Effects of AI in Schools

For most students today, AI is a regular part of their education. Outside of school, sometimes AI can be used as a study aid; often, it is used as a tool to complete homework assignments or write essays.

Perhaps in response, the use of AI in classrooms is much more varied. Some classes are attempting  to integrate AI to enhance the learning environment, but most classrooms are hoping to lessen the presence of AI in the classroom. Many districts are restricting technology use with some schools outright banning phones. A resurgence in bluebooks and paper-pencil assessments is being seen as a way to ensure that assessments accurately reflect students’ learning. 

The growing concern is that if students never practice forming a complete thought without an AI draft to react to, the underlying competency may not form at all. 

Image Source: Visual Generation/shutterstock

Entry level jobs are becoming harder to find in a tighter labor market. Many high schoolers report graduating and feeling unprepared for college or careers. Jobs that are available are increasingly seeking candidates who exhibit strong judgment, are able to adapt to new situations, and are effective collaborators. Students must both learn about the field they are going into, and develop soft skills highly sought after by employers.

Key Skills for Students

Across research the same cluster of competencies keeps emerging as both AI-resistant and increasingly valuable. They are specific, developable capacities that employers consistently flag as scarce:

• Comfort with uncertainty: ability to make decisions without all of the facts, or in ambiguous situations

• Metacognition: understanding how you think, identifying your gaps, and adapting under uncertainty

• Collaboration under pressure: working with others toward shared goals when stakes are real and outcomes are unclear

• Empathy and ethical reasoning: applying genuine moral judgment in ambiguous situations, not just identifying what sounds right

• Effective communication: Ability to effectively share, explain, defend ideas - and understand when mistakes were made

• Resilience: Bouncing back from mistakes and setbacks 

The reported lack of prospective employees with adaptability, complex problem-solving, communication, and resilience skills does not stem from an increase of AI usage, but rather from schools not reliably producing them. These skills are teachable but require deliberate design: structured practice in growing comfortable with uncertainty, managing conflict perspective-taking, active listening, and genuine care for others.

How Unscripted Can Help

The Unscripted Project runs free 10-week improv workshop series in middle and high school classrooms in Philadelphia and New York City, taught by professional teaching artists in collaboration with classroom teachers.

Improv is not just a performance skill. It is a structured method for building the exact competencies the research identifies as most critical and most at risk.

• Yes, And: students practice accepting what is in front of them and building on it, developing the collaborative flexibility employers describe as scarce

• Act and React: students make decisions under uncertainty in real time, building the adaptive capacity that no AI tool can shortcut

• Look Good by Making Your Partner Look Good: students learn that genuine collaboration requires generosity, not competition

• Be Vulnerable: students practice honesty and presence, developing self-awareness and the confidence to show up authentically

• There Are No Mistakes: students build resilience by learning to move through failure rather than avoid it

• Boosting Creativity: students generate original ideas under pressure and in front of others, building the creative confidence that atrophies when AI becomes the default first draft.

These are not metaphors for life skills. They are the mechanisms by which life skills develop. The development of metacognition, empathy, and ethical reasoning require real human interaction, real stakes, and real uncertainty. A room full of students improvising together is one of the few educational contexts that reliably provides all three.

To learn more, please visit our website at www.unscriptedproject.org. To sign up for a workshop, send us an email at info@unscriptedproject.org.