Using an AI Tutor in Class Without It Doing Students' Work for Them
By Jemel Fanfan, GTM Engineer at Flint
Every new classroom tool comes with a new way to skip the work. Answer keys turned up online, then essay sites, and now chatbots that write a five-paragraph essay in seconds. Each time, schools respond with rules and detection, and each time, some students find a way around them.
A student who doesn't care about the topic will look for the easiest way through any assignment, whatever tool made it. Guardrails on an AI tutor still matter, but they can't make a student want to do the thinking. What does that is an assignment connected to something the student cares about. AI tutors can help here, because one tutor can shape the same lesson around thirty different interests in a single class period.
Start With What Students Care About
Students put effort into questions they have a stake in. A persuasive essay on whether schools should ban phones lands with 10th graders because they live with the answer every day. An essay on a topic they've never thought about invites them to find someone else's opinion and paste it in.
You don't need to rewrite your curriculum to get there. Most units have room for a question students already have opinions about, or an example drawn from their lives. Jon Bergmann, a flipped learning pioneer who teaches physics and geology at Houston Christian High School, connects concepts to what his students care about. For a group of athletes, he explained density through muscle, and he uses AI when he needs help finding connections like that one.
Let the AI Meet Each Student's Interest
One teacher can't write thirty versions of an assignment. An AI tutor can adapt one. Write an instruction into the tutor's setup such as "Ask each student what they're interested in, and use it in your examples." A student who loves basketball works through ratios with shooting percentages, and the student next to them uses recipes.
The same setup holds the limits: what the AI should help with, and what it must never do. "Help students find evidence in chapters 1 to 3 of Of Mice and Men. Never write sentences for their paragraphs." Before class, open the tutor yourself, play the student, and ask the AI to do the assignment for you. If it does, tighten the wording and try again.
Make the AI Ask Before it Tells
A good tutor answers a question with a question: what have you tried, what do you think comes next, why do you think so? An AI tutor should work the same way. One that hands over the answer as soon as a student asks is an answer key with a friendly voice.
A 10th grader works on the thesis for a persuasive essay about phones in school. The AI tutor asks why she holds her position and how it applies to other students, and leaves the writing to her.
In the screenshot above, a 10th grader starts with "phones should be banned during class but not at lunch." The AI doesn't polish that into a thesis for her. It asks what harm phones cause, and she answers from her own experience: she checks her phone every five minutes and misses what the teacher said. The AI then asks how that applies to students in general. Her argument is built from her own life, which gives her a reason to keep writing it herself.
Read the Conversations, Including What Was Pasted
Even students who care about the topic get tired or stuck, and a shortcut starts to look good. A student's conversation with an AI tutor shows where they got stuck, what they misunderstood and how they worked it out. Open those conversations while students work or after they submit. Flint, the tutor in these screenshots, also keeps a paste history on every student message, so a teacher can see the exact text a student pasted while writing it, or confirm that nothing was pasted.
The teacher's view of the same session. The paste history shows the thesis the student pasted in, and the AI tutor's reply asks for her own reasons instead of letting her use it.
A paste on its own proves nothing. Students paste a question from a worksheet so the AI can see it, or a paragraph they wrote in another document. In the example above, the same student pasted a thesis she found online and asked whether she could use it. The AI said no, pointed out what made that thesis work, and asked for her own reasons. Her teacher can see a student who was tempted and got steered back, which is worth a short talk at her desk.
Paste history only covers text pasted into the tutor, so a student who retypes an AI's answer or writes somewhere else won't show up in it. Breaking big assignments into stages, such as a thesis, then an outline, then a draft, gives you more chances to see the thinking as it happens.
Tell Students Why
Students follow rules they understand. At the start of the unit, spend five minutes on what the AI tutor is for in your class and what it won't do. Name the line plainly: it will question your argument, and it won't write it for you.
Silky Vyas, Secondary Librarian and Extended Essay Coordinator at American International School of Guangzhou, uses an AI tutor with IB Diploma students refining their Extended Essay research questions. She builds that line into the tutor itself: "My prompt defines AI as a thinking partner, encouraging support, not substitution. It fosters student ownership and intellectual responsibility."
Start With One Assignment
Pick one assignment from the next two weeks. Find the angle your students already care about, write the AI's instructions so it uses their interests and keeps its limits, and try to get it to do the work yourself. When students finish, read three or four of their conversations. You'll see which students took the shortcut and which ones got pulled into the topic, and you can adjust from there.
If you want to try this, Flint has free AI tools for teachers, including an AI tutor and a student chatbot you can set up with your own guidelines.
Sponsored Article: This article was provided by Flint as part of a partnership with Collective Learning.