The Wary AI Educator - Ep 31
00:00:00 Jon Bergmann: Welcome back to the Reach Every Student Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Bergman. The last couple of weeks, I shared stories from my forty year career in education. this week I want to turn to the topic of AI and education. And what I see as big issues. I think I can summarize my feelings about AI and education with one word. And the word is wary, W-A-R-Y, right? Wary definition means feeling or showing caution about the possible dangers or problems of something. You see, I'm convinced that AI poses a much bigger problem than what most educators are thinking. I've had the privilege of traveling in the circles of some of the ed Educational technology gurus in the last decade or two. And as I read what they're writing, they are mostly AI enthusiasts or maybe AI Optimists might be a better word. And I'm not there. Call me the wary educator, the wary AI educator. I, I am increasingly getting concerned For what it might do to the brains of the developing minds of the students that we are teaching. As most of you know, or if you don't, as somebody is learning, a young person is learning, uh, their brain is more plastic, more malleable than the brains of people. Like me, who are older. Like you, who's probably one of the listeners of this podcast. And if that's the case, we need to be very cautious about what we allow Our students to see, to be able to, um, what the inputs are. If we think back to even Some of the things that we have done to students in my career, right, in the last fifteen or twenty years, we allowed them to have access to things like social media and the research on that. It's incontrovertible that it has been damaging for the young mind. It's, you know, Jonathan Haidt in his book, The Anxious Generation, he cites Very compelling evidence that those kinds of changes have moved students into more anxiety, more depression, more suicide attempts, all kinds of things. Uh, that have, that have caused been is, is, is the indicative of where students are because their brains have been rewired because of their exposure to different, Inputs. For example, when I was a kid, I didn't have a cell phone. I didn't have that. That didn't happen until I was already a parent at that time. And so I didn't have the opportunity to grow up with sort of all these sort of Inputs happening. Now, when we turn the attention to AI, AI feels to me, again, I'm an old man, I guess that's it, it's much different. Some people say, well, Jon, you know, AI's like the calculator. When it was introduced, people said it would dumb down their math skills. Um, and then when we had the internet or the computer and the Google technology, Then we would, that would, that was going to dumb people down and people thought differently. AI is no different than that. I'm going to stand here and say, yeah, I think it is different than that. This allows for students to offload a lot of thinking. And I've already talked about this in some previous podcasts. AI can reduce the critical thinking of skill of students. And if that's the case, that's not a good place for us. To go. So I'm wary. I'm concerned about where AI is going.
00:03:43 Jon Bergmann: But I also acknowledge that AI is here to stay. Uh, AI is only going to get better. And better, what I mean by better is it's going to become more intuitive. It's going to know more knowledge. It's going to become more natural in the way it speaks. Uh, it'll be more intelligent, so to speak. And so, yes, I get that. But again, I want to come back to this idea that the plasticity of the developing brain of a human, right, of a child makes a big difference. And how we want them to think, and if they offload so much of their thinking to AI, I'm not sure they're going to be able to develop as well as they can. Will it lead to advances in medicine? It has, by the way. Will it make for more efficiencies in how we do things? It has, it is for me. I do, uh, some consulting with teachers and now I'm using AI to summarize my zoom calls and it's doing actually pretty stand up job. So it's a more efficient way. I'm still taking notes by the way, old school, but. I look at my notes and their notes and they're kind of about the same. And so it's doing a good job of doing certain things, but I am worried that it might offload that, those for our students. For example, in In an article by John Hattie and others, I cite this in one of my recent articles, they talk about how AI is going to take an expert and make them and amplify their work. And it takes a novice and it degrades their work. And I acknowledge what am I teaching? I'm teaching novices. And if I'm teaching novices, It's going to degrade their intelligence. And I, I, as a classroom teacher, right? My students left here a couple hours ago. I'm here after school. I don't want their intelligence to be degraded, not, not in the remotest. And so we need to rethink. What we're doing with AI in the classroom. And so I'm going to say this. I think we need to limit the AI use, uh, in the classroom. And honestly, here's the big, the big deal. It's all about homework, honestly, because when we send on homework and that they need, that they need to do cognitively complex tasks, the vast majority of students, if they're like my students, uh, Is they're going to rely on, ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever tool they're gonna, AI tool, and they're gonna allow it to do the work for them. Instead of do the work themselves and we're going to have a negative impact on their learning. They're, they're not going to learn the stuff themselves. So here's my remedy teachers, uh, principals, leaders in education is we need to move the cognitive work. To in the class, the hard cognitive stuff has to happen in the class. That's right. In the class. And because if you send home the hard stuff, There's a very low likelihood that it's going to come back as the original work of the students. Now, some might argue, they say, hey, Jon, original work of the students, they're working in companion with their uh, AI Friend that they've got or whatever. And I'm all for people working together, but again, if your students are like mine, they're going to let it do some of that work for them. Now. There's ways where we can use AI, right? I'm not anti-AI totally. Um, I'm more anti-AI than most is that that AI might help me brainstorm something. It might help me do some things like that, but let's have, let's do that. Sort of in the context of the classroom so that when the students, uh, they will develop their own thinking and, one thing I'm starting to do is I'm starting to rethink my approach to mastery learning. So I've been a big proponent of mastery learning where students move through content at a flexible pace. Sometimes people see their own pace. And I've been doing that now since I came back to the classroom in 2019. And I wrote a book on the topic, The Mastery Learning Handbook, And one of my concerns about that, this is what happened, right? My students would take home, they would say, hey, I'll just do that at home. And I said, oh, that's great. You can do this work at home. And then what I was discovering is they were taking Home, the hard cognitive tests because they were all at a slightly different place in the content, right? Mastery learning, everyone works at a slightly different pace. When they're ready, they take the test and they pass it, they move on. And my students were like, okay, yeah. And they were doing this at home and they were using AI to do the. Now what I'm starting to do is I'm starting to go back to what I started out in my sort of uh, ed guru stage to just a traditional flipped classroom where all the students watch the same video as their homework, not that cognitively complex. And then they come to class and then we do the hard cognitive work in class. And then their brains are developing. It's lower technology. They still have laptops, but oftentimes I say laptop closed. All laptops are closed. We collect their phones at the beginning of class. So they, it's a low technology environment. And now it's time to put your thinking caps on. And think. And I, I, I really see flipped learning as an answer to AI because they can get the lower cognitive tasks, right? Or the lower cognition, kind of like the information transfer through a short reading or a short video. And they'll do that. And when they come to class, let's do the hard work then. So it makes the classroom time much, much more valuable. So if I've got any advice to you teachers, leaders, is if we're going to not have the damaging effects of AI impact our students, Then what we ought to do is Really reconsider the usage of the flipped classroom model so that the students can do the hard work with you there. Now there's benefits for you being there besides just them not being succumbed to the temptation to use AI. The benefit is that you're there to help them when they're stuck, right? In a traditional learning, right? In traditional learning, I do the lecture thing. I do the thing in front of the class. And then the students go home and then they struggle with their homework, but they're not struggling anymore because they have this great helper who will do the work for them. Now that's not every student. There are students who really deeply care about their learning and they are fighting the AI temptation and that's awesome. if I know a thing about human nature and student nature, they will take many, many, lots of them. We'll take the path of least resistance and I want them not to take the path of least resistance because they need to struggle. If you're going to grow, if you're going to grow, you need to Put yourself under stress. I lifted weights this morning. When I lift weights, I need to actually lift the weights. I need to actually put a stress on my muscles if I want my muscles to become stronger. And that's the brain is a muscle, not really, but if you think of it as a muscle, then you can. We need that muscle to work. We need them to work their brain and not let something else be worked in its stead. And the quote that I keep coming back to that I quoted in one of my articles was, it's like AI, using AI for an assignment is like using a forklift in the weight room. Think about that. That's not a good, that's not a good route. So anyways, I want to come back. I am the wary. AI educator wary. I, I think we need to be very, very careful in how we distribute it to our students. But yet at the same time, we need to teach them how to use it well, but I'm going to do that in my class and I'm going to limit how much work I send home that they can A.I. A bull it or chat GPTable homework. That's not going to be, it's not going to end well. I recently read an article about a English teacher, I think it's professor actually, and they were giving up. They says, I am just a chat GPT detector and I'm tired of doing that because the assignments she was assigning and the students were turning in papers and they were all done by AI and it's like. Why am I reading all these papers that these students didn't write? That would be very, very frustrating if I was in their, in their shoes. Anyways, hey guys, thanks for listening. I know I'm ranting a little bit about AI. I've got some more thoughts on AI that I will share as I develop them. I've got a great idea that I'm going to play around with this week in class uh, when students use AI and I'm going to tell you how it went in the next episode because I think this might be a way to Help them to think about AI in a positive way. Not my idea, by the way. I stole this from another teacher at my school. Uh, we've been brainstorming these things. So anyways, Hey, if you enjoyed this podcast, podcast, the podcast, I encourage you to hit the subscribe button and please share it with your friends. It's super easy in whatever podcast app you use.
00:12:31 Jon Bergmann: And if you want to give me a shout out, then give the podcast a review. That just gets me in front of so many more eyes. So thanks a lot. Hey, so now go out and reach every student. Hey, you can find out more about me at reacheverystudent.com. This is Jon Bergman.
