A Brief But Spectacular take on harnessing AI in schools

Adrian Antao is a high school English teacher at KIPP NYC. Adrian has worked with educators, coders and designers at the nonprofit Playlab.ai to develop Project Toni, an AI tool to support his students with their writing revisions. While many are worried about using AI in the classroom, Adrian has found real benefits. He shares his Brief But Spectacular take on harnessing AI in schools.
Amna Nawaz:
As a New York City high school English teacher, Adrian Antao has embraced technology to help his students. While some express concern about the influence of A.I. on education, Antao has worked with educators, coders, and designers to develop an A.I. tool that helps students with their writing revisions.
He shares his Brief But Spectacular take on harnessing A.I. in schools.
Adrian Antao, High School English Teacher:
Here it is, the argument essay. It’s a yes/no question that needs an answer in the intro.
Because I have taught for close to 20 years, I have taught almost every English class this school has offered.
Why did the author want to write these four paragraphs?
I have wanted to be a teacher since I was 10 years old. Initially, I thought it was a job that would garner you respect as an adult. As I got older, I fell in love with literature and have lucked into a dream job.
OpenAI dropped ChatGPT on all of us last November. My initial reaction was terror. The summer began with me sitting in on conversations about how to adapt A.I. for the classroom, and, by July, we began a partnership with a company called Playlab that provided an open platform for teachers to create their own A.I. bot.
I’m going on to Project Toni. It’s an A.I. chat bot that can be a teaching assistant for teachers and a writing tutor for students. So I’m going to put in the assignment. It is designed to read articles that students are also reading, so they can engage in the conversation to begin the revision process.
Toni will provide strengths and areas for improvement for each paragraph. The problem that I had in mind was largely the jealousy I felt toward math teachers and science teachers, who can give instant feedback to students during tutoring. If I assign a five-page essay, that’s a 500-page novel that I would have to get through.
Before Toni existed, the feedback cycle largely mimicked the letter writing that you would see in Jane Austen movies, roughly two to three weeks, and this shrinks that feedback cycle to 24 to 72 hours.
Remember what I told you on Tuesday.
Introducing Project Toni into the classroom has been fascinating. What I’m discovering is that I’m needing to teach them how to use it well. Just press one and Toni will give paragraph-by-paragraph suggestions. It’s not Alexa or Google. You don’t just give it simple commands. You have to engage with it.
Specifically, could you elaborate on why this was a poor example? And it will give you two to three sentences of explanation. And you can convince Toni that it was incorrect. But what that takes is for you to make a stand for your own writing, which is such a huge move in a writer’s psychology to have the confidence in your own sentences, where, often, students are coming from a space of doubt and fear.
You’re entering in a partnership the way a professional writer and a professional editor enters into a conversation, and they’re both engaged in trying to make the writing better.
The P is the purpose.
One of the goals of being a good teacher is to give them academic attention and show them how intelligent they are. What I enjoy most about teaching writing is seeing growth in one of my students. It fills me up the way a great sentence in a novel fills me up. It’s a really fulfilling experience.
My name is Adrian Antao, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on harnessing A.I. in schools.
Amna Nawaz:
Tonight’s Brief But Spectacular is part of a six-part collection on the future of education.
Geoff Bennett:
And you can watch the entire series on our Web site. That’s PBS.org/NewsHour.