A Case Study in Thinking: Generative AI and Role‐Playing Conversations
Gretchen McKay · The National Teaching & Learning Forum · 2025
When EI meets AI: Practical tipsIn each of these cases, there are depths of emotion to explore.Today, instructors feel less like the AI is going to take our job, per se, and more like AI is going to have our students emerge from our course without thinking for themselves.These conversations about the emotional impact of AI's emergence in education are important because it may alleviate concerns about the "burnout" (Wu et al., 2024, p. 111) teachers feel.To that end, we suggest how EI can inform a few practical strategies for engaging in conversations about AI.• In setting AI-related policy, approach this task in a spirit of inquiry and generosity.A syllabus statement like this is likely more effective at opening an honest, on-going dialogue than an outright ban: At various times in our course, you will be encouraged to use AI; at other times you will be asked to refrain from using it.As we continue to learn and integrate AI, we will think together about the practical and ethical implications of doing so.• From there, we can model effective, discipline-specific uses of AI in our instruction.For instance, an historian may upload a primary source image and ask AI to analyze that image by describing relevant details worthy of further investigation.A mathematician may ask AI to help with solving a problem by prompting the AI to ask probing questions, yet not provide an answer for the student.And so on.• When suspecting a student of cheating, we encourage instructors not to leap to a charge of plagiarism, but first spend some time in self-inquiry.What is emotionally urgent?What needs to be addressed in my teaching?Because AI detection tools have a high rate of false positives and because we want to help students revise to be better than average, we want to support them as they revise their work (or, in a worst-case scenario, the AI's work) and improve it.In other words, they need to be better writers, artists, and problem solvers than AI, and we can support them in doing so.• Talking with colleagues who may still be resistant to using AI, we can listen with empathy while still sharing our own enthusiasm, examples, and approaches.As with all changes in teaching practice, it is more likely that our modeling an effective strategy will be better than simply telling a colleague that they "should" use AI in their own classrooms.