Teaching Writing With AI Without Replacing Thinking: 4 Tips

Steve Graham believes AI can help students learn to write but he doesn't want it to replace the writing process.

“Writing can be a powerful tool, and we have evidence that it will help you understand the material better and remember it better,” says Graham, a professor at Arizona State University, who has studied effective writing instruction and how AI does in writing assessments .

But that only happens if students actually write. “If we move to a point where something like chat GPT is writing for us, then we lose the advantage of thinking about the material we're writing about, which can increase our understanding," he says.

Reconciling these two goals -- having AI help students learn to write more efficiently without hijacking the cognitive benefits of writing -- should be a key goal of educators. Finding the ideal balance will require more work from both researchers and classroom educators, but Graham shares some initial tips for doing this currently.

1. Have Students Brainstrom Without AI

Many talk about how they use AI as a brainstorming partner and to generate ideas. Graham isn’t certain that’s the best use for students, at least not initially.

Instead he’d like to see the students get their ideas down on paper before working with AI. “You're still thinking about it, then you're bringing in other ideas,” he says.

2.  Have Students Write A First Draft Without AI

Once a student has the ideas for a paper, Graham advises having them write a first draft. “Then the polishing of the material may be a great place for AI to help us,” he says. This might include sentence construction, changes to tone, and other aspects of writing improvement that are generally separate from the part of writing involved in thinking about a topic.

3. Have Students Go Deeper Than The First AI Response

AI tends to offer advice so confidently students might be tempted to take it whether it improves their writing or not. To overcome this, Graham suggests writing a sentence and then having AI suggest multiple versions of that sentence, and then rewriting it with the class making it clear why the final sentence you chose is the best.

“Just as we might teach students how to form more complex sentences from simpler sentences with something like sentence combining, we can have activities where we help students make those kinds of decisions so that they use the feedback from AI to improve their sentence skills and make informed decisions,” Graham says.

4. Emphasize Thinking In All AI Writing Tasks

Graham says that teachers want to have students focus on the idea that “thinking” goes along with writing as they explore utilizing AI for writing help. Even parts of the revision process should be centered on student thinking. Bolstering digital citizenship is also important in reducing the use of AI to cheat and shortchange learning.

“We want to be sure that at each point that we use this where you could potentially take thinking out of the mix, that we make sure that we structure the situation so that that's not going to happen,” he says. “We want to really emphasize ownership of what's written and responsibility. Ultimately, if AI helps you in some way, you need to be transparent about that. And if there's errors, they're your errors, because it's your responsibility to check on that.”

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