Wake County teachers pioneering use of AI in the classroom

CARY, N.C. (WTVD) -- When Wake County math teacher Brendan McMonigle needed a fun new way to teach his students rational functions, he didn't print out worksheets with questions such as "What is the X-intercept?"

He turned to Chat GPT.

"I spent a lot of time engineering a prompt that they could put into chat," McMonigle said. "And then it would have a sort of storytelling process with them where through it they learned how to solve math problems."

McMonigle along with Spanish instructor Mindy Hope are both teachers at Wake's Crossroads Flex High School.

"We are a very technology-heavy school," Hope said.

They are two of the hundreds of Wake County school teachers now trained to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into the classroom.

And so, it's pretty important for our students to know and responsibly use any form of technology, AI included," Hope said.

Generative artificial intelligence's relatively recent rise triggered plenty of concern among educators, including fears about cheating and plagiarism.

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A Pew Research poll last fall found that a majority of US teachers are uncertain about AI or think it does more harm than good in K-12 education.

Allison Reid is the Wake County Public School System senior director for digital learning and libraries.

Unlike some school districts that banned then unbanned AI tools such as Chat GPT early on, Reid and her team have been working non-stop, writing and re-writing rules of the road for responsible AI use for students and teachers.

"Our first coursework on AI for staff came out, I guess a little more than a year ago," Reid said. "We've already had to update that course twice because of changes with the technology."

And some of the benefits are immediately clear.

AI can speed up rote tasks such as adding citations to an essay.

But critics point to drawbacks more worrisome than cheating; after all, students trying to cheat is nothing new.

They fear students' over-reliance on AI could lessen their ability to think critically and overcome frustrations with concepts that don't come easily.

"What we like to message to students is that you can put a question into Google and it will give you an answer. Sure, you can put a question into AI and it'll give you an answer," Hope said. "But the higher-level thinking skill, the way to get ahead and grow your brain and be a higher-level thinker is to vet that. And that's a skill that anybody needs."

In any case, they're teaching in a brave new world, one AI prompt at a time.