This is the first in a two-part series featuring a conversation with three secondary educators on how AI is reshaping classroom practice.
Dennis and Kristina, co-authors of AI in the Writing Workshop, join Marilyn, author of several Heinemann titles including her latest, 5 Questions for Any Text. Their collective thinking and writing dovetail beautifully to address this pivotal moment in education, as AI becomes an increasingly prevalent tool in classrooms.
Together, they share how they’re integrating AI with intention and transparency—from delaying its use early in the school year to modeling how to question and push back against AI-generated output.
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Transcript
Marilyn Pryle:
Having the conversation with my students about AI and those larger questions about what's the role of it in our lives, how are we using it, I've found that there's this dichotomy of it's good or it's bad, or we're using it to write our papers, or teachers are using it to try to catch up to the students, that kind of thing. And instead of that, I think we should be focusing on these other questions with the students, like, what is happening? How are we using it? Where are we headed? So in my class, although there are ways that both the students and I incorporate it, I try to talk openly with them about it. And sometimes they're surprised. They're like, "She's talking about AI." And it's just setting that stage of, no, we all have to talk about it a lot and keep talking about it.
Edie Davis Quinn:
Yeah. When you're transparent about how you're using AI, are students just often surprised that you're using it as a tool? Is that the initial shock?
Marilyn:
All of it. And even asking them about it and even saying, "Where's an appropriate stage to maybe look for help with this assignment or paper?" And they're kind of like, "What?" Because it's this all or nothing thing. Sometimes for the students, especially at the high school level, if you're using it at all, maybe you're cheating, maybe it's writing your paper for you. So a lot of times I feel like it doesn't even get talked about in class, it's this thing that we're just not even going to address, and you're not allowed to do it and you'll get written up if you get caught. That kind of a thing. Whereas I feel like the conversation should open up.
Edie:
Yeah, so when you're doing that modeling, Dennis and Kristina, I imagine you do this in your classroom too, you're also modeling how you're vetting the output and how you're thinking critically about how you're using it. And I would like to get more into that, some of the guidelines that you have for using it in your profession and how you are transparently modeling that conversation for your students.
Kristina Peterson:
I don't really even open up AI use for my students until at least the first month or so of school, but I am trying to be really intentional about showing them that AI can still hallucinate and still be biased. So I will intentionally show outputs from ChatGPT, or starting this year our students will have unfettered access to Gemini on their Google Suite. I'll start by showing them hallucinations with Gemini and really try and talk about why we can't just trust any output as a source of absolute truth. We always have to think critically.
And I love Marilyn's 5 Questions for Any Text, because those can easily be adapted for all AI output, and having kids look at what did this output give me? Did it even respond to my prompt? I have found with ChatGPT-5's new release that it's not as specific as it used to be, so I've had to continuously prompt... I've gotten in the habit now of saying, "Don't make assumptions on my prompt. Ask me questions." I think it's the questioning and the reflecting, and then the talking about if you used a portion of it, why, and the reprompting. That's where the magic, I think happens with AI.
Dennis Magliozzi:
I just want to highlight what I heard out of Marilyn and Kristina's responses. Kristina used the word intentionality. I do think that AI has made us pause as teachers and ask ourselves, what are our intentions? Being very intentional about bringing it into the classroom. A lot of times, especially if you're a seasoned teacher, intentionality can sometimes be forgotten because we get into the practice and habit of the thing we've been doing over a long period of time. So AI, things that involve AI, make us pause, make us stop, make us think, how am I going to bring this into our classroom? As high school teachers, the three of us, I think sometimes we can take things for granted, our kids know all of X, Y, and Z, and we are leading now with the assumption that they don't know much about AI. So we do really stop and make intentional steps towards harvesting that knowledge with them as we're moving forward.
The other thing that Marilyn said was about, I kind of interpreted it as a candidness about pulling back the curtain and talking to our students about what's happening. That's another thing. As you get going in your teaching career, or even earlier in your teaching career, I think we might try to hide all the things that we're doing because we want to look like we're seasoned in practice and we know exactly what's going on. That level of candidness that AI is forcing us to step up in front of the classroom and say, here's what I'm doing, here's what I think it's okay for you to do, here's what I think it's okay for me to do, what do we all think about this? That just brings in an energy into teaching that I really love. It's tough to get there. We have to put down some guards as teachers, but both of those things from those two responses, they're meaningful steps for us as teachers if we're engaging with them actively.
Edie:
Dennis and Kristina, I know I've heard you talk before about, "write first." You always write a draft first. You have these guidelines that you've just put in place for yourself.
Kristina:
I think "write first," and then the one that follows it, "struggle second," are two of the biggest. But I've had people ask, how do you force a high school student to struggle with their writing when they can just go to AI? And that is a really hard thing to do, and it really is all about, I think the environment, the community you build, the fact that we have our students in person. I know some schools are totally virtual and I don't know how they would be able to enforce this. But we can ask our students to write in a notebook and make that part of our daily practice, and build those routines where they're in the flow state again that I feel like has been broken.
They read for 10 minutes in an actual book, and then they do some quick writing where they're just practicing and failing and trying. And there's no grades, it's just for fun or just to build some stamina. And then I'm going to ask AI for five or six options. So it's not giving me the one answer, it's giving me multiple answers, and then I model in front of them my thinking and why I picked line four over line five, or why I combined line four and five together. So being really clear about your struggle and then really clear with yourself and with AI about what you're asking from it, I think those are the most important parts.
Dennis:
The thing that I'm looking forward to the most in terms of my work with AI in the future is this excitement about Marilyn's work. When I was listening to you develop your five questions in your opening chapters, I just thought, "Oh, man." For example, what am I reading? And you were talking generally in terms of texts, but you were also very much eyes wide open about what's out there in the digital world. And I was thinking about the AI world specifically and how all five of your questions apply to it. "What am I reading?" when it comes from AI, is a totally different question than, "What am I reading?" when it comes from an actual living author. But each of your questions as they pop up, there's just so many components that you could explore with AI.
Marilyn:
For sure. The presence of AI has now put us in a position where we have to evaluate this transactional side of education, which of course as teachers, it's so much more for us, but I think students perceive it as transactional. I turn in paper X, you give me grade Y. So now if paper X is already done a million times out there on the internet, now what are we doing? So I actually talk to my students about that, how you're in school, you have to want it. There has to be that intrinsic motivation. We talk about that a lot in my class, like, what are you doing? Why are you here? And then Kristina, you said, reading for fun. Writing for fun.
I think about this, learning feels good. It releases dopamine. We've got that on our side. It shouldn't be as hard as it is. But I feel like learning has gotten buried in all this other stuff, and students feel that and know that. So tapping into that idea of we do these things, we read, we write because it makes you a better thinker, which is going to make you a better citizen, which is going to make you a better human. And really saying that a lot to them and trying to get that intrinsic motivation going, so that when they get to that "struggle second," they can do it and we're cheering them on.
Edie:
Yes. And I feel like everything you just said, also applicable to the profession too, like educators. Yes, students, but we all have to ask ourselves those questions in the roles that we're in.
Kristina:
And this idea too, that we have to ask ourselves, why am I asking my students to read this? Or why am I asking my students to write this? Especially in AI, when AI can do the essay or write a pretty great poem or win a chess match. AI can do these things. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do them because those are things that make us human, but I think that we need to be more intentional about when and why and how because of that transactional aspect. And of course students want A's, and a lot of our students are doing tons of things outside of class and they're taking all really hard classes. So if they feel that assignment's not meaningful for them, they might turn to AI for support or sometimes just to completely generate something and hand it in. And while I'm not condoning that, I understand why a lot of them would do that.
And in some ways, I've been teaching for 20 years now, and some of the, I guess fads that have come through, I'm now seeing a lot more merit. Like flipped classrooms. I think that was a very popular thing 10 years ago and I never really dug into that. But maybe with AI, now students need to go and do some of the, I don't know, video content learning outside and then answer the questions in class, because they can AI all of those questions I used to ask them. And work-study practices, which has been a thing I think in our district for 10 years, things like self-direction, creativity, collaboration, those things are all crucially important in the age of AI. But now those are the things that keep AI and student, I think effort, separate. So we have to lean into those more.
Edie:
Marilyn, I want to go back to something that you touched on. We hear a lot and talk a lot about AI policy and use with students. And then you were saying as an educator, sometimes too there's also this feeling of we don't talk about it, we don't admit we use it. What's the feeling you're getting around policy or shame? Or what's the general feeling around educators using AI from the district level, on a school level? What's the feeling there right now?
Marilyn:
It's so interesting because in some districts, you'll have they've adopted magic school completely. And so now we're all getting trained and we're all using it, and it's all here and the kids can get on there. So, there's that. But then in another situation, this actually happened, there was a teacher who... In my own class, I have used AI as an additional, I don't want to say peer reader because it's not human, but an additional checker of essays. And it has added a really interesting layer because it can pick up something that your actual peer couldn't. And for example, for my students, it was generating titles that were really good and the students liked them. And they appreciated that, what the title was doing, and it was something they hadn't seen before. I said, "Well, you can choose if you want to use this new title or not." Some of the feedback was way off, so I was kind of like, "Obviously disregard." But it was an in-class exercise.
Another teacher used it to actually grade the papers and the kids lost their minds. They were so mad. They were like, "You're not doing your job." And everyone has perceptions about what we should be doing as teachers, what's acceptable, what's not. And I don't know that anyone's figured it out. Like Dennis was saying, we're in the middle of it. The teacher who had used AI to grade the papers wasn't doing anything wrong, it's just the kids could tell that the feedback didn't sound like him. And so we're navigating it.
Dennis:
When you first asked that question, my head initially went to something that Marilyn had said before, this kind of bipolar, all or nothing kind of thinking about AI. It's been my mantra at a lot of the PD that Kristina and I have given, is just this idea that if you use it, then everything that you've created is 100% AI and that's not good. But there is so much nuance and gray area in between, and that's really what we've been navigating. And there's a lot of beneficial pushing of thinking that can happen in an interaction between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.
It just has so much knowledge. It's our knowledge, it's human knowledge that it has been trained on. So when we plug something in and we're looking for ideas, it's feeding human-like knowledge back to us. So there are ways for us to push ourselves, to push our thinking, to develop our curriculum, all of those things. But we are caught in what Marilyn was talking about before, this kind of black and white conversational world that goes way beyond AI. It's out there everywhere. AI is caught up in that too and we're just trying to navigate those gray areas.
Kristina:
I've been saying this phrase a lot at the end of last year and plan to this year, this idea that we're using AI to help us double down on what it means to be human. If AI can be a tool that helps our students author something the way that they want or supports them because of a learning disability or something like that, then I see that as a really powerful tool. Marilyn had mentioned using it for feedback and we've done that as well with our students. One of the things that I was really surprised by is how much my students will push back on the AI, and they might not against a peer or my feedback. Or if I say something about Macbeth and I think that he was solely responsible for his actions and the witches didn't influence him at all, that has to be the absolute truth. Whereas if AI says that, they can have a really healthy debate, and I think we need more of that in the class. So I've liked that.
Dennis and I wrote a piece, and I'm 100% with him about it not adding that final grade. And this coming school year we have to go through a calibration activity, where there's a piece of writing in front of us and all of us who teach freshman English need to be trained to give it an identical grade. I feel very passionately that writing and grading writing is subjective. I take into consideration the student that wrote it, the process that they went through, and all of those things really influence how I give it a grade. But if the educational system is saying, "Nope, it has to be 100% objective," then maybe AI does do all the grading, because then why am I part of that process? If we're saying it's totally objective and we're taking the meaning and the heart out of writing, then I guess I side with AI, whereas I would rather have writing be fully subjective and immersive and the process weigh far more than the final product.
Dennis:
When AI first hit the ground running, the two of us talked a lot about its possibilities and things that could be out there. And I remember specifically saying, "If AI can be an effective consistent grader, then why can't teachers be the coach on the side who gets to work with them as not the final grader?" And that's kind of a cool dynamic, a cool position to be in. And then have AI essentially producing that final grade. That makes it kind of like teacher and student who are working together to meet these standards. For a minute, that seemed like it might actually be a good idea.
And then the thing that flipped me goes to the article that Kristina and I wrote, and I don't see any way around this, I think that we change who the audience our students are writing to is. And if they think they only write to a bot for the rest of their lives, then they don't actually ever learn what writing is. I'm just couching all of that. You have the power of this as a curriculum administrator moving into a district. I wonder what your thoughts are too about both sides of that or anywhere in between.
Marilyn:
There's so much there. I 100% agree that a human should be assigning that final grade and being the person helping. I will say, when I used it with my 10th graders to be that extra level of peer editing, peer reading, it turned into a good cop, bad cop kind of thing because the AI was really strict and blunt. Whereas in my classroom, I communicate the information I want to communicate, but it's always encouraging and that kind of thing. So it was kind of nice to be like, "Well, the robot's mean. Sorry, but it's true what it's saying." So I did like that dichotomy.
But here's another scenario. I'll layer this on. I've in the past had an administrator say, "Yes, you all have 30 people in your classroom, but use AI to grade." So it was this kind of thing of we're going to just jam-pack people. We're not going to hire the teachers we need, all of that, and then you've got AI to help you. It just reinforces this system that in so many ways is broken. But it's not the solution. It can't do the thinking that a human can do. I guess I'm saying, I don't know, to answer your question. But this is the dialogue. How are we going to use it?
Kristina:
And it's like, what's more important, the students and their learning or the grade that they have at the end of the year?
Marilyn:
Exactly.
Kristina:
And for schools, I think it is the grade, it's the GPA and it's that transcript. And of course students are going to use AI to try and beef up that transcript.
Marilyn:
I know. It's that transactional nature that I brought up before. It's getting exposed. It's like, okay, well, the transaction is now complete, we can do both sides of it. So now what? Now what is the purpose of education? This is really the question that needs to be discussed, but we're not going to solve it in this podcast.
Edie:
Thanks so much for tuning in today. To learn more about the resources mentioned in this podcast, please visit blog.heinemann.com. And while you're there, you can also read a full transcript. This is just one of a two-part series, so make sure to check out the second part.
About the Authors
Marilyn Pryle (@MPryle) is an English teacher at Abbington Heights High School in Clarks Summit, PA and has taught middle and high school English for over twenty years. She is the author of several books about teaching reading and writing, including 50 Common Core Reading Response Activities and Writing Workshop in Middle School. Learn more about Marilyn at marilynpryle.com.
Dr. Dennis Magliozzi has been teaching high school English since 2008. He has an MFA in poetry from Vermont College of Fine Arts and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of New Hampshire. He has supervised teachers in the UNH Learning Through Teaching (LTT) program and teaches in UNH’s Writers Academy. He is co-developer of "Arts in Action," winner of a 2023 New Hampshire Governor's Arts Education Award. He is also a co-founder of Bookshelf Diversity, a statewide grant project designed to get diverse books into the hands of New Hampshire students.
Kristina Peterson has been teaching high school English since 2008. She has a master’s degree in teaching and serves the educational community as a new teacher mentor and the Secretary of the New Hampshire Council of Teachers of English. She also teaches in the University of New Hampshire’s Writers Academy and Learning Through Teaching program. She is an Ambassador to the award-winning Arts in Action program through NH's Racial Unity Team, and cofounder of Bookshelf Diversity, a statewide grant project that provides diverse books to New Hampshire classrooms.
