I'm Not Here to Give ChatGPT Feedback
“I’m not here to give ChatGpt feedback.” I announced to my period 3, AP Literature and Composition students. They nodded in agreement. Ask me 10 years ago and I would never have guessed I would be facilitating conversations about the appropriate use of AI in the classroom.
As sites like MyBib and BibMe made citation generation accessible and easy back in 2009, I ditched the “cheatsheet” MLA Citation Guide I’d created for my 9th grade Humanities class. Why spend precious class time on something important but agonizingly boring when I had a tool that could save me and my students class time. All English teachers will remember the first time they used Turn It In (which btw, started in 1998!!) and how it revolutionized their approach to research papers. Students covertly used tools like Grammarly (2009) and Quillbot (2017), thinking they were pulling one over on their teachers, not realizing most of us were using those same tools to edit and improve our handouts and lectures.
Just two years ago, the way the term “ChatGPT” was whispered in the hallways made it feel like a dirty word. Now, everyone and their mom is hosting a Zoom session on how to “transform your teaching with AI.”
Here’s my unsolicited advice and how I’m approaching AI use this school year.
Continue to design meaningful writing tasks. Grown folks want to get mad at young people for taking shortcuts or taking the easy route of popping a prompt into ChatGpt. But let’s get real. We’ve all taken the easy route at one point or other during the workday. Why waste our time and energy on something we find meaningless? This is why whenever I’m creating a task for my students I ask myself, is this worth their time to complete? Is this worth my time to read or give feedback? How does it cultivate critical readers, writers, and thinkers?
Have an explicit conversations about the appropriate uses of AI in your content specific class. As a literature teacher, I’ve always made the time to talk about why I’d rather read a wacky hot take on a text than read regurgitation of some idea on Pink Monkey, Cliff Notes or Sparknotes. While those sites can be helpful, I’m bored with the same old ideas about symbols and themes in The Great Gatsby or A Raisin in the Sun. I’ve now shifted that conversation to one focused on AI. Early on, during my community agreements lesson, I stop and ask students to collaborate on “What is an appropriate way of using AI in this course? How can you use AI tools to help you with mastery of content or skills?” The students offer more nuanced, insightful advice than I ever could. And, because it’s coming from their peers, they are more likely to internalize this advice than listen to my old crotchety warnings.
Don’t waste your time policing students. I am not interested in a fight about whether or not this assignment is written by AI rather than Amanda. If I find Claude’s work, I leave a short note about why I’m not giving feedback. More often than not, I purposely list ChatGPT as part of a menu of sources to build content knowledge on x, y, or z.
Again, design meaningful learning tasks and essential collaborative discussions. This is the bottom line. We should be creating learning experiences that demand critical thinking, critical reading, and critical writing. If we aren’t doing that, then why am I in the classroom? If a student can just hop on YouTube or open up Claude, then they don’t need me. If this is a challenge, then pssst go use ChatGPT to help you construct something more rigorous.
By no means is this easy. But I didn’t enter this profession because it was easy. Ignoring the realities of how much our students rely on AI is burying our heads in the sand. Facing difficult conversations about when, how and why we should use technological advancements such as artificial intelligence seems the only way forward in 2024.