Kristina Peterson, who has taught English for 17 years at Exeter High School in New Hampshire, empowers students to use school-approved AI tools to brainstorm—for instance, talking to an AI chatbot that represents Atticus Finch, the lead character in To Kill a Mockingbird, when they are reading that classic novel, according to an article in Education Week.
Educators should view AI as a brainstorming tool that must be bolstered by meaningful guardrails and best practices, she believes. This calls for teaching students to be healthy skeptics of anything AI produces, regardless of the subject. One of her classes perhaps finishes reading a chapter in a novel. They come to class the next day and Peterson gives them a chapter summary generated by ChatGPT. Those AI-generated summaries typically have factual errors, which Peterson confirms before handing them to the students. Students then go through the summary and highlight the errors.
“I do that to double check that they actually read and understood the chapter,” Peterson says. “But, more importantly, to show them that even as advanced as AI is becoming, it still can hallucinate. It still can get things wrong. They love to point out what AI got wrong. And they push back on AI far more than they push back on me.”
Bottom line, students and teachers must learn to put a human touch on everything AI produces.
Education Week
