Is AI Cheating Your Students Out of Learning? Episode 39
00:00:00 Jon Bergmann: Welcome back to the Reach Every Student podcast. I'm your host, John Bergmann, long time teacher, 40th year in education. And we are back for season four. Today, I want to share with you how you can help yourself and your students navigate the world of AI with a somewhat old hack. You know, I believe 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, guys, if you are sending home an essay, right? Right. Or whatever, some kind of a written response and you think and you expect the students to turn it in digitally. that ship has sailed. You can't do that anymore. If you are expecting most students to do academic, you know, to be academically integrity or whatever, So how can we ensure that students actually learn in class? Now, let me give you a little background about my my journey with AI. about a year and a half ago, my principal asked me to dive deep into AI to help prepare our teachers for the AI wave. At first, I thought I would be revolutionary tool personalized my students learning. So I played with AI, I created AI tutors, I read the blogs, and I enthusiastically jumped into AI. But as the year that last school year progressed, and as I used AI 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 to quickly she asked ChatGPT to help her solve the resolve the problem. Now this could this student could have solved that problem if she just sat with it, just for maybe two more minutes, maybe her a use of I shortchanged her learning. She did not go through what I would call productive struggle. When we learn we need to struggle at first and over time that struggle becomes less and less and less. That's how learning takes place. In another instance, I had created some AI tutors to help a different class my geology students. I originally designed them to be done in class, but then some of my students told me that they would just do it at home. But then when I realized they were doing is they wanted to do it at home so that they could then use AI to cheat on the AI assignment. Ah, I was like frustrated. Now hear me carefully. I big handed founding flip learning, right? I'm not a Luddite. I've used technology in my classroom for decades. I know that I is not going away, but I must find a way to teach in this disruptive time. I also see utility in AI in specific settings. So I plan to use AI in my classroom, but under a much more controlled circumstance. So here's here's my big idea. It's the old hack I talked about at the beginning, right?
00:02:54 Jon Bergmann: Flip learning the basics of flipped learning. Let me explain. Flip learning to you in a quick nutshell. Do. My first 19 years of teaching I taught traditionally. I stood in front of my students. I taught them science stuff. Um, by the way, and then I sent them home to do more cognitively complex stuff. The next day, students would theoretically come back with completed homework, but of course they didn't. Many struggled with it, and I invariably spent my first two minutes of each class reviewing what they didn't understand. And then during my 19th year, Aaron Sams and I helped pioneer the flipped learning method because we realized that the traditional method wasn't working. So we instead we asked what we were doing. Part of me is we asked our students to do the hard stuff at home, and then they often got lost and struggled. And the big idea, the big idea, flipped learning, is that you have students do the easy stuff as homework. That's the introduction to the material through reading or a short video, and then you do the hard stuff in class. Now, we've often summarized this with three shapes of Bloom's Taxonomy. Now remember Bloom's taxonomy. There are. It's traditionally pictured as a pyramid with remembering. Understanding. Applying. Analyzing. Avoiding. Creating. Reading up from the bottom to the top. If you'd been in my class those first 19 years, I lectured in my class and I did the remembering, understanding, the presentation of new content. And then we had a little bit of class time left to apply and analyze and evaluate and create. But most of that stuff got sent home. But in a flipped classroom, you flip Bloom's Taxonomy. So think of an inverted pyramid so there's more class time to do the hard stuff. And then as we thought more deeply, we actually thought the ideal shape. Now picture this. You still have Bloom's Taxonomy remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating. But instead it's a diamond shape where the biggest area of the shape is at the apply and analyze regions. So if you go to my class, which I flip, my class of course, is in my flipped classrooms is the bulk of my class. Time is spent on applying and analyzing, and less time is on remembering and understanding. My students are going to get that as pre-learning. And I think we need to rediscover flipped learning in this age of AI, right? In my high performing school, we expect a lot of our students, so they're expected to come prepared for class. And the beauty of flipped learning is that it's students. Homework is not to do the cognitively complex tasks that I can do. So they're expected now to get introduced to the class content by reading a short article or watching an instructional video, and then they come to class to do the hard stuff. And 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 the other volcano will ooze lava and not explode. If you teach Ela, you'll have time for your students to write essays in your presence without the aid of AI. If your world language teacher, you can have them do science without using a translator. You have them speaking the language. If you teach history, you can have a debate about the causes of World War two or whatever. I mean, this it flip learning needs to be rediscovered is what I'm saying. In this age of AI, you see, the key is we can't send home the hard stuff anymore. So I encourage you to learn more about this, methodology, because it really is a way that will address the biggest issues that you're facing with AI. Now let me have just a quick chat to those of you who are the big AI enthusiasts. those of you who are arguing that we must incorporate A into our classrooms, that students need to learn how to use AI and how to use it as a tool. First of all, if that's your that's your deal. I don't totally disagree with you. I will be using AI tutors in my classroom on a limited basis. You see, I see the value of AI tutors to help personalized learning. But I also know that I'm teaching people with young brains that need to develop their own neural networks, um, and process their own learning. You know, in previous post AI or in a previous podcast, I've shared some of the research, about the diminishing critical thinking skills of our students. I have this, podcast. I will stupefy our students unless we do these six things. So I would encourage you to go back and hear some of my reasonings on why I think we have to be careful with what we do. And there's a new article that came out. Barbara Oakley who wrote this article called The Memory Paradox Why Our Brains Need Knowledge in the Age of AI. And what she argues is, she argues that we need to have students. People need to build up their own individual knowledge base so that they can evaluate AI. And so it actually means that learning and traditional education is actually more important. Another study by John Hattie and others basically said that AI is an amazing thing for those who are experts, but for novices it can degrade their intelligence. And we teach novices. And so since we're teaching novices, um, we've got to develop their brains so that then when they get into the world of AI, they can use it to its most powerful extent. Extend. Hey, thanks for listening. That's kind of it for today. I encourage you to hit the subscribe button and share it with your friends. It's super easy regardless of what app you're using. Additionally, if you're interested in AI proofing your classroom, I have created some courses. One about flipped learning on how to use flipped learning in this AI world with the best practices of flipped learning that that course I've got one for both higher education and for K-12 that I think you will find very insightful so that you'll know how to do this because you're going to have a million questions. I was just with a friend or a new friend. I just had met this guy, I guess, and, uh, he heard that I was in the founding of Flipped Learning, and he's a teacher in the local area here.
00:08:52 Jon Bergmann: And he said, I gotta ask these questions. And I said, here you go. And I, uh, he's taking the course now. So I would encourage you to think about that as well. And that can be found at Jon bergmann.com. Hey, uh, so now I want you to go out and reach every student. So find more at reach every student.com. John Bergmann out.
