When the Grammarly writing assistant was rolled out in 2009, few educators would have predicted how far generative AI would come in fifteen years. What started as basic suggestions for grammar and mechanics now has the ability to summarize, paraphrase, and compile an entire paper (including citations). With this growth has come an existential crisis for administrators and teachers who wonder if there’s still a way to keep students accountable for producing their own first-time work. While some trust that applications like CopyLeaks or Turnitin will eventually figure out a consistent way to identify AI-generated work, so far the results are less than stellar—with false flags, inconclusive results, and (perhaps most concerningly) the inability to catch AI produced by paid subscriptions.

Educators have been responding rapidly, rolling out more scaffolding for projects, tracking keystrokes, recording students’ writing progress online, and having more individual student-teacher conferences to check project stages—overall taking the writing process to a whole new level of micromanagement. And it smells like panic.

How can Christian school administration and faculty craft a school response that cuts through the mayhem and will work for everybody? It’s a complex question and worthy of each school’s consideration. After all, generative AI is readily accessible to students and is being marketed toward a young demographic. Furthermore, surveys are showing rapid integration across the industries—making the proficient use of AI a very real-world skill that future employers will expect from employees.

Rather than ignoring this pressing issue, Christian educators must stay aware of current trends in AI and shape their school’s ethical approach. AI, with all its benefits and concerns, is coming, ready or not.

Benefits of AI in the Classroom

To begin, Christian educators can see the benefits of generative AI technology, an incredible feat of man-made technology. With ChatGPT, users can generate a well-articulated paper on any topic within seconds. Along with quick results, generative AI can answer complex questions and provide solutions to personal issues, being as specific or as general as the prompt; from ideas for a project to practical tips with time management, the only limit to this AI tech is the user’s imagination. ChatGPT also has specific potential to help challenged learners. Students with a language barrier, a need for personal tutoring, or challenges navigating school itself have found AI to be an effective help for getting work done. These benefits of AI can help teachers see a great potential for technology in the classroom and lead some schools to embrace generative AI in the classroom.

Concerns with AI in the Classroom

Along with acknowledging benefits, Christian educators must also recognize concerns with generative AI technology. First, ChatGPT’s quick and carefully articulated work can give a false sense of accomplishment, especially for students delegating their assignments to AI. Some educators are concerned it will replace deep critical thinking, original creativity, and hard work—character traits that Christian teachers work hard to instill in their students. If students grow dependent on AI technology for help, they could also lose motivation to do good work themselves. Second, ChatGPT’s personalized responses may lead to a false sense of personal attention and connection; however, AI technology is a product of programming and data entry, lacking human emotion or reason. It cannot and should not replace the bond of human connection. Third, ChatGPT is programmed with the worldview and ethics of the AI training dataset; standing “neutral” to religious groups, the user will quickly find out that it holds a “your truth, my truth” view of God, morality, and other important concepts. (And speaking of the training datasets, using people’s copyrighted works as part of AI development has raised red flags for its own set of ethical concerns.) Fourth, ChatGPT gives open access to any individual, having little to no guidelines or restrictions. Parental controls, filters, and age limits—none of these solutions for safe searching are built into the common AI chatbots, like ChatGPT. Unless these sites are blocked on wi-fi, any person can access generative AI. These concerns with generative AI technology should not completely overshadow its benefits but should alert educators to potential issues.

Navigating Accountability

Three Approaches to AI

Accounting for the benefits and concerns with AI technology, each Christian school must determine its approach to generative AI. While there are drawbacks to using AI technology, teachers and students should not view AI as an enemy of education but rather a powerful tool that deserves proper care and appropriate use. Generally, schools will take one of three possible approaches to generative AI technology:

• Approach 1: Attempt to ban it.

Like any other new technology, students are likely to learn how to use generative AI in their own time and under their parents’ supervision. Although school is a place to prepare students for life as a Christian and independent citizen, teachers should not expect to teach every aspect of life with the limited time they are given. With this approach, teachers must clearly instruct and enforce that students must not use AI in creating or editing their assignments because it is a dishonest representation of their work. This may include a short lesson about AI or may be built on a mutual understanding that school is not the place for AI. And while no program is currently able to flag AI-generated work with complete accuracy, the use of this detection software could still act as a deterrent when students know that it’s being used. The difficulty will be in enforcement.

• Approach 2: Include it.

Because school offers a unique opportunity to prepare students for life, administrators and teachers may desire to introduce the concept of using AI in particular applications. Generative AI will become one topic among many in the classroom. With this approach, teachers in junior high or high school will prepare to teach students the benefits and problems of AI in their specific field; they will also teach students how to use caution and discernment in using generative AI. Depending on time restrictions, teachers could create a project that requires the use of generative AI to train students how it can be used; or they may choose to expose its limitations as a programmed tool. Teachers could use AI in their personal prep for class or for enhancing the lessons.

• Approach 3: Integrate it.

Because AI is a flourishing tool in a variety of careers, teachers have an opportunity to help students learn about and use AI technology to help them with their workload. With this view, generative AI, like ChatGPT, would become a regularly used tool for various subjects, treating it with the same attitude as calculators or laptops. Teachers could integrate this tool into their curriculum to train students how to use it expertly. Because it has limited standards of its own, schools using this approach must set up clear, straightforward guidelines for use of AI to avoid letting it get out of control. With a variety of assignments, teachers would teach students to balance personal work and AI-generated work. Teachers would want to become extremely familiar with different applications of AI and to be ready for any student or parent questions about its use; this would require extra research and integration in the curriculum.

Whether your school chooses to Attempt Banning, Include, or Integrate AI technology, you should personally research advances in this tool to be prepared; students and parents will likely question your school’s stance on AI, and it is up to you to have a helpful and clear response.

Navigating Change

While the future of AI in education is such a rapidly developing field, you may also want to discuss with school administration some code switches to help bridge the gap, no matter which of the three approaches you choose.

• Examine the gradebook weights.

  For example, if your term paper is worth twenty-five percent of the class grade, perhaps it would make sense to lower that a bit. What if you made in-class assessments worth more and redistributed that twenty-five percent among the thesis selection, source-finding, outlining, and drafting? Perhaps the final draft could also be accompanied by an oral presentation, where you can gauge during a question time at the end whether the students understand the material presented (and were therefore likely to have completed the work themselves). This scaffolding and weight redistribution, when paired with an oral presentation, could help you determine authenticity.

• Experiment with handwritten submissions.

  The days of handwritten, in-class creative submissions may be returning. (Perhaps you remember the days of blue book assignments and yellow legal pad drafting.) For example, you could create mini assessments that test the same skillset as the longer papers. Have your students write a body paragraph where they introduce, state, cite, and explain the quotation presented on the board, beginning the paragraph with a topic sentence and ending with a clincher.

• Extol the power of human creativity.

  Your creative writing students may feel disempowered by the thought of a million invisible fingers producing better technical writing than they can. But your students have the spark of genius and original creativity, whereas AI is all data and patterns and algorithms, devoid of consciousness. Simply speaking, AI lacks soul, while your students have soul in spades. It’s their time to shine.