The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) recently announced they will be launching a new national AI academy for teachers in partnership with the tech giants OpenAI and Microsoft, as well as the United Federation of Teachers, a New York City teachers union. The institution will be based in Manhattan but will have an online component, according to a release announcing The National Academy for AI Instruction.
Rob Weil, Director of Research, Policy, and Field Programs in the Educational Issues Department of the AFT, explains what the academy will look like both at its initial launch this fall and going forward.
Here’s everything teachers need to know about the national The National Academy for AI Instruction.
What Will The National Academy For AI Instruction Be Like and When Will it Launch?
The space for the The National Academy for AI Instruction will be about 20,000 square feet with multiple classrooms and meeting rooms.
“There will be AI labs,” Weil says. “There’ll be a studio for podcasting and other virtual work. And then there will be just places where teachers and developers can sit down and work together on ideas.”
This space, however, will not be ready by the fall when the AI academy begins to work with teachers. Those sessions will take place in temporary spaces, Weil says.
Will There Be An Online Component To The AI Academy?
Yes.
Although districts will send educators great distances for worthwhile trainings, and New York City is a place many want to visit, the team behind The National Academy for AI Instruction knows that not every educator who might benefit from participating will be able to make it to New York City in person.
“We have to have a robust virtual program, and we will,” Weil says. “We have kind of a leg out on that because AFT already has a massive online presence with our Share My Lesson website. The academy will have a partnership with the Share My Lesson website.”
Weil adds that the site already has more than 2 million unique users, so the AI academy will be able to harness that existing user base.
What Will Classes Be Like?
The AI academy will be the opposite of a top-down AI instruction program. Instead, it’s viewed as an environment in which educators can connect with other educators and those in charge of building the tech to help learn and shape AI policy in the classroom going forward.
Privacy, safety, and teacher choice will always be stressed, Weil says. It will also be laser-focused on classroom uses for AI.
“There are a lot of people that are doing AI at the 10,000-foot level or 20,000-foot level, and all this policy and all that stuff,” Weil says. “And all that is really important. We need policy. We need regulation. But that’s not what the academy is about. The academy is about practical use of these tools at the classroom and worksite levels.”
What About Teachers Skeptical of AI Use In General?
Some teachers are uneasy about this partnership between teachers’ unions and big tech, and are not sold on AI in the classroom.
“A lot of teachers are skeptical about technology, and for good reason,” Weil says. “They should be skeptical because Big Tech in the past has abandoned teachers.”
For instance, many educators initially embraced social media, but now feel it has unforeseen negative impacts on the classroom environment and student mental health. Now teachers feel like big tech has largely ignored that concern. Weil understands teachers’ desire to avoid repeating that experience with AI. In fact, the AI academy is part of preventing that disconnect from happening by opening up a two-way dialog between educators on the ground and those designing the technology that makes its way to classrooms.
On an individual level, Weil says that when he has worked with teachers who were skeptical of AI in the past, he began by acknowledging the validity of that stance. Then he urged them to “work with us and just see what we’re doing, and see if it fits what you’re doing in your classroom.”
After educators participate in one of the AFT’s existing AI trainings, they tend to be less skeptical, Weil says. “[This is] because we do talk about the privacy, we do talk about all the protections, but we also say, ‘You’re in charge. How you use these tools is up to you.’”