By: Dr. Amy Galloway Swann
As educators, we’ve been through countless waves of innovation, but none compare to the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI). While many focus on how AI can personalize instruction or raise concerns about cheating, the truth is that AI changes everything. It challenges not only what we teach but also how we teach and how we prepare students for the future. To keep pace with this monumental shift, we need to rethink our approach to education.
From “How to Answer” to “How to Ask” the Right Questions
For generations, education has been centered on helping students find the right answers. Standardized tests, worksheets, and even grading have all reinforced this pattern: success meant identifying the correct solution. However, in the age of AI, which can provide answers instantly, the true skill isn’t knowing the answer—it’s knowing how to ask the right question.
For years, coding was seen as the key to future job security, with schools heavily investing in coding initiatives. However, AI can now perform coding tasks faster than most humans. As a result, the essential skill has shifted from coding to asking the right questions and crafting effective prompts. AI thrives on user input, and students must learn how to guide these systems thoughtfully, generating refined and specific outputs. The ability to iterate, prompt, refine, and curate AI’s output is now crucial.
Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy humorously illustrates this concept with the answer to the ultimate question of life being “42”—but as the story reveals, it’s meaningless without understanding the right question. The same holds true for AI: without targeted questions, even the most powerful systems can generate irrelevant or shallow responses.
Schools must now take inspiration from fields that prioritize critical thinking and editing skills. Journalism courses, once thought to be fading, are crucial in this new AI world. They teach students to curate information, sift through vast amounts of content, ask thought-provoking questions, and piece together meaningful stories. These skills apply directly to engaging with AI—students must act like editors, shaping the information AI provides rather than passively accepting it.
The New “How”: Refining Outputs and Developing Creativity
Being able to refine AI-generated outputs is a skill in itself. Students must not only evaluate what AI produces but also learn to add their own creative flair. A great example comes from the field of fashion design. Designers don’t just take a basic concept and leave it untouched; they elevate it into something glamorous, distinctive, and often groundbreaking. Similarly, students need to take AI outputs and transform them—whether they are essays, images, or datasets—into something that reflects their own vision.
In this way, fashion designers teach us how to enhance a simple AI-generated product, making it beautiful and compelling. The lesson here is clear: AI can provide the base, but the final product requires a human touch to make it truly unique.
Odyssey of The Mind (OM) – Helping Prepare Students in Many Ways
Odyssey of the Mind (OM) is an international creative problem-solving competition that challenges students from kindergarten through college to tackle open-ended problems, ranging from building mechanical devices to creating performances based on literature or historical themes. Hosted in states across the U.S., including Colorado, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Florida, OM emphasizes critical skills such as teamwork, innovation, and critical thinking—skills that are increasingly important in the age of AI.
While AI can assist with generating ideas and performing technical tasks, creativity, voice, and the ability to refine outputs are uniquely human. OM participants develop these very skills, as they learn to think outside the box, collaborate with peers, and present their own unique solutions. These experiences prepare students to interact effectively with AI, teaching them how to shape and improve AI-generated content and add their own creative flair—something AI, for all its capabilities, cannot replicate.
Developing Student Voice: Socratic Seminars to Art Projects
In a world dominated by AI-generated content, it’s critical that learners are empowered to find their unique voice. Because of this, Socratic Seminars have newfound relevance. These seminars, which are rooted in dialogue, encourage students to develop their own voices, ask probing questions, and engage in deep, thoughtful discourse. While AI is increasingly capable of producing surface-level answers, the value of student voice—their ability to push past initial outputs and seek deeper meaning—will become more important than ever.
Additionally, we might look to pre-existing art forms as an example of what it’s like to conduct and curate AI. We may benefit by thinking of how we use AI more like sampling or collage than full-fledged composition. Letting students combine disparate elements of images, audio, video and more is an effective way to help them build skills as an editor and a curator in service of finding and honing their own unique ways. Projects like these teach students how to refine and improve AI outputs by continuing to prompt and modify the system’s output, adding personal, cultural, or musical touches that make the final product truly their own. In many ways, refining AI outputs is like creating a playlist—you start with a base, but your personal preferences and creative choices make it distinctively yours.
Conclusion: Embracing AI by Teaching Students to Curate, Refine, and Edit
AI is a transformative force, and to prepare students for the future, we need to focus less on technical proficiency and more on teaching them to become curators, editors, and innovators. Whether it’s through Socratic Seminars, journalism courses, fashion design, Odyssey of the Mind, or even HIP-HOP production, we must help students refine AI outputs, ask the right questions, and develop their own unique voices.
The future of education lies not in what students can do better than machines but in what they can do with them. By teaching students to prompt, refine, and transform AI outputs, we empower them to thrive in a world where human creativity and perspective are what truly set us apart.
As we continue to integrate AI into education, it’s important to recognize that these tools, while powerful, are only as effective as the minds that guide them. By equipping students with the skills to critically engage with AI—whether through refining outputs, curating content, or adding their own personal voice and style—we empower them to take ownership of their learning and creativity. The next generation of learners will not only need to master AI, but also transcend it by applying uniquely human insights, empathy, and originality to the challenges of tomorrow. As Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.” In this way, the partnership between human and machine becomes a vehicle for deeper understanding, innovation, and artistic expression.
Dr. Amy Swann is the Chief of Strategy and Compliance at Matchbook Learning, with over 20 years of experience innovating and improving schools across the U.S. Her work in change management and personalized learning has been featured in various publications, including the Harvard Letter and PBS News Hour. Connect with her on LinkedIn: Amy Swann.
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