All the focus on AI cheating is eroding trust between teachers and students. That’s one of the conclusions of a new report from the Center for Digital Thriving at Harvard that sampled more than one thousand educators and included interviews with dozens of students.
Teachers are worried about students using AI to cheat, while students are worried about being accused of cheating and that their teachers are using AI in ways they shouldn’t, explains Dr. Beck Tench, a co-author of the AI education policy report.
“The suspicion that students have of teachers is that they are using AI to grade their papers or create their lesson plans or write their recommendation letters and all of that stuff, too,” Tench says.
All this suspicion creates an atmosphere that is not conducive to learning.
“Students and teachers are both entering the classroom with a kind of two-way suspicion, suspecting each other,” Tench says. “And that's eroding trust, which is eroding what they need in order to teach and learn.”
Fortunately, there are ways to move beyond this distrust that Tench and her co-authors share in the report.
“We think it's really important for adults to approach young people with curiosity and empathy," she says. "So we have, in the report, three mindset shifts we recommend exploring in order to approach students with more empathy and curiosity.”
1. Moving From Assuming To Asking
“Instead of assuming students are using AI for everything, ask what they're using AI for,” Tench says. This is a simple mindset shift that can have a big impact, she adds.
AI has a tendency to make students invisible in many different ways, from hiding what they’ve learned if they’re using the tools in submitting papers to hiding their passions and interests if they’re turning to a chatbot instead of a teacher with questions.
Additionally, it can make student achievement invisible, as Tench says that some students dial back their best work because they’re afraid it will trigger an AI detection tool.
“All of these invisibilities, you can tap into, you can make them visible by having conversations about the technology,” Tench says. “The technology itself is making those things invisible, and the conversation about the technology makes it visible. And so if you talk about how you're using the tools, if you talk about why you feel pressured to hide your use of the tools, if you talk about all the different ways a tool can be used and whether or not this one is or isn't okay, you start to uncover the things that the tool is hiding.”
2. Moving From Centering The Technology to Centering The Student
Once again, this involves a small shift in the types of questions you ask. So instead of a technology-centered question such as, “What are your feelings about AI?” Tench recommends student-centered questions such as, “What’s important to you right now? What do you care about? And, is technology making that easier or harder?”
As part of this, it's helpful for students to realize that they are in the same boat as their classmates and their teachers.
“We consider our use of technology as sort of an individual habit, and an individual set of goals and experiences,” Tench says. “And the reality is that it’s very hard to change a specific tech behavior, as an individual.”
AI chatbots, such as smartphones and social media before, have become such an important aspect of society that it's hard for students to opt out of using these on an individual level. But Tench says that discussing what students value as a group can help you decide what limits to place on technology.
She uses a phone-free family dinner as an example. By saying, “We all care about connections, so we are going to put our phones in a stack at dinner so that none of us are looking at our phones,” is "a heck of a lot easier to do than every individual person trying to avoid a phone during dinner.”
3. Moving From 'Us Versus Them' To 'Us And Them'
“It's true that everything that students are experiencing with these tools, adults are also experiencing with these tools,” Tench says. “If we can realize this is a problem that we can tackle together and are each part of that equation, both the young people and the adults have something to contribute to our collective way forward, we're gonna have a more positive relationship as we approach whatever that solution is.”
Doing this involves recognizing the vital elements that young people bring to the conversation and approaching them with genuine interest.
“To be curious about what they experience, and what they think will help us all navigate toward a greater future, instead of basically moving into a stance of being very protective and controlling of their tech behaviors,” Tench says. “That creates an 'us versus them,' a situation where you lay down a rule that they work around and do anyway, right? But when you include young people on the policies, on the thinking around what's happening, on the collective imagining of a better future, that is a much more productive way to go about confronting some of these issues. Because we're all facing this reality. It’s not just young people. So having them help in creating a better future, is better for them, and it's better for us.”
