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How can AI be useful in education to support literacy?

AI and literacy in education nahrizul-kadri-OAsF0QMRWlA-unsplash

As AI tools become more pervasive and their capabilities expand and improve, it is essential that young people are supported to learn how to use AI to support their literacy and education rather than supplant self-expression. Providing high-quality professional development on AI for teachers is key to unlocking AI learning in the classroom and will empower teachers and their students to think critically about the use of technology in their learning.

However, our research tells us that teachers want to support their students to develop the skills they need to interact safely, critically and ethically with AI, but that many do not feel that they have the knowledge and expertise to lead this learning. Just 3 in 10 teachers said they had received training from their school in this area and 2 in 3 teachers felt they needed more training, support and resources to use AI effectively.

In this article, Nisha Tank, Head of Secondary Improvement delves into the findings of our latest research into how young people and teachers are using generative AI and considers how teachers can use AI in education to support their teaching methods.

Why AI matters in school leadership 

School leaders have a vital role to play in providing time and resources for teacher training to develop their confidence, knowledge and understanding of how to interact with AI so that it can be used safely and effectively to support learning in their subject. Access to effective professional development in AI has the power to mobilise a highly creative and resilient secondary teaching workforce to engage in new ways of thinking about how AI can support their practice and learning in their subject.

Why AI matters in teaching 

AI is here to stay.

It has societal, ethical and existential implications which inevitably push responsible digital citizenship and future-ready skills increasingly to the forefront for both students and teachers. The question of how AI can be integrated into meaningful learning experiences that support rather than substitute learning and prepare students for the world of the future will demand new ways of thinking about how we learn.

It is important for teachers to be given opportunities to develop their understanding of how AI works, including its limitations and capabilities. This might look like prioritising:

  • How to develop ethical approaches to evaluate AI systems for their reliability and bias.
  • How to build skills to communicate with AI in a way that provides opportunities to critically evaluate and reflect on its outputs.
  • Collaborative planning within subjects and opportunities for interdisciplinary teams to work together
  • Harnessing the power of collective efficacy to develop practice will be essential.

Understanding what AI is, recognising its complexity and fast-evolving nature will enable teachers to model safe, effective and ethical interaction with AI, and to apply their knowledge and understanding to provide learning opportunities that position the outputs from AI as material to be interacted with and critically evaluated rather than passively consumed.

How can teachers promote active and critical engagement with AI?

To promote active participation rather than passive consumption of AI teachers might:

  • Explicitly model co-creation with AI as a core skill, articulating the process and demonstrating how AI can assist with learning rather than displace it.
  • Build the skills needed to interact with AI safely and effectively through scaffolded learning experiences, which provide increasingly complex and autonomous opportunities for students to interact with AI safely and effectively.
  • Use real world examples to demonstrate the risks of uncritical AI use. For example, how misinterpretation or lack of critical analysis could lead to confabulations or bias, and model how to evaluate and verify AI content.
  • Consider how to use AI as a motivational tool to build confidence and skills, for example to support for students who are less engaged with reading and writing.
  • Consider how AI tools could be used most creatively to support writing and reading in enthusiastic readers and writers. For example, providing feedback, developing characters or suggesting reading material.

Active and passive learning: How AI and disciplinary literacy can mitigate against students’ overreliance on AI

Teachers in our survey expressed concerns about students’ overreliance on AI creating short cuts and dependency and eroding concentration and stamina. AI adds an additional dimension to the ever-present discussion around active and passive learning. A key area for practitioners to explore is how to leverage AI to drive intrinsic motivation to learn, activating curiosity and criticality, and developing co-creative learning opportunities that mitigate passive consumption. And literacy must sit at the heart of this work.

AI tools generate content based on patterns in data, which is not necessarily based on deep understanding of how knowledge is constructed in a subject. For teachers, the knowledge and understanding of disciplinary literacy - how knowledge is constructed in a subject – plays a vital role in learning to collaborate effectively with AI tools. Disciplinary literacy focuses on the unique ways that knowledge is constructed and communicated in each subject discipline and teachers will need to guide AI with discipline-specific thinking, for example designing prompts that reflect the nuances and ‘mindset’ of their subject or stimulating AI to model expert thinking in a discipline.

Equally for students, engaging with AI through a disciplinary literacy lens is not just useful but essential. An understanding of disciplinary literacy helps students engage with subject content meaningfully and actively, enabling them to ask better questions (or prompts) that align with disciplinary ways of thinking, such as the need to consider bias, perspective and reliability in historical sources, to test ideas with evidence and precision in science, or explore meaning, emotion and interpretation in English, and – most importantly - to actively interrogate outputs in any subject.

Using AI tools in their learning puts students in the driving seat to ask meaningful questions, explore ideas deeply, and challenge what they receive. Thus, promoting active learning. But to do that effectively, they need to bring both subject content and disciplinary knowledge into the conversation.

Taking a disciplinary approach to interacting with AI will help students to:

More content

  • Hone skills

    of how to think like an expert in a subject.

  • Craft prompts

    that reflect how a subject communicates.

  • Read critically

    Interrogate and challenge what they are given.

  • Develop an ethical awareness

    Consider representation, fairness and data sources.

  • Promote reflective dialogue

    Treat AI as a thinking partner not as the ‘right’ answer, and revise prompts to dig deeper.

  • Be an active participant

    and drive their own learning.

  • Develop metacognition

    Consider how understanding what is needed to read, write and communicate well in a subject – their disciplinary literacy knowledge - helped them to interact with AI to improve its output and get the response they needed.

What are the best AI tools for teachers?

There are a raft of AI tools available for teachers that could be used to support teaching within the classroom. We have provided a few examples of AI tools and resources for teachers below, all of which are free to access. However, as the landscape shifts, we know there will be more tools available and alternatives that you might find and prefer. Let us know which tools you use!

AI resources to support professional development:

AI and the barriers to digital inclusion

Alongside the opportunities that AI offers to enhance education, proactive measures are needed to ensure equity, access and inclusion. Having the right training and infrastructure to leverage AI is a critical factor in removing barriers to digital inclusion. Equitable access to technologies in school and home settings could be because of the following barriers:

  • lack of devices
  • internet connectivity
  • digital literacy

These barriers to digital inclusion and AI use should be key considerations – both for teachers and students. Proactive measures are needed to support digital inclusion so that students with varying needs, background and abilities have access to usable tools. Clear policies and guardrails must form the bedrock of all this thinking and action.

Additional resources, training and support

We'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts or experiences relating to AI and literacy in education. Email us at research@literacytrust.org.uk

Discover training opportunities for secondary practitioners including our next What is Disciplinary Literacy? CPD online workshop on 1 October 2025.

Explore our Writing for pleasure and writing for skill training, resources and classroom support.

Sign up to receive our latest news about research reports, training events and classroom resources in our Training and Resources newsletters.

Take part in our 2026 Annual Literacy Survey when it opens.

Further reading