ChatGPTeach?

The debate over AI in education often falls into binaries: pro or anti, ban it or embrace it. But Maya Bialik, Ed.M.'12, thinks both camps are looking at the technology the wrong way.

The best approach, she argues, isn’t to debate whether to embrace or shun AI, but to evaluate when and how to use it. In her book, Irreplaceable: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing in Teaching and Learning, which came out in February, she and coauthor Peter Nilsson offer teachers a framework for deciding when AI enhances learning and when it short-circuits it. 

“Part of the idea of this book was to help expand people’s imagination into what could even be possible, and what could be exciting, and what could be effective,” she says. 

In the book, Bialik breaks down these possibilities according to three educational contexts that she says are here to stay: teachers preparing for class, students learning, and teachers and students working together. 

With these givens, Irreplaceable examines how AI can support teachers, acting as an aide for research, planning, and giving feedback. As a research and planning assistant, AI can help teachers study curricular requirements and develop lesson plans. For example, Bialik writes in the book, a teacher might ask AI, “What kind of problem or challenge would naturally require students to use [this skill]?” or “Which aspects of this goal could students personalize based on their interests, perspectives, or prior knowledge?” 

And as a feedback assistant, AI can help teachers grade assignments and generate immediate, high-quality comments on student work. 

Bialik advises teachers to use AI to enhance their agency. “Teachers are the most creative people in the world,” she says. But they need high-quality AI that helps them elevate their ingenuity rather than give them more slop to wade through, she adds. She encourages teachers to treat AI less like a tool and more like a collaborator or an agent that works on their behalf. 

For students, Bialik distinguishes between AI as a “learning assistant,” like an on-demand tutor, and a “doing assistant” that helps them complete tasks not central to the learning goal. Much like calculators allow students to focus on complex mathematical concepts after mastering basic computation, AI can help them tackle higher- order challenges once they’ve developed basic skills. 

In the classroom context, the book explores how AI can take on administrative tasks like attendance and data tracking while also serving as an instructional coach that provides teachers with insights during and after lessons. 

While Bialik highlights AI’s usefulness, she also acknowledges that it can hamper learning if used incorrectly. “It’s really tempting to use it for cognitive offloading because that’s how our brains are designed … we try to conserve our energy,” she says. To guard against this, teachers will need to emphasize student accountability and encourage students to reflect on their decisions about when and how they use AI. 

Bialik started thinking about how AI is changing education when she was working as a researcher at the Center for Curriculum Redesign, tackling the question of what students need to know to be prepared for the 21st century. The first book she coauthored, Artificial Intelligence in Education, came out of that work and focused on the history of AI in education and how the technology might transform curriculum. 

In 2020, she became a middle school science teacher at Boston College High School. When ChatGPT launched two years later, she co-created Question- Well, an AI tool that helps teachers create and export instructional materials to platforms such as moodle, Kahoot!, and Quizlet as a way to make lesson planning more time efficient. To date, the tool, which has free and paid options, has generated nearly 8,400 questions from more than 5,000 teachers based in 185 countries. 

Around the same time, Bialik was invited to present on a panel for EdWeb, a free online learning community, about the ethics of allowing students to use AI. That led to her writing Irreplaceable and deciding to pursue a Ph.D., at Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, studying how AI can enhance teacher agency. 

Bialik is reluctant to make sweeping statements about AI’s impact on education. 

“I love nuance, and I think every technology comes with tradeoffs,” she says. Her favorite example is Socrates’ opposition to writing; he feared it would weaken memory and cause people to misinterpret his words. He may have been right, but it’s hard to imagine the information age without the written word. The same might hold true for AI and the world of tomorrow, she says.

Kimberly Ashton is a freelance writer and editor whose work focuses on storytelling for educational institutions