Teaching students to 'be better than a robot'

Summary

This Marketplace Tech episode asks whether AI in classrooms should be understood only as cheating or as a capability students must learn to judge. It centers on Christy Gerdhary of Babson College, whose faculty group The Generator explores values-based and care-centered responses to AI rather than only bans and detectors. The strongest contribution is AI Writing Pedagogy: assignments that make AI collaboration visible, ask students to evaluate bot output, and push them toward work with personal, embodied, or multimodal meaning.

Key Claims

• AI chatbots can generate essays, summarize texts, translate languages, and sometimes solve multi-step math problems, forcing educators to rethink assessment and evidence of learning.
• Some teachers ban AI, but Gerdhary argues students need to become “better than a robot” by understanding tool limits and output quality.
• The Generator began at Babson College in fall 2023 and brought educators from more than 30 Boston-area institutions into shared AI teaching conversations.
• Values-based and care-centered approaches matter because Gerdhary says AI detectors tend to flag already marginalized students more often, creating AI Detector Bias risk.
• Prompt engineering is treated as writing: students need to know what makes a prompt, response, revision, or transformation effective.
• Remediation assignments can ask students to let AI transform their work, collaborate with AI while color-coding authorship, or create something AI cannot produce.
• The Bulgarian grandmother and clay rose example shows why physical making, personal memory, language, and family context can exceed generic text generation.
• The episode suggests that AI may push writing instruction beyond default five-paragraph essays toward public, multimodal, and judgment-rich communication.

Key Quotes

“be better than a robot” - Gerdhary’s classroom rule for student AI literacy.

“five-paragraph essays” - school writing form she says is uncommon outside school.

Connections

• Marketplace Tech and Christy Gerdhary - show and guest.
• Babson College and The Generator - institutional setting for the faculty AI conversations.
• AI Writing Pedagogy, Transparent AI Use, and AI Detector Bias - concepts added by the episode.
• AI Literacy Against Worship, Human Judgment Under AI, and Learning Experience Design - broader AI literacy and pedagogy branch.
• First Draft Thinking, AI Shortcut Risk, and AI As Tutor - related March 2026 homework-risk source; this episode focuses more on writing assignments and transparent collaboration than on homework sequencing.

Contradictions

• No direct contradiction found.
• The source complements What do students lose when they rely on AI for homework?: the March episode emphasizes delaying AI until after a student’s first attempt, while this January episode shows what structured, visible AI collaboration can look like after students have material to transform and judge.