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Today, students can generate essays with the push of a button. Brittany Collins ’14 is exploring what this means for teaching students to write and think.

For author and educator Brittany Collins ’14, writing her college essay was a formative experience, inviting her to reflect deeply and explore grief through writing for the first time. She had lost her father, Jeffrey Collins ’83, during the summer before her sophomore year at 91����. The writing process took six to seven months of drafting and two more of revision, sharpening not only her writing skills but also her capacity for introspection and resilience.

Today, Collins’ work centers on the effects of grief, trauma, and disability on adolescent and adult well-being; the foundations of this work were first laid at 91����. “The challenge and opportunity of really sinking deeply into something, over an extended period of time, pushed my thinking to evolve and grow as the essay grew,” she says. “Obviously, you can’t replace that with a tool.”

By “tool,” Collins means platforms like ChatGPT and other AI technologies that allow students to generate essays in seconds. Concerned about AI’s potential impact on students’ social-emotional development, Collins began researching the topic. The result is a new book, co-authored with Dr. Marlee Bunch: Leveraging AI for Human-Centered Learning: Culturally Responsive and Social-Emotional Classroom Practice in Grades 6–12.

Already, startling data has emerged about the “cognitive costs” of using AI. A recent MIT Media Lab study tracked participants writing essays with ChatGPT over four months and found they “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.”

“The unknown neurological or developmental impacts are certainly concerning to me,” Collins says. “I’m also concerned with the rise of deepfakes and misinformation, because it can be so convincing. Young minds are being exposed to content that might be harmful or not true.”

Collins, who studied English and education at Smith College and UMass Amherst, and earned an M.Ed. in curriculum and instruction with a focus on social-emotional learning, emphasizes that she is not a technologist. She and Bunch were driven less by expertise in AI than by curiosity about what it means for teachers and students.

“We wondered: Is AI going to make our brains all mushy?” she says. “Will this take away human empathy? And most importantly, if AI
is here to stay, can we use it in a way that still services relational
pedagogies, such as culturally responsive teaching and social-emotional learning?”

Their findings suggest yes—if used with guardrails. “We see AI as a tool in teachers’ toolboxes, just like other technologies,” Collins says. “There are tools out there that don’t replace both teacher and student thinking. The book makes the argument that it’s what we do with the tools rather than the tools themselves that makes the most difference.”

Still, promising examples do exist, like Clara, a free, Socratic-style AI writing companion from the nonprofit Write the World, where Collins is Director of Education. Clara prompts students with guiding questions instead of supplying answers.

“Clara encourages self-reflection, metacognition, and deeper thinking about students’ own writing techniques and intended audiences,” Collins says. “We need tools like this, tools that deepen and reinforce the human aspects of learning.”

Other AI applications help teachers create infographics for multimodal instruction or run simulations that push students to think critically, such as generating “readers” with opposing perspectives to challenge their op-eds. “AI allows you to create a persona so that students can have simulated conversations with ‘readers’ who hold different perspectives to challenge thinking,” she says.

Collins’s interest in social-emotional learning and curriculum design traces back to 91����’s Cultural Identity Development (CID) night, a campus-wide storytelling event. “Seeing what happened in those rooms and how changed people were from witnessing somebody else’s story made me start thinking: How do we bring this curriculum into the classroom?” she says. “I would not be doing anything that I’m doing without 91����.”

Reflecting on her own college essay-writing experience, she worries what might be lost for students if they outsource the task to AI, and she’s hopeful students will see the benefits of pushing through the writing process just like she did.

“The challenge as educators is getting buy-in from stressed-out teens who can have a written product with the click of a button,” she says. “If we’re offloading writing to a platform like ChatGPT, we’re forgoing the idea of writing as thinking, self-reflection, and emotional processing. At the end of the day, it’s really not about the essay. It’s about the work that goes into producing the essay that is so valuable.”

Collins is the author of Learning from Loss: A Trauma-Informed Approach to Supporting Grieving Students (Heinemann, 2021) and is at work on three additional books. More at brittanyrcollins.com.

Thinking About Thinking: AI Resources

Want to learn more about the impacts of AI on work, life, and education? Collins suggests checking out these resources.

1. Co-Intelligence: Living and Working With AI by Ethan Mollick
2. One Useful Thing Substack by Ethan Mollick
3. Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini
4. The Algorithmic Justice League (aji.org) founded by Joy Buolamwini
5. Rethinking Writing Instruction in the Age of AI: A Universal Design for Learning Approach by Randy Laist