Generative AI tools have been broadly available to teachers since the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022.
Three-plus years in, where does this technology’s adoption stand among educators, and what are the barriers?
Among the challenges standing in educators’ way are a lack of professional development and teachers’ own hesitancy regarding the technology, say experts who discussed this issue during Education Week’s most recent A Seat at the Table webinar series.
AI has turned out to be a powerful tool for teachers and schools, and the applications available for them to leverage are only becoming more advanced.
Teachers are using AI to accomplish time-consuming tasks such as creating exams, presentation slides, and rubrics for grading in seconds. AI can help provide feedback on student assignments; write individualized education programs for students in special education; and provide translation services.
Educators are designing custom chatbots to give advice to new teachers and to coach students through job interviews. One district leader even used AI to to create a course to introduce students to AI.
Teachers are also using AI as a personal assistant and thought partner, having ongoing conversations with chatbots about what to include in their next newsletter home to students, and how to craft lesson plans.
Enrique Noguera, an assistant dean and the lead AI strategist at Passaic County Community College in New Jersey, said he’s discovered productive uses for ChatGPT during unlikely moments — such as when he’s at home washing dishes.
“I put my headphone in and I’m talking to ChatGPT, building content and talking to it about a specific [lesson] design problem,” he said in EdWeek’s webinar. “It wasn’t like, ‘GPT, build this content for me.’ I wasn’t offloading the work to GPT. But we were building, if you will, collaboratively.”
However, many educators remain hesitant about the role of artificial intelligence in schools.
In an EdWeek Research Center survey from last summer, educators were split on whether AI will be good or bad for teaching and learning in the next five years. Forty-seven percent said AI will have a negative impact, and 43% said it will be positive.
One roadblock to educators adopting AI is a lack of support, whether that’s from clear policies laying out appropriate AI use for staff and students or professional development that shows educators how to use available tools.
Only 13 percent said in an October EdWeek Research Center survey that their district had an AI policy that had been made clear to both students and teachers. Forty-four percent of teachers, principals, and district leaders indicated they hadn’t received any professional development on how to use AI in their work.
Twenty-nine percent said they had one-time PD, 19 percent said they had training more than once, and 8 percent said they had received ongoing training.
Teachers simply aren’t getting enough professional development, said Melissa Weatherwax, a learning coach and former K-12 teacher.
“We’re in this really tricky situation where we’re using it a little bit, but we don’t have the depth of understanding of what [AI] could potentially do and how it really could transform teaching and learning,” she said in EdWeek’s webinar.
After all, if educators are inexperienced with AI, they won’t have the expertise required to place guardrails around — and educate students on — AI use in their classes.
Even teachers who regularly use AI in their work can be at a disadvantage when it comes to teaching AI literacy or modeling productive AI use among their students, said Weatherwax.
Teachers are often using AI tools designed specifically for K-12 education and aren’t necessarily using ChatGPT in their classrooms.
“Yet, we assign something for students, send them on their way, and it’s the Wild West. They can use anything that they choose once they’ve left our rooms,” she said. “How do we go about having a conversation, teaching students these skills, when we don’t have access to OpenAI to show them or to have them experience it while they’re in our classrooms?”
The natural response for teachers, then, is to police students’ AI activity by using detection tools, which misses the opportunity to teach students how to interact with the technology responsibly, Weatherwax said.
While many educators are not convinced that AI will be a net positive for teaching and learning, the field is in broad agreement that the technology will alter how teachers do their jobs.
Nine out of 10 educators said they expect AI to change the work of teaching to some extent, in a December 2024 survey by the EdWeek Research Center, with 42% indicating they expect AI to change teaching “a lot” in the next five years.
AI is a double-edged sword. The capabilities that make it so useful can also make it easy to overuse, the panelists said.
For example, it can be all too simple to offload challenging cognitive tasks onto the technology — for both students and teachers, said Noguera.
He sees this drawback even when it comes to one of his favorite AI-powered tools, Google’s NotebookLM.
“You can put a 1,200-page textbook in [the platform] and ask it to whittle it down into a paragraph,” Noguera said. “It did all the heavy lifting, basically preventing you from having to even engage directly with reading the content — which is highly problematic.”
Even so, AI skeptics still need to know how to navigate the technology, Noguera said. Using AI responsibly requires knowing how to use it in the first place.
“It is naturally designed to compress, to do the heavy lifting,” he said. “You can’t really begin to even articulate that as a need unless you actually begin to engage with the tools, and that’s just the reality of it.”
