Is AI Cheating Your Students Out of Learning? Flip Your Class!
The AI ship has sailed. If you send home complex homework assignments, many of your students will most likely use AI to do the work. So what should you do? How can you ensure that students actually learn in your class?
Background - I Wanted to Like AI
This past year, my principal asked me to dive deep into AI and help prepare our teachers for the AI wave. At first, I thought AI would be a revolutionary tool that would personalize my students' learning. I played with AI, created AI tutors, read the blogs, and enthusiastically jumped into AI.
But as the year progressed and as I used AI in my classroom, I changed my tune. One pivotal moment was when I was watching one of our top students working to solve a complex physics problem. She had her laptop open and quickly, too quickly, asked ChatGPT to help her solve the problem. This student could have solved the problem if she had just sat with it for two more minutes. Her use of AI shortcutted her learning. She didn’t go through what I would call “productive struggle.” When we learn, we need to struggle at first, and over time, the struggle becomes less and less.
In another instance, I had created AI tutors to help my students learn geology. I originally designed them to be done in class, but some of my students told me they would just do it at home. Then I realized many were using AI to cheat on the AI tutor assignment. Argh!
Hear me carefully: I’m not a Luddite. I have used technology in my classroom for decades. I know that AI is not going away anytime soon, and I must find a way to teach in this disruptive time. I also see some utility in AI in specific settings. I plan to use AI in my classroom but under much more controlled circumstances.
The Basics of Flipped Learning
During my first nineteen years of teaching, I taught traditionally. I stood in front of my students and taught them science stuff (I have taught almost every science subject). I then sent them home to do more cognitively complex stuff. The next day, students would theoretically come back with completed homework. But of course, many struggled with it, and I invariably spent the first few minutes of each class reviewing what they didn’t understand.
During my nineteenth year, Aaron Sams and I helped pioneer the Flippped Learning methodology because we realized the traditional teaching method wasn’t working well. We asked students to do the “hard stuff” at home, and they often got lost and struggled. The big idea of Flipped Learning is that you have students do the “easy stuff” as homework (the introduction of the material through a reading or a short video) and then you do the “hard stuff” in class. We have often summarized it with the three shapes of Bloom’s Taxonomy below. A traditional class spends most of the class time on information transfer (knowledge and understanding), and there is little time left over for the hard stuff (Application, Analysis, Evaluation, Creation).
When we flipped our classroom, we essentially flipped Bloom’s taxonomy and used less class time for information transfer (the “easy stuff” and more class time for the hard stuff.
And then as we thought more deeply, we proposed a more realistic rendering of Bloom’s Taxonomy where the vast majority of class time is devoted to the applying and Analyzing. Thus the “Bloom’s Diamond” image below.
b
Why Flipped Learning Needs to be Rediscovered in the age of AI
At my high-performing school, we expect a lot from our students, so they are expected to come prepared for class. The beauty of Flipped Learning is that students' homework is NOT to do the cognitively complex task. They are expected to get introduced to the class content by either reading a short article or watching an instructional video.
They then come to class to do the “hard stuff.” This frees up significant class time for students to think deeply about the subject. In my case, we do more physics problems or experiments. In my geology class, students will sit and discuss the reasons why one volcano will explode and another volcano will ooze lava and not explode. If you teach ELA, you will have time for students to write essays in your presence without the aid of AI. If you are a world language teacher, you can have them do assignments without using a translator.
The key is that we can’t send home the “hard stuff” anymore. Thus, Flipped Learning needs to be reconsidered in the age of AI. As someone who helped pioneer Flipped Learning, I have seen many teachers not implement it well. The best practices of Flipped Learning are now well known, and there is no way to convey those in a short blog post. I would encourage you to go to jonbergmann.com and take one of several short video courses I have created to help you transition to using flipped learning in the age of AI.
Before I close, I want to address the AI Enthusiasts.
Addressing the AI Enthusiasts
Let me take a few minutes to address those arguing that we must incorporate AI into our classrooms, that students need to learn how to use AI, and how to use it as a tool. First of all I don’t totally disagree with that sentiment. I will use AI tutors in my classroom on a limited basis. I see the value of AI tutors to help personalize learning. But I also know that I am teaching young people with young brains. They need to develop their own neural networks and the process of learning.
In a previous post, I shared research by many that AI is diminishing the critical thinking skills of our students (AI will Stupefy our Students Unless we do these Six Things). I would encourage you to read that post and click on the source material I cited. Since the publication of that article, I came across another research paper that encapsulates why AI is not all it’s cracked up to be. Barbra Oakley and others wrote The Memory Paradox: Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in an Age of AI. This insightful research paper mirrors my observations in both my classroom and as I interact with teachers worldwide.