What Happens When We Actually Listen to Students About AI
Gina Tesoriero spent years teaching the same 12 seventh-graders all day in a New York City classroom. When she started bringing STEM and design thinking into her room, something shifted — students who had been checked out were suddenly engaged. She wanted to understand why. That question eventually led her to a PhD, and her research has something important to say to every educator navigating AI right now. Her doctoral work focused on how recent high school graduates are using tools like ChatGPT to manage their academic lives, their jobs, and everyday decisions. Some of those students were her own former seventh-graders, now young adults. What she found is both simple and urgent: stop policing AI use and start getting curious about it.
One of her former students — a full-time teacher working toward a graduate degree — built herself a custom ChatGPT writing tutor that asked questions one at a time, accepted voice-to-text responses, and was available at midnight when office hours weren’t. That’s not a shortcut. That’s a student who understood her own learning needs and had the digital literacy to do something about it. It’s exactly the kind of autonomous, creative problem-solving we say we want to develop. Another student in Gina’s research was using AI in ways she wasn’t comfortable with. Instead of shutting it down, she got curious and asked why. What she learned reframed everything: how a student uses AI reveals what’s missing in their learning environment. If a student is leaning on a tool as a crutch, there’s usually a reason — and that reason is worth knowing.
This lands directly in the heart of Québec’s Digital Competency Framework. The framework calls on educators to develop students’ capacity to think critically about technology, to use digital tools creatively and responsibly, and to engage ethically in connected environments. But that can’t happen if we’re not creating classroom cultures where students feel safe to be transparent about how they’re actually using these tools. Silence doesn’t produce digital literacy, conversation does.
Gina is clear that AI literacy isn’t the technology teacher’s job — it belongs in every classroom, every subject, every grade. The pace of change is too fast and the stakes are too high to keep it siloed. Québec’s framework makes the same argument, positioning digital competency not as a standalone course but as a cross-curricular responsibility shared by all educators. The students who can tell us the most about what isn’t working are often the ones we forget to ask. Gina’s research is a reminder that curiosity — about our students, about the tools they’re using, about the gaps we haven’t seen yet — is still the most powerful pedagogical move we have.
Hear the full conversation on the ShiftED Podcast. This post was produced with AI assistance.
