Teachers put AI to the test

“About three months before OpenAI launched publicly, I was given a sneak peek, and I knew immediately that this is going to drastically change education, probably forever,” says Darren Spyksma, the Associate Executive Director for the Society of Christian Schools in British Columbia (SCSBC).

Just over a year ago, Spyksma was tasked by the SCSBC with helping Christian schools in British Columbia respond to the generative artificial intelligence (AI) boom. He noticed there weren’t a lot of companies working to tailor AI tools to Christian education. Spyksma says the rush to develop new AI tools “feels a bit like an arms race.”

The SCSBC, partnering with the Center for the Advancement of Christian Education and a consulting company, began developing an AI program for educators in K-12 Christian schools. The software, now named Amplify AI, is designed to assist teachers in lesson planning, creating tests, drafting challenging letters to parents, and adapting lessons for inclusive education and Individual Education Plans (IEPs). Amplify AI (amplify-ai.ca) launched to the public in April.

A time saver

Particularly in inclusive education, Spyksma and the team have noticed a huge potential for Amplify AI as a tool. “In most educational jurisdictions, if students with diverse abilities are enrolled in a school, the school is obligated to provide an individualized education plan and student learning plan for these children, and that is a very bureaucratic and arduous process.”
But, he says, a number of inclusive educators who tested Amplify AI have said the education plans are “better than what humans can create.” They noticed that the specificity it provided regarding the child’s skills and interests was faster and of a higher quality than what most educators would produce. A job that would usually take three to five hours now takes fifteen minutes.

Ella Ringma, Assistant Principal at Centennial Christian School in Terrace, B.C., tested out an early version of Amplify AI. While she noted the early version had some limitations that made it slower than other AIs, she was excited to try it. “I think it has the potential to help teachers keep the Christian worldview at the front of their thinking. You can ask other AIs to do that, but you must do all the prompting. To have an AI that has that built in would be a time saver.”

Spyksma is already in conversation with other Christian education associations and schools internationally about adapting the AI program to their local curriculum.

“[AI] is a bit of a Pandora’s box,” acknowledges Spyksma. “The box has been opened and we can’t close the box again. So if that’s the case, how do we respond faithfully and through a redemptive lens? That’s the challenge I think Christian educators have before them, and we’re hoping to help them with that through these tools and the work we’re doing.”

Guardrails and priorities

Amplify AI is built on OpenAI’s ChatGPT software. ChatGPT is a Generative AI program trained on massive amounts of information. Most of the information is publicly available and comes from books, Wikipedia and news articles. But OpenAI is also facing legal challenges for intellectual property violations in the content it generates.

Spyksma’s team may have used OpenAI’s software, but they did establish their own guardrails and priorities. They trained the Amplify AI on expert lesson plans and a theological framework, which form the base of the tool.

One way to think about how Amplify AI was trained is to picture a series of concentric circles telling the software which information to prioritize. For Amplify AI, Jesus’ actions in the Bible are at the centre. Circle two is what Jesus said, and circle three is the rest of Scripture. Circle four is key creeds and unifying Christian teachings (such as the Apostles’ Creed), and circle five is a broad scope of Christian thinkers (such as the Reformed favourite, Abraham Kuyper).

Even with the extensive training for theological soundness, the AI hasn’t been without its tricky spots. At one point, a principal asked the tool as part of a social studies lesson to create “a theological backing for medical assisted dying.” The tool did exactly that. The principal emailed Spyksma, “This is not OK.”

Spyksma still stands by the software. “Because this is an adult (teacher) facing tool rather than a child (student) facing tool, I’m not as concerned about things like that as this principal was. Even if the output from the tool isn’t quite in alignment with the teacher, the teacher needs to use their discernment to make decisions about what they’re going to use and what they’re not going to use, as opposed to just accepting what the tool outputs. And that’s also part of what it means to be human and wrestle with the direction of God’s Word.”

Future concerns

The name, Amplify AI, comes from the team’s desire for the tool to amplify the teacher’s skill, not replace the teacher. If the tool makes a teacher’s job easier, giving them more time to better interact with students and be present with them instead of spending hours on lesson planning, it could be a blessing. But any technological innovation tends to solve some problems while creating new ones and we’re human, prone to sin and shortcuts.

“The likelihood of me relying on generative AI more than I should is high because it feels like a necessity,” says Spyksma. “My concern for increased generative AI use is that it’s not going to make our life better, it’s just going to demand more of us because now we should be able to get twice as much done as we used to get done.”

When he looks to the far future of education, Spyksma’s speculations surrounding AI are grim. He’s worried that human teachers will become a luxury only affordable for the wealthy. “The least financially secure are the ones that are going to face even more challenges, because more of their education is going to be done by tech, not by humans. They’re going to miss out on so much more of what it means to be human in that process, and we don’t know what the consequence of that is.”

Students and AI

As an educator, Ringma also has concerns about teacher training and school policy around the use of AI. Should there be age restrictions? When is it acceptable to use and when is it not? Should an ethics course be taught before students are allowed to use AI in school?

“These are very important questions to be asking at Christian schools where we see each student as being made in the image of God,” Ringma says. “We, as teachers, are given the task of stewarding students’ learning so that they can grow in their understanding of their place in God’s Story. How are we going to ensure that AI is not negatively affecting their learning? How do we teach our students to use AI so that they recognize that it is only a tool?”

Ringma is worried that relying on AI tools might affect students’ critical thinking skills. “The process of learning to write well is part of brain development. Critical and creative thinking are both built through the process of writing. If our students are using AI to do their writing, the connections are not being made in their developing brains. At a Christian school, this should be a big red flag, as we know that our students have been created to develop these gifts to their full ability. If we are allowing AI to rob them of this, that is a problem.”

God’s sovereignty

Yet Spyksma says, “If we believe that God is sovereign and God, in his sovereignty, saw all of history at one time and saw this play out, this was part of the latent creative potential that God created when he created.” If that’s the case, Spyksma believes “we have an obligation as Christians to engage [in generative AI].”

The questions educators, parents and students have about AI use will shift as technology develops. Instead of asking how much of a role AI can or should have in schools, they will question the purpose of schools in the first place. Why education? What is the value of it, and how important is human contact?

“What does it mean to be human and how do we work with families to help develop image bearers into all God wants them to be?” asks Spyksma.

It’s not a question an AI can answer.