Three guiding principles for using AI technologies in middle school education

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have generated a great deal of concern about the effects of these new technologies on teaching and learning. In this manuscript, we explain that the benefits of AI technologies far outweigh their concerns, and to help middle school teachers effectively use AI, we presented three guiding principles: (1) Prompt writing is very different from Googling and other Internet searches. (2) AI prompts can be interactive and conversation-like in which successive prompts and the resulting AI outputs can become increasingly more precise and detailed for teachers’ instructional needs. (3) Effective use of AI technologies requires teachers to carefully scrutinize AI outputs for accuracy and pertinence to their classroom teaching needs. Throughout the manuscript, we provide examples of how AI can be used to identify a myriad of instructional resources and strategies for supporting students’ learning. We share our opinion that the new AI technologies should not cause unnecessary alarm, but they might serve as a rich instructional resource for teaching and learning in the middle grades.