When Cerelia Hampton began work as an English department supervisor at Bremen High School District 228 two years ago, the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT had just begun making waves in education.
“I happened to be in the teacher workspace, and (teachers) were all talking about this,” Hampton said. “A couple people turned to me and said, ‘Cerelia, what are we going to do? All of the kids are going to cheat on their papers.’”
District 228 teachers were not alone in their immediate skepticism of a free-to-use online AI chatbot that spits out responses to user generated prompts almost instantaneously. According to a Pew Research Center survey from fall 2023, a quarter of kindergarten through high school teachers say AI tools result in more harm than good for K-12 education. Only 6% said they believe the reverse.
However, since Hampton began digging into ChatGPT and other AI tools with classroom applications, she and other District 228 leaders have become more enthusiastic about the inclusion of such tools in teaching and learning.
“When the Internet first came around, we thought that was going to change education and ruin it,” said Jim Broswell, director of operations and technology for the district. “It did change it, but it didn’t ruin it, it just put it in a different place. I think the same things are happening with AI.”
Broswell said he understands AI can create fear among teachers as students find new ways to cheat or plagiarize and said some districts have looked to curtail the technology’s use in schools. But Bremen 228 has taken the opposite approach, embracing the potential of AI to not only help students in their research and studying, but also for teachers to detect potential issues with turned in work.
“I think the thing that we’re doing that’s working really well is that we don’t have hard and fast policies,” Broswell said. “We’ve created a culture where people are trying AI, and they’re finding out the good and the bad, and then as we go we’re taking that feedback and shaping what it’s going to look like here in our district.”
The district has involved educators in developing their open minded approach, Broswell said, by forming a technology committee of 30 teachers from departments across the district’s four high schools: Tinley Park, Oak Forest, Hillcrest in Country Club Hills and Bremen in Midlothian.
The committee was tasked with research surrounding AI and education, even taking part in a full-day workshop given by an AI expert with the Illinois Learning Technology Center.
Teachers learned that more successful than banning students from using AI is providing them guidelines of ethical versus unethical applications. Hampton said one example is allowing 11th grade students writing essays on college and career readiness to use ChatGPT to search ideas for topics to write about, but not to conduct research or draft.
“I witnessed a teacher utilize ChatGPT with her class just to generate interview questions for someone they wanted to interview about their career,” Hampton said. “That was very cool to see, because it’s not writing the actual paper, it’s just getting the ideas going.”
Hampton and Broswell said outside of making students aware of when AI use is permitted, teachers have learned to craft assessments that make cheating with AI more difficult.
Broswell said useful approaches teachers learned include straying from simple wording of prompts on assessments in favor of more complex “AI proof questions” as well as requiring students complete more of their work in the classroom, without access to devices. He’s also found AI tools can help teachers with this work in such ways as creating different versions of tests so students in different class periods can’t share answers.
“The things that teachers are using (AI) for are nothing but positive,” Broswell said. “I think it’s been a force multiplier — teachers have been asked to do more and more over the years … Time is a concern, but now we have these supercharged tools that are allowing us to do what we want more frequently at better quality.”
ostevens@chicagotribune.com
