Mirror, Mirror On The Wall, Who’s The Realest Of Them All?

I am a lifelong student who made a career out of it through teaching. As of this year, I have taught for over two decades in almost every field of the Humanities, in almost every type of school. One thing that has persisted across my entire career is the love of the aha moment, that is, the moment a student understands something in a new, deep, and personal way. That, at the heart of it, is why I teach. It was my first aha moment that made me fall in love with learning. I chased that feeling from university to university, one degree after another, until I finally decided that I wasn’t going to leave school; I would make school my career. I became a teacher in order to preserve that aha moment in me and, hopefully, to give it away.

The aha moments I have today though are different from the ones I experienced in college, like when I first discovered Kant’s “paralogisms”. Today my ahas are about my students, more particularly about how they learn, what motivates them and what stands in the way of their aha moments.

One of the most dramatic aha moments my students collectively had occurred two years ago with the introduction of ChatGPT into the world. It was as though there was a collective “aha” from my students as they learned they could ask ChatGPT a question about their homework, and they would get a seemingly correct answer; they could ask ChatGPT to write their homework, and, – aha – we have liftoff.

Of course, the first thing I considered was how wonderful this new tool was going to be for me and for others to expedite a multitude of inefficient activities, like classroom policies and homework instructions. My next thought, however, quickly turned to what was going to change in the classroom. How was AI going to change the way my students learn? It was bound to be as revolutionary, if not more, than the introduction of the computer. Two questions were, and have been, on my mind ever since: 1) How useful will AI be as a source of knowledge; and 2) what impact will AI have on learning? The latter question is perhaps the “million dollar question.”

There is no one who doubts that AI is going to challenge and change education. The real questions are how, and for better or worse? I am not a doomsday seer. I do not believe that AI will destroy education, but, like with anything, change will require change. With the ubiquity of AI, there is no question that we have to ask some serious questions about how we teach and how students learn.

I am deeply unrevolutionary when it comes to learning. I don’t believe new is better, and I don’t believe we are smarter now than we were in any other time in history. The human brain works in a complex, but consistent, way and has since its very evolution. Technology and progress have abounded, but the process of learning hasn’t changed. It is still very much what I like to call an “experience of a concept” activity. That said, while learning hasn’t changed, the obstacles around it have. Here are four questions I now find myself asking:

1. The mirror metaphor: Teaching and learning are like a mirror. The teacher reflects what is in the student until the student begins to reflect what is in the teacher. It is a useful and meaningful metaphor. AI has polished the mirror so well, however, that it has become impossible to distinguish between what is AI and what is human, thus making it difficult for the teacher to see what is really reflected in the student. Hence, the need for accurate AI transparency. Should teachers use AI detection? I know it is easier to argue that AI detection doesn’t work than it is to thoroughly test it, and the landscape of AI detection is fairly broad. While I would never rely solely on AI detectors, I have come to see that it is no longer wise to do without them. I do not, however, think of them as "detectors" so much as transparency tools, ways in which to peer into students’ work to understand what is theirs and what is from AI.

2. Now that AI can be passed off as human work, how do we know when learning has occurred? In other words, what happens when students have all the right answers but none of the knowledge; can produce accurate prose with little ability to write?

3. Epistemic fragility: aha moments depend upon the quietest of all causes, the insight that comes as a result of doing one’s own authentic thinking. If a teacher cannot distinguish between what is student-thinking and what is AI, how can the teacher develop and foster the aha moment? After all, isn’t that what the classroom is for?

4. There is and always will be an existential need to experience the real human voice, and this is no less true in writing. No matter how good AI gets, it will never do the job of making our voice real without ourselves speaking it. How, then, do we safeguard teaching our students to write so that they can hear themselves, hear others and be heard by others?

Real education and learning require an authentic human voice and real aha.