At Milton, the importance of speaking is rarely underestimated. Take most Monday and Friday mornings as an example. A plethora of student and faculty voices at Upper School and Class Meetings greets us, with each voice sharing and promoting various engaging opportunities here at Milton. But where speech has the power to inform and to persuade, discussion has the power to compromise and thereby create change in our communal expectations.
Students and faculty alike share a passion for education, and most of the time, education at Milton is a harmonious balance. At times, however, the student-faculty pursuit of education enters into ambiguous territory. When it comes to AI use, at least from a student perspective, Milton lacks structured community expectations due to a lack of a standardized AI policy. Yes, guidelines for academic integrity include AI use, but oftentimes, opinions about these expectations vary by teacher and student. In our current era of rapid technological advances, when new innovations constantly enter the educational sphere, a lack of clarity regarding our academic norms will deteriorate our institution of learning. Therefore, Milton should strive to implement a new form of community programming, through our central passion for speech, specifically aimed at building connections between students and faculty through meaningful, two-way discussions.
The structure of these student-faculty meetings should center on the back-and-forth contribution of both parties. Discussions could have multiple small groups of students and faculty talk about different topics. Rather than seeking to promote change, these smaller discussions would focus on getting students and faculty talking to each other with the hopes of promoting mutual understanding on campus issues. Each discussion would have an individual topic—like AI use, Milton’s carbon footprint, socioeconomic divisions, or the phone policy—which students and faculty would vote on; these discussions could replace the current Stables format in their time block to make discussions more impactful to school policy.
Focusing more on large-scale community changes and school-wide norms, Milton could hold monthly panel discussions, possibly during USP, where a select group of students and faculty would sit in front of the school and engage in discussions together with the rest of the school watching. After a period of discussion, the student and faculty panels would open the floor to the remaining student and faculty bodies, so they could pose their own questions.
A prototype for a student-faculty discussion series was this past February’s Asian Society “ask-meanything” panel, in which students had the opportunity to ask questions to faculty members on a myriad of topics. For future student-faculty discussions, the main difference would be the focus on oscillation between both parties. Both the students and faculty question each other if we want to make progress regarding community norms.
An example of a possible student-faculty discussion topic is the use of AI as an educational tool. Published in 2024, a paper titled “Examining Faculty and Student Perceptions of Generative AI in University Courses” compared both student and faculty AI-use tendencies. Students exceed faculty in the fluency with which they use AI and students’ reliance on AI.
Therefore, students, more so than faculty, enjoy the prospect of using AI for educational purposes, a prospect that becomes problematic if faculty and students have different expectations regarding that extra AI usage. Thus, this student-faculty disparity could provide the topic for fantastic open discussions. One AI talk could focus on specific uses of Flint AI, an educational AI product Milton has purchased, whereas another could cover the pros and cons of AI integration into school programming. AI is just one example of a possible student-faculty discussion topic—other potential ideas could include expectations regarding homework hours or general school norms.
When we do not openly discuss opinions, neither students nor faculty can adequately engage with one another. In establishing spaces where students and faculty can freely share opinions, our Milton community will not only be more open but also more unified around the values and ideals we support.