Worried About AI in Your Classroom? 1 Common Syllabus Mistake to Avoid

Updating your course syllabus is a traditional back-to-school activity, but in the age of AI, it’s important to avoid this common mistake.

Update your academic (dis)honesty policy in regards to AI use.

How you word your academic honesty policy depends on a variety of variables: the course you teach, the standards you assess, the expectations of your building/department, and the technology tools and training available.

Those variables may indicate that students are encouraged to use AI, are limited in how/when they use AI, or are not allowed to use AI. Regardless of where you wind up on this spectrum, it’s important to outline your expectations for acceptable use in the course syllabus.

Clear expectations about acceptable use put parents, teachers, and students on the same page regardless of personal feelings about AI implementation. Your academic honesty policy will also be more effective if everyone in your department/building enacts the same policy and communicates consistently with administrators. A policy is only effective if it’s applied equally, so developing a policy through collaboration is key.

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How I Got Here

Before I share my academic honesty policy, I wanted to give some background to contextualize my thinking. Last week, I shared the education articles I’ve been reading. As I was writing that post, I realized how much of my reading has focused on AI in the classroom. While I’ve read a lot, these are the 3 articles that have carried the most weight for me. (If you want to read more, this is the Pinterest board where I track my recent reads about edtech.)

AI=B+ by Ben Parker from Public Books. An Associate Professor of English at Brown University, Parker’s article comes from a classroom perspective. Instead of focusing on ways to tell AI-generated essays apart from original student work, Parker focuses on why such an essay isn’t valuable. Parker notes that such essays write around rather than at a prompt and tend to circumvent interpretive tasks, proving weak, poor, or mistaken evidence. As a result, Parker insists that students should continue with interpretative exercises. Even if English essays aren’t part of your future, interpretation is. A machine will not be ready to interpret your partner’s tone nor will a chatbot interpret the effect of propaganda on your voting habits.

Why You’re More Likely to Develop AI-Psychosis than to Join a Cult by Kristen French for Nautilus. In conversation with University of Exeter philosopher Lucy Osler, French discusses some of the psychological dangers of building and relying on chatbots for social interaction. For me, one of the takeaways from this article is that chatbots can function like an echo chamber; they have been trained to prolong conversations, so they can behave like parrots, which might be cute but might also repeat some of our worst fears, insecurities, and weaknesses.

In the classroom context, I think about students who struggle with mental health, and giving them a tool that might worsen their mental health is troubling. We know that social media can be harmful to our mental health, and chatbots are just a different form of social media except that we’re socializing with a syncopathic computer.

What’s the Point of School When AI Can Do Your Homework? by Matthew Gault from 404 Media discusses how AI tools aimed at education are the result of a transaction-based view of education. In other words, students often view schooling as a means to an end: complete the class, earn a credit, accrue enough credits and you earn a diploma or degree. We could probably trace this view of education to the capitalist foundations of American life, but that’s asking a lot of a blog post. Instead, my takeaway was thinking about reframing education.

Rather than thinking of “completing” a class, focus on learning, growth, and creative thinking. In the opening of Bleak House, Charles Dickens imagines a teacher pouring knowledge like vessels; if our education system looks like this Dickensian nightmare, then it’s time to reframe education and assert that its value isn’t in credentials but lies in building neural pathways that encourage curiosity, questioning, and creativity.

AI is so top-of-mind right now that even after I drafted this post, I read two more articles I felt compelled to share. First, I read Adults have struggled to set rules for AI in school. These teens figured it out by Cory Turner from All Things Considered on NPR. Turner describes a kind of student mock-Congress that developed a bill designed to create clear brightlines for when and how artificial intelligence should be used in public classrooms. That this is a student-designed bill really resonated with me because it indicates adults and teens have some of common ground.

Additionally, NPR’s Lee V. Gaines shared this poll, which captures teachers’ attitudes towards AI in the classroom. There is plenty of data in the poll, but a few pieces really stood out to me. Nearly 40% of surveyed teachers indicated that increases in unauthorized classroom use of AI have led them to require more assignments done by hand and/or in class. Additionally, 65% felt that use of AI harms students’ abilities to form healthy relationships. Nearly 60% felt artificial intelligence is eroding trust between teachers and students. These pieces of data stood out to me because they echo so many of the concerns I’ve been trying to put into words.

My Department’s Academic Honesty Policy

My department spent a long time researching, evaluating, and collaborating on our academic honesty policy. We have different experiences and training, and some of us do not come from a traditional teacher background. Working with folks who arrived at education as a second act was helpful in shaping our policy. We also enlisted our 6-8 counterparts and teachers from other departments to build a policy that we could adopt broadly. Along the way, we checked in with our admin team to make sure we were not contradicting, complicating, or duplicating existing policy.

In the course of our discussion, we covered a lot of ground both positive and negative. However, we kept coming back to these sticking points: our state standards for ELA do not ask students or teachers to use AI and the standardized assessments based on those standards do not allow students to use AI.

What that boils down to is this: right now, our job is to help students become independent and forward thinkers. Large language models draw on existing texts, so they are based on past knowledge and customs. As teachers, we do not want students stuck in the past, so before they employ an AI tool, we want to help them develop the tools for independent, original thought.

Our Policy: While generative artificial intelligence (AI) provides users with many opportunities, it is a tool that has to be used responsibly. Like any tool, if AI is used improperly, it can become problematic and can endanger learning outcomes. With this in mind, academic dishonesty is strictly prohibited and includes cheating, plagiarism, unauthorized collaboration, and the unauthorized use of AI, including but not limited to Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI-enhanced tools. This includes Grammarly.

When an instance of academic dishonesty occurs, teachers will conference with students, parents, and administrators. As a result of this conference, the teacher will decide if the student is eligible for full credit, partial credit, or a replacement assignment. In the case of a second offense, the teacher, in collaboration with administrators, will decide if the student loses credit for the work, grade reduction, course failure, and/or removal from extracurricular activities.

I’m sure this is not a perfect policy, but it’s what we are using. We included some latitude in the consequences because not all instances of academic dishonesty are equal. We also wanted a policy that addresses all types of academic dishonesty.

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