If teachers survive the onslaught of artificial intelligence, then most assuredly they will have to change their classroom practices.
“In 2017, Alex Campbell, a sociology teacher at Elizabethton High School in Tennessee, offered his students the assignment of a lifetime: Could they solve a notorious series of cold-case murders that had stumped law enforcement for more than three decades?”
“He warned them up front: ‘This is going to be the hardest class you’ve ever had.’”
“His students’ response left no doubt: They eagerly dug into the so-called Redhead Murders, unsolved killings of at least six young women whose bodies had been dumped along roadsides across the South from the late 1970s through early 1990s. They soon tracked down an FBI profiler, interviewed a victim’s brother, built timelines out of decades-old case files and identified several new victims. They brought in a true-crime podcaster who was already poking around the killings, developed their own profile of a killer and landed on a theory of the cases that the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation eventually supported.”
“Their work became the basis of their own 2024 true-crime podcast, Murder 101. Later that year, Campbell gathered a new group of students to continue the work – it became the basis for an Amazon Prime TV series of the same name that in July cracked the streaming service’s top 3 series rankings.”
“In an interview, Campbell said the daunting project succeeded not because his students found the work easy – just the opposite, actually.”
“’I make it obvious to them up front that this is going to be very hard, but they’re going to be invested, and so that makes it easy to do hard work,’ he said. ‘If you ask people about the most meaningful experiences in their life, they’re almost always hard.’”
“That insight sits at the center of a conversation now surfacing among educators. As generative AI drafts essays, solves equations and summarizes novels in seconds, a growing number of teachers say the technology has stripped away the last excuse schools have to address a problem they’ve long avoided: chronically low student motivation.”
If the role of teacher is to survive, classroom leaders will need to become more creative about what they want their students to learn. Otherwise, artificial intelligence could replace those teachers who are just going through the motions.
As always, talented classroom teachers should survive the artificial intelligence onslaught, but we all know not all classroom teachers are talented.
ABPTL will be away until October 5th. Til then. SVB
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