If you’ve been teaching for the last few years, you have watched firsthand as AI blasted into our classrooms with hardly a word of warning. English teachers everywhere have responded with a mix of apprehension, fear, anger, and defeat.
This world of AI is uncharted territory to say the least, and we are all dealing with it in our own ways, but one thing is for sure: it has disrupted the ways in which we teach. We’ve all had to change A LOT of what we did in the past. And everything feels like it’s still changing.
In this post, I want to go into several ways I’ve been dealing with AI in my own classroom including what’s worked in terms of navigating this strange new world. I’m not going to spend much time on what hasn’t worked because you’re likely already familiar with those areas.
The AI situation (for lack of a better descriptor) is an area where we as teachers will have to be flexible and ever-evolving because AI is ever-evolving. However, I do think the following tips are ones you can use for a long time because what’s at the root of each are things that should be part of our classroom for the long term.
Tip #1: Discuss AI early and discuss it often
On week one of the school year, we have to start the conversation with our students about AI. Students all come to us from different places and have different experiences, and we all have to get on the same page with certain topics regarding AI.
A few of these topics include:
- What constitutes as AI?
- When can we use it in this classroom?
- When should we absolutely not use it in this classroom?
- What are the long-term negative effects of becoming dependent on AI?
- How is AI affecting our world and environment?
These are only a few questions that you can use with your students, but I’d argue, these are all valuable and you should discuss at least these topics with your students. If you teach high school students, you should not simply tell them not to use AI. You need to get to the root of some of the “whys” they should not use it (and when it might be acceptable to use).
Students need to truly dive into the long-term effects both on their own developing minds and on our society as a whole if we become dependent on AI to do the bulk of our thinking.
How to talk with your students about AI
I do a lesson the first week of school where I give students a choice board that they can navigate on their own which covers topics related to AI. They read a few articles, listen to a few podcasts, and watch a few videos. They take notes, and then we reconvene as a class and discuss openly what they learned and what questions they still have.
You might be amazed how much your students have not thought about AI and its implications as you do this lesson.
From here, we create class norms around AI usage. As the teacher I can trump any unreasonable norm they create, but the shared experience of creating norms together lets students be part of shaping our classroom expectations, and ultimately this is incredibly important if I want them to uphold their end of the bargain (i.e. not using AI to write their papers or do their thinking).
Want to use my lesson for this? Grab it here (free download):
Tip #2: Get into the ethics of it
This piggybacks off of tip #1, but it’s worth spending a little more time here.
It’s important we are teaching the ethics behind AI usage because this is one big part of the heart of the problem.
Really dig in here with your students. Get them thinking about:
- Why is it unethical to use AI? Or…when is it unethical and when is acceptable?
- Who suffers when you use AI (you, an unnamed person, a creator, the arts?)
- Why is using AI cheating?
- Is using Grammarly and other bots using AI? Where do we draw the line? (For instance is spell check and grammar correction ok but rewriting a whole paragraph to flow better not ok?)
I noticed with my own 10th grade honors students that many of them did not realize that using Grammarly and other “bots” was using AI. They thought these programs just helped refine their writing or were similar to spell check. But are they? These bots would rewrite their entire paragraphs and turn them into fluent (and boring) prose.
These bots robbed my students of their voice, and it was so sad to see because my students actually thought this was better writing.
You can also discuss with your students the environmental effects of using AI. The energy consumption from every query you ask Chat GPT is incredible. According to this article, a recent study showed that the queries asked to Chat GPT in 2022 required the same amount of energy it takes to power a small country.
Tip #3: Do some self-reflection: what’s driving students to use AI?
This can be a tough one but we do need to ask ourselves the hard questions.
The book Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman got me thinking about this a lot. He bring up the issue of how our students feel the need to get everything “correct” from an early age because of the points associated with everything. The result is classrooms where students don’t take risks, copy from others, and turn in papers that they think will earn them a good grade.
I’m not going to go deep into this topic here (maybe in another blog post sometime), but consider asking yourself the following questions, and then adjusting based on what you discover:
- Are my students cheating because they’re lazy or are they cheating because they don’t want to get a low grade? If it’s the second, is there a way to create a classroom environment that has less points tied to certain assignments?
- Are my students just checked out and don’t care? If so, is there a way to create assignments that will get more student buy-in, so that students are less likely to cheat.
- Are my students overwhelmed with out-of-class obligations and responsibilities and don’t feel they have the time to do this assignment correctly. Can I work in class time for this?
We address these issues regularly inside my English teacher membership, The English Teacher Vault. If you need support on any of these issues (and these are big issues), consider joining our community. We are all in this together, and there are not easy answers.
However–once you do take a long hard look at some of your answers to these questions, you might naturally come to conclusions that both help with student engagement and lessen students’ use of AI.
Example of a better assignment
One quick example: I used to have students watch a movie and analyze the hero journey in the film as their summative for that unit. However, now I realize that AI can so quickly and easily do this that I just don’t want to assign it anymore. Now the assignment consists of students writing about their own hero journey from their lived experience and analyzing how it fits into the archetypal stages.
Students can brainstorm and draft in class, and I can have conversations with them through the process. I get to know them better, build rapport, and then I know that they did not put a prompt into Chat GPT to get the “answer.” They have more buy-in to this assignment than most typical essays, significantly reducing the need to cheat. They also have class time to brainstorm, outline, and draft which decreased the need to cheat because they don’t have time outside of class to complete the assignment.
Tip #4: Have students write often in class (especially those first two months of the year)
The previous tip was pretty philosophical and maybe a little pie-in-the-sky (though I stand by it). This one is full-on practical: have students do a lot of in-class writing with pen and paper the first few months of the school year.
This is critical, and I’ll be the first to say I’ve learned it the hard way. If we don’t really know what students writing is like, we will struggle to know if they’re using AI or not. But if we read several short and long pieces that they wrote by hand in our classrooms, we will have a much more accurate view of where they are with their writing and what their voice sounds like.
These do not have to be full essays–several decent paragraphs can get the job done pretty well. Even quick writes work for this (I like to assign these almost every day the first week of school). Here is a link to a few of my favorite quick writes.
Once you move away from pen and paper and let students use the computer, be sure that students are still frequently writing in class with only their document open and all aides turned off. I would also advice regularly checking Draftback or similar programs to be sure no copying and pasting is happening once students are typing essays.
Tip #5: Create an environment where students take risks without penalty
This one is a bit of a nod to the previous two tips, so I’ll make it short and painless: we need more low-stakes, frequent writing in our classrooms that don’t have grades attached.
If we want better writers and if we want students who rely less on AI to do their thinking and writing, let’s give them many chances to play with writing where they don’t have to get it all “right” all the time.
One way I like to do this is with fun and creative bell ringers. My students LOVE these and they rarely ask me if it’s for a grade. They see the benefit as the year progresses and their writing improves.
You can grab 10 of these free from this blog post. Inside the English Teacher Vault we have many more bell ringers just like this that can get you through your entire school year.
Takeaways
There are both philosophical and practical issues involved in how we navigate the complexities of AI as English Teachers. This post just scratches the surface. The key points I addressed were:
- Discuss AI early and discuss it often with your students
- Get into the ethics of AI use with your students
- Ask yourself some tough questions: why are my students cheating?
- Have students write in class (and with pen and paper) at the beginning of the school year to get a sense of their writing style and voice
- Create a classroom environment where students take risks without penalty
