Looking Ahead with AI, Part 1: Teachers
A Focus on Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Innovation
This is part one of the “Looking Ahead with AI” series. You can find part two, about students, here, and part three, about school leaders, here.
Here in the U.S., we’re approaching the end of the school year. Summer is a time for rest, reflection, and planning, so I’m going to write a few posts that look ahead to the school year to come (and beyond) from a variety of perspectives. The goal is to offer some ideas for how we can integrate AI into our summer reflection and planning in a way that allows us to be proactive, considering how AI might support goals we already have for ourselves and our students.
Let’s start with teachers and their workflow.
Teaching with AI: Efficiency, Effectiveness, and Innovation
It is important for teachers to engage with AI. However we feel about it, we have a responsibility to develop some basic literacy about its impact on school and the world beyond it. Knowing more about AI allows us to talk with students about it, to explore the ethical implications of it, and use it to reflect on and reconsider the purpose of assessments.
One simple and useful way to build AI literacy is to explore how it might support our professional workflows. Consider these three pathways:
I have always enjoyed Ethan Mollick’s analogy that having AI is like having an eager but naive intern who can be extremely helpful with some training and mentorship. Because AI is so powerful and so responsive, it has the potential to assist us in many, many ways. We just have to know what to ask.
Efficiency
Teachers are pressed for time, and that time is increasingly consumed by 1) a heavier workload and/or 2) tasks that don’t meaningfully relate to the work that got them into the profession in the first place. The vast majority of “AI Tools for Teachers” I see on the market tend to address these efficiency challenges: Generate rubrics in seconds! Craft emails to parents! Grade papers automatically! The strength of these tools is that they make using generative AI easier: they do a lot of the prompt-crafting for you and they have user interfaces that are less open-ended than the usual chatbots.
While tools like these might be a good entry point for AI beginners, they are limited. There isn’t a lot of room for tinkering or creativity, and teachers have told me they find the outputs relatively generic. If using these tools sparks your enthusiasm for AI, though, I recommend you move into the widely available chatbots (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.) and start crafting your own prompts and using dialogue with the bot to create teaching materials or other work products.
AI for Education has a good prompt library to get you started.
Many chatbots (Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT Plus) allow you to attach files for the bot to read and learn from. Give the bot an example of your work (quizzes, essay prompts, project plans, etc.) and ask it to create new and/or differentiated versions.
If you have one task in mind that you know you’ll need help with over and over again, try creating your own bot via tools like Poe or HuggingFace or ChatGPT Plus (what Open AI calls “GPTs”). I have a couple of bots that do a great job creating alt text for images and generating summary reports of long documents.
Effectiveness
We can also use AI to become better at elements of our work. Let’s take three core elements of teaching as examples:
Instruction. Consider how AI can improve your ability to present and explain content. A few examples:
Have a bot explain a topic to you at a variety of age levels (fifth grade, 12th grade, graduate school, etc.) as a way to think about and refine how you explain that topic. Or, share examples of content you teach and ask it to explain it as clearly and concisely as possible, perhaps even creating guided notes for students.
Upload or copy/paste a handout or worksheet you’ve written and have it reformat it to be more usable or to improve the clarity of the text. One of my favorite prompts: ask it to generate questions or points of confusion students might have about teaching materials you share.
I met a Spanish teacher last week who used our workshop time to explore how the AI audio tool Eleven could generate readings of text in a variety of personas and accents so that students would be able to listen to Spanish in voices beyond just her own.
A couple of English teachers I have met are thinking about how AI image generators like Adobe Firefly can be used to help students understand and analyze text as well as support creative writing. Could they generate images of Shakespearean metaphors? Could they use them to help visualize the settings of novels (particularly science fiction) or build their own fictional worlds?
Feedback. Rather than attempt to delegate feedback to AI, consider how AI can improve the quality, quantity, or process of your feedback.
Give AI a sample of your feedback. Multiple examples are helpful; remember that AI can easily absorb large amounts of information and does a better job analyzing text when it has a lot to work with. Have it look for patterns, make recommendations for improvement, or reformat your feedback into more readable or concise formats.
Use AI to make your feedback multimodal. Give AI some of your written feedback and ask it to create an audio reading of it (Eleven can do this). Or, speak your feedback into an AI bot and have it edit and refine it to make it a useful and polished written piece.
Assessment. I think this is an area where AI’s superpowers of pattern recognition, quick but impersonal output, and growing context windows could be really helpful to teachers.
AI can not just generate assessments like quizzes, it can also understand assessment data and help us make decisions aligned to that data. Here’s a short post and video from Chris Goodall that I think offers a good example.
If you work with rubrics, upload a completed rubric to a bot and ask it to generate a narrative comment based on the scores. If you don’t use rubrics, share an assignment and some previous feedback with a bot and ask it to use that to generate a prototype rubric.
Use AI to support grading calibration. If you and your colleagues all give the same assignment, give a bot a sample of student work, your shared outcomes or rubric, and other relevant materials like the assignment prompt or grading criteria. Ask AI to grade the work and generate feedback. Compare that with your own assessment and that of your colleagues.
Innovation
I hear a lot about AI's potential to generate new ideas, but I don’t think AI has original ideas; it’s just that it sometimes shares ideas that we haven’t thought of yet. Because of that, I think there’s real potential in its ability to help us put our own new ideas into action.
Move from theory to practice. As a consultant, I am often the person who comes to a school for a few hours, introduces a new idea, and leaves just in time to wish educators luck in implementing it. I think AI could be a helpful partner in processing and implementing new approaches.
Identify a new practice you’ve learned about but haven’t tried yet (for example, project-based learning, or culturally responsive pedagogy, or spaced and retrieval practice). Provide AI with a unit or lesson plan and ask it to redesign it by applying that particular theory. Be sure to ask it to explain its reasoning.
Identify a change to your curriculum or a new project that you’ve been mulling for a while. Provide a bot with your idea and all the context you can (grade level, subject, intended length of time, learning outcomes, etc.). Rather than having it just design the project for you, tell it to play the role of instructional coach and ask you questions about it. Have it ask you questions one at a time and use your answers to generate more questions.
Make the impossible possible. I’m increasingly convinced that the most radical and innovative ideas about AI in education are going to come out of individual classrooms and the work of teachers and students. Look at how Mollick challenges his students to “do the impossible” with AI. If you are serious about AI, I think it’s worth making time for you and students to explore how AI can reimagine the kind of work we do at school.
Make AI Meaningful for You
When I was a teacher, I’d set aside time every summer (usually the beginning or the end, depending on my energy level) to try to design something new or redesign something old for the coming school year. I would have loved to have had access to generative AI during those times, not because it could give me ideas, but because I already knew what I wanted to do and why I wanted to do it. I really could have used more support, though, on how I was going to achieve it.
Upcoming Ways to Connect with Me
Speaking, Facilitation, and Consultation. If you want to learn more about my school-based workshops and consulting work, reach out for a conversation at eric@erichudson.co or take a look at my website. I’d love to hear about what you’re working on!
AI Workshops. I’ll be on a team of facilitators for “AI, Democracy, and Design,” a design intensive for educators being held June 20-21 in San Jose, CA, USA (offered via CATDC).
Leadership Institutes. I’m re-teaming with the amazing Kawai Lai for two leadership institutes in August (both offered via CATDC): “Cultivating Trust and Collaboration: A Roadmap for Senior Leadership Teams” will be held in San Francisco, CA, USA, from August 12-13 and “Unlocking Your Facilitation Potential” will be held in Los Angeles, CA, USA, from August 15-16.
Conferences. I will be facilitating workshops on AI and competency-based education at the Summit for Transformative Learning in St. Louis, MO, USA, May 30-31 (STLinSTL).
Links!
I’m a proud member of the board of the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (ATLIS), and I was recently a guest on their podcast, sharing some examples and insights from my work. I also announce a new nomination process for adding members to the board, part of my role as the chair of the nominations committee.
Here’s an interesting 4-part framework for writers on how to share AI’s role in the creation of a piece. Could be applicable to schools looking for citation guidelines for staff and students.
A troubling overview of the environmental costs of generative AI.
A thorough, balanced summary of the controversy surrounding Jonathan Haidt’s book The Anxious Generation and the research at its core.
Keep an eye on the smaller, cheaper AI models being developed for use on phones and in open source formats.
“Generative AI is an ‘arrival’ technology. Unlike laptop computers, its presence in schools is not the result of a policy of adoption. Like smartphones, students are using generative AI on school assignments regardless of whether the schools encourage or forbid it. In many respects, the stakes of ‘arrival’ technologies in schools are much higher than the stakes of technologies brought in by school leadership.”