AI means opportunities, challenges for schools
As the 2023-24 academic year begins, districts are confronted with both the challenge and opportunity of advancing artificial intelligence.
“There are different perspectives on it,” said Brian White, superintendent of the Butler Area School District.
AI technology has advanced in leaps and bounds over the last several years, now allowing users to fully generate both text and visuals by simply describing the intended end-product.
White said while some teachers pledged to forbid AI in their classrooms, a surprising number have embraced the technology.
“We have people, who I will call ‘early adopters,’ that are saying, ‘Hey, this is going to change our classrooms for the better, and we should start figuring out how we’re going to put this into our curriculum,” he said.
Even national organizations for education are divided on the topic, according to White, leaving many districts wondering what stance to take.
“So what we had shared in our newsletter was: We’re going to issue some initial guidance to our staff, but we are going to pose that question this year at our school board visits to each of the schools in our community,” he said.
As generative AI such as ChatGPT improves day by day, White said community input would be essential in determining the district’s policy.
“We’re not at a point that we’re ready to define it,” he said. “You know, we want kids to be able to write on their own, but also there are some diagnostic tools and things that might come out of this that can be pretty powerful.”
At the same time, he said the technology poses definite concerns for academic dishonesty and privacy.
“What does our community want the role to be?” he said.
White said the Butler district has already issued some “academic regulation” ahead of any policy on AI.
“For right now, the directions we’re giving is that private information is not to be entered into AI generative sources,” he said. “The second piece is that teachers do have the ability to say that AI-produced products are not acceptable for the class assignments and the work that they’re doing.”
And while White admitted that software for identifying AI-produced work was “not highly effective,” he said discrepancies in classroom-based assignments and out-of-class assignments would make its use readily apparent.
“If there’s a written portion of a classroom-based assessment and you can’t pass it, but you had text-generated essay written at the graduate level, there’s going to be a discrepancy there,” he said. “It’s going to be challenging though; I don’t want to say it’s not going to be challenging.”
On the other hand, White said the district’s current academic regulation does not prohibit teachers from exploring the technology in the classroom.
“Should a teacher or a class want to engage with AI, we’re asking them to reference it, cite it,” he said. “It says that a portion of the text is generated by AI so that it’s disclosed to the teacher upfront.”
The English departments in the district have already begun to develop formats for citing AI-produced work, according to White.
“The whole point is that we want to respect our students privacy, but we can’t ignore this,” he said. “We’re going to continue to learn more.”
White said staff in the district have already signed up to attend events on AI in the classroom throughout the school year.
“The big piece is really that we decided to engage our community as part of this conversation,” he said. “It’s bigger than just any one of us and how we want our kids to be exposed to this and utilize this.”
