Why I, A Former Tech Coach, Am Anti-AI in Classrooms
As I head back into the ELA classroom after years off, it seems appropriate to start this post with a little vocab.
Cognitive Offloading: A process in which we use an external tool (genAI) as a secondary method to aid our internal process (critical thinking, problem solving, etc.).
Cognitive Outsourcing: A process in which we delegate our internal processes (critical thinking, problem solving, etc.) to an external tool (genAI) as a primary method.
Cognitive Offloading: A process in which we believe we no longer have the capacity to successfully engage in internal process (critical thinking, problem solving, etc.) and become conditioned to solely use external tools (genAI) as a primary method.
You may already see where this is going, but there are two important factors at play here that have pushed me over the line where I now view having students use generative AI in the classroom as borderline educational malpractice.
Cognitive offloading is reliant upon adequate background knowledge and understanding to be able to properly vet and analyze information about a topic.
The social/cultural context around the purpose of grades in school has shifted what was (arguably) intended to be a measure of student learning into a spot where good grades are now perceived as the primary goal of school.
Let’s look at #1.
Let’s say we encourage students to use a genAI tool to help them brainstorm a writing assignment, ask them to write it themselves, and then use genAI tool to help them edit and revise the writing at the end. Sounds like a reasonable balance where genAI is being used as a support.
But what’s really happening here?
If I were to do that (which, to be clear, I hate the idea of doing that with my own writing), I would be able to vet the brainstorm to see if it truly matches what I wanted to say and how I might lay it out. I then would write my own draft, and would ask for suggestions from AI, many of which I would reject because it doesn’t match my voice, the tone I want, etc. That’s what it looks like when someone with adequate content-knowledge and understanding attempts cognitive offloading.
On the other hand, if I don’t have adequate understanding of writing, I end up blindly accepting the genAI input and doing whatever it says. Let’s ignore for a second that this results in completely lifeless writing, but instead, let’s focus on the thinking happening for the student. The process that is concerning here is that the student doesn’t understand what quality looks like, but they begin to believe that genAI is producing higher quality work. They begin blindly accepting, but they aren’t truly engaging in the internal processes they need to be engaging in for learning to happen. As such, they very easily slip from cognitive offloading, where they are an active piece of the process, to cognitive outsourcing, where they simply are blindly using genAI because they don’t have the ability to think critically about the input.
Then, the most concerning step happens. When we believe that there is a higher quality or standard that is expected, and we have a tool that can do it on its own, but we don’t believe that we also can engage in that high level of thinking and content production (especially in early stages of learning something new), cognitive surrender is a common next step for students.
As someone who has studied motivation A LOT, cognitive surrender is one of the worst places for a new learner to be. It’s an immediate feeling of an insurmountable imbalance between where they need to be and the amount of effort it would take to get there. Cognitive surrender is a sign that the student (a) is aware of a massive gap in their knowledge, (b) doesn’t know what they need to do first to begin bridging that gap, and (c) doesn’t believe that they have the capacity to be successful in this endeavor.
Now comes the greater context that adds more complexity to the issue.
Grades.
Grading culture in modern American school is, to put it gently, one of the most problematic elements of our educational system, both within the school and in the culture of education in America.
To be clear, that was the gentle way of saying that. I just finished reading responses to a survey where I asked kids how grades impact them, and the non-gentle version is full of long, endless strings of four-letter words that would make your mother tell you I’m never allowed over for dinner again.
The culture of American education has completely lost its way. There’s no way around it. What was initially (arguably) designed to be a measure of student learning (ideally, the goal of education), has now become the goal in and of itself. Ask kids why they go to school, and most at the secondary level will tell you its to get good grades. Ask parents about the goal of school, and the instinct for most will be to say good grades.
At a macro level, learning is not a priority in the American school system anymore.
This is where the slide from cognitive offloading to cognitive outsourcing to cognitive surrender becomes a real issue. Now, you have hopeless students who feel an immense amount of pressure to get good grades, regardless of how much they learn, being handed what is essentially a grade-giving tool in genAI.
If kids, parents, and the American culture of education truly cared about learning, I would possibly (very big maybe here) see a potential where AI supports learning.
However, until there is a massive shift in the priority of our culture around education, AI will only serve to weaken students’ ability to think critically, persist in problem-solving, learning basic skills, and most importantly, believe in their own capacity to be successful, to control their own outcome, and to have an impact in the world around them.
For this, and many other reasons including the MIT study and virtually every study coming out now about the impact of AI on students, I am refusing to allow students to use AI in the classroom.
For those who are going to shout, “BUT THEY WON’T BE ABLE TO KEEP UP IN THE MODERN WORKPLACE?!”
(A) I didn’t know how to use my email in high school, and now I’m reading and writing like a million emails a day. They’ll figure it out, especially if they believe that they can learn to do anything. (B) What if the point of education wasn’t just to churn out soulless cogs designed to work as fast as possible inside of a machine that doesn’t care about them, but instead was to help students learn to live happy, purpose-filled lives that help them see their own worth and the value they can add to the world around them?
