During a full staff meeting on Sept. 25, Dean of Faculty Ty Talbot, who also teaches visual arts, introduced ways teachers could use AI as teaching tools. The meeting held, in the Wellness Space of the ULab, included the entire upper school and middle school faculty and most non-teaching staff. Talbot presented on two websites, Brisk and Magic School, which he believes are more helpful to teachers than other AI platforms like ChatGPT.

“For me, it was very cool to see how other teachers were using it and how they thought about teacher wellness with respect to that,” said Talbot. “How do you take out some of the tedious parts of being a teacher in order to free you up to do the intellectual work, and the emotional work more effectively.”

The UPrep family handbook aims to provide students with expectations on acceptable AI use. According to the handbook, students are to “use AI text and image-generation tools only when they are permitted or required by the teacher for a specific academic purpose, and with the teacher’s explicit permission.”

However, no such AI guidelines exist for teachers at UPrep.

“Teachers should be held to the same standard as students, and I think in a lot of ways, they aren’t,” senior Wilson Ferguson said. “While it makes perfect sense to have rules for students, I think those same rules should be applied to teachers.”

According to two different surveys conducted by The Puma Press, 89.7% of the 29 teachers who responded use AI as a teaching tool in some way. This contrasts the results from the anonymous survey sent out to students, which showed that only 47.1% of the 121 students who responded use AI for schoolwork. The survey was conducted anonymously to protect the identities of students.

The swift emergence of AI for educators has prompted middle school science teacher Alexa Lansberry to consider her own rules about using AI as a teaching tool. 

“I’ve thought a lot about, if I’m asking students to not use AI, should I be using AI?” Lansberry said.

Despite not allowing her students to use AI, Lansbarry employs it as a teaching tool to come up with activities to do in class.

“The conclusion I came to was that I’ve already done it. I’ve gone through school,” Lansberry said. “Obviously AI wasn’t a thing when I was in school, but I’ve already built the skills.”

According to Lansberry, students have far more to benefit from not relying on AI to quickly complete work.

“When students are using AI for projects, writing, things like that, they’re bypassing the assignments that were designed for them to build skills,” Lansberry said.

Similarly, upper school English teacher Sean Patella-Buckley adds that AI use can cause students’ learning to be impaired.

“For me, it all comes down to the learning process,” Patella-Buckley said. “Having AI do the work for you leaves you exactly where you started in terms of understanding your own thinking, understanding someone else’s thinking and expressing that understanding.”

For junior dean and upper school Spanish teacher Ciara McGrath, the Sept. 25 meeting was the first time she had learned about AI platforms for teachers.

“It’s only been in the last five weeks that I was introduced to some of these tools,” McGrath said. “It’s very early in the process, so I wouldn’t say it’s beneficial yet.” 

As he begins to explore the possibilities of using AI as a teaching tool, history teacher Damin Bauer stresses the importance of fact-checking information when using the tool.

“I think it’s a starting point,” Bauer said.  “Obviously, the information needs to be verified but that’s why using other sources is a requirement.” 

Other teachers like Patella-Buckley, are also starting small.

“So far, I’ve been using it to craft surface-level study questions and to create presentations more quickly,” Patella-Buckley said. 

He agrees that AI will remain and grow as an online tool, emphasizing the need for teachers to grow alongside it. 

“You can’t make it go away. So we have to learn how to adapt and to live with it,” Patella-Buckley said. “It’s a powerful tool, and like any tool, it can be used to achieve amazing things.”

Often, teachers who use AI as a teaching tool simply use it to save time. 

“From a teacher’s perspective, if there are tedious things that you do…that’s a great use for a teacher to use it,” Talbot said. “I can save three hours of my time to interact with students in a different way.”

Bauer relates the emergence of AI to the beginning of the internet, specifically in terms of their potential and how they are viewed.

“I’ve always been supportive of it,” Bauer said. “Just like when the internet came out and you were told not to do research on the internet. Once it’s out, it’s out.”

The potential benefits of AI lead Bauer to believe that its possibilities are endless. 

“I think it’s going to revolutionize education if it’s used properly,” Bauer said. “Why not use a tool that’s going to make you a better student?” 

Lansberry has found that AI is a strong tool but notes that it can easily be abused.

“For educators, I think it’s a really great tool if you use it the right way, although I do think it can be easy to lean on it too much,” Lansberry said. “The AI that’s out there is so user-friendly that it can be tempting to use it for everything. That could lead to problems, especially because AI is new and can make mistakes.”

While Ferguson agrees that AI is a helpful tool for teachers, he finds it unfair if students and teachers are held to different standards in terms of using AI as a timesaver.

“I think it saves [teachers] a lot of time, so I don’t see anything wrong with that,” Ferguson said. “Where I see a problem with it is when they say, ‘here’s all this busy work’, and you can’t use AI, because that just seems unfair to me.”

Lansberry believes that the risks of AI could increase over time.

“I think if a teacher were to start using AI to plan all of their lessons and used them in the classroom without thinking about if the lesson would work with their teaching style or for their particular groups of students it could really impact the quality of education students get,” Lansberry said. “It could be a slippery slope as AI becomes more sophisticated.”

A senior who wishes to stay anonymous so as not to compromise future endeavors as a student, admits they have used AI for schoolwork.

“I’ve used it to help me get bullet points for a discussion or for writing an assignment if I need bullet points,” the senior said. “Sometimes I just straight up use it entirely.”

Teachers understand that this is happening but want to limit students’ use of it.

“You want students to have some facility with using AI, but you don’t want AI to do all their thinking for them,” Talbot said.

Despite hopes for students to be able to use AI fairly, McGrath has doubts about correct use in the UPrep community. 

“I definitely want students to be able to practice and use it in a way that they can understand the different values for it,” McGrath said. “Something that concerns me is making sure that students know how to use it appropriately, and that they’re using it in a way that they can cross-check it with reliable sources.”

The anonymous senior understands this reasoning.

“It definitely does take away from learning opportunities that teachers are offering you,” the senior said.

Even so, Bauer has found success in encouraging students to use AI in his classes.

“Every time I tell them to use it, their work gets deeper because they don’t have to search for the simple stuff,” Bauer said. “They can actually have the time to develop [their work] and connect it to other things.”