A Teaching Minute brings you teaching tips from the CTL.
Leaning in to AI
Friday, 2/20/2026
This year, many of our Teaching Minutes will spotlight the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at UVM by featuring faculty who presented at the UVM SoTL Symposium. These pieces will highlight their teaching innovations or experiments, with topics ranging from incremental teaching improvements to more formally researched interventions, and what they've learned along the way. The Symposium is now held each spring, hosted by the CTL and the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, with support from the Office of the Provost.
At the May 2025 Symposium, Dr. Margaret Maynard (Occupational Therapy) shared a new teaching practice from her course, Children as Occupational Beings. She emphasized that these doctoral students—future clinicians—must develop and maintain strong critical reasoning and analytical skills. Now that GenAI is increasingly embedded in clinical tools and electronic medical records, turning to it to develop treatment plans is tempting! But in some situations, this could lead to serious errors, particularly in high-stakes pediatric or neonatal intensive care settings. Therefore, understanding when, and when not, to rely on GenAI is essential.
So, Margaret and her colleagues leaned in.
They designed assignments that asked students to intentionally use AI to generate treatment plans. Students first completed in-depth, instructor-developed, evidence-based learning activities. Then they were asked to use AI to generate treatment recommendations for two complex pediatric case studies: a brachial plexus birth injury and a feeding disorder.
Students were asked to analyze each of the AI-generated recommendations for safety and appropriateness, taking into account the children’s ages and the stage of their treatment. Finally, they evaluated and wrote about the AI recommendations explaining whether they would choose to implement each one—and why or why not.
Rather than students passively listening to lecture about why they shouldn't rely on AI, Margaret thinks it's far more effective to ask them to actively and deeply engage with these complex questions, exploring AI's accuracy. And indeed, they discovered that, occasionally, AI made recommendations that were inappropriate for a child’s age and in direct contradiction to established protocols. This underscored the necessity of ultimately relying on their own critical judgment and evaluative skills.
However, students also learned that AI can be useful in certain contexts. For instance—especially for students who don't have much experience being with children—AI is helpful in brainstorming fun, playful, and age-appropriate activities to keep their pediatric patients engaged.
Pre- and post-course surveys showed students were in strong agreement that these assignments were crucial for understanding what GenAI can, and can't, reliably do.
Next week’s Teaching Minute will focus on a Civil Engineering class that similarly helps students discover the pros and cons of GenAI's influence in that field. If you have any questions for the CTL about these or other teaching topics, we'd love to hear from you at ctl@uvm.edu.
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www.uvm.edu/ctl
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