Around the world, governments are cracking down on young people’s screen time, with the UK announcing a social media ban for under-16s this week. Similarly, universities and faculty are reviewing the unrestricted use of phones, laptops and tablets in classrooms, based on evidence that associates digital distraction with lower attention, lower retention capacity and poorer academic performance.
Of course, fear of technology’s effects on learning is nothing new across the sweep of history. For example, portable calculators were also once restricted, as they were thought to erode students’ basic calculation skills. In ancient Greece, Socrates even distrusted writing – he believed it weakened memory, as it encouraged the brain to depend on external signifiers.
The truth is that the speed of change generated by artificial intelligence is so great that it is incomprehensible to many education system regulators. It’s hardly surprising that they treat its effects as anomalies, rather than acknowledging that teacher-directed instruction and memorisation learning, in which the teacher exclusively holds knowledge, transfers it to students, formulates the questions and expects predetermined answers, is no longer fit for purpose. As an educational model, it requires the students to play a fundamentally passive role.
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Fortunately, as economist and academic Sala-i-Martin says in his book From the Savannah to Mars, GenAI offers an opportunity, almost unthinkable only five years ago, to reimagine a new educational model – one that recognises that humanity’s understanding of the world and its progress began precisely from the capacity to question reality critically.
For this reason, I invite all educators, regardless of the level at which they practise their profession, to consider themselves the judge, jury and executioner of the traditional educational method. It’s time to deliver the final blow and move on to a new system, with questioning at its centre.
To do so, you must overcome fear. You must challenge prohibitive restrictions. You must also embrace technology as your greatest ally in promoting curiosity and strengthening your students’ capacity to learn.
Here are five possible uses and suggestions for beginning that journey:
1. Use GenAI to turn closed questions into open ones. Ask your students to write a simple or closed question, and then invite them to generate more open, comparative, causal or reflective versions. The pedagogical value does not lie in copying the tool’s version, but in analysing why one question is better than another.
2. Ask a GenAI tool to model different levels of depth. GenAI is extraordinary at offering different angles and levels of depth from an initial question. This will help your students discover that asking well is not simply about asking more questions, but about asking with greater depth and precision.
3. Use GenAI to provide feedback on the quality of a question. Ask your students to use it as an arbiter of the quality of their questions. This will help them assess how clear, relevant or overly superficial their formulation has been.
4. Deploy GenAI for follow-up questioning. Teach your students not to settle for the first option. AI is a powerful tool for generating multiple possibilities that will help students discover different perspectives on the original question.
5. Change the logic of assessment. Instead of assessing students based on the quality of their answers, I suggest moving toward methods and strategies that assess the quality of their questions. Develop exercises in which students formulate questions at different levels of complexity, working from the information or data they have been given.
These five recommendations are being applied in teacher professional development processes within the Presidential Project for Innovative Educational Centers, which is being implemented through a consortium composed of three universities and the Ministry of Education of the Dominican Republic.
Every major technological shift has been met with fear, yet education moves forward when it sees the opportunity beyond the disruption. Instead of seeing GenAI as a threat to learning, let’s look at it as a tool to move education beyond rote memorisation and towards curiosity, depth and critical inquiry. The future of education will belong not to those who ban technology, but to those who teach students how to think, question and learn with it.
If you are an innovative and optimistic teacher who believes in human talent and intelligence, I invite you to get involved in creating this new kind of education. This is the education already appearing on the horizon – one that carries with it hopes of social mobility and prosperity.
Enrique Darwin Caraballo is a member of the board at Universidad del Caribe (UNICARIBE).
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