Artificial intelligence (AI) in academia. It’s a thing that sparks large debates between teachers and students. Teachers often dock most of, if not all, of a project’s points if they discover that a student used AI in the creation of it. Using AI might even be seen as a form of academic dishonesty, alongside other major offenses like plagiarism. But what is often not discussed is teachers utilizing AI to form a lesson plan. It begs to question whether teachers should be supported if they use AI when students cannot.
To get a rough idea on how teachers may use AI, I talked with Ms. Evans, who has used AI to create activities for students before. When she asked about her feelings about using AI, she said, “I see it as something that can give me ideas and maybe help out when I’m creating a creating lesson plan.” Additionally, she feels like AI creates a more diverse variety of problems. As of now, she has mainly used it to create warm-up problems for her math classes. Ms. Evans has not seen a difference in students’ grades since she began using AI.
On the contrary, in the United Kingdom, there was a debate in their House of Lords (British equivalent to the Senate in the U.S) about AI in schools. One of the arguments brought up against it was that it may have a bias in what information it gives teachers. John Bailey of the publication Education Next, whose article was brought up during the debate, elaborates by saying, “If this data contains biases, those biases can be learned and perpetuated by the AI system.” If this claim turns out to be true, then there is a possibility that teachers may be using information that is swayed in a certain direction. This can be a large concern, especially for history and government teachers who want their lessons to be as unbiased as possible.
With the two opposing sides giving their reason for their stance, you can decide for yourselves if you support the use of AI in the creation of lesson plans. On one hand, it can help create diversity in the way questions are created and speeds up the process of forming a plan. On the other hand, the information taught could be biased towards a certain ideology or opinion. Ultimately, however, the idea of teachers using AI to create lesson plans is still in its infancy. There is still a lot to learn and explore with AI making lesson plans.
