Teachers are pulling up a chair to implement AI in the classroom.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) announced on Tuesday that it will open a training center in New York City devoted to teaching educators how to responsibly use AI systems in their work.
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Dubbed the National Center for AI Instruction, the training center will open this fall and kick off with a series of workshops on practical uses of AI for K-12 teachers. Representing close to two million members, the AFT is the second-largest teachers’ union in the United States. The effort is being launched in partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic, who have pledged a cumulative $23 million for the hub.
“Now is the time to ensure Al empowers educators, students, and schools,” OpenAI wrote in a company blog post published Tuesday, announcing its plan to invest $10 million in the Center over the next five years. “For this to happen, teachers must lead the conversation around how to best harness its potential.”
Backlash and acceptance
The rise of generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT in recent years has sparked widespread concern among educators. These systems can write essays and responses to homework questions in seconds, suddenly making it difficult to determine if assignments have been completed by hand or by machine.
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At the same time, however, many teachers have actively embraced the technology: a recent Gallup poll found that six-in-ten teachers used AI at work in the most recent school year, helping them save time on tasks like preparing lesson plans and providing feedback on student assignments. To make educators feel more comfortable about using AI, companies including Anthropic and OpenAI have launched education-specific versions of their chatbots: Claude for Education and ChatGPT Edu, respectively.
Like many other industries that have suddenly had to contend with the ubiquity of powerful AI systems, the US education system has struggled to achieve a healthy balance with the technology. Some school systems, like New York City’s public schools, initially opted to ban its employees and students from using ChatGPT.
But over time, it’s become clear that AI isn’t going away, and that there is yet to be a long-term benefit in ignoring it. The NYC public school system later changed its no-ChatGPT policy, and some universities, like Duke University and the schools belonging to the California State University system, have begun providing premium ChatGPT services for free to students. Similarly, the Miami-Dade Public School system started deploying Google’s Gemini chatbot to 100,000 of its high school students earlier this year.
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Like those university initiatives, the new partnership with the AFT will also benefit the AI companies sponsoring the effort, as it will place their technology into the hands of many thousands of new users.
President Trump issued an executive order in April focused on equipping students and teachers with AI literacy skills, signaling efforts like this one with AFT are in line with the administration’s forthcoming AI Action Plan, set to be released later this month.
Impact on critical thinking
Apologists for AI in the classroom will sometimes compare it to previous technologies, such as digital calculators or the internet, which felt disruptive at the time of their debut but have since become foundational to modern education.
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A new body of research, however, is starting to show that using AI tools can inhibit critical thinking skills in human users. The technology’s long-term impacts on human cognition and education, therefore, could be far more pronounced than we can know today.
A recent study conducted by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft, for example, found that “while GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort.”
An MIT Media Lab study yielded similar findings: that using AI “undeniably reduced the friction involved in answering participants’ questions,” but that “this convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users’ inclination to critically evaluate the LLM’s output or ‘opinions’ (probabilistic answers based on the training datasets).”
Finding benefits while avoiding risks
The National Academy for AI Instruction aims to chart a path forward for educators in the age of AI, one that embraces the technology’s benefits while steering clear of the potential risks that are very much still coming into focus.
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“The direct connection between a teacher and their kids can never be replaced by new technologies,” Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, said in a statement included in OpenAI’s blog post, “but if we learn how to harness it, set commonsense guardrails and put teachers in the driver’s seat, teaching and learning can be enhanced.”
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