If you wandered the hallways of Oak Lawn Community High School last week, you might have heard the soft buzz of teenagers—phones pressed to ears—introducing themselves to local café owners, village officials, and even large corporations. Those calls weren’t idle chit-chat; they were classwork.
Some of the school’s sophomore Honors English 2 classes have plunged into a two-week Project-Based Learning unit that asks a deceptively simple question: How can Oak Lawn build a healthier, more sustainable food culture? To answer it, students must blend time-honored reporting skills—cold-calling sources, conducting in-person interviews, logging field observations—with the newest digital tool in the classroom: ChatGPT.
Teacher Jeff Vazzana frames the assignment as “A.I. on guardrails.” Artificial intelligence can brainstorm survey questions, sift through database research, or mock up a web layout. Yet every claim that appears on a team’s public website must be verified by a living, breathing stakeholder. “If a chatbot suggests that energy-drink marketing is spiking teen sugar intake,” Vazzana explained, “students pick up the phone, call a pediatric dentist, and confirm that that’s what’s happening in the real world.”
Even the project’s digital flourishes remain tethered to human voices. A team documenting Oak Lawn’s cultural food heritage translated outreach emails into Arabic, Polish, and Spanish with ChatGPT, then recorded elders’ recipe stories on smartphones. The resulting mini-documentaries will stream on the students’ sites with captions, the same A.I. drafted—polished line-by-line after interviewees checked them for nuance.
That confidence with tech is no accident. Over the past year, Oak Lawn’s faculty received district-wide professional-development sessions on “eyes-wide-open” A.I. integration—covering ethics, data privacy, prompt engineering, and classroom guardrails. Rather than banning the technology, educators practiced using it to bring the new technology into the classroom, safely and purposefully. “AI, whether we love it or have reservations, is changing how and what we teach: our staff must have the necessary tools to lead our students ethically and technologically for what comes next in their professional and personal lives,” said Instructional Coach Billy Denton.
Students will present their findings to peers and invited adults in sessions on April 30 and May 1. Still, several projects are already gaining outside traction as students advocate for the changes they want to see.
For Vazzana, those invitations are proof that the methodology works. “A.I. accelerates the draft,” he said, “but authenticity comes from a conversation—the moment a student hears a pause on the other end of the line and knows they’ve asked the right question.” In a world where information is often one keystroke away, Oak Lawn sophomores are learning that sometimes the fastest path to the truth still starts with: Hello, this is a student calling from Oak Lawn Community High School…