Teaching in the Age of AI - Embracing the Tool While Preserving Critical Thinking

The statistics are staggering: nearly 50% of K-12 students use ChatGPT at least weekly, both inside and outside of school, with 86% of university students using AI tools to assist with their schoolwork. As an English tutor and SAT prep instructor, I'm not just witnessing this shift—I'm living it daily with my students.

Last month, a student showed me an essay she'd "written" with AI assistance. The grammar was flawless, the structure perfect, but something was missing. When I asked her to explain her thesis, she couldn't. This moment crystallized what many educators are grappling with: how do we harness AI's power while ensuring students develop genuine critical thinking skills?

The knee-jerk reaction among many educators has been to ban AI entirely. This approach is not only unrealistic but counterproductive. These tools aren't going away—they're becoming more sophisticated and integrated into professional environments our students will enter. Instead of fighting this reality, we need to reshape how we teach.

In my SAT prep sessions, I've started incorporating AI as a drafting and brainstorming tool while maintaining rigorous standards for analysis and revision. When students use AI to generate essay outlines, I require them to defend every point, explain their reasoning, and identify potential counterarguments. The AI becomes a starting point for deeper thinking, not a replacement for it.

However, a recent study found that 72% of high school students use AI to complete assignments without really understanding the material. This reveals our real challenge: we're not just competing with AI for students' attention—we're failing to make learning compelling enough that students want to understand, not just complete.

The solution lies in fundamentally rethinking our approach to assessment and instruction. Instead of asking students to summarize a text (something AI excels at), we should focus on synthesis, evaluation, and personal connection. Rather than assigning generic five-paragraph essays, we can design prompts that require students to connect literature to their lived experiences or current events—tasks that demand human insight.

For SAT preparation, this means teaching students to use AI as a research assistant while developing their own analytical voice. When working on reading comprehension, students can use AI to clarify difficult vocabulary, but they must develop their own strategies for approaching complex passages under time pressure.

The most successful students I work with understand that AI is a powerful tool, but it can't replicate the kind of nuanced thinking that colleges value and standardized tests reward. They use it to enhance their learning process, not replace it.

As educators, we have an opportunity to model thoughtful AI integration. By showing students how to use these tools ethically and effectively, we prepare them for a future where human-AI collaboration will be the norm, not the exception.

The goal isn't to eliminate AI from education—it's to ensure that when students graduate, they possess the critical thinking skills that no algorithm can replicate. In this new landscape, our role as educators becomes even more crucial: we're not just teaching content, we're teaching students how to think.