AI-Generated SEL and Mental Health Lesson Plans? First, That's Not Our Wheelhouse

How would you feel about your kid being taught an AI-generated lesson plan on SEL or mental health?

Well, Edutopia reports that that kind of thing is happening now, thanks to tools like Leni, which schools are using to have teachers or counselors or other people who work with kids generate lesson plans, I guess for the whole class, maybe for small groups, maybe for individuals, on specific mental health and SEL and related topics, and they kind of tie it into MTSS and all of that.

I have concerns about this on a number of levels.

Let me know what you think about this.

I think on the one hand, schools should not be doing this kind of thing anyway.

Like, the evidence base is very poor.

for school-based mental health and SEL interventions.

And often we make things worse by stepping outside of our wheelhouse, right?

Medical professionals take the Hippocratic Oath.

And as educators, we don't take the Hippocratic Oath, but I think we have that same obligation to do no harm.

And we can't really do that with things that are outside of our training, right?

Like I am not a mental health professional, so it is irresponsible for me to practice mental health care in any way just as it's inappropriate for me to write a prescription to give somebody medication other than you know maybe a you know an ibuprofen if they have a parent's note if we're allowed to do that like mostly we need to stay in our lane and a lot of the mental health and SEL efforts that are happening right now in schools I think do violate that Hippocratic Oath and do cause us to step outside of our wheelhouse.

I have big concerns about schools doing this in the first place because we need to leave it to professionals who are not us.

We are not those professionals.

We are in a different profession entirely, and we should do teaching.

We should do education, and we should leave mental health care to mental health professionals, just as we would leave surgery to surgeons and prescribing to general practitioners.

There is just so much that we should not be doing at all.

From there, and maybe thinking about lesson plans later, you know, more generally, I think we've gotta start with the best that we have already.

And the idea that like you can use AI to generate something quickly in a pinch, like we shouldn't feel great about that.

We shouldn't feel great about saying, well, I don't have anything and I don't know what I'm doing, but I need something.

You gotta do something, right?

Well, I don't know that it's always better to do something than nothing and the idea that you would just like pull up a $5,000 a year website and print something out just because you're in a pinch, like this is not how a profession operates and I don't think we should be doing this kind of thing.

And I think if I heard as a parent from my kid that they were taught a lesson that the teacher had generated with AI and it was on a topic where I felt like maybe the school shouldn't be addressing that in the first place, like the fact that it was generated by AI would not make me feel better.

And it's probably not going to be explained to students that that's where the lesson plan came from, but like parents can find out if you're using these platforms, they can do public records requests and things like that.

So I don't feel great about this.

Now, again, this is not the students using the AI, it's the educators, but let me know what you think about this situation.