The Breck community has arrived at a crossroads where we must ask ourselves the question: How can faculty best incorporate AI into the classroom in ways that improve learning? One overarching theme from every faculty interview conducted for the “AI in the Breck Classroom” piece was that faculty and students alike care deeply about preserving the critical thinking that is so core to Breck’s mission of creating “confident learners who lead lives of intellectual curiosity, self-knowledge, and social responsibility.” Our subsequent reporting raises the question of whether the current state of faculty-led AI integration actually aligns with that mission. The data suggests that there is ultimately room for growth, with the majority of respondents indicating that teachers’ current use of AI has no impact on their education experience, and the next largest group indicating that it impacts their learning negatively or very negatively. This finding should be a call for Breck’s administration to step back and evaluate whether the current approach to AI integration is truly serving our mission.
In this critical moment of reflection, we urge Breck to keep open dialogue at the forefront of its approach. When community members make it a priority to talk to each other, effective progress will become possible.
As the Breck community approaches an ever-changing technological future, we suggest a few tangible AI-related initiatives be made a priority. First, student voices should be foregrounded as the process of AI integration continues. Together, we should create a student coalition that represents the student body’s views about AI so that when decisions are made, they are representative of all of us. Secondly, Breck innovators should be striving to branch outside the school’s walls as they begin to draft AI policy. Breck should be reaching out to and learning from experts—in the fields of AI and of independent school education—so that our progress isn’t made in a vacuum, but rather exists as a microcosm of large-scale growth. Third, Breck needs concrete, fair, and timely acceptable-use guidelines for faculty, so that student integrity can thrive by faculty example, rather than exist as a one-sided standard that erodes relationships and trust.
Ultimately, Breck must continue to keep its students’ learning at the center of all that it does. The Breck community can overcome any challenge or moment of uncertainty that comes its way, as long as we commit to transparency, collaboration, and ensuring that AI does not diminish the integrity, depth, authenticity, and purpose of the Breck experience.
