FARMINGTON—The use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) seems to be taking off at a rapid pace with a 1,700% increase on Google in activity around AI from 2022 to 2023. The Davis School District has formed an AI Steering Committee to look at the use of AI in the classroom and to study both the positives and the challenges. It is just in the preliminary stages as they gather more information.

“AI is here,” said Assistant Superintendent Dr. Logan Toone in a presentation to the school board. “It’s part of what we’re doing. It’s in our schools and in our futures. So to pretend like it doesn’t exist or to shut it out of students’ lives is not only going to prove impossible it’s not going to help our students for the future because AI will be a part of their college coursework and their careers.” 

AI is a challenging environment, he said. “When you think about AI, you have immediate concerts about integrity, which are legitimate. Even more pressing is student safety and privacy because students in that environment are creating accounts and sending that data in unknown places on the internet where there is lots of opportunity for misuse of student information.”

Toone said the committee met with universities and people from other districts who are in this space. “The most insightful one was with a guy from Arizona State. They’re on the cutting edge and forefront of AI in the classroom.”

The focus in a university classroom is a little bit of a different conversation than in K-12 classrooms, he said. “But the way they structured their work is in subcommittees. So modeling after their work we created our AI staff committee into three subcommittees. We come together once a month in three groups.”

One is understanding stakeholders, said Toone. “Stakeholders being students, staff and parents.”

The second one is professional practice, he said. “They will consider what ways the teachers can use the tools and what kind of protections need to be in place for students to make sure they are attending to student learning.”

The third subcommittee is AI policy, Toone said. “That’s not necessarily board policy but kind of the same philosophy and purpose statement governing the direction for the district in terms of AI.”

Toone said they developed a draft survey of teachers on generative AI. “Generative AI is like ChatGBT where you can ask questions and get answers. There are tools designed to generate text from the information that you put in.”

The survey showed that 23 of 50 responses resulted in no plans to use AI in the future, he said. “About 42% were concerned about academic integrity. Of the 50, they were concerned about students not learning the material because they were utilizing AI to bypass the learning experience. About 20% were concerned about incorrect or outdated information generated by AI and developing other academic habits like procrastination.”

None of this is actionable data, said Toone. “But it helped guide and govern the creation of a refreshed survey that goes a little bit deeper into the concerns. Our intent is to get a survey out hopefully before the break or right after to get larger actionable feedback from our secondary teachers.”

The policy subgroup will look at what policies are out there such as ethical implementation like cheating. “One hundred percent of the time that when I addressed a student for plagiarism it was always because it was better than they should have produced,” said Superintendent Dr. Dan Linford. “You’ve seen enough of their writing in person. There’s a real shift when they try to turn in AI work.”

The AI Steering Committee will continue to work on what AI looks like in the district, said Toone. “For now it is still very preliminary. What’s next? We’ll continue to gather stakeholder feedback and continue to hone in on those philosophies and procedure statements and continue to develop some teacher resources around those things.”

“We’ve got to get ahead of this,” said Board Member John Robison. “Not trying to catch up. Not trying to ignore it. It’s here.”