As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, the use cases and applications to education become more evident. From personalized learning to administrative automation, AI has the potential to significantly enhance the educational landscape. However, like any transformative technologies, it also presents challenges that need to be strategically managed. This article provides a guide for school leaders, teachers, and educators to develop an AI strategy for secondary schools, helping them identify opportunities, risks, and key actions.
Robot playing chess - Adobe Stock
Before diving into the strategic framework, it's crucial to understand the AI landscape in education. AI can augment teaching, provide personalized learning experiences for students, and automate administrative tasks. However, it's not a silver bullet and its implementation should be carefully considered.
The technology is still believed to be in the early iterations of what AI is truly capable of and, on it’s current trajectory, experts expect models that are comparable to human levels of intelligence to emerge in the coming decades. That said, we don’t have to wait for the cybernetic revolution to realise the benefits of what AI offers today; AI already presents very real use cases and applications across almost every industry.
“It [AI] can beat us at strategy games such as Go, chess, StarCraft and Diplomacy, outperform us on many language performance benchmarks, and write passable undergraduate university essays. Of course, it can also make things up, or “hallucinate”, and get things wrong – but so can humans (although not in the same ways).” - Paul Formosa, AI and Philosophy of Technology
Specifically for education, where narrow AI has been applied to STEM subjects already, the development in Natural Language Programming and Large Language Models paired with the copious amount of available, training data have made it possible to apply the technology to other subject areas such as Humanities, Social Sciences and English - any essay-subject really.
As in most innovation cycles, transformative technologies are met with both excitement and skepticism and, in fact, the right approach to adopting new technologies safely and in a way that truly realises benefits usually lies somewhere between the two. On one hand, understanding AI and recognising the significance of the technology opens the door to educators as to identifying clear opportunities to reduce teacher workload and enhance the learning experience for students. On the other hand, introducing a technology that is not well understood with little buy in could produce an expensive, time-consuming mistake, both of which schools are in short supply of.
Despite the reasoning on both sides of the fence on whether or not to have an AI strategy, the argument quickly becomes unnecessary; AI is already impacting the education sector whether we want to acknowledge it or not. A Forbes survey conducted at the start of this year found that 90% of the student respondents were aware of ChatGPT in December 2022 and 89% admitted to using it to help them with assignments and exam preparation.
These statistics are only the beginning. As AI becomes more pervasive and easily assimilated into parts of everyday life, the blanket ban on all things AI goes from difficult to near impossible. Therefore, having a strategy of how, where and when AI should be used in schools provides students and teachers with clear opportunities and guard rails to take advantage of the technology.
The strategic framework for implementing AI in secondary schools involves three key components: teachers, students, and the school senior leadership team. For each component, we will identify the opportunities, risks, and key actions.
If recent months have demonstrated anything, it’s that teachers are feeling the squeeze of the cost of living crisis as well as ever-increasing workloads. At Educait, we believe that the recent developments in AI provide clear opportunities to reduce teacher workload and, in fact, teacher users of Educait have already seen a 40% reduction in time spent across their marking and lesson planning workloads. Part of the strategy should include helping teachers realise the benefits of AI whilst building their confidence in using AI tools.
Opportunities: AI can augment the role of teachers, freeing them from time-consuming tasks such as marking and creating lesson resources. This allows teachers to focus more on student interaction, lesson planning, and professional development.
Risks: Over-reliance on AI could potentially inhibit the development of core teacher competencies, particularly in the area of marking, which provides insights into student understanding and progress.
Key Actions: AI should be used as a tool to assist teachers, not replace them. AI marking and resource creation should be deployed strategically. For instance, AI marking could be used for teachers who have finished their training years and have a solid understanding of student assessment. Additionally, at Educait, we deploy the use of AI to facilitate frequent formative assessments meaning that teachers will still have to sharpen their marking skills for summative assessments.
Modern students are extremely tech savvy and AI tools will soon be seen as commonplace technologies that become part of every day life. With that, students, in many cases, are ahead of the adoption curve and are likely already interacting with AI tools. Therefore, addressing where tools like ChatGPT can and can’t be used becomes critical as well as informing them of risks of using AI such as its hallucinations, biases and limitations in training data.
Opportunities: For students, AI can provide personalized learning experiences, adapting to their individual learning styles and pace. AI offers the opportunity to receive highly targeted and specific feedback without the teacher being the bottleneck for students to learn and iterate answers quickly. This can lead to improved student engagement and outcomes over time whilst alleviating marking loads for teachers.
Risks: There's a risk of over-reliance on AI for learning, which could potentially lead to academic misconduct and ultimately stunt the learning process for students. It's also crucial to ensure data privacy and security for student data and personal information.
Key Actions: Implement AI tools that complement traditional learning methods and promote a blended learning approach. Introduce clear guardrails for when and how tools like ChatGPT should be used. For example, use ChatGPT as a Socratic Teacher where it can offer no answers, only questions encouraging students to think deeply about their task, or as a critiquing examiner to highlight areas of improvement. Teachers should also be trained in how to pick up on easy to recognise patterns that the submission has been written completely by a LLM (structure of the answer, hallucinations, lack of depth or insight, repeated statements, lack of citations etc.). Ensure strict data privacy and security measures are in place such as not passing personal information to any data models.
Across a leadership team, it’s unlikely that there is a consensus on the topic of AI; some members may be all-in on innovative solutions, some may see the benefits but are more concerned about the risks and others may feel so technologically removed that they don’t concern themselves at all with the matter. Despite the lack of consensus, AI is already impacting education and the technology will only become more sophisticated over time, therefore, ignoring the topic gives rise to larger risks over the long term. Having a basic understanding of the technology and acknowledging the impact it could have is a starting point to developing a view on how your school intends to deal with AI.
Opportunities: On a school-wide level, AI can streamline administrative tasks, improve resource allocation, alleviate teacher workloads, and provide valuable insights into school performance and student outcomes. In the short term, by adopting AI, your school is actively pioneering new innovative solutions that will help improve student outcomes and is taking tangible steps to trying to reduce teacher workloads. Over the long term, this could help with critical issues such as teacher retention and student attainment.
Risks: The implementation of AI requires significant investment in technology and training. Despite the clear benefits AI could yield, teachers could be averse to new tools, particularly those they might not understand. Implementing tools with a low adoption rate are a sure way to lose trust amongst your staff and waste money.
Key Actions: Develop a phased approach to AI implementation, starting with areas where AI can provide the most benefit. Identify AI champions for school wide initiatives but also for each department that intends to make use of it. Doing so allows champions to be a point of contact and resource for colleagues and collaboratively develop internal policies to further the advantages of AI and mitigate any risks. Invest in teacher training to ensure teachers feel knowledgeable and comfortable enough to interact with the technology as well as understanding its limitations so they can adjust as needed.
Developing an AI strategy for schools is a complex but necessary task. By identifying the opportunities and risks and taking key actions, schools can harness the power of AI to enhance teaching and learning. As we navigate this journey, it's crucial to remember that AI is a tool to aid human-led education, not replace it.
If you're interested in finding out more about how Educait can help you meet you're school's strategic objectives then feel free to email one of our team.