The Future of Teaching and AI
S. M. Gollmer
This summer I read Dr. Jared Horvath’s book The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning – and How to Help Them Thrive Again. In this book he documents how student academic performance has been impacted by screen time and provides useful tools to facilitate teacher and parent engagement when confronted with increasing pressure to expand use of technology in the classroom. The pressure to increase technology use comes not only from EdTech businesses, but from AI companies themselves.
The Roher and Tyrell documentary, The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist, interviews leading AI experts and communicates both the existential threat, as well as the utopian prospects of advancements in AI. I find it interesting that one of their optimistic hopes for AI is transforming education. Who can object to a personalized tutor who is always available to interact on subjects as wide as the internet? It seems the traditional teacher will be obsolete once this technology has been tested and refined.
But does this reflect true education? If a personalized tutor moves at the students’ rate of engagement, will students learn as quickly as they should? Neil Postman, the author of Amusing Ourselves to Death, critiqued the use of media when educating students. By engaging students with videos for the purpose of learning, there is an unintended consequence. Although students learn through this medium, they are often put in the position of being passively entertained. We can learn facts and concepts passively, but true understanding comes from actively synthesizing these facts and concepts into a working model that allows us to create novel insights.
The Chronicle of Higher Education article, Companies Are Skeptical of New Graduates. Cornell Has Ideas to Fix That, sites a 238-page report generated by 18 Cornell faculty members charged to address The Future of the American University. The Chronicle states, “Companies have a ‘jarring’ skepticism of higher ed, the authors found, thanks to a new generation of degree holders who lack key skills like handling uncertainty, compromising, and absorbing feedback.” The article continues by stating, “’Sound judgment develops through practice, not transmission,’ the report says. That is, it’s not just important what discipline-specific knowledge students learn, but how they learn it.”
In my opinion, this diagnosis provides insight into how AI should be used in education. Proponents of AI see the role of the teacher changing in the classroom. But the role has already changed in classrooms that make extensive use of technology. The teacher becomes supervisor and troubleshooter. Technology provides instruction and incentive for engagement. It may allow us to be more efficient by packing more students into a classroom, but does this enhance the learning experience?
Education is a social and creative activity, not just a cognitive one. With time maybe AI can simulate these aspects too, but that assumes we want our students to bond to a machine rather than to a person who cares for them. That also means we want our students to exercise creativity within the confines of an AI’s training, rather than under the supervision of a person who can understand the true spark of genius.
The Cornell report recommends pedagogical fixes to better prepare graduates for the real world. They include “tightening Cornell’s rules on late assignments so that students practice making tough decisions about competing priorities.” In light of this, “the university should anticipate that students will have moments of serious self-doubt, such as when they receive a bad grade in an important course, and ‘intentionally teach how to respond to negative feedback.’” If these fixes are implemented by an AI educational system, the lack of reciprocal relationship will only increase the alienation between students and their learning. It takes a human to sympathize, and yet maintain high standards, to promote effective learning in the classroom. As Horvath has documented, this will not be accomplished by technology, no matter how sophisticated it is.
Posted in: Technology