少女福利

Saint Michael鈥檚 Education Professor Claudine Bedell teaches her students not just how to use AI tools, but when to use them, when to avoid them, and how to recognize their limitations and ethical concerns.

Bedell, who also serves as the Associate Dean of the School of Society and Culture, began working with AI alongside her students in 2023 to help them develop more integrative curriculum units.

Now, Bedell鈥檚 approach centers on developing critical thinking skills specific to educational contexts, including ethical concerns like avoiding bias and inaccuracies and using AI as a crutch. She and her colleagues in the Education Department are greatly concerned about the impact that AI could have on student privacy under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

Bedell emphasizes that future teachers must understand their students鈥� learning objectives before turning to AI for assistance.

鈥淵ou have to be a critical consumer (thinking), what is your objective?鈥� she said. 鈥淗ow will you teach that objective to your students? Using what instructional strategies? And then, how will you assess the learning of that objective?鈥�

She said that when using AI to build a rubric for assessments or to generate texts at different reading levels, for example, it can be easy to miss the mark. Expertise in assessment and evaluation in the educator鈥檚 content area is crucial.

Professor Claudine Bedell

Bedell herself uses AI-generated rubrics in her classes as teaching tools, creating opportunities for students to critique them and recognize flaws and areas for improvement. The same approach applies to 鈥渄esigning the actual performance tasks that you want students to complete to measure student learning,鈥� she said.

She regularly discusses with future teachers how to design assessments that require authentically human work, including creative ways to evaluate performance in the classroom 鈥� something that cannot be produced by AI.

Bedell sees significant potential for AI to support personalized learning. One of her students created individualized math workbooks for every student based on their assessment results. But here too, teacher expertise remains essential.

鈥淚f you don鈥檛 read those workbooks, and you don鈥檛 monitor students鈥� progress,鈥� the personalization loses its value, Bedell said.

鈥淲e educate you to be an expert in your field,鈥� she said, 鈥渁nd you have to use that expertise to be a critical consumer of what you take from AI, and what you ask AI to do.鈥�

Read the collection of stories on AI at Saint Michael’s College. This story was published as part of the Spring/Summer 2026 edition of The Saint Michael’s College Magazine.聽