Life@MA • Investigative

Why Does My Teacher Have 10 ChatGPT Tabs Open?

How MA Teachers Are Utilizing AI

By Danny Shapiro '28 in Winter 2026

Every week, 700 million people, more than twice the population of the United States, interact with ChatGPT, including many MA students. From providing an overview of a topic to making research more efficient in history or giving feedback on an English essay, large language models (LLMs) like the aforementioned chatbot are obviously reshaping the way high school students learn. What's less obvious is how generative AI is used by teachers.

Ellie Beyers, chemistry teacher, Science department chair, and member of a group of MA faculty investigating how the school can better leverage the nascent technology, said she has "occasionally used AI for resource preparation...we had a review packet for the tenth-grade semester final, which I put into [ChatGPT] to produce more questions in a similar style. And so that was an extra review packet in addition to other resources to help students prepare for the final exam." Beyers also goes out of her way to make it clear to students if AI was used to create a resource or activity.

Devon Magaña, who teaches English II and III, explained that she likes to "think of AI as an assistant," using it to organize comments she's already given on a student's essay into rubric categories. For example, she'll tell ChatGPT that a given "comment is about constructing a claim, and this student earned a refining, so put that in the refining part of the comment bank." On using AI to generate plans for entire lessons, Magaña says that ChatGPT's ideas do not contain "a lot of nuance," whereas an activity "created by putting several heads together and talking to each other in real time" produces a "really useful lesson plan."

History teacher John Hutchinson reflected on his occasional use of AI: "it's always as a rough draft that I then need to edit through." Once, he used ChatGPT to help create example paragraphs to prepare his students for essay writing. "Even with those, I had to spend half an hour editing it so it looked like what I actually wanted."

Magaña remarked that "My favorite thing about teaching is asking [myself] 'what does this group of kids need?'...I know that different groups of students will respond better to [different activities]," whereas chatbots cannot account for the individuality and humanity of its students. While some professions are being rendered obsolete by AI, human teachers promise that they are here to stay.