We live in a rapidly changing technological landscape, and the rise of AI in all aspects of our lives is unavoidable. In recent months, professional uses of AI have proliferated, with many companies pushing AI tools on their employees in the name of efficiency. A study done by Pew Research Center suggests that about 16% of all employees use some form of AI for their jobs, with 31% reporting that, while they don’t currently use AI, they know that some parts of their job could be done with AI.
What’s more, a study done by McKinsey reports that 92% of companies plan to invest in Generative AI tools in the next year. It’s clear that company leaders are racing to catch up to technological innovations and incorporate AI into their company frameworks to avoid falling behind. But a workforce is different than a classroom, and the impact of AI on students remains a concern, with the potential consequences for critical thinking and learning still uncertain.
We’ve been here before: The rise of AI in the classrooms, as well as technology companies’ push to use new AI products, mimics the internet boom of the early 2000s. We hear refrains of the then-common narrative that laptops would revolutionize student learning and prepare youth for the future. Now, it’s the same argument, albeit with LLMs instead of laptops.
So, what AI tools are teachers implementing, and how are they using them? To learn more, we surveyed teachers around the US, from elementary to post-secondary levels and across subjects. Our survey asked them to share their personal beliefs about AI, their current uses or perceptions of it, and their students’ attitudes or uses of it, if applicable.
In our survey, teachers reported using ChatGPT as a “sounding board” for lesson planning, to brainstorm ideas, and to generate handout templates (that they also manually modify). They also reported using MagicSchool AI and Khanmigo (Khan Academy’s AI tool), not just for lesson plan support, but to create fun hooks and generate engaging slide decks for their lecture-like lessons.
One teacher reported that many of her colleagues use AI to write report cards, but she does not, as she does not feel that AI completely matches her writing style—yet. However, despite some limitations, teachers noted that it can help with the phrasing of ideas for the delivery of specific feedback to parents. No teachers reported giving their students AI tools to use in the classroom (yet), but instead discussed the impact that AI has had on their own roles and workload.
The National Education Association details a 2025 study conducted by researchers at the University of Missouri to assess teacher burnout. Out of 468 public school teachers, 78% shared that they had thought about quitting their jobs since the pandemic. With teacher burnout at an all-time high, it makes sense that teachers are turning to tools that might increase efficiency and give them more space and time to focus on their classroom time with students. A 4th-grade teacher from Madison, CT, said, “Teachers have extremely large workloads as it is, so to have AI and know how to use it to help them can be very beneficial.”
“AI is very helpful for teachers,” they emphasized, “but it's really important that teachers are trained properly to use it. I think schools should have more… professional development days focused on how [to use] AI to their advantage.”
Seemingly, those professional training days are starting to become more prevalent. From a nationally representative survey of 300 districts, a New York Times journalist reported that at least 48% had provided A.I. training for their teachers as of fall, 2024—up from 23% in fall, 2023.
Additionally, more professional learning resources and asynchronous opportunities exist for teachers, making training more accessible than when ChatGPT was first released; Write the World’s own library of AI teaching and writing resources, for instance, provides background knowledge, prompts, readings, and classroom activities designed to support teachers’ responsible use of AI (including WtW’s Socratic AI writing assistant, Clara) with students. One of the surveyed teachers from Kansas City, MO cites Ethan Mollick as her go-to reference for understanding and teaching with AI.
Student thinking can be influenced by AI whether or not they intentionally use it. For example, a middle and high-school humanities teacher from Texas told me that they believe students are starting to rely on the Gemini AI summary that appears at the top of Google searches. It is positioned above the top search results, potentially feeding students homogenized information and identical (if not always reliable) results.
A New Yorker article recently detailed various experiments designed to assess participants’ answers to prompts with and without AI and found that those who used AI had writing that was vastly homogenized. One MIT experiment tested 50 students from various universities, splitting them into three groups with ChatGPT, Google Search capabilities, and no assistance. The study prompted them to answer, “Must our achievements benefit others in order to make us truly happy?” Not only did the students who used ChatGPT produce vastly similar answers, they also showed less brain connectivity through electroencephalography (EEG) testing after four months of use.
For demonstrated outputs, “A.I. is a technology of averages: large language models are trained to spot patterns across vast tracts of data; the answers they produce tend toward consensus, both in the quality of the writing, which is often riddled with clichés and banalities, and in the calibre of the ideas.”
The common theme among educators is that AI can be an incredible tool if used responsibly and with guardrails in place so as not to not overtake critical thought. The answer may be varying lesson mediums and providing education about, and promoting student awareness of, AI. One teacher shared, for instance, that he has discussed the environmental and energy impacts of AI use, which many students (and adults!) may not be readily aware of.
Technological advancements are inevitable, but we can proactively put barriers and responsible processes in place to preserve student creativity and intellectual autonomy. Keeping these ideals in mind, Write the World offers Clara as a solution for responsible AI use in the classroom. Clara is a Socratic AI tool for students that is designed to enhance, not replace, student writing.
In accordance with Write the World’s mission to support teens in becoming better writers, as well as providing a platform for their unique voices, Clara acts as a guide and brainstorming tool. It offers real-time feedback and poses open-ended questions that help students think more deeply about the content and technique of their writing. As well, students can use the tool to conduct cross-disciplinary research on non-writing topics, such as to learn about historical context for a fiction story. It does not generate text for students but instead supports them as a teacher or tutor would, scaffolding their creativity and critical thinking.
If you’re interested in bringing Clara’s Socratic AI technology to your middle or high school classroom or district, sign up for a free pilot here. The tool is easily integrated with Google Docs, ensuring smooth implementation alongside existing software and tech systems. As one teacher explains to her students, “AI is a tool, but AI is not meant to replace inquiry or analysis; it is meant to support it.”
That is exactly what Write the World has aimed to create with Clara, and we look forward to continuing to support—and collect feedback from—teachers and students with this innovation!