Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm in recent years. Everywhere you turn, people are making predictions of a future where AI has replaced humans in certain jobs or even whole industries. It appears every software platform is including some type of new AI integration and forcing users to adopt the newest version with its accompanying price increase. Like many people across countless industries, educators, and other ministry leaders can be left dizzy from the whirlwind of changes or proposed changes to their jobs, wondering where they go from here. It is into this feeling of the unknown that José Bowen and C. Edward Watson seek to provide the bewildered educator a sure footing from which to continue their ministry. Teaching with AI is a practical handbook which seeks to take the mystery out of AI tools and prepare educators to use them in a way that continues to fulfill the task of education in this new cultural reality.
Bowen and Watson bring a unique blend of scholarly expertise and practical wisdom that allows them to write Teaching with AI in a way that resonates with educators, guiding them through the challenges and opportunities of new technology. Bowen is the former president of Goucher College and has spent his career at the intersection of digital innovation and classroom practice. Watson is the vice president for Digital Innovation at the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and has spent years advancing initiatives in digital pedagogy. Together, these two authors bring a wealth of experience with emerging technologies that allows them to speak into the current reality of educators who are seeking to integrate AI tools into their work.
Teaching with AI is divided into three logical sections that help educators put together the AI concepts and apply them to their work. The first section, thinking with AI, sets the groundwork for the following sections. In chapter 1, the authors focus on the basic question of “What is AI?” so that educators don’t feel left in the dark. This helps to take some of the mystery out of AI and therefore diminishes fear so that educators who are hesitant to integrate these tools into their classroom or workflow will have a better understanding of what is going on behind the algorithm.
From there, chapter 2 continues to build on the basics explaining how work will change, not because AI will replace jobs, but because every job has some tasks that can be delegated to AI tools. The authors argue that AI-assisted work can be done faster and better than human only work, but there will always be a need for a human expert overseeing the AI output. This is the new reality educators need to be training students for. With this in mind, chapters 3 and 4 close out part 1 by explaining that AI literacy in the classroom should focus on finding the best AI tool for the job and prompting it in such a way as to get good results from the tool. The authors note that new tools have always made creative production easier, but they still require refined skills to identify high-quality work. Education has always been about developing this type of problem solving and wisdom, so educators should focus on preparing students to use these new AI-powered tools well.
Part 2 of this book narrows the focus to how faculty can integrate AI into their work in a way that lightens their workload. Chapter 5 overviews tasks such as student interactions and answers to FAQs, generic grading, and feedback options that are all are ripe for AI assistance. The authors even go into how AI can help create multiple discussion questions and versions of assignments to increase variety in the classroom.
Chapters 6 and 7 tackle the topic that is possibly highest on most educator's minds when discussing AI, and that is AI policies and cheating. These chapters explain why AI detectors’ accuracy is highly variable, and points to ways educators can mitigate the temptation to cheat through ideation, focusing on the process of the assignment, and scaffolding learning. There are highly practical suggestions as administrators think through their AI policies that keep an eye toward the future while also focus on good pedagogy.
This section ends with chapter 8, covering grading and re-defining quality. Students typically do not yet understand what quality work is, so they are content to turn in generic AI output. This should lead faculty to create examples and rubrics with AI that force students to add value beyond what AI can produce and consider grading based on the process, not just the product.
Finally, in part 3, the authors turn their attention to learning with AI. Chapter 9 highlights how AI tools can be an infinitely patient tutor. Students can use AI tools to get feedback based on assignment instructions and also use it to role play and study. Chapter 10 comes back to the topic of assessments built for human effort. The authors give practical tips for faculty to integrate AI tools in the classroom with the student in view. Again, the idea that faculty should grade on the process and not simply the final output is at the forefront of the discussion.
Chapter 11 wades into the topic of writing with AI. The authors argue that one major purpose of writing is to clarify thinking. If students are not wrestling with their own thoughts, the purpose of the papers is lost. Therefore, faculty should teach students to ideate with AI, and refine ideas, not to write the paper wholesale.
Chapter 12 concludes the book by returning to AI proof assignments. This chapter contains many practical tips for alternate assignments and creative projects that can be supported by AI but that cannot be completed by AI. This section is highly practical and serves as a repository of ideas for faculty to use AI to aid the learning process.
In a field that is pushing the cutting-edge, Teaching with AI makes three major contributions. The first is providing educators with a mostly up-to-date guide to implementing AI in an educational context. The focus is primarily on the classroom and not the boardroom, making this an important and desperately needed tool for practitioners. There have been a litany of resources theorizing how AI tools will change business and even education, but few have been able to speak practically to implementation in the classroom. Even those within the context of church educational ministries can glean applications to implement AI tools in their daily workflow. Bowen and Watson have been able to produce a work that meets this need and gives educators the tools they need to teach faithfully in the current cultural landscape.
Along these lines, the second major contribution is that this work provides a future-focused yet balanced perspective for policies and procedures, addressing educator fears without catastrophizing. This is a difficult balance to strike with such a cutting-edge field. Some works tend to discuss the end of education as we know it and recommend outright bans on AI tools, while others describe a utopian future where all tedious work is outsourced to AI. The reality, as with many things, is somewhere in the middle. The authors strike a balanced approach to teaching in this new reality of an AI world, preparing students for a to-be-determined future, while remaining grounded in the reality that humans will always be using technology to create.
And this is where the authors propose a key tenet that, while not overtly so, aligns with the biblical idea of the image of God. Bowen and Watson make clear that AI tools cannot create by themselves. Any creative output from these tools has to do with the creative prompt input by a human. The creativity is not in the tool, but in the way the tool was commissioned to output new combinations of text. Christian educators can seize on this and encourage creativity among their students as they seek to express the creative image of God innate in every human.
For ministry leaders who do not serve in a formal educational context, these sections on policy and procedure can appear to be irrelevant for their context. The underlying principles, however, can serve to help them think through the ways AI tools can and should be incorporated into their workflows. Just as student papers should not be written solely with AI, neither should sermons or lessons. But the creative output from an AI tool can help ministry leaders clarify their thoughts and develop novel ways of communicating to their audience without losing the unique human contribution in the process.
Finally, Teaching with AI serves as an excellent repository of prompt ideas for students and educators alike. Strewn throughout the book are lists of prompts that educators can peruse when searching for inspiration and then adapt for their own purposes. Particularly, chapters 11 and 12 provide a number of great prompt lists that faculty can keep handy for whenever needed. Chapter 3 as well includes a structure educators can work through to engineer their own prompts and teach students to do the same. Likewise, ministry leaders can use these chapters with small adaptations to increase their own skill and use of AI tools to further their ministry. This is the heart of the practicality of the book and makes this a resource that can be revisited repeatedly as time goes on.
Bowen and Watson have produced an excellent work taking the mystery out of AI tools for educators and helping them integrate them into their work. Teaching with AI strikes a good balance of in-depth knowledge of how AI tools work and the practicality of that knowledge in the classroom. However, as with many cutting-edge books like this, there are some points that are already out-of-date. Several tools the authors recommend no longer exist, leaving the reader to search for an alternative. The biggest detractor, however, is several claims the authors make early in the book about the nature of AI-empowered work and the job market which recent research has begun to dispel. Even so, the core of this work remains an excellent primer for educators of all levels to get up to speed on the advancing world of AI tools. It is highly recommended for any educator who is seeking to best steward the task of education in this new cultural reality.