. AI Discussion Creates Opportunities for Deeper Reflection on Technology's Role in Society
This student's journey demonstrates how engaging with AI academically led to meaningful personal reflection about technology's role in human connection. Through their coursework, they developed insights that extend far beyond the technical aspects of AI.
The student articulates a sophisticated thesis about technology's evolving role in their life: "I'm thinking the overall emotional lesson behind my project is that in a lot of the incidents I've been brainstorming, I've thought about how technology has really connected me to the people that I love. For example, I talk a lot about video games that I grew up playing or the music that I grew up listening to that my dad would download on my old iPod Touch."
However, they also recognize a shift: "As I've grown up, the technological experiences that I've had have, instead of facilitating that connection, actually harmed my connection with other people." They specifically connect this to their current experience with AI: "I'm now watching in school as I become a more independent worker, looking for feedback by a computer versus feedback from the person sitting next to me."
This reflection led them to a broader social message, wanting people to consider "how technology is playing a role in their relationships and if it's isolating them or connecting them with those they love."
By incorporating AI discussions into the classroom, teachers can prompt these kinds of reflections, helping students develop awareness about their relationship with technology that extends far beyond simple tool use. When teachers avoid AI discussions, they miss opportunities to help students think critically about all technology in their lives.
3. Structured AI Exploration Can Build Transferable Skills in Critical Evaluation and Effective Communication
The student's experience shows how guided exploration of AI develops important skills in critical thinking and communication. Their comments reveal growing sophistication in how they evaluate AI outputs and how they craft inputs to get useful results.
The student notes that AI feedback can be challenging to interpret: "sometimes it's hard to tell if it's responding that way because it thinks I wanted it to respond that way or if it's responding that way because it actually thinks that I'm doing quality writing." This demonstrates emerging critical literacy skills essential for navigating an information landscape increasingly shaped by AI.
Similarly, they gained insights about effective communication with AI systems: "My first reaction every time I go to enter a Mentor prompt is, these are really long and detailed prompts, and it has always been kind of a moment for me of, wow, the amount of thought that has to go into purposely getting an AI to produce what you want is a lot more than what I would have expected. When I open ChatGPT to help me with grammar, I just put something in and say, 'fix the grammar on this' and it does."
The student also describes how Mr. Jackson "helped us with different ways that we could kind of prompt the AI to give us quality results in what we were asking for," showing how teachers can scaffold the development of these communication skills.
The class activities helped them recognize the importance of specificity in communication: "I feel like that's the one thing that I'm not the best at—prompting an AI clearly. I would just request it to give me honest feedback on the specific things I wanted to focus on. Point out grammatical errors to me, if that's what I was looking for. I would try to be specific about those particular things."
These skills in critical evaluation and precise communication transfer well beyond AI contexts. Teachers who avoid AI topics miss opportunities to leverage student interest in these technologies as entry points for developing transferable skills that will serve students well regardless of how AI technologies evolve.
In conclusion, this student's journey suggests that thoughtful classroom engagement with AI offers significant benefits: it guides students who are already encountering these technologies, prompts deeper reflection about technology's role in society, and builds transferable skills in critical thinking and communication. For teachers reluctant to address AI in their classrooms, this student's experience demonstrates how valuable such discussions can be in preparing young people for a future where AI literacy will be increasingly essential.
Nick and Terry
Check out some of our favorite Substacks:
Mike Kentz’s AI EduPathways: Insights from one of our most insightful, creative, and eloquent AI educators in the business!!!
Terry Underwood’s Learning to Read, Reading to Learn: The most penetrating investigation of the intersections between compositional theory, literacy studies, and AI on the internet!!!
Suzi’s When Life Gives You AI: A cutting-edge exploration of the intersection among computer science, neuroscience, and philosophy
Alejandro Piad Morffis’s The Computerist Journal: Unmatched investigations into coding, machine learning, computational theory, and practical AI applications
Michael Woudenberg’s Polymathic Being: Polymathic wisdom brought to you every Sunday morning with your first cup of coffee
Rob Nelson’s AI Log: Incredibly deep and insightful essay about AI’s impact on higher ed, society, and culture.
Michael Spencer’s AI Supremacy: The most comprehensive and current analysis of AI news and trends, featuring numerous intriguing guest posts
Daniel Bashir’s The Gradient Podcast: The top interviews with leading AI experts, researchers, developers, and linguists.
Daniel Nest’s Why Try AI?: The most amazing updates on AI tools and techniques
Jason Gulya’s The AI Edventure: An important exploration of cutting-edge innovations in AI-responsive curriculum and pedagogy.
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"Together, we designed and ran an AI Theory and Composition class at my school."
For me, this is such an intriguing path for many schools to consider offering: to get teachers enthusiastic about doing the work you both have done to create a specific course + space to help students develop this expertise—and then to broaden it organically within school communities over time.
(Also: way more effective than just "flipping a switch" and telling all teachers to implement AI without any guidance or resources!)
That sounds like a fantastic opportunity to keep up your work with broader impacts. I'd love to see your frameworks applied in that area as a proof of concept and then expanded.