A(I)cademics
I left the teaching game before Chat GPT blew up, but the more AI is in the news, the more that I think about the implications on education. Take it from me: Teacher Brain is a chronic condition with no known cure.
Last year, when Chat GPT was first popping off, I read some of the example essays news outlets were posting to show that education as we knew it was over. These AI-powered essays were… not impressive, though I acknowledged that it still presented a problem. While A-level work still required genuine thought, I’ve known my share of students who are happy to settle for a C and more free time. So, even as a mediocre writer, ChatGPT had the power to circumvent writing (and thereby thinking) for a huge number of students. Now, by most reckonings, the bots are continuing to improve. Within a couple years, maybe they will be writing A+ work. Historically, those who underestimated technology haven’t come out looking too great.
At any rate, here’s the dilemma: the point of school is to give kids a basic foundation of facts and teach them to think; meanwhile, the internet is a repository of facts and AI can convincingly fake thought.
Specifically, I posed myself the hypothetical challenge of what essays should look like in an AI age. I don’t think appealing to students’ sense of right and wrong is going to do the job. Many students see grades as essentially arbitrary, and how wrong can it be to cheat a broken game? Kids cut corners. It’s fun alliteration, and it’s also true.
When I was teaching AP English, my students had to take notes on how passages from their text addressed big ideas and incorporated specific writing techniques. And I knew immediately that my kids could complete the assignment without reading the book. They could Google a list of quotes and some basic summaries and still finish the assignment. But unless they plagiarized (and we had software for that), they still had to analyze what they were reading and write a compelling explanation for how writing techniques connected back to the big ideas of a text. Even if they never cracked the book, they still needed reading and writing skills to succeed.
Our new version of essays has to meet the same challenge: even if a student turns in an essay copied wholesale from a chatbot, they should still need to apply writing skills to pass.
Here’s what I’ve got: the final product of English essays shouldn’t be the essay. The final product of the English essay is now the post-essay conference with the teacher. And it would look something like this.
The final draft of an essay is turned in.
The teacher reads and annotates the essay, in some places with specific questions, in other places by just highlighting areas of interest.
The student receives a list of the type of questions they should be prepared to answer about their essay, the types of rewriting they may be asked to do during a conference, and a rubric. This can’t be a full list, but the student should understand how they’ll be asked to rethink their writing.
The conference arrives. The student brings their essay and an open notebook. The teacher starts with questions that analyze the essay: how did the student shape the tone of their writing to get their point across? What’s another piece of evidence you could use here? What was the overall purpose of a highlighted section? Which section best supports the main claim/thesis? The student answers these questions, all of which are graded by rubric.
When all of the conferences are done, The teacher hands the students lists of minor rewrites to perform on paper before class ends. Essentially, the students are given a timed revision instead of a timed writing. These revisions might look like “address a new counterclaim,” “rewrite a transition sentence to connect from point A to point C,” and “provide greater historical context.” The revisions are graded and balanced against the conference for a final score.
I’m not pitching this as a perfect solution. This type of assessment is time-consuming, and for any teachers who had the nearly 40 kids per class I did before leaving the school system, that’s a logistical challenge. It also means more time needs to be invested in fewer written products because the assessment component will take longer than ever.
But, I still think it has merits. Even students who haven’t written a word of their own essays would need to understand the writing process to pass verbal portion of the conference. And the written portion assesses writing ability without access to a computer, but unlike an AP timed writing, students who have done the work have plenty of advanced time to consider what they’ll be writing about.
I don’t envy teachers still in the field the challenge that AI presents, but I don’t think the situation is as hopeless as all those news sites keep suggesting. We’re in a world where computer and internet access are increasingly becoming a given. At the very least, we need to teach kids to think critically about what AI hands them. And this way, everyone gets to keep the essays that we all loved reading/writing so very much.