Chapter 1
Embracing AI in Education

In response to the rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), during the 2022–2023 school year, educators voiced concerns over plagiarism, cheating, and the futility of many of their traditional assignments. Suddenly, within minutes, students could generate essays that were hard to tell apart from human writing. Conventional plagiarism detection methods became obsolete as generative AI produced individual responses for each student. Some teachers scrambled to modify their assignments to keep up with the changes, while others were unaware of the newfound technological developments.

While the issue of academic integrity was pertinent in the months following the advent of these new technologies, the longer‐term conversation must involve embracing and making room for AI to ensure our classrooms meet our students' needs effectively. Educators must learn what AI is, how students are using and can use it, how it can make their lives easier, and how pedagogical goals that once seemed impossible can now be reached.

This book is a primer for educators to do just that. Throughout the chapters, I provide background information on the technological changes (both past, present, and likely future) and what that means for every teacher across the educational system. In addition, the book contains examples, tips and tricks, and thought‐provoking questions to help prepare educators to teach in the age of AI.

Significant technological developments have always forced educators and the systems they work in to evolve to meet the educational needs of their students and take advantage of new opportunities. In that way, AI is similar to the challenges that educators have faced in the past. However, what makes these challenges different is the rapid pace at which they are developing, and the pain points and fractures within our educational models that they are exposing. These two factors make it essential that educators think about the implications of these developments on their practice and pedagogy quicker and more thoroughly than ever before.

To help educators do just that, Chapter 2 helps teachers develop a fundamental understanding of what AI is and how it is related to education, Chapter 3 highlights the fractures created by AI and identifies opportunities for large‐scale change and adaptation in education, and Chapter 4 helps adapt traditional pedagogical theory to AI.

While plagiarism and academic integrity may have captured the initial public dialogue for education, I hope to present a more optimistic future for education. If these technologies are integrated and adapted to, instead of fought and avoided, educators and students will be better equipped for the world that awaits us as AI revolutionizes our societies.

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES: AI IN THE CLASSROOM

• What opportunities does AI present in the classroom?
• What challenges do educators face when implementing AI?
• What are the risks of overreliance on AI in the classroom?

While AI has intruded upon our classrooms, the opportunities it will create for our schools far outweigh the risks such technologies pose. The transition and adaptation will not be seamless, as we've already started to see, but with the proper knowledge and skills, educators can approach this new age ready to focus on what they do best: teach our students. Nonetheless, as with any rapid development, we must carefully consider how, when, and why we shift our practice and pedagogy in response to AI. While the entirety of this book is devoted to helping teachers carefully navigate this transition, the following sections provide an overview of the opportunities and challenges that AI is bringing.

The Opportunities

In the wake of the COVID‐19 pandemic, teacher burnout and attrition were at all‐time highs. This was not surprising given the growing blend of challenges teachers face. They are suffering from the pedagogical challenges of students who are academically behind, disengaged with the classroom, and presenting with various developmental, cognitive, and socioemotional needs. In addition, they are burdened by the practical challenges of keeping up with parent and administrative communication, implementing multiple systems and protocols, and ensuring they generate standards‐aligned material. These have combined to push teachers to the breaking point and caused a nationwide teacher shortage. While AI cannot fill in the gaps created in the classroom by our departing colleagues, it can help solve and mitigate many of these challenges and make teaching a less daunting experience for current and future teachers.

Teachers spend countless hours outside their instructional time planning lessons and activities, preparing instructional materials, providing assessment feedback, and managing administrative tasks. These tasks are independent of teachers' face‐to‐face time with students, and involve generating and responding to content for various non‐instructional purposes. The development of generative AI technology thus offers a path to offloading much of the workload that happens behind the scenes of instructional time. AI can help outline curriculum, draft lesson plans, generate assessments, and draft communication and feedback for teachers. The more teachers can rely on AI for this portion of their workload, the more time and energy they will have to focus on providing students with direct instruction. Chapters 5 and 6 provide suggestions for educators on how to best use AI tools to make their own time more effective and valuable.

AI can also solve many of our pedagogical problems by providing us with custom, individualized, technology‐based solutions to the issues we are facing. Creating personalized, interactive, and dynamic learning opportunities is becoming easier and more accessible for a broader range of educators to meet our students where they are and help keep them engaged in the learning process. Recent developments in AI technology will allow teachers to tailor their instruction and assignments to individual students, creating a more equitable and effective teaching strategy. In addition, AI systems will be able to help teachers analyze student data, and pinpoint learning difficulties and gaps quicker to provide targeted support for struggling students. Chapter 7 details how educators can use AI to boost student differentiation and engagement through various strategies and tools.

Many of these opportunities are already present with the technologies as they stand now, and in the upcoming years, these will only further develop and present more ways for teachers to shift how they spend their time.

The Challenges

As educators begin to take advantage of these opportunities, it will remain essential to engage critically about how much we come to rely on these technologies. There are significant ethical and practical challenges that such drastic changes in our workflow and pedagogical tools will bring, and both students and teachers need to be able to think and act critically.

As students prepare to enter a world where AI is ubiquitous, whether in future educational stages, their careers, or their social lives, they will need to be able to analyze the ethical and social implications of various AI technologies. They will have to be able to navigate how and when to use the assistance of AI and define what integrity means for them and their peers. As democratic participation and dialogue change, students must be able to navigate misinformation, deepfake media, and tailored manipulation and propaganda. They will also need to think through what they produce and put out into the world and its consequences for the rest of society. Finally, they will have to critically evaluate the output of AI to spot and address biases and inaccuracies. Chapter 8 provides guidance on critical skills and dispositions students will need to develop in school to successfully navigate these challenges later in life.

Educators, too, will need to act carefully to ensure that introducing AI doesn't worsen existing problems in education. While AI has the potential to help us narrow the achievement gap, we need to ensure that our responses take advantage of it to do so rather than risk widening it. To do so, we will also need to make progress on closing the digital divide to ensure that AI's benefits are equitable. Finally, as more data and information is shared with AI companies and providers, educators need to be able to think through data privacy and security to ensure that students are not exploited for profit gains. Some initial thinking and background on these issues are covered in Chapter 9.

Given the nature of technological developments and AI specifically, teachers will need to focus on self‐evaluating their skills and knowledge to navigate these challenges. While teachers do not have to become technical experts in machine learning, there are core skills and knowledge that will help them navigate the age of AI. They will also have to constantly remain in tune with new developments and progress and seek resources that help build on their practice. In fact, teachers can turn to AI itself for their own professional and personal development. All of these suggestions are built upon in Chapter 10.

Risks

One of the fears echoing from most industries is about the future of the workforce in the age of AI. Educators, however, will remain crucial players in...