Navigating AI: Finding Balance Between Caution and Practice
Despite my thirteen years of teaching experience, I don’t feel like a veteran teacher. Early in my career, I was told that teachers hit their stride after three years, then five years, and now I don’t know many teachers who would claim that they’ve figured it out at any year.
In my case, I feel like I’m constantly in a state of flux. I’ve taught different classes almost every year and transitioned between at least five different school contexts. As a teacher of English learners, my students have varied in grade level (including high school, college, and adult learners) and English proficiency (including newcomers, long-term English learners, and native English speakers). These experiences have built expertise, but that expertise comes at a cost.
Teaching is an impossible job. If you crunch the numbers, it’s a wonder any of us are able to fit everything we need to prepare for our classes into the limited time we’re given. Integrating technology into the classroom was sold to us as one solution to this problem. We were told that not only would educational technology decrease our workload, but it would also improve learning, increase engagement, and help students build 21st-century readiness skills. The shift to virtual learning during the pandemic gave many of us no choice but to adopt these edtech tools.
Over the past few years, I’ve heard a lot of the same messaging used to encourage teachers to adopt generative AI, and many of us are much more resistant this time around. Growing research on the environmental impacts of AI datacenters, paired with my observations of the harm that technology has caused young people, has made me quite cautious to put AI in front of my learners. I will admit, however, that I have used it to cut down on my planning time.
Though some teachers have viewed generative AI with contempt from the very beginning, most I’ve talked to have found at least a handful of ways to use it. I have used ChatGPT to help me backwards plan, scaffold instruction, integrate the content and language demands of my lessons, translate instructions, apply grammatical concepts in English to the language backgrounds of my students, and create instructional materials that make learning more concrete so we can rely less on technology, including translation tools, in my classroom.
While my use of AI tools has allowed me to navigate the increasing demands of teaching English learners amidst my many professional transitions, I noticed that I was often reaching for these tools out of desperation with little clarity of purpose. However, the spaces where educators and leaders were encouraged to discuss AI felt unbalanced. Professional development sessions related to AI often sing its praises with no acknowledgement of the dangers. Conversations about technology within my school’s leadership team primarily focused on discouraging the use of generative AI. I wanted a space to contend with this dichotomy.
Participating in the AI Together Community of Practice with Lead by Learning allowed me to process my many conflicting thoughts related to generative AI while also learning from others in my cohort, while recognizing the impacts AI has already had on our society and our classrooms. In each session, we were provided with research and guidance to deepen our understanding of topics related to AI. Memorable sessions provided academic research to support best practices for engineering AI prompts more effectively, protecting student data when using AI, and conceptualizing how the use of generative AI impacts our environment.
Each session allowed time to apply this learning using AI tools and discuss these topics with other educators. It was especially enlightening for me to hear the ways that teacher librarians, literacy experts, multilingual educators, and teachers of English learners thought about plagiarism, scaffolding, and language instruction. Our conversations oscillated between practical examples, moral considerations, and frank admissions of the ways that AI has shifted our thinking about our teaching practice.
During the independent work time, I chose to explore MagicSchool, an AI-powered platform designed specifically for K-12 educators and our students. Looking ahead to the upcoming school year, I began planning for yet another year of transition. I used the AI chatbot Raina to plan book orders for my Academic English Language Development class. I also built a syllabus for a Business Composition class that I proposed and will be teaching in the fall semester. Embedded in this syllabus was a draft AI policy for my courses. Finally, I took some time in our sessions to test many of the teacher tools offered by this platform that I think might be useful for the upcoming school year, including tools that help draft text-dependent questions and create AI-resistant assignments.
As my role shifts this upcoming year again, new questions will inevitably arise related to generative AI and my teaching context. Moving forward, I feel prepared to make more ethical decisions related to how I integrate AI into my planning process and discuss AI with my students, colleagues, and our school community. Though I continue to approach AI with caution, I am grateful to have grown in my awareness of our ever-evolving technological landscape and how educators are learning to navigate this new reality.
Heather Tills has dedicated her career to designing learning environments and curriculum to support English learners as they develop English proficiency and build the academic skills they need to succeed in and beyond the classroom. She currently teaches at Oakland High School and serves as the Director of their Recent Immigrant Support and Engagement (RISE) business pathway. Her passion for supporting her learners and continually improving her practice has inspired her to pursue many professional and academic challenges, which you can learn more about on her LinkedIn profile. Heather also publishes writing on her Substack page, Teaching While Human, and posts resources for sale on her TeachersPayTeachers store, Curio English.
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