Artificial intelligence (AI) has been an ongoing topic of discussion on numerous fronts, and its uses have grown exponentially in a short time. It is now easily accessible to a great deal of the population, especially teenagers and young adults.

This is where someone like Ben Taylor, an educator from The Country School, comes in. Taylor and a few of his colleagues are part of a task force attempting to build a curriculum to teach their students about AI. He realizes that the technology is evolving and spreading fast and wants teachers and parents not to disregard it but to understand that their children need to learn more about it.

“We [The Country School] know we don’t want to just run away from this and pretend it doesn’t exist,” Taylor said. “We want our students to be well educated to use these tools at their disposal, but we need to take some time to evaluate them.”

Taylor and his team understand the questions and concerns that people will have with students, especially in 7th and 8th grade, being informed on how to use AI.

“We as educators need to teach and protect students about safety issues in terms of access and appropriateness of the content they can interact with,” he said. “The Country School is particularly interested in the environmental impact and sustainability of AI.”

One of the main ways that Taylor and his staff plan on using AI in the classroom is to help students think critically about their work. Staff and students are being informed and taught about AI’s different uses, and Taylor mentioned that teachers can have their students critique AI to better their writing.

“After students read a novel…we ask AI for essay prompts, and as a class we critique the essay prompts and turn them into better ones,” he said. “We then take those prompts and ask AI to write a paper with language appropriate for an eighth grader using the essay prompt the students came up with.”

The technology allows students to acknowledge the faults with AI and use it combined with their own brains and learning to construct a response or an answer that is correct.

“You’re doing something that gives the kids a new opportunity to learn and understand something they may not have had before,” Taylor said. “Using these tools to aid in reflection sounds pretty powerful to me. Really careful lesson planning is necessary to make sure that the act of creation is still happening.”