AI with Integrity: Bringing Clarity to the Learning Process #AskTurnitin
Got questions about AI in the classroom? Watch this panel discussion — then ask what's on your mind.
We've gathered a panel of educators to come together for a panel discussion on a question many of us are navigating: how can we support authentic student learning in a world where AI is everywhere?
The recording is attached above. Take some time to watch, then share your questions in this thread. We’ll be checking in and responding right here on TEN through July 3.
Answering your questions:
Jason Friend has been an English teacher at Saratoga High School since 2003. He is a founding member and the current program coordinator of the Media Arts Program, an interdisciplinary academy dedicated to innovative education. Passionate about thinking and writing, Jason has had several articles published in Philosophy Now. He received the Goldin Award for Excellence in Education in 2016, and was named Teacher of the Year for the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District in 2026.
Melissa Rofer has just completed her first year as an English teacher at Los Gatos High School. Previously, she taught English at Cupertino High School from 2004 to 2010. Between these roles, she spent 14 years as a parent volunteer and K-12 substitute teacher. She has her Master's in Education from U.C. Santa Cruz and is a graduate of Humboldt State University.
Audrey Campbell is a Manager of Educator Engagement at Turnitin, where she connects educators with practical, real-world strategies for teaching in a rapidly changing landscape. Before joining Turnitin, she was a classroom teacher for ten years and understands the everyday realities educators face. She’s passionate about helping educators make sense of feedback, learning integrity, and the evolving role of AI in ways that feel supportive and useful.
Karen Smith brings 34 years of experience as a public school ELA teacher and literacy coach to her role on Turnitin's Teaching and Learning Innovations team. Since 2021, she has designed instructional resources and professional learning content that help educators worldwide implement Turnitin products effectively. Her extensive background in writing instruction ensures all her work is deeply rooted in pedagogy and academic integrity.
Not sure what to ask? Start here:
"How do I write an AI policy my students will actually read?"
"Should AI use be allowed on some assignments but not others?"
"How do we rebuild a culture of original thinking in an AI-saturated world"
#AskTurnitin Guidelines:
1. Be respectful: Treat all participants with kindness and professionalism.
2. Stay on topic: Questions should relate to AI detection, teaching strategies, and classroom experiences.
3. No product support requests: Technical or account issues should be directed to Turnitin Support
4. Avoid sensitive personal info: Do not share personally identifiable information about yourself, your institution, or students.
5. Engage constructively: Share insights, ask thoughtful questions, and build on others’ contributions.
34 replies
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#AskTurnitin Conversation Starter: What is lost if students rely too heavily on AI?
Are there specific skills that you feel are at risk? How are you addressing that in your teaching?What happens to the cognitive process when students outsource their thinking? While AI can help students generate ideas, structure arguments, and polish prose to create high-quality results, these tools may also bypass the intended learning process.
The most vulnerable skills include forming original arguments, navigating initial drafts, evaluating sources, and developing intellectual confidence through challenging work. Because writing serves as a method of thinking rather than just a reporting tool, removing the effort from the process may limit student growth.
Rather than banning technology, many educators are redesigning their curricula. They emphasize the writing process over the final product by incorporating reflection, in-class assignments, and explicit AI literacy instruction to clarify where AI use supports or hinders learning.
Visibility into this process allows for better support. Turnitin Clarity provides educators with data on how student work develops beyond a simple similarity score. This tool offers a transparent environment for students to use AI according to instructor guidelines, transforming enforcement into an opportunity to discuss effective tool usage.
The primary objective is to ensure that students continue to learn. By observing the development of a document, educators can provide targeted coaching, helping students build critical thinking, judgment, and a unique voice.
How do you maintain the integrity of the thinking process in your classroom?
I'm eager to read your perspective on this topic, especially how your AI-Resilient Writing framework gives visibility to student thinking during the writing process.
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- YES! This question gets at the heart of what I think educators are wrestling with right now.
For me, what's most at risk isn't just writing; it's the thinking that writing makes visible. Some of my biggest learning moments as a student (and later as a teacher) came from struggling through a first draft, realizing an argument didn't hold up, or figuring out how to connect ideas (I imagine many can relate to that!). That productive struggle is where critical thinking, confidence, and a student's unique voice are developed.
I don't think the answer is asking students to avoid AI altogether. In fact, our colleague Anna Borek talks about how we need to shift from simply prohibiting AI to actively teaching AI capablity and judgement in her article on Future Campus:
AI needs ot be taught, not just caught (By Anna Borek, Senior Director, APAC, at Turnitin)
Instead, we need to be intentional about when AI supports learning and when students need to do the cognitive heavy lifting themselves. There are plenty of places where AI can be a valuable thought partner (brainstorming, generating questions, or providing formative feedback). Still, there are also moments where the learning objective is independent thinking, synthesis, or reflection.
That's why I appreciate the shift from focusing only on the final product to making the learning process more visible. When educators can see how ideas evolved and how AI was used, conversations become less about catching misuse and more about coaching students to become thoughtful, responsible learners.
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, Educator at Los Gatos High School, California, shares:
Persistence and patience are just two of the “soft skills” lost when students look up an answer or have AI generate work for them. Attention span, focus, and the ability to problem-solve challenging situations are all affected. This negatively impacts their academic and social-emotional growth.
ELA content standards rely on the development of critical thinking skills, and these are lost when students use AI to read overviews or generate writing. These skills are needed for reading comprehension and analysis, such as the interpretation of context clues, figurative language, and rhetorical approaches to reading, writing, and speaking (just to name a few!). Relying on summaries and on externally generated answers, rather than primary sources and original work, deprives students of the valuable experience of building those mental pathways themselves.
To address this, I try to increase interest in and interaction with the material. In my classes, we discuss and practice metacognition to make the acquisition of their skills and habits transparent and intentional. We do a great deal of interpreting current art, writing, and events that are high-interest to increase engagement in the historical and literary concepts and work we explore. It takes a LOT of time spent pre-planning lessons and classroom management strategies to support this.
Process writing at home is more fraught than ever, and it will be hard to maintain as an assessment, which is disheartening because it is a time-honored practice that has thus far been an integral component of the secondary ELA curriculum.
, Educator at Saratoga High School District, California, shares:
Critical thinking, authenticity, and trust. Many English teachers have already given up on the out-of-class essay. While I’m trying to use Clarity as a means to keep the out-of-class essay alive, I’m not sure it is going to be possible in the long term. And, if that particular mode of assessment dies, I honestly don’t know how we are going to help students learn to think deeply about a topic over a long period of time, to ponder multiple rounds of constructive feedback, and to carefully revise their arguments and their methods of making them.
would love to hear your perspective!
And and , what do you think?
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Absolutely! When I taught writing, I always put emphasis on pre-writing activities and the importance of review (including peer review) and revision. AI could help in asking clarifying questions or identifying gaps in evidence and support for claims.
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I agree with the vulnerable skills that Monica highlighted. Moving to an assignment model that requires students to show more of their writing process seems like a good approach. The greatest concern I see from faculty about this change is the workload. I think many are concerned about the amount of time it will take them to review student "pre-work" in addition to the final product. I'm still thinking through this.
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You raise a really important point! Workload is one of the concerns we’re hearing from faculty when we talk about more process-oriented assignments.
When I think about making student thinking visible, I don’t think it always means adding more steps or creating more work. Often, it means slightly adjusting what we already ask students to do so we can better see the reasoning, decisions, questions, and revisions happening along the way.
That also doesn’t mean instructors need to review every piece of pre-work in depth. Sometimes the value is simply having access to the process when it’s helpful. I think about instructors who ask students to work in Google Docs. Most are not reviewing every part of the document history, but it’s there if they need to better understand how the final product came together.
That’s part of what I think is helpful about Clarity and upcoming assignment types like Multipart. They can give instructors more visibility into the work students are already doing along the way, without turning every step into something that has to be reviewed or graded separately.You asked a very timely question, and our product team is working on something closely aligned with this. We’ll be able to share more later this month.
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thank you, this is helpful information!
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You're welcome! I talked a little bit about how I adapted some of my assignments for the writing process in one of the earlier conversation starters, if you're interested.
I know the last thing instructors want or need to do is 'more work.'
What assignment models are you seeing in your classroom? -
The beauty of reviewing the prewriting is that by the time the final draft comes around, you generally already know what it will look like--or so I found when I was in the classroom.
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Welcome to AI with Integrity: Bringing Clarity to the Learning Process #AskTurnitin!
We’ve brought together a panel of educators to explore a question many of us are navigating today. This discussion features secondary educators in California who have firsthand experience with how AI is showing up in the classroom.
We invite you to watch the video above and share your insights and experiences on AI use in your classroom. Our panel will be here to answer your questions.
This is an open space for thoughtful discussion and shared learning, so we encourage you to join in!
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Wow, what a great discussion!
So grateful to , , and for jumping into a great conversation on responsible AI use and the modern challenges of learning and teaching in a digital landscape. I'm eager for others to watch our recording and let us know what they think about our range of topics.
Check it out and please leave your comments below!
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Hi all! I'm super excited to have been a part of this panel and engaging with two fantastic educators who are facing the use of AI daily! This was a fun conversation and I was a bit disappointed when our time was over. Hope all you viewers have a similar experience!
I can't wait to continue the conversation over the next two weeks! -
#AskTurnitin Conversation Starters: How has AI changed when and how you check student work?
Educator at Saratoga High School District, California, shares:
"As I mentioned in the panel discussion, I’ve stopped thinking about AI detection as something that happens at the “end” of the writing process. Instead, I check for AI use on the earliest possible writing steps, and try to hold one-on-one conversations with every student whose writing has been flagged by Clarity as concerning. Students have been much more receptive and honest when the stakes are low, and this approach has had positive impacts on getting them to do their own work."
Educator at Los Gatos High School, California, shares:
- Laptops closed for notes unless previously arranged with a student due to an accommodation.
Minimal laptop use during class. Specific expectations communicated for when they are used.
Typed assignments written in Clarity and/or uploaded to Canvas with a check for AI.
Handwritten notes checked regularly.
An increased attention to penmanship and spelling.
Increased amount of printed articles, documents etc, so that laptops stay closed more and work is completed on the article or paper/whiteboard/posters/etc.
More in-class individual writing and student interaction in pairs, small groups, and whole class.
We’d love to know: Are you shifting AI checks earlier in the writing process? What has that looked like in your classroom so far?
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Thank you for sharing this discussion. It was helpful!
I'd love to get perspective on this question both from Turnitin employees and from educators. When using Turnitin Clarity, do you find that students ever have privacy concerns about their writing process being recorded?
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#AskTurnitin Conversation Starters: When did you first realize AI was changing student work? What moment made it real for you?
Educator at Los Gatos High School, California, shares with us this answer:
When suddenly the time normally spent to grade essays quadrupled as I tried to figure out what was AI vs student generated. As I mentioned in our discussion, I was quite confused by some of the patterns I was seeing in many of the students’ writing. The issues were not what I would expect from a developmental standpoint nor based on the coursework I knew they had completed in previous grades. When I saw what LLMs were producing and compared it to some student work it suddenly made MUCH more sense. -
#AskTurnitin Conversation Starters: How are you redesigning tasks to make student thinking visible?
Teachers are innately adaptable. We adapt courses, assignments, instructions, feedback, deadlines, and expectations. In many ways, we are professional tailors within the garments of education: adjusting the thread, fabric, buttons, and seams so the learning experience fits the students in front of us.
When I think about making student thinking visible, I don’t think it always means adding more steps or creating more work. Often, it means slightly adjusting what we already ask students to do so we can better see the reasoning, decisions, questions, and revisions happening along the way.
As a former educator, I usually started from the end. If I wanted students to produce a literary analysis of a short story or poem, I first thought about what I needed to see before the final essay: how they were reading, what they noticed, where they were confused, what questions they asked, and how their interpretation changed. That shaped the scaffolding around the assignment.
Sometimes that meant literature circles with specific roles. Sometimes it meant short reflections after discussion. Sometimes it meant brainstorming, thesis work, rough drafts, quick check-ins, or discussion posts. The point wasn’t to create busywork. The point was to make the learning process visible enough that I could understand how students were getting to the final product.
By the time I read the final essay, I usually knew the student’s work already. I knew who had struggled through an idea, who had changed direction, who needed more support, and who had skipped parts of the process entirely. That visibility helped me respond to the learning, not just evaluate the product.
I think this matters when we talk about AI and assignment design. If students are allowed to use AI, or allowed to opt out, the core question may not be “How do I redesign everything?” It may be “Where can I ask students to show the thinking that is already happening?”For example, maybe AI is allowed during brainstorming, especially for students who process ideas through conversation. In that case, students might explain what they asked, what the tool helped them consider, what they rejected, and what they decided to do next. Maybe AI is used to explore possible sources, alongside a lesson on research literacy and evaluating credibility. Students who choose not to use AI can still document their search process, source decisions, and moments of uncertainty.
In both cases, the learning outcome stays at the center. Students are still practicing analysis, research, writing, revision, and reflection. The difference is that we are asking them to make their choices visible.
To me, “visible thinking” is not about surveillance or adding another sleeve to a jacket that already fits. It is about changing the thread a bit so the work students are already doing becomes easier to see, discuss, support, and assess with integrity.
I'm wondering if others in the community might have their own perspective? How are you redesigning tasks to make student thinking visible? -
This is not a question but rather an appreciative comment. I really appreciated being able to hear the insights of current educators who are actively using Turnitin products like Clarity. They bring a helpful, on-the-ground perspective about the benefits and challenges of handling AI usage. I'd love to see more discussions of this nature.