Teaching

I have a wonderful new group of eighth graders in my Tech Projects class, and they’ve been hard at work brainstorming ideas, narrowing them down, doing research, and finally picking their best one. At that point, I have them create a project proposal that asks them to step back and think about various aspects of their idea, even though they want to dive in immediately. This isn’t easy, and it doesn’t come naturally.

Something shifted for me recently. This week, for the first time, I could actually see myself walking away from the flagship corporate AI products. Not from AI itself — from the companies.

The first time I heard about what would become the Khmer Magic Music Bus, I wasn’t even in Cambodia. I was listening to my colleague Steve describe a rest stop on a long drive through the countryside.

When a colleague teaching an intro to technology course approached me about her students’ interest in learning about AI and asked if I could teach it, I was excited. I developed a five-session unit centered around business development with an AI co-founder. What I discovered surprised me, and has implications for how we might think about preparing students for an AI-integrated future.

We tend to see failure as an endpoint: a closed door, a dead end, a signal to turn around and try something else. For much of my life, that’s exactly how I viewed it too. A failure meant I wasn’t good enough, smart enough, or disciplined enough. It was a judgment, not just on what I did, but on who I was.

Over time, however, I’ve discovered something unexpected. Failure has often been my most reliable compass, pointing me toward paths I might never have discovered otherwise — paths that felt more like me and brought real joy into my life.

Every time I show other teachers how I’m using AI in my classroom, I can see anxiety flash across some faces. It usually happens right after they witness an AI-facilitated student conversation that shows surprising depth, personalization, and responsiveness. Sometimes they come right out and say it: “If AI can do this, what’s left for me?”

Every teacher has to figure out who they are and how they best interact with students. For me, looking back after 23 years in the classroom, that journey quickly led to a realization: young people get a lot of empty praise. When everything is celebrated at the highest level, genuine feedback becomes meaningless or expected. That approach simply doesn’t work for me in terms of both personality and educational philosophy, and I don’t think it works for my students, either.

I’m preparing to teach a unit on AI literacy to a group of high schoolers next month, and it’s clear that we need to spend some of that time discussing the ethics of using Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. I’m still working through this stuff myself, particularly because students are sharing their own opinions about it and getting me thinking, so I thought I would take this opportunity to carefully consider the ethics of this type of AI, both as a teacher and as someone who uses LLMs regularly.

As a teacher, I’ve witnessed countless moments where curiosity transforms learning from a task into an adventure. One story particularly stands out. In my Tech Projects class, I had a student who was paralyzed by the blank canvas of possibility. The course begins with complete freedom to choose any technology project, and for this student, that freedom felt overwhelming. Nothing seemed quite right.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what works in my classroom and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s obvious - like when a project catches fire and students can’t wait to dive in. Other times, it’s harder to pin down why something that looked great on paper just didn’t land. I need help to see things clearly. That’s why I’ve always valued getting feedback on my work.

I wanted to find out how AI tools might impact the learning process for students in my 8th Grade Technology Projects class. I always ask my students to think deeply about their project experiences, but I can only get so far with a worksheet. Would doing these reflections with an AI facilitator make a difference? You bet. In fact, the results blew me away.