Tag: Distraction

  • 5 ways to infuse AI into your classroom this school year

    5 ways to infuse AI into your classroom this school year

    Key points:

    As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape the educational landscape, teachers have a unique opportunity to model how to use it responsibly, creatively, and strategically.

    Rather than viewing AI as a threat or distraction, we can reframe it as a tool for empowerment and efficiency–one that allows us to meet student needs in more personalized, inclusive, and imaginative ways. Whether you’re an AI beginner or already experimenting with generative tools, here are five ways to infuse AI into your classroom this school year:

    1. Co-plan lessons with an AI assistant

    AI platforms like ChatGPT, Eduaide.ai, and MagicSchool.ai can generate lesson frameworks aligned to standards, differentiate tasks for diverse learners, and offer fresh ideas for student engagement. Teachers can even co-create activities with students by prompting AI together in real time.

    Try this: Ask your AI assistant to create a standards-aligned lesson that includes a formative check and a scaffold for ELLs–then adjust to your style and class needs.

    2. Personalize feedback without the time drain

    AI can streamline your feedback process by suggesting draft comments on student work based on rubrics you provide. This is particularly helpful for writing-intensive courses or project-based learning.

    Ethical reminder: Always review and personalize AI-generated feedback to maintain professional judgment and student trust.

    3. Support multilingual learners in real time

    AI tools like Google Translate, Microsoft Immersive Reader, and Read&Write can help bridge language gaps by offering simplified texts, translated materials, and visual vocabulary support.

    Even better: Teach students to use these tools independently to foster agency and access.

    4. Teach AI literacy as a 21st-century skill

    Students are already using AI–let’s teach them to use it well. Dedicate time to discuss how AI works, how to prompt effectively, and how to critically evaluate its outputs for bias, credibility, and accuracy.

    Try this mini-lesson: “3 Prompts, 3 Results.” Have students input the same research question into three AI tools and compare the results for depth, accuracy, and tone.

    5. Automate the tedious–refocus on relationships

    From generating rubrics and newsletters to drafting permission slips and analyzing formative assessment data, AI can reduce the clerical load. This frees up your most valuable resource: time.

    Pro tip: Use AI to pre-write behavior plans, follow-up emails, or even lesson exit ticket summaries.

    The future of AI

    AI won’t replace teachers–but teachers who learn how to use AI thoughtfully may find themselves with more energy, better tools, and deeper student engagement than ever before. As the school year begins, let’s lead by example and embrace AI not as a shortcut, but as a catalyst for growth.

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  • Debating the Terms of Prejudice Is a Distraction

    Debating the Terms of Prejudice Is a Distraction

    To the Editor:

    John Wilson is right (“No One is Gaslighting You,” Aug. 20, 2025) that the term “gaslight” can be abused and manipulated in ways that are tendentious, ad hominem and not empirically sound, as can many words and phrases. 

    However, that’s not an argument against its reality as a social phenomenon and its pernicious impacts. One of the common features of prejudice and discrimination is their denial. That doesn’t make all reported allegations of prejudice and discrimination accurate and true, but it is a frequent characteristic of expressions of prejudice and discrimination to deny their existence. Whether or not such forms of discrimination and prejudice are institutional or systemic may be legitimately contested. But, even if they do not meet the definitions of those terms, when prejudice and discrimination are repeatedly and extensively encountered and consequently undermine equality, freedom and access to justice, it is inimical to the respect and fulfillment of civil rights and human rights to focus on debating whether terms such as “gaslighting” or “institutional discrimination” are appropriate to describe real and widespread experiences of exclusion and abuse.

    Rather, energy should be invested in correcting those alleged rights violations and reducing their prevalence and intensity, affirming human dignity, equity and equality, and respect for diversity. Like many forms of discrimination and racism, antisemitism is widespread in the United States. Sociological research shows that approximately one in four Americans holds substantially prejudiced anti-Jewish attitudes, including justification for discrimination and violence against Jewish Americans. Universities are not immune to these pejorative and harmful societal prejudices and beliefs; they reflect them. Elite institutions, including Harvard, are not ivory towers of moral virtue. Gaslighting is as real at universities as it is elsewhere and minorities—including Jews—experience it frequently. I have experienced it at my own university repeatedly and pervasively from different sectors of the university, including its leadership. Our new chancellor is trying to improve our campus climate and culture to ensure greater inclusion and respect for Jewish students, staff and faculty, but this will require substantial will and leadership, investment of resources, and the support of our university community as a whole.

    The dynamics of abusive behavior and behavior that enables abuse—including in contexts of domestic abuse but not exclusive to it—–are such that bigotry often manifests as a denial of empathy, care, trust and responsiveness to individuals reporting and experiencing its harms, and concurrent attacks on their character, honesty and rights and hostile claims that their reported experiences are fabricated, exaggerated or made with malicious intent.

    That should never be our response to harassment and discrimination that violate civil rights laws and undermine the ethos of our universities and their capacity to provide equal access to education without discrimination for everyone.

    Noam Schimmel is a lecturer in global studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

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