With this year marking the expansion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the world, the school has begun to find ways to utilize this new technology to enhance education.
Both faculty and administrators are redefining education by incorporating AI into the curriculum, ensuring that the use of AI aligns with the school’s mission of maintaining ethics and academic integrity, according to Associate Director of Teaching and Learning Maggie Thompson. The newly released school policy regarding the use of AI in a classroom setting is as such: “We believe generative AI can elevate teaching and learning at Harvard-Westlake. With a focus on integrity, creativity, sustainability and connection, we are committed to using AI to further the school’s mission.”
Head of Upper School Beth Slattery said the school wants to ensure AI does not replace feedback and teaching, but enhance it by using AI as a complementary tool.
“The school’s statement for faculty use of AI prioritizes human connection, sustainability and efficiency because the use of AI does not have to be all bad, it just needs to be used ethically,” Slattery said. “When using AI for work, it should start and end with human work to make sure work does not become unfiltered. I do not think the use of AI has to be a bad thing when it is used to enhance work after a human writes it.”
The school’s Information Technology (IT) team helps facilitate the integration of technology on campus in addition to technical support for faculty and staff. They are currently working strategies for how to most effectively incorporate AI into education at the school.
Chief Information Officer Dan Alig said he is currently working in partnership with AI companies to understand how to effectively use AI in an academic setting.
“The school is forming a partnership with OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, to think about how something like ChatGPT exists in a school like Harvard-Westlake,” Alig said. “As of this week, we have provided all faculty with access to ChatGPT.”
Thompson said another way the IT team is fostering AI literacy on campus is by exposing different forms of AI to teachers at the school.
“Teachers are all at different places with how they use AI, and so I want to build different opportunities for teachers to experience the technologies pertaining to their subject so that they understand how it works,” Thompson said. “One thing [IT] has done is having specific experiences during faculty meetings to enhance understanding of how to use the technology. For example, one thing we have done is put the same prompt into different technologies such as ChatGPT, Claude and Java to see what happens. These opportunities provide teachers with a better understanding of how to use technology to increase productivity and efficiency in work rather than do the work for them.”
One concern the IT department is facing when introducing new technologies to faculty is that they have the potential to do work for teachers. Alig said introducing the teachers to AI and showing them specific strategies to enhance their work will prevent them from using it in a dishonorable manner.
“It is really easy to get AI to do things for you, and that is a trap a lot of people fall into,” Alig said. “However, that outcome is not great because it does not align with the educational standards of the school. Whether teachers are using it for their writing or just for planning [lessons], it is important they only use it as a potential thought partner and not as a replacement for the work they do. We have a lot of highly qualified, very skilled professionals here, and [IT] wants to make sure faculty are using it to enhance their work, rather than replace it.”
The IT department formed an IT council where representatives from different departments can collaboratively discuss various aspects of technology on campus such as the functionality of projectors and discuss their varying opinions about AI within the school. They have held two meetings where teachers are currently discussing their individual concerns about how AI impacts each of their subjects.
English Teacher and IT council member John Garrison said the council allows faculty to consider new ways to utilize AI within their subjects.
“Across the school, there is a lot of variance between people who aren’t using AI at all in their classroom to people who are integrating it directly into assignments,” Garrison said. “What the council does is allow teachers to share their own innovations with technology in order for other people in the council to think about how their discipline might utilize AI.”
The history department’s representative on the IT council, Peter Sheehy, said the history department is working to ensure that AI is being used in a cautious manner and only for specified work by students and faculty.
“The key consideration for the history teachers is to be really clear about what skills they are trying to develop,” Sheehy said. “The skills the department is trying to prioritize the most among students are the ones where AI should be used the least. In other cases of secondary importance such as busy work, then the use of AI can be appropriate. If students are organizing large amounts of data, AI often tends to display bias in its response depending on the specific phrasing of the question. Until we all become experts in prompting and understanding how it works, there are lots of dangers to AI use.”
Sheehy said he uses AI to increase efficiency when preparing for class by having ChatGPT formulate daily summaries for his lessons.
“I have always created memos to prepare me for class,” Sheehy said. “I will take academic articles that I’ve read, notes and documents and put them into ChatGPT to have AI organize them for me. It has the ability to organize, synthesize and provide me with headlines for specific topics. I have already learned and taught this material for 25 years, but just having AI be like a personal assistant to refresh me before class is helpful.”
Some teachers are incorporating these new technologies into instruction. For example, World Language Teacher Marc Schuhl recently assigned a project where he encouraged students to use AI to complete it. After consulting with the IT department, he was able to provide his class with access to ChatGPT Pro to generate images for the project, and 80% of his class took advantage of this resource.
Schuhl said the challenges that arose from this project revealed the unpredictability of how AI will become integrated into education, and reminded him of the similar change that occurred after the invention of the internet.
“With AI, everything’s so new that I just have to commit to knowing the process is going to be a little ugly, that my students are patient with me,” Schuhl said. “The unexpected challenges that occurred [during the project] reminded me of the beginning of my teaching career when the internet first became a thing. It was obviously going to be a transformative change, but the first couple of years using it with students was a mess because it was super slow, would disconnect and people would get frustrated. I knew it was going to get really good and robust, and I am feeling the same way about AI right now.”
