I was excited to attend the recent Human-centered AI in Education workshop with Eric Hudson at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School alongside colleagues from many local independent and public schools. I was familiar with Hudson’s work from his time at the Global Online Academy (GOA), a virtual school and National Association of Independent Schools member. GOA was our middle school’s go-to hub for professional development and online resources in 2020 when we had to reimagine and implement teaching and learning during the pandemic.
Hudson started the workshop by framing two education technologies for us—“adoption technologies” and “arrival technologies”. Adoption technologies, like the SmartBoard or iPad, are ones that schools have a choice as to whether they adopt, whereas arrival technologies, like the internet or smartphones, arrive in schools no matter what. AI is in the latter category—it has arrived in education and is already everywhere, whether we as educators have chosen its presence or not.
What does this mean for education? I learned that there are four priorities for AI use in education that we should keep at the forefront of our work:
Augmentation over Automation
Teachers and students should prioritize using generative AI as assistance, like how a student might consult a teacher, parent, or tutor, rather than automation or a product generator. Imagine AI as an assistive device to pave the way for new tasks that humans can only do with the help of machines rather than a technology to take over human tasks.
Literacy over Policy
Due to AI’s ubiquity, we cannot control student use with policy alone. No tool can definitively prove that one’s writing contains no AI-generated parts. Instead, the successful integration of AI in schools will involve educators teaching students critical AI literacy skills. I saw this recently when Sarah Pikcilingis partnered with Annie Fuerst to teach a seventh grade math lesson focused on AI. The lesson introduced cognitive friction for students by requiring them to analyze how well AI solved a math problem they’d been working on. Through lessons like these, teachers can turn concerns about AI into curricula and ensure that students know there are ethical trade-offs to using AI.
Design over Technology
Prioritizing design over technology is about the teaching and learning component and how we might build assessments like tests, quizzes, and projects in a world with AI. We have to recognize that due to its presence in our everyday lives, generative AI is not a tech problem; it’s a design problem. According to Maha Bali, a professor at the Center for Teaching and Learning at the American University in Cairo, educators have four options in an AI age:
- Make AI use impossible for their students.
- Discourage AI use by redesigning assessments to formats in which AI would not perform well.
- Allow AI use within boundaries.
- Allow indiscriminate AI use.
Schools will need to focus on the second and third options in the next few years.
Vision over Decisions
We are at a point now where schools need to pause and consider, What is the vision? Where do we want this to take us? What is our vision for a productive, human-centered world where AI is present? These are the questions we face as we build Belmont Day’s evolving vision of AI’s role in the work of teaching and learning.
At the end of the workshop, I was excited to thank Eric Hudson in person for his and GOA’s help getting us through the pandemic. This kind of visionary and global thinking about education was just what we needed in 2020 and need again now in the age of AI.
