From conversing with online chatbots to getting help from Alexa, many of us have already become accustomed to generative AI at home, but what about at school? Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer — otherwise known as ChatGPT — is an online AI system that generates original content on command. Classroom use of ChatGPT along with other generative AI tools like Bard, Scribe, and DALL-E has been met with both hype and hysteria. 

It’s being said that generative AI will have the same impact on education as the calculator. That’s an understatement, if you ask Middle and Upper School Computer Science Teacher Joelle Henry. “It’s way more disruptive than that,” she contends, predicting it’ll be more like the printing press and the internet in its potential to shake things up. 

As she describes it, ChatGPT is essentially a computer that has been fed all the information available on the internet — from books and articles to images and videos — then trained to readily spit out content when prompted with human-like syntax. But while ChatGPT may sound like a human, it doesn’t think like one. “It can’t actually think,” Joelle says. And — in its current form — it’s prone to making mistakes. Referred to as hallucinations, mistakes are rendered with 100% confidence. That means students and teachers need critical thinking skills to analyze results. 

Joelle thinks much of the anxiety surrounding ChatGPT stems from educators not having the time to learn more about it. “It’s moving at such a fast pace, and teachers are understandably concerned about things like safety, accountability, and transparency.” 

All things considered, Joelle anticipates the inevitability of AI’s impact on education with optimism. “Generative AI can grade PDFs of physics worksheets that have graphs and handwritten answers,” Joelle says. “It’s better for AI to complete those tasks so teachers can focus more energy on students.” In November, she spoke on this topic at the Virginia Association of Independent Schools’ annual conference in Richmond. Her presentation, “Shaping Tomorrow’s Classrooms: Harnessing the Power of AI in Education” outlined the opportunities generative AI offers.

Aaron Proctor, who is in his first year at Flint Hill as the director of academics, believes that once teachers figure out how to leverage its advantages and mitigate its risks, generative AI can be a helpful resource for both students and teachers. As of press time, there is no fail-safe way to test whether AI has been used on assignments, although there are apps that purport to do so. For Proctor (he goes by his last name), this underscores the need to expose students to AI in a setting where teachers can guide them toward ethical usage. “We need to teach our kids how to cite it appropriately and how to scrutinize the content,” he says. And since the internet is replete with bias, so is generative AI. Students will need to learn how to spot it. 

Technology and Instruction Department Chair Jennifer McKain is in the same camp as Proctor and Joelle. In her role leading the Technology and Instruction team at Flint Hill, Jennifer works with teachers to implement technology tools that both improve their practice and equip students to engage a tech-savvy world. She envisions a future where the workforce calls for the ability to use AI effectively and sees tremendous value in staying up to speed with it. She suggests that “teachers can use it to refine the questions they pose in the classroom and uncover richer layers of analysis.” Jennifer anticipates that teachers will soon deploy generative AI to write rubrics, create worksheets, and grade papers, knocking out time-intensive tasks that take them away from students.

This fall, Joelle pitched the idea for an Upper School course called Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and used AI to write the proposal. “I uploaded our proposal form to ChatGPT, told it what level the students would be at, the duration of the course, and what topics I wanted to cover.” The site then generated a proposal, which she reviewed, tweaked, and submitted. The course was approved for next year and will offer students the opportunity to study fundamental AI concepts, machine learning algorithms, and deep learning techniques – all with an emphasis on practical implementation and project-based learning. 

Proctor is excited about AI’s potential to enhance the experience for teachers and students at Flint Hill. He’s not worried that AI will supplant the role of teachers in the classroom. “The highest quality education will always involve authentic interpersonal connection between teachers and students,” he says. “What we teach, how we teach, and how we grow professionally — all three of these can be aided by generative AI.”