Teaching with AI, Rooted in Values: A Professor’s Journey Toward Ethical and Human-Centered Learning

This case study presents a values-based approach to AI integration in teaching, drawing on classroom-tested strategies using NotebookLM, Claude, and ChatGPT to reinforce mentorship, inclusion, transparency, critical thinking, and ethical reasoning. The narrative illustrates how the instructor’s teaching values guided AI experimentation through a process of building the scaffold while standing on it, recognizing that educators must develop new pedagogical structures while simultaneously using them to support learning (Allen et al., 2021). Students benefited from a reflective, dialogic, and human-centered learning environment grounded in meaning-making, co-learning, and shared inquiry (Bushe & Marshak, 2015).