With the new technology of AI advancing and making its way into schools and education, administrators at RDHS decided it was time to harness this new tool in an effective way. As of last year, Dr. Albro, Mr. DeLaura, and the Board of Education established the AI Committee to find ways to make AI a useful resource in the classroom.
Before the committee was established, the administration attended professional development opportunities and AI workshops to further enhance their understanding of the functions of AI. “We wanted to form a committee to see how we could bring that knowledge back to River Dell,” Assistant Superintendent, Mr. DeLaura, said.
The AI committee was founded with the core purpose of it being “to learn about AI” and to “work together to come up with guidelines,” according to Superintendent Albro.
The administration wanted to come up with ways that AI can be effective for students’ learning. Additionally, Mr. DeLaura explained that they wanted to figure out how it impacts students, but they “didn’t just want to cut off access…we wanted to find ways to embed it into our learning structure.”
As a member of the English department and AI Committee, Mrs. Carney, offered, “If we don’t help our students work with it, I think in some ways we send them into the world unprepared.”
Furthermore, in order to help the students create a healthy relationship with AI, the administration started working together to set up reasonable, flexible guidelines for student usage of this platform.
For example, some guidelines currently put in place is that if given permission, students may use AI at the beginning of an assignment in order to brainstorm ideas. This would then set them up for success in that they can expand those ideas and finish the rest of the task on their own. However, this usage of AI is only acceptable if it’s “cited” and “the information is shared,” said Mr. DeLaura.
On the other hand, administrators are aware that this is the very beginning of a very fast-growing technology, therefore, guidelines are never set in stone. “We don’t have policies yet. We have guidelines. We are still learning,” Dr. Albro explained.
In order to reassess guidelines and discuss different aspects of AI in the classroom, the AI Committee plans on holding meetings a few times a year. According to Mr. DeLaura, the committee is planning on meeting in November, February, and at the end of the year.
In addition to these meetings, the AI Committee is planning on using “turn-key trainers,” to expand the RDHS community’s understanding of AI, explained DeLaura. These trainers are “teacher-led technology experts” that worked with Mr. DeLaura over the summer.
The plan for this year is for these technology experts to expand teachers’ knowledge of AI and the use of it in the classroom.
In addition, Mrs. Carney had already started incorporating AI into her lessons. For example, in some of her classes, she used AI to teach students about tone. “I had you all give AI a persona and say create an email with this particular tone,” she said.
The AI-generated email used literary devices such as “syntax and rhetorical questions” that demonstrated to students the ways that tone can be established in a literary work.
Not only does the AI committee value teacher opinions, they also want to incorporate student voices. Dr. Albro said, “A student is just starting out in their educational career” in comparison to the administrators who are not going to have an entire life of education with AI.
“It is going to impact you very differently than it is going to impact me,” Albro explained.
In a recent survey conducted by Mrs. Carney in her senior and freshman English classes, 58 out of 59 freshmen (98%) and 20 out of 21 (95%) of seniors did not know how to properly cite AI as a source.
In addition, 63% of freshmen said that AI should be fact checked for accuracy while only 52% of seniors said the same. “That shows me I have work to do in my classroom,” Mrs. Carney acknowledged.
For the future, the AI committee plans on continuing to hold occasional meetings to discuss the guidelines of AI and the way students can gain knowledge. “There are ways to use it to enhance the work I’m doing,” said Carney. “I’m trying to make it a partner.”
