I started asking different questions when ChatGPT entered my classroom.

How I fell down the AI-and-education rabbit hole

In early 2023, I began seeing writing that made me pause. It was polished, organized and technically competent, but something was missing. The ideas didn’t always sound connected to our conversations. Students sometimes struggled to explain what they had submitted. The finished work looked better, but I wasn’t convinced that more learning had taken place.

At first, I was frustrated. I was also overwhelmed.

How do you teach writing when a student can generate a polished response in seconds? How do you assess critical thinking when you aren’t sure whose thinking you are reading? And what happens to the foundational skills students once developed through drafting, struggling, revising and finding their own words?

I went down a rabbit hole trying to get ahead of it.

I experimented with ChatGPT myself. I redesigned assignments, explored new approaches to feedback and asked students to document and reflect on their AI use. I began teaching professionals about generative AI while continuing to watch what was happening with students in real classrooms.

The more I learned, the less interested I became in the simple question of whether students should be “allowed” to use AI.

Because here is the part I keep coming back to: I can feel frustrated when students use AI to generate work for them, but I also can’t entirely blame them.

We gave young people access to a tool that can produce an essay, solve a problem, summarize a reading or complete an assignment in seconds. Then, in many classrooms, the only meaningful instruction they received was: “Don’t use it.”

We haven’t consistently taught students what responsible AI use looks like. We haven’t shown them how it can support their thinking without replacing it. We haven’t helped them recognize when using it enhances learning—and when it allows them to avoid the very work that would have helped them grow.

And then we are surprised when they use it as a shortcut.

I don’t believe the answer is to ban AI, pretend it isn’t there or blame teachers and students for not knowing how to navigate a transformation none of us were prepared for. But I also don’t believe that producing better work with AI automatically makes someone a better writer, thinker or communicator.

That space between rejection and uncritical acceptance is where Future Minds Collective lives. This is a place to ask better questions about what learning should look like now, what young people still need to be able to do for themselves, and how educators and families can help them use AI with judgment, intention and honesty. We may not have all the answers yet. But “don’t use it” cannot be the whole lesson.

Kathleen Pierce has spent more than 15 years teaching writing, communication, critical thinking and professional skills at the post-secondary level. She holds a Master of Education in Adult Education and Community Development and has taught university students, adult learners and professional audiences.

Her work with AI and education began in the classroom in 2023, when the arrival of ChatGPT forced her to reconsider long-standing approaches to writing, feedback and assessment. Since then, she has experimented with AI-supported learning, redesigned assignments, taught generative AI to professional learners and contributed to conversations about how education can adapt without allowing technology to replace the learning process.

Kathleen is also a parent of two school-aged children in Durham Region, Ontario. That perspective keeps her focused not only on what AI can do, but on what we want young people to understand, practise and become capable of doing for themselves.