Thinking of Using EdTech AI Inside a Writing Classroom? Focus on Small, Strategic, and Humane
by Mary Ehrenworth and Philip Seyfried; Co-authors of AI & Reading Instruction; AI-Enhanced Literacy; AI- Supported Teaching for Multilingual Learners
There are ways that AI can help you amplify your best writing teaching. It can help you get more feedback to more kids more quickly. It can help you better see your multilingual learners’ gifts. It can help you offer grammar lessons based on kids’ individual writing. It can study kids’ writing and suggest strategic partnerships. These are among the many surprisingly beautiful and helpful ways that AI can extend your powers as a writing teacher. We’ve worked with EdTech AI in many classrooms, and we see kids’ faces when they receive immediate, warm, expert feedback as soon as they write. We’ve seen teachers breathe as they realize their twenty-three fifth graders, or one hundred and twenty-three ninth graders, will each get a personal, specific compliment and a tip, today, as soon as they draft, freeing teachers up to help kids implement that feedback.
We’ve also felt the palpable anxiety of English and ELA teachers as they consider how AI might shift the balance of humanity in their classrooms. It’s good to be cautious, to be careful. After all, school is a place where young people learn to share parts of themselves and deepen their connections with the community of learners around them. Any technology that diminishes our young people misses the mark, but when used well, technology can help them flourish. Focusing here on EdTech AI, that gives kids an AI thought partner and coach, such as Flint, SchoolAI, MagicSchool, here are five practical tips for introducing AI in ways that may deepen the humanity in your classroom.
- Focus on more strategic technology use, not more screen time. Nobody wants kids on screens more – not parents, not teachers, and (this is less clear), not most kids. So, don’t think about ‘AI class periods.’ Think about short, controlled, strategic doses of high impact feedback and coaching. For example, in a writing unit that spans three weeks, students might get feedback three times across the writing process, from their EdTechAI partner, each time for a five to ten minute session.
- Set up your EdTech chats to offer thoughtful, manageable, controlled feedback. Remember that AI is programmed to be helpful. That means that it will often do not only what you ask it, but more. If you invite it to offer kids feedback on their work, it will offer a lot of feedback. It may offer to help kids draft. We usually tell our EdTech AI that we want it to focus on feedback that will help kids not only with this piece, but as a writer overall. We suggest that it gives three compliments and three possible next steps. We tell it not to draft for students, with the exception of sometimes giving a one sentence example.
- Insert AI ‘partner’ chats between peer partnerships. Imagine that Sara and Amber have done a little drafting on their literary essays, and each has spent five or ten minutes getting some compliments and next steps. Now, each of them can jot some notes, and then meet as a peer partnership, to share the feedback they got, and strategize about which of these next steps they want to try. The AI feedback is just a first step in their peer partnership work.
- Teach kids to negotiate AI feedback, to make their own choices, and to be metacognitive. We usually set our EdTech chats for kids so that their AI partner will give them more than one next step or tip. That way, you teach students to make thoughtful choices and develop agency. They can work with you or a peer partner to negotiate these choices. Partnerships can also study the quality of AI feedback – good EdTech AI will offer feedback that is warm and specific. Students can learn about feedback, so they can strengthen their own abilities to give feedback to peers.
- Teach kids to come to AI with ‘Brain-first’ work, and to learn to train their AI partner. We’ve written a lot about the idea of brain-first work in our books. The idea is that you teach students to come to AI with notes, ideas, drafts, goals. When students learn to talk to their AI partner about what kind of support they want, they also learn to train their AI partner. They can learn to tell it how much feedback they want, or when it is getting too bossy, or doing too much. EdTech AI use is apprenticeship for the AI use kids will do outside of school, and we want them to develop a sense of agency.
If you’re thinking of introducing AI into your writing classroom, know that you’re teaching kids about AI use as well as about writing. We want to introduce thoughtful, ethical norms. School is the place where all kids get equal access to learning about technology, and where all kids need to grow as writers. We have a technology now that can help more writers get more feedback, more writers get focused tutoring. Let’s work with it carefully, in ways that amplify the best writing teachers.
