Cherie Shields, a high school English teacher in Oregon, told me she recently assigned students in one of her classes to use ChatGPT to create outlines for their essays by comparing and comparing two 19th-century short stories. contrast on themes such as gender and mental problems. health: ‘The Story of an Hour’ by Kate Chopin and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. After the outlines were generated, her students put their laptops away and hand-wrote their essays.
The process, she said, had not only deepened the students’ understanding of the stories. It had also taught them about interacting with AI models and how to extract a useful answer from a model.
“They have to understand, ‘I need this to do a sketch about X, Y and Z,’ and they have to think about it very carefully,” said Ms. Shields. “And if they don’t get the result they want, they can always revise it.”
Creating outlines is just one of the many ways ChatGPT can be used in the classroom. It could write personalized lesson plans for each student (“explain Newton’s laws of motion to a visual-spatial learner”) and generate ideas for classroom activities (“write a script for a ‘Friends’ episode that takes place at the Constitutional Convention “). It could serve as an after-hours tutor (“explain the Doppler effect, using language an eighth grader could understand”) or a sparring partner for debates (“convince me that animal testing should be banned”). It can be used as a starting point for classroom exercises, or as a resource for students learning English to improve their basic writing skills. (The education blog Ditch That Textbook has a long list of possible classroom uses for ChatGPT.)
Even ChatGPT’s shortcomings – such as the fact that the answers to factual questions are often wrong – can become fodder for a critical thinking exercise. Several teachers told me they had instructed students to try to trip ChatGPT, or evaluate its responses as a teacher would evaluate a student’s.
ChatGPT can also help teachers save time preparing for class. Jon Gold, an eighth grade history teacher at Moses Brown School, a pre-K through 12th grade Quaker school in Providence, RI, said he had been experimenting with using ChatGPT to generate quizzes. For example, he gave the bot an article about Ukraine and asked it to generate 10 multiple-choice questions that could be used to test the students’ understanding of the article. (Of those 10 questions, he said, six were useful.)
Ultimately, Mr. Gold said, ChatGPT posed no threat to student learning as long as teachers combined it with substantive classroom discussions.
