Getting Started with AI in the Classroom: Recommended Readings
While we can all agree having generative AI thrust unknowingly upon us is a less than ideal situation, whether you’re now exploring AI’s potential to improve student learning outcomes, designing new assessments, or addressing its myriad ethical considerations, we’ve curated three reading resources that offer practical guidance and important insights into implementing AI in your classroom.
Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning, Antonio Bowen & C. Edward Watson (2024)
Why It’s Useful: Bowen and Watson’s book can help you think through how to integrate AI into your teaching practices. Structured into three parts—“Thinking with AI,” “Teaching with AI,” and “Learning with AI”—this book goes beyond theoretical discussions and addresses topics such as developing AI literacy, rethinking academic integrity, and streamlining administrative tasks. Creatively reimagining possibilities for our classrooms, it also offers practical strategies, including sample prompts and policies, to help instructors get started using—and be more transparent about their use of—generative AI. While acknowledging its challenges, Bowen and Watson will encourage you to view AI as an opportunity to rethink your pedagogy and improve your learning outcomes.
“The Metacognitive Demands and Opportunities of Generative AI,” Lev Tankelevitch, et al. (2024)
Why It’s Useful: Recent research into how generative AI impacts learning is beginning to reveal how it can improve students’ metacognitive processes—and thus promote critical thinking—during learning tasks. The authors discuss the potential for AI to both support and challenge your students’ metacognitive abilities, providing a framework for designing assignments that foster metacognitive development and encourage students to iterate to learn to use AI more effectively. Sometimes known as prompt engineering, encouraging students to write better prompts to get better results promotes—rather than subverts—improved critical thinking skills.
AI and Writing, Sidney I. Dobrin (2023)
Why It’s Useful: Dobrin's book offers an in-depth approach to thinking about generative AI's impact on writing practices and teaching rhetoric. He addresses both the conceptual and practical implications, discussing ethical, social, and material considerations. It's particularly valuable for instructors in writing-intensive courses seeking to understand and teach the complexities of AI-assisted writing, as its approach to designing writing assignments is still derived from a classical understanding of rhetoric.
These resources collectively offer a foundational approach to rethinking generative AI’s role in education, from practical classroom applications to deeper cognitive and ethical considerations. By engaging with these texts, IU instructors can thoughtfully integrate AI into their pedagogy in order to enhancing student learning outcomes and prepare them for a future that will likely require a strategic approach to AI literacy. The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) is also here to support you as you explore these new possibilities. Please don't hesitate to reach out with any questions or for further guidance.