Several English classes at Sedro-Woolley High School are implementing lesson plans designed by Linsey Kitchens to help students understand the limitations of artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT.
During a recent lesson in Linsey Kitchens’ English 101 Advanced Placement language course, the Sedro-Woolley High School teacher instructed students to ask an artificial intelligence-based program about something they’d consider themselves an expert in.
“It ran the gamut from Lord of the Rings to (Seattle) Sounders soccer,” said Kitchens. “One girl, she asked about the menstrual cycle.”
The experiment resulted in roughly three-quarters of her students getting programs like ChatGPT to lie to them, providing erroneous information that’s also known as “AI hallucination.” Students then wrote reflections on their results, and Kitchens said many were surprised about the untruthfulness of the large language model-based AI.
This lesson is one of several now being incorporated into English classes at Sedro-Woolley High, in an attempt to bring AI literacy to high schoolers. Kitchens got the idea from taking an online college humanities course called “Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?”
The free, online course — developed by University of Washington professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin D. West — explains how to “learn, work and thrive in a world increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence,” according to a February press release.
Bergstrom and West are affiliated with the UW’s Center for an Informed Public, which Kitchens is associated with through an offshoot program called “Co-Designing for Trust.” Kitchens received a fellowship for the program from the Center for an Informed Public, which led her to discover and take the course.
Kitchens was inspired to adapt the course’s curriculum to the secondary education level and is now working with fellow Sedro-Woolley teacher Anna Ferdinand to implement it. The series of lessons is being utilized in all 10th grade English classes, with 9th and 11th grade English Department instructors having agreed to incorporate them by early next year.
Both Kitchens and Ferdinand are unaware of any other regional school districts using these lessons or implementing a similar program, but Kitchens said the lessons were made publicly available this month in a national Zoom call with Teachers for an Informed Public.
While Kitchens acknowledges AI’s potential benefits, she has concerns over the lack of knowledge both students and teachers have about its limitations — despite many of them already using daily.
“(Many) students have a false impression that it can do everything well, and they don’t know when they should use it and when they shouldn’t,” Kitchens said. “And that’s the end goal of the course: to make responsible, ethical, judicious decisions.”
Ferdinand said that in teaching about AI, she has been somewhat surprised to learn many of her students already operate under the assumption that using AI to do their work is unethical.
As both a writer and instructor, Ferdinand said it’s apparent to her when a student has used AI to write an assignment. Those who do, she added, often fess up to it and will then re-do the assignment without AI help.
The technology may also be eroding trust in the teacher-student relationship, said Indigo Gambill, a 19-year-old senior and teaching assistant at Sedro-Woolley High. Friends have completed coursework without AI, only to be failed by instructors accusing them of using the technology.
Kitchens said her teaching experiences have revealed that many of her students use AI to do math homework, which has led to concerns within the high school’s math department about declining test scores. The combination of students with still-developing brains, unfettered access to optimized and addictive AI programs, as well as busy lives, she added, is a recipe for shortchanging their own learning.
“If there’s a tool to help get something done faster, they’re going to use it,” she said. “And I can’t necessarily blame them. The system (currently) does not support them making wise decisions when it comes to AI use.”
Currently, Sedro-Woolley’s AI literacy curriculum includes an introductory lesson and four subsequent ones.
Each begins with a bigger picture concept, several minutes of direct teaching about the capabilities and limitations of available LLMs — including Gemini, Bard, Grok, ChatGPT and others — followed by student interaction with the programs and a reflection period.
At semester’s end, Kitchens will collect feedback from teachers and students and further revise the lessons, at which point they may be rolled out to other school districts in Washington or other states connected to the Center for an Informed Public, she said.
In the meantime, Sedro-Woolley students and teachers are continuing to figure out how best to incorporate AI into their lives. Ferdinand isn’t quite sure what that looks like for her yet.
“I really am going to have to draw those lines of where we can use it — where it is a tool, and where it absolutely shouldn’t be,” she said. “So, I’m still working that out for myself, because it’s just something has popped up so quickly. It’s a scary time, but it’s a very important time.”
— Matt Benoit
Also read in Salish Current:
• “Could one conversation change how you see this place?” Aug. 29, 2025
• “Fear of the unknown: AI anxiety in academia,” Jan. 7, 2025
• “An election in the age of artificial intelligence,” Sept. 20, 2024
• “Assistant … or replacement? AI, in real life,” May 12, 2023