How 1:1 Education Can Leverage ChatGPT to Promote Student Learning
Our Operations Director, Staci Stutsman, offers a comprehensive analysis of how ChatGPT and other AI-based software are already changing education. Are we ready for it?
When I first started hearing about ChatGPT and other new chat-based AI software, I immediately thought of the types of prompts I used to assign my students when I taught university-level English and new media courses. I used to ask students to develop original arguments using close textual analysis and introductory research skills and I’d have them analyze fan and audience reactions to popular texts. They would also compare themes across texts and media. I immediately started wondering how I might re-word my assignments to make them resistant to AI-generated-responses. I thought about how plagiarism software like Turninit would adapt to this new technology.
I more recently dug into the conversations being held across K-12 and higher education and realized that I had been wondering about the wrong things. The question is not how we out-wit AI. The question is how we teach students to respond critically and thoughtfully to AI and, when appropriate, leverage it to support learning.
Anna Mills with the Chronicle of Higher Ed has some great thoughts about this. She notes that “it’s a dead end to focus on designing prompts that AI won’t be good at.” She also argues that turning to multimedia assignments and personal narratives isn’t the answer, and we should not count on plagiarism software to successfully detect AI-generated-writing, especially as AI advances. So, what should teachers be doing? She has two key recommendations: 1) explore the nature of AI and its risks, and 2) focus on motivation and process.
We should be introducing the tools to students, helping to demystify the technology. We should teach them how it works and how to identify its limits. We should practice using it with them on the tasks that it’s best suited for (ie, short summaries, creating study guides, generating practice tests, etc.). We should help them learn to identify weak claims with unsubstantiated evidence and how to fact-check. They should become their own experts at identifying jargon without substance. We should also educate them about the biases and racism often inherent to technology and code, including AI software. As with teaching across all ages and subjects: we should teach them to be thoughtful interrogators of information and critical appliers of knowledge.
All that said, students are human, and the temptation to take shortcuts is strong. So, especially in writing, we should help them unlock their own internal motivation to learn to write in their own voice. We should make sure writing assignments tap into their interests. We should regularly provide feedback along every step of the writing process. We should workshop. We should discuss. We should build relationships with students and create spaces in which we can show students how we find their ideas (not ChatGPT’s) interesting and worth cultivating. Luckily, as a 1:1 school, PacPrep teachers are especially well-equipped to take on this challenge. The very nature of 1:1 sessions allows for this thoughtful exploration, this continuous real-time feedback, and this relationship-building. Together, teachers and students can explore and use AI while developing student writing skills in tandem.
If we zoom out and move beyond plagiarism concerns, we will also begin to appreciate all the possibilities that AI has to offer students and teachers. For instance, ChatGPT has the possibility to improve accessibility for many learners (though, of course, there are limits to this accessibility and a lot more work needs to be done here). It can help people with lower literacy skills to better decode poorly-written or complex language. It can help people who use speech-generating devices, speeding up their communication. It can help those struggling with communication to articulate their ideas more clearly or with a more polite tone. People can practice conversations or hold mock interviews. It can easily correct a text for grammatical or spelling errors.
It can also help teachers with lesson planning and administrative work, cutting down on some of their labor so that their energy can be spent fine-tuning their lesson plans or working with students 1:1. They can use ChatGPT to create rubrics, tests and practice tests. They can generate examples without having to anonymize past student work and create customized prompts based on their students’ interest.
For example, one could ask ChatGPT: “I have a 3rd grader who loves video games. Can you make me ten practice questions about fractions that take into account his love of video games?”
And in less than 1 second, ChatGPT will answer: “Your 3rd grader is playing his favorite video game and has earned a total of 24 power-ups so far. Of those power-ups, he has used 2/3 of them already. How many power-ups does he have left to use in the game?”
Teachers can save their most-used prompts as templates and generate new questions over and over. The possibilities (and resources out there to explore those possibilities!) are endless. As teachers embark on this new phase with their students, here are some recommended resources to get them started:
And in the meantime, happy exploring. I invite you to approach AI with the same curiosity that we’ll ask our students to approach it. Examine it, test it, find its limits, question it, and learn how to work in concert with it.