What a room full of teachers taught me about AI

Earlier this year I ran a day-long session for a group of teachers on AI and education. About 30 people, a mix of subjects and experience levels, from someone who uses ChatGPT daily to someone who had typed the word "prompt" for the first time that morning.

A few things stood out.

The first was how familiar the anxiety felt. The fear isn't really about AI specifically. It's about change arriving faster than the time available to absorb it. Teachers are already stretched. Adding "understand a transformative technology and figure out what it means for how you teach" to the list is not a small ask.

The second was that the most engaged conversations were about values, not tools. People weren't interested in a list of apps. They wanted to talk about what learning actually is, what it means to author something, whether there's a difference between understanding and producing the right answer. These are genuinely hard questions that have been around for a long time. AI just makes them more urgent.

The third was the Kahoot. We did a quiz partway through the morning, and nothing in four hours of slides came close to the energy of a room full of adults competing over a multiple choice question about what a "token" is. I'm noting this for future reference.

The title of the session was "Exploring and using AI with curiosity and cautious critical optimism." It's a mouthful, and I stand by every word of it. Curiosity because dismissing the technology completely is not really an option at this point. Caution because the limits are real and worth understanding. Critical optimism because the alternative, given where we are, seems both accurate and useless.

One teacher said something near the end that has stayed with me. She wasn't worried about her students using AI to write their essays. She was worried about them losing the patience to struggle with something hard. That feels like the right thing to be worried about.