Generative AI technology is transforming all sectors of society, and the classroom is no exception. Whether or not you’re part of the growing number of educators who are using generative AI to reimagine the way they teach, you probably know that your students are already experimenting with these tools even more than you are. This creates a unique challenge for educators, who must weigh numerous factors in deciding how to include generative AI in their curricula.
On one hand, it’s clear that cultivating AI skills is an integral part of workplace preparedness. On the other, there is attention being given to ensuring that generative AI does not unintentionally stifle student learning, especially where critical thinking and creativity are concerned.
As with any nascent and rapidly evolving technology, it’s important to note that we’re just beginning to get early insights on generative AI’s impact on both education and work. That said, there is already ample data that the appropriate classroom technology tools, when properly utilized, can increase student creativity.
Why does this matter? Beyond being an engaging pedagogical methodology, creativity offers short- and long-term benefits to students. Creativity is now ranked even more highly than AI skills as an essential part of career preparedness, in no small part because of the ways in which generative AI is already changing the future of work. Creativity is itself also a key facet of a holistic, meaningful and healthy educational experience. When considering mental-wellbeing, for instance, an overwhelming 95% of educators report that fostering creativity leads to improved mental health and reduced stress for students–as well as for themselves.
The right generative AI can help accelerate creativity in the classroom, expanding and amplifying these positive outcomes to more students in five key ways.
#1: Remove barriers and increase creative confidence for students without advanced design skills
We’ve all experienced the so-called “fear of the blank canvas.” But for students who feel they don’t have the requisite artistic or design skills to even begin a visual or creative activity, this fear can be paralyzing, reinforcing these students’ lack of confidence and making them more reticent to engage creatively.
Generative AI educational tools break the often-amorphous creative process down into clear and manageable steps. Instead of being stuck worrying about how or where to begin, students can use these tools to move through the creative process from having an initial idea, to testing and iterating upon it, to producing a finished piece of work.
However, this doesn’t mean that students to whom design comes more naturally will have their talents sidelined. The proper generative AI tools for creativity in the classroom will give students multiple output options at each step, allowing them to utilize their unique skills and preferences as they work toward a final result and utilize simple design features to make custom edits and additions.
By making it easier for all students to do creative work, generative AI tools can build student confidence–which in turn leads to greater student satisfaction and deeper learning.
#2: Enable more self-expression through personalized outputs
Unlike standardized learning approaches, which demand that students solve a problem for the correct answer, generative AI-enhanced creative learning biases towards individual preference and self-expression. Generative AI tools like Adobe Express for Education are designed to respond to and iterate upon choices made by student users via prompts that ask for continuous refinements of visual and figurative language, nouns and adjectives until an original idea is fully realized. This process naturally invites students to insert their own interests, perspectives and sensibilities in the objects, images and styles they employ.
Well implemented, a generative AI-assisted assignment should result in 30 students having 30 submissions that are all unique. As with removing barriers, personalization and active learning together support better education outcomes and increase student confidence, which in turn motivate students to continue engaging creatively.
This level of creative personalization also allows students to practice stepping into the role of active creator, rather than passive consumer, of media and information. Beyond merely engaging their own voice and style, students will also see how audiences relate to what they have created—and how they relate to the work of their classmates. If the work a student produces with generative AI doesn’t convey their intended message, they will have the opportunity to evaluate their own process and choices. Because every student who completes a generative AI-guided assignment will turn in unique work, teachers can make reviewing peers’ submissions a dynamic part of the learning process.
In these ways, students can leverage generative AI educational tools to become both savvier consumers of content and more ethical creators of it. Teachers should encourage students to be thoughtful about their creative choices and the impact these choices have, and to be transparent with their audience about their use of generative AI. Technology like Content Credentials, which are baked into any image created with Adobe Firefly in Adobe Express for Education or in Creative Cloud, demonstrate to students what such transparency looks like in practice.
#3: Reduce student time needed to complete creative activities
As the North Dakota K-12 AI Guidance Framework elegantly puts it, “AI is best used to augment uniquely human traits, such as creativity, while automating more mundane tasks.” Without generative AI, the time required for students to go from brainstorming to iterating on to presenting a final creative project can be extensive, capping the number of such projects a teacher can hope to assign with an already packed curricula or else spiking student stress levels by assigning too much homework.
Generative AI, on the other hand, makes mundane or repetitive work like updating dozens of design elements almost instantaneous, allowing students to see what their ideas look like on screen and quickly iterate towards a polished product—instead of being stuck implementing an idea they’re not excited about. Creative projects that might have been assigned once a term before generative AI can now be completed as frequently as once a week or more–especially since teachers can also use these tools to brainstorm new lesson plans.
#4: Practice the essential components of creative thinking
Generative AI’s unique capability to make the imaginary instantly visible can help students understand and engage with abstract concepts in a more visceral way. This creates a framework to efficiently practice and synthesize the subskills that make creativity possible, which include:
- Problem-solving
- Taking creative risks
- Embracing contradictions
- Innovative thinking
- Connecting, synthesizing and transforming ideas and visual information
Focusing on embracing contractions, for instance, might entail students doing a generative AI-assisted exercise around a complex literary character or historical figure who has seemingly contradictory attributes. Students might brainstorm all the attributes that character or figure has, using character analysis diagrams or t-charts. From there, students could utilize metaphors and figurative language to prompt generative AI to brainstorm animals or objects that share each group of attributes, then use image generation to bring these hybridized images to life.
One student might visualize a soft-spoken civil rights figure as a felt-lined ringing bell. Another might use generative AI to depict a literary figure like Gatsby as an amiable charlatan by creating a hybrid of a golden retriever and a snake. Generative AI tools invite students not to be bound by the confines of reality, amplifying their creativity as they practice close reading, historical thinking, and creative thinking in ways that drive deeper learning.
#5: Demonstrating understanding in deeper ways
Generative AI not only facilitates a more iterative creative process but also provides a digital record of the student’s critical and creative thinking and decision-making at each step. So-called visible thinking routines such as this help students facilitate better cognitive function overall. They also help teachers gain a deeper understanding of what their students have learned.
By making student thinking visible, generative AI educational tools allow educators to evaluate their students based on how they have synthesized knowledge within their own creative processes and then determine what creativity-enabling skills their students should continue practicing. Simple-to-use rubrics can further help educators in making their feedback effective. They also allow students to practice showing where and how they utilized generative AI, creating transparency and trust between teachers and students, similar to traditional citation and attribution in essays.
Selecting the best generative AI tools for your students
While it’s self-evident that educators should use generative AI tools that they can trust to be safe and reliable, it is equally important to select tools that are specifically designed to facilitate and teach, not replace, creativity. A tool like Adobe Express for Education does both. Like all Adobe products, Express for Education is designed and maintained using Adobe’s principles of AI ethics. It is also built to respond to student prompts at every step in the creative process, compelling students to be both actively engaged and reflective about their creative choices and always customize, personalize, and add their own unique voice and point of view to their creative work.
As with all enrichment materials, the discernment, connection and trust a human educator inspires is a foundational part of learning. Even the best generative AI educational tools need the expertise of a human teacher to yield the best results. Utilized in this way, however, these tools can yield better creative and overall educational outcomes than we’ve ever imagined.