Creating the Classroom of Tomorrow: Stephen Fitzpatrick Discusses Generative AI

Welcome to another episode of AI Goes to College.

I am joined, as always, with my friend, colleague and co host, Dr. Robert E. Crossler from Washington State University, who just got out of some AI training.

So we may hear a word or two about that.

Or not.

But we have a special guest today, Stephen Fitzpatrick.

He has over three decades of experience as a secondary school history teacher, debate coach, lots of other things.

He's become a thought leader in generative AI who spent the last few years exploring how it can be applied to education through a research award grant that he got, which is kind of cool.

He's got a strong interest in technology and how it can support pedagogy.

Steve is open to panel discussions, webinars, podcasts, article contributions, pretty much anything you might have in mind.

It's worth checking with him.

He offers a very insightful, informed and unique perspective on this cutting edge issue that all of us in education are facing.

The way that Stephen and I connected is through his really excellent, well thought out substack Teaching in the Age of AI.

And there will be a link to that in the show notes.

Stephen, welcome to AI Goes to College.

Thanks so much for having me.

It's nice to see you, Craig and.

Rob, thank you 100%.

Stephen, I want to echo what Craig said in thanking you.

You've thought about these things a lot.

I wanted to start with a question.

You've been in education for quite a while and you've seen a lot of fads come and go.

What really got you interested in generative AI and what made you think that this particular advancement transformation will stick around rather than fading like other fads?

Have you?

Yeah.

I still remember the first time I saw ChatGPT in operation and it happened to be sort of in a public setting.

We were running a debate tournament and we had one of these big clear touch screens at the tournament and one of the coaches said to me, oh, have you seen this thing chatgpt?

And I said, no, I hadn't heard of it.

And he put it up on the big screen and demonstrated it for me.

And I just remember watching as this text unraveled.

I think the question, remember back then it was like, oh, write a poem in the style of Shakespeare or something.

And it was World cup was happening.

And so it was a poem about the World cup in Shakespeare.

And I was sort of like mesmerized by this and I just had that kind of light bulb.

I can remember a couple other times that happened.

One when I saw the ipod and I said, oh, this is going to change everything.

And certainly wireless Internet, when I sort of connected with that, I was like, this is huge.

And so it just sort of instantly said to me, this is different than other things because it is a generative form that's combining information.

And within weeks, you know, I had started to get my read everything I got my hands on.

And I think that article that said like, high school English is dead came out like 10 days or two weeks after this thing debuted.

And so then it was off to the races.

And so I've been sort of following closely everything about it since then.

So I want to follow up on one of the things you just said there.

The high school essays, English classes, dead.

In college, there's a lot of essay writing.

I think that's been one of the things that we have a lot of conversations around is how do you make sure students know how to write?

Because regardless of whether or not the machine does it for you or you do it, there's a lot of value in writing.

What are you seeing happening inside of high schools at that level that maybe gives you some encouragement that we can actually still teach students to write?

Or what do you wish we were doing that might help with that?

Yeah, I mean, that is the conundrum that seems to be the central dilemma.

One of the things I've written about as the technology has gotten better and better is it does so much more than writing now that I think a lot of people forget.

But the written piece is so central to educators philosophy.

I think it took a while, at least at my school.

And even anecdotally talking to others, that first year, the thing wasn't quite working as good as it is now, the quality was still pretty suspect in many ways.

Our first year that certainly 2023, end of 2023 school year, we didn't have a ton of major cases.

It was really the following year that I think more and more kids started to use it.

And then I will say at the end of 2025, it was all over the place.

And all the kids were using it for all sorts of different things.

And so just to backtrack any prompt you can put into AI for a written assignment, it can produce something certainly passable for most high school students.

And one of the first things I did was from the beginning is red team.

Almost every one of my assignments, I just put everything through to see what it was doing.

And I was sort of like taking stuff to my colleagues and saying, are you seeing this?

Are you looking at what's happening?

And as I got Better and better at prompting the machine.

And as the technology got better and better, it became pretty clear that this was going to be a major, major issue for schools.

So on the positive side, a lot of kids initially, there's still a good number, although they're starting to dwindle, of kids who want nothing to do with it in the sense that they understand that this is not going to be helpful for them long term if they don't learn how to write initially.

I will say that again, anecdotal, but I've done a lot of reading on this.

A lot of the kids last year who were I'll never touch it this fall are touching it.

So I don't know how long that many students are going to be able to hold out as they watch a lot of their friends.

And I've heard many stories like this too.

You're in a class with somebody kid next to you is using AI for everything and getting A's and you're sweating and killing yourself and maybe not getting as good a grade.

That's gotta be maddening for a student.

Let's explore something that you just said and it came up in the pre show as well.

You were on a podcast a couple of weeks ago and you mentioned something about AI use being normalized among high school students where it's not something extra they do, it's just something they do, whether it's for their, you know, day to day lives, for their school lives, for their social lives, whatever.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Sure.

Like I said, the first 18 months or so, maybe even two years, kids were very nervous about it.

There was this kind of stigma and taboo around it.

You know, there'd been enough media coverage of how horrible it was for learning.

And so a lot of kids held off.

And I think the last 12 months especially the learning curve has really gotten a lot more steep.

And so I'm pretty open with students about talking about it.

One of the things I talk about on my sub stack is the importance of engaging kids honestly on this issue.

And when I can talk to kids pretty honestly, they will reveal how frequently they use it.

For almost anything, they use ChatGPT like Google.

And as I joke, Google is using Google is now ChatGPT because of our AI overviews.

I mean, it's all just integrated.

When I talk to teachers or people who say I'm going to ban AI, I say, are you banning Google?

I mean, it has an AI mode.

Now you're just going into Gemini if you want to do that.

So I get chatgpt in real time in class where I'll say something and sometimes I will say what is the stat on that?

See what AI comes up with.

And we can kind of go into it deeper if we need something.

But it's normalized both on that side and on my side with the recognition that it's just what they use now in terms of generating text for them to submit, that's kind of a bright line.

But if they're going to generate text for notes, a lot more kids are using NotebookLM, which if you've used that before, you know how organized it can be and sort of useful if you know what you're doing.

But it also means kids aren't always doing the readings.

So with everything with AI there are these trade offs.

And so I just can sort of preach to them, like, can't stop you from using AI in these different ways outside of class.

But I can tell you what best practices are in terms of what's going to help you or hurt you.

You've coached debate for a long time.

Yes.

Right.

So are you seeing students use AI to kind of up their game when they do the debate prep or practice not just their facts, but also practice going back and forth with an opponent?

Are you seeing that?

Absolutely.

So I don't know how familiar you are with the high school debate world, but there's multiple different styles of debate.

One of the most popular styles are policy and public forum debate, which are these prepped topics that you have weeks in advance of.

Tournaments and kids used to do an enormous amount of research pre AI on these.

Now they can do an infinite amount of research on these.

We tend to participate and for a reason that just happens to coincide nicely with, I think, the debate skills absent AI in impromptu formats where you get a topic and you have 15 minutes to prepare.

And it's much more on logic, argumentation and not relying on statistics and evidence as much.

But even in that format, we just had an online tournament yesterday.

So if the kids have 15 minutes to prepare for an online topic, for a impromptu topic, there's nothing that can prevent them from using AI to at least help them brainstorm and come up with stuff, you know, that's not great in terms of teaching that skill.

But it's just the reality there are a number of AI platforms.

I can send a couple to you after the show.

It built a public forum debate website where you can do what we're doing right now.

I can give a speech, the AI will transcribe it The AI will then produce a speech back and you.

And it'll read it to you and you can debate the AI, essentially.

And this kid made this website over the summer or last spring.

It's pretty amazing.

So there are some real, real advantages.

AI is really good at playing both sides.

So it's very good at developing arguments and probing arguments on the other side.

I don't know if you read Stephane Bouchard's stuff sometimes.

He was a former director, I believe, of the National Speech and Debate Association.

And so if you look at a lot of his posts, he talks a lot about aia.

You mentioned a couple times you've convinced people they can't ban it or tried to, by saying, well, can't they use Google?

And you know, even in the debate world that with these online debates, there's nothing you can do, which I agree.

But the one thing I've seen a lot in the news over the course of this last summer, as schools are trying to avoid cyberbullying, a lot of the mental health things going on in the school is outright banning the use of phones inside of the school hallways.

And I see a lot of those say mental health issues with AI and some of the things that are going on with that.

Do you think that the use of phones, you know, is functionally saying, inside of the walls we're not going to use AI, but then outside you're going to use AI, we're going to.

Well, how do you see that playing out?

Because it seems like there's places where there's good use cases.

We want to teach students the right way to do that.

But at the same time, because of the other things we can do on devices, schools are saying, we've had enough.

We're not going to let that disrupt the learning exercise.

So a couple of thoughts on that, both on the technical side and sort of the social emotional side, our school.

So New York State, where I am just Kathy Hochul, signed a bill over the summer ban cell phones.

You know, bell to Bell policy.

We're an independent school, so we don't have to follow that, but we also implemented a Bell to.

A Bell to Bell cell phone ban.

And it's been really illuminating and it's been great.

The thing is, and I'm sure this is the case on college campuses, I don't know how, how prevalent it is at public schools, but all our kids have laptops, right?

So in some ways, what's mitigated the disappointment of losing their cell phones is they can still text message each other through their computers.

And they can still play games on their computers, and they can still do a fair amount of the kinds of things you could do on your phone.

What they can't do is walk around all zombified, holding the phone in front of their face.

And so that was kind of the thing we were mostly trying to get at.

So there's a lot more conversation, there's a lot more engagement, which is terrific.

But unless you're blocking the Internet, they still have their computers to go online.

And, you know, they bring them to class.

It's not required.

But almost all kids have a laptop they bring to class.

I know some public schools in our area that have simply blocked.

And I don't know how.

I don't know.

I haven't talked to my friend this year.

They certainly blocked ChatGPT last year.

I don't know what the tech side is from the ed person.

If you can block every single possible AI tool, I don't see how that works.

But some schools have done that.

So they've tried to cordon themselves off during the day.

I think that's a real tech challenge.

So I guess the short answer is cell phones can help with the mental health and the addiction, and this sort of constant.

Because it's.

The social media isn't quite the same on the computer.

You know, some of these mobile apps are designed to be much more addictive as a mobile app.

But on the AI side, it doesn't matter whether it's a phone or computer.

I get the cell phone ban.

Matter of fact, my wife would like to impose that on me from time to time, But I don't know.

Banning AI just seems like it's at best a temporary measure that's not really preparing students for the world they're going to face.

I mean, like it or not, and barring some zombie apocalypse, AI is here to stay, just like the Internet was in the late 1990s.

And it seems to me we ought to be focusing on helping students learn how to use AI to up their game.

So instead of just do this.

This stuff for me, copy the prompt and get something out, paste it in, and I'm done.

It's how can you do more with it?

Which is what we saw really, with research in the Web.

When you had to schlep over the library and hope you had enough dimes and quarters to copy some articles, you know, you didn't have the access to the scholarship that we have now, and the expectations were totally different.

So research is up the game.

I wonder if we're not taking a short sighted approach by just trying to ban AI completely.

Love to hear your thoughts on that.

So sometimes I think the ban AI is the wrong question in the sense that as you point out, it's just really in some ways nonsensical.

As long as you have Internet access, you have access to AI.

Many of the tools that we're all accustomed to using have AI embedded and built in.

The question for me is preserving activities and learning situations where AI is not an option versus where it is either deliberately an option or a option that's like, okay, fine, you can use it for this or not, but what you're trying to do is X.

And so how you use AI either needs to be documented or something like that.

So what you have seen, and this was a lot of people writing about this summer and I think a lot of professors and high school teachers as well have moved back to the Blue Book or the, you know, the Marvel Composition book where I just gave a in class comp last week.

And yeah, you know, the kids are doing it in a preserved environment where they just don't have access to AI.

We have a tool called lockdown browser where it just pulls up a one screen if you want them to actually type.

Because I don't like reading handwriting all that much.

But there are ways to do that and I have found the kids are pretty amenable to that and they understand it.

Some of them are actually quite relieved because they know it's an evil, you know, it's an even playing field.

But then there may be other assignments where you're going to say, okay, here's something where AI might give us some creativity and how to do that.

But you do have to restructure what you want kids to do if you're going to think about that.

And that is the million dollar question.

Nobody has a best practice yet.

There's a lot of suggestions, there's a lot of advice, there's a lot of good examples.

But those are what I sort of look for when I hunt and pick and choose online for different things to see ideas.

So Stephen, when I have conversations at the university level about what we're doing in the classroom, I put things in a couple of buckets.

One is AI tools and improper use and how to do those sorts of things.

And the other is on AI resilience and how do we design teaching in such a way to where it doesn't matter if you're using AI.

In fact, we might actually learn more and we can get at some of the softer skills or some of the social skills or some of the other things that maybe we neglected when we were focusing more on making sure that the content was learned.

Are you seeing those similar conversations happening at the high school level, or is that something that's happening later on that we're trying to balance between those two things?

It's hard for me because I've been in one school my whole career, but through other activities and so forth, I do have a lot of connections.

I do talk to a lot of people at other schools.

And again, this is somewhat anecdotal.

It's not a study.

There are not enough conversations along the lines of what you're talking about.

There is still a defensive crouch amongst the majority of teachers that I talk to who are, you know, keep it out.

I, I, I can't deal with it.

The kids are using it to cheat.

And many of them are just simply either not AI fluent enough to understand what this technology is and what it does, or are just simply not ready to have the kind of conversation which is a big conversation about what restructuring or rethinking your pedagogical approach is.

Our school went through something called the Rail Framework Responsible AI use in schools kind of.

I forget what the L is, but the slideshows that we looked at for there, I've quoted some of them on my substack, were essentially the best quote I heard was saying, if we're just going to redesign assignments to do the same thing, but with AI, that makes no sense.

So it was kind of like schools need to have these big, big questions.

And I do not think many schools are ready for that.

Yeah, and I think what you highlight too is the interesting challenge of training up educators.

Right.

I think of educators in college or even the high schools who when they received their training, AI wasn't even a word people knew.

And now we're at a point where, Holy cow, from 0 to 60 in 3.2 seconds, we have to be ready to completely rethink how we do things.

And I have friends who work for Microsoft, who work for Amazon and these sorts of places where they're sent to weeks long training on how to upskill themselves to be able to provide value in this world.

That's changed.

Is that something that you think high schools have the appetite for, to upskill their teachers to the level that we need radical changing in thinking?

Or is there another pathway that you think education is going to have to get there?

Well, one of the things the Rail framework emphasized, and I do tend to agree with this is so two things.

One, teachers have been through the pandemic.

Like educators, many of them are sort of exhausted, burned out, shockingly as much as we pivoted and went to enormous amounts of technology in a very short period.

You know, Nobody heard of Zoom.

People got much more facile with their LMSs to do all the things that they could do, to post assignments, see assignments, you know, we got very good.

Very quickly.

Some of that has faded.

I think people were like, thank God the pandemic is over and we can pivot back.

And again in person, instruction is just, there's no beating it.

But what I think that means is when AI comes right on the tail end of COVID people are like, are you kidding me?

Like, we're now going to have to have more of this.

I will say one thing, you know, I am completely 100% self taught on AI.

There is enough out there on the Internet that if you want to watch videos, if you want to do stuff, you can get yourself very up to speed pretty quickly.

A lot of the in service trainings from my experience, are not as productive as they could.

I'll just leave it there.

And so, you know, small pilots getting people inside of schools who are experts or who, you know, teachers want to learn from, teachers, they need good use cases.

I got a colleague who wanted nothing to do with AI.

When I said, oh, let me show you this thing that I did right, suddenly they're interested.

So I think it's peer to peer.

I think that quite frankly is going to be the best way to do it because there are still a lot of people who don't want to learn about it.

So you bring them into a big hall with 50, 100 teachers and they sit there with their arms crossed and ask questions about is an AI destroying the environment and why are we doing this to begin with?

That, that to me is not a recipe for productive in service training.

I was just at a university and that sort of thing came up with one of the action groups around AI.

What do we do about these people that just don't want to use it at all and they're digging their heels in.

Leave them alone.

I mean, really, some of them, you're just not going to get.

They'll either get their eyes opened at some point by one of their friends at lunch or they won't.

And you're, you're just never.

I've never seen any of these technological, I hate the word transformation, but transformation that everybody got behind.

And so, you know, if Mr. Smith doesn't want to do it.

Okay, their loss, you know, let them keep doing things the hard way.

But I think we've hit on something that's really fundamental.

Until we get some critical mass of faculty at the high school level, at the middle school level, at the university level, wherever that are actually using AI, they're not going to be able to adapt to AI because they don't understand it.

You know, they just aren't going to get it until they have to start using it.

And once they find themselves using it, they can create AI resistant or AI embracing assignments, or they can figure out ways to do things with AI pedagogically that they can't do without AI.

But you can't do any of that until you understand what the technology is capable of and what it's not capable of.

And you're.

I'm with you 100%.

You are not going to get that from some consultant, you know, you're going to get that from somebody who's actually doing the work.

Yeah.

And I want to be clear, I'm not at this point an advocate and saying, oh, you know, every teacher should be using AI in their class and jumping up on the chair and embracing it wholeheartedly.

But I think the reality and recognition that the students are using this technology is the one where if you aren't aware of that, you know, I've been reading stuff online about why isn't everybody coming to my office hours?

Why are my lecture halls half full?

Because you're posting your lecture notes and the kids are like, I just need your lecture notes.

I don't need to listen to it.

Our school went to go see a professor give a really interesting talk at a very well known school.

And I was sitting in the back and it was just so interesting to me because you had these very accomplished professors up at the front.

They were talking about the research they had done for this book and they were really erudite and incredibly sophisticated.

And I have no idea.

These are older guys.

I have no idea if they use AI for research.

I suspect they don't, but it's a different world, Right.

And the two students, the graduate students who were sitting in the back who were watching this presentation, I can see they're both on notebooklm.

They're taking.

They're just their whole workflow is set up with AI in a way that was probably really effective.

This was a graduate program.

I could see everything that they were doing and I was just thinking what a great microcosm of what's Happening is older professors, very traditional, really interesting.

But younger guys who are just like not even a second thought is the water in which they swim.

People adapt to new technologies or they don't.

So Stephen, I want to follow up a little bit about how graduate students are seeing this and what gets me excited about that is we're going to see young professors entering higher education growing up with these tools.

We're going to see high school students coming into college already having some aptitude towards them.

And one of the approaches that I take in dealing with the fact that the world's changed is, is different pedagogy.

So no longer do I want to get up there and lecture where lecture notes are going to give them all the answers.

But do experiential learning and activities where they're involved in the learning process and you can start to observe how they're learning, how they're applying.

Do you see high schools changing their pedagogy at all and in response to what AI allows or is it.

Are we really seeing students coming to us in college who it's been more of the same?

Well, I think as long as all of the high school use is happening outside of the purview of teachers, guidance and you know, not really understanding what they're doing, it's going to be really hard to predict how, you know, kids will just go from high school to college with their own skill set if it's not in some ways, if not managed, at least discussed by teachers.

One thing we are seeing more of, and our school just adopted one of these AI wrappers, right?

These sort of magic school Flint is one and I've been playing around with this a little bit and there's a couple big advantages.

One, that the chats are all self contained so you can see the kids, how they interact with AI and you can see what they're prompting and how they're doing it.

And you can also design specific guardrail lessons that are focused on a particular thing if you want them to use AI for a particular assignment.

I'm not sure how many teachers are especially skilled at doing that yet, but I've played around with it a little bit.

I have this independent research class where I just feel like that is my sandbox class for seeing what.

Because it just seems, at least to me, I've had arguments about this with people online, but it just seems to me that AI in research or research organization or data management or notebook LM or whatever you're talking about is just going to be.

I don't see how research in five or ten years is not going to involve AI to some extent.

And so giving high school kids a chance to kind of look at that Perplexity will write, and it's free.

I mean, Perplexity will write a pretty detailed report with a lot of sources on any topic you can imagine pretty quickly.

But we can compare that to say why that isn't good enough.

It's skimming whatever that top layer is on the Internet.

It doesn't have access to an enormous amount of the paywall materials that you really want for research.

But having that conversation, I think is really important.

So I feel like in that particular class, I do want to equip kids with some sense of what's happening and what's likely to happen if you're in a ninth grade freshman English class.

I don't really think a lot of 9th grade freshman English teachers are particularly comfortable with kids experimenting with using AI to help them write their stuff.

I mean, I got a sixth grader, I don't want her anywhere near AI to do that kind of work with her for a while.

So it's a huge challenge.

It's gotta be exhausting to teach 9th grade English anyway.

And we want to knucklehead age.

I want to kind of go back to something that we've hinted about a few times and that's AI as a partner for thinking rather than a replacement for thinking.

And there's a subtext in a lot of what you've written, and Rob and I have talked about this a lot, that AI has tremendous potential for helping students improve their thinking skills.

You know, we've seen, okay, research that shows it can degrade critical thinking skills, which, okay, maybe, but it can also enhance critical thinking skills and can help, especially students that may be in less well resourced schools, get access to some things that maybe they don't have access to in their schools.

So given your experience and the conversations you've had, what are some good ways to channel students natural curiosity about AI into something that's more positive, relevant, and maybe growth oriented with respect to their thinking skills, rather than kind of an outsourcing tool.

Yeah, I think the huge thing is cultivating the mindset, right?

I mean, it is all how you use the tool and understanding what it is and what it does and the kinds of questions you ask and how you respond to it and how you iterate the output.

A big issue that I have is a lot of kids don't even read the output that they get.

And so there's literacy issues Here too, right at the point where you really can't use AI effectively, certainly until you can write coherently.

And you can't use it effectively until you can read what it's giving you critically.

One of the real fears about using AI in research with younger students is, is that the AI will just tell them what to do.

Oh, this is the great research path.

This is how you should do it.

And just you get a computer telling you that, and you're 16 years old, you're like, this is great.

I just have to follow these instructions.

And you treat the computer like the teacher and you just execute on what it says.

And I'm like, well, does that make sense based on the research you have?

Could you ask it to elaborate?

Can you push back?

And so that's the critical thinking piece that we have to really train kids.

And they need to understand that AI is.

It's not only not infallible, it's what it's doing is building on what you're saying.

And we know this from the sycophancy problem, right?

It just tells you in many ways what you want to hear.

And so I designed this learning activity, and this was really funny actually, because I designed this learning activity within the AI wrapper that was very specific about pushing them, just continued to reflect questions back at them.

And half of my kids were like, the AI is being really mean to me.

The AI, it's not like just telling me they're used to it, giving the answers.

And I said, no, I programmed it that way.

And so that was an opening experience for me because I was like, this is not how they're used to dealing with this tool.

Which is, again, it just confirmed to me the importance of talking to them about what this technology is.

So, Stephen, I'm curious.

You mentioned 16 year olds.

We've talked about ninth graders, we've talked about your sixth grade daughter.

One of the things I've seen written about is at what age are students even ready for using AI?

Part of that's their ability to critically think against it.

Part of it's mental development and those sorts of things.

As you've interacted with high school students and your own daughter, who you said was in the sixth grade, where are you seeing it to be a good value add at some point?

Is there kind of a happy place where you've seen, I could kind of be okay starting to work with students at this level?

I think the electives that I teach, 11th, 12th grade is where really I'm willing to be a little bit more Roll up my sleeves and kind of get a little bit dirty with how it works.

Even the 10th graders that I have, I teach a 10th grade American history course.

I'm reluctant to there.

There's certain very specific use cases that I've done that I think were interesting and helpful.

We, we broke down a sort of an old.

You ever read any of these 16th, 17th century documents, primary source materials?

And so we kind of worked through one of those in class and struggled.

And we did have AI analyze and take a look at it and it was quite, quite helpful, I thought.

But in terms of having IT support or do their own work, I'm not ready for that.

With 10th grade, I have gotten feedback from parents, both of parents who are current and parents of kids who are in college who have been remiss that we didn't do more with 12th graders because they're going into the deep end of the pool and they end up in college where everyone seems to be using it.

So some of those parents want pushing for a little bit more AI literacy in 12th grade.

So again, short answer to your question.

By mid junior year, senior year, I think that's a fair, reasonable time.

But I struggle with the idea of like, let's bring AI into middle school.

I'm not ready for that yet because I don't have enough use cases for what that.

Stephen, Rob and I have both enjoyed reading your substack articles and learning more about your thoughts and your experiences.

And I'm sure our listeners will as well.

So before we get to our last question, give listeners an overview of what you write about in your substack, any message you want to get out there about your activities, substack or otherwise.

As I said, I'd been thinking a lot about it pretty much from the jump.

That spring of 23, I applied for a grant within my school, which, you know, covers my seven or eight different AI subscriptions.

I don't even know what I'm up to at this point and played with everything.

You know, my biggest thing is I do play around with the tools.

I don't know if you've touched the new Claude skills function that came out last week.

That's a, that's another level up.

That's a huge, huge breakthrough.

I think even bigger than GPT5 in some ways.

That's had going to have some impact.

So I'm pretty facile with the different tools and keep on top of that as far as schools go.

I just wasn't seeing conversation that I expected it to have when it first came out, you know, the first year it was kind of crickets across a lot of different districts.

It was ban, ban, ban, and then a little bit of relaxation and then a lot of just not much.

And when the deep research model came out, I think it was fall of 24 maybe, I said, okay, this is going to be a game changer.

And that spring is when I decided to write about this.

I had been asked by Jane Rosenzweig, as I think the director of the writing center at Harvard and she runs the substack called the Important Work.

And she reached out to me just because of a comment that I had left on somebody's substack and said, hey, would you be willing to write a guest post?

I wrote a guest post on using a GPT with my kids on a reading assignment.

And after I wrote that, I enjoyed writing it and I said, why am I writing for somebody else's thing?

I have so many things I want to say.

And so I started in March, started writing this and just continued to be invested, interested.

But my stance is again, it's not uncritical adoption by any stretch of the imagination.

It's education, understanding and a recognition that again, this is my view.

It sounds like Craig and Rob, you may share it.

This is going to be a pretty long term transforming technology.

And so that's sort of where I'm poised.

And as a result of doing this, one of the great things about the writing I've done is I've gotten to meet people like you.

I've had dozens of people reach out to me and there's a network of people, I think, that are doing this kind of work, interested in working with schools.

And there's not as much in the K12 space as there is in the higher ed space, or at least I'm not seeing it.

That's why it's so important for our listeners to read the writings of people like you that are in the trenches and seeing what we're going to be getting in the next year, two years, three years, four years, we need to be prepared for that.

So along those lines, let's take about 2 minutes, 3 minutes.

What do you think are the most important things that college faculty need to know with respect to their expectations for the students that are going to be coming into our world in the next few years?

I think they need to know the main tools.

I read something somewhere about a professor last year who had never heard of NotebookLM and her kid was, you know, one of her students was using it and she was just no idea.

I think at a bare minimum, getting familiar with the major tools, I also think crystal clear policies, not just for class, but given assignments.

I think we're going to get to the point where you can just say, listen, you know, for this particular activity, I don't want you to touch an AI tool.

You know, this is the one where you're going to do this 0 to 100 for whatever reason, pedagogically explain it if you don't want to.

Don't feel like you need a reason to explain it.

Crystal clear boundaries.

And there's going to be some where you're going to be like, here's what the product needs to be, here's what you need to do.

I don't care how you get there, but you're going to have to show me.

Or there's going to be an oral component to this.

There's going to be a presentation, there's going to be some kind of other accountability piece.

I do think kids need that because if it's squishy, they're going to do what you don't want them to do.

That's what I would tell you from a high school standpoint that I see the best designed activity that I do that might involve some use of AI.

Almost instantly a kid will do something and I'm like, that's not what, that's not what I meant.

That's not what I wanted you to do.

So it's like the toddler in the living room, right?

He's going to find the light socket somewhere.

So I think the more you know ahead of time and it may mean talking to a colleague, going to somebody who's more experienced than you.

Say, I'm thinking about doing this.

Can you put an eye on this assignment?

And we're almost at the point where you can ask AI to help you.

Look at your AI assignment and it will probably give you some good overviews about what it's doing.

Right?

Yeah, Metaprofting.

I love it.

That would be a great prompt.

You're a ninth grader.

It's the least expected thing you can do on this particular assignment.

Well, I wrote about this.

Some kids are putting their stuff in and they're saying, what's my, what should my grade be on this essay?

And it'll tell them an A.

And they're like, I'm done, I don't need to do anything else, clearly.

And then when they don't get an A, they'll be, what are they going to say?

The AI told me I'm going to get an A.

There's just so many things wrong with that in terms of them understanding how it works works that they think that would be a useful way to prompt an AI.

Well, in some ways I love that because it's a natural consequence of a decision that they made and they learned that they need to be more critical in their prompting or in their various different things.

So in some ways or go to the teacher, right?

Like as the teacher.

Well, yeah, come on, let's not get carried away.

But if they're learning that I can't trust this tool and everything it tells me they're going to have to learn, what's the process of being more critical in evaluating things?

College this might shock you, but if an assignment's due at 8 o' clock in the morning on Monday, it gets worked on at 2 o' clock in the morning on Monday while I'm sleeping.

And that the opportunity for them to ask questions or whatnot isn't there.

With the right structures in place, we can actually meet students where they're at, when they're at and when the learning is occurring.

It just forces us to rethink how we're doing things rather than putting a band aid on the way we've always done things.

We need to create a robot.

Exactly.

Read the chapter, read the syllabus, read the project directions.

That's all that needs to be said.

I'm really glad to hear that it's given some A's.

I always got B pluses out.

It'd be like that 85 to 88 range in everything I ever ask it to grade.

Well, that's the sycophancy, right?

I mean maybe if you asked it to read it as if it was mom, you get a different response sort, who knows.

I will say I built a custom GPT as a top journal editor and it.

It's fairly brutal.

Oh yeah, it'll come back.

A matter matter of fact, we've got a paper we were about ready to submit and it was kind of like, yeah, you don't want to do that because you're going to get a desk reject.

The Claude skills play around with that.

I'll have to check that out.

That one will really give you some.

You know I built.

I'm terrible at Excel and I borrowed a skill of making Excel spreadsheets and almost instantly you have a working completely perfect Excel spreadsheet.

Just saying I needed to do this.

I want this, I want these formulas.

I want it to do this.

And it's fabulous.

Rob Steven, any last remarks before we call it a wrap?

I would just ask the two of you, from your perspective, I was saying this to Craig before the show.

I'm just curious, what's your sense for the appetite of the average faculty member for, or is it just too all over the place to make any conclusions for engaging with these tools?

Because a lot of what I read online is there's still a real pocket of people who are not just not wanting to use it, but are actively trying to not have AI become part of our world.

I can speak from a department chair's perspective and what I see in my own faculty and then kind of broader.

What I'm seeing, and that is, is in the Carson College of Business, we are embracing it and we've got a lot of faculty that are stepping into it.

But when I talk to textbook vendors and different people and tell them what we're doing here, they say, you're far and away beyond what we're seeing in the Pacific Northwest with faculty that we're talking to.

And so that's business faculty to business faculty.

I think it depends on your strategic approach and how people are looking at this.

And there are still pockets.

But even at Washington State University, it's a real struggle for students because every professor seems to have a different view and different rules.

And students, one of their big concerns is that they feel like they can't keep straight when they can and when they can't and when they're going to be sent to honor court for violating the rules and when they're going to be, you know, plotted for saying, wow, you did great on that assignment.

You really used AI well.

So I think consistency of whether it's in the high school, where there's consistent policies, or colleges, universities, the more that we can say, okay, this is our approach, and when it's okay, when it's not okay, and to do things in a way that makes it so students don't feel like they have to do everything behind closed doors.

And really that we're going to have people that may not have all the answers.

But I would assume that teachers and educators know how to critically think and can help students at least with that part of adopting and usage as we all learn to use it together.

I think of teaching Intro to Information Systems classes and having students come in and say, I know computers and I know the Internet.

And yeah, they don't.

They've used it for some things and they've done some things.

And I think it's going to be the same way with AI, students are going to come in and say, I know how to use it.

Our job, much like it's been with the Internet, much like it's been with computers, is okay.

You're comfortable with it, you're familiar with it.

Let us help you figure out how to use it properly, to know when to use it, to when not to use it, and to.

To develop skills so it enhances your awesomeness as opposed to replaces your awesomeness.

Because as soon as we get to a place where we're being replaced by what the machine can do, then where's the value of hiring you and not just giving all these things to the machine?

I think faculty are tired.

You brought this up, Steven.

It was Covid.

And then dealing with post Covid, we're just starting to see some pretty significant impacts of the COVID kids hitting college.

And now there's this chatgpt thing thrown on top of that, and it's a lot.

I have some sympathy for faculty that are just saying, I just don't want to do anything else.

I'm already working way harder than I want to work and should be working.

I have some sympathy for that, but I also think that's kind of burying your head in the sand.

And.

And if you put a little effort into it, it can actually make your life easier.

But it does take a little bit of effort.

All right, any.

Any last thoughts, Rob?

Steven, just to dovetail on the one comment you made about kids having to go from class to class with different policies, that's a big one.

Because I will say one of the reasons my own classes that I've been reluctant to do certain things is because I know that can make life more difficult for my colleagues.

Kids will say, can we do this in other class?

They'll say, no, you have to talk to your teachers about this kind of thing.

And that puts them in a tough spot.

So this is different than, like, oh, Mr. Fitz uses a clear touch, or he does things this way through his lms.

It's not the same.

It's a different thing.

You're opening a Pandora's box, so I'll leave that.

That's what's missing.

We're still missing coordinated action.

Well, Craig, my last word is going to be to thank Steven for being here.

This has been a great conversation.

I've truly enjoyed getting to meet you, getting to know you, and I hope that our listeners enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Thank you.

Likewise.

Thanks a lot for being on.

And remember, teaching in the age of AI, it's on his.

It's Steven's substack.

And there will be a link in the show notes.

That's it.

We'll talk to you next time on AI Goes to College.

Thanks.

Thank you.