Okay, so. Last week I wrote about six considerations I’d learned at a conference that was exclusively focused on A.I. in K-12 education. You can find that article here.
I left a final consideration unexamined because I wanted to save it for this week. It was a question raised by Jessica Garner, Senior Director of Innovative Learning at ISTE + ASCD, who gave an inspiring keynote at the conference. She asked us, “Are we using A.I. for efficiency? Or for transformation?”
If we use A.I. for efficiency, Garner said, it creates a loop.
Teacher uses AI to create an assignment. Student uses AI to complete the assignment. Teacher uses AI to grade the assignment. Student uses AI to make corrections to the assignment. Teacher uses AI to summarize the assignment’s corrections and give feedback.
In this loop, who is learning?
AI is. That’s the only learner in the room.
So here’s the essential question. Is our usage of A.I. just making our day-to-day work faster and easier?
Of course, that’s pretty alluring. Who doesn’t want things to be easier?
A recent article in The Cut, written by Kathryn Jezer-Morton, deconstructs why we want to reduce friction in our life. I see a lot of us (myself included) doing this.
“Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from,” Jezer-Morton says. We escape “into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands: Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Speaking at all— overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate, easily, and we do.”
I have used AI to plan trips, to figure out if a rabbit I was petsitting needed hay and how much, and to find out the estimated price of a 2020 Nissan Rogue. All of that is information gathering. That’s awesome. It’s how our students and teachers are using it. Yay!
But if students and teachers are using it to make things easier, to cut corners so we can get to the doom-scrolling a little faster, that’s a problem.
If we use AI to grade our papers, we aren’t learning about our students as learners.
If we use AI to plan our lessons, we aren’t being thoughtful about pacing, differentiation, or natural learning sequences.
If we use AI to create prompts, we’re reducing creativity.
If we use AI to develop a staff meeting agenda, then a robot planned our staff meeting. And that’s exactly how sterile it will feel to the people attending.
You get the point.
Instead, we should think about how AI can make us better, smarter, more competent as educators.
As administrators, let’s think about AI as a tool for change.
The magic of teaching, of leading, of being in a people business, comes in thinking about those people. What do they need from us? What will enhance our knowledge of them, our understanding of them?
These are all questions I’ve been thinking about. I have begun to think I don’t want friction to be reduced. I want to be someone who embraces it, who puts in the time and effort to think. To go out in the world. To leave my house and talk to strangers. I suspect we’re all going to need to change our mindsets— to utilize AI not as eliminating strife, but to change how we work through it.
Okay, that’s enough AI talk for a while. I hope you’re all doing well, keeping your heads high and recognizing what you can control— and letting the rest go.
Be curious, be well, take care—
Jen