When ChatGPT arrived, Doreen Mayrell Ed.D saw a way to transform how students learn after the bell. Mayrell, an adjunct professor at Collin College, teaches dual-credit college algebra to 11th and 12th graders. She had long been interested in rethinking how class time is used. One approach, the flipped classroom, moves the lecture outside the classroom, so that time in class can be used for problem-solving and application. But for that to work, all students need access to certain resources. With the arrival of AI, she saw a way to provide that missing support and make the flipped model work for everyone.
While some high-school students have tutors, parents who know the material, and time set aside for school, others have jobs, younger siblings, or no adult at home who can help with algebra. In a course like college algebra, which often decides whether students can keep moving along a STEM path, those differences can be crucial.
Mayrell uses ChatGPT to level the playing field. She builds custom GPTs around each lesson, using her guided notes, worked examples, and teaching goals. Students can move through the material at home in conversation and on a schedule that fits the rest of their lives. She makes the lessons available ahead of time, so students can work before the weekend, after practice, or whenever their own schedules allow. A student who understands the concept quickly can move on. A student who is shaky on fractions, notation, or some earlier skill can slow down, ask follow-up questions, and stay with the problem until it makes sense.
What used to be one lecture delivered at one pace becomes something much closer to one-to-one tutoring.
Mayrell learned early that the tool itself had to be taught. Yes, students need help with the math, but they also need help learning how to use AI to learn other subjects. Mayrell now models that process directly. She shows students how to ask better questions, instructs them to attach their chat transcripts, and reads those exchanges to see where the process breaks down.
That changes in her classroom. Because students have already gone through the lesson, class time can dig into applications, discussion, and practice instead of definitions and formulas. Mayrell also uses ChatGPT to rewrite traditional word problems for contexts that her students actually care about, while keeping the math the same. A worksheet about trains or watermelons can become a problem about Taylor Swift tickets, fantasy football scores, or makeup prices.
The harder change is for educators. In many classrooms, the first question teachers ask about AI has been how to block it. Mayrell chose to teach students how to use it, then changed her own role from lecturer to coach. That shift in behavior takes work. It asks teachers to give up habits that once defined the job.
For Mayrell, the payoff is concrete: students who used to meet the hardest part of learning alone now have a way through it.
