US author Natalie Wexler: “A lot of what I’ve seen with technology in classrooms is a waste of time.” Photo: nataliewexler.com
Schools need to be judicious about how technology is used in the classroom, particularly generative AI, a visiting American education writer has warned.
On an Australian tour, Natalie Wexler will be in Canberra today (7 November) to conduct a literacy workshop organised by Catholic Education Canberra and Goulburn for ACT teachers from across all sectors.
Author of The Knowledge Gap, Ms Wexler writes and speaks extensively about evidence-based literacy teaching and the science of reading and learning.
Ms Wexler said unfettered access to artificial intelligence and large language models would only undermine students’ writing ability and capacity for understanding and retaining knowledge.
She said students were only cheating themselves by using these AI products.
“There are beneficial uses for AI in education, especially for lightening teachers’ workloads, but when students’ have access to AI to use for their writing in particular, then it’s very tempting to just have ChatGPT do the writing for you,” Ms Wexler said.
“Writing provides cognitive benefits. You’re you’re offloading those cognitive benefits to a bot. You’re not getting them yourself.
“They feel like they’re they’re getting ahead, but they’re really cheating themselves if they have ChatGPT even write an outline for them because even writing an outline is a learning process.”
Ms Wexler said keyboards and screens held little value in primary schools, where handwriting still needed to be taught.
She said some schools in the United States were just teaching keyboarding, but handwriting was important to help kids learn in those early years.
“It really helps them understand how to decode the words, and it’s been found that when people, for example, take notes by hand rather than typing on a device that they prompt that they remember that information better, they understand it better because they have to distill it,” Ms Wexler said.
Technology could have a place in classrooms but not the way it was generally being used.
It could be used for “retrieval practice”, designing a program that would quiz students in ways that would help them be able to retrieve information when they needed it in the future.
“But a lot of what I’ve seen with technology in classrooms is kind of a waste of time, frankly,” Ms Wexler said.
She said a teacher using effective methods that align with cognitive science, or how the brain learns, could do a better job.
Students were also less likely to be motivated to work for a computer or a program than for a human being with whom they had an actual relationship.
“So I don’t think that we should have technology trying to replace teachers,” Ms Wexler said.
“There are ways that technology can supplement learning, but we have to be very careful with it.”
Ms Wexler takes a nuanced and wholistic approach to literacy, arguing that while phonics was an important early tool in teaching children to read it could only go so far.
Without a store of relevant knowledge, students might be able to decode text but not understand it, as was required in later years.
Ms Wexler said that along with explicit teaching of reading and writing, students needed a content rich curriculum to build their comprehension skills.
“In the United States and I think to some extent in Australia we’ve been treating reading as separate from writing, and both of those things as separate from the content areas,” she said.
“Those things are really all connected and once you get past foundational reading and writing skills everything we can understand when we read, reading, comprehension, everything we can express when we write draws on everything we are able to learn, and they are in themselves ways of learning.
“So we need to connect all of those things in the classroom and ensure that every literacy teacher is also a content teacher and vice versa.”
Ms Wexler said schools needed to be building students’ academic knowledge and vocabulary, beginning in the early grades with reading aloud and, through discussion, introducing them to topics, including history and science.
“Then they’ll be able to draw on that fund of knowledge that they have stored in long-term memory to read and to write about a range of topics,” she said.
Ms Wexler said explicit teaching did not mean just lecturing to kids but teachers being highly interactive and engaging.
Nor did it eschew inquiry-based or self-directed learning.
“It’s not that students should never engage in inquiry or discovery, it’s just that when students are new to a topic or they’re far behind where they they should be, it’s going to be more efficient to initially at least teach explicitly and then once they have some knowledge of the topic, yes, sure, then there can be more self-directed learning,” Ms Wexler said.
