AI and Literacy: Four Reflections on Dr Molly Ness’s Interview

I recently had the pleasure of listening to a rich conversation between the Technology Essentials in Education podcast and Dr Molly Ness — a reading researcher, teacher educator, and founder of a literacy consulting firm who has spent her career centring literacy as an issue of social justice. Dr Ness works with schools and districts across the United States, supporting educators in implementing the science of reading and thinking critically about how new technologies — including AI — fit into that work.

What struck me about this interview was how many of Dr Ness’s insights map directly onto the conversations I’m having with New Zealand school leaders and literacy teachers right now. As someone who spends their days in schools supporting AI governance and literacy PLD, I found her balanced, evidence-informed perspective refreshing — and urgently relevant.

Here are my reflections, organised around four themes that I believe matter most for our kaiako (teachers) and ākonga (students).

1. Using AI to Improve Student Achievement

Dr Ness described AI as “a tool in the toolbar” — not a silver bullet, but a genuine timesaver that can free teachers to focus on what matters most: direct, intentional instruction and relationships with students. That framing resonates with me entirely.

When a teacher can use AI to generate comprehension questions aligned to a text, pull out tier-two vocabulary, or create a learning crosswalk for a novel study in minutes rather than hours, the saved time doesn’t disappear — it redirects into the high-impact practices we know move the needle on achievement: small-group instruction, formative assessment, conferring with individual learners, and the deliberate acts of teaching that technology cannot replicate.

Dr Ness also shared a powerful example of using AI to generate dialogic reading questions for a read-aloud of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Dialogic reading — a research-based approach that transforms read-alouds from passive listening into active, conversational engagement — is exactly the kind of practice we want every early childhood educator doing. If AI can jumpstart the planning for that, while the teacher remains the one facilitating the live, responsive, interpersonal dialogue, that is a net gain for achievement.

The key insight: AI should lighten the planning load so teachers can invest more energy in the instructional moments that directly improve outcomes. It is a behind-the-scenes tool, not a front-of-classroom replacement.

2. Closing the Literacy Gap with Intentional AI Use

One of the most important points Dr Ness made was about the difference between using AI to shortcut learning and using it to deepen it. She described a trend she calls “the shallowing of reading” — where students increasingly read for headlines, read for shorter durations, and read superficially. AI, if used carelessly, can accelerate that trend. But if used intentionally, it can push against it.

For me, this connects directly to closing the literacy gap. The students who are most at risk are those who already struggle to engage deeply with text. If AI becomes a way to avoid reading rather than a way to scaffold it, we widen the gap. But Dr Ness offered a more hopeful framing: AI can generate decodable texts matched to specific phonics patterns for struggling readers. It can create differentiated comprehension prompts that meet learners where they are. It can help a teacher plan a backward design for a novel study that ensures every layer of meaning is unpacked — not just the surface plot.

She also noted that AI is forcing a rethink of student assignments — and I think this is where the gap-closing potential is highest. When a teacher can no longer ask students to “write a five-paragraph essay about the theme of The Outsiders” (because AI can do that instantly), they are pushed to design outputs that require personal connection, reflection, and genuine engagement. Those deeper, more authentic tasks are precisely the ones that build the literacy practices our struggling learners most need: connecting to text, articulating their own thinking, and seeing themselves as readers and writers.

Closing the gap means using AI to scaffold towards deep engagement, not away from it.

3. Using Technology in Wise, Intentional Ways

Dr Ness used a phrase I want to lift up and carry into every PLD session I run: “healthy hesitation.” Not fear. Not a ban. Not uncritical adoption. Healthy hesitation — a deliberate pause to ask: Is this the right tool for this moment? What is gained? What is lost?

She was particularly cautious about AI replacing read-alouds, and there is now research to support that caution. When we rely on pre-recorded or AI-delivered read-alouds, we lose the in-the-moment language opportunities, the intentionality, and the responsiveness that makes a read-aloud a cornerstone of literacy instruction. The read-aloud is not just about the words being read — it is about the relationship between the teacher and the students, the questions asked in the moment, the organic connections made to children’s lived experiences.

Wise use means knowing where AI shines and where it doesn’t. Dr Ness suggested we lean into AI for:

• Generating vocabulary lists aligned to a text
• Creating comprehension questions at multiple cognitive levels
• Producing decodable texts for targeted phonics instruction
• Backwards designing novel studies and scope-and-sequence planning
• Jumpstarting dialogic reading prompts for picture books

And we protect from AI:

• Live read-alouds and the interpersonal dynamics they create
• Student-teacher relationships that drive motivation and engagement
• Authentic assessment tasks that require personal voice and connection

Dr Ness also made the point that her own high-schooler uses AI to generate practice quiz questions for calculus and chemistry — using it as a learning process tool, not a product shortcut. That distinction between process and product is, I think, the single most important conversation we need to be having with our teaching staff. If we teach students to use AI as a learning tool — generating practice questions, checking understanding, exploring different explanations — we build the digital literacy they will need as lifelong learners. If we only frame AI as a threat to be policed, we leave them unprepared for a world they already inhabit.

4. Protecting Our Students in an AI-Saturated Literacy Landscape

Dr Ness was unequivocal on one point: AI should not replace the role of a well-informed teacher who has an interpersonal relationship with students. I could not agree more, and it connects to a concern I hear from every school board I work with: how do we protect our ākonga in a landscape where AI-generated content is everywhere?

There are several dimensions to this:

Protecting the quality of instruction. Dr Ness warned against taking AI output uncritically — it is a starting point, not an endpoint. Every AI-generated question, vocabulary list, or comprehension prompt needs a teacher’s expert review. When we hand AI output straight to students without that critical eye, we risk reinforcing misconceptions, flattening rich texts into surface-level engagement, and devaluing the professional judgement that makes the difference between adequate and excellent teaching.

Protecting authentic engagement. Dr Ness described “AI slop” — the generic, decontextualised, impersonal content that AI can produce when prompted without care. Our students are already swimming in it. If school becomes another place where content feels less personal and less authentic, we risk disengaging the very learners we most need to reach. The antidote is to make school the place where genuine engagement happens — where a teacher reads a poem aloud, pauses, and asks, “How does this make you feel?” in a way that no AI can.

Protecting against blanket bans. Dr Ness pushed back firmly against schools that ban AI outright. Banning, she argued, comes from fear rather than pedagogy. Adults use AI in their workplaces and personal lives; if we are empowering students for lifelong literacy, we need to show them how to use it intentionally and properly — not pretend it doesn’t exist. This is a governance position I advocate for with every school board I work with: a clear, strengths-based AI governance policy that protects students by teaching them responsible use, not by restricting access and hoping for the best.

Protecting student voice and personal connection. Perhaps the most powerful insight from the interview was Dr Ness’s observation that AI is forcing teachers to redesign assignments around personal connection and reflection — things AI cannot replicate. When we ask a student, “How does this text change your thinking?” or “Where do you see yourself in this story?”, we are asking something that no AI can answer for them. Those are the tasks that protect students’ identities as readers, writers, and thinkers — and they are the tasks that close literacy gaps.