AI and Student Agency

And other tools to promote learning...

At a recent staff conference, in a paper on AI that our principal gave us to read, I was struck by the following quote on student agency—that is, students' natural desire and ability to direct their own learning:

"As any kindergarten teacher … can tell you, students arrive to school bursting with agency. But as any kindergarten teacher … can also tell you, an entire classroom of students with this level of agency at all times would be impossible to teach. Out of logistical necessity, an emphasis on compliance and grades, and curriculum and teaching that often doesn't encourage exploration or inquiry, students are taught that some passive compliance is necessary to make schooling possible.

"As much as we lament students whose only questions seem to be, 'How many points is this worth?' and 'Can you just tell me the answer?', we have to acknowledge that they didn't arrive at school that way. If students conclude that schooling isn't really about their learning, they'll make the logical but debilitating choice to trade agency for learning with efficiency."

—from "Deeper Learning, Not Passive Compliance", Tony Frontier, Ph.D.

It was only the day before that I'd fielded a question from a student asking how much of my class they needed to complete in order to receive a final mark for it—and, as someone who has always loved learning, I've struggled with this attitude ever since I first began teaching. As I wrote on one of the darkest days of my rather difficult high-school teaching practicum:

Once I wore bright hues of red,
But now my heart obeys my head.
Shades of black I wear to school.
Dullness is the only rule.
Passionless I teach the text,
Leave the building vaguely vexed,
Bored to tears, but in control—
Stop me please, I'm on a roll
With 30 kids who hate my guts,
But know to ask no "ifs" or "buts",
Learning names and dates and grammar,
How to speak and not to stammer,
How to add up "a" plus "b",
How to fake it till you're free:
Free from all this useless learning,
Free to "get out" and start earning
Money, though a few survive,
Escape the system half-alive,
Return to turn it on its head,
And fade to black from wearing red.

While I eventually found a way to approach teaching somewhat more positively (which is why I'm still a teacher), and have, as a homeschooling father, been working for years now on ways not to squash the love of learning and to rekindle agency in my own children as students, there is no simple, scalable solution to this problem. Including, I would suggest, the wide-eyed wonder with which we sometimes turn to AI as a potential "saviour" from this problem.

The paper that our principal gave us to read, which so aptly captured the suppression of student agency that is built into our educational system, is a good one, suggesting that the active use of AI as a sort of personal tutor to support students' needs for both competence and autonomy can actually more than compensate for the negative "passive" use of AI as a "get the computer to do all my homework for me" work-avoidance (and thus learning-avoidance) tool. But there's no guarantee that AI will be used this way—which is why Dr. Frontier wrote his paper to encourage teachers to use AI in this manner.

However, I think the most valuable takeaway from this paper and from the "rise of AI" is, in fact, the recognition that our current educational system is flawed (as are all systems, of course) and that one of its primary flaws is precisely its suppression of student agency in favour of "efficiency": teaching cohorts of students in lock-step, whether that be in terms of calendar or curriculum content or both.

What AI can contribute here, then, is to reward students' natural interest in learning (which prompts them to exercise their agency) by providing them with the opportunity for personalized exploration of the subject they are learning about—at least when students are encouraged and/or given the opportunity to use it as a sort of interactive tutor—but AI is, in fact, only one of many tools that can be used to inspire and facilitate this renewal of student agency. My personal preference here, as a teacher, is to provide my students with opportunities for project-based learning, in which I work hard to ensure the students create projects they are actually interested in. Flexible timetabling—allowing students to learn at their own pace—is another tool here, as are electives and online and personalized learning, of which homeschooling is perhaps the ultimate example!

In the end, the rise of AI in education and in society at large should not be seen as an "end of the world" scenario so much as an "It's the end of the world as we know it" scenario. It should, as I have said before, remind us what the point of education is, and make us think about what it really means to be human. Education is not a game to get good grades, it is about learning, about achieving our full potential by being trained to exercise our God-given agency and ability to achieve good in the most productive, loving way possible. Which is, of course, what it means to be truly human.