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Exploring Artificial Intelligence in Education

Exploring Artificial Intelligence in Education

By Jackie Waters

St. Mark’s faculty members Maureen Russo Rodríguez and Ron Spalletta spent the 2023-2024 academic year spearheading important conversations in our School community about artificial intelligence and education. With support from Colleen Worrell, director of the Burgess Center for Innovation in Teaching and Learning, they applied for a Patterson Grant for a project entitled “Artificial Intelligence in Secondary Education: Curriculum Innovations & Best Practices.” The grant enabled Russo and Spalletta to enroll in a class through the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education Professional Learning Program in fall 2023. 

Simultaneously, they began planning an AI symposium with Worrell, hosted at St. Mark’s in April 2024. Designed to foster dialogue among peer schools, and offer valuable professional development for teachers and administrators, the symposium connected educators from 38 institutions committed to studying AI’s impact on teaching and learning—and to supporting students as they navigate the challenges and opportunities of artificial intelligence. 
 
Initial Investigations
This deep dive into AI originated with a proposal to St. Mark’s faculty from Russo, who wanted teachers from different departments to get together and share their perspectives on artificial intelligence with the School community. With help from several colleagues, Russo and Spalletta organized their first AI conversation at St. Mark’s over a year ago. Even though the roundtable discussion took place on a snow day, every student seat was full for the optional activity. That proved what Russo and Spalletta already knew to be true: AI “will change the landscape of teaching and learning.”  Fall 2024 Magazine

Amidst their eagerness to explore AI, Russo and Spalletta recognized that many teachers, perhaps from a place of fear or burnout, were coming to the topic with less enthusiasm. Teachers needed resources, which is why Russo and Spalletta’s first project was to compile a resource list for colleagues. They also organized a series of “lunch and learns” throughout fall 2023, while simultaneously engaging in coursework through the University of Pennsylvania.

Patterson Grant Makes Professional Development Possible
In order to learn how to integrate AI effectively in their work as educators, Russo and Spalletta enrolled in the UPenn class as professional development. “To our knowledge and at the time of this proposal, this class is the first and only graduate course of its kind open to K-12 teachers,” they wrote in their Patterson Grant proposal. UPenn's first cohort for the class came from all over the world—15 states and 12 different countries, according to Russo and Spalletta, whose classmates included fellow educators as well as business leaders, heads of school, technology specialists, and administrators driven to help their institutions develop the best policies and practices around AI. 

There were three phases of the UPenn course: “explore,” “envision,” and “enact.” “In the first two phases, we deepened our understanding of AI and the dilemmas facing educators,” said Russo. “And in the last phase, we designed and implemented our own projects to integrate AI in our schools.” As part of their coursework, Russo and Spalletta also needed to articulate a School policy and present a vision that incorporated their values, which they could then share with St. Mark’s colleagues. They were guided by key questions about AI’s role in teaching and learning, such as:

  • What if we as policy-makers, instead of merely policing student use of AI, could do more to actively encourage integrating its use into our coursework? 
     
  • What if we as St. Mark’s faculty members could access expert-informed best practices for AI in education as they emerge and even contribute to those emerging innovations ourselves? 
     
  • What if St. Mark’s faculty could have a seat at the table where the nation’s top researchers in education are developing classroom resources that integrate AI tools into the student-learning experience? 
     
  • What if St. Mark’s could lead the way among its peer schools in organizing conversations about AI teaching innovations? 

AI in the SM Classroom
When it came to integrating AI in the classrooms last year, some St. Mark’s faculty found natural applications of generative AI in their coursework. Modern language teachers, for example, discovered applications for chatbots in their lesson planning to help design activities for students, brainstorm creative content to target specific vocabulary, and create interactive games and role-play opportunities for students. 

Led by Russo and Spalletta, a cohort of St. Mark’s AI “pioneers” began placing assignments they designed onto a shared page for colleagues on Canvas, the School’s learning management system. Math teachers Andrew Bergdahl and Brian Lester experimented with ways to use generative AI to practice problems for Advanced Statistics, designing a two-part activity for regression with AI. Meanwhile, Maggie Kelly asked students to experiment with ChatGPT for an assignment in U.S. History. 

In addition to more mainstream AI tools that faculty have been using for years (such as Grammarly, predictive text tools, and GPS), teachers introduced newer generative AI tools including:

  • LLM (large language model) powered Chatbots (especially ChatGPT, but also Copilot, Gemini, Claude, PerplexityAI) to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the technology, to adjust reading levels for challenging or technical texts, to summarize information, and to draft text for a variety of purposes. 
     
  • Text-to-image tools, such as Adobe Firefly and Playground.ai for image generation.
     
  • Audio transcription and synthesis tools, such as Otter.ai for transcribing meetings and generating summaries of conversations.

The ways Russo used AI in the classroom last year varied, since she taught three diverse courses: IV Form English, Advanced Spanish Literature, and a Lion Term class that focused specifically on AI applications for social good. “In each class, I targeted a few specific tools for experimentation with the aim of building my own AI literacy as much as that of my students,” she says. Along the way, Russo asked students to reflect on how the use of AI augmented their learning experience. 

Her goals for fostering AI use in her classes included: giving students opportunities to familiarize themselves with a few specific, useful tools; allowing students to cultivate healthy skepticism around the limitations of AI by experiencing those limitations firsthand; and demystifying AI and mythbusting preconceptions that exist. “It's important to do some hands-on learning with AI tools so that students can see that it’s far more complicated than just a magic wand or a mere tool for cheating that they have to avoid,” she notes.

Russo also asked students to start thinking critically about AI as a tool that will inevitably augment the learning processes “in ways that are complex and still evolving.” For example, in May, IV Form English students asked Project Toni—a tool developed by Adrian Antao of Kipp NYC on Playlab.ai—to provide them with suggestions to improve a draft of a “This I Believe” essay after they had elaborated their own ideas. 

“I believe the true value-add to AI tools stems from the added dimension of metacognition and meta learning that they make possible!” Russo says. “When the IV Formers used Project Toni, they included in a bibliography of their work and an entire copy of their back-and-forth exchange about their papers with Project Toni. This helped me as the teacher preserve accountability and transparency in AI use as well as gain insights about how well the tool was helping my students.”
 
According to Russo, one of the best practices and mindsets for teachers using AI is to explore it alongside students. “I think teachers naturally feel like we need to wait until we have achieved some sort of “expert status” in a specific AI tool or topic before we experiment with it in our classrooms. However, if we are hesitant to experiment with AI tools, we will miss important opportunities to build our own literacy and to model for students how we can approach new technology responsibility and with a critical, reflection-oriented lens.”

A Symposium Brings Educators Together
With a desire to share what they learned from the UPenn course and lead the AI conversation among peer schools, Russo and Spalletta, alongside Worrell, planned St. Mark’s first AI symposium for educators. On April 19, National AI Literacy Day, the School successfully hosted Artificial Intelligence in Education: New Trends in Teaching and Learning in the Putnam Family Arts Center. 

Workshops explored bias in tech, disinformation, and media literacy, while roundtable discussions focused on AI’s impact on the changing role of teachers and how to design school position statements and philosophies around AI and learning. Plenary speaker Dr. Torrey Trust, a professor of learning and technology in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, opened the symposium with a talk entitled “AI-Aware to AI-Prepared: Designing Assignments and Assessments to Support Student Success.” “You need to teach with AI to prepare students for the future,” Trust said. “You need to be vulnerable. Teaching with technology requires taking risks.” In the keynote address “Pedagogical Prompts: Leveraging AI for Teaching and Learning,” Nate Green asked symposium attendees, “What can AI do for us? What’s holding us back as educators?” As a middle school teacher and academic technology coordinator at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C., Green’s interests include how AI can help students when they inevitably confront obstacles and how teachers can utilize AI to assist student learning. 
“AI is a collaborator for teachers not a replacement,” Green said. “AI is no good without teachers.” Green also shared how teachers should update frameworks about what AI is and what it can do, envisioning this work as a collaborative endeavor, not just with teaching peers but with students, as well: “Go back to your schools and set up a student committee because we absolutely must have their voice in this process.”

In the symposium planning process, Russo and Spalletta enlisted the help of St. Mark’s students Ariel Cheng ’25 and Ian Cho ’26 as ambassadors, and both students participated in panels and sessions. “During the event, I got to talk to so many people, which allowed me to get many more insights into the current problem and further incited my interest for AI ethics,” Cho said. “This event was exactly what we had envisioned during the brainstorming stages. We are so grateful that it became a reality.”

Lesson Learned: Collaboration is the Key
“One of the most important takeaways from the symposium for me,” says Spalletta, “is that because our peer schools are working on the same problems and have the same concerns, we would all have better outcomes if we work together, share resources, and collaborate to build an education-first approach to AI.”

“We as educators have the distinct responsibility to invest in the hard work of ongoing learning about a development that has such a large-scale impact on society,” adds Russo. “Educators will not be able to rise to the challenges of this paradigm shift without making space to share ideas together.” 

When asked what they will take away from the event and share with colleagues at their respective schools, many attendees referenced the necessity for AI literacy. “Educators and students both need to learn how to use AI and how to understand the ethical issues surrounding the use of AI,” shared one participant, while another suggested that “all teachers need to begin working with a “frontier" model of generative AI right away to leverage its power in creating learning experiences for students and themselves.”

Where We Go From Here 
“One thing we have seen other schools and universities do, which we hope St. Mark’s will begin to experiment with next year, is to set up systems through which students can use generative AI on designated assignments while also tracking their use scenarios transparently,” Russo and Spalletta say. “This serves multiple purposes, letting students experiment and giving faculty a window into how and why students are using AI tools.” 

“Each new generation of AI tools advances what is possible and what teachers must consider for their students,” says Spalletta. “In the near future, I hope that we will have strong protocols and use cases that will harness the technology in ways that support learning and open new avenues for students with different needs.”

In the year ahead, Russo and Spalletta plan to craft professional development for St. Mark’s faculty in the form of longer and bite-sized sessions. They have also discussed working with Worrell and Kinne McBride, interim dean of academics, to finish a clear and useful position statement that will express St. Mark’s values as they relate to AI and guide future decision-making. Spalletta and Worrell also plan to create school wide benchmarks for media literacy and AI literacy, define where those skills fit in the overall curriculum, and build case studies that teachers can add to their lessons.

As they look to the future, Russo and Spalletta are focused on dedicating time and resources, so the School can respond and adapt to AI advancements. Russo also acknowledges the issues of access and equity in education when it comes to AI: “The ways in which more powerful versions of chatbots outperform the free versions raises issues of equity for faculty and students alike. This problem is one of many that St. Mark’s will need to address as a School in the years to come. How can we uphold equity in an educational scenario where access to better AI technology will lead to better performance for teachers and students alike?”

Without a doubt, AI is changing how we educate. When asked why teachers should embrace AI, Spalletta says simply, “We must. It’s the only responsible thing to do.”    
    
For more information on AI at St. Mark’s, visit https://www.stmarksschool.org/academics/ai