AI Tools for Teaching Are Everywhere—But At What Cost?

To say that teaching is hard is an understatement.  The jam-packed days, list of lessons to plan, emails to respond to, resources to cull and create, and grading student work are just the tip of the iceberg.  All of these things take thought and a lot of time. And time is what we have the least of.  Which makes leveraging AI tools for teaching a Godsend. 

What can AI tools do for teachers?

Really, the question is what can’t they do?  

AI can create differentiated lesson plans, correct parts of student writing with feedback, craft professional and to-the-point emails, create IEP goals, write everything from decodable texts to exemplar essays, and even make visuals.  Plus a million other things I haven’t listed.  

All things that can take hours of time, depleting our energy.  Spending long hours to complete these kinds of tasks, when we absolutely do not have long hours to spare, is one of the major causes of teacher burnout.  

Which is why I’m a huge, huge fan of AI tools for teachers.  

I’m even ok with teaching students to use it in smart ways.

But there are some major caveats.

I’m really, really fearful about teachers using it as a go-to, “set it and forget it” tool.  

For example, just the other day I came across a very alarming post on Facebook.  In that post, a teacher had used an AI tool to create a quiz that was centered on a text they would be reading in class.  Great idea, right?.  After all, AI will make very light work of this task.  

The image below was the result.

I was stunned.  And not in a good way.

First, I was shocked with how incredibly obvious the answers were.  There would be no need for students to read the accompanying text at all; the answers are that obvious.

Second, if the answers themselves aren’t obvious, the length of them are.  The correct answer choices are longer than the wrong ones in every question.   

Students wouldn’t have to think at all and still get a perfect score on a quiz like this.  A perfect score that would tell the teacher nothing about whether or not students actually understood central idea.

But here’s where I was most taken aback.  The comments below this post.  

There wasn’t a single comment calling out the terrible design of these answer choices.  Worst of all, there was nothing but praise for the AI tool.  

The responses all celebrated one thing and one thing only:  the fact that this tool created questions within seconds. 

None noticed how obvious the answer choices were. 

No one pointed out that this kind of quiz would not help a teacher know if students really understood central idea or not. 

Not one teacher questioned how little thinking would be required of students. 

Exactly the alarm bell that literacy author and consultant Mike Ochs warns of when he says that “[t]here’s a risk of outsourcing your own capacity to think and remember and recall when just a few keystrokes can spit out lots of information at an incredible speed.”

“There’s a risk of using it to do something for you that you should probably do yourself. There’s a risk of trusting it when you know better. There’s a risk of outsourcing your own capacity to think and remember and recall when just a few keystrokes can spit out lots of information at an incredible speed.”

Mike Ochs, author and literacy consultant

If we allow this kind of resource to take the place of our own careful thinking. We’ll soon have a nation full of not just poor readers and writers, but also poor thinkers.  

I’m talking about students and teachers here.  Bringing more and more poor-quality content like this quiz example into our classrooms will lead to less and less need for students to think.  And relying more and more on AI tools to create what we need instead of thinking it through ourselves or not going that critical extra step to improve what the AI model produces will also lead to teachers who aren’t thinking critically, either (as this Facebook post clearly shows is happening).  

Using AI tools for teaching in this way will devastate the education system.  

Just as we must carefully vet what we find on TPT and understand that one-size-fits-all curriculum isn’t the way to go, we also must be vigilant about what AI-created materials we put in front of students.

We cannot accept what it first spits out.  Even with careful, refined prompts, we must then bring our own expertise to the forefront and revise.  AI doesn’t know our students, our goals for students, or what  and how we’ve taught.  

Because it can take some time to get the prompt just right–and then we still have to clean it up anyway–we might actually be wasting more time than saving it.  The exact opposite of the goal we wanted to achieve. 

AI is a great tool, and it can truly increase our productivity.  It can serve as a fantastic thinking partner.  But it cannot replace our own thinking.  

What’s more…

Some teachers now turn to AI for answers that Google can easily answer.  The power required to run the databases that AI uses take a large amount of our water reserves.  Using AI for simple tasks like answering questions  means that “Large amounts of energy are used and converted into heat, requiring a staggering quantity of freshwater to keep temperatures under control and cool down machinery.”  (Earth.org)

Sometimes, it might just be better all around to think through a task ourselves rather than immediately turn to an AI tool.  

That quiz is a great example. 

Somebody sat down to prompt AI to craft it.  It took some time for that teacher to get the prompt to be what they thought was just right.  That teacher will then use instructional time to give that assessment and will need to score it. Probably also take more time to enter those scores into the grade book.  Then, because it’s so poorly designed that it will give a very false sense of student understanding, the teacher will have to spend much more time teaching central idea because the actual assessment later on will show that many students didn’t get it.  

This teacher would have been far better off asking students to read the article and answer these questions as open-ended questions.  Or the teacher could have read the text aloud (or together through shared reading) and asked students to jot their thinking as the teacher posed these same questions along the way.  She could have then collected those responses and sorted through them in minutes to determine who had it, who didn’t, who was on the way, and responded accordingly. 

A much more productive use of time.  

Heck, just listening to what students said in a turn and talk would give more inisight into student thinking than this quiz.

In the rush to get things done, we cannot forget how much our own expertise matters.

What we know about our standards, the content we’re teaching, and our students all comes into play when designing lessons and materials.  All things that AI does not understand like we do.  

It’s why we’re here, doing the work every day.

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Who is Coach from the Couch??  I’m Michelle Ruhe, a 25+ year veteran educator, currently a K-5 literacy coach.  I continue to learn alongside teachers in classrooms each and every day, and it’s my mission to support as many teachers as I can.  Because no one can do this work alone. I’m available to you, too, through virtual coaching calls! 

Simply email me at michelle@coachfromthecouch.com or reach out for a coaching call! I’m here to partner with you to build that foundation of student motivation for writing so your students can realize greater success.

Or, consider joining my Facebook community–a safe, supportive environment (really–no blaming or shaming is allowed!)  where you can ask questions, learn ideas, and share your thoughts among other literacy-loving educators!