Educators at an ‘inflection point’ as AI prompts changes to instruction, lesson planning
In an age when artificial intelligence can so effortlessly manufacture essays and PowerPoint presentations, educators across Lancaster County must increasingly focus on how their students learn and complete their assignments.
Most of the county’s 17 school districts in the last two years have adopted general AI policies, as recommended by the Pennsylvania School Boards Association, requiring schools to provide some level of professional AI development for teachers and set guidelines for students engaging with AI in an educational setting.
The amount of AI resources teachers incorporate into their daily instruction is largely self-determined, and how they use the technology varies widely from classroom to classroom.
Brian Booker, a teaching and learning consultant with Lancaster-Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13, works with teachers to foster AI literacy and show school officials how AI can support students inside the classroom while streamlining administrative work outside the classroom.
AI, Booker says, is “placing more value into the art of teaching and the art of designing instruction, where students are interacting with one another and reflecting on the learning that they are doing, and it’s not focused on the final product anymore.”
Some teachers are using AI to more quickly and efficiently draft lesson plans, but they’re not using the tool with students. Others are using AI to bring their teaching materials to life, for instance helping students have conversations with the Greek gods they are studying, or teaching students to format their own math games.
Many educators have realistic concerns about a world in which there is no longer a “human in the loop.” They worry teachers and students might create a cycle of AI-generated materials passed back and forth, where, for example, the teacher creates a quiz using AI, and the student answers it using AI.
“Without good governance and culture, it would be like the wild west that was once cellphones, where without intentional usage it will be just a wasteland,” Solanco High School teacher Josh Fleming said.
But with good governance, teachers say AI can level the playing field for students with differing needs by putting an assignment in a student’s native language or simplifying the language for a student with special needs, or adding rigor to assignments for gifted students.
Teachers can also complete menial work more efficiently using AI, leaving time for more important tasks like one-on-one instruction with students.
Aside from discussions of the merits and potential pitfalls of AI, school administrators in Lancaster County are taking the approach that AI is here to stay.
“It’s important that we teach the skills because students are going to have this at their disposal for the rest of their lives,” Penn Manor K-12 Learning Facilitator Tony Carrodo said. “It’s all going to be about how we use it and how we show everyone involved how to use it.”
In tems of learning about and incorporating AI, county school districts are well on their way.
Over the last two years, IU13 has held monthly meetings with its 22 school districts to establish a game plan for incorporating AI and has begun offering training for teachers.
Training so far, Booker said, has focused on the basics: “What is AI, how do you use it effectively and then what are the guardrails that we need to understand in order to use it productively.
“It is becoming a part of what we’re already doing, and not this new fancy, spangled thing,” Booker said. “It can be kind of scary at first. But if we can model how AI can be used effectively and safely during our sessions, teachers are more willing to consider it and play around with it.”
‘An inflection point’
At Solanco High, Fleming focuses on technology, teaching courses on everything from drones to video game production and design, as well as an introductory computer science course.
AI is rapidly transforming the tech sector and tech education. Undergraduate enrollment in computer science at four-year institutions fell by 8% from 2024 to 2025, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, based partly on fears that generative AI will replace coders.
So Fleming has had to adapt his curriculum. In his introductory computer science class, Fleming said students learn to code during the first half of the year before moving toward AI-aided software design to reflect how AI is being used in the industry.
“We’re trying to pivot to like, ‘How is this actually used in industry and how do we incorporate it?’” Fleming said.
Students in his class will feed AI a prompt for a program they would like to code, then test the code that AI spits out. If it does not work, students are tasked with analyzing the code to determine what went wrong and how they would fix it to get the final product they want.
Fleming cautions his students against overreliance on AI. For example, during an exam for his advanced placement cybersecurity course, students will have to rely on their own skill sets and knowledge – not AI – to earn a passing score.
The computer science teacher has been learning all he can about AI since the first AI chatbot, ChatGPT, launched in 2022, but Fleming recently added an AI endorsement to his teaching certification, after completing four courses on the technology at Millersville University.
Millersville professor Oliver Dreon helped develop a statewide curriculum on artificial intelligence that the MU courses are based upon.
He said educators are either, like Fleming, rooting their lessons in process-based learning, or they’re putting aside AI technology for lessons on what he calls “high-stakes” material, where the teacher wants to ensure the students are learning the topic without any help from AI.
When covering crucial material, for example, Dreon said educators return to handwritten assignments. With other material, Dreon said, educators can expand their grading to include evaluation of both the final product and the means by which students arrived there.
“Rather than focusing just on the product … show me the process of what you’re doing,” Dreon said. “And if AI is allowed, be transparent about how it was used and where.”
For years, Dreon said educators have relied heavily on a product, such as an essay or test, to assess student performance. Now, he said, the product can look so polished and refined with AI that it is hard to tell which parts of it were student-made and which parts were AI-made.
Booker says AI is a “wake-up call,” as teachers begin to modify what they’re doing to achieve specific learning outcomes for students. Some curriculum will have to change, he said, but another key aspect of success in education will be digital citizenship — teachers and students learning to live and work responsibly in a world transformed by AI.
Taking away the focus from the final product is not necessarily a negative, Booker said. The process is where the real learning happens, he said, when teachers are giving feedback along the way and students improve based on that feedback.
“Right now we are at an inflection point (where educators must decide) what is the purpose of school, and how do we as teachers design learning experiences that reflect real-world learning and real world outcomes through the curriculum and the content set by the standards in Pennsylvania,” Booker said.
Pequea Valley School District trains new teachers on the use of AI (photos)
Leveling the playing field
Last week, Booker led a session at a conference he attended on how AI can help with scaffolding texts and learning materials to suit learners with different needs, including multilingual learners and special needs students.
AI can “make me a handout or a graphic organizer that would support access to the information for my students,” Booker said. “That is what, in a dream world, I would be pushing everyone to do. It’s how we can use AI as a partner to provide equitable access to the learning that is taking place.”
The crux of that practice, Booker said, is teachers understanding their students’ abilities and what accommodations or supports they might need.
“That has been the big piece,” Booker said. “You need to build the culture in your classroom to understand your students so then you can use AI to support their learning needs.”
Stephanie Herr, an English Language Arts teacher at Pequea Valley Secondary School, said AI has made it so much easier to present reading materials both in English and another language side by side if a student’s primary language is not English.
A few years ago, when the district had an influx of Syrian immigrants and a large group of Spanish-speaking students, Herr said teachers were scrambling, trying to rely on Google Translate to teach students, some of whom had no prior exposure to English.
It was a “hot mess in real time and really just struggling to meet these kids where they are,” Herr said.
But more recently she turned to an AI tool for teachers, Diffit, to help her simplify a text like “Lord of the Flies” to a fourth grade English reading level – on par with a student who has only conversational English skills – and present it side by side with the text in Spanish.
AI has helped students across the academic spectrum grow and improve achievement, Herr said, as it can be used to produce high-quality practice materials for assessment tests like the Keystones and the SATs.
And she can customize those materials to meet the specific needs of her students – like helping them analyze the tone of a written work or get a better grasp of its theme.
“You can really start to customize it in a way where before I would have been either searching the web to try to find stuff, or we’re buying something or paying for a program, which is annoying because in my experience a lot of these practice or skills practice programs don’t look like the test,” Herr said.
AI: ‘Timesaver’
Herr said she is tailoring her lessons to meet the individual needs of students in far less time, and other Pequea Valley teachers have learned to use AI to cut down the amount of time they spend doing work behind the scenes.
Learning facilitator and German teacher Dan Holler said tailoring lesson plans to high-performing students who need more challenges is often an extra that ends up on the chopping block at the end of a teacher’s 45-minute planning period.
With AI, extras like that can be built back into the schedule, he said. AI is helping him better fill his time.
“People have the idea that all of a sudden we’re winning back a lot of time because we have these AI tools,” Holler said, but it’s more about efficiency. “We’re getting more done in that 45 minutes than we were before, so that goes to meeting these needs.”
Larisa Garpstas, a second-grade teacher at Conestoga Elementary School in Penn Manor School District, said she uses AI primarily as a time-saving element for administrative tasks, rather than in the classroom.
Garpstas says AI helps her to create so many more resources and brainstorm more ideas than she could have on her own, especially with simple tasks like writing a classroom newsletter for parents.
When using AI with students, Garpstas says she takes the steering wheel, so to speak. She will show her students the AI platform – Google Gemini in Penn Manor – as it answers simple, straightforward questions they might have — like, for example, “What is the most poisonous frog in the world?” (Gemini says a golden poison frog [phyllobates terribillis], by the way.)
Initially, Garpstas said she approached AI with caution and didn’t want to add it to her toolbelt as an educator. But while on sabbatical last spring, Garpstas had only one professional development option available to her, an AI class taught by Carrodo, the district’s learning facilitator.
“Why do I need this? I’m a good teacher without AI,” Garpstas recalled saying to herself. “I had all the reasons not to use it, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to take the class.”
She said the class confirmed some of her fears about AI — that it could spread misinformation, replace critical thinking and exploit private data — and introduced new fears about kids becoming attached to AI chatbots or companions. But overall, she said learning the capabilities AI offers “transformed” her.
“This is going to make a huge difference for me as a teacher creating things and finding activities,” Garpstas said. It’s a “huge timesaver.”
Garpstas, though cautious about the technology, is excited by what AI can do, but other teachers are more hesitant and not as optimistic.
Professor Dreon has walked a lot of teachers through their initial steps into AI, and for the reluctant, he said, incorporating AI into their classes can seem overwhelming.
“I would say those folks at times … I’ve heard them say it’s kind of like drinking from a firehose — it’s just so much stuff,” Dreon said.
He advises educators to learn as much about AI as they can to incorporate it into the classroom. But embracing AI is an insurmountable task for some, and it is pushing tenured professors and longtime teachers out of the profession, Dreon said.
“I mean we just came off of one disruption, the global pandemic, and then on the heels of that we have this AI disruption, and I think that is really challenging our teachers,” Dreon said. “They learned one skill set to try to engage students online and now they’re trying to engage students while this tool is really undermining their ability to assess students traditionally.”
He stopped short of branding AI in binary terms.
“We don’t exist in a world in which there’s no AI, so it’s kind of hard to say like ‘OK it’s good or bad.’ It just is,” Dreon said.
Data and research at this point, Dreon said, shows that students are using AI in a variety of ways, and they’re using it largely without formal instruction, so it is really critical for schools to begin incorporating AI literacy into the K-12 curriculum.
“The shift in assessment might be necessary in some cases because I think we’ve over-relied in some cases on the product being a document of student learning,” Dreon said. “The good stuff about learning happens in the process, and it’s a shift in how we’re gonna assess, and maybe it’s a welcome shift.”
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