Jennifer Goodnow feels the same way. She teaches English in New York. ChatGPT is now used to insert complex readings like book or essay excerpts into ChatGPT. She asks ChatGPT to generate separate versions with depth of knowledge questions for both advanced and beginners students.
Amanda Bickerstaff describes it simply: “Teachers are incorporating AI because they’ve always needed better planning tools. Now they finally have them.”
The same goes for students with individualized education plans, commonly called IEPs—especially those with reading or processing disabilities. A teacher could use AI-generated tools to break up dense passages, simplify sentences, and highlight important vocabulary for a student who has difficulty understanding text. Some tools even allow you to reformat your materials with visuals and audio. This allows students to better access the content.
Chamberlain, Johnson, and Goodnow all teach language arts, subjects where AI can offer benefits—and setbacks—in the classroom. Teachers of math are more sceptical.
“Large language models are really bad at computation,” Bickerstaff says. Her team expressly advises against tools such as ChatGPT when teaching math. Instead, some teachers use AI for adjacent tasks—generating slides, reinforcing math vocabulary, or walking students through steps without solving problems outright.
It’s not all bad. Other ways teachers can make use of AI: Staying on top of AI. Teachers can’t ignore the fact that students are using ChatGPT nearly three years after it was made available. Johnson remembers a student asked to analyze a song. “America” The following is a list of the most recent and relevant articles. West Side Story only to turn in a thesis on Simon & Garfunkel’s song of same name. “I was like, ‘Dude, did you even read the response?'” He says.
Many teachers design around the tools rather than banning them. Johnson asks students to write essays in Google Docs with the version history turned on. This allows him track their writing progress. Chamberlain has students submit planning documents along with their final assignments. Goodnow has been toying around with the idea that students could plug AI generated essays into their assignments, and then evaluate the results.
“Three years ago, I would’ve thrown the book at them,” Chamberlain says. “Now it’s more like, ‘Show me your process. Where were you an agent in this?'”
Detecting AI is still mostly a guessing game. It is well known that plagiarism checkers can be unreliable. The districts have been reluctant in drawing hard lines because, among other reasons, the technology is moving quicker than the laws. If there is one thing that almost everyone can agree on, it would be this: students need AI literacy and are not receiving it.
“We need to create courses for high school students on AI use, and I don’t know that anybody knows the answer to this,” Goodnow says. “Some sort of ongoing dialog between students and teachers on how to ethically, question mark, use these tools.”
AI for Education aims to help provide this literacy. It was founded in 2023 and works with schools across the US on AI training and guidance. But even in the most proactive schools, the focus is still on tool use—not critical understanding. They know the basics of how to come up with answers. Students don’t have the ability to determine whether answers are accurate, biased or made-up. Johnson has begun building lessons around AI hallucinations—like asking ChatGPT how many R’s are in the word “strawberry.” Spoiler alert: it often makes mistakes. “They need to see that you can’t always trust it,” He says.
The tools are reaching out to younger students and raising concerns over how they interact with LLMs. Bickerstaff says that young children are especially susceptible to generating tools, as they’re still learning the difference between reality and fiction. She says that this trust could be detrimental to their sense of reality and development. Already, some students are using AI not just to complete tasks but to think through them—blurring the line between tool and tutor.
This fall, teachers say that it feels as if we’ve reached a new turning point. As districts roll out new technology, student sophistication increases, while teachers race to create the standard before tech does.
“If we know we’re preparing students for the future workforce—and we’re hearing from leaders across many different companies that AI is going to be super important—then we need to start now,” Bickerstaff says.
It’s exactly what Johnson and Goodnow, teachers, are doing. One prompt, each student, and one bizarre apocalypse scene at atime.
