Reflections of a Teacher about Generative Artificial Intelligence: Will AI Replace Teachers? (Part 1)

(Part 1 of 3)

I am a 50-year veteran of the education profession: teacher, principal, preservice-teacher professor, curriculum developer, and Dean of the School of Education at the prestigious Miami-Dade College. I was trained on mimeograph machines, library research, and typewriters. As I retired, I now see many of my students challenged by the newest technological advancement: Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI). Simply put, AI is an app.  You can “talk” to it by asking it to acquire information for you and receive an answer in text, image, audio, or video.  

Technology came into my wheelhouse after many years of teaching and in the middle of my career. I have always been open to innovation and new developments, incorporated technology willingly, and never feared being replaced. However, AI has presented new challenges for teachers like me: will teachers be replaced? How will the role of a teacher change? How will AI change teachers’ relationships with students? Should students be allowed to use the latest AI? If so, will they know how to use AI properly, or will it become a tool for fraud and cheating? What do teachers need to know about AI to support students’ learning and proper use of AI? Will AI widen the already wide achievement gap based on socioeconomics? How can we assess students’ progress when using AI?

I had to see it for myself.

I consider myself technologically challenged, and many teachers may relate. So, I prevailed upon my colleague Erika Twani, a software engineer and education AI expert, for some firsthand experience.  After working with her in an AI environment, I learned that AI is a tool to support teachers, not supplant them. This is what I learned.

ChatGPT retrieves what teachers learned in college as preservice teachers. ChatGPT does not know more than the collective teacher world, although it may know more than individual teachers or those who come to the teaching profession without adequate training. This was a marvelous revelation to me. I became more secure in my knowledge, training, and experience in education.

We explored various “bots,” AI trained for a specific purpose. We engaged in various activities with it in order to assess its capabilities. The bots were set up and trained by teachers.

We first explored an outline for a history unit for 9th-graders. It was developed in the Relational Learning Framework’s six steps: plan, explore, research, practice, relate, and self-assess. The bot was trained to use the Relational Learning Framework and generated the unit based on the framework that it was taught.  Having developed a unit in Relational Learning in the past, I might have developed a similar unit had I needed it.  But because the bot was trained to do it, it saved me unit development time. This is the type of unit that teachers could access and either use for autonomous learning or, in cases where there are no computers for student use or limited internet access, present the unit to their classes and then assess students’ learning.  The unit was comprehensive and thorough. 

Next, we asked ChatGPT to develop a new science unit on the start of the universe for fifth-grade students. A complete unit of study was quickly presented to us. I mean quickly, like within less than a minute. While a teacher could design this, and their role in delivering the unit would not change, it would take hours. Lots of time saved.

In our next activity, we asked ChatGPT to provide five activities in reading comprehension for fifth-grade students. ChatGPT then provided a rationale as to the importance of these activities.  While teachers know this, it was inspiring to read such a statement. The bot provided five engaging activities: book club discussions, reading comprehension worksheets, interactive story maps, Reader’s Theater, and vocabulary-building games.  Each activity came with an explanation of how to use it. As an experienced educator, I was familiar with all of these.  However, to receive the list in mere seconds was astonishing. Teachers could choose which activities might be best for the students based on their knowledge of students and their learning needs and which would not serve them well.

We further refined the prompt, which demanded little computer knowledge and expertise. For example, we wanted to explore strategies to use Reader’s Theater.  We asked the bot to provide AI apps best suited to teach Reader’s Theater. The bot complied and gave additional information. The bot could not always provide specific information as our prompts became more discrete. In this case, the bot directed us to various sites to obtain that information with the URLs included. Seconds, mere seconds, to do this. ChatGPT cut planning time, thus allowing teachers to determine the suitability of learning content to students’ proficiency and needs.

Another activity was to ask ChatGPT to teach me how to simplify and graph an algebraic equation.  Immediately, steps for the process appeared on the screen. This gave me pause.  Mathematics is a challenging curriculum area, and many students, especially girls, fear it.  However, the information provided by ChatGPT would serve teachers in multiple ways.

For classrooms without computer access, teachers could review the steps at home and check their own procedures, seeking more straightforward ways to teach the topic and trying to pre-teach areas of difficulty.  For classrooms with computers, teachers could assign this work as autonomous learning to advanced students based on their learning characteristics. Of course, some students would not master the concept in a computer environment, and teachers could have the opportunity to facilitate interventions and 1:1 work.

As we worked through these bots, I realized that AI did not know more than me as a teacher.  However, it would:

·         Assist by reducing planning time, therefore providing more opportunities to consider students’ proficiency and needs; 

·         Provide a host of ideas for interventions for better learning and expose new, different, and unknown formats and instructional tools; 

·         Enhance teaching with information on new tools;

·         Enable the differentiation of instruction and promote informed student-teacher interaction; and 

·         Serve as a mirror to apprise teachers of lesson delivery quality and how to improve this by reviewing new processes and methodologies.

That work session shared the advantages of AI for teachers. It will never supplant or replace teachers, but it will instead make them more efficient and able to meet learners’ educational needs.

We often hear how burned-out teachers are, how much pressure they are under to perform, and how much their students must catch up after the pandemic. Unlike other times in history, today we have the technology to support teachers’ hard work and get the results they so much yearn for: their students’ success.

What we shared in this article is only ONE way to use AI. Teachers can use AI and improve their efficiency tenfold. Email us to learn how to start today.

Our next article will discuss the students’ use of AI: is it a tool for fraud and cheating or a game changer? Will it widen the gap between the haves and have-nots, or will it - finally -transform education? Stay tuned. We will also discuss using AI for assessment.

Keep learning.