Mastering the human-machine connection allows students and teachers to use AI most effectively, says one expert. Here’s some advice for harnessing the technology to its fullest potential.
A need for AI guidance
Evergreen AI was started by a group of former and current teachers who aim to help partnering organizations understand the “how” and “why” behind AI. Leaders know “AI is here.” But what do we do with it? That’s a question Ryan Findley and his team at Evergreen AI hope to help leaders answer.
They’ve put together a robust AI framework, a set of nearly 60 AI-related competencies that they believe students should be able to master by 12th grade.
“You need a foundation and understanding about AI and what it does, as well as what it’s good for and what it isn’t good for,” he says. “But also, the framework helps people understand how to collaborate with AI and make sense of all the synthetic content we’re now inundated with.”
However, most people struggle to comprehend those topics and create a sensible AI policy for their schools and organizations. For instance, how should an educator approach teaching AI literacy to a kindergarten class? Findley says Evergreen’s resources are to address those questions.
“We’ve created about 250 age-appropriate examples of how you could start to teach AI literacy or AI fluency,” he explains. Educators don’t need to find additional instruction time to introduce AI, he adds. They can bake it into the curriculum.
For example, an early elementary teacher might finish a unit on “Our Community” by opening ChatGPT and asking it, “Describe the [insert school district] community,” noticing differences (or even inaccuracies) in the AI’s understanding of their world.
A middle school teacher covering the American Revolution might have students create an AI Bill of Rights to govern its usage in school, drawing parallels between establishing rules for a new nation and new technology.
High school chemistry students could use a teacher-created “Compound Creator” to simulate chemical reactions, helping them safely explore element reactivity and predict outcomes in ways that would be too dangerous or expensive to demonstrate in a typical classroom.
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Embracing uncertainty
In late April, the Trump Administration issued an executive order to advance AI education in younger students, underscoring the need for education leaders to strengthen their understanding of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI.
The first step leaders must take to unlock AI’s potential is to break down their skepticism about AI, Findley says. Findley compares the introduction of AI and ChatGPT to the release of the calculator. Both were rather transformational and quickly became an essential good.
“I wasn’t around when the calculator came out, but I’ve read that there was a lot of anti-technology rhetoric then,” he says. “People argued it was ‘giving kids the answers,’ but that’s not the case. What it allowed them to do was, when appropriate, skip the rote work and offer them the challenge and opportunity to do higher-level work.”
AI has the potential to do the same. Users simply need to obtain the knowledge and skills to use it correctly. But the human-machine collaboration is arguably the most important skill to master, Findley says.
“It’s about building a skill that comes with working with these things [AI tools], similar to how you’d work with a human,” he says. “You start to understand their quirks and their capabilities over time.”
