Students asking for instruction

Tony Frontier, Educational Leadership, ISTE+ASCD

Tony Frontier ran focus groups with more than 250 juniors and seniors across 20 schools. About 85 percent of them use AI for schoolwork, most on a quarter to two-fifths of their coursework. Ten percent barely touch it, and ten percent use it constantly.

The part to take into a faculty meeting is what the students said does not work: blanket bans, teachers who say nothing about it at all, and teachers who make claims about AI's limits that the students already know to be false. That last one spends whatever credibility the teacher had on the subject, and they do not get it back.

What the students said does work is ordinary instruction — lessons on what the tool actually does, guidelines that arrive with their reasoning attached, teachers who show their own use instead of describing it, and a room where a student can say they used it without that being the end of the conversation.

One student's explanation of the whole problem is that teachers "just don't know how to use it themselves." That is a training gap described by a seventeen-year-old, and a training gap can be closed.

Frontier's article is in the September Educational Leadership.