By Helen Coster
Oct 28 (Reuters) - In the AI capital of the world, sixth-grade humanities teacher Tristen Chang is designing her classroom so students can’t rely on chatbots.
Starting last year, Chang did away with take-home essays and began using oral exams to test students at her San Francisco school. She asks students 15 questions about character, plot, theme and metaphor, which they can answer in as little as five minutes.
"There’s been a long march of technology changing teaching, but AI is the
most drastic," Chang said. "Everything’s out the window.”
As generative AI becomes ubiquitous, US middle and high school teachers are rethinking how they assess learning. Educators are assigning less take-home work, increasing in-class writing and discussion, and redesigning assignments to measure students' thinking rather than simply their answers, according to Reuters interviews with a dozen teachers and education experts across the country.
School systems remain divided over AI, leaving many teachers to navigate the transition largely on their own. Some want AI integrated into classrooms; others want it restricted. Many occupy a middle ground.
“Where many adults are using these tools for various kinds of purposes to help them in work-based settings, we haven't really figured out what that means for education,” said Antero Garcia, an education professor at Stanford University and president of the National Council of Teachers of English.
A FIXTURE IN EDUCATION
As students gain access to AI chatbots on their phones and laptops, teachers are moving more learning back into the classroom. They are increasingly relying on in-class writing, instruction and face-to-face assessment.
Rusty Shabe, who teaches middle school English in San Francisco, said students often turn to AI at home when they feel overwhelmed. He is trying to combat that impulse by devoting more classroom time to writing, taking a month, for example, to work on an essay with seventh-graders.
Bobson Wong, a high school math teacher in New York, now assigns fewer homework questions and more in-class practice so he can better monitor how his students are working.
“AI has definitely changed not just how students do math, but how I teach it,” Wong said.
AI's effect on learning is up for debate. A 2025 Harvard randomized trial found that a custom AI tutor improved learning gains and student engagement, while a small 2025 MIT Media Lab study found that people who used ChatGPT to write essays did the work faster, but appeared to do less thinking.
Even so, AI is becoming a fixture in education: a 2025 RAND survey found that the majority of US students and English, math and science teachers reported using AI for schoolwork.
Last spring, Meghan Hyland, a high school English teacher in a New York City suburb, realized some students were heading to the bathroom to access AI on their phones. Although phones were already banned in her class, she began requiring students to leave them behind when they left.
She has also made classwork a bigger component of students' grades and stopped relying on homework as practice.
“My main ability to understand whether they know how to do critical thinking has to be done in school,” Hyland said.
For some educators, the best way to beat AI is to avoid predictable questions. Because AI is adept at answering conventional questions about character and plot, some teachers have begun asking students for interpretations that depart from mainstream thinking.
“I try very hard to create prompts that, at the moment at least, AI is imperfect at responding to,” said Pian Rockfeld, a high school English teacher in the Bronx.
Among her other strategies: assigning essays that require students to read scholarly articles that typically sit behind a paywall, protected from AI chatbots.
‘YOU CAN’T HIDE WHEN THE LAPTOPS ARE AWAY’
For some teachers, AI is accelerating a broader backlash against classroom technology, motivating them to move away from screens and toward notebooks, pen-and-paper writing and physical projects.
Rex Ovalle, a high school English teacher in a Chicago suburb, tells students to retrieve a composition notebook from a box at the start of class. He limits Chromebook use to roughly 10% of school days.
“I have seen a lot of engagement because you can’t hide when the laptops are away,” Ovalle said.
While Chromebooks and other technology became pervasive during the COVID-19 pandemic, many school districts are now re-evaluating their technology use amid concerns about excessive screen time.
In Hyland’s English classes, students write by hand except when they require special accommodations. She has developed new ways to assess their comprehension of a book, such as assigning a cooking demonstration to show how they understand “A Tale of Two Cities." A black-and-white cookie, for example, represented the book's famous opening line about the best of times and worst of times.
Hyland said she looks for lessons that involve “something done live so that in real time they are showing creative thinking.”
Even as they worry about misuse, some teachers are embracing AI as a classroom tool. They said it can help them find articles on a specific topic, design classroom signage and develop graphics for slide presentations, for example.
Michael Zagari, a high school social studies teacher in a New York City suburb, uses AI to change the vocabulary in historical documents for students at different reading levels and to condense articles so he can cover them in class.
He encourages students to use AI to get started on research projects and thinks they develop critical thinking skills by learning how to effectively prompt AI.
“AI is not going away,” Zagari said. “We need to teach civic responsibility of how to use AI just like we taught responsible use of the Internet.”
(Reporting by Helen Coster in New York; editing by Paul Thomasch and Deepa Babington)
