by Becky Holt
May 28, 2026
Saint Michael’s Education Professor Claudine Bedell teaches her students not just how to use AI tools, but when to use them, when to avoid them, and how to recognize their limitations and ethical concerns.
Bedell, who also serves as the Associate Dean of the School of Society and Culture, began working with AI alongside her students in 2023 to help them develop more integrative curriculum units.
Now, Bedell’s approach centers on developing critical thinking skills specific to educational contexts, including ethical concerns like avoiding bias and inaccuracies and using AI as a crutch. She and her colleagues in the Education Department are greatly concerned about the impact that AI could have on student privacy under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
Bedell emphasizes that future teachers must understand their students’ learning objectives before turning to AI for assistance.
“You have to be a critical consumer (thinking), what is your objective?” she said. “How will you teach that objective to your students? Using what instructional strategies? And then, how will you assess the learning of that objective?”
She said that when using AI to build a rubric for assessments or to generate texts at different reading levels, for example, it can be easy to miss the mark. Expertise in assessment and evaluation in the educator’s content area is crucial.
Professor Claudine Bedell
Bedell herself uses AI-generated rubrics in her classes as teaching tools, creating opportunities for students to critique them and recognize flaws and areas for improvement. The same approach applies to “designing the actual performance tasks that you want students to complete to measure student learning,” she said.
She regularly discusses with future teachers how to design assessments that require authentically human work, including creative ways to evaluate performance in the classroom – something that cannot be produced by AI.
Bedell sees significant potential for AI to support personalized learning. One of her students created individualized math workbooks for every student based on their assessment results. But here too, teacher expertise remains essential.
“If you don’t read those workbooks, and you don’t monitor students’ progress,” the personalization loses its value, Bedell said.
“We educate you to be an expert in your field,” she said, “and you have to use that expertise to be a critical consumer of what you take from AI, and what you ask AI to do.”
Read the collection of stories on AI at Saint Michael’s College. This story was published as part of the Spring/Summer 2026 edition of The Saint Michael’s College Magazine.
For all press inquiries contact Elizabeth Murray, Associate Director of Communications at Saint Michael’s College.
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