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By: Joe Steele, High School PBL Facilitator
Columbus Signature Academy New Tech High School
Columbus, IN
Does AI have a place in Education? The public is starting to see the power of AI through apps like ChatGPT. This program can be tasked with creating emails, journals, short written responses, essays, slideshows, articles, and just about any textual product the app can crowdsource using the characteristics and vocabulary of a topic. AI is so advanced that it can create content within moments and to the ability level of students. I was able to task ChatGPT to write outlines on vast topics, persuasive essays like ones I’d assigned, APA formatted research papers, and even journal entries on class novels. I could give the AI feedback and it would quickly edit its work, making it more suitable for my needs. If my entire educational process was built on students writing rudimentary, generic products to address content standards, I would be terrified. But, if my educational process was built on students being faced with a challenge, and solving it using their knowledge of my content standards as we experience in Project Based Learning, I would see AI as yet another tool for my students to exploit in order to solve real-world problems.
All teachers need evidence that students are proficient in content standards. That is our legal requirement and consummate goal as public educators. Examining traditional teaching practices, the most efficient way to gather quantifiable, parallel data is through text-based exams that assess a student’s proficiency in a course’s set of standards. Once that assessment is established, the teacher’s only obligation is to show quantifiable data that their students are proficient in their section of state standards on those traditional assessments. If students can use AI technology to show their proficiency on those assessments, they can circumvent the entire process and learn nothing, while “succeeding” in school.
Not only that, the extent of student learning is limited to the extent of a teacher’s scope of knowledge. That scope usually only encompasses themselves and their textbook. The teacher tells the students what is correct, what is considered good, and exactly what the student should be reading/writing/watching to be proficient. It can become one extension through text. For instance, Science becomes only the text of our standards taught through synthesized textbooks, practiced through prescribed vocabulary lists, and assessed through reading and writing. If we assume the curriculum can be transferred via text, we assume it can be perfected. This leads teachers to attempt to kill every living part of their curriculum and whittle it down into the perfect path of reading, writing, and assessing. Educators work to find the perfect textbook that leads to the perfect activity, that leads to the perfect vocabulary list, that leads to a perfect exam, that if studied for perfectly, can result in being perfect in our standards. This sounds like the “perfect formula” for AI to create this curriculum, or to create perfect answers for our students. At that point educators no longer need to think or create, as AI can do all of this. Are teachers' roles then rendered obsolete? And since AI can create answers for exams, this system would not need students either.
Project-Based Learning has no fear of AI because we assess processes and the application of our content standards. There is a living and breathing need that our students must address that will require the knowledge of our standards. The PBL classroom does not start in the dead textbook, the facilitator has no obligation to be the expert R2D2, and students are not striving to have the exact answer as their peers. We can use AI as a tool to facilitate our work, creating models, options, and the visions our students have, so that they can circumvent their developing reading abilities. The PBL teacher is not tied to a text, but can use any text that is needed for the learning moments they create in their classroom. The application of our course standards in the real world are very rarely text-based.
The concern with a text-based curriculum is not that AI would take over, it is that the student in a text-based curriculum must arrive as a master reader and writer in order to digest and transfer the text-based curriculum. If a student cannot read, how will they be successful in a text-based social studies, science, or math class? If a student struggles with comprehension skills early on, how will they not end up behind their peers, addressing standards that have absolutely nothing to do with reading? AI shows us that a text-based curriculum is easy to copy, scale, and paste across all classrooms. It is proficient and efficient according to its own data. Yet, as a high school English teacher for the last two decades, I have had the pleasure of teaching perhaps a dozen or so students, out of the thousands, whose comprehension and vocabulary was so proficient they could translate all they were being taught in their courses and apply it to their lives efficiently.
The vast majority of students are at or below grade level. That is not a knock, but consider what having a 4th grade reading level means, then know you can only express all of that student’s curriculum through that filter. That task is difficult enough when the student is a 4th grader, but becomes impossible to a student who’s being faced with collegiate level text and their filter only works to the 4th level. So many of us do not learn through mere reading and writing. Kids will shut down, tune out, or find ways to succeed, such as using AI to assist them. Students who are identified as behind grade level are often given assistance to pass the out-of-reach, age level assessments instead of being given the standards in another way. Students who are behind grade level in their reading abilities are out of luck in this system. The student cannot comprehend the text and the teacher only has the text, and the only assessment available is text-based. There are two paths: give the students the answers or give them a waiver, because without reading comprehension, there is no path to success. That situation is as concerning as a capable student using AI to pass an inauthentic assessment. It should be just as clear that we cannot assess physical education standards through reading comprehension, just as it is unfair to do that in any course that is not assessing reading comprehension.
The PBL classroom sees the short-sightedness of traditional assessments, realizing there is little chance of transfer if we do not explicitly show students how, when and where they will apply our knowledge. The PBL classroom realizes we are not creating uniform, non-playable character (NPC) students coming out of an assembly line. We are creating diagnosing, evaluative, adaptable characters fully aware of their level, resources, and personal objectives, who look at every challenge as an opportunity and every new technology as a tool, fearful of nothing. We must realize that our students’ lives are the test and we can only prepare them until they walk out of our doors and into the real world.
Joe Steele works at CSA New Tech High School as Language Arts Facilitator and also serves as a Magnify Learning PBL Certified Instructor. He lives deep in the hills of Brown County with his brilliant wife, Bridget, a middle school science PBL teacher. They have three children, Kaleb, Savannah, and Weston.
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