439. AI Pre-Mortem

Posted in edtech, educational technology, higher education, learning, motivation, teaching
April 1, 2026

Many faculty, administrators, and students often become caught up in the potential benefits of new technology, but do not always consider the long-term consequences. In this episode, Rebecca Winthrop joins us to discuss a report summarizing the long-term benefits and risks associated with student use of generative AI.

Rebecca is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, where her research focuses on education globally. Rebecca leads the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education and co-leads the Family Engagement in Education Network. In addition to her work with many other global education initiatives, Rebecca has served as the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group and served as co-lead for the Learning Metrics Task Force with the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. Rebecca is also a lecturer at Georgetown University and, with Jenny Anderson, the co-author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Many faculty, administrators, and students often become caught up in the potential benefits of new technology, but do not always consider the long-term consequences. In this episode, we discuss a report summarizing the long-term benefits and risks associated with student use of generative AI.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Rebecca WInthrop. She is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, where her research focuses on education globally. Rebecca leads the Brookings Global Task Force on AI in Education and co-leads the Family Engagement in Education Network. In addition to her work with many other global education initiatives, Rebecca has served as the U.N. Secretary General’s Global Education First Initiative’s Technical Advisory Group and served as co-lead for the Learning Metrics Task Force with the UNESCO Institute of Statistics. Rebecca is also a lecturer at Georgetown University and, with Jenny Anderson, the co-author of The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better, which we talked about on an earlier episode of the podcast. Welcome back, Rebecca.

Rebecca W.: Thank you. It’s great to be back.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Rebecca, are you drinking tea with us today?

Rebecca W.: I, of course, am drinking tea. I believe this is my third podcast with you, so I have it in hand. It’s Bengal spice herbal tea, and it’s delicious.

Rebecca: That sounds quite nice.

John: it does. I just have an English breakfast tea today.

Rebecca: Just?

John: Yep, the standard Twinings English breakfast tea.

Rebecca W.: Simple, classic.

John: Yes.

Rebecca: You can’t go wrong.

Rebecca W.: Yes.

Rebecca: I have a Scottish afternoon tea, John.

John: One of your favorites.

Rebecca W.: What is Scottish afternoon tea?

Rebecca: It’s a little bolder than an English breakfast.

Rebecca W.: Okay? It’s like, wake you up, keep it going.

Rebecca: It is.

Rebecca W.: All right. Love it. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It’s been a long week…[LAUGHTER]

John: Just today alone.

Rebecca: It’s been a lot of Fridays today.

John: So we’ve invited you here today to discuss your Brookings Report on A New Direction for Students in an AI world: Prosper, Prepare, and Protect. Can you tell us a little bit about the study and why it is described as a pre-mortem, which I thought was a wonderful term for this. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca W.: So, we at Brookings thought that we should get ahead of generative AI in students learning and development as it is rolling out and collectively, we all know that there is a parallel movie here with social media that did roll out to students into their bedrooms and classrooms [LAUGHTER] without much attention from people who work with and care for kids, be they parents or coaches or teachers or school leaders. And this time, we really wanted to make sure that all of those communities were at the table. And so the idea was, let’s not wait for five [LAUGHTER] or maybe six, seven years until all the evidence comes back from all the randomized controlled trials, and frankly, after social norms have been ossified, to assess how generative AI may or may not impact students’ learning and development. So let’s move, quote, unquote, the autopsy forward to just see where we’re at and ask the question, “Are we heading in the right direction currently in terms of generative AI implementation?” And we looked at the risks and the potential risks from what we know about student learning and development and how AI is rolled out, and we looked at the benefits and the potential benefits, and that was what we called a pre-mortem.

Rebecca: So part of the study was a Delphi panel. For those that are not familiar with this approach, can you describe how a Delphi panel works?

Rebecca W.: You bet. So first, let me tell you what we did. It was a year of research, and we convened a very large global task force with a number of working groups. Hundreds and hundreds of people were involved. We have data from across 50 countries, and we looked at the literature that is emerging fast and furiously, including reviewing over 400 studies, and we spoke to parents, students, educators, education leaders, technologists, who were in schools on the ground about what they were experiencing. And then the last thing we did was, as you said, a Delphi panel, which is a methodology that is very good for forecasting and is useful when a field is new or undeveloped or doesn’t have clear rubrics or guidelines or principles, which is the case we are in now, and it consists of gathering a very diverse mix of experts and running them through a series of very structured questions. So those were the three main things we did to gather data to assess this question, “Are we on the right track in terms of generative AI rollout for primary and secondary students’ learning and development?”

John: And the report provides a lot of discussion of potential benefits as well as potential harms. Let’s start with the more positive thing first. In what ways might generative AI be supportive of student learning and perhaps improve some of the equity that we are not always seeing in our educational system.

Rebecca W.: So we found a lot of potential benefits that were often from very strategic intentional narrow uses of generative AI. In the report, we list our top six alongside the top six risks. And the benefits are things like helping bring kids who are not participating in the teaching and learning process into the teaching and learning process. You mentioned equity, John, so one of my most vivid examples of this is from work to support Afghan girls who, once they reach secondary school, are banned in their country from going to school. And there’s a whole initiative with Afghan diaspora educators who are using AI to create little mini lessons [LAUGHTER] that go by whatsapp on their cell phones to help girls keep going to school, basically, at home, and that is an incredible use case. Now this isn’t AI doing this alone. It is educators who are using this as a tool to help deliver this content that is also adaptive. That’s one example, a very large example that all over the world, people mentioned, especially educators, is saving teachers time. Teachers are overburdened in virtually every country [LAUGHTER] in the world, and there is a lot that generative AI can do to really remove some of the mundane tasks, or at least make them much more efficient, and teachers find that incredibly helpful. It could be admin paperwork. It could be trying to also use AI to improve their lesson planning or materials for students such as, “I have three different grade levels in my eighth grade classroom, can you give me this [LAUGHTER] for the three different reading levels my kids are out so they can all access it and succeed and grow.” So that was really useful. I will put an asterisk next to that one, because many teachers also said, “I hope my managers, be they school leaders, be they more actually, school board [LAUGHTER] leaders, don’t find out how much time I’m saving, because then they’re going to give me double the workload.” So this saving teacher time and freeing them up to do new, more relational, more interesting, more caregiving, more exciting, teaching and learning activities with their time only holds if teacher workload remains constant. There is also a wide range of other ways in which people are experimenting with generative AI, such as new forms of assessment, really being able to see where kids are stuck in their learning journey in a much more granular way, we think, has the potential [LAUGHTER] to be incredibly effective to help educators really help address where kids get stuck, things like helping neurodivergent kids, kids with learning disabilities, multilingual kids. These are the types of benefits that we found in our research.

Rebecca: Are the ways that you’re describing, the ways that AI is actually being used. Is there alignment between them?

Rebecca W.: Yes, Rebecca, you have hit exactly on the issue, which is we found that that is part of the ways in which the education ecosystem is ingesting and deploying AI, but that is not the main way in which young people are interfacing with generative AI. One of our findings was that for young people that live in communities with access to broadband and families with devices, so they may have a phone, they may have a laptop, they can get on the internet, they are interfacing with generative AI anywhere and everywhere. It’s in their Google searches, it’s on their social media platforms, it’s in their gaming platforms, and the line between technology for learning and education, technology for entertainment, and technology for communication have totally broken down. It’s all blurred. One young man told us last year, a high school student in the US, “Well, my school banned ChatGPT, but my friends, we just all go on to social media and get AI to do our homework that way. You can go on to Meta AI or Snapchat AI, and there are AI friends and companions. You can talk to them about how annoying your parents are or get relationship advice. And then you can take a picture of your homework and say, ‘Please write my essay for me.’ And then you can run it through a AI Humanizer that will insert some typos and then you turn it in.” So the thing we worry about most is young people being able to access commercial, often frontier lab AI chatbot models that are not designed for kids and not designed for learning. And I would say the same about AI friends and companions. Currently, by the way, one out of three teens in the US say they prefer talking to an AI friend or companion equally or more than talking to another human being. So this is a lot of kids, and it’s very early days in this technology.

Rebecca: That’s deeply troubling.

John: It is, [LAUGHTER] and one of the reasons why they may prefer that is AI systems tend not to be very judgmental, so if they say something that people might find offensive or troubling, it doesn’t have the same impact if they share that with an AI friend. And it is troubling because we’ve seen some really negative outcomes from some of those where kids were getting some really bad advice, and it’s led to some teens committing suicide.

Rebecca W.: Yes, and Common Sense Media has done a lot of work on this, and they say nobody under the age of 18 should be accessing AI companions just because of that, John. They are designed to be super, super friendly and to keep you talking to them. And everybody, by now, has heard the word sycophantic. [LAUGHTER] So if you’re a teen and you’re out there chatting with your AI friend and your mom makes you do the dishes, and you say, “Oh my gosh, my mom’s so annoying. She’s making me do the dishes, I just find it so unfair.” Your AI friend or companion is likely to say, “I am so sorry. You’re so misunderstood. That’s really terrible, and I’m here for you. Let’s talk about it.” Now, if you were to say the same thing to an actual human peer, they would say, “Dude, my mom makes me do the dishes [LAUGHTER] all the time. What is your problem?” And that right there is the core of the problem. If you repeat that type of social interaction over and over and over and over, that is how young people will develop their social interaction skills, their expectations for how others will treat them, and, frankly, their emotional resilience. Now learning, at the core of it, is about making mistakes and trying new things and taking risks. And if you are a young person who is developing socially and emotionally and your emotional muscles are to be agreed with all the time, we do really worry about what does that do for their ability to take feedback in the classroom, for example, [LAUGHTER] when they need to learn and they need feedback to grow.

John: And, as you note in the report, you’re also learning some social skills by interacting with other real people in the classroom, which is an important part of education, which gets lost when that’s being outsourced to interactions with AIs.

Rebecca W.: Yes, one of the things I keep repeating when talking about this report to people outside of education, in particular, is reminding them that young people are not little mini cognitive processing machines, and that classrooms do not only transmit knowledge from adults to youth. That is an important function, but by no means the only function. A lot of it is, how do you do perspective taking? How do you communicate with other people? How do you read a room? How do you self regulate if you’re used to getting your way all the time? Many things are happening that are really important inside classrooms. We only have to look back a couple of years to COVID when parents were tearing their hair out [LAUGHTER] and saying, please open schools back up and let me send my kids to school, to remind ourselves how important schooling is in kids lives for many reasons. Most kids were getting content at home through online learning, and that was not successful for most kids, again, because they aren’t little mini cognitive processing machines.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a little bit about some of the harms, including the chat companions and not doing your own homework. [LAUGHTER] Are there any other harms that you’d like to highlight that come out in the report?

Rebecca W.: So we did find that, currently, the risks of generative AI, in terms of how it’s being rolled out, are overshadowing the benefits of generative AI for student learning and development, because the risks are of a very different nature than the benefits. They are undermining young people’s ability to think independently, to relate to other people, to take feedback, as we just said, and to have a trusting relationship with their teacher, which are all foundational to even harnessing and accessing the benefits that generative AI poses. So the risks are things like impairing cognitive development when young people over rely on generative AI, not to assist, but to actually do their thinking for them, they are not learning. We all know that children’s brains develop the way they’re used, and if kids are doing their work through a chatbot, their brains are not doing the work, and it’s like going to a gym. If they go to a gym and bring a machine that lifts the dumbbells for them, and they leave, they’re not getting stronger. It’s the same thing. So it’s not just that they’re skipping steps on their homework and being more efficient. It’s that they’re entirely missing out on developing independent, critical thinking skills. We also, as we discussed already with AI companions, are worried about the social and emotional development. We’re additionally quite worried about the decline in trusting relationships that we heard from many people we interviewed, and it’s across the entire teaching and learning [LAUGHTER] instructional core ecosystem. So educators saying “I’m not entirely sure if I trust that my kids are doing their own work.” 50% of educators say they don’t trust their kids work in the US, and that is very hard. Educators need to know if it’s kids work, because that’s how they know how to teach next and what to do if they don’t know where kids are struggling, they’re flying blind. But students also talk about generative AI undermining their trust of teachers. They don’t use that word, but they say things like, “my teacher doesn’t care about me because they’re using generative AI to give me feedback, and I don’t think my teachers are really doing their job because they’re using generative AI to make a lesson plan.” So even if teachers are using AI in a way that they believe could help kids, it’s not a bad thing to give students opportunity, for example, to get feedback on your written work before you turn it in, because maybe that’s an opportunity to improve. But if you introduce that in an environment where there’s minimal trust, the interpretation on the part of the student is that it’s lack of care and professionalism, and that degrades trust even further. We also heard from educators that parents were doing weird stuff too, like taking their students graded assignments that came home, running them through [LAUGHTER] ChatGPT and getting a different grade and confronting the teacher. There’s also educators saying students are challenging me on my expertise because they came up with an alternative answer in chat GPT and the authority by which they’re imbuing ChatGPT as a veritable source, they seem to equate it sort of equal with the teacher’s perspective. So it is troubling, … that part is very, very troubling. There is, of course, other concerns, which we can go into if you want, but we touched on them very briefly, around children’s safety, whether it’s data privacy, whether it’s emotional manipulation towards self harm, which is not everybody, of course, but there’s been enough cases to show that it’s not just a one off and quite dangerous. Again, those are often commercial, general purpose products, not designed for kids, not designed for learning.

John: And one of the problems that kids are faced with is, in their social media feeds, they’re getting ads nearly constantly about all the things they can do to have AI assist them with their schoolwork, or do the school work for them in ways that are not detectable. And one of the concerns that I’ve heard many students express is that they’re reluctant to not use AI if they think all their classmates are. So there is some adverse peer pressure in the current environment too.

Rebecca W.: Yes, this is a huge issue. I am spending a lot of time now out in communities, disseminating the findings from the AI task force report, talking at conferences, meeting state level leaders and talking at school districts in the US, but also schools. And a lot of time, I talk with students, alongside teachers, and students are really worried, young students, you know, I’ve talked to fourth graders, fifth graders all the way through 12th grade. They have a lot of opinions and perspectives. One of the things I have always been surprised at is how much they’re tracking what this technology is doing. And sure enough, in a classroom of 9 year olds or 10 year olds, multiple kids bring up this question of, “What am I going to do for a job. I’m in school to learn. I’m supposed to learn. But what if robots do everything in the world? What is my role? And how am I going to get money?” And then they bring up things like… this is often more middle school kids like, “We’re supposed to be going to school here to learn and get better. And I don’t understand the point anymore. What does it mean to go to school if a robot chatbot can do everything that I’m being asked to do, what does that mean for me? What am I supposed to do? Now this is very demotivating.” They’re very worried about getting dumber [LAUGHTER]and worried about society getting dumber. [LAUGHTER] One young fifth grader last week, who I was talking to at school assembly with students, was saying, “What if we all get dumber and then I have to go to the doctor’s office or go to the hospital and I get sick, and there’s a doctor who isn’t quite as smart as he or she should be, and is relying on AI, and they accidentally take my heart out…” [LAUGHTER] like only a young child could do. That probably is not going to happen, but the general trajectory [LAUGHTER] is one that we all are worried about. So, yeah, it’s a real concern, and I think the social narrative around AI is problematic. I speak with parents a lot, and one parent told me… I was out in California, I was in Silicon Valley… and she said, “How do I keep motivating my child? She’s in middle school. I drive her to school every day, and we drive past a very large billboard that says, ‘Don’t hire humans, hire our AI agents.’” And I said, “Yes, that’s not a helpful social narrative. I wish that the technology companies would abandon that, first of all as a actual goal, [LAUGHTER]… I think they should abandon that… and as a social narrative, because the truth is, of course, we are here. We live here. We will have many, many things that we can do that are productive. 95% of what makes me me, and what makes John you, you and Rebecca you, you is not documented online, [LAUGHTER] right? Only a sliver of our human experience is really documented online. And there’s great things that AI can do. I wish our social narrative would be about AI directed towards scientific breakthrough, solving climate change, solving the question of food insecurity, figuring out how to cure diseases like that. That’s the promise of AI, not let’s just make humans irrelevant. That’s such a ridiculous social narrative.

Rebecca: And although that’s disturbing, at the same time, I find it good that our young people are concerned about these things. [LAUGHTER] That shows some faith in the future, that we have young people who are concerned about where this might take us if we don’t intervene.

Rebecca W.: They’re very, very aware, and they want to talk about it. And I always urge schools and ed leaders to start thinking about not just AI literacy, but questions of, how does the online world work? We talk about, in our report, it’s holistic AI literacy. People throw around the term AI literacy and mean very different things. We don’t mean prompt engineering and we don’t mean necessarily more time on screens. What we mean is learning about how the online world works. And let’s start by having conversations in person around what is exciting? What are you worried about? And then working through things. There’s all sorts of moral dimensions. Can I break up with my girlfriend by using AI to write a breakup note? Can I write a happy birthday to my parent using AI? [LAUGHTER] Kids want to talk about this stuff, and it really is very interesting if you sort of take a step back and think about what it means for human relationships, thinking, experience, what makes us really human? So those are all important questions that we can start with before you ever introduce a chatbot.

John: Right now, the path of AI use is being determined by the big AI companies with very little oversight or very little direction, but in your report, you do provide recommendations on three pillars that may help redirect this in a more positive way. And the three pillars that you use are prosper, prepare, and protect. Can you give us a few examples of strategies in each of these categories that might be used to shift things so that that balance of benefits and risks are altered in a more positive direction.

Rebecca W.: Yes. Our goal was to say, “Are we on the right track?” And we discovered, “no, we’re not.” And then our goal was, “How do we bend the arc to make sure AI can enrich learning and harness it for benefits and mitigate the risks?” And there were three big pillars, as you said, John. One, under prosper is, “What can we do as educationalists in the system today to shift how our teaching and learning is done, so that AI cannot hack the student experience?” Underneath that, we talk about having co- design hubs with educators. This would be developers partnering with educators and education organizations and education unions who are going to lead the way on what are the use cases that me as a teacher in the classroom, or as a librarian or whatever your role is in a school and in the education system, could use generative AI in a positive way? We talk about making sure students are at the table. I really do think every district in the US, or every school, if districts don’t do it, should have a student AI Council. We had a student author as part of our writing crew, and she very much advocated for this, again, because kids are living it, using it, experiencing it, right alongside educators. And she advocated for young people, saying, “Look, we can review procurement contracts. This is our data, by the way. Hey, we can red team and beta test the AI products before they’re procured by our district. We can help educators say how we might get around an assignment, maybe shift it.” So ultimately, I think what we need as educators to have a very clear mix of pedagogical strategies that are AI aware. And what I mean by that is, if you can shortcut an assignment with an AI chatbot, don’t assign it. Do something else. This can be incredibly difficult and [LAUGHTER] time consuming for educators. It’s really hard at the higher education level if you have large classes, but in the K-12 space, it is doable, for sure. And AI assisted… Where can AI help? Is it neuro divergence? Is it assessment? Is it leveling reading materials. And then AI resistant… when should AI not have a role in educating young people, or rather, when and what types of experiences still need to be human to human? So that’s in the prosper pillar.

Rebecca: So we talked a little bit about how widespread these tools are, and how easy it is for students to get their hands on these tools, commercially or otherwise, it’s kind of hard to just like, turn it off. It’s everywhere. But many elementary and secondary school systems are reintroducing mobile device bans during class hours. Is this something that might be helpful? But then also, I mean, we know that there’s AI glasses and things like this too that are in the mix.

Rebecca W.: So, in our report, we definitely support the large social movement started, frankly, by parents towards digital health [LAUGHTER] and good digital hygiene practices, which includes less screen time for kids. Most kids in the United States spend hours and hours. I think the average is five or seven hours online each day. It might be much higher than that I’m forgetting, but that’s important. We support bell-to-bell cell phone bans in schools if there’s a pedagogical exception, especially for schools that might be rural and not have good science equipment, and they use their cell phone as a gyroscope and stick it in a plastic bag and do an experiment, spin it around, great, but it’s teacher controlled. And I do think we currently know that kids are using screens to access generative AI, but exactly to your point, Rebecca, this will change soon, and so a movement that is about screen free childhood will soon need to pivot to be a pro presence, pro human, pro interaction childhood, because generative AI will be embedded in our clothes and our glasses and our, I don’t know, our writing implements. Who knows? And maybe that’s better and can be used in very specific ways to help augment learning, but it also presents a whole new landscape of difficulty [LAUGHTER] in thinking about how you control that.

John: I am concerned about some of the new technology coming out. Meta glasses, in particular, are a little bit troubling, because right now they’re not being used that often by students, but I’m seeing more and more student posts on various forums asking, “Well, how can I use this?” And one of the challenges is, right now, they’re voice controlled, but they could always put things up on a screen that has answers to test questions or something that may not be easy for instructors to see, even if they are taking tests on paper, for example, and the fact that AI is multimodal makes it a bit more challenging. One of the issues I’ve run into is I’ve been using polling software for many years in my classes, and in the past, students would generally think about it and then pick their own response, but because they’re coming in on their laptops or on their smartphones, they can just take a screenshot of it and just have it automatically answered. Or there are so many browser plugins that if they’re using a laptop, it can automatically provide an answer to them with questions. And that type of instruction used to be really helpful in giving students and me feedback on how students are learning and their progress, and it’s become almost meaningless today because of multimodal AI.

Rebecca W.:yeah, it’s a big challenge, I think, for everyone, but particularly at the higher education level. And I imagine we will eventually evolve for a little period. There’ll be a brief period where we reach some equilibrium, and there’ll be other ways to gather that sort of feedback that you’re used to from the clickers that is no longer relevant, or maybe if classes are small enough, we’ll do just a lot more Socratic dialogs and oral presentations. I know the class I co-teach at Georgetown, we just moved from a final paper to a final oral exam, one hour with each student to present to us their final findings in a PowerPoint that we say you can use AI, because we won’t be able to really control that, but we’re going to grill them [LAUGHTER] and whether they know their stuff, and we can do that because it’s a seminar. Now, if you have 100 students or 60 students, it’s a much bigger challenge, and to me, the alternative seems to be going back to blue books, [LAUGHTER] and nobody is used to writing by hand anymore.

Rebecca: John, you have some experience with this, I believe. [LAUGHTER]

John: In my econometrics class this semester, I had moved away from paper exams during the pandemic, and I really appreciated the fact that having exams that were online or assignments that were online, and projects and so forth that were online gave students much more flexibility in terms of time, for the students who needed a little bit more effort to catch up. They could do that,… for students who process things a little more slowly. But I was finding that that wasn’t happening in the same way anymore, because the responses were all kind of looking like they were AI generated, and the projects that they were creating look very much like AI-generated projects.

Rebecca W.: How can you tell, John? I’m sorry to interrupt you in the middle of your story, how could you tell they looked like AI generated? I’m always curious what people see.

John: The main thing was that students were doing so much better on their written project than when I asked them questions in class. They sounded very professional quite often, in ways that the students generally didn’t in other forms of writing. And they were very polished, and it just showed a dramatic leap in their performance, and I talked to them a bit about it, and they said, a lot of us use AI because we’re concerned that everyone else may be. And I talked to them about all this on the first day of the class, and put the syllabus together, and I was thinking about moving back to blue book exams. An- I talked to them about it, and they liked the idea. And the blue book exams in particular are two stage ones. So they take it first individually, and then I grade them, but then the next class day, they take an equivalent exam in small groups where they’re explaining things to each other, and it’s a very positive experience. I had done this many times before, prior to COVID, before I moved to entirely project-based assessment, the work was dramatically weaker than it had ever been before. And so I talked to them a little bit about that, and they said, we’ve been relying on AI when we got stuck, because it’s just so much easier, and it’s a bit of a challenge.

Rebecca W.: It is, and that’s one of the things that we found also in our risks, such high levels of dependence. Young people are saying, I can’t start anything anymore without AI there to help get me going the minute you sort of are stuck, rather than pausing, thinking, doing the deep reflection, which is needed to deeply engage and embed what you’re learning, [LAUGHTER] You get a quick “Oh, wait, I think, let me just ask AI and it’ll help me get on the right track.” And it feels like it’s okay, because maybe you’re asking a friend, but really it’s stopping young people from doing deep learning.

John: The desirable difficulties that Bjork talked about, they’re bypassing those, and that’s where we get long-term knowledge retention and transferability. And it’s not happening in the same way that it used to.

Rebecca: It seems like we’ve snuck into that second pillar, “prepare,” a little bit here. It’s a nice transition. Just telling students to stop using AI or don’t use it seems like a very different circumstance that won’t work, compared to the conversations like you’ve been having with your students, where they’ve had the opportunity to try to do something that’s not using AI, and they’ve realized that they’re not able to do it, and realizing how much the AI has prevented them from learning the materials. So how do we convince faculty that we need AI literacy? How do we help students recognize that using AI in certain ways is not actually helpful to them. It might be helpful in the moment, but not long term.

Rebecca W.: Yeah. Well, again, as you said, if the first pillar is, let’s shift teaching and learning, that’s something we can control. The second pillar is, let’s make everyone in our education institutions prepared to do teaching and learning in an AI world, which includes, for young people, but also educators, “How does the online world work?” In a K-12 setting, we teach young people about biology so they learn about how the living world works, but we don’t teach every kid about how the online world works, even though they’re spending huge amounts of time there, not because we want them necessarily to all go be a computer scientist. We don’t want every kid to go be a biologist either. But when they know it’s zeros and ones and lives off of our ideas and our data, how it does pattern recognition, what it’s really good at, what it’s not good at, that is very empowering. Knowledge is power, and we know that the more people know about AI actually, the less they use it. So I think we need holistic AI literacy that’s about how the online world works. I think that simple bans, although I empathize with the educators who do them because they are trying to help their kiddos learn. Kids always get around them, I just don’t think they’re feasible. And then, on the flip side, open ended, you can use it no matter what type of a thing is definitely risky, because a lot of the tools are not safe for kids, as I’ve said, and not made for learning. So we really do need to have assignments [LAUGHTER] in a school setting that kids can succeed on and that force them to get knowledge into themselves. You need to get knowledge into yourself [LAUGHTER] in order to be able to use it, to be creative, to apply it. And I do think that everybody needs really some holistic AI literacy. It’s students, it’s families, educators, school leaders, we all sort of need to get ourselves up to speed. And I would say that to the skeptical leader, skeptical educator, that there’s a real urgency to this, because, just like John said, we will miss out an entire generation who will rely on AI too much, even though they might not think they are and actually not be developing their cognitive abilities that they need to thrive.

John: So the last pillar is “Protect,” which involves trying to regulate AI platforms so that they are used more effectively. And I know that is being done to some extent, at least in Europe, we haven’t seen a lot of evidence of that here. In fact, we just saw in late February, the federal government has declared one platform a threat to national security because the federal government wants to allow it to do illegal things without any constraints. In the current environment, at least, is it very likely that we’ll see much regulation of AI platforms at the federal level?

Rebecca W.: It’s very unlikely that we’re going to get significant federal level AI regulation. There does not seem to be hardly any appetite for regulating large tech companies at the federal level from the administration, however, I do think we will probably get regulation at the federal level around children’s safety. This is, to me, the one bipartisan issue that I see, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, we all have kids, and we all want our kids to be safe and generative AI is worrisome, AI companions are very worrisome. They should not be available and used by kids, and so there’s a lot of bills, actually, bipartisan bills at the federal level around regulating generative AI for kids, particularly AI companions. But there’s also a great deal of legislative action at the state level because of the gap in federal legislation, states are jumping in and trying to regulate, and that’s annoying for technology companies, because then they have this really complicated landscape of regulation that they’ve got to try to navigate and design products around. It would actually be much better and more efficient if they got together and supported sort of national safeguards and guardrails and appropriately [LAUGHTER] effective regulation at the national level, but they haven’t yet done that. So states are jumping in. So I actually think this is a parent-, student-, teacher-, driven movement, and state houses across the country are very, very concerned about it.

Rebecca: So I’m a parent, I’m an educator, I’m a member of the public. [LAUGHTER] What do I need to do to help change the trajectory of AI in a more positive direction?

Rebecca W.: Yeah, I think you can think of yourself as in concentric circles. As a parent, talk to your kids about it. We are developing a list of tip sheets for families and parents that talk about what families and parents need to know, and also key things to talk with your kids about around generative AI that is derived from our report, little, short, bite size, one pagers and on social media, because we found that this is a huge gap. People are looking at educators and students and leaders and jurisdictions and parents and families are left out of this conversation. So those are available at brookings.edu anybody can download them for free, and we’re beginning and there will be more posted throughout the next couple months. So that’s one. Two, as an educator, obviously you can lean into having conversations about generative AI with your students and really open up and see where they’re at. And if you don’t have an institution that’s leading on it, you could form your own little AI council with your students in your classroom for your class, like, hey, how should I handle this? This is my struggle. You guys want to learn. You’re feeling pressured by students like, nobody’s happy, nobody’s happy about this situation. It’s not like kids are like, this is the best thing in the world, and thank God, especially at the higher ed level, they’re there to learn, and they’re like, oh my gosh, but everyone’s using it, and then I’m going to get worse grades, and I want to go to grad school, so I need to use it too, or I want to get a good job. So I would have conversations at an educator level, and then as a citizen, there’s lots of groups to get engaged, and I would reach out to your local representatives, of course, especially at the state level, possibly the federal level, there’s groups like the EDSAFE alliance that have lots of briefings and opportunities to move these issues forward that you can get engaged at.

John: And we’ve also seen some large educational groups starting to push back. One area in particular is over the use of agentic AI, which can log into a course, complete all the assignments, and then log out all without any human intervention other than giving it the URL, your user ID, and password. And I know, the Modern Language Association and quite a few other groups have been pushing back on the AI companies to limit the use of agentic AI in learning management platforms.

Rebecca W.: I think this is just going to be the story for the next couple years, because the technology is moving so quickly. Again, young people and students are really creative, [LAUGHTER] and I’ve never seen a tech system that fully keeps them out. And so I’m sure there will be, and I’m sure it already is happening, technology companies who are working to make sure agents aren’t logging in for students, there’s real vested interest, especially in anybody doing online distance learning,[LAUGHTER] virtual learning, delivering certified learning courses that it isn’t they’re certifying the work of an AI agent. So I’m sure there’s work arounds. I’m sure there will be long cat and mouse games played for several years to come. And the question is, how much will that undercut our students ability to learn? It won’t undercut the most motivated and engaged kids, highly, highly, highly motivated and engaged kids, which is, as I know from my work with my colleague Jenny on our book, The Disengaged Teen, is a sliver of the K-12 student population. Those kids are going to rock. They are going to use AI to go farther and faster and grow. The issue is all the kids who are in passenger mode or busy or maybe managing work and trying to complete a degree. That’s the issue. How do we make sure those kids have a learning experience where they actually are doing the work they need to grow?

Rebecca: Yeah, I think the fact that many of us are overloaded, even as young kids these days, certainly motivates the desire to reduce workload in whatever way possible, or to remove the tugs on time. I wish there was a solution for that.

Rebecca W.: Seriously, I do think this whole thing of “You’re gonna get to a three-day work week and you’re gonna have so much free time.” It’s never happened before. We’ve had technology evolving. What I’m seeing in my work, at least, is I’m expected to do a lot more in a shorter period of time, and I think that’s what’s going to happen. So we have agency. We all are part of a system. So I do think we can exert agency over our own little ecosystem, and I have a lot of colleagues who I work with on my team who I can try to model, and if I’m not a good model, at least I can manage and tell them, “You should go home. This is too much. You can’t do it all. That’s okay. We’ll tackle it next week.” [LAUGHTER]

John: And that’s one of the possible outcomes of increasing use of AI, that we all become more productive and we decide we don’t need to spend as much time working as a society. Another possible outcome is it could end up lowering the return to education, resulting in increasing income inequality and perhaps more unemployment, with more and more of society’s benefits going to a small number of owners of these tech firms.

Rebecca W.: Yeah, and/or introducing… we talk about in the report, maybe there’s a new dimension of inequality around cognitive stratification, where the highly motivated, highly engaged, and the people who can afford the most expensive and therefore the most accurate and powerful generative AI models combined will be super humans, [LAUGHTER]and the rest of us who are maybe less motivated, less engaged and might not have access to even the top models will just not be able to keep up.

John: It reminds me a little bit of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine where there was an elite that lived on the surface, but all the work was being done by the masses underneath the ground. And that’s another possible outcome of all this, which I’m hoping we’ll be able to avoid.

Rebecca W.: Yes, let’s all work towards avoiding that. [LAUGHTER]

John: and doing these types of pre-mortems before things become ingrained could really offer some benefits, because, often, as you said, these things become ossified, that we get locked into these directions, and it’s hard to change things once they become the norms.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’d like to keep dystopias to my fiction reading [LAUGHTER] as opposed to my lived experience.

Rebecca W.: That’s right, me too. That’s the goal.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Rebecca W.: What’s next for my work is, with my colleagues, we are out talking to people, sharing our findings that came out. It’s about a month and a half ago now, and we are thinking about what is our next phase of research. I’m particularly interested in thinking about how generative AI can enrich learning, but not just learning outcomes, but how could it be used in a way, or not used, to make sure we have trusting, supportive, agentic [LAUGHTER] learning experiences for kids,

Rebecca: We always look forward to seeing what is next for you. Each of your reports is really helpful, and we enjoy talking to you. Thank you.

Rebecca W.: likewise. Thanks for having me on.

John: And thank you for all the work you’re doing in these areas that are so desperately needed.

Rebecca W.: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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