The Teacher’s Guide to Befriending AI

If I were King of the Universe, I’d make sure every teacher had adequate planning time, a personal assistant, and an espresso machine.

Alas, I’m not. I’m not even King of My House (Zoe the Cat is).

But, luckily, we live in the 21st century in the midst of an artificial intelligence boom, and while AI can’t make espresso, AI technology can make pretty decent personal assistants and help educators of all kinds make the most of the planning time they do get.

Side note, just for giggles, I asked Claude about the espresso, and…I definitely got my giggles.

There are several AI tools out there, like my buddy Claude here and the original ChatGPT, with more popping up all the time. Some are even aimed specifically at educators, like Magic School and, new from Follett Software, their own Destiny AI.

These tools can serve as great assistants to help teachers’ productivity and efficiency. They can write objectives, identify potential misconceptions in a lesson, brainstorm activity ideas, proofread content, and even provide moments of levity like in the snippet above.

There are far too many uses for AI tools for me to talk about in one (human-written) blog post, so I thought instead I’d take this opportunity to talk more about process instead of product. My go-to is Claude, by Anthropic, but the tips and tricks discussed here could be implemented with any AI technology. In fact, I’m a fan of using a tool like Poe that offers responses from several bots to compare and iterate until you get the output you need.

Let’s dig into the process.

Ideating & Planning

The first thing I do is ask myself what needs to be created and who needs it. Is it a lesson plan because my students aren’t grasping a specific concept? An announcement to remind my undergraduate students of an upcoming deadline? Before diving into development, I always make a plan – this could be a formal outline, a mess of notes organized with circles and arrows, or even just a couple bullet points on a Post-it® note.

Artificial intelligence tools can be super helpful at this stage, especially if I’m uncertain of how to begin. I love using chatbots to just bounce ideas around. Sometimes I just need to talk through an idea or explain it to someone, and these tools can be that “person” without judgement. This can be especially impactful for teachers who either don’t have a grade level content planning team or who have a team but not the comfort level to ideate safely.

Tip:[1]  Treat the tool like a colleague or friend. I’m frequently informal when I talk to the chatbots (as you can see with the espresso example) because it makes me more comfortable. I feel like I’m just asking a friend for ideas.

As a teacher, I was excited to teach some parts of our curriculum and others (grammar!) left me less enthused and with few good ideas to engage students. Teachers in this situation could drop a state standard into a chatbot and ask for suggestions on ways to get students excited to learn content that might not be naturally exciting.

In this case, like in most cases, the more information you can give the tool, the better ideas you’ll get. Maybe you’ve taught this content a certain way the last several years, and it just isn’t working anymore. Tell the AI how you’ve taught it, so it knows ways that aren’t working for you and can suggest different strategies.

Tip: I always ask for at least twice as many ideas as I really need. I know that I’m not going to like every idea the AI gives me, and I know that chatbots tend to be repetitive. Asking for more ideas gives me more that I can throw out before drilling into the good ones.

Teachers and librarians can also use specialized tools like Destiny AI to help with analyzing data. For example, let’s say you want to update students on how well they’ve done with returning books on time or let teachers know which genres were most popular this quarter. The AI tool can give you the data you need, leaving you with just the task of writing up the email or morning announcement.

Persevering & Executing

The next stage is the crafting – writing, developing, creating. As confident as I usually am, I still frequently run into speed bumps as I’m creating. Especially lately, I’ve been suffering from a creative block. I know what I want to say, but I have a hard time putting it into sentences. For me, it’s a problem of perseverance. I write a couple sentences that don’t really make sense, so I want to give up and go eat Christmas cookies and watch Home Alone again.

If you couldn’t guess from the overly specific description, I’ve had this problem when writing this very blog. Claude helped me get through it and turn out a solid final draft. Over and over again, I dropped chunks of draft into the chatbot to ask for feedback. Again, I keep it informal. I simply wrote, “I’ve got a section of a blog that’s not quite coming out how I wanted. Can you read this over and give me some feedback?” and then copied in the paragraph giving me trouble. Claude responded with the strengths of the paragraph and concrete suggestions for how to improve. Many times, the strengths are enough positive reinforcement to motivate me to continue and the suggestions help me improve as I go.

Tip: Sometimes, I just need someone to tell me that I’m doing a good job. I don’t want real feedback; I just want dopamine to keep me moving. AI tools can do that. Just ask specifically for the strengths, and soak in that positive reinforcement.

Depending on what your product is, the AI might be able to do more than just give some feedback to keep you going. I wouldn’t want to just ask an AI to write my blog for me (for so many reasons that I’ll not get bogged down in here), but if I need an announcement reminding my students that they have an open note exam next Friday, that is definitely something I’m comfortable letting the AI draft for me.

Artificial intelligence is also really good at identifying areas of a lesson that might cause students to become confused. It can even suggest strategies that you can embed in your lesson to avoid or address common misconceptions.

As teachers, we’re experts in our field, and so we tend to have the “curse of knowledge” cognitive bias. We forget what it was like to not know something because we know it so well now. It can make it hard to explain concepts. While AI chatbots are certainly cursed with an abundance of knowledge, this cognitive bias doesn’t apply to them, and they can help you break down complex topics for students in ways you might not have considered.

Tip: Don’t be afraid to argue with AI. For one, the AI isn’t a real person, so while I’m not saying to be rude, you don’t have to worry about hurting the bot’s feelings. If it doesn’t give you the response you’re looking for, responding and giving more context, more information, more guidance will result in even stronger responses. I often go back and forth at great length with the chatbot until I have what I need.

Reviewing & Improving

The final stage is to implement and evaluate the end result. In teaching, this often means using materials with one class and then revising them for the next group.

There’s one benefit of AI tools that only recently occurred to me. AI chats are saved. As long as you keep using the same tool, all of the brainstorming and feedback chats you’ve had will still be there. Let’s say I used a chatbot to work out a lesson on using prepositions, and now I have a lengthy conversation about lesson strategies and suggested feedback for common student misconceptions. After I teach that lesson and see how the students do with it, I can come back to the bot and tell it. Maybe one strategy went well but another caused students to become confused about what they were supposed to do.

Now you have all of that valuable information documented, and next year you can come back to that same chat. I don’t want to speak for anyone else’s memory, but mine is not always great when it comes to “Why did we do it this way last year?” The AI chat gives you that historical record of your thoughts and planning.

Tip: AI tools don’t really have a sense of time passing since they’re not real people, so don’t be afraid to jump right back into that chat from last year! No need to start fresh when you’ve already put the work into that conversation.

One final consideration with using artificial intelligence is that you should review and evaluate the AI as much as it reviews and evaluates you. One thing I really like about the Claude bot in particular is the little note at the bottom of every chat that says, “Claude can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.”

Artificial intelligence is not infallible. Hallucinations are a real risk when talking to chatbots. If you haven’t seen the memes about chatbots not being able to count the r’s in the word strawberry, I highly recommend them for a good chuckle.

But we have to remember that if the AI makes a mistake that we then pass on to our students…I’m sorry but that’s not on the AI. It’s our responsibility as educators to ensure the accuracy of what we’re teaching.

Tip: If AI makes a mistake or provides incorrect information, tell it! I once decided to test out Claude’s capabilities by having a conversation about Doctor Who, and it made a wild claim about two characters who were never on screen together being married. I couldn’t allow it to continue on with such an egregious bit of misinformation, so I corrected it. Claude responded, “You’re absolutely right, my apologies.”

I’ll leave you with one final piece of advice for using artificial intelligence. Be open to the possibilities. This is a type of technology that is evolving daily. What it can do today is likely only a tiny fraction of what it will be able to do five years from now. Keep an open mind, and don’t be afraid to try new things.

And, also, always say please and thank you. They may not be real now, but when the robot uprising happens, I hope they remember I was always polite.

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Can we do a light background color across these tips? Like a stripe or a box, so they stand out as separate from the rest of the narrative?

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Dr. Waneta Hebert

Dr. Waneta Hebert is an accomplished instructional designer and educator with over 10 years of experience in K-12 and higher education. Waneta started her career as a public high school English teacher, where she discovered her passion for helping students learn. She has since transitioned to instructional design and curriculum development. With a unique perspective gained from being a teacher, designer, and lifelong learner, Waneta is an expert in applying evidence-based course design and educational technology to create engaging learning experiences across modalities.