The Time My Students Used AI in Their Final Reflections – and I Liked It!

This is going to be a really funny post, because if you’ve spoken to me lately, I’m really angry about AI these days. It’s not anything new, per se. I mean my attitude has been like this for a long time: as a human, I am critical of the colonialist, capitalist, racist, Eugenicist roots of AI and the way it is overhyped and also has been historically used to harm humans and exacerbate inequality under the illusion of neutral automation. However, I have also believed for a long time that I cannot control or even attempt to control how students use AI. My overall approach is to spend a lot of time nurturing their critical AI literacy so they’re aware of the ethical considerations, hallucinations, biases, and roots of who and which ideologies lie behind AI tools, show them some alternative tools that hallucinate less (like Google Notebook LM and research tools like Keenious and all the Deep Research versions), then encourage them to use their own judgment to see where AI can support them in doing the work, without replacing them or limiting their creativity, their voice, their identity. And I just ask for transparency. I know not all students will be transparent about everything, but when they describe how they used AI and share the conversation link, it has been so eye-opening over the past semester.

This semester I am particularly proud of the ways students used AI in their final reflections, where I gave them a vague instruction that “AI cannot reflect for you and was not with us in class, but I mean, if you find a way to use AI here usefully, just be transparent about it.”. Here are some of the interesting ways students used AI:

1. My favorite was a student who used AI to create a digital narrative game (similar to ones we developed in class using AI) that puts someone in the place of a student experiencing the class, with 8 scenarios representing 8 different things she learned during the semester. She showed me her chat with the AI tool and I saw her thinking process and how she led the AI to help her create the game, by building fully on her own personal reflections – and it was phenomental. I am so proud of what she produced, and it feels like her work, but packaged with a tiny bit of help from AI.
2. A couple of students used AI (I think NotebookLM?) to create infographics representing their written reflection in visual form. I could see the reflections they clearly wrote themselves, and the visual representation was a cool addition
3. One student used Claude to create a webpage representing their reflection in a really neat, nicely organized way with collapsible spaces. It was a really nice way to quickly see the general things the student was reflecting on, and then go deeper where I wanted
4. One student represented her reflection as a trial on humanity and AI and said that she used AI to help her organize it
5. A couple of students used AI to help them organize their writing, and I noticed the ways in which one particular AI tool (Claude) helped students remember what to emphasize in the reflection and how it highlighted the most important elements of my rubric. It sort of reflected back to me my rubric and made me proud of it… and explained to me why everyone’s reflections this semester were more… comprehensive than usual.

I’ve been saying all semester that students are getting better at using AI, not in the sense of getting better at prompting it to do more work, but in the sense that they are becoming better judges of what appropriate use looks like and what inappropriate use looks like. And able to self-control and take agency over their use of AI when I gave them freedom beside critical AI literacy.

I’m optimistic about how higher education can impact the trajectory of AI in their lives beyond university. My “AI in your profession” assignment, where they interview a professor and a professional about the use of AI in their field helped most students realize that their own personal judgment, identity, creativity are all still important even when AI gets used sometimes, and that there are still jobs out there for them and AI will not replace them. Reading their reflections, I can see how they’ve learned enough about bias and inequity and learned the ways AI can perpetuate bias and inequity, as well as its harm to the environment. A recent activity I did involving ethical considerations for professors’ AI use helps them realize that professionals need to approach AI ethically, not just students, and that these decisions, impacted by AI’s biases and hallucinations, can harm people directly and violate their rights. I see all this in their reflections.

I also can see in their reflections that a lot of the offline experiential learning we did left a mark. The things AI cannot possibly reflect on, on their behalf. Our sessions with the somatic healing expert which many say gave them tools that helped them throughout the semester. Our trip to Tahrir campus to meet international students learning Arabic was a particular hit, helping them take pride in their own language and realize they could talk to people they’d never met before from a totally different culture and not be scared or inhibited, that they could discuss their similarities and differences and even become friends, maybe. I wish I had given them at least one more trip to Tahrir, as many of them expressed this as an improvement for the semester. So many of them also really enjoyed the Soliya experience of virtual intercultural dialogue, and I’m glad I keep this element in my class. Every semester, I wonder if I should cancel the game assignment, but every semester I read their final reflections and how much they are proud of the output of this assignment. But this semester especially, I was amazed by how some of them said this assignment made them dig deep into their personal experiences and get to know their own selves better in the process of making the game, or make peace with certain struggles they’ve had before, from doing this game assignment. Goosebumps all over! And I had thought that since they can use AI to create the assignment, they’d become more distant from it; instead, they learned how to make sure the AI told *their* story and not a stereotypical, sterilized version of the story from the AI’s training base – they learned to teach the AI tool to do the coding part, while they could focus on the content, the meat of the game.

I love that many of them enjoyed the socioemotional literacy activities we did in class, whether board games, discussions, or the Empathy Toy. I am also glad that many of them remembered particular readings and videos we did together or they did at home, and remembered stuff from across the entire semester, not just towards the end. I did add something in the assignment instructionrs about the reflection being comprehensive and both broad and deep and specific. They nailed it this semester. OK, not like 100% of them, but the majority of them. And I do think, from seeing their conversations with AI, that AI helped, but AI didn’t do the assignments, so I’m happy with this as a process and as an outcome. I also loved their recommendations for improving the course – in the past, the most common one was “change the class time to later than 8:30am”. That still came up, but I got deeper suggestions for improvement and I’m hoping to take them on board. Definitely I will try to do more than one trip to Tahrir. Let’s see what else I can manage to implement from their suggestions. Some of the suggestions related to more of certain things, but the more difficult ones that need more reflection from me was more graded group work opportunities (I thought of two already that I can plan for) and more clarity on the structure of the course, like a roadmap and how things relate. I *can* do that and Canvas is organized that way, but I really think they need a visual and for me to be more explicit about both how I overall structure the course, but also how I am flexible and I change my mind about things all the time – I’ll just be more explicit about it and encourage them maybe in their minute papers to share if they were ever unclear on the purpose of some activity or video or reading or something. I may ask a couple of students explicitly to help me a little bit with planning my course next semester to respond to their suggestions. There were a couple of students who felt slighlty overwhelmed or uncomfortable with the socioemotional literacy games at the beginning of class, that are meant to help build community and help them get to know one another, but it’s both a learning outcome of the course, and one I value very much (I control the learning outcomes, no one is forcing me to do this) because I think socioemotional awareness is important for young people to develop – whether they “enjoy” it or not, whether it takes them out of their comfort zone or not, it’s good for them generally speaking, and from most of their reflections, I can see that they recognized that the discomfort helped them grow and learn and get to know their colleagues better.

Speaking of discomfort, this was perhaps the first time that multiple student emphasized how the course was about sitting with discomfort about humanity and about AI, and learning to be better critical thinkers. I’m not sure what I did particularly this semester to encourage that, or if the AI tools were encouraging them to say things like that (I couldn’t see from the chats anything specific in that direction). It’s possible that the last few things I asked them to do about AI were very critical and hit them hard? Or maybe teaching the course with the backdrop of the US attacks on Iran, Israel attacks on Lebanon, and all kinds of human-made disasters everywhere? I’m really unsure… but I hope this continues.

Featured image by Wolfgang Claussen from Pixabay. I love that it is called “drop” and it made me think of this course like a “drop in the ocean” but it has ripples, like in the picture, and I felt like the reflections made me grateful that I got the opportunity to teach these students at this time, and hopefully if they are honest, that I had the effect on them that they mentioned.