AI and Trust

Dearest Teachers,

AI isn’t the first “thing” to change education, and it won’t be the last. We teachers are a very adaptable crew of humans, and I wanted to blog about how this tool - whether it’ll be good or bad overall - does not need to be an annoyance IF we allow ourselves to lean into pedagogies of kindness that have already existed.

Admittedly, I don’t know how the Ungrading community is approaching AI as a whole, but if the chorus is “Trust Students,” this is no different. Students have always had the ability to “cheat” the system in a variety of ways. They’ve paid for essays, from friends or otherwise. They’ve copy and pasted from Wikipedia and other web sites. 

The root of the cheating is intriguing to me. Why do they take these routes? Typically, it’s because of some wild Venn diagram of the following: procrastination, motivation, strict due dates set by instructors, fear of failure, and/or feeling they aren’t smart enough to complete the work with their own words and ideas.

So... instead of tensing up and becoming more rigid in our policies and practices - like asking students to hand write papers, etc. - perhaps we back up a minute. Let's pause and ask ourselves the following:

• WHAT IF we did the opposite? 
• WHAT IF we trusted them and told them we trusted them and explained how these AI tools can help and hurt them? 
• WHAT IF we tweaked assignments to allow redos and continued to ask for rough drafts alongside final drafts and 
• WHAT IF we didn’t have hard due dates and 
• WHAT IF we told them we were okay with errors, that we just want to hear and read THEIR voices?

I don’t think the answer is more surveillance; I think it’s more trust.

Statements I've heard from teachers recently...

• “If I assign online discussion boards, they’ll just use AI.” Okay, IF they do that’s on them, but also, is there a tweak that might prevent that? How is the discussion set up?
• “If they continually redo the essay using AI, I’m not going to allow redos.” But how does that assist in their learning?
• “I think this student used AI, but I’m not sure.” IF they did, it's on them. We don't have to play the "AI cop" role. 

At some point, we have to acknowledge that if they are "cheating" in their learning, they are only doing harm to themselves.