George O’Toole: What Critical AI Literacy Looks Like in Classrooms

What Critical AI Literacy Looks Like in Classrooms

Primary Source: IGNITE English Resources

Overview

George O’Toole presents critical AI literacy as understanding what AI tools do, whose knowledge they carry, who benefits from their use, and when not to use them. His classroom translation is an assessment model that makes thinking visible through plans, drafts, checkpoints, in-class writing, and short conversations.

The perspective recommends asking students what they did with an approved tool and what they kept, rather than asking them to explain why they used it. It also treats refusal and use as legitimate choices, and warns that unequal access to paid AI can distort assessment unless schools provide common resources.

Implications for practice

• Prefer process evidence and teacher-student conversation to AI-detector scores.
• Protect students from being pressured to disclose a disability when explaining assistive-tool use.
• Teach AI concepts and evaluation without requiring every student to use a chatbot.
• Gather more assessment evidence in shared classroom conditions.

The article is a practitioner reflection on an unnamed online panel, not a formal policy or independently verifiable account of the panel’s discussion.