The listening gap is real — how AI might help teachers bridge it

A Grade 4 teacher showed her class a video of children who walk miles barefoot to school. A hand shot up: “Why are you showing us AI slop? No way this is real.” A classmate pushed back: “Bro, my grandma didn’t have shoes when she walked to school.” But another chimed in: “Totally AI.” I watched this classroom exchange last spring, during one of more than 50 classroom observations across five Ontario schools for a study on restorative justice and anti-racism. Teachers whose classrooms I visited expressed an interest in learning how to implement talking or “peacemaking” circles — exercises that involve participants gathering to discuss topics, share stories or resolve conflicts and everyone but the person holding what’s known as the “talking piece” listens. In the Grade 4 class where students thought they were seeing AI slop, learning about such circles hadn’t yet begun. Debates about generative AI tools in classrooms are often concerned with cheating and accuracy. My research in Canadian classrooms, as well as my own teaching practice and other emerging research about AI-supported debate, points to something else: listening is a practice. Most teachers need help leading this, and AI might be able to give them that preparation. Why listening matters In the Grade 4 classroom, most students insisted the video was fake. “Fake” is a powerful word in a classroom because it ends the conversation. If the children on screen might not be real, no one has contemplate what they’re seeing. Once anything can be synthetic, anything can be dismissed. Listening means treating another person’s account of their life as real enough to be changed by it. (National Cancer Institute/Unsplash) That should trouble us. Listening means treating another person’s account of their life as real enough to be changed by it. In our democracies, practising listening matters more now because we are getting less exposure to perspectives that differ from our own. Recommendation algorithms sort us into feeds of the like-minded, misinformation exploits the sorting and we finish the job by settling into networks or neighbourhoods where disagreement rarely intrudes. Read more: How to teach hope when democracy is retreating Large language models tend to affirm, accommodate and keep users engaged. In a competitive market the surest way for a frontier model to win loyalty is to tell people what they want to hear. Teenagers are already turning to AI companions for social conversation. Such “friends” remove the friction of meeting someone who sees the world differently and taking them seriously. Democracy depends on people who can disagree with someone and keep working with them, which is listening under another name. The gap between how much democratic life needs listening and how well we actually do it is widening. Call it the listening gap. Listening develops only through practice In my classroom observations of teachers learning to lead peacemaking circles, I saw something echoed elsewhere across my research. Teachers need preparation and guided practice to know how to respond when students voice perspectives that divide the room. Without sustained support, even willing teachers avoid the conversations that matter most. In earlier research I conducted with education scholar Kathy Bickmore, we found novice teachers wanted dialogue with their students. What stopped them was not reluctance but unpreparedness: not knowing how to open a hard conversation, how to respond when a racialized, immigrant, gender-diverse or low-income student named their own experience, or what to ask next. Novice teachers have expressed wanting dialogue with their students, but not knowing how to open a hard conversation. (Getty Images/Unsplash) Three jobs for AI in dialogue In a world littered with AI-generated output, students should be taught to question what they see. But the very tool that generates disinformation and slop can also, when used well, be a catalyst for teaching youth to listen. The evidence for what follows comes from my own university classroom and from early studies of AI-supported debate, where students engage more critically when an AI model surfaces different viewpoints quickly. Here are three examples of concrete applications educators could explore. 1. A steel-man generator. Ask AI to articulate the strongest and most charitable version of each side of a contested issue. In my teaching, I assign debates in which students first argue the side of a contested issue they grew up hearing most: abortion rights, MAID and climate change. Then they switch sides. After students have exhausted their own ideas, AI can help them hear a sharp version of the opposing view, allowing them to inhabit the discomfort and react to it in their own words. 2. A synthesis engine. In a short course, it’s challenging for students to read enough on their own to represent both sides of a contentious issue fairly. Have AI generate a podcast-style debate between each side’s leading experts or advocates, each voice advancing the best version of one position; students arrive prepared to discuss how to bridge the divide. 3. A rehearsal partner. Most failures in dialogue during regular classroom discussion happen right after a student says something charged, when the teacher freezes, unsure how to deepen the moment rather than deflect it. I watched that freeze repeatedly when I observed teachers conducting everyday classes. For teachers, this is a preparation problem, but also a debriefing one. Most failures of dialogue during regular classroom discussions happen after a student says something charged and the teacher freezes. (Andrej Lisakov/Unsplash) When seeking to learn from existing dialogue problems in their preparation time, teachers could ask AI to take the position of students they had trouble engaging: for example, the one insisting the video is fake. Teachers also need to guard against what AI does badly: hallucinating and agreeing too readily. The rule is simple: Use AI as a prompt for dialogue, never a substitute for it. Back in the Grade 4 room In a room like that Grade 4 class, listening starts with slowing down to ask: What makes something feel real to us? Whose experiences are easiest to believe? And whose are hardest? Imagine students who had practised those questions in circles, who came briefed with the strongest case for every side. Or imagine a teacher who had already rehearsed this conversation, with AI playing the student who insists it is all fake. Without deliberate intervention, AI will only widen the listening gap. Used well, AI could help close it.