AI and the 5th C: Citizenship

Knowledge and understanding are great places to start, but that’s generally not enough. Students need to move up Bloom’s Taxonomy to experience deeper, higher-order thinking. We can facilitate this by having students create a set of AI citizenship guidelines for their classroom. By having students create, they will also be applying, analyzing, and evaluating throughout the construction process.

This type of activity comes with several benefits. First, it provides an authentic application for the new learning. Second, that new learning becomes more relevant and meaningful because it applies to the students’ personal classroom context. Third, it is an authentic and actionable way to generate expectations for your classroom. It includes student input and is done in a way that deeply engages them in the process. There is a high probability that this approach will increase both awareness and compliance with the expectations since the students were engaged in creating them.

There are many ways that you can facilitate the development of AI citizenship guidelines for your classroom. Whichever approach you take in designing this experience, it’s important that all students not only have a voice in the process but are required to contribute ideas. One efficient way to do this is to have every student contribute to a T-Chart or Y-Chart. A T-Chart has two columns, with one to describe what something looks like and the other to note what it sounds like. A separate, related T-Chart is used to describe what it does not look or sound like. A Y-Chart is similar, but it adds what something feels like or does not feel like. Once completed, these charts can be hung in the classroom as anchor charts. Students will be reminded of the guidelines that they helped develop.

Once students have applied the concepts of AI and citizenship locally, it’s important to extend it more globally. There are several considerations to think about as you design these experiences.

1. First, consider how you can connect AI citizenship to the content standards that you are teaching in your classroom. If you are teaching social studies, the connections to citizenship will probably seem obvious and plentiful, as citizenship is likely a central theme in the curriculum. If you are an ELA teacher, perhaps you can connect it to the theme in a piece of literature or integrate it with a lesson on small-group communication skills. Whatever your content area, you can make the learning more relevant and also save time through a curricular connection.
2. Second, determine a community beyond your classroom. Perhaps you target your school, maybe it’s your local community, or you could go even bigger and choose your state or nation. Depending upon the age of your students and your objectives, you might even look globally. Naming a specific community and context will give your activities and conversations about both AI and citizenship added relevance.
3. Third, determine how you are going to have your students apply the concepts of AI and citizenship to your chosen context. The options are many, but here are a few to help get you started with brainstorming ideas.
   • Critique AI. Ask a generative AI chatbot a question relevant to the audience or context that you’ve chosen. Then, examine the response, critiquing it for bias, accuracy, truthfulness, and completeness. How would people in your target audience respond to the answer? Would they all respond the same? Students may need to do some additional research to vet the AI responses.
   • Make students be the teachers. Have students develop learning materials about AI that could be shared with their intended audience. If the audience is local, like another grade in the school or parents and guardians in the community, the materials could actually be shared. With an authentic audience, students will likely be motivated by more than a grade on the assignment, and it gives the outcome of their work true purpose. A variation of this could be to create an awareness campaign for the school, including the design and creation of informative signs to hang around the building.
   • Compare and contrast. For this activity, seek out AI guidelines from a source beyond your classroom. This could be from another classroom or school, a university, an organization like ISTE, or even national guidance generated by a country. Students can then compare and contrast these external versions to the ones that they created in your classroom. This can lead to meaningful conversations about the reasons for differences and similarities. It can lead to conversations about unique needs and identities of the population targeted by the guidelines. It may even lead to revisions in the classroom version.
   • Have AI help. Use your favorite AI chatbot to help you come up with additional learning activities that can work in your classroom. Generative AI can be a great thought partner. Of course, as any good AI digital citizen would do, be sure to thoughtfully review the AI-generated suggestions before implementing them.