If your dining room table looks anything like mine on a Sunday afternoon, it is likely covered in a seemingly insurmountable mountain of student work. Grading and providing feedback are perennial issues that educators have struggled with for decades.
We know the research: Effective feedback must be timely, have the right tone, and provide actionable next steps for the student. Yet, when you are staring down your 90th essay or project of the weekend, maintaining that standard feels impossible.
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Since the release of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) tools like ChatGPT, the conversation in education has largely focused on how students are using these tools — and how we can prevent them from cheating. But it’s time we flip the script.
Just as we must prepare students for an AI-assisted world, we must also learn to navigate it ourselves. We can debate the ethics of this shift, but it’s foolish to try to stop the integration of AI into our own workflows.
Rethinking ‘AI grading’
When educators hear “AI grading,” there is often an immediate jump to concerns about losing the human connection that drives student growth. Let me be clear: the goal isn’t to have a chatbot grade our students’ work. The goal is to use AI to handle the heavy lifting of drafting and organizing, allowing us to keep the heart of teaching human.
By using AI as a thought partner, teachers can give faster, fairer, and more meaningful feedback without sacrificing their entire weekend.
To achieve this goal, we must build a culture of ethical AI use in our own teaching practices, maintaining academic integrity while revolutionizing our workflows. Below are three ways to start using AI to enhance, rather than replace, your feedback.
1. Reframe your tone
We have all been there: it’s late, we are frustrated, and the feedback we write on a student’s paper is a little too hasty or poorly phrased. GenAI is an incredible tool for taking our raw, unfiltered critiques and reframing them.
You can input a brief, blunt comment and ask the AI to rewrite it with a warmer, more encouraging tone that still provides actionable next steps for the student. This isn’t replacing your assessment; it’s enhancing your delivery.
2. Build smarter comment banks
Many of us use comment banks, but they often feel rigid and impersonal. You can leverage AI to create highly adaptable comment banks tailored to your specific rubrics and assignments.
By feeding your rubric into an AI tool, you can generate a wide variety of tiered feedback options — from basic corrections to advanced extensions — that you can quickly select and apply to student work, streamlining future grading.
3. Personalize at scale
The most fundamental part of teaching is the close, supportive relationship you develop with your students. Because of this familiarity, you know what kind of feedback each student responds to best.
AI can help you personalize your comments at scale. By using strong prompt design, you can ask the AI to take your core feedback and adjust it for different reading levels, language needs, or specific learning goals, ensuring your feedback meets the unique needs of every single K-12 student.
Learning more
Feedback and grading take an enormous amount of time, but this new AI age makes our desire to give great feedback more attainable than ever. Let’s explore these cutting-edge tech issues and connect them to our long-held professional concerns.
Join my upcoming interactive online session, “AI and the Art of Feedback,” on Thursday, March 26 at 5:00 p.m. The session is free and presented by the Kenan Fellows Program for Teacher Leadership as part of the spring semester of “Not Your Average PD.”
We will walk through short demonstrations of AI-assisted workflows, tackle chat-based challenges to reframe real feedback examples, and build adaptable best practices you can use in your classroom tomorrow.
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