Not a day goes by when computer science teacher Jason Hurd isn’t quizzing his students on ethics.
As the rapid development of ChatGPT and other AI tools has taken the world by storm, the veteran educator has made discussions about the use of the technology commonplace in his high school classroom.
“We do some programming, we put our hands on some robots, but a lot of what we do is discuss the history and evolution of artificial intelligence, where it is and where it’s going,” says Hurd, who teaches in Gwinnett County Public Schools in suburban Atlanta.
“Sometimes it feels like a philosophy class. Sometimes it feels like a math class. Sometimes it’s computer science, and some days it’s a history class.”
The Big Idea: Since 2019—about three years before ChatGPT captivated the public interest—the 177K-student Gwinnett County district has been piloting and refining an AI-oriented curriculum, envisioning a future where their students graduate with a solid understanding of how AI works.
What began as a series of exercises using AI tools has now developed into an educational framework where teachers are encouraged to incorporate AI concepts into their daily lesson plans, from math and science to English and art. As school districts across the country from Newark to Los Angeles pour resources and time into AI tutors and other tools—with varying degrees of success—Gwinnett offers an early example of how to think beyond bots.
“They were the first school district that we could find that had a coherent and equitable strategy for rolling something like this out,” says Alex Kotran, founder and CEO of the AI Education Project, a nonprofit that seeks to help both educators and students with foundational AI literacy.
While there are certainly questions—and concerns—about generative AI’s impact on academic dishonesty and student learning more broadly, experts Work Shift spoke with say educators can’t afford to ignore the growing influence of AI in education and work.
Projections of AI’s impact on the labor market vary widely, but even some of the biggest skeptics about our ability to accurately predict the tech’s impact on jobs believe its impact will be significant. Generative AI is already reshaping demand for tech workers, changing the skills needed in legal work, and threatening outsourced customer service jobs.
“We need to prepare students for working with AI,” says Alexander Sidorkin, chief AI officer at Sacramento State University, where he is in charge of heading up a new institute focused on using AI in education.
“It’s going to take place slowly, not maybe as fast as we want, but it will.”
Getting Beyond Sci-Fi
When Sallie Holloway arrived at Gwinnett County Public Schools in 2019, the suburban district was in the early stages of designing a new high school—Seckinger High School—and leaders knew they wanted it and its feeder schools to have a particular focus.
The Backbone: Gwinnett schools, Holloway says, is known for its history of innovation and thinking about what students need to be ready for their futures. The district has an advisory board of business and higher education leaders that updates them on job trends, including changes in whole careers and specific skills they need to be thinking about.
The district is leveraging its location next door to tech and film industry hubs in Atlanta and as the home to global manufacturers to ensure students are workforce-ready, Holloway says. As the talks about Seckinger High School took shape, it became clear that AI was the ideal focus for that future.
“When we started this, it was before the ChatGPT boom, and so there were not a lot of people who understood it from anything other than maybe a sci-fi lens,” says Holloway, director of artificial intelligence and computer science at Gwinnett County Public Schools.
“There was a lot of educating people on what AI is, what it will mean for our students, and what we need to be thinking about, and creating that buy-in. Then it was really about, ‘How can we make it not just about the technology, but about student thinking?’”
Setting Standards: Years after those early conversations, AI is now a regular feature of coursework from first grade to senior year in Gwinnett County. In an art lesson, students make graphic designs and then create an algorithm to see if it can create that same design. In a first-grade math lesson, students instruct a mini robot to plot points on a line graph.
“In Gwinnett County, the work that they’ve really spearheaded and significantly invested in is, ‘How do we make this accessible to every single student?’” says Kotran of the AI Education Project.
The district’s curriculum builds off state AI standards developed by the Georgia Development of Education in collaboration with Gwinnett County and several other stakeholders including representatives from the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, IBM, Microsoft, and Google.
Mapping the Past and the Future
On the Ground: Social studies teacher Scott Gaffney had no computer science or AI background when he applied for a position at Seckinger High School. Still, he welcomed the chance to experiment two decades into his teaching career.
“I started off wanting to pilot AI lessons in my classroom once every week or so, and I found the kids were all for it,” says Gaffney. “So that kind of pushed me to go deeper and try to get some more challenging lessons for skilling them up.”
Gaffney’s first AI-driven lesson involved mapping cholera cases in London in 1854, a time-consuming effort that required analyzing and modeling large data sets. Once the lesson ended, Gaffney gave the same prompt to a large language model, which “solved the problem in two or three seconds.”
Those assignments, Gaffney says, encouraged his students’ critical thinking, data analysis, and problem-solving skills—skills analysts say are in demand for the future.
While some students are interested in pursuing engineering, he says many students may not, and that’s by design.
The Framework: Using a “Swim-Snorkel-Scuba Dive” analogy, GCPS prioritizes that all its students have a basic understanding of how to use AI technologies. For those aspiring to learn more, the district offers an AI career pathway. The framework ultimately prioritizes exposing all students to AI and encouraging exploration and experience that could assist them in the future.
“Everybody needs to learn how to swim,” says Kotran. “Some people are going to snorkel; they’re the enthusiasts. And some people are going to nerd out and go deep, and then they’re going to be scuba divers.”
For educators such as Hurd, their job is about encouraging AI literacy, not pushing students into specific career paths.
“I really believe AI is not going to take your job, it’s the person who knows how to use AI that’s going to take your job,” he says. “And that’s what we’re preparing students for … we’re training some students to be developers of technologies, whatever those technologies become, and then we’re training some just in the ethical responsibility and appropriateness of using these intelligent tools.”
The Road Ahead
AI Ed Opposition: Despite the excitement surrounding generative AI, there are plenty of concerns about whether the technology is another iteration of the edtech hype cycle. Both faculty members and employers have talked about the perceived decline in critical thinking skills among young people, and have raised alarm bells about the potential harm generative AI poses.
“We simply do not know what such a world will look like or what it will require of future citizens,” the think-tank Cognitive Resonance finds in a report on the “Education Hazards of Generative AI.” The organization was founded by Benjamin Riley, a veteran of the NewSchools Venture Fund and previous founder of a group dedicated to incorporating cognitive science into teacher preparation.
“Leaders should not invest time and resources to incorporate AI in schools based on assumptions about what the future will bring,” the report says. “Nor should they drastically alter curricula to prepare students for an ‘AI world.’”
A quarter of U.S. teachers surveyed by the Pew Research Center reported last year that they were skeptical of or questioned the potential downsides of embracing AI tools in the classroom. And some recent studies have analyzed how relying on the tech can harm student learning.
Sidorkin understands the concerns raised by educators but believes the technology, while disruptive to education, can be a powerful tool for student engagement and learning.
“If you think of a curriculum as a ladder where you climb your skills from lower to higher, AI removes middle rungs in K-12,” says Sidorkin. “It doesn’t really affect the basic literacy skills. In order to use AI, you need to be able to read and write and comprehend sentences.”
Looking Forward: Kotran goes even further, arguing that students will be hurt in the long run if schools ignore AI now.
“This is an existential threat to students’ well-being when they graduate,” he says. “Is a student going to be screwed if they are scoring slightly lower in math or on English tests? Maybe they’ll be disadvantaged, but if they pick a career pathway that’s going to disappear, that’s going to have a profound impact on their lives.”
At Seckinger, Hurd and Gaffney both say they’re still figuring out what lies ahead for their students. Those who arrived as first-years won’t graduate until the next school year, but both educators have been encouraged by how receptive the students have been to different ways of learning.
“We’re now seeing a lot of these kids who were freshmen—they’re now into their junior year and are interested in pursuing an engineering degree or something in comp sci, or math- or science-based,” Gaffney says. “And that’s cool, but it’s really neat getting a chance just to see them work through problem-solving issues.”
That creativity has become central to the school. “We all feel a sense of this pioneer element to this school culture,” he says.