Educators grapple with how to use AI in Delaware classrooms

Every conversation with leaders from nine Delaware colleges and high schools about artificial intelligence’s presence in the classroom reveals unique ways the evolving technology is being used. 

It’s created a problem for schools and colleges wrestling with setting up their guardrails and adopting recent guidance published by the Delaware Department of Education.

“AI has been in the education space for a while, like certain testing: You take a test, you get a question right, you then get a harder question, and if you get it wrong, you get an easier question, and then it sort of gives you a path forward for student learning,” said Kevin Wright, the instructional technology coordinator for Appoquinimink School District. 

The AI that has drawn attention in recent years is known as generative AI, which includes popular sites like ChatGPT, Claude, DALL-E, Midjourney, and Gemini

Generative AI

Different programs focus on different objects – ChatGPT and Claude are typically for written text, while DALL-E and Midjourney are primarily for artificial images.

A student could type in a prompt such as “write a three-page essay about how the French were involved in World War I” or “create an image of Brad Pitt wearing a Philadelphia Eagles jersey while riding a rhino” and the AI programs would generate an essay or an image.

Policy approaches

These forms of AI have advanced drastically in recent years, to the point where there’s now fake videos that can be generated, and you can’t be sure there aren’t errors in what’s produced (e.g., wrong information or extra fingers/arms in AI images). 

RELATED: State unveils artificial intelligence guidance for schools 

Trish Gerken, public information officer at the Milford School District, said the district is following the state’s guidance.

Here’s what each section of the education department’s guide explains, which can be helpful to teachers, administrators, parents, or anyone else interested in the future of AI in schools:

• Understanding AI: definitions of artificial intelligence, what is and is not AI, predictive versus generative AI and the advantages and cautions of generative AI.
• Implementing generative AI in Delaware districts and charters: best practices for implementation strategies, specifically tips for protecting student data, ensuring ethical AI use, promoting equity and enhancing learning. This section also details how to manage generative AI platforms. 
• Integrating generative AI into the classroom: protecting student data with generative AI classroom integration, ensuring ethical AI use with AI classroom integration, promoting equity with generative AI classroom integration, enhancing learning with generative AI classroom integration, generative AI and student learning and more.
•  Professional learning: professional learning programs that incorporate AI into classrooms, delivery methods and examples of content delivery resources. 

Other educational entities in the state are putting their unique twists on navigating the technology. 

“We have a policy that’s required on every faculty member syllabus, where they choose from a range of options,” said Joel Worden, provost vice president for academic affairs and professor of English and communication at Goldey-Beacom College.

The professors can choose from four options that range from absolutely no AI in the classroom to students being able to use it however they want, and they are given guidance for each.

While Goldey-Beacom has not yet compiled statistics on what options have been selected, all four options are in play.

Justina Thomas, vice president for academic affairs at Delaware Technical Community College, said the school is focusing on educating faculty and students on the ethical and appropriate use of generative AI.

“We’re all really trying to learn at the same time, so I don’t think that there’s a real hard line there of exactly how we’re teaching the students in terms of how to use it or how not to use it,” she said, “but it varies depending on the class and depending on the program.”

Because it’s new, the education of AI usage in ethical and productive ways is a theme throughout Delaware schools. 

“Our approach to engaging with AI begins with a responsibility to establish transparent guidelines aligned with our educational values,” said Denise Wells, vice president of academic affairs at Wilmington University. “AI tools can enhance learning and inspire creativity, but educators must uphold academic integrity for today’s students and future generations.”

​​WilmU, she said, is committed to advancing AI’s integration across its programs in ethically responsible ways, empowering teachers and students through training and opportunities to explore AI as it continues to evolve.

One of the issues with AI is fear and uncertainty, said Tanya Hettler, director of the Center for Education Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute. 

“It is important for districts to put guidance in place for teachers and students before issues arise,” she said, adding that teachers and parents should explore AI for themselves to better understand what it is and how it can be used.

“Professional development for teachers is key,” she said. “It is also important to assure teachers that AI will not replace them but can be an aid in their work. For example, it can help with grading, student-specific one-on-one tutoring, personalized student learning, and reducing paperwork.”

Implementation challenges

A main concern among educators is the use of artificial intelligence for plagiarism. 

While there are detection systems available, they are often faulty and inaccurate.

Joshua Wilson, associate professor in the School of Education at the University of Delaware, pointed out that detection systems often have false positives, and they’re more likely to flag the work of English language learners as AI-positive. 

Christopher Penn, a well-respected data scientist based in Boston, ran the Declaration of Independence through a detection system that said the document – written in 1776 – was 98% AI-generated.

The detection systems can also be confusing and arbitrary. 

Jeff Kilner, instructional technology specialist for the Indian River School District, cites how they typically spew out a number.

“If it says a piece of writing is 65% AI-generated, what does that exactly tell us?” he said, “and it becomes even more problematic when you look at the fact that research shows these detectors actually flag English and second language learners work at a higher frequency, so there are multiple layers of these tools being problematic.”

Hettler said schools should set and communicate a clear plagiarism policy so that students know how to properly cite AI sources and what is and is not acceptable on a certain assignment. 

She believes misinformation, bullying and harassment, and unequal access are also challenges of the AI surge.

“Already in Delaware, some students used generative AI to create a nude image of a classmate,” she said. “These students were suspended. Policies like this should be made clear to students. A student agreement for AI should be signed as part of the district’s discipline policy.”

Some schools use detection systems, but others do not.

UD, for example, does not, but Appo uses GoGuardian with an AI filter installed on all student devices. 

Another downfall of these systems is that an AI system is used to guess other AI, which can be faulty.

It starts with a conversation, and if a faculty member knows their students and knows the content, and something doesn’t smell right, it always starts with a conversation, said Mary Wheeling, director of faculty development and associate professor of English and humanities at Goldey-Beacom. 

“Tell me about your paper; I would love to know where you found these statistics, or tell me your process of writing,” she said.

Wilson said some UD professors are going back to handwritten essays and perhaps having students explain how draft one is different from draft two and how draft two is different from the final submission. 

“The other component to this is making sure that we are using meaningful assessments in the classroom that allow us to see a student’s authentic work in a low-stakes way,” Thomas said. “If we’re in an English classroom and there’s a five-page paper due in week six, we would have already seen a student’s writing leading up to that six-week assignment, so we know, based on all of that evidence, if a student’s using a tool and maybe plagiarizing.”

Worden said that trying to focus all energy and attention toward catching that small percent of students who fully use AI to cheat detracts from what educators are here to do.

Wright said a human-first approach to education is key, but experts agree that AI will likely become an everyday part of education.

Both Wright and Hettler pointed to the need for teachers, schools, and districts to learn how to keep student data safe using AI. 

“This is a question for districts to ask when meeting with AI vendors,” Hettler said. “Depending on students’ access to the internet, there will be differing levels of access to AI, so this must be taken into consideration when teachers create assignments involving AI or grade based on AI usage.”

Many experts compare the presence of artificial intelligence to how people used to feel about calculators. 

“When I was growing up, my teachers told me I wasn’t always going to have a calculator in my pocket,” Equels said. “Well, not only do we have calculators in our pocket, but we have the entirety of all human knowledge in our pockets as well. AI is just going to become ubiquitous with education, and we are going to hopefully see more classes embrace it for their own particular tasks.”

AI usage also depends on the class, which is why the acceptance of AI varies from teacher to teacher.

Classroom applications

Artificial intelligence might be more accepted in a social studies class where a student is trying to compile a thorough background of an event with primary sources and documents.

But, it might be more of a red flag in an English or creative writing class, where a student uses it to simply write a short story. 

Asa Equels, a Spanish and computer science teacher at Padua Academy, said that AI has its own unit, specific to machine learning algorithms for his tech classes. 

“​​What actually is machine learning, and how do we take advantage of the programming that is behind generative AI tools like ChatGPT, or anything like that, so that we can actually get the most beneficial outputs for whatever it is that we are using or that we want for that particular situation,” he said.

He has his students prompt AI to build a website from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

“It helps them to understand that this is a great tool that they can use to do things that maybe they never thought that they were capable of doing,” he said, “but also they can see the frustrations of it not doing exactly what it needs to do, so they see that there are limitations and they learn that there are some things they need to learn on my own before they get AI to do something.”

Wright said that some language immersion teachers in Appo use AI to communicate with families. 

“None of them are native English speakers, so sometimes they’ll get emails from parents that are difficult to translate or respond to,” he said.

Using AI in that situation calms the fears that they will clearly understand what a parent is saying and vice versa, rather than using Google Translate which is a very direct translation and not very colloquial and sometimes doesn’t make sense.

Padua’s Equels said in his Spanish classes, he sometimes uses AI to generate poems that are used to help students with their pronunciation of words and fluency in reading. It’s also used to generate photos to accompany stories, with the end goal of working on the Spanish-speaking capabilities of students.

Wright said that “alteration is easier than creation.”

Some teachers use it to develop prompts or tailor a lesson plan to a student’s unique interests.

It can also be used to open up more discussions about society.

“It’s an interesting exercise in a humanities course to ask students to input a prompt, what you want, what kind of image you want, and then evaluate, why or how do I feel about the image that’s being generated?” Goldey-Beacom’s Worden said. “One specific example was prompting AI to create an image of a female DJ, and why is her stomach always bare in the images it creates?”

Future outlook

As schools explore this new paradigm of education, many have working panels or committees specifically related to AI, or are just now deciding to focus on the topic.

“The DSU Faculty Senate is currently working toward the establishment of a committee to look at the issue of AI usage in the context of curriculum delivery and course assignments,” said Carlos Holmes, spokesperson for Delaware State University.

He said the Faculty Senate expects the committee to be established by the beginning of the new year and will hold its first meeting at that time, and the eventual outcome will come in the form of recommendations on how AI should be governed at DSU.

“As an innovative and rapidly evolving technology, AI offers substantial opportunities to enrich learning experiences in both high schools and higher education,” WilmU’s Wells said. 

She said the school remains excited about AI’s potential to transform education while mindful of the ethical challenges it presents, and its commitment is to thoughtfully leverage this powerful tool, preparing students for a world where AI plays an essential role.

“AI isn’t going to take people’s jobs, but people who know how to use AI will take people’s jobs,” Equels said. “My goal is to train these students to know how to use a modern skill, how to teach them a modern skill, to use a modern tool to make them effective workers, or just effective citizens.”

Several schools – charters, privates, and higher education institutions – did not return multiple requests to interview on artificial intelligence in the classroom.