Five ways I’ve leveraged AI in my English class

Key points:

• Students will be immersed in a world of ai; they need to learn about it.
• An English teacher proposed creative ways for students to talk about and work with ai.
• See related article: 5 positive ways students can use ai
• For more news on ai in education, visit eSN’s Digital Learning page

Last spring, a few weeks after I started using ChatGPT, I challenged my high school English students: “ai can do any of your class assignments,” I told them flatly. “Now prove me wrong.”

I wanted to provoke them, get them to ask questions, and start using these tools, not to cheat, but to turn their learning on its head. She knew we needed to learn this together. And from that day on, we not only changed the paradigms: we sent them somersaults.

1. Test ChatGPT

I first came across ChatGPT last February when I started reading amazing comments from several progressive educators. As a teacher who strives to help students discover their interests and develop their imaginations, I wanted to make sure they were engaged with this new technology. We were about to start our unit in The crucible and I started wondering how we could take advantage of ChatGPT.

Typically, at the end of the unit, I ask my students to test various characters and support their ideas with plenty of original evidence. This time, I wanted you to test ChatGPT as well. What are your strengths and opportunities, your weaknesses and threats?

So I created a project-based scenario: the students were lawyers at a law firm and I was their client, which gave them this challenge: I was thinking about investing in ChatGPT. Based on their understanding and the research they would conduct during The crucible unity, should I? What would be the implications? The advantages and disadvantages?

Then the students began, first reading The crucible, relying solely on their human intelligence. Then, after a week, they expanded their understanding of the classic game through ChatGPT. And it was surprising: ChatGPT helped students uncover subtle nuances and character traits they had initially overlooked, created authentic-looking trial documents that outlined their arguments, provided historical information about the Salem Witch Trials, and prompted the students to explore the themes and messages of the work. . It also generated hypothetical conversations between characters, providing new ideas about how the characters evolved throughout the play.

At the end of the unit, students glimpsed the potential of ai and its potential problems. Many students were concerned about cheating, bias, made-up “facts,” and privacy. But ultimately, most students advised that I, as their client, should invest in ai, and they found that it increased efficiency, helped with workload, speeded up research, improved grammar, relieved stress of deadlines and more.

2. Use ChatGPT as a creative partner

When they returned from spring break, the students discovered that I had taken their advice to heart: I had invested $20 in a premium version of ChatGPT and created an ai workspace in our classroom. Now I invited them to use ChatGPT during our final research unit, during which they would ask questions, come up with a plan, build on their research, and then make their findings public. They soon discovered that they could use ChatGPT as a creative, brainstorming, and spitting partner, with great results: generating open-ended questions, discovering and exploring their interests, creating a day-by-day calendar to achieve goals, coming up with original works of art. and increase song lyrics and scripts. To say they were captivated by ChatGPT’s ability to push their own thinking and creativity further would be an understatement.

3. Considering what follows

During that research unit, I wanted to better understand (and for my students to better understand) what lies ahead in terms of ai. So I invited our school librarians to visit our classroom, presenting glimpses of what’s to come: the good, from conducting medical research to solving complex global problems; the bad, from imitating someone’s speech to waging war on ai; and the surprising, from saving bees to predicting earthquakes.

Surprisingly, the librarians also answered questions, addressed ethical considerations of ai, detailed the importance of vocabulary when it comes to writing powerful prompts, and reminded students that they themselves need to be thinkers and not simply settle for what ChatGPT generates.

4. Go from zero to hero

Just a few days before our fall semester began, I found out that I had been assigned mythology, a subject I had not taught before and which had no syllabus. But, like my students during their research unit, I knew I could turn to ChatGPT as my creative partner. To start, I wrote a detailed message that said: “You are a high school English teacher who wants to teach an inquiry-based mythology class with self-directed learning. You have questions and you are looking for answers. (That is so hero’s journey a la Joseph Campbell.) Now create a syllabus, complete with readings.” Less than a minute later, there it was, in all the mind-blowing near-perfection of it. Next, I asked ChatGPT to create a graph of the hero’s journey with student checkpoints along the way. Once again, within 20 seconds, there it was. In class, I’ve mostly stuck with these materials and so far, so good.

5. Nightclubs: IA style

More recently, I partnered with a school librarian to create an after-school ai club. We are not totally clear about our mission or our objectives: we are in the early days. But we do want students to understand what is happening with ai and, if they are not ready, to at least think about ai and how it can impact not only their careers but their lives.

As for the first challenge I presented, that ai could do any school assignment, unfortunately it turned out to be true: ai can do almost any class assignment. And that made us all squirm. In fact, that’s scary. But that’s all the more reason to delve deeper into ai. As Bill Gates said last spring: “You definitely want the good guys to have strong ai.” We do not want only the “bad guys” to use it, manipulate it to deceive, defraud, gain power or wage war. That is why we must continue talking about ai with our students. We can’t run away.

Soon ai will be a common tool in countless fields. That is why we, as educators, must help our students use it, become familiar with it, and think for themselves about its implications. Yes, it is threatening. It’s also exciting. And it’s going to be your world.