Transcription
This is the second story in our series on artificial intelligence being applied here and now, where it matters most. Last week, we brought you the story of the AI used by your doctor. This week, it's about your teacher, the one you depend on to educate your children, the one we all depend on to prepare the next generation of workers, the one that we all remember from our own childhood.
"Whenever I talk to people about their experiences in education, they always name this one teacher who was so influential, and they got into this discipline because this teacher was amazing and inspired them."
Where students said, "What?"
Westin: Professor Shamya Karumbaiah now teaches those teachers as a professor at the University of Wisconsin. She lives at the intersection of education and tech, focusing on the application of artificial intelligence in America's classrooms.
"We know that teacher in the front of the classroom and students in front of their laptops is not a model that works. It's broken. Last couple of years, especially, has been very exciting. And I would say the big change is the ability for teachers to customize what's happening with AI."
"So why don't you look for on your Kira dashboard..."
Westin: Lance Key is one of those classroom teachers adopting and adapting AI as he teaches computer science in the Putnam County School System just east of Nashville, Tennessee.
"Computer science curriculum, they've really gamified it, and they've made it colorful, and engaging, and exciting for the students. And also, you know, inside of there, if they try to do things that they can't, it again will redirect them. It'll give them, 'Oh, there's an error here.' And then they can go to the chatbot and try to work through what the error is. And then it'll redirect them to where they need to go."
"I think the big opportunity that stems from AI in the classroom is the ability to personalize instruction to individual students."
Westin: Andrea Pasinetti is co-founder and CEO of the company Kira. It provides the education software platform to Lance Key's classroom, as well as to many of the largest school districts across the United States.
"With AI, a teacher has an unlimited number of teaching assistants to support that process. And the teacher can provide guidance, guardrails and guidelines on how to provide that support to students. That looks like students working on a terminal and having an AI tutor that they can query either in written text, by typing on a keyboard, or in spoken word, by speaking directly to the terminal on the computer."
"The AI chatbot."
Westin: That personalization is something that Key is experiencing every day in his Tennessee classroom.
"It allows me to have a more personalized relationship with my students in the classroom. Before, there was one of me. And for every question that came up, I was like bouncing around the room, just answering questions all the time. But now we've got, you know, a tutor that can help them along the way. And I can build personalized tutors for them, too. So if it's on a specific content area, I can say, 'OK, today we're working on solving two step equations. Here's a two step tutor that my students can work with alone.' And they can ask it questions. So then I can walk around, and then one on one check with students. I've also got a dashboard on the backside that will alert me if there's a student that's having problems. So then I know real time that I need to go check on Johnny or Susie."
Westin: Over and above that personalization, AI can also provide teachers like Lance Key with some much needed relief.
"My wife previously was an English teacher, and I recall grading essays being very daunting for her because she would have to score 150 essays every time, if they wrote an essay in the classroom. So using a rubric, being able to upload our district rubrics into Kira, and being able to use their... One, their grader off of that rubric, but also their AI detection, their plagiarism detection, and their feedback writer has been amazing. So we can load all the papers up into that. It will score it all for us. It will give us all the feedback. And the teachers can then just review it. And I think that's the big thing that we can focus on with AI, is the time that it gives teachers back in the day. By 2030, we're going to need to hire 30 million teachers, because we've got teachers retiring and people not going into the field. So we're going to have a teacher shortage that's coming, along with a high burnout rate. So I think AI can help us with some of the repetitive processes that we do over, and over, and over again."
Westin: For all it's promised today, it turns out that the use of AI for education isn't all that new. While large language models are only just making their debut in schools, other forms of AI have a long history. How long has either artificial intelligence, or maybe we should call it "machine learning," going back, how long has it been used in the classroom?
"You'd be surprised how AI and education, uses of it in education, have a lot of common sort of origins. And so I come from an academic background where my advisor's advisor's advisor back in 1980s was creating what we now call as cognitive tutors that were being used in Pittsburgh classrooms. And people have studied... there's this work done in the 1990s on ethnography, basically, of how teachers are using AI in the classroom. What does introduction of AI in the classroom change in the social structures? Student-student interaction or student-AI... student-teacher interaction?"
Westin: It's only in the last few years that AI has developed to the point where companies like Kira can put it to use in the classroom. According to surveys by RAND, as of the 2023-24 school year, a quarter of all US teachers were already using AI to teach students, and Pasinetti says the key is the conversation.
"We use AI as a catch-all term for a lot of different technologies. In reality, what's happened with the most recent wave of AI, with LLMs in particular, is a more discursive medium. So AI now, unlike even three, four years ago, is able to have real conversations with students. It's able to engage with students on a level that feels more human in some respect. We founded Kira four years ago, before AI was popular. AI wasn't cool. It seemed premature. And in many cases, it was entirely verboten. There were a lot of districts that said, 'We can't really be talking about AI with parents because it gives them a lot of anxiety, or there's a lack of understanding about what AI can do.' And so the whole conversation would die at the very beginning. So I would say there's been a radical shift where that anxiety and resistance has given way to curiosity."
Westin: And some of that curiosity has turned into plain necessity, as school districts across the country struggle to deal with teaching students in a multitude of languages.
"It's important to bring students' home language into their classrooms. A very promising benefit or opportunity for AI here is to bridge the gap between the language that the teacher speaks, and the different languages that the students in the classroom speak. Thirty-two states in the United States reported that their students speak over 200 languages. And these 32 states have a deficit of bilingual resource teachers. So there are all these opportunities out there in terms of what's already working in the classroom, but there is limited human resources."
"The number of districts that can now teach languages like Mandarin, or Arabic, or, you know, French and Spanish, where historically it would have required hiring a native speaker of that language, and, as a result, been much more difficult to achieve for a district. The ability to do that now is immediate. Districts can leverage AI tools to teach a new foreign subject, or a foreign language as a subject in a way that they couldn't have in the past."
Westin: For all its advantages, the widespread use of AI in the classroom is not without its risks. Risks we've all heard about with other applications of AI: things like hallucinations and bias, but also risks that are unique to education. A Pew study from last year showed that a quarter of teachers think AI tools do more harm than good in the classroom. Only 6% say AI is beneficial.
"Any piece of AI that is generating text anywhere where it is student facing, you have to be careful about the implications hallucinations have in this specific context of education. The goal in the classroom is for us to help students learn. Hallucination is absolutely detrimental to students learning. Any sort of misinformation, it could... I would also talk about potential biases, potential, you know, toxic content, the kinds of... any kind of text that the AI is generating that is harmful for students learning and well-being."
Westin: But perhaps a greater risk with AI applied to the classroom is the risk of expecting too much of it.
"AI is a tool like anything else. It has very, very real limitations. The fact that it's discursive and it resembles an interaction with a human, in some isolated cases, makes it feel a lot more advanced than technologies we've interacted with in the past. But as of today, AI's boundaries are still limited. And it's very easy to overstate. There's a lot of hype. It's very easy to feed into a narrative of fear. But the reality is AI is still answering fairly discreet questions being asked by students, and supporting teachers with the answering of those questions. I think students interacting with computers one on one is definitely something that schools, district teachers, parents, students themselves need to be careful of. It can take students out of interpersonal relationships. It can dull students' abilities to interact with their peers. So AI is by no means a panacea."
"Over 90% of innovation in AI for education fails. I believe that it is because they do not consider what's... the kind of practices that's happening in the classroom and it's built in this black box. Second is also, often in computer science, I have a background in computer science, often we make oversimplifying assumptions about real world context. So we are sort of assuming that these factors do not play a role, and we build a system for this ideal context. But classroom, real world classrooms, are far from ideal. Students have very different needs. There's a lot of learner variability. They come in with a lot of preconceptions, that often is hard for us to catch right away."
Westin: So with all the hype, and a fair amount of failure, how can an investor sort out which AI education applications have the most promise?
"The AI hype certainly has led to a lot of funding for what I would call as systems that are generated to put a lipstick on the pig. Is that the phrase? [Laughs] If you haven't even thought about, fundamentally, how are you going to improve education, and you're only coming from the point of view of, 'We have this AI tool and we're going to find something to apply to.' It's not going to work. It's yet another fancy tool, but the underlying things that have been broken in education continue to be broken."
Westin: Whether it's investing, or teaching, or learning, everyone agrees that, in the end, it all comes back to the teachers themselves.
"I think that's the real promise of AI. It allows teachers to do what they do best. When you think of your favorite teacher, you don't think of, you know, the teacher who taught derivatives the best. You think of the teacher who encouraged you, who made you feel smart, who made you feel capable, who made you feel like you could learn anything and accomplish anything. And I think that's where teachers really shine. That's where AI is really a democratizing power, I would say, in education."
"There is something about that human intent. There is something about a human being caring about a child, about a student, which I don't think AI is able to do that."
"My dad just a few years ago, he changed a headlight in the car. And I'm like, 'Why don't you take it somewhere and get it done?' He said, 'I watched a YouTube video and it taught me how to do it.' So I think that we have some dispensations that are happening in education right now, where some shifts are happening. Teachers aren't being minimized, but our roles are changing a little bit to where we're guiding students to learning, and we're able to personalize learning more because we have the time to be able to do that."