Community R-VI language arts teachers are asking the Board of Education (BOE) to help them define and set rules for the use and engagement of artificial intelligence (AI).

Jami Williams and Haley Larson, language arts teachers at Community R-VI High School, told BOE members at a regular meeting on Jan. 17, that AI isn’t something on the horizon.

“Artificial intelligence is here and it is here to stay,” Larson said.

Both ladies made the presentation together and used numbers from a recent survey to make points and justify action. Williams said in the survey 62 percent of teachers said they and their students were already using AI including students at Community R-VI High School. Most of the interactions are with Chatbots. Williams said some humans make pretty lucrative earnings programming chatbots.

“They are programs that are programmed by humans to respond to humans in a human way,” Williams said. 

Williams said about half of the teachers surveyed said they are accepting of the possibilities of AI and how it can be used. Which also means half do not.

“Half of us are there and we’re like, ‘Yeah we can use this,’” Williams said. “The other half is, ‘No keep it out of my classroom.’”

Williams said almost 40 percent of students surveyed said they’re accepting of the possibilities of using AI.

“What that means is 39 percent of students haven’t figured out they can use it to cheat,” Williams said.

Williams said most kids are already using AI on their cell phones with apps like Snapchat that use chatbots. 

“They’re there and they’re going to get access to them and use them for all sorts of things,” Williams said.

According to the survey about 53 percent of students say that teachers are not addressing the proper use of AI. Williams said decision-makers like the BOE need to give more guidance.

“The reason we’re not addressing it is because we don’t know what the proper use is going to be,” Williams said. “Those policies are going to be guided by our high-ups.”

The teachers used some real examples from their classes as examples of issues with using AI. For instance, Williams had students write an argumentative paper on the pros and cons of the Second Amendment. A student writing in favor of the amendment can articulate their point but then needs to include the opposing view. Without any research, a student can type in what they’re looking for and find it in less than a second. Larson said it’s obvious when reading papers and seeing words she knows her students probably don’t understand.

“Students see this and go, “Oh copy and paste,’” Larson said. “Students don’t write like this. We know what our students sound like.”

Larson showed the BOE another example of how AI is being used in the wrong way but there’s also positives to using AI. Both teachers said that AI can be used in ways that help students learn rather than doing the work for them.

“Fifty percent of teachers are scared to show you how to use it because we don’t want them to do what I just showed you,” Larson said. “We want them to use it to research and we want to use it to help them learn but not to just plagiarize and copy and paste.”

Larson said teachers are also using AI to help them develop lessons plans by typing in a sentence about what she’s trying to accomplish and within seconds it’s all laid out for her. Larson said AI isn’t teaching for her but rather helping her find new ways to teach.

“If I’m struggling with something I can just tell it and it’s going to spit out something I can work with,” Larson said. “Do I have to use everything the way it said to? Absolutely not. I’m a veteran teacher I’ve been teaching for a while and I know how to teach things. It’s another way to not reinvent the wheel when I want something new and fresh.”

Williams said she can use AI to help individual students catch up to the pace of the rest of the class without slowing everyone else down. 

“We are differentiating instruction on the fly,” Williams said. “That means if I’m talking about how I want my students to start writing in complex sentences or compound sentences and I have a student who cannot get past a simple sentence. What I do is I tell them to go to Grammarly (An AI tool used for writing) and I want them to ask Grammarly to write compound sentences about a subject. Not only will it show them but it will show them why it’s a compound sentence. I get to move on with the class and that student gets the direct instruction that they need.”

Both teachers urged the BOE to begin thinking about a district policy now because AI is growing so quickly it could be harder to reign in. Williams gave an example of cell phones and how the district had to react to that new technology.

“We cannot be reactive we have to be proactive,” Williams said. “If we put a policy in place now we won’t have to deal with it later. It’ll just be the way it is.”

Both teachers agree that AI is something that needs to be embraced.

“Do you know why it’s growing?” Williams asked. “Because people are using it. Every time someone uses it, it learns something more. So really it’s not artificial intelligence, it’s gleaned intelligence. It’s intelligence that’s put into machine learning. It’s coming from us but they’re putting it together in an academic way.”