By Donald Gilpin

As artificial intelligence (AI) spreads its influence into every corner of 21st century life, Princeton Public Schools (PPS) has subscribed to a program called SchoolAI and has been encouraging teachers and administrators to explore how this technology can help them and their students. Riverside Elementary School has responded eagerly with many positive results and some exciting breakthroughs for both students and educators.

“We believe that this technology could be a game changer for differentiation of instruction, personalization based on student interests, student engagement, and intervention,” said Riverside Counselor Ben Samara, who uses AI in working with groups of students from kindergarten through fifth grade.

Samara is fully aware of the concerns over privacy and the potential for student misuse of AI in schools, but his explorations have led him to discover that AI can enhance the human element in education as well as the mutual engagement of students and teachers.

“We are seeking to be at the forefront of implementation while taking a mindful, responsible approach to technology, ensuring it is used to enhance prosocial and life skills and human connection, rather than detract from them,” he added.

Riverside Principal Max Achtau noted that the students “are full speed ahead” in embracing AI and that the teachers and staff are rapidly “adapting and navigating the landscape.” He explained, “Teachers are aware that this is the paradigm shift in methodologies and best practices, so people are open to learning and using AI in the classroom. We have pilot programs going, and teachers are using AI in different venues.”

He continued, “The kids are eager to try it. This is their world — AI and screens and being at the computer. It’s not just with learning, but outside in their homes with phones and screens, they’re used to working with AI outside of school. It’s a digital world now. We have to adapt. We can still have the same standards and rigor, but we’re changing some of our methods to adapt to today’s learners, to support our students of today.”

In addition to finding that AI can serve as a kind of personal assistant, streamlining tasks and saving valuable time, Riverside teachers have been using AI to allow students to interact one-on-one with chatbots of historical figures, to reflect on their reading, and to learn to debate.

Samara has integrated AI technology into his social-emotional learning curriculum, and he reports, “I have never seen students more engaged or excited to come see me for lessons, groups, and individual work. The results have been tremendous. There are a lot of people in the education world who are scared of this technology because they think it’s just going to be kids in front of a screen like zombies, but this is a tool that should be used to enhance human communication.”

In a typical traditional lesson there might be only three or four students raising their hands, Samara explained, but with AI “There’s a lot of interactivity with the entire class participating and having some investment in the lesson.”

Samara is enthusiastic about potential future uses of AI. “Imagine if you had an assistant with you the entire school day who could help you do all these things as a teacher,” he said. “And imagine if every student had a one-on-one assistant with them. That’s a possibility that we have here.”

Samara has been researching possibilities in AI technology and admits, “I’ve kind of caught the bug.” He recently earned a certificate in AI prompting at New Jersey Institute of Technology. “Efficient prompting is one of the ways you make the technology flourish for kids,” he explained. “You have to have the right prompt. There are certain things that have to be in the prompt for it to be effective and not too general. Prompting is also how you put a lot of the security in place to make sure that there are certain things the AI won’t do for the kids.”

Much of the development of AI in education nationwide has been focused on colleges and universities, high schools, and middle schools, but Samara and Achtau are determined to take full advantage of AI’s possibilities for younger students.

“We’re very curious about how we can apply this technology to help our teachers and students at the elementary level and we’re trying to be a lighthouse school for this kind of work,” said Samara.

He noted that some teachers at Riverside are easing into the use of AI gradually “maybe just dabbling with some of the teacher tools,” but others are forging ahead in using AI for their own empowerment and for their classroom work with their students.

Third grade teacher Katy Solovay, who has been seeing many positive results in her classroom, described some ways in which AI has enhanced her work and her students’ learning.

As part of a unit on civil rights, students were able to have a conversation with a Martin Luther King Jr. bot, to ask him questions about the civil rights movement, to discuss that period in history, to think critically about what was happening, and to deepen their understanding.

SchoolAI has helped Solovay’s third graders in building sentences and in using punctuation and capitalization correctly.

In a recent reading lesson, “SchoolAI asked students about what they were reading and prompted them with discussion questions and helpful comments,” said Solovay. “One of my students even said, ‘This has me thinking in ways I didn’t know I had in me.’”

She added, “SchoolAI has the ability to be adaptive to student needs. If students need more challenging questions, it can adapt to meet the students where they are.”

Solovay went on to emphasize that AI “is not a replacement for curriculum or for good teaching” and that it is important for teachers to monitor students’ work on AI. She pointed out that AI will help her in her upcoming lessons on weather and climate, literary essays and writing, and character studies and reading.
“AI is also a valuable resource for ideas and classroom activities,” she added. “It can help to generate passages, reader’s theater scripts, and even suggestions for other lessons in various fields of study.”
“I think with AI the potential is there to change the landscape of how we help kids,” said Samara.
“We’re excited to explore and to implement AI into our classrooms and learning spaces,” Achtau concluded. “Time has moved on. Technology has moved on. Kids have moved on. They learn differently. Schools also have to adapt.”