Using AI Responsibly in the Writing Classroom

Where is the adult in the room?

“I just think AI needs to be used responsibly. And there is a difference between you, who uses it as exploration, and a student who doesn't know much yet and doesn't have the critical thinking skills to engage like this with AI.” (Anonymous quote from a Substacker)

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The familiar stages of grief have found new resonance in education as teachers grapple with AI's emergence. A recent piece on Substack drew this parallel explicitly, mapping teachers' emotional journey in confronting AI onto the classic stages of loss. But what exactly has been lost?

In 1981, Arthur Applebee delivered sobering news about American writing instruction: students spent precious little time actually writing, and most assignments were brief exercises in recitation rather than thinking. Denial was the initial response. Surely this couldn't be the whole story.

Now, four decades later, we're cycling through similar stages of denial and anger about AI—but perhaps what we're really grieving isn't the loss of authentic student writing, but our forced confrontation with uncomfortable truths about writing instruction that Applebee documented throughout his career.

A fourth grader once confided in me that she felt "disrespected" in classrooms where she had to write the same text everyone else was writing, but in her own words. She told me because I asked her and every other student in my class.

We wrote about the phenomenon—together. Her insight cuts to the heart of what Applebee would document in his final 2011 study¹: writing instruction remained stubbornly unchanged, still anchored in 19th-century notions of composition, still treating writing as the step-child of pedagogy, Cinderella searching for a slipper.

These dated notions insist that texts must be autonomous, bounded by four walls enclosing determinate meaning, representing only the thoughts of the individual author. Above all, they must be unified, complete, self-enclosed, coherent, and ordered. This view has dominated classroom writing instruction since the 19th century, enshrined in textbooks whose core tenets still ground today's status quo.

Having taught graduate courses in composition theory to practicing elementary school teachers, I've witnessed the bargaining stage firsthand. Many teachers I taught couldn't move beyond traditional approaches even if they wanted to. It's wedged deep in the "standards." So when AI appeared, how could there not be grief—and the still smoldering anger that accompanies it? AI calls everything into question.

Consider a real example: a school-wide writing assessment for third graders. The assignment? Write about "best friends." What does it mean to have "best friends?" On the surface, it's ingenious. You want children to write similar papers about the same topic so you can score them using the same rubric. Papers that veer from the prescribed "best friend universe" are marked "off topic."

Never mind that exploring what others have thought about friendship throughout history might be more valuable than squeezing your brain for ideas you don't have or even care about.

This best friends scheme would still work in the Age of AI if we ensure students write with pencil and paper under our watchful eyes. Ban the bot. But AI, as ubiquitous as spellcheck, demolishes this strategy. There is your depression stage.

Responsible use has been education's reflexive response to every technological disruption from calculators to spell checkers to the internet. Each time, the bargaining stage sounds the same: “We just need to use it responsibly.” But what if that well-worn phrase is actually a form of denial? What if it's code for 'Let's find a way to make this new thing fit our old patterns'?

***

Acceptance doesn't mean surrender. When Applebee documented the state of writing instruction across decades, he wasn't just cataloging problems. He was implicitly pointing toward solutions. The same might be true of AI's disruption.

What if "responsible use" of AI means completely reimagining writing assignments? Instead of all students writing the same paper about best friends, what if they:

Critically analyzed AI-generated essays about friendship?

Collaborated with AI to explore different cultural and historical perspectives?

Used AI as a brainstorming partner to discover what actually interests them?

Write about why they do or don't want to write about best friends at all?

Write about whether AI is a friend or foe?

True acceptance might mean moving away from seeing writing as a solitary performance and toward seeing it as a collaborative process of idea and knowledge construction, something AI's presence makes impossible to ignore.

This aligns with what that insightful fourth grader understood: being forced to write the same thing as everyone else, just in different words, disrespects students' individual voices and interests.

Isn’t writing the composite paper on best friends—the same paper everyone else would write with a few wrinkles of difference—AI’s forte? Does the best friend prompt position young writers as AIs? Could that positioning be the cause of feeling disrespected by being forced to write cookie cutter essays?

Applebee's research spanning nearly forty years underscores that the traditional system was built on the assumption that few teachers are expert writers themselves, necessitating failsafe protocols to keep the trains on schedule. Now, AI forces us to acknowledge that perhaps the real irresponsibility was pretending this system was serving students well.

The path through grief leads to this recognition: responsible use of AI in teaching writing could actually create more authentic instruction, acknowledging that writing has always been a collaborative, tool-assisted process. Rather than seeing AI as a threat to authentic writing, we might see it as an opportunity to finally break free from the artificial constraints that Applebee spent his career documenting.

This freedom will require every teacher to become an expert writer and an expert tool user, including with AI. It's a daunting challenge, but preferable to prolonging the fantasy that traditional writing instruction has been going just fine. Don't take my word for it. Spend fifteen minutes having a conversation with Claude about Applebee's findings. Then we can talk about real responsibility.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Perhaps the real irresponsibility isn't students’ using AI without the critical thinking skills adults sometimes have, perpetuating a system that never truly taught critical thinking in the first place. As Applebee showed us decade after decade, how can students develop critical thinking when they're repeatedly asked to write the same thoughts as everyone else, just in different words?"

1. https://scrapbookedinquiries.wordpress.com/2016/01/19/arthur-n-applebee-and-judith-a-langer-a-snapshot-of-writing-instruction-in-middle-schools-and-high-schools/