View from the Top: Joe Smith on the brave new world of AI
There's no doubt about it: AI is making waves in the education sector and disrupting classroom learning as we know it. This week, Joe Smith, head of London's St Benedict's School, dives into the benefits of artificial intelligence in schools – and explains why it's so important to embrace the opportunities the technology can create...
From its name alone, artificial intelligence should be anathema to school leaders. Authenticity in education is everything: we endlessly exhort our students to 'be their authentic selves' and teach them to be sceptical of anything that seems phoney or contrived. Intelligence itself – the holy grail of schools – must surely come from within, not be created for us by a mere machine.
I’m reminded of the episode in Stephen Fry’s novel The Liar, in which hero and inveterate cheat Adrian (clearly the author himself) is given a single task by his despairing tutor at Cambridge: to come up with an original thought. As Adrian leaves the don’s study he reflects, ‘An original idea. That can’t be too hard. The library must be full of them.’
However, while anything ‘artificial’ in education should be treated with caution, the potential for AI to transform the educational landscape, as it will many others, is huge. I could hardly be called an early adopter of AI, but I am definitely an enthusiastic convert, with some of the evangelising zeal which that implies. For school leaders AI can be a fantastic tool, preventing the experience of staring at the blank screen, thinking ‘surely this has been done before?’ that we’ve surely all experienced. In a matter of seconds AI can draft job descriptions, produce rationales for business changes, even draft assembly talks. And it can do these things very well, if you give it enough information with which to work. The potential too for AI to do very rapid and enlightening analysis of school data is enormous.
At St Benedict’s we are just beginning to discover the ways in which AI can enhance our students’ learning. We have sought to be positive in our approach to AI, and not to see it as an enemy which simply allows students to cheat in their work. We have held assemblies explaining AI to students and why it could be a great positive, along with ongoing education for students and teachers about how to mitigate and prevent the opportunities for ‘cheating’ using AI. In addition to this we have started to use a similarity detection device to give teachers a better chance of spotting plagiarism and the illicit use of AI in students’ work.
The potential of AI for schools on the academic front is clear, in that all schools are more or less starting from the same point and no school has yet really taken a dramatic step forward in how they use AI. For example, the potential impact for students with SEND has still not really been given much in-depth or useful thought, but in particular we could potentially give students with ASD an opportunity to take control of their own learning and ‘talk’ to an AI voice which can respond in ways they find reassuring.
So, we proceed cautiously but confidently into what will no doubt be a very different landscape from the one we have known, but in which the opportunities are potentially limitless.