Artificial intelligence in the classroom? Lincoln County teachers grapple with how to use, refuse or guide it • Lincoln Chronicle

By SHAYLA ESCUDERO/Lincoln Chronicle 

Inside Jake Carlson’s classroom at Newport High School 33 students are carefully drumming on laptop keyboards. The room’s walls are decorated with quotes and black and white posters of former political leaders and literary giants.

At the front, a projector casts the day’s assignment – to use artificial intelligence to create a guiding question about Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “Miss Temptation” that will later be explored in an essay.

Students of the advanced English course modify handwritten notes on an index card as they prompt the AI chatbot with questions as if they were messaging a friend.

And it answers.

If they ask the chatbot to do the assignment for them, it will tell them that it isn’t allowed. If they ask how their work could be made better it will throw out suggestions – narrow their question down, to explore themes with more depth, or may suggest different words to use.

Carlson weaves between the desks to check on students. The chat bot is constrained by parameters he created.

“It’s impossible to give 33 kids individualized help in one class period,” Carlson said.

The day’s assignment – drafting a line of inquiry – would normally take 2-3 weeks in class but with the help of artificial intelligence, it only takes one week, he said.

Carlson doesn’t always encourage AI in the classroom, in fact this is only the third time these students are using it.

He never wants AI to replace his instruction, Carlson said, but it can be used to provide more individualized feedback. Carlson operates on a philosophy that artificial intelligence can be used as a tool to optimize learning. It can give feedback and help students improve their work.

Because of that, he’s quickly earned a reputation for being more open to using artificial intelligence tools in the classroom than most teachers in the Lincoln County School District and has helped the district develop an AI policy.

As artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent, students are using it both inside and outside the classroom. More than half of teenagers use AI chatbots to do their school work, according to a Pew Research study.

Some teachers are embracing it and teaching it as a tool, while others are struggling to change their assignments and grading so that students will be less inclined using it to plagiarize.

Last year, Oregon became the first state to release guidance on integrating AI in public schools.

The Lincoln County School District is crafting an AI policy to implement this fall. The policy isn’t forcing teachers to use or reject it, but intended to give them guidelines and, if they haven’t already, force them to reckon with their approach to AI in the classroom.

AI is here

Generative artificial intelligence is being integrated into almost every industry and almost every aspect of daily life. It’s used in search engines, chatbots, social media websites and digital assistants and it’s being adopted by lawyers, doctors, politicians and teachers.

While traditional AI analyzes data and recognizes patterns, generative AI uses that data to make completely new content. It’s highly controversial.

To many in the tech industry, AI is an inevitable advancement in technology that can streamline work across industries and optimize productivity. But, there’s pushback ranging from environmental concerns to the accuracy of generative AI’s answers.

An AI hallucination is when a generative AI program, such as Claude or ChatGPT, generates inaccuracies, including inventing information that does not exist and presenting it with confidence. AI has fabricated court cases, may to be blame for a teenage suicide and has shown to implement biases and misdiagnose patients.

Students are using it too. One study by Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education found that artificial intelligence in K-12 education could be used to help students read and write, especially students who were learning English as a second language. But it also found that it could impair children’s ability to learn new skills and solve problems. The study ultimately concluded that the risks to education outweighed the benefits.

That research was cited as the reason the Bend-La Pine School Board passed a resolution directing the district to limit technology use in the classroom.

As the use of AI becomes more prevalent, schools across the country are quickly trying to establish guardrails. Do they limit AI use? Do they teach students when to use it and when not to?

These are the questions teachers are grappling as AI changes the way teachers teach and the way students learn.

Changing teaching, changing learning

Newport High social studies teacher Ben Ryan used to incorporate art into his assignments. He would ask students to come up with symbols and drawings to represent the three branches of government. When students started turning in the same symbols, Ryan realized they were asking AI to do the assignment for them.

“It feeds kids’ worst instincts,” Ryan said. “I think that’s the part I really struggle with, is AI, when used properly, can do so many cool, awesome things, but I think the temptation to misuse it is so strong, and there’s no guardrails for if someone wants to misuse it.”

So Ryan has shifted how he assesses students’ learning. He’s gotten rid of most of the artistic projects in favor of more written exams, which take longer to grade.

Ryan believes it may be easier for certain departments to embrace AI in the classroom than others, and teachers are scrambling to keep pace with the changes.

Carlson began having conversations with his students about AI in his classroom in 2023, back when generative AI was rudimentary and wildly inaccurate. At first, he used it as a lesson on media literacy, showing how it was lacking. Back then, some of his most advanced students were using it but the chatbot was not performing well and they would have gotten better grades to do their own work.

As it advanced he started talking with them about acceptable and unacceptable uses. Then last year the district’s approved AI application – School AI – came online. The program doesn’t share student information and teachers control the parameters and feedback processes, Carlson said.

When Newport  junior Simon Holding uses AI in Carlson’s English class it can help him get a better grade. When working on the day’s assignment he can simply ask what grade he would get on his work, and the AI chatbot will give a predictive score.

“When we use AI it’s building on skills we already have and we get one-on-one feedback to see exactly what we need to work on,” Holding said.

But not all the students in Carlson’s classroom are keen on using it.

Ema Parker has seen her peers use AI to make up for gaps in learning when students don’t understand topics in math and she worries about students becoming too reliant on AI for any subject.

“We aren’t going to have AI available to us when we have our exams, it just doesn’t seem as helpful,” Parker said.

She also has environmental concerns: the data centers that AI uses use water for cooling. According to scientists at the University of California, Riverside, each 100-word AI prompt is estimated to use roughly one bottle of water.

“It just seems preventable, like we can do the research ourselves,” Parker said.

AI policy 

Lincoln County School District’s board is poised to adopt a generative artificial intelligence policy at its meeting Tuesday, June 9.

The district recognizes AI as a useful tool, according to the policy, but it also recognizes the risks with biases, inaccuracies and hallucinations.

The policy is broken into three main parts – independent student use, student use in class and teacher use. Teachers are expected to create specific rules for AI use outside the classroom for assigned student work, when it is used for instruction in the classroom and when staff can use it to complete tasks of their own.

The policy outlines that the only student use of AI in the classroom can be with an application approved by the district’s information technology department, and when creating rules around AI use outside the classroom, teachers must consider accessibility and their own ability to accurately and consistently identify the use of AI in students’ work.

“I don’t think there’s going to be anything that’s going to make a teacher actively change what they’re doing,” said district technology director Bryan Freschi. “But they have to think of how they are going to address it and have to be transparent with students and families. They have to put it in their syllabus.”

The goal of the policy isn’t to force teachers to implement AI or eradicate it from their classrooms, Freschi said. And it leaves a lot of the decisions up to them.

“One of our district goals is to get the kids ready for the world,” Freschi said “and AI is already here in the world.”

• Shayla Escudero is an enterprise reporter for the Lincoln Chronicle covering local governments, education, housing and social services and can be reached at [email protected]