6 Questions Teachers Should Ask Before Implementing AI
From Forbes.com
The push is on for teachers to incorporate AI products in the classroom. The federal Department of Education has created a $50 million grant program to promote “AI literacy.” Melania Trump has launched a task force to push AI into classrooms. At the same time, several corporations with a stake in the AI business are teaming up with the American Federation of Teachers to create a National Academy for AI Instruction.
The number of tools available to teachers is exploding, and teachers are regularly told that if they don’t join the revolution, they and their students will be left behind.
But before a teacher implements AI tools in her classroom, here are some questions that she should consider.
What does the program actually do?
If you use a chatbot to draw up lesson plans, here’s what it definitely does not do: it does not study the topic you want to teach, search through various pedagogical approaches being used, evaluate the most solid information, assess how best to conduct that instruction, and compose a lesson plan based on an expert’s grasp of the content and how to teach it.
Carl Hendrick, professor at the Academica University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam, took ChatGPT for Teachers for a test drive and found that the program designs lessons around the idea of learning styles, a once-popular idea that students have modes (auditory, visual, kinesthetic, etc.) by which the best learn. It’s an educational myth that has been thoroughly debunked. ChatGPT for Teachers also appears to do some lesson planning backwards, asking first “what activities can we best use with this content” instead of first asking what we want the students to learn and then what activities would best achieve that goal for that content. It might be fun to play Hamlet bingo, but is that the best way to teach students about drawing out ideas about death from the play?
There are some things that AI does well, but the program is not magic, and it is neither a content nor pedagogy expert.
What is your district’s level of commitment?
Veteran teachers are familiar with an oft-repeated ed tech problem. The program is initially offered to the district at low or no cost, but a year or two later, the company will start to charge a real fee. Then the school district announces that they will drop the program. Teachers, who have sat through professional development and done the work of incorporating the program in their classroom, grit their teeth and brace themselves for the next big thing.
This cycle seems particularly likely with the AI industry, which is spending astonishing amounts of money that it must, at some point, make back.
Brilliant point about ChatGPT designing lessons around learning styles when that concept has been debunked for years. The backwards planning issue is even more problematic tho becuase it reveals how these tools fundamentaly misunderstand pedagogy. Starting with "what activities fit this content" instead of learning outcomes is like building a house starting from the roof.