North Shore School District 112 Superintendent Michael Lubelfeld sits at his desk, watching the word “generating” bounce on his computer screen. Then, text appears, responding to Lubelfeld’s question as if its writer is Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain.
Lubelfeld reads it out and talks excitedly about the potential of the technology that has been perpetually making headlines for years now — generative artificial intelligence.
His excitement is reflected by a substantial commitment by the Highland Park-area district to encourage the use of generative AI by both staff and students, a commitment that began last school year and is set to continue when children return to the classroom later this month.
But how is generative AI being used in the classroom, what does its rise mean for educators and students, and what will the consequences be of a technology that Lubelfeld described as the biggest revolution since the internet?
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From suspicion to a new normal
D112 launched its pilot partnerships last school year with services Magic School AI and School AI. Magic School offers a variety of tools in its suite, including chatbots that imitate historic figures, authors or characters, image generators, coding assistance, college counseling and even a “joke creator.”
The district provided teachers with the pilot’s key objectives, implementation strategies and expected outcomes, all aimed at launching the district into the world of the new technology.
“Not to toot our own horns … (but) I think we really are on the forefront of tackling this and recognizing the importance of this,” said Jeremy Wickham, D112’s executive director of technology and operations.
The services were chosen in part for their data privacy agreements, which were an area of concern for the district going in, Wickham said. AI services use, “everything that you input into it to feed itself and grow and learn,” and the district wanted to make sure no student data was being sent to third parties.
Lubelfeld sees immense potential in generative AI in the classroom to create individualized instruction on a level not previously possible. He’s a member of two professional fellowships related to AI, will be conducting field research at Edgewood Middle School and Oak Terrace Elementary School with students and teachers, and plans to push for an AI advisory committee this year for the district.
“I don’t think we’ve had anything this revolutionary since the internet itself was opened up to the public,” he said.
Rebecca Condon is an instruction coach with D112 at Edgewood Middle, and one of many teachers who are seeing firsthand what AI looks like in the classroom. During last year’s pilot run, Condon said she saw a shift in attitudes from teachers through the school year.
She admitted teachers were “very suspicious” at first, worrying the district was moving too fast. For some, those concerns remain, with a portion of teachers still refusing to utilize the technology.
“But I would say over the last year or so, it’s kind of flipped,” Condon said. “Over 75% of teachers are using some sort. Not necessarily every day or all the time, but they’ve definitely found ways that it has helped them or been a support in their teaching.”
While it’s “not replacing the art and science of teaching,” she said it helps take a load off for teachers, allowing them to look at student data and plan smarter and faster. That includes everything from generating quizzes for readings to creating an “exciting activity.”
But when it comes to student usage, teachers are far more cautious, she said, with fears about it becoming a “crutch.” Still, students have begun using AI as a sounding board, she said, such as having it analyze their first draft for an essay.
The AI tools allow a high degree of control by teachers, Condon said, and they can create a “room” for students with boundaries and parameters that teachers get to set. For example, it could be set up so students can input their essay and receive immediate feedback, or use it to brainstorm about a writing assignment, she said.
For the teachers, Condon said, the new technology can be overwhelming at times. But, “middle schoolers are hard to impress,” she joked, because AI is already a part of their lives.
“They enjoy it,” she said. “They like to use it.”
Reshaping classrooms
Understanding how to best utilize AI is an important skill for today’s students, Lubelfeld said, and “AI fluency” will be a critical skill.
“AI is more quickly being used across the world, across industries, than anything else in the history of the world,” he said. “It took 68 years for 50 million people to fly on an airplane. It took five weeks for 50 million people to engage with generative artificial intelligence tools.”
But its implementation in the classroom raises questions and concerns. One of the big questions around AI and schools is its potential use for cheating.
Sarah Levine works at the Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education as a teacher and researcher, and has been researching how primarily high school students and their teachers are using AI for writing support in classrooms. She said there’s “no question” it’s being used to assist with students’ work, including in ways that “look like cheating.”
But it’s not necessarily an educational apocalypse. She noted that recent self-report studies show students are cheating at about the same rate as they always have — although she cautioned that those results may shift as the technology progresses.
“There’s always been cheating,” Levine said. “There was cheating 10 years ago; there’ll be cheating 10 years from now. It’s more efficient than any other cheating tool, but it isn’t changing the fact that students have always looked for ways to not do the work that teachers want them to do.”
Beyond AI’s usage in cheating, there are broader concerns about its impact on education.
Ed Yohnka is a representative with the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. He said part of schooling is teaching people critical thinking, showing them how to learn and explore. But such ideas of organic educational exploration are at odds with the idea of plugging into something that can simply give answers.
“I would worry about a world in which we simply accept the answer we get from a machine as opposed to doing the work ourselves,” Yohnka said.
It’s a common concern raised by experts: generative AI’s potential to stunt the development of young people. A young brain requires “exercise” and “critical thinking,” said Nina Wieda, an associate professor of instruction at Northwestern University and director of field studies.
“If you outsource the work, the brain passages will not develop,” she said.
Levine mirrored her assessment. There are real concerns about making sure students “develop to become independent, thoughtful, literate, skeptical readers and writers.” AI alone, “is not going to help them do any of those things,” she said.
“There’s no question that letting AI run your reading and writing is going to make you less thoughtful,” Levine said. “It is almost certainly likely to do that.”
Experts said classroom and lesson plans will likely have to change to address those concerns.
Condon said it’s important that teachers create an environment where students aren’t afraid of failure, and so won’t feel the need to cheat. Wieda, who was something of an early adopter of AI at the university, said educators have to reexamine their lesson plans and create new approaches for this new world.
“It’s a hard time to be an educator now, because we need to really adjust what we’ve been doing for centuries,” Wieda said.
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Levine said it’s a chance to re-examine what school assignments are, and what teachers want students to get from writing.
“We have an opportunity to use this stuff to help us interrogate how much more human our assignments and student work could be,” Levine said.
Shortcomings and ‘hallucinations’
Generative AI has technical shortcomings that Wieda, Levine and Yohnka all raised. Wieda talked about “hallucinations,” a colloquial term for when AI generates false information. She said developers have told her it’s not an issue that will go away.
The AI models can be “stubborn” with making up information, Wieda said, and it’s an issue people have to be aware of when using them, especially young students who “may be more naive.”
Levine said students often feel AI’s writing is “bland,” “robotic” and “non-human.”
These issues could be important lessons for students, however, they said. Teachers can give demonstrations to students about hallucinations to make them more skeptical users, and AI’s writing could be a good comparison point for student writers to find their own voice.
Levine said it’s important for teachers to talk with students about AI and guide them through where it can be valuable and where it can go wrong.
Yohnka warned about the “dark side” of AI, pointing to extreme cases like X’s “Grok,” an AI helper on the social media platform that users can interact with that earlier this year seemed to go haywire, spouting “pro-Nazi propaganda.”
“How do you best ensure that the information and answers that students are being given are not being driven by some dystopian tech oligarch?” Yohnka said.
He worries about how societal biases will be embedded into AI models, “building in the discrimination,” and further exacerbating already existing issues.
‘It’s not going anywhere’
A sentiment everyone repeated was that AI is here to stay, and it was important to find out how to implement it into educational programs to best help students.
Wieda said it’s hard to know where AI will go in the future, with so much development ongoing. But regardless, it is “just a reality.”
“You can’t oppose civilization,” Wieda said. “It’s not going anywhere.”
Even Yohnka said he expects it to become part of the classrooms of the future. There was no blocking it entirely, he said, and discussions around AI in schools should be more about its “assets and detriments” rather than just its use.
But he gave a final warning. Yohnka, old enough to remember the rise of the internet, recalled how people talked about its potential. While he hears the argument for AI in the classroom, and doesn’t “think they’re necessarily wrong,” he still has hesitations.
“The internet was going to be the thing that was the wave of the future, that was going to be great,” Yohnka said. “Now, we hear about how we have to take phones away from kids in school so they can’t get to the internet.”
North Shore students will return to classrooms later this month, entering the second year of the district’s AI push. Much like students during the rise of the internet, they’re likely to see continued transformations of the classroom and assignments that may leave schools a little less familiar to parents and grandparents.