Dean of Academic Affairs Currie Joya Huntington shares a look at some new-school-year preparation in the latest Deans' Den Blog.

Alongside schools across the United States, the faculty and staff at Brooks spent the last two weeks of August enthusiastically preparing for students to arrive. Teachers prepared classrooms, discussed pedagogy, met in dorm teams, and thought about what awaited us in the year ahead.

A highlight of the week was a morning-long workshop with Eric Hudson, a leading thinker and writer in the field of generative artificial intelligence in education.

Having spent much of his career teaching English at independent schools, Hudson is an expert at bringing humanity into the versions of generative AI that have entered the mainstream in the last two years.

As with any new technology, there are pros and cons — and while there are many situations in which Brooks teachers may reasonably want to keep AI tools out of student work, it’s also important for us to recognize that this is an “arrival” technology. We don’t have a choice about whether AI will impact our lives. It’s here, and we’ll all encounter it in some way!

Hudson encouraged the faculty to think about how AI can help students and teachers in ways that augment human capacity. In other words: Rather than thinking about how AI automates human work, let’s think about how we can leverage and partner with AI tools to help us go further than we ever could without it.

Image credit: Erik Brynjolfsson, shared conceptually with Brooks by Eric Hudson.

Teachers spread out in the science center and the classroom building, working in small groups to develop AI-engaged assignments, plan ways that students could use AI as a tutoring partner, workshop lesson planning ideas with AI as a thought partner, and generally plumb the depths of the various generative AI platforms to see what might be possible.

There are technical limits, ethical concerns, and a significant environmental impact to consider. There are ongoing questions about how AI fits into our core value of integrity, and more specifically, the core importance of academic integrity. And, amid the questions and concerns, there is much to be learned from working with this technology.

Now more than ever, Brooks School is ready for a present and a future in which AI literacy is a central piece of the information literacy puzzle. We are excited to see what this year holds and how technical developments will continue to shape our program.