Teachers Are Rewriting the Rules of the AI Age Classroom
In San Francisco, sixth grade humanities teacher Tristen Chang has stopped setting take home essays. She runs oral exams instead, asking 15 questions about character, plot, theme and metaphor, which students answer in as little as five minutes. "There's been a long march of technology changing teaching, but AI is the most drastic, and everything's out the window," she told Reuters.
Teachers across the United States are making similar moves as chatbots become ordinary equipment for students. They are setting less work at home, adding in class writing and discussion, and redesigning assignments to measure how a student thinks rather than what they produce. The assessment is the part being rebuilt, not the syllabus.
And the reason is straightforward. A chatbot can produce an answer, but it cannot sit in a room and explain itself under questioning, which is why oral exams, handwritten work and live discussion have come back.
Rusty Shabe, who teaches middle school English in San Francisco, said students turn to AI at home when they feel overwhelmed, so he now spends more classroom time on writing, taking a month to work through a single essay with seventh graders. Bobson Wong, a high school maths teacher in New York, assigns fewer homework questions and more practice in class so he can watch how students work, and says the change has reached his own method. "AI has definitely changed not just how students do maths, but how I teach it," Wong said.
But schools are divided on what to do. Some want AI integrated, some want it restricted, and many sit in between, which leaves individual teachers to work it out alone. "Where many adults are using these tools for various kinds of purposes to help them in work based settings, we haven't really figured out what that means for education," said Antero Garcia, an education professor at Stanford University and president of the National Council of Teachers of English.
And some teachers are going further, pushing screens out of the room. Rex Ovalle, a high school English teacher outside Chicago, has students collect a composition notebook at the start of class and limits Chromebooks to roughly a tenth of school days. "I have seen a lot of engagement because you can't hide when the laptops are away," he said.
Meghan Hyland, an English teacher in a New York City suburb, found students slipping out to the bathroom to reach AI on their phones. Phones were already banned in her class, so she began requiring students to leave them behind when they left the room, and made classwork a bigger share of grades. "My main ability to understand whether they know how to do critical thinking has to be done in school," she said.
And some are attacking the prompt rather than the device. Pian Rockfeld, a high school English teacher in the Bronx, writes questions that AI handles badly and sets essays built on scholarly articles that usually sit behind a paywall, where chatbots cannot follow. "I try very hard to create prompts that, at the moment at least, AI is imperfect at responding to," she said.
But the evidence on whether AI helps learning is mixed. A Harvard randomised trial found a custom AI tutor improved gains and engagement, while a small MIT Media Lab study found people using ChatGPT to write essays finished faster but appeared to do less thinking. A RAND survey found most US students and English, maths and science teachers already use AI for schoolwork.
Not every teacher is resisting. Michael Zagari, a social studies teacher in a New York suburb, uses AI to simplify historical documents for different reading levels and to condense articles for class. "AI is not going away, and we need to teach civic responsibility of how to use it just like we taught responsible use of the internet," he said.
Teachers are shifting to oral exams, in class writing and face to face assessment
A survey found more than half of US students and teachers use AI for schoolwork
Some schools restrict AI, others integrate it, leaving many teachers to decide alone
A Harvard trial found an AI tutor improved learning gains, while an MIT study found less thinking
Handwriting and notebooks are returning in some classrooms as screen use is re-evaluated
Source: Reuters
