In the last post in this series, we discussed the great work that the AI policy subcommittees are doing as part of the SREB Commission on AI in Education.

In this post, the K-12 Instruction subcommittee gets to take center stage.

A Look at the K-12 Instruction Subcommittee

Made up of educators and leadership across the South, the subcommittee is tasked with creating guidance for how AI should be used in K-12 classrooms.

Objective

The primary objective of this subcommittee is to learn how students and teachers at the K-12 level can take advantage of the benefits of AI without forgetting the pitfalls that exist within these tools.

Balancing potential risks, such as bias and lack of access, with the possible rewards, like differential learning and better productivity, can be a difficult task. However, this group has shown itself to be up for the challenge.

One way they accomplish this goal is by looking for ways to implement AI at all levels of education. Helping schools figure out how to start building these tools into all levels in the appropriate manner is the main initiative for this group. 

Key Focus Areas

As this subcommittee has worked, they have focused on four main pillars of AI classroom usage. They developed the pillars below by interviewing K-12 teachers around the South, as well as reviewing and analyzing publications related to AI in K-12 instruction.

1. Increasing cognitive demand: AI has the ability to help teachers create tasks that better support strategic thinking and allow students to reach higher levels of creativity.
2. Streamlining teacher work: AI can also help take mundane tasks off a teacher’s plate, allowing them to focus on supporting their students.
3. Supporting personalized learning: Another potential benefit of AI is that it can help teachers create personalized learning plans to reach students at all levels.
4. Developing future AI users: Finally, AI can be used in the classroom to help students develop into the AI users of the future.

Along with looking at the ways that AI can be used in the classroom across these four categories, this subcommittee also looks at the risks of using AI, such as increased plagiarism, overreliance on the tools and more.

Current Work

This subcommittee is working on finalizing its first set of guidance, centered around the four pillars discussed above. They plan to publish a report offering more insight on the pillars and the ways AI can help teachers and students take advantage of these benefits while remaining aware of the risks.

The ultimate goal of the report is to help schools find ways to use AI in the classroom in an ethical and appropriate manner.

Along with the report, the subcommittee plans to start interviewing teachers who are already using AI in their classrooms and are leaning into one of the above pillars, serving as examples of its use. This will help them start to create vignettes of successful AI usages in real-world classroom settings.

Ultimately, their aim is to create professional development resources that can be used to help educate teachers on how to effectively use AI in their schools.  

Conclusion

Between the policy and K-12 instruction subcommittees, we can see how that the SREB Commission on AI in Education is hard at work. However, we are not through yet. Join us next month as we look at the third subcommittee: postsecondary instruction.