I've been experimenting with ChatGPT and Open AI with my high school seniors since December 2022. The pitfalls of this new tech have been well documented, so in this post I'll spend more time on some of the potential and possibilities for AI in the writing classroom (in other words, "PhatGPT").
On Jan. 26, 2023 I had a fascinating conversation on a WRITE Center Webinar with Mark Warschauer, Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, and Paul Allison (slides below).
That said, it’s here, and I want to prepare my students to be aware of this technology as a tool that can improve their thinking and writing, rather than a nifty little gizmo that does their work for them.
And I think it’s worth saying that what I talked about in this webinar is rooted in sound writing pedagogy.
In this first case study, I wanted students to write an essay where they synthesized what they learned while we read a book together and journaled their individual thoughts.
My English 9 students and I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon, a fictional story narrated by a teenager with autism. It was my first time teaching the book. I supplemented it by watching parts of documentaries about real people with autism spectrum disorder.
My goal was to have the students read a book but also learn what it’s like to live with ASD, and maybe to be more tolerant of neurodivergent thinkers in general. For my semester exam my students were to write an essay with pen on paper in 75 minutes.
To be honest I was struggling with creating an essay prompt that would be challenging enough to hold people’s attention but supportive enough for the others And I should add that this was the last exam the Friday before we got out for Christmas vacation. It was the last of four days of semester exams for them, and when the bell rang, it was Christmas vacation.
So Paul and I used ChatGPT to help me think this task through. Paul and I started by asking questions in ChatGPT interface about autism, questions that I still had even after learning about it over the past month. It was easy to enter these questions in a text box (see Mark’s slides 7-11).
Can you summarize the most important things to know about autism?
What do people who live with autism say about neurodivergence (Temple Grandin, Kim Peek, Ethan Lisi)?
- How might I structure an essay about autism, using examples from real people with ASD?
- Can you give me an example of the kind of essay you’re describing?
- What if I want to include my own experience of people with ASD?
- Do you have any suggestions for how I might personalize this essay?
- How could I design an essay prompt for this topic that requires examples?
- Can you summarize all this to help me get started?
I argue that this thinking process was different than just Googling an essay topic about autism and the Curious Incident. In this case, the Chatbot became a thinking partner for me (see slide 32). The chatbot had more interest in the topic than even my most empathetic colleague.
You can look at the final essay prompt which is linked on the slide. It’s way longer than I originally was thinking when I was struggling with this task, before engaging with ChatGPT.
If you're a teacher you might be wondering how I had the time for this. There was a lot more up front time but the result was a richer experience for my students. In nearly every case, their writing exceeded my expectations.
The students were engaged right up until the bell.
So back to the issue of how time consuming this was. Well, there’s also a lot of time I put into responding to, and assessing, these essays. All of this time was much more enjoyable than it usually is because of the overall quality of student writing. As I read through their work I found myself saying, “I want to keep on reading!” This doesn’t always happen when I am assessing student work.
My second example is where I used AI to help my 12th grade AP English Language and Composition students. I've been involved with NWP for a long time, and am a believer in an inquiry-based writing classroom.
Incidentally, I think an inquiry-based approach to writing instruction makes it less likely that students will plagiarize (Elyse, slide 19). Like in a lot of your classes I want my students to assess the credibility of sources and then to be able to synthesize credible sources into their own original writing.
But one of the problems of practice I experience with this kind of approach is making sure that students are accurately summarizing credible sources.
Just like we do in our classes where we teach students how to assess the credibility of sources, we teachers can write instructions for AI to help our students check for credibility every time before they actually start summarizing an article.
So I thought AI could help with this task.
On slide 33 you'll see an assignment where my students create a post on a website called Youth Voices. What’s different is that on this site they can communicate with AI in a controlled way. To use AI in a powerful way, where the student writers can engage with AI like a thinking partner.
The first day back from winter break I had my students write about a story or event from 2022 that was personally significant. Students then wrote summaries of those articles and then compare their summaries with AI summaries.
An example of one of my students work can be seen on slides 34 and 35.
A lot of what teachers worried about when ChatGPT first burst on to the scene was that students wouldn't have to write anymore, bots would do it for them. What's important in all of this experimentation that I've described above is that my students are doing the work first, and AI is being used as a thinking partner. Students still do the work first, and then get feedback from AI. And they use this feedback to improve their writing. This isn’t plagiarism.
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