In the debate over generative artificial intelligence’s place in education, on one side are skeptics like Lahainaluna High School teacher Jarrett Chapin, who are frustrated by the masses of students trying to pass off AI-plagiarized content as original work.
On the other side are supporters such as a team of educators and students at Mid-Pacific Institute, who are embracing AI as a learning tool, believing people can benefit as they learn to use the technology productively and ethically.
Chapin said he was so dismayed last school year at the swelling AI plagiarism by some of his English students that for this new school year he has decided to make students do all assignments by hand and in person in his classroom, with cell phones and other devices banned.
“This means that I may have as many as 150 handwritten paragraphs … and my job is changing into something excruciating, where I’m just gonna sit there and read in order to evade this inevitable, allegedly, plagiarism,” he said.
Of about 70 English students he taught last year, Chapin said he sent warning letters home to the families of 10 students whose schoolwork appeared to be copied from AI content. The letters said the student would get a zero on an assignment unless the student’s own work was submitted.
Many other students got shorter verbal warnings. “I said, ‘I see something wrong here, redo this,’” Chapin said.
He rues AI for tempting students to skip the mental exercise needed to develop such skills as reasoning and critical thinking. “It’s when you’re struggling to get a thought out and you don’t have the language for it, and you can’t ask a genie to tell you, and you have to find it in you or in the dictionary, and all of a sudden that ‘A-ha!’ — the epiphany,” he said.
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Meanwhile, a team at Mid-Pacific Institute is not only mounting trainings to help educators learn to teach using AI, but including students among those who are teaching the teachers.
The approach is consistent with the Manoa private school’s emphasis on “deeper learning” — the idea that students learn best when the content is meaningful to their lives, said Mark Hines, director of Mid-Pacific’s Kupu Hou Academy, a professional-development program for public and private school educators.
Hines said AI can be a boon for students, especially because of its intuitive ability to adapt to the user’s unique needs. A youngster learning Newton’s laws of motion, for instance, can tell ChatGPT, “‘I’m a fourth grader. Give me examples I can understand,’” Hines said. “Every teacher who designs learning for their students, and every learner who’s trying to come to understand something, has an adaptive tool that can really powerfully help them where they are.”
Kimi Yokoyama, 18, a recent Mid-Pacific graduate heading for Seattle University, said AI has accelerated her learning. Her computer science teacher encouraged students to use AI to learn foundational concepts, enabling her to move faster to more complex work, she said. Without AI, “I would have been stuck there for weeks just trying to figure out one little thing. … I save a lot of time by using these generative AI tools.”
Yokoyama and Mid-Pacific senior Sydney Woolley will be part of the team training Mid-Pacific’s teachers about AI. The two also were part of a group of Mid-Pacific students who presented in support of AI to a recent online international conference of educators.
Woolley said some educators “were the type who prefer paper writing and the more traditional aspects of curriculum. Everyone’s allowed to teach in different ways. But I feel like the main thing that we’re trying to push is that our world is developing, and therefore our curriculum must develop as well.”
