By Liz Delf, CTL AI in Teaching and Learning Fellow
A Quick Guide for Faculty
Why we still want students to write
Even in the age of AI, writing is a key mode of learning that supports inquiry, critical thinking, rhetorical awareness, cognitive sharpening, expertise building, and reflection.
Four approaches to AI & writing
Use this framework to engage strategically with AI in your writing assignments. Choose an approach based on your assignment goals and disciplinary context.
1. Build on what works
Lean into best practices established before AI:
- Emphasize writing as a mode of learning and inquiry
- Build in process steps: proposals, drafts, revision, reflections
- Consider labor-based or ungrading approaches
- Clarify expectations with guidelines and rubrics
- Align expectations with your discipline
2. Make small changes
Adjust assignments to reduce student reliance on AI:
- Shift to low-stakes writing assignments
- Reduce page length or number of assignments
- Try multimodal assignments or group work
- Emphasize personal or local/campus knowledge
- Lean into authentic assignments
- Teach when and how to disclose AI use and model it yourself
3. Integrate AI purposefully
Use AI for scaffolding while students do the critical thinking:
- Leverage AI for brainstorming or outlining
- Use AI to generate counterarguments, then students write rebuttals in their own voice
- Incorporate AI as a feedback step and ask students to reflect critically
- Invite students to use AI to support writing and include a reflection on their AI use
4. Make AI the subject
Interrogate AI output to build critical literacy:
- Critique AI responses about questions in your field (fact-check for accuracy, nuance, gaps, bias, and simplifications)
- Generate AI responses on controversial topics in your field, then have students identify what viewpoints are centered, marginalized, or absent
- Prompt AI to generate examples of a genre in your discipline, analyze output as a class before having students create their own version
Key principle
Goal: keep students doing the critical thinking, judgment, and inquiry that writing supports.
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About the author: Liz Delf is a CTL AI Faculty Fellow (in partnership with the AI Literacy Center) and Senior Instructor II in the OSU School of Writing, Literature, and Film. She approaches AI integration by emphasizing process over product and designing assignments that encourage students to use AI as a thinking partner rather than a replacement for critical analysis.
Top image by Taiki Ishikawa on Unsplash
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