AI is making its way into classrooms and changing the way students learn and teachers teach. Many teachers and students are now adapting to AI and figuring out ways to use it in their classrooms and their administrative work, enhancing learning and supporting their academic tasks. Understanding how AI is applied in education highlights its positive and negative impacts and how its use can be optimized.
When used responsibly, AI can open doors for students to learn more effectively and efficiently. Although student use of AI is often portrayed as relying on tools like Chat GPT to complete essays or assignments without gaining new skills, many students actually use AI in ways that support and enhance their learning.
AI is often used in writing to brainstorm ideas, generate creative hooks, edit drafts and provide editing suggestions on organization, spelling and grammar. Generating ideas through AI allows students to quickly obtain creative ideas that greatly enhance the quality of their assignment while still having them learn and experiment new ways to engage the readers. AI can also assist students when they want to review and improve their writing. After drafting, students can input their work into AI, which will suggest ways to refine or polish the writing. As students incorporate this feedback, they learn new ways to write at a higher standard.
When seeking help with challenging topics, AI chatbots offer easy access to information and detailed explanations. This approach is helpful because the AI can give comprehensive answers that are not only presented in different ways than in class, but also quickly generated for easier understanding.
Furthermore, some students use AI when they want advice on whether joining a specific class, club or organization will be valuable for them in their career or future. Using these insights, students can decide if that extracurricular activity will be beneficial, worth their time or help them achieve their goals. “Sometimes I use AI when I want help deciding whether to join a club and to learn how it can prepare me for my goals,” says Green Hope sophomore Leah Kim (‘28).
However, alongside these benefits, AI also presents challenges for students. For instance, some students develop a dependency on AI. Since AI is so easily accessible to all students, many utilize it too often or use it to do the majority of their work instead of only using it to a certain extent. This reduces a student’s critical thinking, learning and growth skills due to using AI to quickly answer anything that requires time to think. Additionally, having AI do the majority of an assignment can also be considered cheating, plagiarism and academic misconduct. As Mr. Bernhard, an AP English Literature teacher at Green Hope explains, “I think AI can be dangerous in a sense that people can cut corners, they can cheat and they can rely on it rather than growing their own skills.”
In addition to its misuse, concerns about AI include security and accuracy. For example, AI might take the input of students and use that data to answer questions from other people. Another issue is that many students use AI to research and gather information. The challenge, however, is that AI occasionally gives inaccurate information because it is often pulling knowledge from random websites on the internet that can have false or biased information.
Perhaps most importantly, AI can take away individuality from a person or student’s writing. When students use AI to edit their writing, it can often come out more generic and with less detail, making the writing less unique and harder to stand out. Leah explains, “I like to use AI to review my writing, but sometimes, I don’t like the result it provides because it takes away the individuality from my writing and often makes everything sound bland.”
While students are exploring AI in their own ways, teachers and administrators are also using it to save time, support students and strengthen learning. Teachers use AI to help them complete simple but tedious tasks, and also use it to help teach students more efficiently and effectively.
A significant benefit of AI for teachers is its ability to support individual student learning. Specifically, teachers can do this by enhancing personalized learning for students. By incorporating educational platforms that use customized AI, teachers can provide learning tailored to student needs and weaknesses quickly and efficiently without having to individually assign each student a different study guide or having all students do the same practice work. Furthermore, AI can also be used to gather data on specific students or the class as a whole, helping teachers understand what to focus on or steps to take to better help the students study.
To save time, many teachers use AI to grade assignments such as simple feedback for basic writing assignments based on prompts or fixed answer questions. This allows teachers to save time on repetitive work that can easily be graded by anyone. In addition to grading, teachers save time with AI by finding resources that complement what they are already teaching. They can turn to AI to suggest additional materials that connect with their current curriculum. Ultimately, these tools free up valuable time for teachers to focus on students’ learning needs.
Finally, teachers use AI to demonstrate how to use different techniques of literature to enhance and improve writing, such as how Mr. Bernhard uses it in his classroom. “Yesterday, I was teaching my AP English Literature class about pacing in storytelling and the way authors use different types of sentences to make a story go fast or slow,” explains Mr. Bernhard, “What I had the students do is to write the story of their upcoming weekend, trying to make the pace as slow as possible. We then used AI to modify the syntax of the sentences to reframe it as going very quickly. So what that did is it demonstrated how to do this rather than having them just trying to write it themselves or pull examples from texts, so it had both student input and change from the AI in a way to demonstrate the concept with a lot of speed.”
While AI supports teaching in many ways, it can also create challenges for educators. One significant concern is the use of AI detectors in schools. Unfortunately, these detectors can be both unreliable and inaccurate, creating major issues when determining whether a student’s work was made by AI or plagiarized. If teachers depend too heavily on AI detectors, students may face unfair consequences. This creates complications for schools, since removing detectors entirely would eliminate regulation.
There are many ways that AI is used in education today. This raises the question of how its use could be improved. One approach is for students to only use AI as a guide or a helper rather than to use it to do assignments. The goal is not to monitor students, but to help them understand that the tasks they rely on AI for are skills they need to practice and strengthen on their own.
Similarly, schools should also work to improve their teaching methods. Mr. Bernhard emphasizes, “In our setting, where grades are very important and we think about learning as trying to get an A rather than really mastering the skills or trying to learn as much as possible, I think that AI is more of a bad thing than a good thing. When we think about becoming smarter or better or helping us learn new things, I think AI is a good thing, but there is a disconnect between those, and it seems we don’t always prioritize learning and the mastery of skills in schools, and it’s too focused on grades and scores.”
Over the years, artificial intelligence has become increasingly sophisticated as companies provide it with better data, enabling it to perform a wider range of tasks. Mr. Bernhard reinforces the idea that the way we teach in schools has to change in order to beneficially use today’s technology to learn and improve. “AI is a part of technology as we use it now and it’s important to know what it does. It’s important to use it, but if we’re going to use AI effectively in school, the way we think about school and grades has to change. Otherwise, there is going to be this continued disconnect, so it’s going to force us to reframe what we believe school to be.” AI is reshaping education by helping students develop skills and assisting teachers in their work. Careful and intentional use can make learning more meaningful and prepare students for success beyond the classroom, but the risks should always be kept in mind.
