Brad Miller has tried to stay open-minded about artificial intelligence. During the past school year, the humanities teacher at Champlain Valley Union High School began using AI in his lesson planning and found it saved him time.
That “allows me to be more balanced and less stressed out,” he said in an interview this spring.
Yet Miller said he plans to scale back his AI use for the coming school year because he doesn’t want to depend on it too much. “I find myself going, What should be the group size for this activity? Oh, maybe I’ll just ask Gemini,” he said. Then, he said, he’ll tell himself, “No, Brad, you’ve been teaching for 14 years. Just rely on your instinct.”
Most high school students aren’t supposed to lean on AI to write papers or solve math problems, but some Vermont teachers are using it — even as their school districts are still developing policies for AI use in the classroom. Some teachers employ the rapidly evolving and sometimes unreliable technology to reduce their workload. Others have decided to avoid AI altogether — and steer their students away from it. Some students, meanwhile, said they are wary of their teachers using AI tools to create lesson plans and worksheets, especially when they are restricted from using AI in school themselves.
In January, the Vermont Agency of Education released a detailed 50-page document offering guidance for teachers and administrators on responsible AI use and appropriate implementation of the technology at different grade levels. It includes recommendations for developing district- or school-wide policies but stops short of imposing restrictions.
Some teachers have decided to avoid AI altogether — and steer their students away from it.
State Sen. Seth Bongartz (D-Bennington), chair of the Senate Committee on Education, is interested in the topic, too. He said in an email to Kids VT that legislators have raised many concerns about AI. He wrote that his committee is working with educators to develop the right policies and is likely to address the issue in the next legislative session.
Bongartz would like to see “a model policy” from the state ed agency, he wrote. “And then, with that in hand, having the schools figure out how to navigate that difficult terrain. I don’t think that I’m prepared to just have a blanket prohibition.”
Katharine Shepherd, dean of University of Vermont’s College of Education and Social Services, advises teachers to use AI purposefully, with clear expectations, while taking into account data security and ethics. “Schools should be talking amongst the faculty and with their students and families about what are the downsides of using AI,” she said.
Shepherd worries about students depending too much on it. That goes for teachers, too, who should avoid creating shortcuts that lessen the quality of their teaching, she said.
And transparency is key. If a teacher allows students to use AI to develop an outline “and then [the student] used it to do the whole paper and I don’t say that, I need to know that I will have consequences that are negative.”
The nonprofit organization aiVermont, which promotes AI literacy, has provided teachers with some hands-on guidance, showing them how to use AI tools at its three annual seminars. Cofounder Marc Natanagara suggested that AI can help teachers create lesson plans, rubrics for assessment and chatbots with narrow parameters to aid students outside of class.
Natanagara believes students should have some exposure to AI to understand how to use it. He compared it to learning to drive: “We could look at how to read street signs and how to use a vehicle,” he said, but a student shouldn’t get a driver’s license “without having them behind the wheel at some point.”
With these resources, but no guardrails, many Vermont districts and schools are forging the way themselves. Here’s how three of them are approaching the AI issue.
Harwood Unified Union School District
The Mad River Valley school district has a committee that’s in the process of creating its own AI policy. “We realized that we needed a unifying philosophy and approach to AI to avoid confusion or inconsistent rules and to make sure that we’re using best practice in our teaching and learning,” said Ellen Parent, a committee member and English teacher at Harwood Union High School.
Though she’s on the committee, Parent doesn’t use AI in her own classes. She said she wants students to focus on the process of writing, rather than the product. She talks often with students about why she steers them away from AI.
“I’ve had pretty collaborative discussions with all my classes, starting this year, to just talk through AI with them,” she said. As a group, they discussed potential benefits and harm, Parent said. “We’ve all come to the decision that it is not going to help us with our goals in class.”
Champlain Valley School District
A group of educators in one of the state’s largest school districts is trying to figure out how to teach and learn in an AI world. They see the benefits of AI but want to keep humans at the core of student learning, group leader Stan Williams said. CVSD has released an AI policy focused on equitable learning, educator support and ethical use. But Williams expects the policy to change as the group explores more answers.
“It’s the starting point,” he said.
For the past two years, the district has offered a course for teachers called AI Unpacked, which they can take at their own pace. They learn about AI workbooks to track classroom lessons, AI tools to synthesize materials and ways AI can help in their everyday lives. “The biggest thing was knowing where the tools are and to practice using them,” said Katie Kuntz, a humanities teacher who took the course.
Kuntz said she has seen the benefits of using AI for planning and has relied on it mostly to find resources and make them more accessible to students. AI also helped her be more creative with her assignments and try new classroom activities, she said. When she uses AI, she added, she discloses it to her students.
Miller, her fellow humanities teacher, agreed that transparency is important. He didn’t disclose AI use consistently during the past school year, he said, but plans to include an honesty statement with all content he makes using AI going forward. “I want kids to see that I’m taking accountability and not pretending.”
To address student use of AI for schoolwork, the Champlain Valley Union High School English department has adopted a “red, yellow, green” (stop, caution, go) policy. Students can get AI help to build background knowledge and find credible sources without permission from a teacher, but they are supposed to avoid other uses unless they ask their teacher beforehand.
Charlie MacFadyen, a recently retired Champlain Valley computer science teacher, encouraged limited AI use in his classes. He created Gemini Gems — referring to Google-generated AI programs — specifically tailored to his lessons.
As a member of the high school’s technology committee, MacFadyen visited some ninth-grade classes this past school year to talk about AI. “Some really, really wanted nothing to do with it,” he said. “Some were really excited about it.”
Not Olivia Searson, who graduated from Champlain Valley Union this spring. She said she doesn’t like teachers using AI. When she tutored other students, she said, she could tell that some of their teachers created worksheets with AI. She noticed mistakes and inconsistencies in those worksheets that she believes wouldn’t have occurred if the educators had done the work themselves.
THE Sharon Academy
Blake Fabrikant, dean of students at the Sharon Academy, a private school in Windsor County, does not think AI belongs in the classroom. Although he understands why some people use it, Fabrikant said he worries that people “confuse being easier with being better” when relying on AI. In his film class this past year, he required students to write in blue books by hand.
“It takes a lot more work” for the teacher, he said, “but you have to be really thoughtful and careful in how you plan.”
Ada Breese, a Sharon Academy student, has talked with some of her teachers about AI. At Fabrikant’s urging, she wrote a letter to the editor of VTDigger, stating her position against it.
“I’m someone that I think really benefits from learning from someone who enjoys teaching what they’re supposed to be teaching,” Breese said in an interview with Kids VT. She said she feels less motivated when teachers give work generated by AI. “If they don’t care about it, then why should I?”
Karmen F. Wilbur is a first-year student at the University of Vermont. She graduated in June from Champlain Valley Union High School, where she cofounded CVU’s student-run print newspaper, the Hawks’ Nest.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Machine Learning | How are Vermont educators approaching AI? Cautiously.”
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