Teaching with Writing in an Age of AI: Supporting motivation and setting up guardrails
Anna Mills, College of Marin
A presentation for Southwestern College
January 29, 2026
Housekeeping
As you’re probably aware, there is no perfect way to prevent AI misuse
AI misuse is a “wicked problem”
“AI and assessment must be treated as something to be continually negotiated rather than definitively resolved."
“[A]dmitting there are no “correct” solutions does not mean there are not better and worse ones…”
Thomas Corbin, David Boud, Margaret Bearman, and Phillip Dawson, The Conversation, September 16, 2025
My goal: To support you to build your own multipronged approach to reducing AI misuse as you teach with writing
Strategies to reduce AI misuse:
Extrinsic to intrinsic motivation
Intrinsic motivation strategies
Combined extrinsic and intrinsic
Extrinsic motivation strategies
Designing assignments to support intrinsic motivation
Why is writing in college important? Not for the product. For the thinking process.
“A fundamental tenet of Writing Across the Curriculum is that writing is a mode of learning. Students develop understanding and insights through the act of writing.”
I frame the purpose of my writing course by inviting students to comment on a reading about what writing can do for us
“What makes writing so valuable? I would argue that academia and the professions need writing because it is our best tool for sharpening our thinking. It helps us slow down and clarify our ideas.”
Introduction to my OER text How Arguments Work: A Guide to Writing and Analyzing Texts in College
Consider making the learning purpose explicit at the top of each writing assignment
A sample purpose section:
Purpose
We need reading and writing practice more than ever in an AI era
Let’s double down on what we know: research-based best practices for teaching writing have become yet more crucial
For one overview of principles in writing instruction, see the National Council of Teachers of English 2016 position statement Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing.
Are there ways the student can connect the writing to their own interests?
Teach and support writing processes
Collaborative annotation/social annotation of class readings (try Hypothes.is or Perusall)
Decrease the pressure and focus on grades: Alternative assessment
Various practices: ungrading, labor-based grading, collaborative grading
“One of the things that alternative grading can do is to help shift students’ focus from getting grades and generating products to learning and engaging in a learning process.” –Emily Pitts Donahoe
See Asao Inoue’s book on the subject (open access).
An intrinsic motivation strategy: �Guide around AI uses that support learning, and help build skeptical AI literacy
Giving AI a role supporting the student’s writing process may help deter other uses that replace the student’s writing
� 👍 Yes to AI for input�� 👎 No to AI for output
Giving students AI context: Background materials on AI capacities, risks, and ethical concerns you might consider assigning and discussing before activities involving AI
Working with AI feedback can build confidence and skepticism
Photo by Mikhail Nilov: on Pexels.com
The feedback approach I know best: Peer & AI Review + Reflection (PAIRR), a collaboration supported by the California Education Learning Lab
Our team includes 16 faculty from 8 public colleges and universities in our state.
The PAIRR Process: A Metacognitive Model
Step 4: Assessing and reflecting on feedback puts students in the driver’s seat.
The Peer & AI Review + Reflection packet of assignment materials
Consider experimenting with the PAIRR prompts for your own assignments
Make the logistics easier for teachers: PAIRR partner not-for-profit app MyEssayFeedback protects privacy and syncs with your gradebook
More varieties of tutoring-style writing assistance: the PapyrusAI prompts
PapyrusAI, from the Digital Learning Lab at UC Irvine, is also funded by the California Education Learning Lab and led by Tamara Tate and Mark Warschauer.
They have shared an open library of tested feedback prompts organized by student need, such as brainstorming, organization, evidence, thesis refinement, and grammar and mechanics.
Another approach: invite students to evaluate the AI reasoning on a problem (See AIPedagogy.org)
In the AI Validation activity, students evaluate competing accounts of how to think about a problem
“Take a challenging problem on the topic your class is working on. It should be a problem where there is either one right answer or where there are answers that are “more right” than others.
Give the problem … to an AI tool. Ask it to generate multiple solutions and explain its reasoning.”
- Robert Talbert, AI Validation, AI Pedagogy Project
Ask students to share their chat sessions
Ask them to use a share function in the chatbot app to create a link to a web page transcript of their chat session
OR ask them to copy and paste into a word processing app and share that document. This will be necessary with Copilot chats.
Intrinsic + extrinsic motivation through motivating assignments with elements that preclude or discourage AI
Assignments that include writing but go beyond the essay may encourage engagement
Build relationships and community as the context for reading and writing�
Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.
Intrinsic + extrinsic motivation through clear AI policy
AI is a lot to process for students as well as for us…
AI policy can warn students against misuse but also offer
It’s hard to get specific enough about all possible uses of AI. That will always be a work in progress.
Consider possible uses beyond auto-generating the whole assignment (i.e. AI for brainstorming, AI for feedback, AI for help with organization, grammar, or genre conventions, AI that ask you questions, AI that suggests counterarguments)
My approach is to recommend AI for tutoring-style assistance, not task completion
Would an ethical tutor help you in this way? Then it’s okay to use AI in that way.
Two pages from my OER textbook AI and College Writing: An Orientation, supported by a California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office Zero Textbook Cost grant at Cañada College
Two sources of scaffolding for teachers creating policy.
One option: leave specific guidelines to a “Tools and Rules” section for each assignment
The idea and phrase come from ESL instructor Julie Carey of Cañada College. Here’s some sample language I use:
Sample policies
–From Crafting Your GenAI & AI Policy: A Guide for Instructors by Tricia Bertram Gallant of UC San Diego
A large collection: Classroom Policies for AI Generative Tools, curated by Lance Eaton
My own syllabus statement for English composition, Fall 2025
Extrinsic motivation through process observation
Writing in class: considerations
Writing by hand: Many students are uncomfortable with this especially for a high stakes assignment. Many need accommodations but may not have documentation.
Writing on laptops: May only be possible with adequate laptop loaner programs or computer labs.
What other class activities are we giving up? Can we monitor effectively for AI use in class?
Proctoring outside the classroom
Could we require some course assessment to be done in proctored centers whether writing or tutoring centers or testing centers?
An example: University of California San Diego’s Triton Testing Center, run by Dr. Tricia Bertram Gallant.
Oral assessments can complement written ones
Caution: audio and video can be deepfaked pretty easily, for free
With platforms like HeyGen, anyone can upload a brief video of themself and create an avatar that will read AI scripts in AI-generated videos.
See this sample HeyGen X post where Wharton business school professor Ethan Mollick’s avatar speaks German (Mollick doesn’t).
Requiring document history
Looking at a document’s version history can be tedious.
Various apps and extensions facilitate the instructor’s analysis by showing time spent, copy/paste incidents, edits, and more.
There are free and paid options.
Digital process observation apps that work with edit permission in Google Docs
Digital process observation apps that ask students to write in a different app
ProcessFeedback.org: nonprofit, educator created (Dr. Badri Adhikari, University of Missouri)
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ProcessFeedback.org Chrome extension offers a ribbon across the top of a Google Doc that tells the number of edits
If you click “Explore Process” you get a lengthy report that shows time spent, the history of what was copied and pasted, and much more (see this sample).
The level of detail may send the message to students that the value of the assignment lies in the process of working in the document.
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In Grammarly Authorship, the user can decide if the authorship report includes a replay of the whole drafting process. I don’t require students to share this. I pay more attention to time spent.
Digital process observation considerations
My approach is to let students choose from a menu of process sharing options
My template assignment on Canvas Commons includes these options:
Is all digital process observation surveillance? Is the vibe necessarily big brother? Can it be more learning coach?
How do particular forms of digital observation feel to students? How do they compare to in-person proctoring?
See What is process tracking and how is it used to deter AI misuse?” a blog post with multiple perspectives from the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI.
Software blocking AI use
First, a little about a new development: agentic AI browsers
These are systems that move around digital environments and do things, much as a human would.
They are designed to behave like a personal assistant or a coworker.
They will complete coursework in Canvas.
Who or what moves the cursor?
Agentic AI browsers are easy to access as of Fall 2025
ChatGPT Atlas takes a quiz as a student
Online proctoring via lockdown browser
Lockdown browsers prevent other activity besides the assignment or quiz itself, using a separate app or browser extension.
These may be used for online asynchronous assessment or in-class writing.
Respondus, Proctorio, and Honorlock are common examples.
Lockdown browsers seem to block agentic AI
A lockdown browser limits which browser and/or extensions a student can use.
Some institutions are recommending Respondus and Honorlock as a stopgap approach to blocking agentic browsers.
Lockdown browser considerations
Extrinsic motivation through AI detection
We all have the experience of reading text and trying to decide if we think it was AI generated.
How well can we distinguish AI text from student writing?
Our intuition about what is AI text may help us initiate important conversations if we know the student’s writing well. But it could lead us astray. Could software help?
How does AI detection software work?
“AI detectors…are trained on examples of AI-generated and human-generated text, and make their best probabilistic guess about whether a given piece of text is more like one than the other.” –A Guide to AI for Gonzaga Faculty, Gonzaga University
Commonly used apps (not necessarily recommended): Turnitin, GPTZero, Copyleaks, and Pangram
AI detection considerations: Accuracy
How useful is an imperfect indicator?
Free software exists that rephrases AI text to “humanize” it and get around AI detectors
AI detection considerations: labor and privacy
Instructor labor: Reviewing results is quick but requires some administrative overhead.
Privacy: Any use of a detection system should be vetted by the institution’s IT department. It needs to be FERPA compliant.
AI detection considerations: fairness and bias
AI detection considerations: pedagogy and relationships
Many are concerned detection will create or reinforce an adversarial relationship between teachers and students.
To some extent this depends on framing. My syllabus language includes reassurance:
A few detection resources
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To review, we’ve talked about strategies to Reduce AI misuse on a spectrum from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation
Intrinsic motivation strategies
Combined extrinsic and intrinsic
Extrinsic motivation strategies
First, take 5 minutes on your own to consider the worksheet (in the chat).
Then, we’ll go into breakout groups for 10 minutes
Each person shares:
A few resources for continuing the conversation
Questions?
Comments?
Thank you!
I’d be glad to connect and continue the discussion on LinkedIn or at annarmills.com
Slides, open for commenting: https://link.annarmills.com/Southwestern
Presentation licensed CC BY NC 4.0