My 10th and 11th grade students, in addition to reading novels and short stories, use AI to advance their critical thinking skills, writes David Nurenberg, who has taught high school English for 26 years and is the host of the podcast Ed Infinitum, in an essay in The 74.
He calls his approach the third option to policing AI, which he says is impossible, or allowing students to use AI to generate ideas, explain difficult concepts and produce/revise writing that accelerates cognitive decline.
Nurenberg describes key activities to his approach:
- Students learned to discern actual analysis from simplistic summaries, and to suspect the allure of AI’s instant “correct answers.”
- In literary discussions, we sometimes invited chatbots into the conversation; many students described these interactions as “bizarre” and “disjointed.” One student “started purposely saying dumb things just to see how ChatGPT would find a way to say `great idea.’ It just felt so fake.”
- As we wrote, we compared LLM-generated essays with human-generated ones, teasing out how AI’s “sophisticated-sounding” yet “generic” prose differed from the “messier” but ultimately, in the students’ judgment, more engaging language they themselves created. Students were discovering the value of developing genuine voice. I hope at least some emerged thinking ChatGPT was best reserved for inter-office memos and letters to one’s utility company.
- As we researched, we studied how AI search summaries don’t represent internet searches but instead reflect word proximity within a static corpus of text that lacks access to paywalled scholarly research and draws disproportionately on unregulated chat forums.
- As we took and organized notes, students compared their manual note-taking process to the output of AI note-taking tools. They learned how what we choose to include or exclude in summarizing notes, how we use emphasis and phrasing create and propagate different narratives.
- When we studied AI, at the same time we studied neurological research about how humans, unlike LLMs, don’t just rely on pattern recognition, but also make intuitive leaps. Students did something else that AI couldn’t: related classroom content to personal experiences.
- When I abandoned AI bans, I instituted AI audits. Students had to demonstrate their thoughtful, detailed evaluation of each AI tool they used. This included knowledge of how it operated, what they felt they gained and lost by using it, how they verified accuracy of information, and how they had not relinquished their own thinking. The students recognized that using AI always requires vigilance.
- I had to teach fewer novels to make room for AI literacy, but ultimately my job is not to teach novels; it’s to teach students. They learned how personal evolution often comes from struggle and discomfort, how our desire for ease can hold us back from achieving our potential, how dangerous it is to invest authority in words just because they emerge from a machine. These lessons were equally valuable as any takeaway they from novels
- To be sure, my experience was often fraught. Some of my less-confident students never stopped considering LLMs’ “clear” and “well organized” writing superior to their own and still hesitated to trust their own readings of literature over “the answers” ChatGPT offered.
- Research suggests that this training is crucial for keeping AI users from engaging in “cognitive surrender, marked by passive trust and uncritical evaluation of external information,” as opposed to “cognitive offloading, which involves strategic delegation of cognition during deliberation” when using AI.
The 74
