Generative AI tools have become widely available to teachers since the general availability of ChatGPT in November 2022.
More than three years later, where is the adoption of this technology among educators and what are the barriers?
Among the challenges facing educators is a lack of professional development and teachers’ own hesitance toward technology, say experts who discussed the issue in Education Week’s latest A Seat at the Table webinar series..
AI is proving to be a powerful tool for teachers and schools, and the applications they can leverage are becoming increasingly sophisticated.
Teachers are leveraging AI to accomplish time-consuming tasks Create rubrics for exams, presentation slides, grading, and more in seconds. AI can help provide feedback on student work. Create a personalized educational program For students receiving special education. We provide translation services.
Educator designs custom chatbot to give advice to new teachers Guiding students through job interviews. One district leader used AI to create a course to introduce students to AI..
Teachers are also using AI as personal assistants and thought partners, having ongoing conversations with chatbots about what to include in the next newsletter for students and how to plan lessons.
Enrique Noguera, assistant dean and lead AI strategist at Passaic County Community College in New Jersey, said he has found ChatGPT can be used productively in unexpected moments, such as while washing dishes at home.
“I put on my headphones and talk to ChatGPT, building content and talking about specific things. [lesson] “The design problem is,” he said in an EdWeek webinar, “It wasn’t like, ‘GPT, build this content for me.'” It wasn’t offloading work to GPT. But so to speak, we were building together. ”
However, many educators remain hesitant about the role of artificial intelligence in schools.
An EdWeek Research Center survey last summer found that educators are divided on whether AI is good or bad for teaching and learning over the next five years. 47% said AI would have a negative impact, and 43% said it would have a positive impact.
Teachers aren’t getting the PD they need to get the most out of AI
One barrier to educators adopting AI is a lack of support, whether it’s clear policies setting out the appropriate use of AI for staff and students, or professional development showing educators how to use the tools available.
In an October EdWeek Research Center survey, only 13% said their school district had a clear AI policy for both students and teachers. 44% of teachers, principals, and district leaders said they have not received professional training on how to use AI in their work.
29% said they had received PD once, 19% said they had received training multiple times, and 8% said they received ongoing training.
Melissa Weatherwax, a learning coach and former K-12 teacher, said teachers simply don’t receive enough professional development.
“We’re in this very difficult situation where we’re using it bit by bit, but we don’t have a deep understanding of what it means. [AI] What it can potentially do and how it can actually transform teaching and learning,” she said in an EdWeek webinar.
After all, if educators are inexperienced with AI, they won’t have the expertise needed to put guardrails around them and educate students about using AI in the classroom.
Even teachers who regularly use AI in their work may be at a disadvantage when it comes to teaching AI literacy and modeling productive AI use for students, Weatherwax said.
Teachers are often using AI tools designed specifically for K-12 education and are not necessarily using ChatGPT in their classrooms.
“Yet, we assign something to the student and send them out. It’s the Wild West. Once they leave our room, they can use whatever they choose,” she said. “How do we have conversations and teach these skills to students if we don’t have access to OpenAI to show and experience OpenAI while in the classroom?”
The natural reaction for teachers, then, is to use detection tools to police students’ AI activity, which misses an opportunity to teach students how to interact with technology responsibly, Weatherwax said.
Even skeptics must learn how to use AI
Although many educators are not convinced that AI will ultimately benefit teaching and learning, there is general agreement in the field that this technology will change the way teachers do their jobs.
A December 2024 survey by EdWeek Research Center found that 9 in 10 educators expect AI to change the job of education to some extent, and 42% said they expect AI to change education “significantly” over the next five years.
AI is a double-edged sword. Because it’s such a useful feature, it can be easy to overuse it, panelists said.
For example, Noguera says it can be far too easy for both students and teachers to offload difficult cognitive tasks to technology.
He sees this shortcoming even when it comes to one of his favorite AI-powered tools, Google’s NotebookLM.
“It can hold 1,200 pages of textbooks.” [the platform] “It does all the heavy lifting for you, and you basically can’t even read the content directly, which is very problematic,” Noguera said.
Still, Noguera says AI skeptics still need to know how to navigate the technology. To use AI responsibly, you first need to know how to use it.
“It’s designed to naturally compress and do heavy lifting,” he said. “You can’t even articulate a need until you actually start using the tools. That’s the reality.”
