You may recall Hour of Code, the giant corporate-infested campaign to popularize coding (if not, I recommend Natasha Singer's Coding Kids). That has now become the Hour of AI, but apparently some folks want to extend that a bit. Powered by MIT RAISE and the "leading researchers in AI education," here comes the Day of AI, which comes equipped with a whole raft of units more appropriate for actually many several days of AI. Incidentally, RAISE stands for "Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education," so there's a sign of where this is headed.
The list of curricula is extensive and runs from pre-K through 12. For instance, there's a K unit "Machines All Around Us" that "introduces students to the foundational idea that machines are human-made tools designed to help people do work and solve problems." There are units about how to verify information and thinking critically about AI, and they are not at all terrible (not perfect, but not terrible).
However, "The Writing Process in the Age of AI" for grades 9-12 is hugely problematic.
Let's start with calling this the "Age of AI," as if AI is the dominant feature of our times. I'm willing to entertain an argument about that designation, but I'm not prepared to concede AI world domination as a fait accompli. I'm not able to see the educator guide or student resources (because I'm not going to give them my info), but I can see the slide deck that accompanies the week's worth of lessons. So let's take a look.
Lesson 1 is "Demystifying the Machine," and it does a nice job of making clear that LLMs do not use "thinking," but rather a process of predicting the next word. It sets up LLM prediction against human judgment, and that's fair. It also provides an age-appropriate but reasonably accurate explanation of what LLMs actually do. So we're actually off to a good start. It's not going to last.
Lesson 2 is "from ideas to argument." This section highlights where the first place the creators think AI fits in the writing process, and it begins with the dubious advice that "AI is a good tool for brainstorming, questioning, and organizing." It adds the caveat that AI can give you more ideas but can't decide which ideas matter. The slides suggest that you prompt the AI, then annotate the results, weed out the ones that are weak or with which you disagree. They do not add "get rid of ideas that are actually wrong," which strikes me as the most time-consuming part of this approach. The rewrite the one you pick.
"Choosing, revising, and rejecting" are "where the thinking is" is the claim here, and while I agree that that's where some think could happen, I have seen this movie before in the classic shake and bake high school "research" paper. Student locates however many sources you required, looks for the one that's easiest to turn into the assignment, and tries to rewrite something so that it says the same thing in a non-plagiarizey way. No thinking is required for any of it (which is why I stopped making that assignment).
Could this AI version of brainstorming involve thinking? Sure. Will it? Probably not.
Lesson 3 is "from prompt to persuasion," and it continues our trip through the writing process, and now we are headed way, way out into the weeds. Ever get stuck getting an essay started? AI can write that draft for you, "especially if you give it a high quality prompt." By "high quality prompt" you should include the sections you want in the essay, the arguments you have developed, counterarguments (if you're doing that, I guess) and other aspects of the essay you want to specify. I am trying to imagine a universe in which a writer has thought through all of the content and organization of an essay and yet somehow the actual writing escapes them. I cannot. If you have developed all the elements of the "high quality prompt," the actual placement of words on the page is barely work at all.
The creators of this slide show remind you that AI can give you a draft, but you have to revise and rewrite to "make it yours." But let me share this: in 39 years of teaching human high school students, I found that getting them to do meaningful rewrites and revisions on their own rough drafts was by far the hardest part of the writing process. But the creators of this show want students to revise the AI draft "so it is accurate, sounds like you, and says what you want it to say." But if you know what you want it to say, why wouldn't you just start by writing it yourself?
There's another layer of bad here-- this is training students to be accountability sinks. Instead of being creators themselves, this approach trains them for a role in which they do not create, but accept the responsibility of fixing whatever the bot extruded.
And of course the reality here is that students will have the AI do everything and make nominal attempts to pretend to "make it their own." This is a framework for formalized cheating.
Lesson 4 is "name the process" which is about documenting the many ways that you used a bot to do the work. The lesson works through the details required-- it's not enough just to say you used AI, but specify which brand bot, record your prompts, and "reflect on how the use of AI affected your writing--this is your chance to show your authorship." You're going to show how you an author by writing insights about the essay that the bot wrote for you.
Lesson 5 is "deciding when to use AI." This lesson talks about cognitive effort and cognitive debt and encourages students to think about how using AI to avoid thinking is probably bad. It cites research that shows that students who wrote essays with genAI tools could not reproduce a version of those essays later on their own. "It was like their brains hadn't stored the information." No shit.
The best way for a classroom teacher to use this unit would be to go straight to Lesson 5, maybe throw in a bit of Lesson 1, and explain, "And that is why we are not even going to bother with the rest of this unit."
What is the benefit of using a bot to do most of the work of a writing assignment? Who knows. This unit is a solution in search of a problem, or more to the point, a product in search of a use case.
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