For teachers, AI-literacy development is essential because their knowledge and skills can shape successful use of AI to improve student learning, write Professor Claire Wyatt-Smith, of Wyatt-Smith Education Solutions and Dr Megan Kimber of Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Learning Sciences and Teacher Education, in an article in The Educator Australia.
UNESCO views AI-literacy as foundational to human-center learning. AI-literacy includes:
- understanding what AI is, how models are trained, and understanding data and algorithms;
- using ethical principles to think critically about AI and AI-human interaction;
- knowing the benefits and risks of AI in education;
- using AI to plan lessons, teach, and assess students; and
- having professional development to hone these skills.
Human-centered AI is the most important guardrail that must be deployed in schooling.
AI-literacy for teachers involves:
- engaging ethically with AI;
- finding AI that is easy to use, age appropriate, and aligned with curriculum;
- arousing students’ interests;
- promoting individual and collaborative work, thinking analytically and critically, and being creative;
- tailoring learning for individual students; and
- modelling creating with AI in critical, ethical, and original ways.
AI literacy allows teachers to model framing prompts that elicit relevant information. They can model critically engaging with the response through checking the AI’s sources, questioning the information, and comparing it to information from other sources.
Teachers might model using prompts to aid adapting and creating new pieces, discussing their processes and creations, and assisting students to evaluate their own work.
Assessment is essential. Teachers must know how to differentiate learning experiences. Assessment gives feedback on students’ progress and helps teachers decide what they teach next.
To facilitate assessment, AI-literate teachers examine if an AI tool:
- provides students with timely and effective feedback on their work;
- offers the ability to ask questions of students;
- involves peers in questioning and providing feedback;
- provides opportunities to further students’ learning goals; and
- enables student agency.
AI-literate teachers are data literate teachers. They identify the data they want to collect, know how to collect that data, and how to analyze it. Data literate teachers apply their findings to their classroom.
Collecting and compiling students’ results can help teachers track student learning over time, identify students’ growth and determine what to teach next.
For AI to improve learning, teachers need to be AI-literate, engaging with AI in human-first, ethical, knowledgeable, and imaginative ways to plan lessons, teach, and assess their students.
Teachers can use AI to improve education. But this will only happen when they are AI-literate and human-centered learning remains fundamental to schooling.
The Educator Australia
