Category: Uncategorized

Don’t Let AI Write Students Out of the Story

I am old enough to have used — or tried to use — a slide rule in high school math, so I remember the kerfuffle over the emergence of handheld calculators. Oh, no, people exclaimed: kids won’t learn their times tables! Indeed, calculators and subsequent tech have changed what kids learn and how they do math. Every advancement in technology has impacted education, for both good and bad. Word processing and text analysis have transformed my own writing and the way I interacted with students’ writing for the better, even as it empowered students to plagiarize more easily — definitely a worse outcome.

My attitude toward emerging tech has always been to embrace what is useful even as I worked to limit any harm. Why, then, do I feel so threatened by the ubiquity of artificial intelligence. I believe the impact of this tech on learning is different. Calculators didn’t replace mathematical learning and processes; they just shifted the labor and focus. When students use AI to write, however, the only meaningful process they might engage is crafting a prompt, and that doesn’t require the deep thinking of crafting their own writing. 

Gallup tells us that “The percentage of high school students who report using GenAI tools for schoolwork is growing, increasing from 79% to 84% between January and May 2025.” (https://newsroom.collegeboard.org) That percentage appears to be growing. More and more students use AI not as a tool for writing, but as a complete substitute for it.

What are those students sacrificing? What does learning to write well offer that is lost with dependence on AI?

My answer? So much… Research supports a multitude of benefits from developing the capacity to write with clarity and effective expression. The cognitive psychologist Dr. Ronald

T. Kellogg considers writing a “technology for thinking.” His article lists key benefits of writing:

  • Deepening knowledge
  • Helping readers retain what they have read.
  • Building executive planning skills
  • Developing metacognition — “the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style.”
  • Forcing writers to stress-test ideas
  • Allowing the writer to respond to counterarguments and cite sources.
  • Revising as a practice of self-critique and self-improvement
  • Empowering because it allows self-expression
  • Dealing with emotions productively through journaling (www.nytimes.com)

I would add a few more benefits:

  • Writing to learn: the very act of writing can be a tool to for the author to figure out what they’re thinking, to gain more understanding, to examine topics critically, to make connections, etc.
  • Developing voice: great writers develop a recognizable and specific voice, just like many singers. HS student Hadley Benson writes about the program for middle schoolers that she leads. With the help of high school students, these middle schoolers learn and practice public speaking in a safe, supportive environment, culminating in their delivering a public speech. She says they gain confidence when they “believe their own thoughts are worth sharing, even when they come out wrong the first time. Students who feel they have a voice at school are seven times more motivated to learn.” [www.the74million.org)
  • Generating “original” thought: even if there is “nothing new under the sun,” writers who come up with a meaningful idea on their own – before discovering that others have had that idea as well – develop their own thinking and engage with the material in a deeper and more meaningful way. I will never forget the epiphany my remedial students had: they were reading Of Mice and Men and asked me why Steinbeck always referred to a character as “Curley’s wife” instead of giving her a name. When I turned the question back to them, they decided she wasn’t a person in her own right, a powerful discovery they made on their own. Turning everything over to AI will rob students of discoveries like that.  

This long list of the benefits of writing may not be fully realized when students depend on artificial intelligence. We should be wary. Last year, a small study from M.I.T. showed that individuals who wrote in partnership with A.I. chatbots recorded lower brain activity while they wrote, compared with those who worked without chatbots. The writers who used A.I. struggled to remember what, exactly, they had written, and felt little ownership over their work. This long list of the benefits of writing may not be fully realized when students depend on artificial intelligence. We should be wary. Last year, a small study from M.I.T. showed that individuals who wrote in partnership with A.I. chatbots recorded lower brain activity while they wrote, compared with those who worked without chatbots. The writers who used A.I. struggled to remember what, exactly, they had written, and felt little ownership over their work.  (https://arxiv.org). These findings join a growing body of research suggesting that frequent A.I. use can degrade critical thinking.

For students with still-developing minds, the most urgent question, then, is how to protect thinking in a world where it has become so easy to outsource writing.

Dr. Steve Graham, a writing expert and educational psychologist at Arizona State University, asserts that “Intellectual growth occurs at every stage, from brainstorming to fine-tuning a final draft. If writing is thinking, then any part of the struggle that is outsourced to technology amounts to relinquishing some freedom to perceive. How will students ever know what they really think of anything — whether it’s “The Crucible” or A.I. itself — if they ask a machine to spit out an answer for them?” (www.nytimes.com)

Artificial Intelligence can be a useful tool, but it is no replacement for a writer’s own work, and dependence on it can limit personal growth. A Brookings study finds AI undermines educational and social-emotional development, as well as teacher-student trust. “The risks we found are things like shortcutting learning so that you have less cognitive development,” said Rebecca Winthrop, who heads Brookings’ Center for Universal Education and is an author of the report. Their brains are still developing and school should ideally help them practice critical thinking and “sustained engagement with challenging material.” Yet for most young people, AI isn’t a “cognitive partner” but a surrogate. It doesn’t accelerate their development — it diminishes it via cognitive offloading. The result, researchers say: declining skills across the board. (www.the74million.org2)

Teachers can lead students to use AI as an appropriate tool for many stages of the writing process and preparation for it: brainstorming, initial feedback on drafts, identifying gaps in thinking, explaining complex ideas, offering multiple perspective, etc. None of these replace the students’ own synthesis and expression.  

Michael J. Coren says it better than I ever will:

“AI may be making our work better. There’s new evidence it’s making our thinking worse.

When AI tools are accurate — and they get better every month — the gains can be profound. The costs are less obvious but could be just as real: a steady erosion of our natural intelligence.

Imagine hiring a personal trainer. Your goal is to get stronger. But when you go to the gym, you tell your personal trainer to lift the weights for you.

The next hour is a blur of motion as “you,” via your hired muscle, lift more than ever before in your life. Each time you call out another set, the trainer lifts hundreds of pounds with perfect form. Having never broken a sweat, you inscribe your name on the building’s wall of fame.

That, in a sense, is what many do with AI when they direct it to solve the algebra equation, draft the client memo or write the code achieving the task at hand, but eroding their own ability to.” (www.washingtonpost.com)

Another Teacher Role Model

Today I bring you another former student who has become an excellent teacher. She and I reminisced about her successes and struggles as my student and now as a teacher herself. 

A while back, I wrote, “Even as I struggle with the current teacher shortage and an inadequate teacher pipeline, I find hope in the passion and commitment of some teachers currently in the classroom.” That’s still true. Julie Robinson Hill is one of those teachers, decades after she was my student.

Julie initially set out to be a principal because she didn’t see enough women administrators. Although she started as a theater major, she wanted a day job that was more predictable and switched to English and Secondary Education, a fortuitous choice because, once she got in the classroom, she realized she liked working with students more than she’d like administration. After 21 years, Julie retains the passion that brought her to her students.

Before Covid, Julie loved teaching theater and fine arts. She believes those classes really help with belonging. Online learning during the pandemic shifted that and put her in English full-time. After a year, the school turned her theater office into a costume closet, and kids no longer get to gather and build community there.  That saddens her, but Julie has found camaraderie and new challenges in teaching English. At first, she felt unprepared to teach Creative Writing, but she found her way. She even uses some of the exercises and prompts she remembers from my creative writing class!

Julie still talks about her years teaching theater a bit wistfully. She spent fifteen years doing that, nine of them theater only. She found herself working on all cylinders for productions, especially when she collaborated with a friend on the show Spelling Bee and felt she had a perfect cast that rose to high levels of excellence. That show ended up in the High School Theater Festival and went downstate, the artistic and collaborative pinnacle of her career at that point.  

Now Julie transfers that passion and drive for excellence to her English classes. She gets to know so many more kids and see different sides of them. She has a different demographic than her theater kids, but these students also love performing with her guidance. They do podcasts and open mikes at ARC [Academic Resource Center] Fest; they choose and workshop their projects.

I asked Julie what has been most surprising to her as a teacher. She responded, “You don’t realize from the teacher side that many things that you need to do end up weaving together in awe-inspiring ways. You pull on things from your life.” She finds that when she’s working with kids, “everything else melts away – that magic is always there.”

A bit of a people-pleaser by nature, Julie has learned to let things roll off her back more. When theater parents were upset about the part their student got [or didn’t get], they might have preferred to believe it’s her fault instead of accepting that someone else was a better fit, but she’s learned to let that go. She uses rubrics in English to help explain students’ grades, but she acknowledges that there’s an element of subjectivity and has learned to get on the same page as parents most of the time.

Since the pandemic, the biggest issue she sees is that students, parents, and even counselors believe that students need more downtime, while she believes too much downtime leads to procrastination and feeds anxiety. She encourages her students to take a fun class or peer mentor special needs students; that way they would feel less stressed and more productive and more part of a community. Julie says her students crave community, want to feel good about themselves, and want to be challenged. She builds community and creates challenges in class.

What advice would she give to new teachers, parents, and/or the public at large? Julie acknowledges that it’s a hard time to go into teaching, that teachers have less autonomy than they used to, but that it’s worth it. She would tell a young teacher, ““If you have the drive and passion, if you seek a life of creating with young people, then find a mentor and go all in.” She has been mentored one-on-one by a retired teacher who helped her see what wasn’t working and why; she calls that the “greatest “cup-filler” of her career. Teaching is not just a job to Julie; it’s her calling. She would encourage parents to allow their kids to experience adversity and grow from it. “The thing that builds character and gives kids a sense of who they are and who they need to be is adversity.” Her teaching is an investment not only in her students’ academics but in their approach to the future.

Julie loves teaching adolescents because they may present as very sophisticated but aren’t yet set in their ways. So many kids come back and giggle about how they were and how much they’ve grown. She knew she liked kids when going into teaching but didn’t know how much she’d enjoy playing a small role in helping them discover themselves, take a loss, and develop some grit. She finds that being close to them is a fountain of youth for her and helps her feel optimistic. She finds it thrilling to see them start to develop their own set of beliefs rather than just parroting parents.

Julie really enjoys getting to know students outside of class, too.  She has traveled with kids and done extracurricular with them, and she just went to a school hockey game for senior night, discovering a whole different world that had her seeing those boys differently. She also worked with students on a food drive for a food pantry and relishes these connections. As the mother of three children under six right now, she’s had to scale back, but she still finds some time to know her students outside of class.

In the current system, Julie feels that students and families respond to incentives like weighted grades too much. She wishes students felt more of a sense of choice and that they might take classes because they’re interesting and different instead of packing their days with AP classes and creating frustrating workloads.

She herself, like all teachers, has a huge workload, so she’s learning to make peace with not being able to return some work as fast as she wants. She’s working on giving more formative feedback in class and being more selective in the other feedback she gives. Although Julie remains committed to extensive feedback in creative writing, she realizes that she needs to be thoughtful about what she chooses to collect. She sees focusing on critical thinking skills as leading to better writing.

Like many veteran teachers, Julie has faced numerous changes and challenges, but her passion for teaching and determination to support and engage her students sets her apart. She has adapted to change after change, making her an invaluable role model. Teachers like Julie Robinson Hill give us hope about the future of education.

Happier News for a Change

When so much of the news is distressing, here’s a break with some good news about education:

  • The American Exchange Project helps students build bridges across the American divide. Co-founded by 29-year-old David McCullough III, grandson of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough, it pays to for youth to spend a week in the summer after senior year “in an American town that is politically and socio-economically and culturally very different from the one that they’re growing up in,” McCullough said. Participants report bonding with others very different from themselves and seeing shades of gray in a world that used to be more black-and-white. (cbsnews.com)
  • Boston has opened high school reengagement centers that “offer a proven, scalable way to help more students find a path to a diploma and a better life.” Dozens of volunteers visit the home of students living well below the poverty line who have had poor attendance to encourage them to stay in school. Bostons’ four-year graduation rate went from 59% in 2006 to 81% in 2022. The five-year rate jumped from 65% to 84%.  Other districts could certainly duplicate this effort. (nextcity.org)
  • Indiana already had some work-based programs to prepare students for chosen careers, including those that do not require college. Now their Career Scholarship Accounts are available to every student as a sophomore in high school. “Students participating in qualifying programs can apply for $5,000 each year to pay for career training courses, enroll in earn-and-learn opportunities and cover the costs of items like transportation to and from work sites, uniforms, tools and certification exams.” (the74million.org)
  • Education Reimagined is developing partnerships with educators, communities, and researchers to shift the current model of schooling to “one built on community-based ecosystems of learning that offer deeply personalized opportunities to all students.”  For example, the brand-new City View Community High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, uses the local Chamber of Commerce as students’ home base and creates personalized learning activities, connected to standards, and community-based projects and problem solving. (the74million.org2)
  • Michael Hayes, a male fifth-grade language arts teacher at Hidden Valley Elementary school, started “Men Count” to ensure that Charlotte students see more men of color in the school so that many can see themselves. Male volunteers from all over Charlotte participate, providing role models children can relate to. (charlotteobserver.com)
  • Hope Chicago is taking a two-generation approach to attacking poverty by working with five Chicago schools to provide scholarships for both students and a parent of those students. As long as the student stays in school, the parent does, too. An April 2023 report by “Belfield, a City University scholar, found that college enrollment rates averaged 74% — a 17% increase — in the organization’s first year partnering with the five schools.” Chicago Hope plans to expand the program. (the74million.org3)
  • Ed tech nonprofit UPchieve offers free, individualized, on-demand academic support. This 24-hour online tutoring service relies on 20,000 volunteer tutors to offer free, on-demand academic and college application support to any U.S. middle or high school student attending a Title I school or living in a low-income neighborhood. (the74million.org4)
  • Two years ago, some students at a 60% white school in East Ridge, Minnesota, met to brainstorm what they could do to make students of color feel less isolated. They founded the Close the Gap club, which offers free tutoring by students for students. 40-50 teens participate and appreciate the support, finding it easier to get help from peers than teachers. (startribune.com)
  • Last spring Aleksander Simeunovic, a high school student in Batavia, Illinois, created Fox Valley Coding Buddies to promote online safety and digital literacy for elementary and middle school students. The group has already hosted 46 workshops across eight suburban school districts for students in grades 3-8 with 1,550 student participants, using 76 trained volunteers and eight executive board members. They tailor each workshop to the specific schools’ needs. (www.shawlocal.com)
  • New Jersey is the first state in the country to require public schools to teach media literacy to K-12 students. They believe that “students will become better citizens as adults by learning how to conduct research, analyze information, determine credible sources and ask questions to better reach their own conclusions.” (dailygazette.com)
  • Last month St. Charles, Illinois, offered a parent program entitled “Make Kindness Go Viral: Addressing Cyberbullying at Home.” A presenter from the Cyberbullying
    Research Center provided information on how kids use the Internet and their devices first and then examined cyberbullying, sexting, and unwise social media use along with practical strategies for identification, prevention, and response. (district303.org)
  • Two college students in Tulsa, Oklahoma, live in a senior community for free in exchange for performing music concerts and practices and engaging with residents. Although the financial benefits attracted them, both they and the residents say the bonding has been wonderful. The students bring joy and life to the facility, and the residents provide encouragement and advice. (kjrh.com)
  • A first grader in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, has been working on improving her reading by going door to door in her community and practicing by reading to seniors. Not only has Maggie’s reading improved as the seniors support her and help with difficult words, but they really enjoy the company! (kare11.com) In my own hometown retired adults work in the elementary schools as volunteers and report the cross-generational experiences are truly fulfilling. Perhaps we can expand opportunities like this across the nation.

It’s easy to feel discouraged about education given the strains schools are facing and the impact of the pandemic on learners. News items like these can remind us that good work continues around the country. We should support it and urge expansion of the best initiatives.

Partnering with AI

Image courtesy of Dall-E

Educators around the country recognize that AI is ushering in an unavoidable transformation. Those who fear this transformation wring their hands and try to block AI, “ [b]ut the barricade has fallen. Tools like ChatGPT aren’t going anywhere; they’re only going to improve, and barring some major regulatory intervention, this particular form of machine intelligence is now a fixture of our society” (nytimes.com). The “breakneck pace of AI developments suggests that humans could never outrun it,” so we need to learn how to embrace AI and use it wisely. Educational technology researcher Mike Sharples, of the UK’s The Open University, says transformers like GPT-3 are set to disrupt education. Teachers will have to change the way they teach. “As educators, if we are setting students assignments that can be answered by AI, are we really helping students learn?” he asks. (thespinoff.co.nz)

Education faces a critical choice now: we can fight an inevitable shift, or we can learn to use that shift to improve teaching and learning. The first approach is doomed, the second overdue. The pressure of AI should force educators to develop deeper questioning and thinking approaches.

We already know about efforts to defeat AI that won’t work. Last December Markham Heid, a health and science writer, called for handwritten essays to “beat AI.” He claimed, “The dump-and-edit method isn’t necessarily an inferior way to produce quality writing. But in many ways, it is less challenging for the brain — and challenging the brain is central to education itself” (thewashingtonpost.com). While writing by hand has a different neurological impact than keyboarding that may be useful, it also has significant drawbacks: slowing down the process for fast keyboarders who cannot write as fast as they think [a major issue for me], potential legibility issues for the teacher who’s reading the work, and greater challenges to performing significant revision. And handwritten essays would have to be completed during class time, to ensure no use of AI, which would shorten any writing opportunity.

Nor can we avoid “cheating with AI” by turning to technology. Tools to detect the use of AI and prevent cheating “aren’t reliably accurate, and it’s relatively easy to fool them by changing a few words, or using a different A.I. program to paraphrase certain passages” (nytimes.com).

From Kevin Roose, a technology columnist: “Instead of starting an endless game of whack-a-mole against an ever-expanding army of A.I. chatbots, here’s a suggestion: For the rest of the academic year, schools should treat ChatGPT the way they treat calculators — allowing it for some assignments, but not others, and assuming that unless students are being supervised in person with their devices stashed away, they’re probably using one” (Ibid.). This approach fails to address writing outside the classroom adequately, though. Should we just succumb to AI or consider how best to make writing outside the classroom enhanced by AI instead of being replaced by it?

Mike Sharples, a professor in the U.K., used GPT-3 “to urge educators to “rethink teaching and assessment” in light of the technology, so that we might make it a teaching assistant and a tool for creativity instead of a cheating resource (theatlantic.com). Paul Fyfe, English professor and instructor in a “Data and the Human” course, went further, asking students to “cheat” by writing an assignment with AI and then reflecting on “how the experiment tested or changed their ideas about writing, AI or humanness.” He argues that students who refine their awareness of artificial prose may also be better equipped to recognize what Fyfe calls “synthetic disinformation” in the wild. Students in his experiment, for example, discovered plausible-sounding false statements and quotes from nonexistent experts in the essays they produced with the help of AI” (https://www.insidehighered.com/).

Peter Greene, a writer about K-12 policies and practices, posits that “Authentic assignments grow out of classroom discussion and debate. When an English class studies a particularly rich work of literature, the focus and emphasis will grow out of the class itself, leading naturally to ideas for essays about the work. The discussion becomes one of the texts being considered, and it’s a text the software has no access to.” He also suggests using local concerns, current events, and real issues in the school community; such topics are not only challenging for algorithms to fake, but they also tend to be “richer and more rewarding.” Research papers that use primary sources and live interviews are another option. (forbes.com)

If ChatGPT kills certain types of writing, like formulaic five-paragraph essays and typical college admission essays, will that really be a loss? Only if we fail to replace those performative types of writing with deeper, more meaningful kinds of writing. For example, Greene suggests using  ChatGPT as a prompt tester. If teachers feed their prompts to the chatbot and it produces an essay they would consider well-written, then “that prompt should be refined, reworked, or simply scrapped… if you have come up with an assignment that can be satisfactorily completed by computer software, why bother assigning it to a human being?” (forbes.com2)

What other concrete strategies will make AI a helpful partner in education?

  • Create outlines: Cherie Shields, a high school English teacher in Oregon, had students in one of her classes to use ChatGPT to create outlines for their essays comparing and contrasting two 19th-century short stories that touch on themes of gender and mental health. Students evaluated the outlines and then used their revised versions to write their essays longhand. She said this approach “had not only deepened students’ understanding of the stories” but also ”taught them about interacting with A.I. models, and how to coax a helpful response out of one” (nytimes.com).
  • Focus on process as well as product: New Zealand education technology expert Stephen Marshall, from Victoria University of Wellington: “Teaching that looks at a completed product only – an essay for example – is finished” (thespinoff.co.nz)
  • Use AI to learn to edit and verify instead of regurgitating: Ben Thompson, full-time writer for Stratechery, which provides analysis of the strategy and business side of technology and media as well as the impact of technology on society, suggests a radical approach: schools should have a software suite that tracks AI use and challenges students to use that suite to generate their answers to one given prompt: “every answer that is generated is recorded so that teachers can instantly ascertain that students didn’t use a different system.” He predicts that “the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident — wrong answers will be often pushed out on purpose); the real skill in the homework assignment will be in verifying the answers the system churns out — learning how to be a verifier and an editor, instead of a regurgitator.” Wouldn’t that help develop critical twenty-first century skills for an AI-dominated world? (stratechery.com)
  • Evaluation and critical thinking: “Several teachers…instructed students to try to trip up ChatGPT, or evaluate its responses the way a teacher would evaluate a student’s”  (nytimes.com). Krista Fancher’s student loaded a social entrepreneurship project from the previous year and “asked chat gpt to find everything wrong with the solution. It did. He used the list of flaws to redesign the project and built a new prototype designed to connect grandparents and their grandchildren.” (ditchthattextbook.com).
  • Problem-solving and synthesis: AI can help students create projects in which themes and elements are connected in non-linear fashion. One teacher annually checked her seniors’ understanding of Paradise Lost by having them put John Milton on trial before local lawyers, asking if he had successfully justified the ways of God to man. (forbes.com)
  • Teacher planning: use AI to
    • write personalized lesson plans for each student
    • generate ideas for classroom activities
    • serve as an after-hours tutor debate sparring partner
    • serve as a tool for English language learners to improve their basic writing skills.
  • AI applied rubrics: Ronak Shah gave his science fair rubric to ChatGPt and had students submit their work for feedback that would have taken him hours. He and his students found the feedback helpful: “it offered tweaks to improve replicability and validity. It complimented innovative and unique ideas. In fact, it summarized all of its feedback with lots of ‘glow and grow’ phrasing” (edweek.org).
  • Challenge students to best ChatGPT: Shah also gave ChatGPT test questions from his science test and then gave the machine- generated answers to students. He challenged them to improve on the machine’s answer, and “Students were offended at the notion that a robot could be smarter than they are and worked collaboratively to find any way to strengthen the otherwise very strong responses” (Ibid.).
  • Ronak Shah recommends these changes:
    • “First, validate the world students actually live in and question rigid attachments to pedagogy that don’t fit the world they’ll inherit. As teachers, it is our responsibility to open ourselves up to the challenges students will have to face. If we focus our time and energy on that, we’ll be able to do it better. It’s OK to let go of the rest.
    • “Second, change the relationship among students, teachers, and technology… Challenge the students to form an alliance with you, to create content and express knowledge better than a generative AI tool like ChatGPT.
    • “Third, we have to change the way we assess students and the role those assessments play in school accountability. Our assessments are mostly designed to test student thinking on items that are easy to ask and measure on a test. But just because they’re easy to measure doesn’t mean we’re measuring the right things.
    • “Let’s move toward a future where teachers and assessments focus on collaborative, real-world performance rather than answers to narrow skill or fact questions. And let’s embrace ChatGPT and other AI software to help us get there” (Ibid.).

In May 2023, United States Office of Educational Technology published Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning, a thorough if somewhat academic explorationwith seven recommendations:

  • Emphasize Humans in the Loop
  • Align AI Models to a Shared Vision for Education
  • Design Using Modern Learning Principles
  • Prioritize Strengthening Trust
  • Inform and Involve Educators
  • Focus R&D on Addressing Context and Enhancing Trust and Safety
  • Develop Education-Specific Guidelines and Guardrails (teched.gov)

This committee jargon is unlikely to drive coordinated and meaningful change. Neither individual school districts nor teachers themselves have the capacity and resources to make such global changes. We need a national approach.

Trailblazing teachers are publishing ways to use AI and sharing their ideas – check out “Ditch that Textbook” for excellent examples (ditchthattextbook.com). That’s a great start, but it’s not enough. The pace of AI advancement may seem terrifying, but fear won’t slow it down. We need a coordinated national response on how to deal with AI’s impacts across the board. In education, we need a coordinated national response to professional learning about AI for educators. AI can destroy or transform education. It’s up to us to fight for a valuable and long overdue transformation that will not only convert AI from an enemy to a partner but will also force us to provide the kind of deeper learning opportunities and adaptation of currently needed skills that we have yet to accomplish. The time is now, if not yesterday!

AI Is Here!

AI [Artificial Intelligence] has the potential to impact teaching writing in a number of ways. For example, AI-powered writing assistants can help students improve their writing skills by providing real-time feedback and suggestions on grammar, spelling, and style. AI-powered tools can also help teachers grade written assignments more quickly and accurately, freeing up time for other activities such as providing individualized feedback to students. Additionally, AI can be used to create personalized learning plans for students, helping them to progress at their own pace and improve their writing skills more effectively.

While AI has the potential to greatly improve the teaching of English, there are also some potential dangers to consider. For example, relying too heavily on AI-powered tools could lead to students becoming overly reliant on technology and losing their ability to think and write independently. Additionally, AI tools are only as good as the data they are trained on, so if they are not trained on a diverse range of writing styles and voices, they may not be able to accurately assess or improve students’ writing. Finally, the use of AI in education raises concerns about privacy and the potential for bias in the technology. It is important for educators and policy makers to carefully consider these potential dangers and take steps to mitigate them when using AI in the teaching of English.

Bet you thought I wrote those first two paragraphs. Nope! I asked open-source artificial intelligence [https://chat.openai.com/chat] to write them. The prompt for the first was “how will ai impact teaching writing” and the second, “the dangers of ai for teaching English.” Both paragraphs are well written and informative. How many students would offer a more clear and effective expression of the issues?

What does this mean for education? Because each generated block of text and image is unique, plagiarism becomes impossible to identify through an internet search. Students can turn in essays and submit college essays written by AI, and no one would know the difference. What do schools do to adjust to this new reality? Making all writing happen within the classroom period penalizes students who take time with their writing process and prevents true polishing of written drafts. We need to rethink how we teach and evaluate writing.

Artificial intelligence now can also generate unique, free, uncopyrighted images with Dall-E. To make Dall-E work, researchers feed images to a computer, matching them with word descriptors. AI is trained to make connections and then use them to produce new images, but the images are only as good as the input and training. “Bias found on the internet can show up in results, such as a prompt for a “CEO” that produces only white men” [washpost.com].Researchers then overlay “noise” in terms of visual static and teach AI to remove the noise to reveal a clear image. AI generates the images based on the words used as input. Dall-E generated the image accompanying this blog after I requested “a water color image of a computer screen with AI generated images” [https://labs.openai.com]. As a blogger, I no longer have to pay to use images or worry about avoiding copyright issues. Where, though, does that leave visual artists?

Wael Abd-Almageed, a professor at the University of Southern California’s school of engineering, warns that “Once the line between truth and fake is eroded, everything will become fake. We will not be able to believe anything” [washpost.com2]. Such image generation poses clear risks. “Each evolution of image technology has introduced potential harms alongside increased efficiency. Photoshop enabled precision editing and enhancement of photos, but also served to distort body images, especially among girls, studies show” [Ibid.]. AI can generate the kind of “deep fakes” that have been misused politically. Companies that offer and use AI have struggled to build in safeguards, but the technology is progressing more quickly than those efforts. AI researcher Maarten Sap said “asking whether OpenAI acted responsibly was the wrong question. ‘There’s just a severe lack of legislation that limits the negative or harmful usage of technology. The United States is just really behind on that stuff’” [Ibid.].

Hand wringing won’t help. Teachers need to focus on process more than output. New Zealand education technology expert warns that AI will transform teaching: “it’s going to require an awful lot of work from teachers and institutions. Teaching that looks at a completed product only – an essay for example – is finished” [the spinoff]. And, since “AI doesn’t know or care about truth” [Ibid.], educators will need to find strategies to evaluate for truth and teach students those strategies.

Whether we like the advent of AI or fear it, we need to figure out how best to work with it. AI does provide opportunities. For example, “teachers could generate a set of AI ‘essays’ on a topic, then set students (individually or in groups) to critique them and write their own better version” [Ibid.]. AI may even prompt long overdue changes in pedagogy. Perhaps we will finally focus on “better ways to assess for learning, such as constructive feedback, peer assessment, teachback” [Ibid.].

This is all fairly new to education. In the summer of 2020, OpenAI began offering limited access to a new program called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 [GPT-3]. Even if “GPT-3 seems to be manipulating higher-order concepts and putting them into new combinations, rather than just mimicking patterns of text” [nytimes.com], we face a sea change in communication and education. We are behind the 8 ball in thinking about how to adapt and even thrive with this new world order and how to regulate it fairly and effectively. But we must, for a continuously increasing ability of computers to generate text and images is already happening. AI is here now.

Education in Crisis

Image from printersrowlitfest.org

Last Saturday I had the privilege of selling my teaching memoir, Tales Told Out of School: Lessons Learned by the Teacher, at the Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago. Not surprisingly, the majority of my customers and visitors were teachers. Everyone who had not yet retired reported the same concerns:

  • The kids are not all right. The pandemic and the dysfunction in our country have taken a huge toll.
  • The kids are not behaving as well as they did pre-pandemic. They are less cooperative, less engaged, and less friendly.
  • We aren’t going to help kids make up academic deficits until we address their mental health issues.
  • The controversies swirling around so many districts about what can and cannot be taught are disempowering to teachers and make them question their willingness to stay in the profession.
  • Teachers are tired, too. They’ve paid a heavy price during the pandemic, too.
  • There’s just too much micro-management.
  • The pressure on current teachers to cover empty classes on top of their own load is too great a burden.

I recognize that this is a small group of anecdotes, not a vetted research study. But on Wednesday, when I was joined a group of former colleagues for a tram ride through the spectacular Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, I shared that feedback with them. The woman seated directly in front of me turned around and said, “Both my grown daughters are teachers. They’re in two different states and teach different grades, but that’s exactly what they say!”

Research studies about mental health issues for young people abound. I’ve written about them before, and I’ll write about them again. And we already have a serious teacher shortage and a grossly inadequate pipeline of teachers in training. The response, to let college students [Arizona and potentially Michigan] and veterans [Florida] teach without proper training and certification is not the answer. Even in the best of times, teaching has always required commitment, content knowledge, classroom management skills, and training in effective methods and best practices. Yet teaching may never have been more challenging than it is today, so teachers really need good preparation. We cannot help teachers and students recover unless we make significant changes:

  • We need to work on a culture that too often doesn’t value teachers or treat them with respect. Imagine, for example, if the media did more news stories about classrooms that are working well.
  • We need to empower teachers to do the decision-making for which they were trained instead of having screaming adults at school board meetings force administrations to surrender decision-making.
  • Every teacher needs a living wage and a workable class load.
  • We need to expand and develop programs that help teachers-in-training with college tuition in exchange for some years of service teaching in under-served areas after graduation.
  • We should provide mentoring for new teachers.
  • We must staff mental health positions in schools. The NASP has long recommended a ratio of one school psychologist for every 500 students, yet the national ratio average is 1:1211 and approaches1:5000 in some states [nasponline.org].  The need has never been greater, and classroom teachers have neither the time nor the training to fill it.

I felt so lucky to teach for over 30 years, to know so many students, to work with communities of colleagues. Let’s make sure those still in the classroom get to feel that way. Let’s invest in changes that support both teachers and students. That’s our best hope for retaining teachers and reaching and supporting students.

“The Children Are Our Future”

While many complain about teens, my problem-based learning elective class, which fostered service projects for the school and larger community, taught me that teens can and will make major contributions to their community. Right now, when so much education news keeps me awake at night, I loved reading about the high school senior in Olivia, Minnesota, who did just that.
 
The son of a military veteran and relative of others, Dominique Claseman grew dismayed that his small town didn’t have a veteran’s memorial. Although some residents of this farming community of 2500 people 90 miles from the Twin Cities had put up a few rocks and signs in recognition, that didn’t seem adequate to Claseman. He was ready to design and enact his Eagle Scout project, and his veteran father was his scoutmaster. Claseman and his parents toured war memorials in other towns. Then Claseman began his own PR campaign to raise funds. He sought interviews at local radio stations, handed out brochures, and went door-to-door to local businesses. He offered families the opportunity to sponsor stone pavers engraved with their veteran’s name. Although his initial goal was a modest $12,000 – 15,000 dollars, donations came not only from Olivia but from surrounding towns, hitting almost $77,000.
 
Claseman drew up a sketch inspired by memorials he’d seen. His contractor grandfather helped with the design. By May, the finalized blueprint showed “a long walkway leading to a stone monument and four granite benches in a 21-foot circle representing the 21 boot steps the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns walks. The memorial also would include flagpoles and Army helmet sculptures in honor of two local men who died in Iraq. A local crew volunteered to pour the concrete if Claseman would purchase the supplies. Then his dad walked across the wet cement in his Army boots to complete a walk of honor with 21 footprints” [washingtonpost.com].
 
Over three weekends, Claseman and his family, along with other members of his scout troop, installed the landscaping and 280 inscribed pavers. “’There were about 10,000 pounds of rock, so, yeah, it was a lot of work,’ Claseman said’ [Ibid.]. This past Memorial Day, two years after Claseman began fundraising and designing, the monument was dedicated. Jon Hawkinson, mayor of Olivia, said, “’Dom’s project proved to us that when creativity meets ambition, wonderful things can happen’” [Ibid.]. Several hundred people attended the dedication and grew quite emotional. 91-year-old Marjorie Barber came to honor her uncle who died in World War I at the age of 21 along with more than a dozen relatives who served during World War II, including her late husband. “’We have 17 members of my family on the memorial — almost all are gone, a few are still living…We never had a place to remember our veterans before, so what Dominique did is really wonderful and uplifting for our town’” [Ibid.]. Kim Wertish, whose 20-year-old son James was killed in a mortar attack in Iraq in 2009, bought markers for her son and some of his comrades. She called the Olivia memorial “extra special.”
 
Claseman expects his younger brothers to add to the memorial for their own Eagle Scout projects. He said he was thrilled to see his friends and neighbors paying their respects on the Fourth of July. “’Everyone came together for the veterans,’ Claseman said. ‘That’s what this is all about’” [Ibid.].
 
This heartwarming story feels remarkable, and Dominique Claseman is an admirable young man, but I feel confident that his story is not unique. While the news is full of grim updates about the concerning state of education, some young people continue to rise to the occasion and even to exceed anyone’s expectation. We should learn more of these stories. I find myself humming Whitney Houston’s song:
“I believe the children are our future
Teach them well and let them lead the way
Show them all the beauty they possess inside
Give them a sense of pride
To make it easier
Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be.”

Out of Africa

In 2010, when we were on our second safari in Tanzania, we again splurged on a posh yurt village in the Serengeti. This time we met a wealthy couple from England, pompous name-droppers who claimed to be friends of David Cameron, then the Prime Minister. I knew we held different values when she appeared at dinner in a flowing white linen shirt and palazzo pants, knowing full well that locals would have to try to wash them in water heated over an open fire. At dinner one night, she confirmed that sense when she started denigrating zoos. Another guest and I pointed out that zoos were responsible for significant conservation efforts, like the Amsterdam Zoo’s program for black rhinos, and that many people could only learn about animals through zoo. “Oh, no,” she replied blithely. “They should just all come to Africa to see animals for themselves.” Clueless and out of touch, she failed to see the value of empowering people to learn about the world beyond their own lives.

I have been thinking of her attitude a lot lately as I continue to read about the attacks at library board and school board meetings as people fight to curtail access to books for readers. Yet reading is an invaluable way for each of us to expand our awareness of worlds hitherto unknown to us. As a teacher, I always accommodated parents who had concerns about works in our curriculum. As an educator, parent, grandparent, and citizen of this country, I am appalled at the efforts of conservative individuals and groups to limit not only their reading of their own family members but of everyone. They would remove so many books from libraries and schools that many students would never see themselves reflected in their reading, much less learn about others who are different.

Consider this passage from Reading is Fundamental [scenicregional.org]:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.

I am somewhat comforted, though, by Newton’s Third Law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. I am relieved to see many organizations actively working to support those of us who would fight such censorship. These include the following:

If I were still in an English classroom, I would depend upon the efforts of the National Council of Teachers of English. Their “This Story Matters” initiative provides rationales to defend books under attack. Their position says it best:

The right to read is one of the foundations of a democratic society, and teachers need the freedom to support that right so their students can make informed decisions and be valuable contributors to our world. A story can encourage diversity of thought, broaden global perspectives, celebrate unique cultures, and motivate the reader to achieve their dreams. This right matters. This Story Matters.

Tennessee Leads the Way!

Image from governorsfoundation.org

Like so many states, Tennessee is concerned about the “COVID Slide,” the estimated learning loss for students from the pandemic’s school closures and disruptions. Their Department of Education recently released data that projects an estimated 50% decrease in proficiency rates in 3rd grade reading and a projected 65% decrease in proficiency in math. This is about 2.5 times higher than the learning loss students can experience during a normal summer break” [governorsfoundation.org].

Such data is not news, but Tennessee’s approach to this harsh reality is news. The Governor’s Early Literacy Foundation [GELF] addresses this problem: “The mission of Governor’s Early Literacy Foundation is to strengthen early literacy in Tennessee. Our vision is a Tennessee where all children have access to the resources, guidance and support they need to become lifelong learners” [tn.gov/education]. In January of 2021, GELF, in partnership with the Tennessee Department of Education, “announced a statewide rollout of Ready4K, a research-based text messaging program to help parents support their students in learning at home” [Ibid.]. Their research confirmed that 97% of parents had smart phones and texted [Ibid.]140,000 families with children enrolled in pre-K through third grade received, at no charge, “three weekly text messages with facts, easy tips, and activities on how to help each child learn and grow by building on existing family routines. Text messages match each child’s age, with simple, engaging facts and suggestions for building on existing daily routines, such as getting dressed, bath time, or preparing a meal” [Ibid.]. 

“’Tennessee is taking a leadership role in providing families with accessible, evidence-based family engagement text messages to help foster child development and bridge the gap between home and school during a time of unprecedented challenges,’ said Ben York, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Ready4K. ‘With more than 15 million children in the U.S. living without adequate internet access or devices, the use of texting addresses the country’s digital divide and enables even the hardest-to-reach parents to access high-quality information and resources for their children’” [Ibid.]. 

An evidence-based program, Ready4K is continuously being evaluated and improved through ongoing partnerships at Stanford, Brown and Notre Dame universities. It “has been shown to increase family engagement at home and school and increase child learning by 2-3 months over the course of a school year” [Ibid.]. 

Last week GELF announced its second year of Its K-3 Book Delivery program. Partnering with Scholastic Library Publishing, it will deliver half a million books to teachers and students all over Tennessee, including to every first grader in the state. The high-quality and age-appropriate books will be delivered directly to homes at no charge [businesswire.com]. Encouraging students to read through the summer improves their literacy and reduces learning loss.

Participants agree. A survey by GELF showed a positive response to the program from caregivers, teachers, and students of 94-97% [Ibid.]. 

This program builds on Dolly Parton’s incredible leadership for childhood literacy. “Since 1995, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library program has delivered meticulously chosen, personalized, age-appropriate books every month to children up to five years old — all free of charge” [rollingstone.com]. Initially a very local program, it kept expanding and, by February of 2021, had distributed nearly 155 million books [Ibid.]. Now the state of Tennessee is following her lead.

The pandemic has brought about lots of handwringing about learning loss, and I myself have written about it often enough. Here, though, is meaningful good news. Here is a state, one not necessarily known nationwide for leadership in education, that offers a concrete solution to address the COVID slide. Their leadership makes me hopeful for the children of Tennessee. Now may other states follow suit, developing programs like these or their own alternatives, so that our students catch up and become literate adults!

Enough!

More than 311, 000… that’s how many students have experienced gun violence at school since the Columbine High massacre in 1999. “While school shootings remain rare, there were more in 2021 — 42 — than in any year since at least 1999. So far this year, there have been at least 24 acts of gun violence on K-12 campuses during the school day” [washpost.com].

So we start the sad dance all over again. Politicians who claim to be pro-life [who would take away a woman’s right to choose how to deal with her pregnancy] spout the same sanctimonious spiel to all who will listen even as they fight gun control legislation and take millions from the NRA. And nothing changes… We are growing numb as well as impotent.

David Frum points out: “Every other democracy makes some considerable effort to keep guns away from dangerous people, and dangerous people away from guns. For many years—and especially since the massacre at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School almost a decade ago—the United States has put more and more guns into more and more hands: 120 guns per 100 people in this country” [atlantic.com]. He reminds us that the most numerous gun sales in our country’s history occurred during the pandemic, “almost 20 million guns sold in 2020; another 18.5 million sold in 2021” followed by a surge of gun violence [Ibid.]. We are the “only country with more civilian-owned firearms than people “ [forbes.com].

The conservative podcaster Allie Beth Stuckey points out that the one common factor in these school shootings is that they are all committed by young males. She argues that we “are doing absolutely everything wrong when it comes to promoting healthy masculinity, purpose, & goodness for these boys and men” [Ibid.]. The gunman who killed 19 students and 2 teachers in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24 had dropped out of school after being bullied for a speech impediment. He had a difficult home life and unsatisfying job, and his behavior and social media posts offered warning signs. Yet no one pursued those signs, and he shot his grandmother in the face before walking into a school, wearing body armor, and randomly shooting victims. We may not understand, but we must act.  

We could know more and better understand situations like these if it weren’t for the 1996 Dickey Amendment that forbade the CDC from using its funding to study gun violence. In 2019 the law was clarified, and research resumed the following year, but now we’re running to catch up [washpost.com 2].

And I fear, as do so many, that once again nothing will be done. Brian Broome argues that nothing will change, that this will be yet another tragedy that will prompt empty speeches and vigils but no action on gun control. “The gun is a holy relic in America. A sacred talisman. More important than life itself [washpost.com3]. We live in a country that loves its guns more than its children. Isn’t that backwards?

Some in the Senate have tried. After 32 people died and many more were injured in the August 2019 El Paso and Dayton shootings, Senator Chris Murphy and others were negotiating with then Attorney General Bill Barr when the Trump/Zelensky call derailed that effort [washpost.com4]. Even the Manchin-Toomey bill, so diluted to appease the NRA that some called it “toothless” couldn’t pass the 60-vote threshold [Ibid.]. Manchin tried again after the May 2022 massacre at a Buffalo, New York, grocery store. Again, no legislation passed.

Those who argue for the sanctity of the Second Amendment to the Constitution would distort its meaning and context. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” That right did not include private ownership of cannons, and assault rifles didn’t even exist. We require training and licenses to drive a car but not to own a gun.

Our elected officials are failing our nation. “Nearly 60% of registered voters think it’s at least somewhat important for lawmakers to pass stricter gun laws, a new Morning Consult/Politico poll found after a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York—even before another shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday further ramped up calls for Congress to pass gun control legislation” [forbes.com]. Yet once again, nothing changes.

What can we do? Each of us must find out the position of our elected officials on gun controls. Then we need to work to vote for candidates who will support red flags and background checks and mental health efforts. We must vote out the hypocrites who offer sympathy as they block change. Congress and Governors and the President haven’t done it. It’s up to all of us.