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Navigating Artificial Intelligence to Improve Teaching and Learning: Early Lessons from Gem Prep Innovation Schools (Idaho)
By Alan Gottlieb
It should come as no surprise that Gem Prep, the Idaho-based charter school network, has leapt ahead of the pack in its use of artificial intelligence for teacher planning and classroom instruction.
Gem Prep, after all, has a strong reputation for being on the cutting edge of education innovation, particularly in the use of technology. It started as a single online school in 2004, and by the fall of 2027 will have expanded to eight in-person campuses as well as the thriving online school and a couple of blended learning pods known as Learning Societies. Gem Prep was also a 2024 Yass Prize semifinalist.
But as with any new technology, the charter network has been cautious and thoughtful in its rollout of AI.
“You have to balance a new technology and its uses,” said Laurie Wolfe, Gem Prep’s chief academic officer, and an avid user of AI for her own work and life. “There’s always going to be good, and there’s probably always going to be ways to use it for ill.”
Gem Prep leadership first introduced AI and its potential benefits (and risks) to the network’s board of directors earlier this year to secure buy-in before proceeding with a gradual rollout to teachers and administrators.
“We did a demonstration with the school board on ChatGPT and how it could be used,” Wolfe said. “We asked them to do a couple of activities just to see what that looks like. At that point, they had heard of it, but none of them had ever tried it.”
The first reaction among board members, Wolfe said, was “‘oh my goodness, look at this output.’ And then we shared with them some examples of when things go awry and you get misinformation. We wanted to present a balanced view.”
“We felt we needed to get the board to understand AI, because if you don’t have the support of the board, and you don’t have the support of your executive team, it’s going to be difficult to get people on board with it and get the support that you need. Anytime you try new technology, there are going to be mistakes and missteps.”
Ultimately, the board signed off on introducing AI gradually to teachers and students, and the rollout began in earnest at the start of the 2024-25 school year. Some teachers have jumped in enthusiastically, while others have been more hesitant, worried about potential cheating by students.
The bottom line is that AI isn’t going away. Kids are going to use it outside of school, so it makes little sense to pretend it doesn’t exist or issue a blanket ban on its use.
Gem Prep licensed an AI platform called MagicSchool AI and made it available across the network to all teachers and administrators. MagicSchool, which is used by charter networks and school districts around the country, describes itself as offering more than 70 tools to help teachers plan lessons, differentiate instruction, generate rubrics, provide students with writing prompts, and much more.
The chief advantage of a tool like MagicSchool is that it takes a lot of the mystery out of getting AI to behave as you want it to, said Jost Leavell, Gem Prep’s technology integration specialist. New AI users often grow frustrated by the need to engineer prompts that get AI to do what you’re asking.
“With tools like MagicSchool, the prompt engineering side of things is already greatly taken care of,” Leavell said. “As opposed to ChatGPT, which if you put in a bad prompt, you’re going to get a bad result. This is a relief, especially to people who are brand new to AI.”
Gem Prep teachers who are AI-savvy or curious don’t limit themselves to MagicSchool. One other popular platform is Class Companion, which provides students with AI tutoring and instant feedback.
Gem Prep Meridian English teacher Rebekah Rasmussen uses Class Companion to get her students instant feedback on rough drafts of essays she has assigned.
Rasmussen, an early adopter by nature, has put significant effort into learning the strengths and weaknesses of AI, and its best uses for educators wanting to optimize their time working with students. Having AI analyze rough drafts is one of the greatest efficiencies she has found.
Running rough drafts through AI gives students an extra layer of critique, allowing them to go back and revise their work before handing it in for grading. Typically, students hand in a ‘final’ draft for grading and are offered a chance, which few take, to revise for an improved grade.
“When they’re able to get that feedback on their rough draft, they can have a really good final draft,” Rasmussen said. “Because I would say 70 percent, if not more, of students don’t want to go back and revise their final draft based on the feedback from the teacher.”
In other words, having AI review rough drafts adds a much-needed, helpful step to the writing process because typically students submit only final drafts, which are graded. Teachers with dozens of students simply lack time to read through rough drafts and final drafts.
Quick and early feedback is but one of a wide variety of ways the Gem Prep teachers and administrators have begun using AI, particularly this school year. Wolfe mentioned a few MagicSchool tools she finds particularly intriguing. One is a “hook generator,” which provides suggestions to teachers on how to grab students’ attention to get them immersed in a lesson.
Another is a relevance generator, which helps answer the age-old student question “why should I care about this? What possible relevance does it have to my life or my future?”
Chandon Siman, a veteran high school English teacher at Gem Prep Meridian, said he has found multiple uses for AI in his classroom, all of which help students and save him time so he can focus more on working one-on-one with kids.
He likes using MagicSchool to score early drafts of papers against a rubric so students can see exactly where their draft is strong and where it is weak, and how they can shore it up to ensure a good grade.
Another way Siman employs AI is MagicSchool’s sentence-starter feature. “I had them play around with it and use it to help them generate sentence starters for introducing evidence or creating topic sentences or the thesis statement of a paper,” he said.
“Yes, I want them to learn to be able to create and develop their own sentence starters,” Siman said. “But a lot of times learning how to write is being able to mimic what good writers do. So giving them an opportunity to see what strong writing looks like has value and the content and evidence and analysis are still all theirs.”
Other potential uses for AI mentioned by Wolfe and teachers include adapting class assignments to the individual reading levels of students, and allowing students to have dialogues with characters in a book they are reading.
Tools like MagicSchool can be huge time-savers for administrators as well, performing tasks like quickly translating letters sent to parents into multiple languages with a high degree of accuracy. It can also help special education teachers draft and revise Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) for their students.
Despite the user-friendly tools available, some Gem Prep teachers have been hesitant to start using AI, Wolfe said. One objection she has heard is the fear that AI can be used for nefarious purposes, not just in schools, but worldwide.
But probably the chief objection from teachers is that students will use it not as a tool for learning, but for cheating. Strong proponents like Rasmussen acknowledge that concern.
“There are still going to be kids who use it to cheat, who use it to plagiarize their papers,” she said. “There are going to be kids who are savvy enough to become excellent prompt engineers, and go through and change the wording of a paper written by AI so that it sounds more like their voice.”
Still, Rasmussen said, benefits outweigh risks. “The key point is that while there is a risk of cheating, the students who learn to use AI effectively and critically will gain more benefits than those who simply try to cheat,” she said.
Gem Prep teachers and administrators who believe in using AI stress that it is not a crutch or a tool that replaces the hard work teachers and students must do to be successful. Rather, it is potentially a time-saving device that can help teachers in particular dispense with some of the more arduous and tedious tasks that don’t require a sharp human brain.
Whatever the use, Wolfe said, educators would be wise to assume that AI can only get them 60 or 70 percent of the way to a finished product, be that a lesson plan, a rubric, or an entire curriculum.
AI is inherently untrustworthy, with a tendency to make stuff up out of thin air (hallucinating, in AI parlance). This means that an ethical educator or student will always double- and triple-check anything AI produces or suggests.
Still, that provides a potentially enormous time-saving. And that’s something perennially stressed educators can appreciate.
“I’m interested in figuring out how we can help teachers and leaders in particular, actually have some balance in their lives and be able to leverage some low-level tasks that we can automate or make easier for them,” she said. “And that’s one of the great things this technology has the potential to offer.”
Where will Gem Prep be with AI a year from now? According to Wolfe, the “mind-bending” speed at which the technology is evolving makes that impossible to predict. Gem Prep will have to remain nimble, she said, constantly revising and updating policies as the technology evolves or, equally likely, makes quantum leaps in capability.
“There are so many different uses that could develop, but how do you know what’s going to take hold and people are going to like?” she said. “Or are people going to push back and say ‘this is getting too scary?’”
Alan Gottlieb is a Colorado-based writer, editor, journalist, communications consultant, and nonprofit entrepreneur who owns Write.Edit.Think, LLC. He founded EdNews Colorado, which later merged with Gotham Schools to form Chalkbeat. He does consulting work for Bluum, an Idaho-based non-profit education group.
