central office says we want an AI system to tell us which students are struggling and should be prioritized for resources. Tat sounds like an efficient approach to resource management, but it takes away the deeply nuanced understanding that a teacher has about their students. We need to be very careful not to turn over important deci- sions, especially about young people, to AI. Te other concern is something called cognitive atrophy.
What skills do we start to lose when we, for example, turn writing over to AI? What happens to critical thinking? What about the ability to determine misinformation and disinformation? What happens to creativity?
MP: What do you think the impact is on the relationship between student and educator?
PM: Well, right now, in some really positive cases, it’s helping to engage students with new content, like customized learning resources, creating some interesting lesson plans. It can actually be really useful for translating for English language learners. So, on one hand, it can really extend and amplify the work teachers do. In terms of the chal- lenges, we can also see that sometimes it gets it wrong. Sometimes the content it produces isn’t great, and sometimes in the translation, it doesn’t do a very good job. We’re finding teachers who send a letter
26 ETFO VOICE | FALL 2025
home, let’s say in another language, and the translation hasn’t been audited by a human being. So there can be miscommunication. Tat’s creating some other tensions. We’re really working with our teachers in Alberta to try and make sure they learn about AI as a pedagogical tool as opposed to jumping into using it a lot.
MP: Tere are so many risks and benefits. What are some other considerations?
PM: Tere are big privacy concerns. For example, if you take student data, let’s say education psychology assessments, and you upload these into large language models, the AI will remember the data that you uploaded. Te same goes for student assessments. Te reality is that even if you ask the system not to retain the information, by default the data is stored for 72 hours. We need to be really mindful not only of the privacy issues but the ethics as well.
MP: I also want to talk a bit about large classes and the effect of AI. Do you foresee any effect of AI on class size?
PM: Class size is really an issue of underfunding, but class size and complexity go together. Students have such a diversity of needs – social, emotional, cognitive, behavioural, language learners, socio-economic. But if I think of AI applied to the issue of class
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