AI in Education

Like so many technologies, and so many tools more generally, these are neither inherently helpful nor inherently harmful. They certainly are disruptive, but so were pocket calculators, word processors, spell check, and Google Translate. These have changed what students and teachers spend their time on in schools, but fundamentally they have allowed us to spend less time on the rote and routine, and more on the critical and the creative.

Several years ago, some of my colleagues and I were fortunate to be featured in a book entitled The Revenge of Analog¹ for some problem-solving work we were leading with groups of teachers and educational leaders. Years before anyone in the mainstream was talking about artificial intelligence, long before ChatGPT or the forced resort to online learning that was occasioned by the COVID epidemic, we were trying to imagine what the future of education that combined the best of the brick-and-mortar school with the best in technology might look like. What the author concluded—as have so many others before and since—is that “whatever technology is being used, the success or failure comes down to the interaction between the student, the teacher, and how the teacher manages the relationship.”²

While AI (and whatever may come after it) will certainly change the nature of the interaction between the student and the teacher, it will not replace it. As much as AI can gather, calculate, and extrapolate from what has already been created, like the technologies that have preceded it, it cannot generate truly “new, innovative ideas.”³ You need humans for that.

This was the message that our STEM Integration Specialist Wendy Mayer imparted to faculty last Friday at an all-school professional development workshop, that the choices we make about how we use technology in our classrooms at Roeper are really no different from all the other paedagogical and curricular choices we make. As we think about how to best use these tools, and teach our students to use these tools, our focus remains squarely on what will “educate and inspire gifted students to think as individuals and engage as a community with compassion for each other and this world.”